Sometimes people just up sticks and leave, walk out. Often there is some apparent reasoning, but sometimes there isn’t, and even given those reasons, it can seem odd. It’s not just leaving an area either, people quit jobs, resign from courses, avoid particular people, and so on. An explanation for the related phenomena is only as useful as it opens the door to something that can be done about it. L. Ron Hubbard found just such an explanation, so I thought I’d share it with you…
As a Scientologist, I use the technologies developed by L. Ron Hubbard through his research in the 20th century, in order to improve conditions in my own life and to help people around me. A major factor in Scientology is the use of a workable technology of “ethics”. This is detailed in full in the book, An Introduction to Scientology Ethics by L. Ron Hubbard, which you can buy or get from the library. One part of this technology is the explanation for relatively unexplained departures, which are referred to as “blow-offs”.
We have the view of a person who has a good job, who probably won’t get a better one, suddenly deciding to leave and going. We have the view of a wife with a perfectly good husband and family leaving it all. We see a husband with a pretty and attractive wife breaking up the affinity and departing.
Man explained this to himself by saying that things were done to him which he would not tolerate and therefore he had to leave. But if this were the explanation, all man would have to do would be to make working conditions, marital relationships, jobs, training programs and so on all very excellent and the problem would be solved. But on the contrary, a close examination of working conditions and marital relationships demonstrates that improvement of conditions often worsens the amount of blow-off. Probably the finest working conditions in the world were achieved by Mr. Hershey of chocolate bar fame for his plant workers. Yet they revolted and even shot at him. This in its turn led to an industrial philosophy that “the worse workers were treated, the more willing they were to stay,” which in itself is as untrue as “the better they are treated, the faster they blow off.”
Before I share the crux of it all with you, I wanted to define a term used in Scientology, the word overt (also overt act). This is a noun meaning “a harmful act or a transgression against the moral code of a group”. A sane person is ashamed of his or her misdeeds and reluctant to confess them, thus following an overt act we get the effort to withhold the fact of having commited it. This is known simply as a withhold. Here goes:
People leave because of their own overts and withholds. That is the factual fact and the hard-bound rule. A man with a clean heart can’t be hurt. The man or woman who must, must, must become a victim and depart is departing because of his or her own overts and withholds. It doesn’t matter whether the person is departing from a town or a job. The cause is the same.
Almost anyone, no matter his position and no matter what is wrong can remedy a situation if he or she really wants to. When the person no longer wants to remedy it, his own overt acts and withholds against the others involved in the situation have lowered his own ability to be responsible for it. Therefore, departure is the only apparent answer. To justify the departure, the person blowing off dreams up things done to him, in an effort to minimize the overt by degrading those it was done to. The mechanics involved are quite simple.
For more information, consider taking a course from the Scientology Handbook: Integrity and Honesty. Get it at your local Scientology Church or Mission, or as a free online course through the Scientology Volunteer Ministers website. You can also read the chapter from which the above quotations were taken, on the Scientology Handbook website.
Please leave a comment if you have any further questions. Quotations above are © L. Ron Hubbard Library.