Life can best be understood by likening it to a game. Since we are exterior to a great number of games we can regard them with a detached eye. If we were exterior to Life instead of being involved and immersed in the living of it, it would look to us much like games look to us from our present vantage point.

Despite the amount of suffering, pain, misery, sorrow and travail which can exist in life, the reason for existence is the same reason as one has to play a game — interest, contest, activity and possession. The truth of this assertion is established by an observation of the elements of games and then applying these elements to life itself. When we do this we find nothing left wanting in the panorama of life. (p. 44)
By game we mean contest of person against person, or team against team. When we say games we mean such games as baseball, polo, chess or any other such pastime. It may at one time have struck you as peculiar that men would risk bodily injury in the field of play just for the sake of “amusement”. So it might strike you as peculiar that people would go on living or would enter into the “game of life” at the risk of all the sorrow, travail and pain just to have something to do. Evidently there is no greater curse than total idleness. (p. 44)

By studying the elements (factors) of games (contests) we find ourselves in possession of the elements of life. Life is a game. (p. 45)

There is the principle in Scientology called pan-determinism. This could be loosely defined as determining the activities of two or more sides in a game simultaneously. For instance, a person playing chess is being self-determined and is playing chess against an opponent. A person who is pan-determined on the subject of chess could play both sides of the board. (pp. 47, 48)

It is a scientific definition in Scientology that control consists of start, change and stop. These three manifestations can be graphed alongside the apparent cycle of action: create, survive, destroy. Any person is somewhere along this curve.

[...]

There could be three things wrong with any person, and these would be the inability to start, the inability to change, the inability to stop. [...] Neurosis and psychosis of all classes are entirely inabilities to start, to change or to stop.

[...]

An individual begins first by being unable himself, without help, to start, to change and to stop. Then the mind may become prone to these disabilities and is unable to start, change or to stop at will. Then the body itself can become subject to these three disabilities and is unable to start, to change and to stop. The oddity is, however, that an environment can so work upon a thetan that his body becomes disabled through no choice of his own. Similarly the reactive mind can become disabled through no choice of either the body or the thetan. But the thetan himself, beyond observing the effect of various causes and having initiated the thought to be there, can only become disabled by becoming too partisan, by becoming too little pan-determined, and so bringing himself into difficulties. These difficulties, however, are entirely the difficulties of consideration. As the thetan considers, so he is. In the final analysis the thetan has no problems of his own. The problems are always “other people’s problems” and must exist in the mind or the body or in other people or his surroundings for him to have problems. Thus his difficulties are, in the main, difficulties of staying in the game and keeping the game going. (pp. 68-69)

In past dissertations on the subject of the mind and philosophies of life there was a great deal of speculation and very little actual proof. Therefore, these philosophies were creations, and one philosopher was at work outcreating another philosopher. In Scientology we have this single difference. We are dealing with discoveries. The only things created about Scientology are the actual books and works in which Scientology is presented. The phenomena of Scientology are discovered and are held in common by all men and all life forms. There is no effort in Scientology to out-create each and every thetan that comes along. It is, of course, possible to conceive Scientology as a creation, and to conceive that it is overwhelming. It should be viewed otherwise, for it is intended as an assistance to life at large, to enable life to make a better civilization and a better game. There are no tenets in Scientology which cannot be demonstrated with entirely scientific procedures. (pp. 69,70)

THE GOAL OF SCIENTOLOGY

The end object of Scientology is not the making into nothing of all of existence or the freeing of the individual of any and all traps everywhere. The goal of Scientology is the making of the individual capable of living a better life in his own estimation and with his fellows, and the playing of a better game. (p. 86)