Getting Things Done

Since a very early age I loved getting things done and I was always searching for answers. My father was a scientist and taught me, early on, to examine new ideas and prove them out before accepting them as truth.

While a boy in the 1930s I lived for a few years with a very religious family in San Jose, California, went to a church school and studied the Bible because I was told it had all the answers to life's mysteries.

While reading the Bible, I applied what my father had told me to do, but a lot of it did not prove out for me. For example, I found that the effectiveness of prayer was too limited for me.

Then, when I was 12 years old, I joined the Boy Scouts, and gained a wealth of practical knowledge and skills very useful in life. I learned how to survive in the wilderness, how to organize and lead a group, and found a workable moral code in the "Scout's Law". They were very useful in getting things done.

When I graduated from high school in 1948, I wanted to study philosophy, but that "wasn't practical" so my mother suggested I try a premedical major in collage. That interested me if I could specialize in psychiatry to learn about the mind and how to help people with "problems".

I checked out the subject and found that it was not only completely ineffective, but actually harmed people with electric shock and other crazy "treatments" rather than helping them.

Then I got smarter, sat myself down and asked myself, "What would you really like to get done?"The answer was, "To communicate with a lot of people", for some odd reason.

I changed my major to radio and television, took a bunch of speech and theater courses that I loved, got a job in a small radio station out of town and worked my way up a larger station in San Jose with my own show. I felt I was getting things done at last.

But now that I had an audience, I didn't have anything of real substance to communicate. I realized that I needed to have a purpose for my communication,something interesting and universal like the answers to such questions as:

Why do we exist?
Where did we come from?
Where are we headed?

I had read the Bible, studied various philosophies, got a college degree and completed my military service without finding any valid answers to such questions. So I decided to look elsewhere.

THEATER IN PARIS

I learned that I could attend school in Paris on the GI Bill so went there hoping to discover some workable answers to life's mysteries.

I enrolled in the Sorbonne to study for a doctorate in philosophy and joined the American Students and Artists Center that had its own theater.

There I organized an English language theater group and produced and directed "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams. It turned out to be a hit among the English speaking community and got a good review in the "International Herald Tribune".

I followed this with "Waiting For Godot" by Samuel Becket (in English, not the original French) that was a bigger hit and moved to a larger theater for a short but popular run.

The whole original French cast and director saw and loved it, and Samuel Becket invited me over for Irish whiskey and an interesting philosophical chat.

I went on to do more productions and put together the "American Theater Association of Paris" with Ingrid Bergman, Noel Coward,Jean-Louis Barrault, Richard Wright and Irwin Shaw, among others, on its Advisory Committee and Board of Directors.

I was having a good time getting things done. Olivia de Havilland invited me over for tea. I had dinner with James Jones and his wife, and shared apple pie and words with Alan Ginsburg. Art Buchwald rejected my request for support, but William Saroyan cheered me on.

Though brilliant in their own field, none of them seemed to know much more about the fundamentals of life itself than I did.

THE UNKNOWN KEY FACTOR IN COMMUNICATION

Each spring, the city of Paris holds a theater festival inviting major productions from around the world to perform there. I saw Laurence Olivier do Shakespeare and wondered why I could understand what he was saying, but not the other actors in the play.

I also saw Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble do his play, "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", in German, and after only a few minutes the language problem no longer existed.

Here was an unknown factor in personal communication that I needed to find out about.

I mentioned this to an American playwright friend, and she invited me to a Communication Course given by her husband.

THE COMMUNICATION COURSE

The first evening we each sat facing another student, doing nothing but just looking at each other for over two hours without a break.

They had me take off the glasses I had worn for 15 years. "This will be easy", I thought. But, after about a half hour, weird things began to happen to my vision. I also got extremely uncomfortable at times but persisted with the drill for the full two hours helped by some urging from the instructor. By the end, the student I was facing had became very "real" to me, and I felt extremely alert and clear-headed.

Afterward, I had walked half way home before I realized I was not wearing my glasses, and could see perfectly well without them. Then my vision blurred, but I knew that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. The eye trouble had to have originated in my mind. I threw the glasses away and have not needed them since.

(This was really getting things done!)

The next evening, I discovered that what I had observed in the two theater productions earlier that year was a basic communication principal completely overlook by others.

The principal is that words are only symbols for concepts or ideas, not the concepts or ideas themselves.If you understood the concept or idea and make it your own, you can easily pass it over to another person, with or without the words, or even with words that have a different meaning.

Wow! I had finally found a basic principal in life that WORKED, and was able to drilled it until until it was easy to do.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THOUGHT

On arrival that evening I had asked the Director, "What in the world IS this stuff?" He laughed and loaned me a book called "Scientology, The Fundamentals of Thought"by L. Ron Hubbard.

There they were! The apparent answers to my questions about life. I checked them out and found that they actually worked. They were powerful tools in creating a better life getting things done.

When the Communication Course was completed, I went right onto L. Ron Hubbard's professional practitioner's course that trained me how to really help otherswith what turned out to be an incredibly effective mental and spiritual technology.

I found that I was now able to repair relationships, fix broken homes, handle people's stress and depression naturally, but more important, help the able to become a lot more able in life. This went way beyond just getting my questions about life answered. This was getting thinks done with a miracle producingtechnology.

DISCOVERED BASIC TRUTHS

I was able to personally verify for myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the validity of the following basic truths about life.

1. I am a spiritual being that occupies a body, not the body itself, and can operate independent of the body.

2. The reason I am here is to play the game called Life. "Life is a game consisting of freedom, barriers and purposes." (L. Ron Hubbard)

3. Happiness is dependent on creating or adapting a purpose one wants, and then developing the ability to overcome the barriers to achieving its goal.

I adapted the purpose of Scientology, "a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights".

For nearly 30 years subsequently, I worked full time in Scientology organizations, many directly with the Founder, L.Ron Hubbard. I continue to study the subject and find new insights from it every day.

All in all, it has been an amazing adventure and a whole lot of fun getting things done that I like to get done. I suggest you try it out.

My very best,

Fred Hare