t has only been in Scientology that the mechanics of death have been thoroughly understood. Hitherto, the whole subject of death has been one of the more mysterious subjects to man.We are actually the first people that do know a great deal about death. It is one of the larger successes of Scientology.
In the first place, man is composed of a body, a mind and what we refer to as a thetan—the Scientology word for the spirit, the individual being himself who handles and lives in the body.
A very effective way to demonstrate this is by saying to a person, “Look at your body. Have you got a body there?” Then tell him, “Get a mental picture of a cat.” He will get a picture of a cat. That picture is a mental image picture and is part of the mind.
The mind is composed of pictures that interassociate, act and carry perceptions. While the person is looking at this actual picture ask him, “What’s looking at it?”
Nobody ever asked this question before! It is quite an innocent question, but this particular phrasing and this particular demonstration of the parts of man were unknown before Scientology.
This procedure gives a person a considerable subjective reality on the idea that he himself is a being that is independent of a mind or a body. There is an actual separateness there.
Man thought he had a human spirit. That is totally incorrect. Man is a human spirit which is enwrapped more or less in a mind which is in a body. That is Homo sapiens. He is a spirit and his usual residence is in his head. He looks at his mental image pictures and his body carries him around.
What happens to man when he dies?
Basically, all that happens is that a separation occurs between the thetan and the body.
The thetan, however, takes with him old tin cans, rattling chains, bric-a-brac and other energy phenomena that he feels he cannot do without and stashes this in the next body that he picks up.
In this lazy time of manufactured items and gadgetry he does not build a new body. He picks up a body that is produced according to a certain blueprint that has been carried through from the earliest times of life on this planet until now.
There is such a thing as a cycle of action: create-survive-destroy. At the shoulder of the curve an individual is mostly interested in surviving. Early on the curve he is interested in creating. And at the end of the curve, he is interested in the disposition of the remains.
This cycle of action occurs whether you are speaking of a building, a tree or anything else. When we apply this cycle of action to the parts of man, we get a death of the body, a partial death of the mind and a condition of forgetting on the part of the spiritual being which is in itself a type of death.
The first thing one should learn about death is that it is not anything of which to be very frightened. If you are frightened of losing your pocketbook, if you are frightened of losing your memory, if you are frightened of losing your girl or your boyfriend, if you are frightened of losing your body—well that is how frightened you ought to be of dying, because it is all the same order of magnitude.
We strike the first observable phenomenon in death when we find out that the mind, in spite of mechanisms which seek to decay it and wipe it out, does maintain and preserve mental image pictures of earlier existences. And with proper technology and an understanding of this one can be again possessed of the mental image pictures of earlier existences in order to understand what was going on.
But unless remembrance is restored to the being, the mental image pictures usually just continue to be pictures. Without that remembrance, sending somebody into a past life and having him look at a mental image picture would be similar to sending him to the art gallery. He would not connect himself with that picture.
The restoration of memory is therefore of great interest, since all that is really wrong with a person is that things have happened to him which he knows all about, but won’t let himself in on.
