The Field of Mind

A conversation between two 20th Century charlatans

One evening L. Ron Hubbard and Bob Dobbs were discussing the Secret of Power over a joint and a bottle of cognac. (Or perhaps it was Alan Watts and Bob Wilson…Let’s just say it was Hubbard and Dobbs for now). As Hubbard took a long deep draw from the spliff of fine Lebanese boo Dobbs asked him, “But what even is the mind, Ron? Clearly it’s not inside the brain, you and I have personally opened up enough of those to know that much. Clearly the mind is something immaterial. But what exactly is it?”

“The mind, my friend, is an energy field. Hear me out: the human body is a great and complex receptor. Our bodies are like radio antennae which are tuned to pick up the signals of mind that permeate the universe. The mind isn’t something that arrises in us, it’s a great field, like electromagnetism, that we tune into. The sense of individuality is the ego, a physiological response to the body’s interactions with environment and with mind. The mind wants the body to last and survive for an adequately long period of time so that the mind can use it as a tool for learning, exploration, discovery, pleasure, and most importantly, play. The ego, or personality, forms so that the body/mind system will motivate itself to survive and thrive. The mind, or consciousness, is a unified field.”

“Do you mean that there aren’t separate minds, there is only one greater mind, and it’s picked up and interpreted by individual bodies in space?”

“YES! Exactly! We all act like we have individual minds, mostly because we do not have clear and straight forward telepathic abilities. But the truth is that all of our minds are the same mind being filtered through different biological receptors. If you pour water through a colander the water appears to split as it goes through the different holes but it all reforms again once it falls through the holes and into the basin. In this same way the “water” of mind, as it flows through the “colander” of our planet appears to separate into the individual minds of the different physical life forms. The ego is the unique way in which your physiology filters and interprets the mind signal that passes through your bio-package. That is why consciousness change is such a powerful tool. Ego disillusion allows mind to flow unimpeded through your corporeal form, it opens up a path of least resistance through which mind will tend towards.”

“So what is the soul then?”

“The soul is the ego. There is no individual spirit or soul to grasp onto and ride into the afterlife, nor is there one that will reincarnate in the next life. There is but one self in the universe, that which is called I. When I say the word I, I am trying to point at that most fundamental part of me, the true and unbreakable me which is My True Self. The real trick is understanding that what I am referring to when I say the word I, is the exact same being/self/thing that you are referring to when you say the word I. There is but one I and we all share it. But there are many eyes through which the I looks.

“You mentioned earlier our lack of telepathy. If we are all the same mind then why can’t we think each others thoughts and remember each others memories?”

“This is an excellent question. Memory is a very interesting thing indeed. Why do we have memory at all? Why are we able to remember our own past? For the past does not exist, save for in the memories of living things. The desire to remember is built off of the fundamental misunderstanding of mind and reality that I am pointing at. I cannot think your thoughts or remember your memories because there is no need for it. You and I share the same mind. You carry those memories for me, why should I need them too. Furthermore, why should the mind need to remember anything at all. The mind does not die, only the body. The mind has no need for memory because the mind has no fear of annihilation. Memory is something that is created by the body and stored within the body. You could say that the ego itself is but the sum total of memories that the body has stored. The whole endeavour of history has been a grand attempt at increasing memory capacity. Ever since the written word we have been honing and perfecting our ability to store our memories outside of the body.”

“Computers…”

“Precisely. Computers are the logical next step in the externalization of memory started by the written word and the alphabet. We think we’ve perfected the art of memory but the one thing we keep failing to remember is that we’re all one mind, reality is an illusion, death is an illusion, and the whole point is to have fun with time and space. That’s why we started up the universe in the first place, to have fun with ourselves. We are one universal being, there is no separate, no other. We’re it. Mind is truly one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe: physical matter, time, space, light, and mind. All light is Light, all matter is Matter, all time is Time, all space is Space, and all mind is Mind. There is only the illusion of separateness, the appearance of separateness but, as the cliche goes, appearances can be deceiving. Because of literacy and our disproportionate reliance on our faculty of eyesight we are biased towards appearances. We prefer to take things at face value, as they appear to be. It makes it easier for us to remember.”

“You’re talking about McLuhan’s theories now, is that correct?”

“Yes, Marshall is a very bright man, he has clarified much for me.”

“What I don’t understand, Ron, is why is it that you’re the first person to see this, to understand what seems so obvious, now that you’ve said it?”

“I’m not. The Taoists will tell you the same, but with different words, so will the Vedantists, the Buddhists, the Gnostics. Hell, on a good day you can get a Catholic to admit as much. This is not a new idea, how could it be. Anyone who listens to themselves and takes themselves seriously enough will soon discover that they are the fundamental it and that death is not the end. It is when we start listening to authorities and giving them more credence than our own authority as individual manifestations of the greater self that we start to get way-far-out and out of tune. Humanity has gone out of tune with, what the Chinese call, the Tao, or the natural flow of the universe. When mind flows through us now, it is shaped and moulded through the prisms of culture, language, technique, machine, and belief system such that what comes out the other end is something so completely other and alien to what was fed in, that it’s not surprising that we have such a hard time believing that we aren’t separate, in some way, from the greater field of universal mind/body.”

“So isn’t it wrong, then, to take advantage of people like we do?”

“In a way, yes. For, if we are all one, then anything and everything we do is either a form of masturbation (playing with ourselves) or self harm (hurting ourselves). When we take advantage of people’s naiveté, if it causes them harm, psychologically or otherwise, we are causing harm to our greater self, the unified field of mind/self/body that we are. I struggle with this often and I do not know the answer, because the satisfaction and the fun that I get from fucking with these morons is beyond any pleasure I’ve ever known. Is their suffering more bad than my pleasure is good? I do not know. I think perhaps if we were all experiencing pleasure together it would be best, but these ideas only became clear to me recently. Perhaps I would have never come to these realizations if I had not swung so far along the Left Hand Path.”

“You mentioned taking oneself seriously…do you take yourself seriously?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it depends on what you mean by “yourself” and “seriously.” I take seriously the idea that my fundamental self, the thing I call I, is the ultimate self and a universal constant, and yet I see no problem in taking seriously the individual ego-self either because, as a manifestation of the entirety of the universe, it is no less a part of the greater self than anything else. But I try not to hold on to it or feel attached to it as though it’s something precious because that would prejudice me against everything else and I’m as much everything else as I am myself. The ego, the body, they are lovely and wonderful, but so is everything else, and am I not flowing through everything else as well? Why should I be an ego chauvinist? What is so great about this aspect of myself over all of the other aspects?”

“What about other animals?”

“Yes, they are physical manifestations of mind too, you wouldn’t be wrong to substitute the word mind with the word life. Mind is the field of energy that, when it is allowed to flow through physical matter, becomes what we call life. Everything biological is part of the mind-matter complex, when these two universal constants interact, life forms.”

“Far out!”

This was the last conversation L. Ron Hubbard and Bob Dobbs would have; though they would meet several times again, never did they utter a word to one another for as long as they both lived.