The Goal of Psychology, Scientology and the Teachings of Eckhart Tolle

This was written in August of 2011. This is not about psychiatry that is done by MDs. The main purpose of these 3 things may appear different but they all have the same goal. The main goal is the highest happiness. Do you have an open mind!

But it gets even more specific than that. First with psychology, they talk to people and get them to go over traumatic experiences until these things no longer bother them. They do this to make a person happier and mentally and emotionally healthier. Some events are so traumatic that people seem to be stuck in them.

A very famous American psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), said "I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness."

The purpose of Dianetics was to do psychology but not to use drugs (medications), electro-shock therapy and labotomies like psychiatrists did. They would do this by talking to people. They developed electric meters like lie detectors to help them locate what was bothering a person the most.

The goal was to get rid of the effect of all the traumatic events in a person's life. When this was done, the person was then known to be "clear." Then Scientology was created since they found that too much of working on past traumas could be depressing to a person. This would make it harder for them to do this process. So Scientology had processes to help a person be more in the present.

They explained that past traumatic events would trap "attention units" in those past events. By going over the event until the event no longer bothered them, it would free these attention units so that they could return to the present where they belonged. This is similar to what is done in psychology. With these attention units in the present, the person would be happier and more effective.

Although when doing the Dianetics processing, people would claim that they remembered things from before they were born. The leader of this, L Ron Hubbard, would ignore this when it happened and told others to do the same. That is because we all know that a person has only one life. But this continued to happen.

Now L Ron Hubbard was a playful person like a child. So he decided to let a person talk about one of these past life events as if it were real. He treated it like it was real for the fun of it. But this person that he was working with, then had a much bigger improvement than ever before.

This guy wanted to talk about this past life event because his subconscious mind knew that he was really hung up about what happened in it. Have you ever met someone that you liked way too much for knowing them such a short time? Maybe you have unfinished issues with them from a past life.

So they kept doing this and decided that these memories were real past life events. So it was then called Scientology since the Dianetics only deals with the present life. This information about past lives is not taught since they are not supposed to teach anything since they may get it wrong. They let people read it about it themselves in a book written by L Ron Hubbard. The only place to find the above information about past lives becoming part of Scientology is in a series of books that describes the history of Scientology as it happened called The Research and Discovery books.

If I were still a member of Scientology, I would not be able to write about it. That is only done by their very best public relations people. Now Eckhart Tolle teaches people to be in the present since he had a strong experience of this while in a depression. After this he was no longer depressed, but very happy. Then he was made very popular by Oprah Winfrey and her show. This is also how Dr Oz became so popular and got his own TV show.

There is a medical doctor, Brian Weiss, that is a psychiatrist. He is famous for helping people greatly by dealing with their past lives. Many other psychiatrists have learned this from him including some people who do not believe in past lives. Wikipedia says:

Weiss graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1970, completing an internship in internal medicine at the New York University Medical Center then returning to Yale for a two-year residency in psychiatry.

See the bottom of this page for his books written about past lives after some very strange things happened to him with patients. If he were not a psychiatrist, I bet his friends would have thought that he were crazy and should go see a 'shrink!" Have you ever had some very strange things happen to you? You can leave comments at the bottom of this page.

Also there is a spiritual poet Kahlil Gibran. He says that there is a cup of joy inside each person but they cannot drink from it save (unless) they forget the past and renounce the future. Renounce-- to refuse to follow, obey, or recognize any further. Actually to explain this further the Indian scripture, The Bhagavad Gita , says that you should renounce the fruits of your actions. That means that you do your best but do not worry about the outcome of those actions.

Since it happened to Eckhart Tolle (being strongly in the present moment) by accident, he does not know a practical method to make this happen for others. So he then learned about Buddhism since they have many stories about this and the meditation is about practising being in the present. There is this famous Buddhist story about a senior monk with a younger monk. I will call Wong and Yu that were traveling together. So they see a women that is unable to get across a river. So the senior monk Wong carries her across.

Now Buddhist monks are not allowed to be touching women. But they are not anal retentive about it. So this other monk, Yu, keeps thinking about how he did something that he is not supposed to do. Finally after thinking about it for 2 hours since it bothered him so much, he asked Wong why he did it. Wong says that what matters is that he had put her down 2 hours ago, but Yu was still carrying her!

This is an example of being stuck in a past event. Whatever great sites they came across, Yu did not noticce them since he was thinking in his head about something in the past. Some women who get raped are so traummatized by this that for many months if their husband touches them, they will jump.

Being in the present is similar to what they talk about in positive psychology and being in the flow. Being strongly in the present causes one's perception of time to slow down or stop.

The flow was discovered by a guy waking up in the morning and starting to look at crystals under a microscope. A couple of hours later he was having trouble seeing the crystals. He was using the light from outside reflected in the microscope to make it work. It was having problems because it was getting dark outside. So he did this the entire day but it only felt like a couple of hours to him.

So the goal is to be fully in the present moment but the way to do that is where there is disagreement or mystery.