Learning How to Learn and Learning How to Live

How Itzik Akilov was inspired to get the answers he had long sought in life from Scientology. His profile is one of 200 “Meet a Scientologist” videos available on the Scientology website at www.scientology.org.

“Here. Read a book,” Benjamin Akilov told his inquiring brother.

In 2004, Benjamin had just started studying Scientology and was putting to good use the practical tools he was learning in the family business—a multi-faceted device-production company he ran with his brother Itzik.

The simple illustrated hardcover book Benjamin handed Itzik was called Learning How to Learn, a secular application of discoveries in the field of study by Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard.

“This is a book for kids, not for me,” Itzik remembers saying, insulted.

Then he read it and realized, far from this being a “mere children’s book,” here was a simple presentation of information he really needed—he had never known how to learn before.

Learning How to Learn conveys the three most fundamental barriers to study: the misunderstood word, absence of physical mass to pair with the written text, and a leap to the next level in a sequence of learning steps with a lingering confusion on the preceding one.

Itzik had spent his life searching for truth, but nothing he had encountered had fit for him, spiritually or philosophically. He kept asking himself and the schools of thought he encountered, “What is life about, really?” Nothing he had ever read before had worked so well and so quickly as this technology of study, and he wondered what else its author had to offer him.

He decided to take Benjamin up on his offer to bring him to the Scientology Center in Tel Aviv. “That’s how the affair between me and Scientology began,” he says.

As Itzik, now 40, progressed through taking courses and receiving Scientology spiritual counseling, he felt increasingly more aware of what was taking place around him. Having learned how to learn, now he felt he was learning how to know.

“I started to understand,” he says, “and part of that was understanding that the answers lay with me. I have come to know what is happening to me, why others act the way they do, and what life is all about. And life just keeps getting better.”

View the Itzik Akilov video at Scientology.org.

The popular “Meet a Scientologist” profiles on the Church of Scientology International Video Channel at Scientology.org now total 200 broadcast-quality documentary videos featuring Scientologists from diverse locations and walks of life. The personal stories are told by Scientologists who are educators, teenagers, skydivers, a golf instructor, a hip-hop dancer, IT manager, stunt pilot, mothers, fathers, dentists, photographers, actors, musicians, fashion designers, engineers, students, business owners and more.

A digital pioneer and leader in the online religious community, in April 2008 the Church of Scientology became the first major religion to launch its own official YouTube Video Channel, which has now been viewed by millions of visitors.