CHAPTER 26
REPRESSION
Sometimes a person has things that they don't want to look at, things that they keep hidden from themselves and are afraid to find out about.
We have already approached this from the positive side by running processes to increase one's willingness to look at things. But eventually one also has to address the action of repressing things directly.
Here we are not talking about things which you are withholding from others but things which you are trying to hide from yourself.
In psychoanalysis this is called repression. One prevents oneself from thinking about things that one thinks are too horrible to contemplate.
Early Scientology was at odds with psychoanalysis, so they called this suppression instead of repression, but it is the same action of keeping something buried out of sight and not letting oneself think about it or react to it.
Unfortunately, Scientology also used the word suppression to refer to the action of a suppressive person keeping one suppressed and under one's thumb (discussed in an earlier chapter) resulting in some confusion between these things.
Also, there seemed to be different degrees of how heavily one worked to keep something buried. At the mild level, one simply keeps something obscured and at the extreme, one works to completely make nothing out of it and treats it as if it had never existed.
The avoidance of thinking about, looking at, or confronting something is one of the major factors that we are addressing throughout this book and this would seem to be an appropriate time to examine the underlying theories.
In basic Scientology theory, there is the idea that there are 4 states or conditions of existence in which a creation might exist.
The first of these is the true or pure form in which the creation is created. This is the object or idea or whatever seen exactly as it really is. This is referred to as the state of AS-ISNESS.
Since the creation is fully known and viewed, it may be created or not on a moment to moment basis.
There is a strong possibility that the underlying godlike nothingness of which we are a part is balancing the void with an infinity of creation.
On that basis, things which are in a state of as-isness may be permitted to vanish because they may be recreated at will, but things which are not in this state must be retained or made to persist to prevent the possibility of their recreation being lost. At the highest levels above all pain and suffering, one would want everything available even if many of those things were not usually desirable. If you are looking at a timespan of trillions of years, you wouldn't let anything, no matter how poor or degraded, disappear from your library because you might want it just once a few billion years down the line.
Taking this from another slant, an immortal, infinite, and indestructible godlike being's greatest problem would be boredom. He wouldn't let anything fall out of the realm of possibility and therefore will never let anything, no matter how horrible, disappear unless he can recreate it at will.
This may be hard to imagine right now, but you will want all these things later to add spice and variety to a mostly joyful infinity of creation. What is wrong is that you have far too much of this unpleasant stuff running all at once, like trying to eat a dish that is covered with inch thick layers of salt and pepper and spices. Deep down, you will never let yourself wish these spices out of existence because then you would never have salt again. To do that would be crippling yourself at the higher godlike levels. So instead you must go to the work of cleaning up the mess.
Which brings us back to the conditions of existence.
When something is altered from this state of as-isness, it will persist on a compulsive basis. In other words, as long as you are looking at the alteration, you will keep holding the thing in place. To let go of something, you must see it as it is rather than seeing it in an altered condition. This altered condition is called the state of ALTER-ISNESS.
But instead of confronting it and seeing what is really there, which gives one power of choice as to its continued existence, the person will sometimes try to get rid of it by trying to stamp it out of existence. He tries to make it NOT exist by means of force. This is called NOT-ISNESS.
In other words, something is there but the being makes a strong postulate that it is not there. This works halfway, because you are strong enough to hide something from yourself so that it appears to be gone, but deep down you wouldn't really let it vanish. As a result, you end up with something that appears to be gone, but is really still there operating out of sight.
When applied to the area of your own mind and thoughts, this act of Not-isness is the action of repression. In other words, something is there and you make nothing out of it, strongly deciding that it is not there and never happened. As a result, it continues to persist out of sight and can operate to your detriment.
While something is in an alter-ised condition, it is persistent and can trouble you but you are still aware of it. Once you have not-ised it, it is not only persistent and troublesome but it is also out of sight and repressed. The solution in either case is to look at it and bring it into view fully, in which case it returns to a state of as-isness and comes fully back under your control. Then you will permit it to vanish, or you can mock it up again for entertainment if you are so inclined.
These 3 conditions of as-isness, alter-isness, and not-isness in regards to one's own thoughts, memories, and feelings becomes fairly evident as one processes oneself. The things that you confront fully cease to trouble you and the things that you repress are eventually discovered and found to have been holding you back while they were in the repressed condition.
Because this is so self evident in individual processing, the next logical step is to extend these ideas into the realm of objective reality.
But the 3 conditions discussed above are inadequate because another factor has come into play. This factor is the interaction between multiple beings, each of whom may as-is, alter-is, or not-is things that are shared between them. And so we must assign yet another condition, which is called IS-NESS or reality which we can use as a catchall for these more complex interactions.
And simply dumping all the group interactions into a single bin called IS-NESS is really an oversimplification, but it will serve for the purposes of this chapter. Although the nature of reality is an extremely interesting topic to pursue as you become more advanced, it is really at the leading edge of research. There is much speculation, theorizing, and sporadic (non-repeatable) phenomena that shows up in this area and you would be wise to get your own house in order first. The processes in this book might indeed lift you into this realm, but full mastery is far beyond sporadic phenomena and this book is only a first step on the road.
Therefore our immediate emphasis is to bring things into view that you are hiding from yourself and lay them to rest, so to speak, by restoring confront and awareness.
This gives us a simple rule of thumb which is very useful. If a condition is persisting, there is something about it that you are not looking at or confronting.
This ties together with the earlier chapter on protest (which also ties into compulsive creation) because the main reason that one not-ises something is because one is protesting its existence. If necessary you can clear up your protests against something as a preliminary step, but by this point you should usually be able to simply look at something and confront it.
CAUTION: As Not-isness is removed, the last alter-isness will come into view first. This may be highly distorted from the actual truth. Do not mistakenly assume that it is true and use it for a basis of operation.
For example, let us say that a husband gives his wife some flowers. Now let us say that the wife has some earlier bad experiences which lead her to believe that this means that the husband is having an affair. Instead of confronting the area, she twists and alters it out of shape, imagining various scenes of the husband seducing his secretary.
Then she carries this too far, the pictures that she is imagining become too dreadful to contemplate, and she represses the whole thing. When this repression is first lifted, her suppressed pictures of the husband's cheating are the first thing that comes into view, and they may seem very real.
These in turn have to be confronted before the real truth becomes visible. And confronting them fully may require looking at the earlier bad experience which lead to the trouble in the first place.
26.1 Cleaning Up Bothersome Ideas and Worries
Let us say that you are worried that some unpleasant thing might be true or something might have been done to you, but you are not sure and are all confused on the matter.
If you confronted this properly, you would either see the truth or would take action to find out or perhaps would not even care, but in any case you would not be bothered and worrying.
If you can't achieve this by simply looking and confronting, then there is something interfering with your ability to look at the area and think clearly about it.
Sometimes you can simply push through this by using simple tricks to raise your confront. You might, for example, simply mock up some pictures of the thing happening and copy the pictures a few times until they become easy to look at and you can throw them away easily. Many of the things in this book can be used on a one shot basis like this.
But sometimes something stronger is needed, and the most likely situation in this case is that you are having so much trouble with it because it is either something that has happened before or that you have done to somebody else.
For this you can run the following:
a) recall (or imagine) a time when something like this happened to you (or something like this was true).
b) recall (or imagine) a time when you did something like this to another (or caused it to happen to another)
c) recall (or imagine) a time when another did something like this to another.
Note that recalling a time is preferable, but if you can't spot one, then try to approximate one by imagination.
Since you might be dealing with something that is heavily suppressed, you may have to pull off layers of half imagined stuff before you can reach a true recall.
Alternating the commands lets you poke at it from various angles instead of straining at one point.
If there is something that you want to run this on right now, go ahead and do so.
This process should be used as needed while running the following steps.
26.2 Avoiding Thinking About
Run these alternately.
a) what might you avoid thinking about
b) what don't you have to avoid thinking about
c) what might another avoid thinking about
d) what wouldn't another have to avoid thinking about
Finish running the process before you go chasing off after things.
Something might come into view and come apart completely on the process, or it might only come apart part way. If you reach a point where you feel really good about the process and it seems complete, that is the point to end off.
If some hidden thing came into view and the process completed without actually resolving it completely, go ahead and run 26.1 above on it.
26.3 Never Happened
Run as in 26.2 above.
a) what might you pretend never happened
b) what would it be all right to have happened
c) what might another pretend never happened
d) what would another feel it was all right to have happened.
Again, use 26.1 if some unresolved idea remains after running the process.
26.4 Made Nothing Of
Run as above.
a) what might you have made nothing of
b) what wouldn't you need to make nothing of
c) what might another have made nothing of
d) what wouldn't another need to make nothing of
Again, use 26.1 if some unresolved idea remains after running the process.