I've said before that as a young man, I studied philosophy. Let me now clarify what I mean.

As a child something was missing in my life, and I didn't know what it was. I came from a "broken" but not unhappy home. I loved my mom dearly, and had a very close relationship with her. I would have been (and still am) what you'd call a "Mama's Boy". There was nothing I couldn't discuss with her, and usually did. But again, I felt there was something missing. Something I was looking for, but I didn't know what it was.

During the period, let's say from about 12 through my high school years, I decided to take a more active role in working out what it was I was missing. Accordingly, I decided to investigate philosophy and religion.

I was raised Lutheran (protestant Christian). But my religion left me with a lot of questions, particularly as I got old enough to really wonder about the shape of the universe. In particular, it never made sense to me why a God would insist on the incarnation of his "son", and his inevitable (and incredibly painful) sacrifice, in order to make up for the transgressions of Mankind. For an all-powerful God, it simply didn't add up. But maybe that's just me. And what about all those folks who didn't believe in this whole Jesus thing, or worse, had never heard of him? You know the drill. We've probably all been through it. If you happened to belong to a church at the time, you probably drove your pastor or preacher crazy with questions he clearly was unequipped to answer.

So I decided I wanted to know what other religions were about and other philosophies. I studied them all together, so it wasn't like I studied oriental religions and philosophies, and the switched to occidental ones. It all took place together. I also studied, at the same time, schools of psychology, since it appeared to me that psychology was the sibling of philosophy.

In no particular order, let me detail what I found.

As for oriental philosophies and religions, I'll be kind and say that what I found there seemed to have some great depth, but more or less was gibberish. You've heard of questions like, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That was more or less the whole of oriental religion and philosophy as far as I could tell. There appeared to be more to it, but I was unprepared to embark on a years-long study which likely would lead nowhere. There probably were some deeply hidden truths within these philosophies, but one would have to dig quite a ways to find them. And you had no idea whether what you'd find was "truth" with a small "t" or "Truth" with a capital "t". But given the sign posts, I had a feeling that whatever emerged would be the sort of truth where you just thought, "Well of course it would be that way." Occasionally there would be some offshoots which might be worth examining, like energy centers in the body and the idea that the more crap you own, the worse off you probably were. But whatever truth there was there didn't impact the really important questions I had. Again, it mostly appeared to be gibberish. Appealing gibberish, but in practical terms, not very useful. So at some point, I closed the door or the Orient. Whatever these people knew certainly hadn't made them the masters of all they surveyed. So if they had anything of practical value, they weren't using it. And there was every probability that there really wasn't anything of lasting pragmatic value there.

As for Western philosophy, that was a different matter. These fellows were quite obvious about what they believed. As I said, I didn't want to engage in a years-long in depth study of each philosopher. I was on the clock. It seemed simpler to me to look up each philosopher and find a summary of what they posited, and if that seemed correct or important, to follow it up with further reading and study. So I took one philosopher at a time, and found summaries of what they had to say. In each and every case, I found that what they had to say was impractical, and gave the impression that it was devised by someone who never left their house to actually live. Most of the ideas were so wrong it was obvious. Or they were so bad that if extended out, they would result in a dismal life of unhappiness.

Notice here how I had set myself up to be the final judge of these "great men's" deep thoughts? I find that kind of funny. It never occurred to me to say, "Well, he's obviously smarter than me. Perhaps he's right and I'm the dumb one." Nope. I looked at the ideas and determined, based on my experience (which I never considered to be inadequate, even though I was just a teenager), that they were all crap, different colors perhaps, but all made of the same sordid excrement.

I didn't study all the Western philosophers. The older ones, like Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, really didn't have much of practical value to disseminate. They had some good advice here and there, but most of what they had to say felt more like religion than philosophy. Do's and don'ts. And no real answers to the fundamental questions of life.

The more recent Western philosophers had much more in the way of gibberish to convey. After getting part way through my survey of their work, it became clear to me that none of them really had any clue about what they were proposing. And in fact I decided to go no further into the study, as I was willing to bet that none of the ones I hadn't yet studied knew any more than the clueless ones I'd already studied about. In other words, the whole pile of them were worth nothing in the broad scheme of things. Moreover, none of them appeared to have consulted with the real world in coming up with their ideas.

Onto psychology. Psychology was clearly divided into "camps", "schools" and "fads". Freud was obviously a disturbed individual. His emphasis on sex was clearly a hint at his own aberration. His disciple Jung was more interesting. But he had a lot of emphasis on dreams and symbolism, which, as far as I was concerned was a deeply misplaced emphasis. He'd gone down a long road to nowhere. Dreams are meaningless. They are clearly the mind playing tiddly winks with itself while the body rested and repaired itself. It is only on the very rarest occasions that dreams have any value at all, and you could probably throw them all away and be just fine. Symbols are a trap. They have meaning only because we assign them meaning. But if you give them any more credit than that, you're doing yourself a disservice. They are never as esoteric as anyone would have you think.

I considered Abraham Maslow an interesting case. He was the first psychologist I found who proceeded, not from studying the demented to the sane, but in the opposite direction. He first looked at people who were evidently sane and fulfilled in life, and tried to distill down what it was that made them so. An interesting approach that drew some good conclusions. Unfortunately, the conclusions were more or less obvious to anyone who cared to look. And none of them were particularly profound.

There were various other schools of psychology, but they were more or less faddish, and again, of no fundamental value. Then there were the real psychos who had the idea of cutting up or shocking people's brains. Even as a teenager, I had the idea that brains weren't really where consciousness resided. But I was pretty sure you shouldn't go around just randomly abusing brains. It was clear that the people doing this were playing with fire, at the expense of the victims they were continually making.

It quickly became clear that, like the philosophers, the psychologists were just guessing. There was no underlying universal theory, no fundamental understanding ever reached by any of them. At least not one which was in any way "true".

I considered the psychologists more contemptible. They were insinuating themselves into people's lives with theories based on complete guesses, tampering with the guts of what people thought and felt. For the philosophers, you had the choice of reading or not reading them. Believing or not believing what they had to say. But when you called upon a psychologist, you were asking for someone to tamper with your ideas and emotions, possibly to your detriment. Another point: there didn't appear to be any milestone which marked the end of "treatment". If they really knew what they were doing, their treatment would be of definite duration. You go for X period of time, and then you're finished, "cured". How many "patients" or "clients" of psychs can you say that about? Very very few.

So there went the end of that survey. Those psychology folks had no idea what they were talking about. They were just guessing. And I didn't have time for folks who were guessing.

Purely coincidentally at this time, I happened upon the Dianetics book, and decided to give it a read. After all, it billed itself as "The Modern Science of Mental Health". Mental health as a "science", and someone bold enough to call it that, would have to be either a pretty smart cookie with a different approach, or a complete scammer like the rest of them.

Dianetics was different. Here was a guy who said, "I studied this many cases, and put them all through this rigor to this point. And this point is a well-defined point of superior mental ability." Not bad. A guy who actually had the guts to put his ideas to the test. That's different.

And then Ron dropped the bomb. What was the point of all life? What was all life trying to do? What was the one thing that tied it all together? Survival! And you just thought, yeah, well duh. And then you took a second look. How fundamental was that? Pretty damn fundamental. He explained it in context, but when you looked at the idea yourself, you could see it all around you. And it made complete and total sense. Moreover, the survival "impulse" was divided into four "dynamics"-- self, sex and family, groups, and Mankind. And at that point, you say to yourself (or I did), "Well let's just see". And sure enough, that pretty much encompassed it all. Why did people do what they did? And in every case, there was your answer, plain as day and right in front of you the whole time. They are all surviving, or trying to. There were graphs of how this tug-of-war between the individual and whatever, which made up the graph of the person's survival. Up one day, down another. One day you got a promotion. Another, your favorite aunt dies. Survival rises and falls.

Revolutionary. Not only was this idea obviously true. It was fundamental. Incredibly so.

And then there was this theory about how life was made to suck. The outside world got inside, and it was called an "engram". It made people push-button automatons. But holy crap, this guy had a way to get rid of this stuff. An actual therapy which would handle the crud. And here comes the theory of it. And that looks sound enough. And as you're reading the book, you can see about how the therapy would actually remedy these engram critters. Who else had that? Freud? Nope. Jung? Nope. Rogers? Nope. Maslow? Nope. Not Hegel, not Sartre, not Locke. No one else had drawn such an obviously true but fundamental conclusion about life and then used it as the basis for a therapy whose aim was to rid life of its most disturbing elements. I couldn't vouch for whether the therapy actually did what it said it did, but this guy Hubbard had the guts to claim it would, and then dared you to put it into practice.

That was probably the cherry on top of the whole thing. This guy says, "Look it's not that hard to understand, see? And you can do this stuff yourself. Don't take my word for it. Study the rest of the book yourself, try this stuff out, and see if it doesn't do everything I said." Holy crap. I'd never seen a bolder statement from anywhere in philosophy, religion, or psychology. And again, the fundamental ideas are apparently sound.

My reading of Dianetics was toward the end of this evolution. It was the only remnant of that whole study that I really kept around. This Hubbard guy probably knew what he was talking about, and none of the other folks did.

I more or less stopped studying these areas and went on with my life. But as I looked out over my life and experiences, I did so through the lens of the principle of Survive! It was a mental tool of continuous usefulness.

Two or three years further on in my life, I rediscovered Scientology, and was amazed to find that the same guy who had written that cool book had also put together this whole other, related subject. And when I got my first glimpse of the Grade Chart (on my first visit into a Church), I just flipped out. Holy crap! All those abilities I figured had to be there but no one was very good at them-- they were all there on that chart! And there were different "therapies" to get to each one of them. And this wasn't some guy touring the country, telling you how good his ideas were and then leaving you to your own devices after you bought his book. Here there were actual organizations full of people who knew about this stuff and were prepared to deliver it.

And so I did my Communications Course and joined up right away.

There are people who have parted ways with the Church, and decided to undertake studies like the above. I always discourage it, because I've been there and it's a dead end, as I described above. Of course, they're welcome to do as they please. And perhaps, if they study these areas more closely than I did, they will come up with some idea which is fundamental. But I can almost guarantee that if the idea is that fundamental, it also shows up in Scientology. And if so, maybe Ron discovered it in his philosophical researches, and decided to incorporate it into Scientology. Making Scientology a handy compendium of the best or most true ideas. Meaning, you could pretty much throw out all the rest, study Scientology alone, and you'd get all the fundamentals you need. I can say that, in the last 40 years, Scientology has never let me down in this respect.