In the world today (circa 2022) individuals cannot call themselves free from economic and political constraints or the demands of just survival in a locked down environment.
As LRH states below “The only thing that can trap a thetan is his attention.” Those of you who have audited others or yourselves will know how real this is!
TV, radio, newspapers, advertising, fixate on how we are not free and must obey the rules of those who “look after us! These rules are all designed to fix our attention, and it is getting much, much worse! The electronic and paper-based bombardment of information keeps individuals in a “hypnotic” state. Hypnosis is a state of human consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion. (From Wikipedia.)
We, as Scientologists, have a huge advantage over the average person as we can see what is occurring and do something about it, so as not to become effect and have our attention hypnotically fixed.
You don’t realise how bad off this society is until, “You’re actually leading any person who is not Clear, then, out of a morass of entrapment, not out of a mass of ignorance. And he’s trapped to the degree that his ideas are fixed….
“Exteriorization, even the state of OT, depends upon bringing about greater states of freedom, not greater states of wisdom. This is an important difference, because the wisdom will take place anyway. But by concentrating on the wisdom you are all too prone to fall over into the idea of the implanted stable datum. But if you think in terms of freeing his attention, you then lead to freeing the being.
“The only thing that can trap a thetan is his attention. That is all that can trap a being – stone walls do not, definitely.
“You have a situation here where an individual is totally untrappable: completely and utterly untrappable by anyone except himself. What traps a being is his unwillingness to confront things which are not interesting to him, or to back out of situations in which he has lost interest, or to move off and go his way but still, somehow or another, be responsible for where he was….
“Well, we are studying, now, how does an individual fix his attention and then substitute for himself or for thinkingness or for something else, some inanimate postulate? …
“How has he trapped himself?
“He says, ‘this is an unawareness area which is going to handle these confusions.”
LRH, Saint Hill Service Facsimile Handling, 18 Sept 1963, from Academy Lectures Level IV transcripts pages 120-121
We have, as LRH states, this brief window of time, in which the Tech is available to us to understand and apply in order to free ourselves and our fellow beings. It is important we do this for ourselves and assist, where we can, those who are trying.
“And you don’t have to go to heaven or to hell if you don’t want to. You can be entirely free to go anywhere. And you can be immortal and yet have your body, your family, your friends.
“We are extending to you the precious gift of freedom and immortality – factually, honestly.
“You are a spirit. You are your own soul. You are not mortal. You can be free.”
LRH, “The Golden Dawn”, 1954, Issue 1-0A, 1954, page 272 Tech Vol II.
“There are those who would tell you that only a fiend would set you free, and that freedom leads at best into the darkest hells, and there are those to inform you that freedom is for you and not for them, but there are also men of kind heart who know how precious is the cup and drink of wide, unbounded ways. Who is to say whether man will benefit at all from this knowledge hardly won? You are the only one who can say.
“Observation, application, experience and test will tell you if the trek has been made and the answer found. For this is the science of knowing how to know. It is a science which does not include within it cold and musty data, data to be thrust down the throat without examination and acceptance. This is the track of knowing how to know. Travel it and see.”
LRH, The Creation of Human Ability [1955], page 248