Scientology Axioms — a Commentary

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Comments by 

In the summer of 1956, I did the HCA course in Washington, D.C. There was a written final exam, which consisted partly of writing all the Scientology Axioms verbatim. You might imagine that this was a senseless exercise in rote memorization without understanding, but just the opposite was the case. On first reading the Axioms seemed confusing and expressed in esoteric language, such as "alter-isness”. As I went over and over the axioms, the confusion dropped away, and their meaning became clearer. I understood them, not only in the abstract, but also how they applied to my own experience. Throughout the rest of my life, they have served as stable data by which I understood my own life as I lived it

Now I am not sure that reading someone else’s interpretations of the Axioms would help or hinder someone in understanding them. Perhaps the route of memorizing them as LRH wrote them is a more effective process. I am sure that the author of this new book gained a lot by writing it. I confess that I have not read much of it, for I found it of not much interest to me at this point in my life. Skimming it, I found nothing to disagree with, and the book appears to be well written. Still, I wonder what the intended audience is. A student of the Axioms would better spend his time going over the original text of the Axioms and clearing and demonstrating each one, than by reading another’s ideas, I believe

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Brief comment by Antony: in 1956, in London, I did a similar or the same HPA exam including writing out all the 50 axioms verbatim. I managed it. I have not read this book in depth but only dipped into it and am fascinated by the division of the axioms into groups and the references to other similar Scientology things like pre-logics logics, two sets of Dianetic axioms.

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Comment by  Nomen Nescis

Hi Ant

Thanks a lot. I have experienced the same thing as your anonymous commentator: I learned the Axioms by heart (almost) and consequently happened to notice instances of them in life, so they got more and more real to me. Often I would have session cognitions and then realize that they were actually rewordings of some axiom or other.

Obviously, I have had very many cognitions on writing the book, but equally obviously, many Scientologists have given up understanding the axioms and would never bother to learn them verbatim or even try to study them again. It is for these that I have written the book. Some, like yourself who once learned them by heart, may get the idea that they can get in a comm-line to them, after all, that they can come to understand the axioms.

ARC

 From a Danish contact:

Undskyld mit sene svar, men tusind tak for teksten med Axioms og Factors. Jeg har allerede læst i den, og synes den meget spændende. Den glæder jeg mig til at dykke mere ned i.

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A proofreader, Beth Guest, reports on the 26th of January:

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