and he created a organization known as scientology for one to agree with him. You ever look at the chart hubbard created known as the chart to total freedom: (it's all bullshit)
Among other small previous details, this series of "precise steps in perfect order and gradients" was in alignment with what I wanted as to knowledge about life and spiritual evolution. I walked in determined to learn all the possible theories and practical applications from someone who seemed to have undertaken a lifelong of incredible and thorough research on the subjects at hand.
I had been doing this research myself almost since I was born, looking for truth (after I discovered that untruth also existed, at about 4 y.o.) and more particularly after reaching majority age thus freeing myself of all the inconsistencies and missing pieces I'd found in my parents' and religion teachings about life. For this I started examining plenty of religions, lines of thought, mystical practices, past lives, psychology and healing stuff, etc. but what pissed me off was that I always felt there was "something missing", not at the goal level of course (and am still quite far of the arrival line! LOL) but in the intermediary steps. There was no sequential order, learning was done sort of in concentric circles, so to speak, so levels of evolution that I thought I'd realized kept coming back in front of me at the next turn of the wheel. Furthermore, although almost each of them seemed to possess a few valid answers about "Truth", none had them all thus not worthy of an absolute dedication. I examined and picked things here and there randomly, slowly building my own collection.
So indeed this "orderly sequence of precisely measured, weighed labeled steps" devised by someone who had apparently researched the whole subject in a much bigger and deeper scale than me and whose writings were making sense to me as they coincided and aligned in a fair extent with things I had already found out, were the "real-deal closer". He appeared to me as having already separated all the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and reordered the whole thing in a neat and simplified to its most essential significance, series of to-do sequential steps. No more mysteries in the dark, no more missing pieces.
The map is definitely not the terrain, alas, in this particular case.
so hubbard said I don't want you to agree, but I want you to agree. LOL
Indeed his rhetoric sucks big time, especially in the lectured materials.
I don't think so with your last sentence, certainty not with Hubbard's rhetoric, maybe you'll get that one day.
Someone looks at the finger, another looks at the sky, a third one catches the pickpocket
in fraganti and gets to keep the money, finding out those were Monopoly bills as soon as he gets home. Later on, someone else finds the wallet in the trash bin, and discovers a hidden and highly valued antique gold coin.
A man's trash is another man's treasure ... but has to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected before recycllng.
That is to say, in regard to both last sentences (LRH's and mine):
1. He's just trying to make the audience "look inside themselves" and find those agreements. If they were relatively aware, they could understand a) what he is apparently trying to convey (which is also what he is really trying to convey) b) the tricky double-edged sword he's playing with here, by "wishywashing" the audience's brains as in a washing machine (agree-not agree-rinse-and-repeat). Hypnotical and dumbing.
So there's a different menu for every different level.
2. I have examined some of my own agreements and found out many interesting clues about myself. So I can conclude it is a relatively valuable tool among many others in my own toolbox.
3. I believe we always find exactly what we need to grow/evolve at a given point in life. I used to think long ago it was just a series of magical rewards, coming from the outside. I've come to find out that besides just being aligned with the right side of things, I also can steer it to get the answers I am looking for.
And it's a bit more complicated that that, yet.
But I am getting used to drive around in those damn concentric circles without getting much dizzy...
