Lecture: Learning Processes: No-game condition
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1957, 7 January
Document title: Learning Processes: No-Game Condition
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Sixteenth American Advanced Clinical Course
Location: Washington, DC
Document ID: 16ACC-04
Description: Hubbard compares Scientology with yoga; says closest thing to a Scientology process on Earth before our time was yoga or Zen Buddhism;says he studied that work for quite a bit when he was young, until he discovered there was something wrong with it; says Scientology processes snap people out of their heads and achieve the exact result which Gautama Siddhartha Buddha was trying to establish and achieve; compares Scientologists with Buddhists re: meditation.
But let’s take up this, now, just on a very blunt, forward basis. You’re making this person learn something. All right. To the degree that you run Mimicry, it has some slight therapy. You say, “One-two-three,” he says, “One-two-three.” Now, that means that you have made him make his voice say “One-two-three.” See? You have showed him that he can mimic another action. You can do that all day, as long as he is making something make a mimicry. See, you give him a mimicry, and then he makes his hand do a mimicry, and so on. To that degree — to that degree — you have a plus therapy. See? The mimicry. That’s a plus therapy.
But now you’re going to get him to consider that he has learned something. That’s effect on him. Now, that isn’t going to change anything more than a small idea or two, and is certainly going to be an effect on him, and it is certainly not — directed straight at him — therapeutic. It’s just not therapeutic, that’s all. It’s the same process, almost, as “Look around here and find something that could have an effect on you.”
So fine is this hairline between a games condition and a no-games condition1, so critical is it in its understanding, that I have had every auditor — good, brainy auditors — do this same thing: They’ve said to me, “Oh, yes, I get that. No-games condition, games condition. Yeah. Nothing to it. Very clever. Very witty. I appreciate that, Ron. Thank you,” and so on-walking off down the street and going on about their job — and anywheres from two to five days later, suddenly come around and look at me and say, “No! You mean…!”
“Oh, yes!”
And they’ve cognited on it. I’m afraid it’s a slow-fuse proposition. That’s why I’m punching it up to you. But the difference between knowing about games condition and not knowing about it is the difference between, let us say, Scientology and yoga.
Now, why is it that the boys in Tibet didn’t burn the world up? What slowed that down? Something must have slowed it down. Because a white man goes over there and he studies the thing, and he winds up with his head in a wonderful condition of short circuit. He just can’t quite make this out: It can do things, it’s interesting, it takes so long to learn, so hard to do, it is so impractical. Final analysis: He sits still for twenty years, and at the end of twenty years he can sit still. Does not appeal to the Western mind at all.
And yet, there is just the thinnest difference imaginable between that and Scientology. You could actually study Scientology for years and be absolutely certain that you were studying yoga. It’s not their practices are similar; they’re not. But people in Tibet, working with the work of Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha), actually were walking along a very, very exact philosophical track that has so many truths in it that it must have been totally true, and which would lead to an enormously interesting expansion. If it had ever been expanded, it would have become Scientology — see, if it were expanded. I’m not saying that this work is better than the work of Buddha or anything like that. All I’m trying to say is that we’re working with much the same tools, much the same observational position.
What’s different then? It’s quite amusing, quite amusing. The forms vary, you might say. This varies and that varies, but there’s a lot of similarity. Probably the greatest thinker of his time. Because thinking in such high levels of reference in a world so steeped in ignorance was a much greater feat than anyone in a scientific, mathematically-oriented world putting together such truths. Thinking, back in the relative dark ages of about 625 B.C., was really a trick. That was really a trick; that was a light.
But he didn’t say one thing: A yogi sits and meditates. You understand? He sits and meditates. And a Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. Got it? Boy, that hairline, its width is not measurable by micrometer calipers. And yet it is the difference between a progressive science and something which is just stuck on the time track for twenty-five hundred years.
A yogi would sit and meditate, sort of expecting something to happen, maybe. He would sit, he would meditate. And boy, you can do that for a long time. The Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. Not that there’s a difference between the thetan concept. Because the one group in the world who knew about thetans — our work is not patterned on them; it just happens that they did know about this, we discover later — who knew the most about this, was composed of those lamas, and so on, of Tibet in the world of yoga.
All right. Now, if they are this well advised, why didn’t they unwind the whole thing? I mean, why didn’t more fantastic things happen than have happened? How is it that the Dalai Lama can be chased out by a bunch of commies? See, that’s an interesting question. The United States government might breathe down the back of our necks occasionally — undoubtedly will, every now and then — nevertheless, it’s changing things around right this minute, because we think it to be a good idea. But the Dalai Lama ran when the communists came in. It’s because we have the thetan at cause, and the bank or environment at effect. And the yogi has the bank or the environment at cause, and the thetan at effect. Complete tsk! Actually, graphically, just swapped ends. Got that?
Yet I imagine you’ll find, someplace in yoga, large statements concerning the fact that you must be cause; and it’s all a big rundown and a lot of talk about it. And then you’ll look at the actual processes and find out they have not been carried over into it. The closest thing to a Scientology process on Earth before our time was yoga; this was the closest thing to it — yoga or Zen Buddhism. These were the closest things to processes. Many of the principles with which we work can be found in those works. But we are not working with these principles because we found them in that work.
When I was very young, after studying that work quite a bit, it became obvious to me that there was something wrong with it, and so went on an entirely different, independent developmental line. Knew about that work and, in some degrees, it closes.
Don’t let somebody come along in yoga and say now, “Oh, I see what you’re doing; you’re doing yoga.”
You say, “Well, I see one thing about you is you don’t know what I’m doing.” See, that would immediately become clear to you.
Another thing is they pull the sin of tremendous number of data, none of them evaluated for importance. Data is not classed in importances. The data is just endless. If there was any “most important datum” in the work of Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, it was “If you can conceive mind essence, you will be free.” That’s the most important statement he made. But that isn’t isolated. And he goes on at once to tell you then, “You must not enter into the worlds of motion and not-motion, of separation and not- separation.” There are twelve dichotomies there that you mustn’t have anything to do with on processes.
And actually, our processes based on motion and not-motion, and separation and not-separation, and so forth, snap people out of their heads and achieve the exact result which Gautama Siddhartha Buddha was trying to establish and achieve. You can just ask somebody, “Find something around here and say you’re connected with it,” or “…say it’s connected with you.” (To be exactly precise, to illustrate what I’m saying here.)
“Connected… connected… Well, that light’s connected with me. That’s connected with me. That’s connected with me.”
You keep this up for a little while on a not-too-bad-off person, and actually not a very well-off person, and next thing you know, they’re sitting eight feet back of their heads. You can take a person who’s fairly well off and run Separateness and get the same thing. In other words, run either one of two techniques he said you must never run and you accomplish the exteriorization for which he was striving with twenty years of meditation, gazing at your navel. Got the idea? Hm? So therefore, there is something wrong with that work.
Yes, if you can conceive isness, if you can conceive isness with no further complication, you’ve got it. And the second you try to conceive isness, the world caves in on it. See? You say to this fellow, “Mock up a girl.” See? He does this two dozen times, three dozen times, and all of a sudden the bank just goes squash! Little particles start running around. Motions, actions occur of one kind or another, and all of a sudden, why, boom! He’s got chaos. Why? Because he couldn’t conceive mind essence. What is mind essence? Mind essence is probably a thetan. Well, if you could conceive the idea of a thetan, believe me, you would be in wonderful condition — providing you could do it. But we ask almost anybody to conceive a static, and he gets awfully ill. So it means at once that this one-shot Clear, Buddha fashion, was not an attainable thing — for the bulk of the people.
We’re working on something else entirely different. We are not trying to free somebody into some mythical heaven where he can stand still forever. That’s not what we’re trying to do. The goals, everything else, are different.
Yet, I’m merely telling you all that simply — not to downgrade Buddhism. I’m telling you this is a wonderful and a great thing that happened here on Earth twenty-five hundred years ago. A fantastic thing is, out of the darkness and ignorance, somebody steps forward like that and carries forward the only civilization that Asia has had to date that has been stable at all (due to his work and his teachings), and was able, without any frame of reference in the field of mathematics, science or anything else, to isolate so many interestingly true principles. For somebody to do that under that condition, that’s heroic. That’s great! For somebody, today, to dream up Scientology, put it together out of mathematics, science, and so forth — there are tremendous fields from which to draw for this information. You see? That was a great feat!
But, the main thing I am telling you is this singular little difference between the two things: The Buddhist would sit and meditate for twenty years, expecting something to happen, see? And the Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. The Buddhist would do it this way: He’d say… twenty years later, see? A Scientologist would run it this way: “All right. Now I’ll make my body sit and meditate. Ah, that’s fine. I did it. All right, I’ll make my body sit and meditate.” And he’ll go ahead and do it. He would do it to the body. All of a sudden he’d probably say, “Well, you know, this isn’t having any effect on me!” But he would say it from about two light-years back of his head.
The slight time difference might interest you: I suppose, ten to twenty hours versus ten to twenty years. Buddhism would take ten to twenty years. But where he’s gotten at ten to twenty years, I am not prepared to say. Because they do not look as alive and do not act as alive at the end of the period.
Hubbard, L. R. (1957, 7 January). Learning Processes: No-Game Condition. Sixteenth American Advanced Clinical Course, (16ACC-04). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC.
Notes
- Definitions: games condition, no-games condition ↩