“You may have been taught that the mind, spirit and life are very difficult things to know about. This is the first principle of Scientology: It is possible to know about the mind, the spirit and life.” —L. Ron Hubbard
You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand the mind. But you do have to know that the mind can be understood. If you start trying to find out about the mind assuming that you will never really understand it, you will probably won’t.
All you need to do is observe and learn from the things that you observe. That is how L. Ron Hubbard found out so many things about people. However, you do not need to start all over again from scratch and do all the research on the mind in order to know. All of Mr. Hubbard’s initial discoveries are discussed in detail in the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
There are two ways of learning things. 1) Learning from direct experience and 2) Learning from the experience of others. By reading what L. Ron Hubbard wrote about the mind you begin with the 2nd method but are then able to look into your own life and see for yourself using the 1st method of learning.
For example, in the book Dianetics you can find out about how the mind begins to get into problems when it stops being able to differentiate and begins to “identify” which means it thinks of different things as the same thing. This is called A=A=A thinking. For example, a person can identify water with terrible fear and loss. That person will never enjoy a cruise or may even have trouble saving a child that has fallen into a pool.
However, Dianetics offers a therapy called auditing in which you can find the moments in your past (called engrams) when the mind began to identify and then relieve those incidents, leaving a person again able to enjoy water (or whatever it may be) again. This is merely one example but one that is real and has happened. Only when this kind of thing happens to you, you will learn about the mind using method #1 (direct experience).
However, anyone can read about the therapeutic effects of auditing and then see how techniques can benefit them. L. Ron Hubbard wrote his discoveries down so he could share it with anyone who would wish to know.
