Here's a short but powerful lecture set from November 1952 titled The Perception of Truth. Old name is "Logics and Axioms Lectures" or "L&A".

Thank you.

We scanned the transcripts of the 1988 Clearsound release. We do not have the original version.

The Axioms were basically written on a summary of information which began in November of 1938. And the basic Axioms of Dianetics were written at that time. It's interesting that the material at that time was called Scientology. It appeared in an unpublished manuscript called "Excalibur."

To FZBA US: if you have access to the old reels, please check these for any RTC omissions.

I had a great many calls, and have had a great many calls, to be permitted to read "Excalibur." So just as a joke one time I said, why, sure, I would give anybody a copy of "Excalibur" for fifteen hundred dollars. That's a little trick you use: When you're tired of saying no and no hasn't made any impression on anybody, then you just make it scarce. And that's the same as no, but they're so used to this society making everything scarce that it falls inevitably, then, that there would be no bids for it. So fifteen hundred dollars for a copy of "Excalibur" unfortunately netted two replies – demands for "Excalibur" – and this was quite interesting.

We will be back in the next millenium with lots more goodies!

I had also qualified. I said a person had to be of extreme stability, and so forth, in order to read this book. So I had to knock those two out on insufficient stability.

Director, FZBA of Scandinavia

The truth of the matter is that the raw, naked material of "Excalibur" has the effect upon Homo sapiens of uninhibiting him. And he suddenly realizes that all those things which have held him in a cage are shadows. And they're shadows of such flimsy character that about four cases out of fifteen, in reviewing the material, find themselves suddenly – they think – capable of doing anything they wish to do, and they promptly proceed to do it.

P.S. Don't forget to study the Standard Operating Procedure for Theta Clearing, located in the Appendix.

Well, that is not the case. One is not free in this MEST universe and in this society to do everything he pleases to do. There are some small regulations.

There is an organization known as the police, an organization which is addicted to making you do everything you don't want to do and preventing you from doing everything you want to do. And that is their motto. Their motto is "stop motion." A society – Homo sapiens – in this age could not exist without a very, very adequate police force – tremendously adequate. As a matter of fact, there have been much better police forces. The present police forces of Earth are a little bit in apathy.

The Mexican police force is the only one I know of that isn't in apathy, and it is so completely unregulated and untrammeled that it doesn't have to be. They have what they call a ley de fuego, which solves all of their police problems. That is to say, someone must obey the police, it says in the law-books. They must obey the police. And the other thing it says in there: if anyone runs, you shoot 'em. So it's a simple method, then, of handling anyone suspected, oh, of striking a match, anyone suspected of murder – same order of magnitude in Mexico. All you do is when you pick up the suspect you tell him to run: If he doesn't run, you shoot him, and if he runs, you shoot him. And so it's very effective and very simple.

PART 0: Cof$ Introduction

But most countries are more in apathy than this, and they stop motion in many circuitous and devious and covert methods. Police merely symbolize the desire of a society, each one, to protect himself from all. Just why this is conceived to be necessary is inherent in the structure of the MEST universe.

PART 1: Introduction: The Q List and Beginning of Logics

The MEST universe is an extremely degraded universe. It is a universe which runs on force. If it were the only universe, this would be a pity and I would be in apathy. Because to discover what the MEST universe is, of what it is composed and that its basic law is nothing but force, that it has no truck with an ethic, that it cares nothing about sanity, that the crude force of a crashing cliff is about as high as it thinks – to discover that this would be the basic, that this is all we have to work with – would be heartbreaking. There would be nothing beyond that. And we could all go into apathy and just quit right there, because there's no future in it.

PART 2: Logics 1-7

There's no future in simply collecting more and more facsimiles and erasing more and more facsimiles. There's no future in arduous and continuous work, work, work. There would be no future in one lifetime; one lifetime would be a very pointless thing. One would get born, he would become educated, he would have some children and then he would pass away by violence, by bugs or by just general decay and deterioration. That would be a wonderful thing, wouldn't it?

PART 3: Precision Knowledge: Necessity to Know Terminology and Law

People have tried to patch that up in the past with guesses and hopes rather than facts. And they've said, "Well, you have a soul. And if you're real good in life, why, we give your soul a little ticket, and it presents it at a gate and then you get to sit still." Well, that was an answer. I mean, it was a little bit of hope.

PART 4: Logics 7-9 and 10-23

They said, "If you're not good, we give you another ticket and we put you on a chute, and there's a fellow down there who has you dance on co... There are seven hells – seven of them – and one is hot and one is cold and one is this way and one is that way. And you stay there forever, too."

PART 5: Appendix and Glossary

Well, they were saved and this was accepted mostly because man is incapable of conceiving of forever. But it was also, as well as a hope, a police method. Of course! You couldn't possibly have a wonderful method like that without turning it into a police method. So they said, "Boy, you better be good, because we can not only hang you here, we can hang you for an eternity. And boy, are you under control!"

Now, you all of a sudden tell people this isn't true. You tell them so convincingly, they get uninhibited suddenly. In many cases they get completely uninhibited, and they simply go – as we have called it and still call it – "up the pole." Now, perhaps you will see a member of this class go "up the pole." And if you do – if you do – be very sympathetic to him. That will pull him down quicker than anything else I know of!

Or let him have something, make him a present of something. Give him some MEST, or anything, or just let him go up the pole. It is inevitable that in three to six months he will come down that pole with a splash and a crash which would be the amazement even of a fireworks distributor.

The four lectures by L. Ron Hubbard which you are about to hear introduce the forms of thought behavior used in the creation of the MEST universe.

That is going up the pole: It is the achievement of ecstasy without knowledge.

These lectures, given in London on 10 and 12 November 1952, profoundly changed forever the way that we view the subjects of thought, knowledge and, consequently, life.

Now, in the field of mysticism, we occasionally have beheld this phenomenon. Someone suddenly says, "Why, it's only shadows." Boom! He's on his way, he goes up the pole and there he is. Maybe he stayed there for quite a while but he seldom stayed there longer than six months, because the lack of information could not help but result in his being booby-trapped by the MEST universe. As long as he stayed in a body, as long as he was still susceptible to the laws of economics in any way, as long as cliffs could fall on him, as long as he associated and went into ARC with other human beings, he was done!

Ron had arrived in England in September of that year, intent on establishing a firm base for Scientology there and setting up a major central headquarters from which it could be run. He planned to train up scores of new Scientology auditors and to introduce all of the tremendous technical advancements he had recently made in the subject. He wished, generally, to "clean up a front yard for Europe to look at and blink".

So what is the answer to a mystic? The mystic's answer to this is "Let's see if we can possibly, by some strain of the brain, get up a pole. And if we can get up this pole, let's make awfully sure after that that we just deny the MEST universe, we deny eating, sleeping, we deny motion, we just stay off and we hold the whole thing off and live on a mountaintop or something, because otherwise we're going to come down the pole." And so they do all these things and come down the pole. There's really nothing more heartbreaking than coming down the pole once one has gone up.

Even before his departure from Phoenix, Arizona, he had been working hard to get things in order in the UK in anticipation of his arrival. Operating mainly by letter and cable, and with the assistance of but a single aide on the other side of the Atlantic, Ron established the British branch of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. He worked on the procurement of the quarters from which he would instruct the London Professional Course, and he arranged for the local printing and wide distribution of Scientology books and training materials.

The reason we call this the pole, by the way, is the mathematician's analogy of the two-dimensional worm. He sees man as a two-dimensional worm. And this two-dimensional worm lives in a two-dimensional plane. And one day he's crawling along this two-dimensional plane and what do you know, he runs into a pole. He runs into something, and of course there can be nothing there because it's two-dimensional. And he's run into a third dimension, and that can't be there. That's obvious. So he sort of backs off and shakes his head a little bit and goes off and ponders it and maybe he tells another worm about it and maybe he doesn't.

Within a month of his actual arrival in Great Britain, Scientology was booming. Over that short space of time the headquarters of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS) had been firmly established at 163 Holland Park Avenue in London, twenty-six of twenty-eight persons had been processed to completion of Theta Clearing with Ron's new techniques and eighteen professional auditors had been trained, with many others still in training. Suddenly the UK had nearly as many members as the U.S. HAS and had caught and passed the U.S. in the total number persons who had completed Theta Clearing!

But one day there's some other worm crawling along there and he goes boom! And he says, "There can't be anything here. But by golly, maybe there is." And he speculates on this, and he tells some other worm about it and some other worm comes over and runs into this pole – wham! He says, "Gee, there is something here."

It was against such a background that Ron delivered these talks on knowledge and the Logics to those fortunate students who personally attended those two days of lectures.

And maybe this third worm, by this time, has seen enough of it – there's enough agreement that there's a third dimension there, a pole there – that he goes up the thing like this. Very quietly, you see, he gets up a little higher and a little higher, a little higher, a little higher, a little higher – and then he holds on like mad and he looks down and he sees the plane down below him. And he says, "My God! My God! What am I doing up here?" Well, it was all right when he was going a little higher, a little higher, a little higher. Yeah, he was fairly happy then. But when he found out he was up there and there wasn't any other worm there – zzzz! Was this bad!

These priceless lectures were nearly lost, due to the unforgivable neglect of the sound engineers who originally recorded them. The quality of the recording job they did was extremely poor. Only by the most meticulous and careful application of Ron's Clearsound(TM) technology were these lectures able to be salvaged, so that you could benefit from this brilliant technology today.

But he'll crawl down the pole and he'll go out and tell other people, "Look, there's a pole there; I've been up it."

It is our great pleasure to present these lectures to you.

And they'll say, "It's a what?"

Well, he'll say, "Well, I know it's a pole. There's a third dimension."

They say, "Well, what's a third dimension?"

"Well, it's something you go up."

"Go where?"

"Up."

"We know there's no up. What are you talking about?" And it finishes him. He's out of communication.

Maybe it takes generations and generations of worms before somebody goes up the pole and comes down again and makes a remark on it solidly enough that somebody else will believe there's a pole there. And then maybe somebody will go and sniff at it. And then maybe another one will see it and maybe another one will climb it. And if enough people go up this pole and fall down this pole, somebody sooner or later is going to get a communication line about this pole.

Well, horribly and ineptly enough, that's practically what I did. But the point is that if you suddenly were to present this pole and everything there was about this pole to somebody, and they all of a sudden jumped to the conclusion you were right but they didn't know why you were right – kaboom! They're up the pole, too.

You've got to have two maps for a pole. You've got to have a map which says "This is the way to get up a pole," and you've got to have another map and it says "This is the way to get down a pole." And if you don't have both of those maps, the subject's no good.

Now, the mathematician uses this analogy to explain fourth dimension. You know, I can tell you with a considerable sigh of relief that there is no fourth dimension. It's a wonderful mathematical symbol. You can run four simultaneous equations together and you can find that there's a w, x, y, z, but fortunately they're only theoretical. There is no w. It's not a fourth dimension. It's an infinity of universes. There is no fourth dimension, but there's your dimensions. And people go around straining to understand the fourth dimension. That's wonderful – there is none. If they had strained as hard to find out what is a universe, they would have known what the fourth dimension is.

So you'll hear of such things as space warps, you'll hear of such things as "Well, fourth dimension is really time. Yeah, that's what it is! Fourth dimension is time. And you flick from a time fourth dimension through and then you find yourself in the MEST universe; and then you change your mind somehow and you go out of the MEST universe – and that is a fourth dimension – and you keep riding in this other..." Oh boy, we can really get screwy on this one. We can go mad on this one with no trouble at all.

And preclears have. They've sat around and they've figured and they've figured and they've figured. And they start asking the E- Meter this and that and they start testing themselves this way and that and they figure some more and they figure. And what do you know? They wind up in a state that approximates that poor worm with no map down. And they say, "There's something here! I know there's something here! But I can't get off of it myself and I can't tell anybody about it!"

Well, gee, what do you know? We have a study of universes. And if I told you all these universes were the same? Nah. That's one of the primary points: Two universes are never the same universe. We're talking about universes. We're talking about the MEST universe as a specialized case, a degenerate universe. It's a sort of a trap universe to end all traps. It could be called the inevitable average, probably. The inevitable average of illusions would wind up as a MEST universe. You could always create a MEST universe. But the laws of creating universes, whether they apply to the MEST or another universe, are remarkably the same. But the universes could be remarkably different.

Now, how do you get away with all this? How do you square this around? If you were just studying the MEST universe, you might as well give up, because it's not worth studying and it will reward your study by kicking you flat. It's not worth studying – that's the truth – unless you had a better idea or a better goal in mind.

Every man there is, is a universe. You talk about God: The most you will know about God for probably a long time to come is you. If you want to know what God is all about, or if you want to know what you're all about, you want to know what the fourth dynamic is all about, you consult the essential elements of "you-ness." Not buried, unconscious, submotivated, libido-icated, bypassed symbolizations of the left hind ruddy rod, which we therefore graph and say, "It's all mysterious and you can't understand you, so therefore we can own you." We're not running that operation.

What you know and what you are, you know, and you are where you are at this moment. Step outside of yourself, you're suddenly uninfluenced by a tremendous number of ridges which match your wavelength. You all of a sudden are freer to think, you're freer to be and your beingness picks up – markedly picks up. But you're still you. You're nobody else but you. The horrible part of it is, you never will be.

Now, what are the essential elements of you, then? Now, when we say "What are the essential elements of you?" and "What are the essential elements of a universe?" we're talking about the same thing.

Now, we can take a preclear, we can tell him to step two feet outside of his head and get him squared around a bit, get his alertness and awareness way up. He all of a sudden looks around the body and he says, "Boom! I'm not a body, think of that. Gee. Hm! How peculiar. Never occurred to me before that I wasn't a body. Well, all right, so I'm not a body." But you haven't educated him even vaguely.

You just told him to do that. You just went out here in the street and you just got a guy and you said, "All right, step two feet back of your head."

And he says, "Do what?"

You say, "Well, be two feet back of your head."

And the fellow says, "...All right. What do you want? Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. I am two feet behind my head! What are you doing to me?"

Don't think for a moment that your preclear has to have any technology. You sometimes have to be kind of subtle about it. You kind of say, "You know, it's true that human beings have an immortal soul. And sometimes, in rare cases, men are their own souls. This has been known to happen. And sometimes if you merely ask someone to stand out from his body, he does it – if he's very intelligent he can do this. The lower classes can't" – something on that order.

You say, "Be two feet back of your head."

And the fellow goes bong! "Oh, I am? Isn't that peculiar? Isn't that... Oh, that – that's awful."

Or he'll say, "Whee, here I go! Goodbye!" Bong! The body's there.

And you say, "Hey! Where the hell is that preclear? Here I sit with a body on my hands!"

I can just see the police now. It's a funny thing about police, they're awfully sticky. They insist that bodies have their hearts beating and everything else, if you can imagine such a silly law. Just as though they could do it. They insist that bodies be alive and so on. So anyway, sometimes your preclear does a bunk and he's halfway past Arcturus when you finally get the right word: "Well, think, then, of your poor auditor."

All of a sudden, bong! All right, he's back.

"What did you do it for? I was on my way. Hm, been waiting to do this for ages."

Well, he's outside of himself in universe time and space: partially his own universe time and space – for the first time contactable by him – and partially MEST universe time and space. There he is. And there, standing immediately in front of you, is the matter of a multiplicity of universes.

If this material could just do that and produce this phenomenon, it would be awfully interesting and it would be worth doing. It really would be. If you just knew that somebody could step outside the back of his head, take a look at his body and adjust whatever was wrong with his body, and step back in again and be well, this would be quite remarkable. We would have done a great deal and it would be perfectly justified. But unfortunately, this isn't all there is to know about it – or very fortunately.

You'd have to know the laws of universes. A Theta Clear is merely a thetan who is stable outside of his body. That's all he is. You can kick the body in the shins, you can punch the body in the nose, you can shake the body around, you could probably throw the body under a truck – he'd still stay outside. He'd still be himself He wouldn't snap into the body and go unconscious. That is a Theta Clear and that's all a Theta Clear is. It isn't an educated thetan nor a cleared thetan nor a thetan with his own universe nor anything. It's just somebody who can be outside of his body, know he is completely outside of his body, know that he is the life unit, know that he is still him and that he doesn't have to snap back into the body automatically every time the body gets hurt. That's a Theta Clear. Well, where do you go from there? That's not too difficult to achieve. On some preclears, of course, we'll probably bury them, thetans and all. They've probably been in the MEST universe so long that they probably will not be able ever to get out of it now. Probably when you put them in the coffin, pour in the formaldehyde, it'll probably leave the thetan there too – probably in a vague state of awareness; a very vague state of awareness. And then it'll probably come up into full awareness but be unable to move any part of the body, you see, and have to stay there in the coffin – I mean, probably... And formaldehyde smells so bad! I can't understand why such a preclear doesn't co-operate more. It's really his fault for not co-operating. I wouldn't be talking about anyone I see here.

Anyway, the point is, you've been in that state many times and you didn't know enough to go on in that state. You didn't think it was possible to. You thought you had to have a body. You thought you had to have this. In other words, this whole thing was booby-trapped. You died – boom! You said, "Where's a body? Where's a body? Where's a body? Oh, I got to report back to base. I've got to do something or other." And then you say, "Ah, finally got a body. Gee! Gee, now I'm in the know again." In other words, "Now I'm all set to be more aberrated than ever."

Vicious cycle – one that had a tendency to run down after a few thousand years, because, you see, you're in the last ditch. This is the last leg. The last leg is MEST body, Earth, 1952 A.D. That's sort of where you throw... Well, you say, "Poor old Bill. I know he was a teammate and everything, but he's gotten worse and worse and worse. And every time we put him in a doll, he sticks. So we'll just send Bill down to Earth and maybe he'll get to be a congressman or something."

Be it as it may, here you have, then, an entirely different thing. You have an educated thetan – educated thetan – who could not only perceive this universe but construct his own; who could not only monitor a body, but move in and out of one at will and do anything he wanted to it and still move out of it again. Or he could stand off five thousand yards and run a body through all of its paces and have it play the Moonlight Sonata. Um-hm.

Here you have an educated thetan, a thetan who knows enough to handle the problems of the MEST universe, knows enough about universes to handle his own, and knows enough to protect and handle his own universe when he has one. And knows enough of the track and what happens in the MEST universe so that it can't happen to him again.

What have you done?

You've read the book Science of Survival. It says theta impinges itself heavily upon MEST and then disenturbulates – withdraws and disenturbulates – saving what it has known and learned about MEST. Well, of course this is the end of the cycle, because it's the beginning of one.

A thetan has come down this track now for an awful long time, and there's been an awful lot of information accumulated and collected. And what is it? It is not a study of the MEST universe. We are not here learning about the secret of the MEST universe. We're learning about the basic laws of universes so that you can make one, so that you could have one, so that you could protect one. Sounds wild, doesn't it? Sounds pretty wide.

The science of physics or the science of chemistry are peculiarly applicable to the MEST universe because it's gotten so bad. But you could make a universe where they applied. Or, just for kicks in your universe, you could fix them so they wouldn't apply. Repeal Ohm's law. All right.

Therefore, you're studying two different subjects. You're studying (1) a process: Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 2 (not Issue 1). You're going to have the joke on the first class; you're learning a different process. You've got to know Issue 1, too. [See Standard Operating Procedure for Theta Clearing in the Appendix of this volume.]

Here we have, then, Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 2. That is how you make a Theta Clear. That's all there is to that. That's easy. I could tell you that tonight and explain it to you tonight, and the Instructors could talk to you about it for a couple of days and a couple of periods, and you could go out and do it. And we could turn loose an auditor or two on you and probably have you all cleared.

For what? And to what end? To make a Theta Clear. Great. Same thing as saying set you up in a shooting gallery – let's make ducks out of all of you on a shooting gallery. Because you'd run around as a Theta Clear, and you might last for a day and you might last for two weeks and you might last for six weeks and you might last for another lifetime and you might last for four or five lifetimes – and then one day, there you'd be on that doggone trap again. Or next week you'd run into a ridge and go kaboom! and go into apathy and say, "What am I gonna do now? Nothing. There is nothing that can be done about it. Move back into a body, I guess." That would be great, wouldn't it?

Well, there's nothing easier than this therapy.

You want to patch somebody up – somebody hasn't been able to walk for six years, or something of the sort. Tell them to step a foot back of the head. If they can't step back of the head, then they go to Step II, go to Step III, go to Step IV. And they finally do get a step [out] the back of the head, and then you have them patch it up again. And you say, "Move back in. That's fine. Okay." Pat them on the head and let them go their way. It's a fast process. It even works on the people who are complaining very bitterly now that they are unable to get out. There are two or three of these. But it works very easily. Actually, if they only knew it, the other auditors of the class have plotted against them. And actually, people have fixed it so they're unable to do this, and so on, and it's all plotted that way.

Well, actually, it might as well be. See, I could take any one of these characters and spring him in a very short space of time. I sprung the roughest case that ever walked in to a Foundation – that had had so many hours of processing that they'd run it up on a tabulating machine and broke the tabulator. And I started in with this case on Standard Operating Procedure 1950 and did a little bit for the case – did quite a bit for the case – but stepped in with Theta Clearing techniques and in approximately, I don't know, about three hours, had myself a halfway Theta Clear. Two other periods, maybe a half an hour or two hours – somewhere in between a half an hour and two hours more – had myself somebody doing a large part of the rest of the process.

And this preclear was over to Buckingham Palace the other day, trying to interfere with the British government. And I discouraged this preclear a great deal about this whole thing. I said, "I don't want the British government interfered with and you don't either. It's doing just fine. Doing just fine. And when speeches are given in the House of Lords, they ought to go the way the speech was supposed to be given, not get sensible. And you don't want, suddenly, somebody breaking forth and making declarations about the atomic bomb and so forth."

Preclear practically went into apathy, by the way, because all this M.P. did was stutter. Got the M.P. going and then he couldn't make his speech, he just kept stuttering. It was very embarrassing. He never stuttered before. Maybe he's still stuttering. I'll have to phone him up and ask.

But boy, that's really low-order stuff to put this thing to use on. I mean, here's a preclear, processed for a few hours, beautiful shape, the next thing you know, we're over in a member of Parliament – over in Parliament. Great.

God help Eisenhower, that's all I've got to say. I've heard more people say, "You know, I'm not doing anything tonight. I think I'll go over to America and..." Well, the dickens with this kind of stuff I mean, you'll find, eventually, that about all you can do for a government is let it evolve, not revolute. Let's evolute them, not revolute them.

Revolution never produces anything. Throwing something out of gear momentarily, the vast inertia of the people closes in again and patches it all up. Evolution can be fairly fast, but evolution is on a level of the people, not on the level of the government. A people get the government it deserves. You have to change the people to change the government.

So, it takes public education and a lot of other things. You're not going to go out here, though, and teach these people Theta Clearing. They're not going to believe you, in the first place. You're going to have to teach them how to raise better babies and how to keep their husband happy or how to make him unhappy, or you've got to do something with these techniques to make them immediately, instantaneously applicable to the everyday business of living. You can do that. But that's the solution if there's any such solution. It's along in that band.

Now, we're not handling the governments of the world, or even vaguely interested in the governments of the world, in this course. We're interested in the anatomy of universes. What's a universe? How does it get that way? How does it go off the rails? What are the basic laws behind them? What do you have to do as an individual with a universe? Are you capable of the manufacture of a universe? Can you regulate and modulate a universe? Those are questions which you will have to answer for yourself. The data is all here. When I say all here, I mean all here. I mean, we've got the information. Works!

All we've been doing for just ages now in Dianetics and Scientology – all I've been doing is simply shuffling the deck again and dealing it, taking the factors involved and dealing them a different way and taking the factors involved and dealing them a different way. And that way you can get thousands and thousands of techniques.

But you only get one set of Axioms. It should be quite important to you, because it tells you there's a finite number of data for you to learn and know well.

If you learn this data and know it very well, you will be able to answer yes to all those questions I just asked. You have to prove it to yourself. But at no moment, anywhere in this course, are you going to find me forcing any datum down your throat.

I'm teaching you two different things. There's two different lines of data going out here. One is simply fact, data. This is the datum and that's all this is – this is a datum. And then you'll hear that datum evaluated in its proper place: That, I have never under any circumstances perverted in any way. I have never slanted data in any way. I give you data as it is just for the sake of data. And the other is my opinion of the datum. I'll give you my opinion of the datum. That really is relatively worthless to you. Really. Makes life interesting, about all.

What I tell you about "governments should evolute," yeah, you can learn that the hard way, but it happens to be more or less my opinion. It's none of my business what you do with this information really. It's just data. Just data. And as a result, when I give you this data, I'm not giving you opinion. When I'm giving you data, I'm giving you data: The data is tested, the data works, the data is inexorable as geometry. And then to make life more interesting, I very often give you my opinion of the data.

My own philosophy, my own method of existing is far, far different, perhaps, in many cases than the data itself, because I've selected out, after all, certain randomities.

There are certain things which I have decided to be mad at in this universe. I've decided to be mad at psychiatrists. There is no reason why I should be mad at psychiatrists. Really, the sensible thing for me to do about psychiatrists is simply go over and talk to them, make a couple of patients well, show them how they can make bigger fees, pat them all on the head, and you've got Dianetics and psychiatry. But there's no randomity there. No randomity at all.

They're never going to hurt a preclear, really. I can rave and rant about electric shock and prefrontal lobotomy – you can pick them up in the next life and they'll be as good as new.

All right.

Therefore, what I give you is data. The data in these Axioms is pointed up very sharply. And you can tell very easily what is my opinion or what is my side comment or my randomity, and what the datum is. The data stands, as itself, as close to pure knowledge as is available.

This data I'm giving you now on the Axioms falls into three categories. The first is what we're going to call the Q list. There's nothing in mathematics even vaguely approaching this, but Q means the top level from which we are now working – the top level from which we're now working; the highest echelon from which all other things are derived. Knowledge is a pyramid, and knowledge as a pyramid gets itself a common denominator which evaluates all other data below it. At this point of this pyramid, this top point, we have what could be called a Q, and it could be also called a common denominator. It is in common to every other datum in this pyramid full of data.

Now, at any level of this pyramid – any level – we have a greater complexity of knowledge. At any level in this pyramid, as we descend down the line from that common denominator, we find it less and less able to be recognized – this common denominator – in the data. It's less and less obvious what its common denominator is, but that doesn't make that common denominator any less a common denominator or any less workable. And the Q from which we're operating now evaluates all the data in the material universe.

That's a small statement, but I'll make it bigger. The Q we're operating from now evaluates all the data in any universe, and it's not near high enough as a Q. There's a higher Q than this, and I'm fishing for it now. Have it one of these days and what do you know, we'll have a simpler pyramid. Right now the pyramid is pretty simple.

So, if you can envision knowledge as this pyramid – and that's one of the oldest symbols there is for knowledge, by the way. You see in Masonic emblems, you see in Egypt, all over the place you see pyramids, conical objects, that sort of thing. That's what they're trying to represent. The datum I am giving you first appeared here on earth eighty-two hundred years ago. The analogy of knowledge and the pyramid. They've been stumbling along with it ever since. You even find it in Mayan culture, and so on.

Well now, if you could envision, then, our datum here, you can see that we're dealing with something which can be found in every scrap of knowledge or action or material or space or time or beingness of any universe.

Now, we had an earlier pyramid. It was no less applicable, but it had a lower-level Q, or CD, and that is survival. Survival is our past Q. We were operating from "life is survival": goal of life is to survive. To survive employs space and time. And that word survival, by the way, evaluates this life, it evaluates most things. But it doesn't evaluate everything. The thing it doesn't evolve is all universes, because you don't have to base a universe on the tenet survival. You can have an instantaneous universe which has no time in it. Hence the word survival was betrayed.

Now, what is this other Q? We've had two or three, by the way: There was this survival and then there was the higher level of self-determinism as beingness. And now we have the Q of self- determinism defined.

Q simply means the most common datum that sums all other data and the point from which we are operating. It does not say there is no higher point. It does not say that point does not exist. Q says that point up here above the pyramid is probably attainable, but we aren't there. We aren't there. We're operating from here. And this, by the way, is quite satisfactory as an operating point at the moment. If it weren't satisfactory as an operating point, there wouldn't be any subject of Scientology or Dianetics. This is Dianetics and this is Scientology. They're operating from a higher Q. All right.

And we get the first of the Qs, the first of the list of Qs: The common denominator of all life impulses is self-determinism.

The common denominator of all life impulses is self-determinism. And that's Q 1.

Q 2: Self determinism may be defined as the location of matter and energy in space and time, as well as a creation of time and space in which to locate matter and energy. Got that? That's self-determinism. Nice high Q, isn't it? Works, though. Oh, that's terribly workable.

I got this, by the way, by watching empirically the behavior of what they laughingly call electricity – and suddenly spotted what was left out of it. And what was spotted and left out of it was the fact that every electrical generator has a base and is entirely and completely dependent upon its base. And the electrodes, in the absence of a base – the terminals, in the absence of a base – simply snap together and you get no electrical flow. And the essential part of any generator is its base. And what does a base do? That's actually the metal base of the motor, you see? It's fastened down to Earth and Earth is fastened down in the gravity system of this solar system, and that's fastened down in the universe in some fashion or other. And what's that base doing?

That means that everything in this universe, actually, by succession of points, is appended to that base one way or the other. And it says that that base is imposing space and time upon the terminals in an electrical generator. So it says, therefore, that all of these fancy formulas about electricity have had a missing element in them. And maybe that doesn't impress you, but we just got through upsetting – with that, the entire study of elementary electricity becomes upset; you've added something new to it. From James Clerk Maxwell on to present time has not seen very much added, but plenty down here in the field of complexity.

Now, let me give you another example of this. Down here, this big field of complexity. And anybody can get more complicated. Any dope, any fool, can come along and say, "Well, let's see, you've got it nice and simple, now let's make it complicated. Now let's get it more complicated. Now let's say that in order to study Scientology, you have to master the Siamese alphabet backwards. Now, let's see, after we've known that, let's go on and get a more complicated datum and an even more complicated datum and an even more complicated datum, and this is the stuff from which we're now going to jump off. The complicated of the most complicated that we can possibly complicate, and we're going to jump off from this point that E=mc2 by the square root of mice. And how you ever get this back to the other, we're not interested in. We're going to go from that point... If you don't know what that point means, just to hell with you. Just the dickens with you. We don't want anything more to do with you. If you don't know that E=mc2 divided by the square root of mice, why, you got no business studying this subject, and we flunk you right now." Typical. Typical in the evolution of a science is to go on and get more complex and more complex and never dream for a moment that you'd better look for a simplicity.

And you think I'm just talking about modern scientists, but I'm not. I'm talking about the boys that came after the lads eighty- two hundred years ago in the upper highlands of India, and the later people from there, the Vedic people, and the later people than that, the Runa Vedic, and the later people than that. And boy, they really got it nice and complicated. Do you know that every essential datum – every essential datum – of evolution, of anything and everything you want to think of, is contained in mysticism and in the basic Hindu writings and in the Vedic writings? Do you know evolution is in there? Do you know the Darwinian theory is in there? You know everything is in there? I don't know anything that's left out. They're all there.

There isn't any reason, really, why you shouldn't be studying mysticism right across the boards – no real reason at all – except for one thing: they booby-trapped it or they didn't know. And for every correct datum in mysticism, there are a dozen incorrect data. For every correct datum in mysticism, there's a misevaluation. For every correct datum in mysticism, there's a reversal of fact, so that if you enter in and use that data, you will be smacked flat. If you want to finish yourself completely and utterly, get standard works on mysticism and practice them just exactly the way it says and you'll be a dead duck one day. And the reason for this is very simple: (1) nobody wanted to integrate the information completely, because it was much more fun some other way; and (2) boys along the line had no slightest desire for anybody coming after them to really know. They had no desire for that, and so they booby-trapped it just as though they'd laid land mines across the line.

Let's take the subject of the chakra – very interesting. There are seven of them. And what do you know! It says right at the beginning there, "Man is a mind who owns a body. He is not a body who owns a mind." It says, "This is the crown chakra. The crown chakra is in the head, it's in the skull. There are seven chakra in all. And now it's the last one which one approaches."

"The crown chakra is the last one which one approaches." Get that. Says that right there. There's the true datum and the false datum. If you took it as the last one to approach, and if you did to the other chakra in the body – the other zones or centers, which are not really beings but which we call entities – if you did nothing but process those and you took up the crown chakra last, the crown chakra would not come free with any ease at all. It would take a terrifically specialized technique.

If you started in with the crown chakra and said, "Beat it, bud," he would. But if you address the other, if you address chakra number seven and work backwards up the line toward the crown chakra, you would probably have your preclear in a condition whereby he was so stuck in his body that only super-super-human- being techniques would free him. That's the way you pin him down.

If you get your preclear to deny the MEST universe and deny it and deny it, you start up a one-way flow of the uncontrollability of force and he will be unable to manufacture enough energy to keep himself afloat. The data is all there; it's all there. It's been there for eighty-two hundred years.

Now, it should strike you as very alarming that somebody would really booby-trap this line. But let's be kinder about it and let's merely say, "Well, they didn't have a process." And you'd probably be closer to the truth, because there's so much truth in it that the added booby-trapping goes unnoticed. And when people try to practice it – oh, boy. You are going to find this out: When you have a preclear who has been deeply, deeply steeped in mysticism, he's going to be much harder to work. Because those things are angled toward pinning him down, pinning him down but good. All you have to do is reverse mysticism and handle him that way.

So, where you see these techniques crossing, remember this: that we are studying a Western extrapolation from basic mechanical principles learned almost entirely and wholly from basic studies of electronics, but with at least very sufficient knowledge of mysticism and Hinduism to suddenly recognize these data when they show up and suddenly say, "Boy, that is why!"

I spent a lot of time when I was a kid watching little matches float around the bowl. I could push them around a bowl once. I could sit still and do this and read minds and read books. But it's very funny; they've got it fixed that if you do them the way they say, the technique will leave you, the ability will desert you. Isn't that horrible? They tell you all these things are possible and then fix you up so you can't do them. The way you're supposed to practice them is the way that ends your doing of them.

Now, you don't have to take my word for that. You'll see before the end of this course if you want to go back and study that material. That material is rich, though. And I'm not condemning the material, I'm just warning you in handling it that you might as well be sitting on a lighted bonfire juggling skyrockets. It's just about that safe. I'm just warning you, don't cross them up until you've got your track very straight and you know this orientation which you're handing out very well. And then pick up that subject if you want for a scholarly study and look it over, and you will, I'm sure, be saying much what I'm saying: "Gosh! If they just hadn't booby-trapped the line, if they just hadn't misevaluated this data, look where we'd be today! Look where we'd be. Isn't it a shame!" And I know you'll be saying that.

All right. So your Q 2 reverts right back to elementary electricity, and it tells you that the law of alternating current has to have an additional factor in it in order to make it work: a base. And what's this base got to do with it? Well, it's got a lot to do with it. It tells you that your preclear, in trying to operate, is actually operating with energy, and that you make energy by locating it in space and time. You make energy, you create energy.

But the MEST universe has the most remarkable factor about it. And this is not a Q; I mean, this is just a comment on it. It has a remarkable factor. And this factor I'd hate to think was completely true, but it just kind of seems like it is. As far as this universe itself is concerned, you can create energy into it but you can't destroy energy out of it. It has a self- perpetuating law in it called the conservation of energy, which makes it an expanding universe, because you can actually create energy into it.

Now, they try to tell you you can't, but it's a very, very silly thing that no proof in any laboratory ever showed up on production of energy. They haven't got that one rigged. They can show you the conservation of energy once created – that once energy is created it is conserved, and it's conserved from there on out. But here's the other one: They try to infer that you can't create energy, but they have never proven it. They have never proven it.

Now, once an atomic bomb has blown up, the laws of conservation of energy go into effect. But it's a great question as to whether or not the laws of conservation of energy also say you can't create energy. Nobody's entered that side of it; they kind of haven't – let's leave that one alone. They say once you blow up energy or try to destroy energy it'll merely convert and the energy is still there. And that's perfectly true. And that's a hideous fact. Here you've got an expanding universe that is unkillable. And when you have licked this law of the conservation of energy, you have licked the MEST universe for once and for all.

But there's a big joke about it: You don't have to lick the MEST universe. All you have to do is change your space-time ratio. Change your space-time ratio and the MEST universe isn't there. You just create some space and time that's not MEST-universe space and time, the MEST universe disappears. That isn't even for you. I don't know but what we all did this, it wouldn't disappear forever. I had a friend that used to say, "You know, I think if everybody suddenly believed that Ford cars wouldn't run, they wouldn't run."

All right. The next Q is something there isn't; Q 3: The identification of the source of that which places matter and energy and originates space and time is not necessary to the resolution of this problem. Not necessary to the resolution of this problem. And you can add to it, at this time. In other words, that simply says that the source of this Q is not necessary to the resolution of the problem at this time. And true enough.

So if you want to really go mad, go chasing after the source of what locates matter and time. And every time you try to do this, of course, you're going to say, "Well, it exists in matter and time, but it doesn't exist in matter and time because it can make matter and time. And then you've got a seniority to matter and time." And you're chasing from here, and looking – you're looking in matter and time for something which is not matter and time. And that would be the silliest thing there was. I mean, frame of reference.

Now, you ask somebody why he's on the track. He isn't going to be able to tell you why he's on the track except in terms of time. He's going to always be looking for prior cause – prior cause, prior cause, prior cause, prior cause, prior cause. And that's "reason why" – means there's a reason that goes before this moment. Cause is before this moment. Every time you ask, "What's the reason the MEST universe..." the cause lies before this moment.

Now, of course, if you chase that down to moment zero, there's got to be a cause for moment zero. Well, the way they've shilly-shallied around with this and double-logicked it out of existence is say, "Well, it's really circular. And when you get back to the beginning of it... Therefore, you'll find it all there, and that's the way you go backwards around this thing."

It's a big joke. The space-time is created. And it's created not by something esoteric, not by something strange, but it's created by a beingness which is most remarkably like you. As a matter of fact, it is you.

And we get to Q 4 which is: Universes are created by the application of self determinism on eight dynamics.

And we get to Q 5 (it's really just a reversal): Self determinism, applied, will create, conserve, alter and possibly destroy universes. And now that's the one cautious point I just gave you a moment before. I said I'm not sure that this material becomes destructible, simply because the MEST universe has this silly law of conservation of energy in it. The law is observably there.

All right. Those are the Qs and that's all the Qs there are.

You want to evaluate these eight dynamics, they're simply the eight dynamics and they come in later when we talk about the MEST universe. When I said they're applicable to all universes – and we just said that – of course, we find that they're applicable in a specialized case to the MEST universe. That's a specialized case.

Now we get into the Logics. The Logics are the forms of thought behavior which can, but do not necessarily have to, be used in creating universes. These Logics have been used in creating the MEST universe; that's obvious. But they do not necessarily have to be used. We call these Logics. And this could be called "How to Think," and it's a very specific section.

And I want to call your attention to the Qs, just the Qs – when I said Q 1, Q 2, Q 3, Q 4, Q 5, the sentence which immediately followed those – boy, call each one of those a datum; call them a datum of considerable importance to you. And it doesn't have anything to do with opinion. That's data. That's usable data and you need it.

Now, a graduation of importance is you're going to use the Qs and the Logics just like mad in processing. I mean, you've got to be able to practically see everything through the Qs and the Logics, just all the way along the line. You've got to evaluate material with respect to these data that I'm giving you, one right after the other. Otherwise your processes will bog down. You will be confronted with things which are to you unknown merely because you're not operating along the line of the Logics. You've run in on yourself some arbitrary of which you may or may not be aware. But these are the least arbitrary of arbitraries. The Logics now could be called "How to Think"; they could also be called "How to Evaluate a Preclear." They could also be called "How to Diagnose." They could be called a large number of things. And each one of these data is quite important to you in processing.

Now, actually, you will be expected to know, as professional auditors, the Qs and the Logics by just rote: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give an example of this: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What a bore! I mean, on that level. Yeah, well, this is easy as saying food is necessary to man: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

These data should be that ordinary to you. Make them ordinary and used and stirred up and misused and abused and kicked around and evaluated any way you want them until finally, by golly, they're your data. Because if you know these data, you can actually list thousands of projects. Thousands. That's interesting, isn't it?

You can invent all kinds of techniques with these. And you can do this with these: you can use these in the field of pretense – like mad. You can leave one of these factors out of what you are saying, and what you are saying will appear to be entirely logical to somebody else and will be utterly unworkable.

You could take these and leave one out or use one in some fashion or other to apply to and evaluate the whole field, let us say, of surgery, and evaluate the whole field of surgery this way and write a book about surgery. And three quarters of the surgeons in existence would read that book, let's say, and they'd read that book and they would be very struck by your tremendous command of this problem. Oh, they'd be delighted. And the other quarter of them want to kill you. Or maybe there'd only be a quarter of them that'd be delighted and the other three quarters would want to knock you off.

But if at any time you find that your knowledge of this has not made you more powerful or has not made your beingness more hardly felt by others, or if you find out that you're having a little bit of a difficult time trying to convince somebody of things, you just haven't learned one of the Logics, that's all. Because these all alone on an educational basis – if your education was oriented around these, you would be a vicious character, that I guarantee. Vicious character. Nobody could have coped with you. You'd have been able to say, "Well, Mama, da-da-da."

Mama would say, "Oh, my God, I've got to give him another shilling." It'd be totally unanswerable except by one thing: force. But there's even a way to get around that.

There's a technique for children. Teach them sometimes and watch what happens to their parents and nurses. It would be horrible. But it's by the application of the gradient scale. We'll talk about gradient scales here in a moment. But the application of gradient scales has, in such an application – just inexorable. I mean, it would just march through anything.

The little child says to Mama the first day, "Mama? Mama, do you want to kill me?"

"Oh no, of course, Johnny. No, no! Whatever put such ideas in your head? Hrrww!" (What's this child been learning? The idea!) "Of course I don't want to kill you. The idea, huh! No!"

"Are you sure, Mama, that you don't...?"

"No!"

Daddy comes home, goes in, talks to little Johnny. Says, "Johnny, we're not trying to kill you." He halfway wants to send for a psychiatrist or something. He's worried. He gets real worried. He wonders what's happened at school. They question him.

Well, you just warn Johnny that all this catechism is going to take place, and you say, "It's going to cause a terrific hubbub, but just keep on asking the same question. Don't vary it, don't extrapolate on this, don't get fancy, don't invent anything. Just say, 'You sure you don't want to kill me?' And you keep that up for a week."

"And the next week you start in, 'Do I have a right to live?' And all week long, at odd intervals through the week, you say to your parents, 'Do I have a right to be alive?'"

And they say, "Of course you have a right to be alive! Oh, my God! Oh, the idea! Well... Poor little fellow, he's been overworked too hard," or something of the sort. But boy, he makes the point.

Then, "Do happy people live longer than sad ones?"

"Well, yes, Johnny, of course they do! Of course, you have to take life this-and-that, but happier people live... I mean, a person has to be happy to... What are you trying to get me into, Johnny?"

"Well, I just wanted to know. Are you sure of that? Well, then, do I have a right to be happy?"

"Yes, of course. Blah, blah, blah..."

Well, then the next week following that, "Do you want me to be happy?" Gradient scales, see?

Little more, little more, little more – you're making the parents, the teachers, make a postulate, a postulate, a postulate, harder and harder. They finally are totally convinced that their lives are going to be practically devoted to the life of this child. And he swings it in this way: he explains, "Then, I don't have a right to own anything, do I, Mama?"

"Why, yes, of course you do! Your dolls and so forth."

"Well, if you owned anything... I could have something I owned, couldn't I? I mean, if I owned something, wouldn't I have the control of it if I owned it?"

"Well, of course."

"Well, do I have a right to own anything?"

"Well, of course you have a right to own anything."

"Well, stop bawling me out about my shoes then. Are my shoes mine or aren't they?" You see how insidious this is? This little kid would wind up – it's a lead-pipe cinch – with the household running. How is he doing it? He's making them make, by gradient scales, stronger and stronger postulates in his favor. And you just draw a curve, and what stronger postulates there are, it'd get to a point where, yes, he should help his father share the profits of the business, if you wanted to go to that. And the parents would not quite know what had happened to them.

Now let's work it in reverse: Let's want to deny somebody some power or some ability or an ownership. Just cut it back one shade every week or every day – just cut it back a hair. Ptock! Just a hair: a little less, a little less, but so tiny in the cuts that he would never quite notice this, and get him each time to agree to them. Because, in essence, that would be it. Each time he must agree that this is the best thing to do.

And how do you do that? You keep saying harder and harder how hard he works, how much responsibility he has to carry. You sympathize with him and you gradually get him to turn over more and more, and you get him to rest oftener. And as you walk in on that track... What do you want to do to this guy? Kill him? Because he'll quit after a while. He'll give you all of his business, he'll be so happy, he'll be so grateful that you did it. And he'll go off someplace and sit down, and then gradually, because times are hard, the next thing you know...

Now, the best example on this is the camel that walks into the tent. The camel that walks into the tent is a beautiful example of gradient scales.

How do you use these things, then? You look for, in the real universe, problems, or you find problems in the real universe, or you find problems in the universe which you have created, which is your own universe. How do you solve them? These Logics will help you out, to understand and to resolve problems. When I say your own universe... You know, you've really never lived in any other universe than your own? You are trying to put your own universe in contest with the MEST universe. And you're trying to make the MEST universe gilded by your own universe or straightened up by your own universe or otherwise. And the MEST universe keeps saying to you, "I am real and you aren't. And the reason I can do this is because I can hurt you. I am the MEST universe and I can hurt you, I can crush you. You have to agree with me; I do not have to agree with you."

And so a fellow breaks down eventually and has no universe. The universe has demonstrated it's so powerful and it's so strong and it's so unreasonable that it can do anything.

All right.