Post-Study Integration


The study of Scientology, EST, LifeSprings, Religious Science, Physics, Philosophy, TV Guide, Christian Science and many other methods of self-advancement involves an extensive incursion into the realm of Data.

This can be a blessing or an unfortunate misadventure depending on how you look at it and how you deal with it.

The benefit of such an incursion lies in the opportunity to assimilate experience from another viewpoint, thus perhaps expanding the breadth of your grasp. But the grounding of all the grasp you will ever have is You, and therein lies a risk.

Because you are not assimilating experience but Data, there is a good chance that you will try to build it up into a body of information. If it is "bought" as another's construct, without the conviction that wells from the authentic self singing the song of its own experience, it will become a compartment of the soul rather than part of the Voice.

But the soul compartmented is not integrated, even when it carries its divisions with intelligent determination. When it is occluded and conclusively ignoring of its compartmentations it is even less integrated.

Thus, for example, the graduate of Hubbard's academies observes the high-tone and the low-tone, the knowing and the apathetic, the ARC-broken (a jargon word for sad) and the PTP-ridden (likewise for worried). He knows some have overts(sins) on their mind and that some have engrams (traumas) on theirs. And he views the world of Others through these categories of technical analysis much as a doctor might see endomorphs and ectomorphs, or some other division of types in the world suitable to his specialty.

He likewise sees himself as a Thetan (a scientologist's word for life-force in the form of a Being operating a body) or a potential Static (aspect of unqualified awareness). And he considers his own place vis-a-vis these different categories and his Dynamics (various efforts to exist in different ways).

This gives him a set of lovely filters which subdivide perception into categories; they are useful if one is over-burdened with chaos, confused overloads of emotion and mis-perception, and they help clarify. And they are helpful in seeking to change the apparency of the world as in engineering or medicine. But they divide his own energy as he must support the walls of his created categories AND the flow of life's energy through the chutes and corrals made by these walls. He may not, in his educated way, associate an "engram" with a "ptp" or see them side by side or appreciate them as raw experience, or listen to the sounds of the heart in these circumstances unencumbered by the analysis he has learned to use.

As such he, fully educated, can be only half-baked, crippled in his own power. He may divert the power of his own perception into the power of the learning he has accommodated. He continues in his head rather than his heart until he can re-integrate.

To re-integrate in this sense means to take the EXPERIENCE of his education and assimilate it as a stream of understanding at a spiritual level, thus forsaking the rusty shells which transported the knowledge to him, the stained packages in which the fast-food of second-hand thought came to him.

(If you must eat at McBeing's, don't ask for a doggy bag.)

Some studies lend themselves quickly to this integration, others do so slowly. The most authoritarian and self-righteous do so reluctantly, and within these we must count much of the teaching of organized religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. When concepts on which so much depends (such as, for example "sin", and "divinity" are so out of alignment with the quick of the heart's experience, the knowledge becomes a permanent, indigestible, guano-coated edifice with hard cornices.

One may find himself graduating from a known cult or an unknown one such as the Girl Scouts, a crash course in family law, or a summer under the tutelage of a heavy-minded grandmother. The re-integration of the spirit after such a course of study is vital to the whole Being and can only occur through a self-willed act of inspection, a personal testing of the new limits and the filters against the bright sunlight of the soul's authentic experience. Throwing oneself into experience of some kind is often the soul's way of finding it's way back to an integrated position from the fractured dark mirror of learning. The quick and instantaneous certainty of the fully Alive must replace the rational and analytical process of the Learned. The two must be integrated or neither is really complete in growth. There is no light outside the authentic reflection of the Self.

Without this light, the keys to growth are buried and erosion follows naturally. With it, one may traverse the toughest belief systems with lightness, cheer and impunity.

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