6406C18 SHSpec-24 Studying: Introduction

     If you can't learn anything, you can't find out how to do anything.  If
an auditor can't learn anything, he will never know how to audit.  This is
very fundamental, but all great successes are built on fundamentals.

     Better than fifty percent of scientology consists of the discipline,
technology, and know-how of application.  You could give the commands of
scientology processes to another group of mental technicians, and they would
get no results.  "Failure to duplicate = failure to understand = failure to
apply."

     LRH and Reg dreamed up a course having to do with business and commerce,
with scientology applied to them.  Reg executed the course, and it has been
very successful.  It is a good-will gesture.  The only trouble is that
everybody tried to get into the act, teaching their own courses to the same
end.  Reg wasn't worried about others duplicating the course.  People are
aware, even with a perfect duplicate course, that they are not taking the real
course in salesmanship.  Even on the copyist, this enters enough in the way of
an overt or something like this, so that he then goes into an obsessive
alter-is, and then it is true that they can't duplicate it.

     Professors in universities cause the loss of technology by writing their
own books on their subjects instead of teaching the real source material,
which they alter-is.  There were thirteen heavier-than-air methods of flight.
The fixed-wing configuration wasn't necessarily the best, though it was one of
the easier ones to manufacture.  The fixed-wing system won out; the other
twelve have lost, even though some were more efficient than the one that was
easy to do.

     In civilizations, it is customary for a body of knowledge to come into
existence, then for some part of it to be duplicated and developed and other
parts of the tech to get lost.  Civilizations die out because they lose their
technology, apart from one gimmick that has nothing to back it up.

     "Technology ... gets lost because people can't study." Civilizations tend
to rise to a peak.  Then, under stress of combat or whatever, they lose their
technology, because no one studies it.  For instance, the technology of the
British silversmiths got lost when the Labor government taxed silver out of
existence.

     One problem with study is the amount of false knowledge around.  If a
person studied without any judgement of what he was studying, or any
evaluation of it, he would study very poorly.  Study has to do with one thing,
basically:  willingness to know.  In order to study, one must first be willing
to know.  Without a willingness to know, you can get systems that add up to no
knowledge.

     In scientology, we have one thing that is not easy to put into texts: the
discipline of how you do it.  It is easy to transmit by example and is at
least fifty percent of what we are doing.  This is a frailty for the future
success of what we are doing.  It is the most likely thing to get lost.  What
needs to be learned is not the commands of processes.  It is how to apply
them.  In scientology, one is learning the doingness, not the processes.  The
processes won't work in the absence of the doingness: TR's, comm cycle,
metering, etc.

     LRH decided to learn about study by doing a course in photography.  He
had done the course up to the third lesson, already, and wondered why he
stopped there, and why he occasionally bogged down, e.g. in the parts about
optics and chemistry.  He realized that he didn't know anything about
photography, despite having done it since age twelve.  He realized that he had
entered the course in a tolerant state of mind, willing to learn a few
gimmicks.  And he realized that this attitude was incredibly arrogant.  He had
always thought that the trouble he had had with photography was that they kept
changing the methods.  He realized that the basics and fundamentals in the
subject, which he didn't know, had been present in the subject since 1860!  At
that point, knowing that there was something to learn, he really started to
study.  From three books in 3 1/2 years, he sped up to eight books in two
weeks.  Arrogance and tolerance: the attitude that, "I know all about it, but
I'm willing to learn a few tricks," prevents a person from studying.

     LRH's standards of criticism have shifted.  What he was willing to take
pictures of changed utterly.  He mastered fundamentals and reached a position
of judgment and opinion on it.  Previously, he had had no judgment, only fixed
ideas.  There is a big difference between an opinion and a fixed idea or
prejudice.  One has fixed opinions when one lacks understanding of an area.
In the absence of knowledge, judgment becomes fixed ideas.  LRH's former ideas
on photography had not been resulting in a finished picture.  Also, before
this realization, he was the victim of external conditions.  If there was no
sun, he could not take a picture.  After this realization, knowing your tools
and darkroom tech, you are not monitored by conditions around you.

     The breakthrough was, "There really is something there to learn!" This is
a prime condition necessary for study.  So the first barrier to learning is
the consideration that you know all about it, and you won't let your certainty
that you know be affected by the fact that you are not getting a result.
Judgment depends in freedom from fixed opinions and on no need to protect
yourself from your lack of knowledge in some area.  Judgment is impossible in
the presence of fixed opinions.  To judge, one must know what one knows and
what one does not know.  Judgment depends on knowledge.  It is not what a
person knows.  It is what he can do.

An auditor's ability to learn, then depends first on his willingness to
learn.  "I know all there is to know," and "I get no results," shows lack of
judgment on one's own skill.  It is a silly statement.

     Status has a lot to do with this.  One considers he must appear wise or
clever or whatever, and pretends knowingness to give this appearance.  But in
the presence of genuine knowledge, a real esteem takes the place of a false,
self-generated esteem.  It comes down to a test of what a person can do.
There is no argument with competence.  Psychiatry serves as a wonderful
example of this.

     To be a good critic of some area, you would have to know what could and
what couldn't be done in that area.  A person who already knows something
about an area can learn more about it without feeling challenged, threatened,
or insulted by the suggestion that he learn it, unlike someone who doesn't
know all about it, but wants to think that he does.

     The only place our technology might break down is from unwillingness to
learn it, stemming from the belief that one already knows it all.  This is one
of those stupid fundamentals that stays in because nobody bothers to as-is
it.  There is always a first lesson to teach, a basic entry point to learning
a subject.  On the subject of study itself, this datum is fundamental.  Where
you fail in instruction, you always omitted the first datum to teach.