To you, what does “reaching your full potential” mean in Scientology?
To answer this, I asked a number of Scientologist friends to answer how they felt about this. Their answers are below:
It also means reaching new levels of happiness and success across all facets of life. We have a saying amongst Scientologists, that you know one by the positive effect they have in their surroundings.
Erin, mother: For me- “reaching my full potential” really means be as able as I can be in my life so that I am able to help others more. I have really found that the things I have done in Scientology have made me more able and have allowed me to handle more in my life. The ways I have experienced this have been in rather ordinary ways, though they have made a huge difference to me in my life. But they aren’t really anything sensational. It’s things like, for example, being more capable as a parent- After my first child I felt like I really had my hands full with just one child and couldn’t fathom having another one. I was doing some Scientology training and, over time, I felt like I became more and more capable of handling things in life, including parenting, and I was eventually ready to add another child to my family. My second child was rather a bigger handful than my first child, but because I felt more capable as a person and as a parent, that more difficult child didn’t rattle me like my first one did. And in fact, being more able as a parent allowed me to figure out some issues my son was experiencing that were causing him to be a bit of a handful. We were able to make some changes ( he needed to be gluten free) and he started doing a lot better.
I know that’s a rather long answer- but for me I guess reaching my full potential is really just about being able to be my best self and being capable in ways that are important to me.
I became a Scientologist around the time I was 18 (about 20 years ago). At the time, a friend introduced me to some of the concepts in Scientology about communication and about how the mind works. Those things made so much sense to me and were such answers to some things in life that I didn’t understand that it made me realize that there was something her that was really worth knowing more about and really understanding. When I was able to look at the religion for myself and understand what it was actually about, that really gave me a different perspective on the religion than what I had been seeing in the media. I would say that the sensationalized religion that the media tries to portray is really not at all what I have experienced.
Tad, father of 3: That’s one of the deeper questions that someone has asked me, actually. There are a few sides to “potential,” I think. What are the properties and qualities and capabilities that I feel I should have, or that I could have at some future time, or assuming some ideal set of circumstances? To me, it’s best quantified by first trying to look at life in its component parts. What is my potential as myself? For my relationship with my wife? For my kids? My work? My group and my church? Mankind as a whole?
For any of those things, what are they like now, and what would their ideal state be? For that last bit, sometimes one doesn’t even know how good something can be. Someone who has never been athletic in their life likely wouldn’t know the elation an elite gymnast feels at nailing a perfect floor routine. Someone who’s grown up in a broken, dysfunctional household likely might set the bar pretty low at what would be a “perfect relationship”. Someone who’s never had kids might not know how to accurately define what being an “ideal parent” might look like.
For me, personally, it’s something I iterate on. There are some things in my life that are going swimmingly, others that I know I’m simply not doing as well as I could. But I’ve got goals I want to achieve for myself, my family, and my group, and to the degree that I’m not able to hit them, well, I’d say I’m not living up to my potential.
But that’s what Scientology has always solved for me. It’s been a path by which I can take my life as it is, in my own estimation, and improve those things that need to be improved. In some cases it’s been my productivity, in other cases it’s been my honesty and integrity to my goals and to my friends that needed address. In other cases it’s been a matter of being able to let go of past upsets, and bad decisions that I was still using illogically to curb what I was doing in the here and now.
In any case though, all that really matters is that one is living up to one’s own standards of “full potential” so that one can achieve their own goals. I hope that answers things.
Rosalyn, Scientology parent and grandparent: Being totally “me” – being able to use all my native abilities to accomplish personal goals, being able to effectively care for my family, help my community, make a difference in the world.