{"id":196,"date":"2011-06-16T22:13:11","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T22:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/scientologybeliefs\/?p=196"},"modified":"2017-10-24T05:17:46","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T12:17:46","slug":"scales-and-scientology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/scientologybeliefs\/2011\/06\/scales-and-scientology\/","title":{"rendered":"Scales and Scientology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"The basic books of Scientology<\/a> contain many scales that people can use.<\/p>\n

Not the dreaded music scales that aspiring musicians have to practice, practice, practice, until they just come out of their fingers without thinking. Personally, I loathed practicing music scales as a child, when I did not understand the scales and did not want to practice them.\u00a0 I think the whole fascination of young boys with baseball and other sports, is simply a response to being made to sit and do something one truly despises, for hours on end.\u00a0 I know I would much rather have been out in center field, myself!<\/p>\n

But the scales of Scientology are useful tools, worth studying, worth memorizing, and worth figuring out how to apply them to life.<\/p>\n

The scales are called \u201cgradient scales\u201d because they mark the gradients (gradual amounts of more or less quantity) of some observable thing.<\/p>\n

The first scale one usually learns in Scientology, and the most useful, is the Emotional Tone Scale<\/a>.\u00a0 When I first started studying this scale, my understanding of human emotions was (an understatement) very confused.\u00a0 A better description might be that I viewed human emotions as a chaotic, dangerous mystery, something that could not be understood.\u00a0 Certainly nothing I had ever read in college textbooks on psychology shed any light on them.<\/p>\n

Yes, I knew that some people were apathetic, and some people were sad, some were angry, some were bored, and some were cheerful.\u00a0 It\u2019s never hard to think of examples of people that are pretty much manifesting one of those emotions most of the time.<\/p>\n

My maternal grandfather was chronically angry.\u00a0 My mother was chronically sad.\u00a0 My older sister was, when young, bored most of the time.\u00a0 But when she hit puberty she became apathetic.<\/p>\n

But I never considered that these emotions formed any kind of a *scale*.<\/p>\n

And I always wondered what made people move from one emotion to another, or fail to do so when they ought to.\u00a0 If you give someone who is bored some really good news, it ought to make them happy, right?\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t always.<\/p>\n

What L. Ron Hubbard<\/a> L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, did was to actually observe people moving through the whole gamut of human emotions, and see that it formed a pattern.\u00a0 He was the first person to actually make that careful observation, and write it down, so that others could understand it.<\/p>\n