Bill and I walked along the Boulevards of Paris and had our same argument all over again.
"Bill, what is the point of auditing your past? You have hundreds of lives and tens of thousands of years of existence. You will never be able to inspect all of it. It is all a bottomless pit that never ends. I say that true spirituality requires that one walk away from their past and drop it. Get over it."
"Yes, but J., there are things in us from the past that keep us trapped. Auditing allows perople to locate these things and eliminate them so that they are free of them. The systematic elimation of past traumas makes a person free."
Free of what? Really? What does Scientology make a person free from? David Miscavige still has asthma. Tom Cruise has two divorces under his belt. You are not happy as a result all of your years of auditing. So who in Scientology is free? No one is certainly free of Ethics."
Bill lit a cigarette and didn't speak right away. We had had arguments about entheta versus truth and I had agreed to say only what was true and never use entheta around him.
It is hard for Bill to be an OT VII. He is supposed to have massive OT powers and does not. He does not lie to himself anymore. This is part of what he calls his truth process. He will not lie to himself anymore: Either a thing is true or it isn't. So he is caught being an OT VII without any of the promised spiritual powers.
"How can one drop their past, J.? One cannot be free of that which they have not located, examined, and re-experienced so that is disappears. Auditing is a way of annihilating the past at all levels so that it no longer holds power over you."
"Bill, how many lifetimes will you spend examining and annihilating your past? You don't even know which parts of your past are real or imagined. You don't even know which parts of your past you really lived. Why audit someone else's past?" I asked with a veiled reference to BT's. "Karmically speaking, you can handle the past by, as the Zen parable says, 'throwing it like snow into a roaring furnace.' You can simply decide to stand free of your past by noticing it when it arises and standing apart from it. Look, one needs introspection and transcendence and yet this path has been around for thousands of years. None of the masters has ever made enlightenment about a massive inspection of a person's past -- and for a price no less! You are paying to audit your past and the totality of your being and yet you go around and around in circles and always arrive back in the same place: You are who you are in some permanent way. Your nature and character are fixed somehow by destiny and karma."
Bill shot me that look. That "look" is one where he is trying to decide if I am an SP or if I am making sense.
"I refuse to admit that I am stuck or cannot change."
"Look, Bill, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it is like the ocean: The ocean is the ocean. It is wet and has waves and its tides move by the pull of the Moon. That is the nature of the ocean. The ocean is perfect in what it is and it can't not be the ocean. There is no problem or engrams for the ocean and there is nothing to change. It is like this with your essential nature and you can relax into the purity of your own nature and stop fighting it and trying to kill it with auditing."
"Yes but J. surely you realize that the ocean is a vast machine of Nature and that men are not. We have motives to decide, choices to make whereas the ocean does not. Auditing is focus. Auditing is a choice not to be trapped by the machine."
"But what is Scientology except a tautological machine? It is a big instution devoted to keeping people doing what? What is it you really do?"
"You don't know."
"I do."
"No, you only know what you read on the internet. Let's go over by Notre Dame and get a cappucino." Going to get a coffee was Bill's signal to back off. I do the same thing to him sometimes when he crowds me.
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