What's it all about?

What is this life all about?  What is my paycheck for putting up with the crap that life is always putting out? 

Friends and Kin:

     Once there was a movie with Michael Caine as the star(remade with Jude Law) and a popular song by Dionne Warwick by Burt Bacharach, "What's it all about, Alfie". The movie was about a horney guy and all the girls he could get in bed, including of course one young girl who fell for him and I think he got her pregnant and took no responsibility for it.  I was that way for too long a time in my life.  Horney, yes, but it took my getting into Scientology to understand why my wanton ways were so incredibly bad.  I thought sex/conquest was my paycheck for living this life. I learned later that I was emulating my role model uncle who was emulating someone else who was probably emulating someone else and on and on.

      It was a game that could not be won. It was a well without a bottom, and the goal was an immediate one without ultimate end. It becomes an addiction, and the craving only gets wilder and stronger and it took control. Finally, the ethics and auditing I received removed the craziness and put me at the helm of my own body and mind. It literally ruined my life for if there was no woman where I was going I wouldn't go. I was a mess. Four marriages later I finally have good sense. I know what my paycheck is. I have been helped and get the greatest satisfaction from helping others.  I know this works, and want to show others it has tools that will help fix any problem. 

     So what is it all about?  What is your paycheck?  It isn't Cadillacs, fur coats, money in the bank, though having those things is nice and contributes to your feeling of winning the game.  The real paycheck is communication, sensation, goals planned and done, helping others, playing and winning games---(life is a game as it has all the components of a game---goals, freedoms and barriers).  One is only as valuable as he is of help to others.   How does it feel to have helped someone who was in need?   How many people have you helped this week, this year?  Has it all been to make money for yourself and your family.

     I pieced it together from data by L. Ron Hubbard in his writings and taped lectures. He was the greatest humanitarian, whose wisdom is so simple, so easy to understand. He distilled life and put it in a way you could apply it to your life and give understanding of what it is all about, including answers to life and death.

     life is meant to be lived. We need experience. The goal of my friends is to make enough money to retire and no longer work, and perhaps do nothing. Their experience is nine to five, TV, some ball games, maybe fishing, annual vacation, a roll in the hay with a spouse or mate, and that is about it.

     There is no danger any more.  No grizzley bears, no pain experience, no exposure to the possibility of dying or horrible injury. This made life interesting. Now men and women volunteer for the military in Iraq and elsewhere to experience the possibility of dying.  My most joyful times was working on the pipeline in Washington State in 1956 when I was nearly killed four times in three months. It makes me smile to think about it. I was shot at three times, caught in an a rockslide in an avalanche and got hit in the head by a big clod of solid clay the twice the size of my head (I woke up in the hospital), barely missed being run over by a runaway dragline on a mountainside, caught beneath a dragline on a steep mountain incline when the tow cable began breaking. Now that was living!!

     I wish I had continued working on the pipeline for a while longer, and not continued in College, but had lived a little more in the real world. College warehouses you for the years you are there, and you learn some things but nothing you cannot learn by reading and studying.  I wasted seven years, but was so damn callow and immature that I didn't have enough sense to face the unknown at that time. I have learned now, having had lots of experience in pain and loss, yet have not knuckled under that I could have taken another route and done much better and have really lived.  This route led to Scientology, and that is what counts to me. 

     One ought, very day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.  Goethe.

     When you meet someone, let him be just who he is, and what he is.  Respect him. Grant him beingness, regardless. There are some who are so lost, some who piss you off if they wear their pants below their ass, but maybe they will learn someday that is not the way. Let them be.  Try to understand them, and if you cannot, it is because you will not.

L D Sledge