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Being Yourself

People are always telling one to 'Be yourself' as if that will solve all problems one has with life, the universe and ... well, everything. This is all fine and dandy except that it does not really provide an answer to some of the issues confronting people these days. In addition how many people can feel they CAN be themselves? It is very difficult for some to simply be themselves when they don't really know who they are? One has to know who one is to be oneself. Fortunately there are some steps one can take if one is facing such a difficulty.

There are prior steps to being oneself one can take to bring oneself to the point where one CAN be oneself.

Before one can BE ONESELF, one has to know who or what one is. So a prior step might be for some:

Find out who you really are

Are you being yourself? Or are you being someone else. Many people think, "Oh I wish I was like, so and so." Many people wish they were a famous person, for example. How many men would like to be 'like' George Clooney? And how many women would like their man to be like George Clooney? (Not what you thought I was going to say eh!). All very nice perhaps but it isn't being oneself. It is being someone else so if one is wittingly or unwittingly being someone else, a mother, a father, the kid down the road that punched your lights out, then one is not being oneself. LRH states in Fundamentals of Thought:

"Valences The whole study of valences is a fascinating one. A valence is defined as "a false identity assumed unwittingly." An identity is modified by valences. People who can be nobody may try to be everybody. People who are seeking a way out of scarcity of identity may become fixed in false valences. Nations can become fixed in valences of countries they have conquered in war, etc etc.

A rule is that a person assumes the identity of that which gets attention. Another rule is that the person assumes the identity of that which makes him fail (for he gave it his attention, didn't he?)

There is a basic personality, a person's own identity. He colors or drowns this with valences as he loses or wins in life. He can be dug up."

So a prior step is to:

Find out who you really are

Once you know that you are well on the way to being yourself.

Of course for some people finding out who one is can be a problem. Not to worry. If that is a problem, there is an even prior step one can take.

Find out THAT you are

Believe it or not, it is quite amazing how many people do not fully appreciate that they exist. They might think they are a brain or a piece of meat (body) or some other such nonsense. This is the prevailing 'think' in the western society. To dumb down everyone into thinking they are a body. Bodies are easier to control not as elusive as beings darn it. Bodies are subject to passports, drivers licenses, health cards, ID cards, suspicious looks and uncomfortable body searches while Beings can flit around like the will o' the wisp going hither and there at will, no passports, no ID and be very difficult to pin down much to the chagrin of governmental ID obsessed departments.

In the same book, LRH said about this:

"Probably the greatest discovery of Scientology and its most forceful contribution to the knowledge of mankind has been the isolation, description and handling of the human spirit, accomplished in July, 1951, in Phoenix, Arizona. I established along scientific rather than religious or humanitarian lines that that thing which is the person, the personality, is separable from the body and the mind at will and without causing bodily death or mental derangement." Further, he went on: "The thetan (spirit) is described in Scientology as having no mass, no wave-length, no energy and no time or location in space except by consideration or postulate. The spirit, then, is not a thing. It is the creator of things."

"The usual residence of the thetan is in the skull or near the body. A thetan can be in one of four conditions. The first would be entirely separate from a body or bodies, or even from this universe. The second would be near a body and knowingly controlling the body. The third would be in the body (the skull) and the fourth would be an inverted condition whereby he was compulsively away from the body and could not approach it. There are degrees (subdivisions) of each one of these four states (conditions). The most optimum of these conditions, from the standpoint of man, is the second."

In the East, there is a better appreciation of one's existence and, although it is not codified as such and the format may vary, it is nevertheless still well understood that an individual is not a body but a being.

Now if THAT still presents some difficulty for an individual, there is still one remaining step one can take.

Find out where you are

Everyone is somewhere. One can easily look around over and over again until one realises one is somewhere. Of course this does not mean an address. An address is simply a label to indicate a location. One is not located by a label despite the introduction of passports, ID cards and the like. How do you locate where you are? Why you simply look around until you realise you are somewhere and where that is.

Having located oneself satisfactorily one can then move up the ladder to the prior step as described above. Find out THAT you are. Interestingly, this becomes easier when you known WHERE you are. Then having found out THAT you are the next step becomes easier too. Find out WHO you really are. And once that is accomplished, you can then truly BE YOURSELF

Oh and you might has noted that we do not tell you HOW to find these things out. Half the fun is in the self discovery. The other half is in the realisations you may have.

References:
Fundamentals of Thought by L. Ron Hubbard. Copyright 1956
Introduction to Scientology Ethics by L. Ron Hubbard. Copyright 1968