Among other gems, Phil J. Spickler <P JSpickler@aol.com>  contributed the following essay to the list of IVY-subscribers on 22 Jul 1998.

        Being of unsound mind and body, and spiritually quite decrepit, I yet
once again take up electrons with my palsied hand and enter into the unmined
field of free expression known as the IVy-subscribers list, which, due to
Antony Phillips' unflagging devotion to the ideals of freedom of speech and
the great heuristic possibilities that sometimes come forth when birds of a
feather flock together, allows me to share with the silent minority and
majority some poor remembrances.

        Back in the late 1930's, a chap by the name of Alfred Korzybski put
together and published a subject which he called General Semantics.  I only
mention this in passing, since his is one of the names that Ron Hubbard put in
the front of the original editions of his book _Science of Survival_.  This
list consisted of people that Ron (the Ron of 1951) felt had been great
contributors to thought and understanding that had helped him in constructing
Dianetics.  Korzybski's book was called _Science of Sanity_, and it's a fairly
lengthy book, but one that's pretty easy to read once you get into it, and it
contains a fair number of things that certainly can be found in early
Dianetics -- one of the big ones, of course, was the notion that "A = A" as an
example of the kind of mindless identification that occurred between one thing
and another in that bastion of aberration known as the Reactive Mind.
Korzybski also set a great store in the kind of conscious and analytical
differentiation that we can all engage in concerning time, location, and other
points of differentiation that make possible a heightened degree of perception
in the present moment.  He also decried the use of generalities, which have
led to some pretty horrifying conflicts, not to speak of extremes of bigotry
and prejudice.  Anyway, there's a lot more, and before a later Ron (circa the
late 1960's) came out with the idea that he'd never gotten anything from
anybody and that nobody had ever really contributed anything to helping his
creation of Dianetics and Scientology, you will find various places throughout
his books and tapes, if they haven't all been edited out, where he points out
the valued contributions of those that went before.

         And now for a short dose of the most unpopular subject that I've ever
had the pain and pleasure to run into.  You may well ask, before proceeding,
what are we going to talk about?  Well, in a word, Truth.  But, you say, isn't
that what everyone is seeking and desiring and working toward and cultivating,
that single thing that we're all entirely devoted to and would certainly never
object to if it came walking inthe front door?  And I say again, Yes, the
Truth, the very unpopular possibility, and as you know from personal
experience as well as observation in other areas, a force that makes the
hydrogen bomb look like a dim flicker of a small candle at a distance of many
miles.  If you will allow me, I shall remind you that it is somewhat axiomatic
that it is necessary to lie about, or alter, the truth of anything in order
for it to gain persistence in time.  In fact, this very thing that we call
Life, this game between Static and itself, requires that this remain unknown
in order for Life, the very tissue of reality, to persist. Just as in magic,
most games fall to pieces and become kind of silly once the truth of what's
really going on is known.  In our ordinary human affairs, in order to keep
things from getting too filmy or gauzy or disappearing altogether, the
necessary ratio of truth to untruth must remain extremely high on the side of
untruth, in our ongoing and frantic efforts, as they say on the western side
of the dateline, in the Orient, in order to avoid the Void.  We've seen
notable examples of fellow human beings who have been processed (not like a
piece of cheese, though) to the point where they became the Truth, and in most
cases after which their lives, such as what was left of them, completely fell
apart: one of the liabilities that goes with getting on a highly accelerated
road to truth and suddenly, with great horror, finding out that you're there.
Gee whiz, I just reached nothingness -- hmmm!  It's sort of on the order of
taking the old Havingness process known as Trio, which had a lot to do with
increasing one's ability to have, to let remain, and to dispense with.  Now if
you really wanted to screw somebody up tremendously, just leave off the Have
and the Let Remain and run them on Dispense With until there's absolutely
nothing there, at which point have your straitjackets and tranquilizers ready
for quick action.

     So, how much Truth are we, as I like to thing of myself and IVy
subscribers -- how much truth is Homo sapiens really comfortable with, about
Life or any dynamic?  There's no set figure or percentage points that really
answers that question, but suffice it to say, it's that amount which allows us
to feel that life is a real and substantial and ongoing thing, and that we are
much the same.  Toward that end, wise auditors generally worked with people in
the direction of improving their willingness and ability to play the game
called Life, and some of the lesser games that are found within it.  And in
order to do that, it really doesn't take very much in the way of auditing or
philosophizing, education and/or training to reach such a result.  If you
simply get the guy, the person, or someone, as close as possible to the notion
of not trying to get rid of their case (case in this case being defined as
life), but simply get him to be willing to have his case, or life, you've
really done the best of helping someone else that I can possibly conceive of,
unless you're running the Divine School of Super-secret Mysteries that yields
nothing but a few folks at the Serenity of Beingness contemplating their or
other people's navels, with occasional flights of drifting along on that
famous cloud number 9 just before the lightning and thunder.

     So, in conclusion, Truth, or too much of it, coming in the front door
cannot be, and is not, popular and is one of the primary known spoilers of the
game, and if not spoilers of it, de-intensifiers of it to the degree where it
loses its great flavors for pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, beauty and
ugliness, and all the other great pairs of opposites that arise together to
make this thing that we seem to be all creating or mocking up together really
interesting and exciting.  Thank you for listening to all this drivel -- I
look forward to a large number of caustic comments that don't start out "Dear
Phil."  Meantime, I've fortified my cave with several guard sheep who can say
"Baaa" in a decibel range that should discourage any attacking rabbits.

Bon voyage,
Phil