Reflections: Emotions

by Nick Broadhurst

We all express human emotion. Emotion can be cheerful, sad, angry, and so on. As life survives well it is generally cheerful, happier. As it approaches what appears to it as an immortality of existence it demonstrates enthusiasm, exhilaration, even serenity. But as life approaches death or a terminated existence, it seems subdued, given up, apathetic.

This change of emotion is because as life fails it finds part of itself captured or trapped in the past losses of life and failure. As it frees itself from these losses, the emotion changes again. We refer to the amount of free life as emotional tone.

At the top end of this emotional scale we find life full of hope, exuberance, cockiness, and a feeling one is maybe truly immortal and can never be beaten. At the bottom end of the scale we find ourselves forever beaten, cannot get better, and any task is forebodingly impossible. Death awaits us. Here much of life is trapped in past losses

These emotional tones are symptoms only life can exhibit. Inanimate objects cannot demonstrate emotions, only life can. The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, drafted a scale with these human emotional tones. Everyone is on this scale somewhere.

Towards the top of the scale are games, action, exhilaration and cheerfulness. Here is where we would describe life as fun and exciting. At this level outward motion is high, speed of movement is relatively swift.

As a person experiences losses in life he descends down a little to conservatism, mild interest, contented and even boredom. Here there is little motion from the person. There is no real effort to reach for something or to push it away. Life is slower.

The next stage down, after more of life is captured in further losses, we find the person thrusting out at danger. He perceives something bad is going to happen and his reasoning is not so good. Here we have antagonism, hostility, anger and hate. These are all outward motions against some perceived danger. Note the being himself is not so much in motion as he is repelling the threat, keeping the threat away.

Next down the scale is fear, anxiety and terror. Here the being is seeing the threat as real but he cannot repel it. He is moving away from the threat. He does not feel safe in confronting it. He has had many losses and has just enough life to be able to move away from the threat.

Next down are the tones of sympathy, victim and grief. There is still some slight motion here but not much as the accumulated losses have trapped almost all of his life force, almost overwhelming him. Next is apathy, useless and dying. Here the being is motionless and has succumbed to the threat.

There are more emotions to the scale than what I have mentioned here but these above are the main ones. How well you are doing spiritually is where you are on the scale.

If you are doing well in life you will be at the top, but if you are not doing well, you descend accordingly.

The purpose of this scale is simply to put some order in knowing what these emotions are and where they are leading to.

The purpose of Scientology is to bring a person from the lower tones, up through the mid tones, to the higher ones. Scientology does this through knowledge of the spirit and through its spiritual counselling known as auditing. The counselling allows a person to reflect and free himself from the past losses of life, and thereby raising up the tone scale.