Sound Off !
An Urgent Philosophic Journey
September 15, 2013
Category: Philosophy and Religion > Philosophy
When I was about 14 a Yale fine-arts grad student selling encyclopedias came to our house and my mother signed me up for painting lessons. At one exact point the experience became exhilarating and transformative. I majored in painting at Yale to follow the truth of creative perceptual immediacy, an act that felt more alive and full of future than any other. By 1965 I had made pieces that stand up even today as high works shining free, at least for me.
Philosophically I looked for heroes whose voices did not waver to my ear — Joyce, Yeats, Henry Miller, Rembrandt, Hart Crane, Socrates, Theodore Roethke, Cicero, Rimbaud, Amadeus — troublemakers all. These individuals shone out for me in the protected but false world of academe. I learned that a communication conceived in joy conveys it ever after to any willing recipient.
One day at Penn Grad School of Fine Arts a fellow student told me in great confidence of a topic called Scientology which was worth a look. The Philadelphia Public Library had a text called Science of Survival which I read with great interest. It tore through much bad or missing information on the nature of man and was a thrilling read. I tried it out, got fantastic results in no time, and have followed up ever since as a Scientologist. The gains have been beyond anything I could have conceived then.
I know that many have run across information that conflicts with mine on this subject. But if you lack first-hand personal experience, the wise course is to ignore hearsay, which specifically includes all media in this case. Look for yourself, decide for yourself, and until then, just say you don't know, because that is the truth.
There is an international, highly flourishing, and rapidly expanding worldwide movement of millions of Scientologists from scores of cultures and speaking almost every language on Earth. As individuals they are happy with the subject and its people, and excited about its direction. They are a logical, active, productive, affluent, and utterly drug-free worldwide public, much smarter than average. And they are peace-loving serious students of a highly workable and scholastically well-grounded philosophy built on clearly expressed axioms.
Yet this is a movement that has been attacked with the full force of its weaponry by Time, Life, The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, Forbes, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, the FDA, the US Postal Service, the IRS, Interpol, the AMA, President Richard Nixon, and the LAPD, to name a few.
Yet here we are, happy and expanding all over the world. If that does not make you curious, then ask for a refund on your education.
My spiritual journey, then, has been through the widening experience of art itself and the application of extensive life-changing material researched by L. Ron Hubbard. It has been in the direction of ever more self-determinism and ability to help others. Introduction to the material is at www.scientology.org.