Man's search has really been for himself, but the
spirit of man looked at by that man poses an impossibility. Can a stream
look at its water? Can a diamond admire its own glitter? It's not
possible. So the individual man's search was really for the spirit of
OTHERS. And he used all manner of interesting devices.
Many people came into Scientology to "know
more about themselves," they think. I'll tell you something. There
isn't anything to know about you, from your standpoint. There's a bunch of
stuff that you dreamed up so that you could thereafter know it, but
there's really nothing for you to know about you.
"You must be curious about yourself" is
the oldest mechanism on Earth to attract and interest people. It makes the
stream look at its own water, the diamond look at its own sparkle. It has
to catch the spark going out, grab hold of it, bring it back and look at
it. When it does that often enough, it introverts thoroughly.
This is a control mechanism to keep people down.
"Introvert. Look at yourself. Pull it back. Don't outflow." If
he knows he's doing this, playing a game, that's all right.
But if he's doing it unknowingly and doesn't know
why he's doing it, believes he is looking into his own eyes and the
windows of his own soul because there is something wrong with him, he can
become a very sick man.
People will have you believe that it is necessary
for you to know why. Certainly there's a "reason why you did
that," but who cares? The point is, did you handle the situation well
from there on?
This mechanism of "look into yourself"
is the aberrated activity of the other fellow trying to make you pull back
your space, your outflow, your anchor points. If you'll make nothing of
yourself, he doesn't have to.
The final result of self-inspection? You know all
about yourself and nothing about the other fellow. Unable to look at a 3rd
Dynamic, he invents a lot of things to know about himself, then invents a
3rd Dynamic and says that is what Man is like.
Every criminal I ever met had only two things
wrong with him: Somebody had said there was something wrong with him, and
he didn't know anybody else was there. Before you have social behavior,
you have to find out that there is somebody else there. What's wrong with
this fellow is his ideas about other people.
It's actually a 3rd Dynamic problem we're up
against, not a 1st Dynamic problem. If you have erroneous data on the
character of the other fellow, you are reduced to the necessity of going
out of communication. Rather than go entirely out of communication, Man
starts shooting.
Your ideas about the other fellow, to a large degree, monitor your
behavior. What we have achieved in Scientology is a knowledge of the other
fellow. So if you are studying Scientology to know about yourself, you're
never going to find out a thing. If you're in Scientology to find out
about the other fellow, you're going to have a tremendous amount of
success. We have achieved knowledge, mainly and chiefly about the other
guy. (1956,
Man's Relentless
Search, Lecture: 5610C05)
You cannot kill a thetan, but you could totally
introvert him so that he would never look out again. That is the goal of
most people who are working at this game. The person takes this datum and
attempts to put it in a form that will cause the other person to look into
himself, or at the backtrack or search a non-existent environment, for a
clue as to what is wrong. It denies the other person havingness and
communication. It denies him the material or communication targets which
are outward.
Introversion is different than interiorization. To
interiorize something, you put it in something else. To introvert
something, you cause it to look in upon itself. It makes its own cage.
This is the only reliable thing you can do to a thetan - make him always
manufacture, everywhere he is, his own cage. This is a final answer as far
as games are concerned. The more introverted a person gets, the more
dangerous he is to himself and everybody else, so introversion is not a
good game mechanism, but it is a goal of games.
The other concept would be to make a fellow look
in at himself. An individual would have to build some kind of loops out
here which would look back. He'd get curves around himself to direct his
sight and force back. He would have to have mechanisms surrounding him so
that if he threw a mass out, the mechanism would pick it up and throw it
back at him. This is an introversion machine. He wouldn't look outward,
he'd look out and back.
That is a special kind of trap. Take a thetan who
was looking back at himself in this odd fashion and then put him in a
container - like a box or a room or a head - and you have two mechanisms
at work at the same time.
One, he is keeping himself trapped with his own
flows, ridges, flowback mechanisms, postulates. And then, while so
trapped, he is also experiencing some ramifications of being in a box or a
room or a head. They want to get out but they can't.
Once you've understood introversion, you'll understand that the mind is
simply an introversion mechanism, and that is about all there is to
understand about it. (1957, Extroversion-Introversion,
its Relationship to Havingness and Communication, Lecture: 5703C27)
Introversion