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Confronting and Study |
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The first point to master when getting into a new subject or area is the ability to confront. The student has to be able to confront the area, the tools of the trade, the people involved. As there are several definitions in the English
dictionary of 'Confront', let us point out exactly what we mean: "To face
without flinching or avoiding". A sentence with that meaning: "A free
society has to be able to confront its problems and resolve them
peacefully".
But one has to be able to face things in order to do something about them. This is an important first step. If one cannot face something, if he avoids them instead, then he is not aware. Awareness is the ability to perceive the existence of. So confront in our specific use of the word is: "Facing up to reality without shrinking back and therefore fully conscious of the real universe and other beings around." If you can confront, you can be aware. If you are aware, you can perceive and act. If you cannot confront, you will not be aware of things and will to that degree be withdrawn and not perceiving. You will thus be unaware of what is going on around you. "That which a person can confront, he can handle". That is a basic law. The first step in handling anything is to face it. There is another law:
If we look at the field of medicine, there are good doctors and bad doctors. To become a good doctor the practitioner has to consistently study and practice. If he doesn't do that he will remain incompetent. But before he will study and practice enough to become a true professional in his field he has to have the ability to confront all the elements it takes to become a medical doctor. Confront is the key to getting started right and to continue on the right path. He has to be able to confront patients, illness, books, blood, instruments, use of medicine, side effects, and so on. The student who gets sick at the sight of blood will never make it in the medical profession. A person who is capable of learning quickly has a high ability to confront that subject. He doesn't shy back but has a desire to know, to practice, show competence, to help.
In dangerous professions confront is of the essence. If a racecar driver can't confront speed, action, danger and noise he won't survive long in that profession. Having a talent for racing begins with that the person can confront all the elements with ease. If he couldn't, he would shy back, have slow reactions, get sick from the fumes, and so on. He wouldn't make it. We haven't even begun to talk about actual skills. Concepts such as "Talent" and "Native ability" is to a large extent explained by the person's natural ability to confront the field. The first step is to be able to be there comfortably in the presence of all the elements of the trade. When he can do that he can start to learn and communicate with the elements involved. All power depends upon the ability to hold a position. To communicate one must be able to hold to a position.
This is even true in physics. A person can't move an object unless he can hold a steady position near the object. Try to move a chair while running around it. It's almost impossible. To be able to move the chair one has to be there and hold a position before anything will happen. You can move just about anything if you have a solid position you can hold. The Greek scientist, Archimedes said, "Give me a stable point and I can move the Earth." Thus before you can handle anything you have to have the ability to communicate with that area. Before you can communicate with an area you must be able to hold a position or be in a location near it with ease. Glibness If they can be made to confront the physical objects involved they will be able to apply. Glib students can thus be made to be able to perform by doing practical things and assignments in their field. Doing that, they are confronting and being there and well on their way. But some students are not even up to being glib students. They can't even confront the book, the paper, the thought. Confronting is the ability to be there comfortably and perceive.
Many different reactions can be observed when a student is made to confront things. Dullness, perception trouble, fogginess, sleepiness and even pains, emotions, and convulsions can occur when one knowingly starts to drill to be there and comfortably perceive the various elements of a subject. These reactions will discharge and eventually be overcome if the student is simply made to carry on. Eventually the student can be made capable of being there comfortably and perceive the elements involved. First he will be able to confront one element. Gradually he will expand his scope and confront more and more elements. People have all kinds of mental tricks they use to get around actual confronting. They can be disinterested. They can "realize it’s not important". They can appear to be half dead, etc. These reactions and tricks will eventually discharge and fade away. In the end they can just be there and comfortably perceive. Eye blinks, swallowing, body movements, odd aches and pains, are all systems of interrupting confronting. They are only symptoms. There are many of these. They are all attempts to confront with a body part and are symptoms of non-confront. They mean the person is not just being there and perceiving. "Confronting" indirectly is another method of avoiding direct contact. The person uses a via, a relay point. He needs something in between the objects or persons involved and himself. He can spy on the girls but wouldn't dream of going up to them and ask for a date. He can become a stamp collector as his only way to stay in contact with his fellow Man. He is terrified about the idea of direct contact, actual confront, and direct communication. Such persons lives are systems of interruptions and vias, all substitutes for confronting. They are not very successful in life. Success depends on being there and perceiving it; and then being able to communicate with it and handle it. Definitions "A gradient scale" means a gradual increasing condition of, or a little more of, little by little. A "skipped gradient" means taking on a higher degree or amount before a lesser degree of it has been handled. One has to go back and handle the missed step or degree or thing or else one will have just losses on a subject thereafter. "Flattening" something means to do it until it no longer produces a reaction. It has been discharged for reaction. "Overrunning" something means accumulating protests and upsets about it until it is just a mass of stops. It usually comes about after passing a good point where the person felt he had accomplished what he set out to do. Anyone can do anything forever unless he begins to stop it. "Invalidation" means a degrading, 'trashing', ridiculing, discrediting or denying something someone else considers to be a fact or of value. Gradients of Confront
The first stage of confront would be to simply look at these elements long enough until any and all discomforts are flattened. This can be done element by element. Then elements in combination can be taken up. One drill that has produced good results, is having the student simply confront printed course materials. A printed page is mounted on the wall, upside down, and the student is sitting on a chair confronting it. The student is not asked to read anything but simply confront the printed materials of the course as a first little step. The next stages would be to drill confronting while the student is moving around. He has to be there and perceive even though he is moving around and occupying different locations. The next stage would be to drill confronting elements selectively while moving around and be able to cope with other things seeking to distract him. The above can be used to develop simple drills of confronting applied to learning and study. But It is first and foremost intended to set out the various axioms or laws necessary to an understanding of the subject of confronting itself. The fundamental and basic simplicities of confronting itself is the first thing that must be grasped. All complexity surrounding any subject or action stems from a greater or lesser inability to confront.
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Complexity and Confronting
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The subject of confronting is not only important to new
students. It plays a huge role in any attempt to understand and relay data. It
plays a role in science and research and general problem solving.
And the reverse:
To the degree a person cannot confront a subject he will use substitutes. When these substitutes get piled up we can get an endless series of complexities. This is evident in many textbooks and in entire subjects. You can find countless examples of this in printed and widely distributed textbooks.
Example: Astronomy. A historic example of this would be Astronomy. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, wrote that the Earth was the center of the universe. This was the common opinion at his time, and long before that. It was held to be true for thousands of years. Mathematicians and astronomers finally figured out how to predict the planets' movements in this model. It was a very complex and incomprehensible piece of mathematics. The Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) took a good look at all this and posed the theory that the Earth was rotating around its own axis and was orbiting the Sun. It explained dozens of astronomical observations and the mathematics needed to describe it was much simpler. Yet, nobody dared look at the facts as the Pope and the Catholic Church was against it. Several decades later Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) came along. He invented the telescope and around 1609 he was convinced, based on his direct observations of the planets (especially Venus), that Copernicus was right. He was confronting the elements of astronomy through a telescope for the first time in history. He actually took a good look at the planets. When he confronted the subject of the solar system directly all the complexities fell apart. What is better known of his story is perhaps all the trouble it caused him personally as the Pope wouldn't allow such teachings. But eventually the fact that Galileo had confronted it and described it made the old complicated ideas fade away. His confront made the subject of astronomy simpler, exploration of space possible. Galileo is actually credited, more than any other, to be the father of the modern natural sciences. Direct observation and actual experiment swept away countless complicated and unworkable ideas. Complexity after complexity was shattered and replaced with confront and direct observation. Natural phenomena could suddenly be described in much simpler ways. Example: Psychiatry. A subject as psychiatry seems to suffer from the same phenomena. At one time there was a classification of several hundred different kinds of insanity. The subject was bending over backwards in complicated classifications of symptoms; yet they had no cure for any of it. This may be the best kept secret in science, but R. Hubbard, who also developed the Study Technology, discovered in 1950 that there was a common simple denominator of all these symptoms. He discovered that there was such a thing called an engram. That is a painful incident in a person's past. The person will, if he is subject to a lot of stress in his present life, tend to relive or 'dramatize' such an incident. Each and all of the types of insanity could thus be explained as a 'dramatization' of the specific content of different types of engrams.
Example: Navigation. Many textbooks on navigation base the whole subject on the assumption that one can't confront where where he is, where he came from or is going. It assumes one is lost. This is a basic assumption of non-confront. You can't directly see where you have been or where you are going at sea, as it is so large, so one assumes a non-confront in all the reasoning in the subject. It goes into a series of symbols and begins to substitute symbols for symbols. This winds the navigator up in a mass of complexities. A student of navigation spends 90% of his time trying to find out what symbols the symbols are meant to represent. Because one starts from a non-confront of the ship's position he then carries a non-confront through the whole subject. If a man isn't lost as he begins to "navigate" he very often is when he finishes! The examples illustrate that any complexity stem from an initial point of non-confront.
The Human Mind and Complexities
Standard Clearing Technology, of which the Study Technology is only the first little step, deals with the human mind and human aberration. Using the processes of Standard Clearing Technology one can make a person look at and recognize the source of an aberration and make it "blow", make it vanish. Mental mass accumulates in a vast complexity solely because one would not confront something. To take apart a problem requires only to establish what one could not or would not confront. A large number of people de-aberrate just by education alone. Good and true data tend to blow the confusions, complexities, and aberrations to a large extent. Being educated in Standard Clearing Technology, which contain the basic laws of life and the mind, will "blow" huge holes in the students' complexities and aberrations. Therefore the above laws are very important ones as they explain what aberration really is and why the processes of Standard Clearing Technology works. Aberration is a chain of vias based on a primary
non-confront. Processing is a series of methods
arranged in a certain order as to bring the person to confront the non-confront
sources of his aberrations.
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