SOME FORERUNNERS of "TOTOLOGY"

SOME FORERUNNERS of "TOTOLOGY"

By HARDIN D. WALSH

THE BASIC problem of living seems to
be the focusing and unfocusing of
attention—which are the only two
problems there are, really. If you
can focus your attention and then turn
loose of it without sticking to it,
you're in business.

In Dianetics, Scientology, Totology,
we have a bunch of new terminology, but
Henri Bergson, a Frenchman, who lived in
Paris from 1859 to 1941, invented practically the same terms that we use today.
He wrote an entire philosophy of life,
body, and mind -- determinism and choice,
and he was an advanced Totologist. Down
thru the ages, philosophers have been
making an attempt to correlate science
and learning and relate it to God, and
they seem to take turns in different generations -- one saying you can. know God, or
Totality, and the next one coming along
and saying you can't know it. This makes
an interesting game; keeps people busy
trying to prove whether you can focus
your attention or whether you can't focus
your attention on the real YOU -- Totality.

Bergson said: "God has nothing of the
ready-made. He is unceasing life, action,
and freedom. Creation so conceived is not
a mystery; we experience it in ourselves
when we act freely, when we consciously
choose our actions and plot our lives."
He was saying that you are Totality,
and that when you go into action consciously, this was You as Totality.

He also said: "It is this vitai urge
that makes us grow and transforms this
wandering planet into a theater of unending creation:' In other words, things are
being created and re-created all the time.

Actually, we are concerned with a series of consecutive locations, for if you
will examine time, you will discover that
there isn't any such thing; it's only
right now, and it's not quite that long.
I snap my fingers and when was it? Just a
few seconds ago. The sound is now traveling out thru a series of consecutive
spaces; it is being recorded in your various and collective universes.

The activity of living and focusing
and unfocusing your attention is almost
entirely a question of automatic restimulation, unless you function as Totality
and are aware that you are creating right
now. Let's consider how this works: It
works in relation to space. For instance,
a man goes to work and he works with other
people, other bodies. He ambles the body
down to work and he gives others around
him a certain number of orders at a certain distance. You'll discover, if you
examine your life, that there's a certain
This concludes the series of articles,
taken from the taped lectures of Bardin and
Joanna Walsh in 1,o,s Angeles, in which they
have tried to show what the philosophers of
the past have contributed to the advanced
thinking of today. -- The EDITOR.
operational distance in which it's safe
to have bodies to talk to. You. know some
persons who must be real close when they
talk to you—they can't tolerate any
space. Others have a tendency to not get
too close when they talk to you.

But getting back to the man at his
work: When he gets home at night, his
wife and children act in the same roles
of existence -- the same "certain distances"
he operated at at work. He doesn't leave
his job at the office; he takes it home
with him. And what does he take home with
him? Why, the same compulsive distances
and locations in space to which he has
assigned command and control.

Here's a little technique that is
practically foolproof, and, within reason,
absolutely unlimited in the solving of
problems. Instead of having a row with
somebody, it is better to walk away from
them and change the distance. Go for a
walk. Look at different buildings or
mountains that are different distances
from you. If there's no one around, or
you're not afraid of annoying neighbors,
point at buildings. Think: "That one's
there, and that one's there, and there,
and there." This gives you control of
these masses of energy. As you focus your
attention here and there, you automatically pull your attention off the areas
of work and livingness close to the body.

A companion technique is to look at
other people, other bodies. All your contact in the business and social worlds is
with other bodies naturally, so if you
win in daily existence, you're happy to
have other bodies around. But if you're
on a losing spiral, you begin to want to
get away on a mountain top, or somewhere,
and meditate away from it all. But this
doesn't solve the problem, because even
if you should get away, you take your
facsimiles of these bodies at certain distances with you. So, get out in a park,
or in a railroad station where there are
many people at different distances, and
look at bodies. Say: "That one's there,
and that one's alive, and that one's also
alive, " and so on. This, too, is an unlimited process, and is so simple it'll
seem silly -- but until you do it, you won't
believe how effective it can be in ex