At some point in the future, we should get comfortable with the idea of having "commentary" along with our Scientology texts. Here is how I'd make the case for that development.

I happen to have a volume of Sherlock Holmes which includes commentary on the life and times of Holmes. This is pretty helpful when reading these stories, as it goes a long way in shedding light on the culture of the time.

I can't imagine trying to understand Shakespeare without commentary on the society present at the time his plays were written. In fact, there has been a project operating which has sought to capture the English accent as it was during the time of Shakespeare. It turns out that accent sounds like a combination of many different accents currently present in England. When I hear it, it sounds like the English of the time was more Scottish than English, but I'm American, so what do I know? One of the advantages of this effort, though, is that a lot of the rhymes of Shakespeare's writing now make a lot more sense. Audience response to this version of Shakespeare has been generally quite good. In addition, it seems clear that Shakespeare's plays include humorous and political references, which made sense at the time. Now, however, they likely pass most listeners or viewers by; we no longer have much connection to the culture of Shakespeare's time. Commentary would solve this problem.

Imagine trying to make heads or tails of Beowulf in its original form. It's Old English. Good luck. The only way to make sense of Beowulf is to translate it into modern English. And even then, we're probably missing a lot of cultural references which would make sense at the time, but now don't. Ever read something in a foreign language, or something in the English of some earlier period, and get the feeling that there are jokes or references there that you're probably missing?

A lot of spiritual writings throughout the world come in various versions, some with and some without "commentary". The commentary serves to fill in blanks about the meaning of the text or the culture of the time.

Some of the Bible is written in Greek. Did you know that, while there's a single word in English for "love", there is more than one such word in Greek, each representing a different kind of love? If you have an English version of the Bible where the word "love" is used, you may likely still not have the proper sense of the text because this word, as written, is not the same as the original Greek version of the word "love". Commentary would help here. A full glossary might assist, but a full explanation of this quirk of Greek might still be necessary.

There is currently a project in the U.S. to go back and recover the meanings of the words of the Constitution, as they were understood at the time of the writing of the Constitution. This is a way of clarifying and giving full context to the Constitution, and thus improving our understanding of our most fundamental American document. It should be noted that that document is only about 250 years old, but belongs to a culture very different than ours.

Phenomena such as the above also affect Scientology. Following are some examples.

In the Data Series at one point, Ron is talking about the "expected scene" or the scene one might expect under any given circumstances. One example he gives is that at the end of a meal, one would expect "full ashtrays". As time moves on, this reference may be harder and harder to understand. In this case, it helps to understand that at the time 40+ percent of the population smoked, and that directly after meals was a favorite time to do so. Also, it was common for adults to sit around the dinner table after a meal and smoke and drink coffee or whatever. Today, the smoking percentage has declined to more like 20 percent, and a lot of people go outside to smoke rather than doing it inside. If you were a kid growing up now and reading this LRH reference, you might legitimately wonder what kind of world Ron lived in. This is an example of a point where culture is important for placing context around a passage of text which might otherwise be misunderstood or simply appear to be gibberish.

Also in the Data Series, if I'm not mistaken, Ron makes reference to children being educated in Geometry because, according to "experts" this is the way we think. Ron remarks on this with disdain. The problem is, I've never heard of this kind of thing. Have you? It seems clear he must have run across this somewhere in his travels and considered it a point of common knowledge.

Ron uses a fair number of expressions which now might be considered archaic, such as "appetite over tin cup". You remember the first time you read over this one in some of his work, and wondered what the heck it meant? Hopefully you had an experienced Course Supervisor who knew just where to find the definition for this and other odd slang.

Consider how much technology alone has changed and changed our lives since Ron was alive. That's a lot of context difference.

And then there's the culture and history of Scientology. In the mid 1960s, Ron wrote Keeping Scientology Working, Safeguarding Technology and Technical Degrades. Scientology had just gone through a period where "quicky grades" (Grades delivered in shortened form not authorized by LRH and denying full gains) had been in use. Now, before reading these three bulletins/policy letters, did you know that "quicky grades" were in use? Do you even know what quicky grades were and how they came about? Probably not. To this day, I'm still not sure what quicky grades were really like. And LRH doesn't really explain it in those works, either. You just sort of have to skip all that and just assume it happened some sort of way and go on. There are definitions of sorts in the Tech Dictionary. But none of it's very adequate in understanding the full magnitude of what happened, how, how it was discovered by Ron, and what was done about it.

Were you aware that cases in the 1940s and 1950s were markedly different from those which began to appear from the 1960s onwards? This was a result of all the drug use in the 1960s which has continued on to today. Cases today are rougher. That resulted in a lot of changes to the Tech. For example, prior to the mid-1970s, there was no Purif. There was no need for it. But by the mid-1970s, it was found that drugs (and environmental toxins) were becoming a major barrier to case gain. Little piece of context there you may not know about if you are younger than a certain age.

Did you know that, prior to a certain point in our history, headaches were handled in any number of ways? And then at some point, Ron discovered headaches were almost entirely a phenomenon associated with interiorization. And thus, the "Interiorization Rundown" was born. If you're younger than a certain age, you may not have known that. Cultural context. History.

Did you know that 1978 represented a banner year for Tech recovery and correction? There's a bulletin about it called Tech Correction Round-Up. But it's not liable to be on any of your course checksheets unless you do the Briefing Course. But that year represents a change in the culture of Scientology, because of all the corrections made to the Tech.

I've gotten into arguments with people who quote items from pre-1978 Dianetic Clear to justify one position or another. In fact, this happened just the other day with a Class VIII. I asserted that Clears should not be audited on Grades. The Class VIII disagreed. He cited for me many references which state that the Grades are essential to making it on the OT levels. The problem was that all his references were pre-1978. In that year, it was discovered that many many many people had gone Clear on Dianetics. Prior to that time, the Clearing Course was necessary after Dianetics to go Clear, it was believed. But in 1978, this discovery about Dianetic Clear was made, and Clears started coming out of the woodwork, including thousands who had gone Clear last lifetime. This required a re-thinking of quite a few things on that part of the Bridge. In answer to the Class VIII's assertions, I presented a post-1978 reference which flatly stated that Clears were not to be audited on Grades. He never tried to reconcile the difference in the two sets of references, his and mine. In my opinion, he had simply omitted or ignored the context of each different era. Pre-1978 was one cultural time frame, post-1978 was another. Very different. I have to hope he doesn't end up being my C/S when it comes time for me to get on my OT levels, because I consider my Grades (of which I only received auditing on Grade 0, but am a "Dianetic Clear") generally "flat". I would only go back and do them under protest.

Ron also made use of military slang without explaining that that was what it was. Words like "chit" and "evolution". "Chit" is known in British English, but almost never used in American English. Moreover, the bald definition of it is just "a piece of paper". The way Ron uses it, it isn't just a piece of paper. It means more than that. When you start digging into its use in military jargon, that's when you realize what he really meant by it. It took me a couple of decades to track this down. My supervisors never knew the full meaning, and would simply point to some crappy dictionary definition of the word, and hope that was enough for you.

"Evolution" was another one. You'd read it in LRH's work, and realize you didn't have the right definition somehow. Your supervisor would present you with the dictionary definition of the word, and you were supposed to be able to get by on that. Of course the dictionary definition was not the proper one, but it was kinda like it, so you sort of limped along. On the other hand, if you did some educated hunch tracking, and looked around in military slang for the way the word was used, you found the exact definition as LRH meant it. There are probably other military terms I've forgotten. The point is that these words and terms were part of LRH's working vocabulary, but not that of the average person reading what he wrote.

The above two words were examples of words which an educated editor should have researched and then included in Scientology dictionaries, regardless of whether Ron defined them at any point. But no Scientology dictionary editor or glossary writer was ever that brave. If a definition could not be found in any of LRH's works anywhere, then someone would put in a request for LRH to define the word as he meant it. And so you got definitions in the Tech and Admin dictionaries from "LRH Definition Notes".

In fact, our dictionaries suffered greatly from their editors' insistence on directly quoting Ron for each and every definition in them. Some of the definitions gleaned that way were still mind-bendingly difficult to integrate with the the words as used in the text. LRH might have spent 15 minutes in a lecture defining a term in several different ways. But including all that text in dictionary definitions was more than silly. Even then, the Briefing Course and well-equipped Academies still had reference cards with hard-to-find words and expressions in them which never made it into our dictionaries. We would have had vastly better dictionaries if the original editors simply defined the terms as succinctly as possible and someone had cross-checked them against the original LRH source material, rather than directly quoting from LRH. You could still cite the original location of the definition.

Worthy of note: Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn both contain language which, in modern English would be considered racist, offensive and appalling. But at that time and place, such language was perfectly normal. One has to read such works while considering the culture they were written in as context.

A given Bible may or may not contain commentary. But many Oriental works of religion and philosophy (e.g. the I Ching and the Art of War) contain commentary, because Oriental thought is often difficult for the Occidental mind to grasp otherwise.

As I've pointed out above many religious works, and likewise some better known but older written works include "commentary" which clarifies the meaning of the text by giving it context. It's not unreasonable to assume that such may be needed in the future with regard to Scientology. Remember how odd the language sometimes seems from documents written just a few hundred years ago. Language can and does change significantly over time, and that's a matter for glossary writers, who should revisit glossaries from time to time.

But glossaries don't account for cultural changes. The context (today's culture, for example) you believe applies for a given passage of text doesn't apply. In which case, it's necessary to explain what was going on at the time, perhaps in some detail. This "cultural gap" will only continue to widen over time. And at some point it will become absolutely necessary to explain the context of the Tech. And the ordinary answer should be some commentary to accompany LRH's original text.

Of course, there will be those purists who will likely argue loudly and interminably with this idea. Many of them may be Class VIIIs. They will likely label me and those who agree with me "apostates" and "heretics". I submit they are stuck in some sort of service fac, or they have other reasons (such as protecting their positions as the ultimate arbitors of the Tech). Because if you consider all I have said here, you couldn't possibly otherwise agree.

Of course, any attempt at commentary would have to be closely monitored to ensure it did not conflict with or alter the meaning of the original text. That is a given. And people would have to be cautioned that, should such a conflict appear to exist, the original LRH would be the preferred reference. And it would likely need to be pointed out that commentary was not written by LRH, is not part of Scientology, and is not from Source. But I persist in saying that at some point, such a thing will be needed.

For what it's worth, the Scientology History Project will be an attempt to provide such context for a variety of texts and eras in Scientology. But that's not the same as including it as part of courses and such. In fact, I would say, in order not to lengthen the Bridge or student time in training, we not include commentary on checksheets, but as an essential option. In other words, a student would be required to have a copy of the commentary, but not required as part of the course, to read or study it. It would be optional.

Food for thought.