There is a mathematical proposition known as “backing up into zero.” We have a zero. Obviously it is nothing, but we keep taking things out of the nothing. So we find out that that zero is actually an infinity. This is a fairly well established principle. That is what we are doing with theta.

Completely aside from Effort Processing, we now have something which is a mathematical science. The test of a science is in whether it needs phenomena which do not exist in fact in order to prove itself, whether it explains existing phenomena and whether it predicts phenomena which, when looked for, will be found to exist in fact.

It is interesting that a fellow by the name of Dirac postulated once upon a time that there were holes in space. An atomic scientist came along not too long ago and started knocking a few alpha particles around, and he found that he was getting two electrons where he should only have been getting one — that is to say, he was manufacturing an extra electron every time he went through this process that he had embarked upon. So he studied it and studied it and studied it, and finally he had to conclude that there was a hole in space. This happened fairly recently. The law of conservation of energy seems thus to have been violated for the first time.

The Axioms do that with an insidiousness which has two or three of our people sighing because “there is no randomity left, there isn’t any variability; it’s going to be dull from here on.”

Theta might be likened to a hole in space. Theta is merely a mathematical symbol. We have backed up to this hole in space. We know what lies just on the other side of the hole; just a millionth of a millimeter on the other side of the hole we know what is there, looking back into this universe. But that is where we are.

But those who have been in Dianetics these last eighteen months or less are fortunate to this degree: You will never see anything like this again. But you will have knowledge and you will have examined phenomena which it is very, very doubtful will ever be examined again to amount to anything.

As a matter of fact, I can take a preclear to that hole without much trouble; pushing him through is something else. I suppose one day some poor luckless devil will get pushed through and he will probably vanish. But it is all for the cause of science!

Anywhere along the line we have had something in Dianetics which was better than anything that existed, but we have not had a complete codification of it. It took quite a little while to find out what codification was needful and necessary in order to deliver it into the hands of individuals who could use it effectively and invariably.

Oddly enough, theta has (1) no weight, (2) no wavelength, (3) no size. So it is zero, obviously! Only it is not zero, because as long as we have been playing with theta it has consistently produced answers. So obviously it isn’t zero.

There were some wild variables in the way I processed. I used to use a technique of trying to give the preclear back to himself, which I don’t think is codified anywhere. Those who have seen me audit with the earlier techniques probably will have recognized it, though: “You know what you’re doing; what are you asking me for?” — that type of validation of self determinism, and a continual hammer and pound on that subject.

Yet if you will go back on the time track to your boyhood or girlhood and break a toy — do that in theta: go back and break a toy — and then come up to present time and go find wherever that toy was hidden away as a keepsake and show me that it is now broken, I will abandon the postulate that theta has no wavelength.

It was not recognized by me that this was a considerable variable, and yet it was, since auditors who perhaps did not have this wish to deliver self-determinism into the hands of the preclear himself, or who did not really realize how to do so — because it was something one sort of learned, like wiggling one’s ears — might not have had as swift results.

Now, here was an experiment we conducted one night: You take a piece of chalk and look at it very carefully. Then break it. Now close your eyes and look at it very carefully and put the chalk back together again. When you open your eyes, there it is — still broken.

As a consequence, the last year and a half has been mainly a study of what auditors had to know in order to produce results. Every time a new codification of technique was made in order to communicate it, lo and behold, some more data fell out of the hat. It kept doing this; it was very embarrassing. The more one studied, the more one knew; the more one codified, the more one had to work with, and the more one worked with . . . It got people pretty dizzy sometimes.

Theta is not traveling in physical-universe time as such. Memories are not stored as electrical charges with wavelength. They are not stored that way; they couldn’t be.

But we were following along a strangely single-line path. It has been a very straight path, actually; there hasn’t been very much variance to it. But there has been change in emphasis.

Here is a very funny thing: Take a fellow who has been going along fine — his body is not deformed at all — and all of a sudden one day he has a sad occasion. His mother-in-law iscross to him or something, and this keys in an engram. After that he goes around all twisted up. He goes to an auditor and the auditor audits out that charger and audits out that engram, and the fellow is then all right again. That is peculiar, isn’t it? He carried, you might say, the potential of that charge all those years without it being keyed in.

The first really new data that came in appeared when an examination was made of language. And then when an examination was made of theta with new MEST, theta andMEST, getting theta back out of entheta and so forth, that theory developed a little data. But the great, big, huge, enormous datum that fell into our laps was the fact — which is extrapolated from these other axioms — that every thought is preceded by a physical action.

The amount of energy contained in one of those charges is tremendous. It is not stored in any cells. There isn’t a condenser or other electrical apparatus known for the storage of this much energy, nor could there be a catalyst which would take a facsimile which was lying on the time track and turn it into that much energy.

This meant that language was simply a symbolization of physical universe actions. And if this were true, then all you had that was valid anywhere along the line was effort. All the mind did was calculate efforts. When it miscalculated them it got in a bad way: it became invalidated. And how did it become invalidated? By miscalculating an effort.

You can watch a fellow running through an incident where he is stuck in the arm with a needle, and you will see the flesh sink. He hasn’t got any muscles to make it sink, but it sinks.

Therefore the mind’s effort to postulate and calculate efforts was obviously the center button. I have said many times to classes in Dianetics, “I am looking for the center button — the button which, when pushed, will blow up something on the order of the atom bombs in New Mexico.”

I found out how to turn a theta facsimile — that is to say, a memory recording — on fully, a short time ago. I broke out a tooth. Somebody was asking if I would mind if I showed them the tooth. I am sorry I can’t do that, because the tooth was broken so badly I had to have it pulled. There wasn’t anything left of it. It was the second molar. It was very strange that it was cracked on the side — very peculiar. There were no cells around to make that tooth crack. It couldn’t crack internally, by a convulsion inside itself, in some peculiar fashion. It was done by a theta facsimile.

Now, the boys in research may have mentioned something of new developments. It is always unfortunate for anyone to talk to anyone in research.

These and various other data bring us to understand that when we travel back in theta, we are not traveling back in MEST. You could figure it out that the body has a set of cells and these cells start out at conception and somehow or other carry these memories as a lasting trace, and all of this sort of rubbish. The funny part of it is that about every seven years there isn’t a single native cell left in the body; they are all changed by that time. Most cells are changed in the body in a matter of months.

I remember going to Kansas City and finding a research preclear spinning slowly, quietly, sadly — but spinning! I audited him for a little while and found out they had been auditing him on three levels: they were giving him Straightwire, he was doing freewheeling and he was running incidents on the track, all at the same time. The research people had set this up as a means of finding out if it could be done. They found out that it could be done and then they said, “Well, guess we’ll go on to another preclear.”

So these memory recordings aren’t passed along from cell to cell. They could be, but they are not stored as electrical energy. You start examining this any way you want to and you will find that there isn’t an energy in the physical universe — at least which we know about — which has a small enough wavelength to store memory recordings.

That preclear went back to Kansas City and last fall I got into his case and found out that he had been left parked in birth for a long time. This was unfortunate; he had gained about twenty-five or thirty pounds. I triggered the groupers out of this and he evidently straightened up. I think he is still in good shape now.

Oddly enough, this was a discovery I made in 1932 when I was in atomic and molecular physics at George Washington University. I made an exhaustive study of the matter. There aren’t wavelengths small enough; physical scientists would know that. The boys fooling around in medicine would not know it because they don’t know the laws of energy, and as a consequence they have postulated, as the best postulates which they can offer, that memories are stored in punched protein molecules. That is cute! The theory says there are ten holes in a molecule — it doesn’t state what punches them — and something like a hundred memories to a hole. You figure that there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons in the body, figure out how many molecules there are and how many memories this is, and you find out that the human body, on this incredible theory, will not store three months’ worth of perceptions, even if you look at only the main observations. Wonderful!

The point is, let’s wipe out now all of the rumors and the statements you may have heard from the research boys. There is always a radio set back in the research laboratory which is in advance of the radio set on the assembly line and being sold. You know this very well. Probably this will always be the case in Dianetics.

The punched-protein-molecule theory is wonderful from this standpoint: You can’t see a molecule by any existing energy known today. An electron microscope will give you a vague impression of the whereabouts of a molecule, but that is about all. You can’t look at molecules. They draw beautiful pictures of them in chemistry, but they don’t look at them. They are small — tiny. Wavelengths of light, wavelengths of electricity, wavelengths of radio or any other energies on the spectrum — supersonics, the black band are much, much too gross to form a recording mechanism such as we know in the physical universe for memory.

But right now, I can tell you bluntly that we have entered into what is known as the second echelon of processing. The first echelon was buttoning up the first dynamic. It took us as far as “why,” but it didn’t tell us why. At “why” you turn around quietly and look out, and you can now see “how,” and you can see it with great clarity. And we now have nearly two hundred axioms that tell you how it comes about.

This is all astonishing data. It is all known to a physicist.

Not all these axioms are necessary by a long ways, but they are axioms. They are mathematical axioms; they will extrapolate into some interesting material.

You start to examine theta and you will find out immediately that theta is having a tough time sweeping along in present time continually. It is sweeping along in present time continually, and it is only in present time continually and can only be returned back to through present time. Your preclear doesn’t go anyplace; he lies right on the couch in front of you.

So, we can tell you “how,” and in addition to that we can give you a process — a codified process — that you can use on preclears which will produce, if not always an absence of the preclear. at least an absence of certain chronic somatics.

In addition to that, the number of people turning up with post-mortem experiences demonstrates utterly that you are not dealing with a genetic line. We don’t need that proof. All we need to look at is this phenomenon of return — the fact that a person is returning back through his memories.

Those who have been working mainly with words and with boil-off will be interested in this axiom: Every thought is preceded by a physical action.

Watching a preclear on the couch returning back through his memories, you can watch such manifestations as his back suddenly sinking in. You can watch him being twisted all out of shape in various ways, in manners for which he has no muscles. He hasn’t any muscles which can accomplish many of these actions which you can see.

Every word is merely a definition of a physical action. Words are symbols of action; words are symbols of motion or lack of motion in the physical universe.

You can take a preclear and by restimulation in full of some engram you can make him sit with his hands and his feet off the floor in an unbalanced position which he could not otherwise maintain, no matter how much you coaxed him to maintain it. It is wonderful.

Now, any time that you process delusion or illusion in a preclear. he goes down the tone scale. Any time you start validating dub-in, he starts going down. You know this by experience. The same thing happens with processing words. You process words and your preclear will go down the tone scale. What you want to process is the action defining the word, and you will process the words.

There is a lot of this experimental data. You can research it all you want to, but it all boils down to this one fact: Theta has no physical-universe wavelength. It doesn’t have any time in it, therefore it can’t have any wavelength. Wavelength is a measure of motion through space against time. So something that has no wavelength doesn’t exist; this says it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have any mass; it doesn’t have any of these things. And it is very funny that the more we play with this stuff called theta, the more answers we get.

The actions defining the words are very easily found, but there is something much easier behind all this. You can just start processing “gunshot” on the effort to postulate or effect action. That is all you have to do, and you will shoot the whole bottom out of the vocabulary so that the vocabulary is no longer very effective.

So we can postulate that we are looking up to a certain point in the physical universe; below that point all is motion and above that point all is question mark. And it is certainly not motion in the physical universe, but it may be motion in its own universe. This we don’t know about.

I wish to call this to your mind, too: Every time you see somebody who is very anxious about words, you see somebody low on the tone scale. Have you ever been around somebody who continually corrected you in your speech? You say so-and-so and they correct you; you say so-and-so and they correct you; they just neglect the idea entirely but correct the words. When you start to sing a song they say, “No, that isn’t the in the second line of that song, it’s an of. “ You finally admit “Yes, it’s of “ and they sigh with relief.

But this is a good, solid, practical, physicist’s method of looking at something. We cannot identify this; therefore, let’s see what we can rescue out of what we can’t identify, and then classify it against what we know, and with that work problems. One of the most practical approaches that physics has evolved is that principle — back up into the unknown, use what you have.

That comes from an axiom which we will cover: One handles words and regards words and all thoughts and all symbolism’s of thoughts just as he does the physical universe. So if a person has to hold on to material objects very hard, he will also hold on to words. If he has been beaten down to a point where he will give great, painstaking care to physical objects, he will also take care of words. Therefore he mustn’t violate these words. This is a very low level on the tone scale.

So here we have a lot of phenomena sitting around in the physical universe, evidently. However, it is not in the physical universe — but it is in the physical universe because there are living organisms here in the physical universe.

Processing of words came from sources of that sort; they started validating words too heavily — words, words, words — rather than the acts. In the first book it talks about kinesthesia, it talks about visio, it talks about sonic movement on the track and these other things. But out of those things many individuals selected only words to be processed.

With what you are in contact, I can’t tell you; but that you are in contact with something, I can assure you. Your theta facsimiles are fascinating. They are facsimiles of the entire environ where everything occurred. They are recorded in the most bounteous fashion imaginable. Everything gets recorded with them. About eighty perceptics get recorded with these facsimiles. And when these facsimiles restimulate and reimpose themselves upon a human being, they evidently do so on an atomic and molecular level. They produce a misalignment of the molecules and atoms which go to make up the structure, or they produce an alignment in that.

This was very bad for processing. You start processing words in a preclear and you are validating them. Every time you start that, you are telling him “This is what’s wrong with you.” You can’t process all the words out of the bank. The whole English language is in any reactive bank two or three times over. Try and process all that out and you have really got a job on your hands. So don’t try it — the devil with it.

They aren’t as gross, you might say, as joints, or as the whole body; they are particularized to every portion of the body, but are evidently residual neither within nor without the body. They just exist. Where and how, we are not questioning at this moment; that is the second echelon.

Process out the effort, and don’t even process out the highly specialized efforts like “What is the effort behind the word don’t?” That is too slow!

So I give you a definition of the departure we are taking when we examine Dianetics. We are examining physical organisms in the physical universe which are obeying a manifestation about which we know a very great deal, and we are watching that manifestation as it works with and influences motion. In doing this we have cracked the riddle of human behavior. We have the full circle now — the full circle. We can take anything out of this.

Very probably the technique which you will be using in Effort Processing will be just the technique on an event level: you will find an event and you will process the effort out of that event. I can tell you how to do that very rapidly; there is nothing much to it.

I am giving you that as a preface which really should be a preface on the Logic section of the Axioms. Dianetics, as anything new, started out with a way of thinking about things. It presents its way of thinking about things as postulates.

You get the preclear in contact with an event and you want to know his effort to understand this situation as he runs through it — his physical effort to understand. Get him to reexperience his physical effort as he runs through this incident. The first thing you know, you will have him in a complete apathy. Great. Now when you have him there, roll him through it again and get his effort, when it is due to come up, to not understand his surroundings. You will find that his reality turns up like turning a rheostat on a radio turns up volume.

One doesn’t argue with a science’s postulates about logic. The fellow working in a science says, “We are thinking about it in this fashion. This seems to produce validity. By this method of thinking about it, we can isolate phenomena. And in this fashion we are able to examine the physical universe better.”

Understanding is basically ARC. Out of affinity, reality and communication you can make every mathematical computation or mathematics known to man. Understanding subdivides into affinity, reality and communication. You know this from the earlier books.

Thus these axioms. We are not worrying about whether these axioms are true or false.

The point is that a person is forced by counter-efforts to agree. Now he is agreeing with a counter-effort, so he more or less becomes the counter-effort and goes out of valence .1 There is the valence mechanism. You have to get his effort to agree in order to get him back in valence. The second you have him in valence you can get his effort to disagree, and the incident will blow. It is fairly rapid.

The first thing we want to know in these axioms is about definitions. Perhaps before this there hasn’t been a definition of ‘definition’. What did one mean by definition?

Furthermore, although we were producing considerable results by taking the perceptions of engrams, that is nothing. There are five thousand gallons of theta releasable by processing effort for every one releasable by processing perceptions. We have been doing it the hard way; we have been picking this stuff up with a pair of small tweezers — trying to clean a desert of grains of sand with a very small pair of tweezers. It has been tough work. And even that made preclears feel better; it did things for them. But now there is so much more that can be done for them.

As a consequence, somebody like Kraepelin in psychiatry could come along and catalogue all of an enormous array of what he called insanity’s and insane manifestations, and define each one. When he got all through he had a beautiful system of classification which was meaningless. The reason it was meaningless was that it did not spot cause or effect; it didn’t designate a cure. All it did was describe.

Now, I also want to touch on something that you are going to run into with Effort Processing whether you like it or not.

Therefore, how does one describe things? Certainly if we are examining phenomena we should know how to describe things, so there has to be a definition for definitions. What are definitions? “What are we going to accept as a valid definition?” is what this asks bluntly.

I am reminded that Aldous Huxley told me that a woman by the name of Margaret Fuller said she had practically made up her mind to accept the universe. Somebody told this to Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle said, “By God! She’d better.”

These are the principal ways of defining things, and this is logic postulate one.

We have had a lot of yak about past deaths. I am awfully sorry to have to tell you that you are going to be up to your ears in them the second you start any Effort Processing, unless you are very careful. If you want to do it the hard way, you can work and just use all your attention units and be very careful all the way along the line and make sure that your preclear doesn’t go out of this life. It is tough to do, but you will be able to do it if you are very, very careful.

The first is by descriptive definition: one which clarifies by describing existing state of being by characteristics. We say, “Table: It has a flat top; it sits on the floor; it has four legs.”

Now, I can give you a Straightwire which will make it fairly easy to keep the preclear in this life — unless you use it too long, and then you go back straightwiring into the other life, which is unfortunate. So you want to be careful about this.

Next we have a differentiative definition: one which compares unlikeness to other entities. “Table: It has four legs and a high top, unlike a chair which has a low top and four legs. It is made out of wood, which means it is different from a microphone.” That is a differentiative definition.

We are talking about phenomena, not opinion. There is a big difference. It may seem horrible to some of us that there seems to be a life cycle going on whereby you kick the bucket so you can learn something and then get born again only for the process of kicking the bucket so that you can get born again. This is horrible. People have been talking about this in that terrible and detestable field called reincarnation. It is very unfortunate that a bunch of crackpots used this one way back when, because now we look at it and we say, “Oh, no! “

Then we have an associative definition: one which declares similarities to the state or object being defined. “Table: a piece of furniture.” That is the associative definition for a table.

This is like the way I felt when I looked at prenatals for the first time; I said, “Oh, no! What a dirty trick for the physical universe to play on me! It was bad enough when I was running them into birth, but prenatals!” And then it was “Sperm and ovum sequences? Oh, no!” And now it is “Past deaths? Oh, no.”

And then there is a dynamic definition: one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, action or purpose. “Table: You use this thing to put things on. It sits on the floor and it’s a piece of furniture. Sometimes people sit on it, but not always. And you build them by putting four legs together and putting a top on, and you take them apart with an ax if you have to.” That tells you what tables are for; it tells you what you do with tables.

But when you use Effort Processing you will snap your preclears right into them. You ask them five, six, eight, ten questions, start processing them, get the effort within the efforts and all of a sudden — boom! He is lying there and the dinosaurs are marching over him and all sorts of things. And you have taken this preclear off the street; this preclear doesn’t know anything about reincarnation or past lives or anything, and you are just trying to fix up his lumbago. It is very embarrassing to an auditor to find out it was given to him by a dinosaur. It is also hard for the preclear to swallow. The point is, that lumbago will go away. But if you say to him, “No, no, no, no. Now, we have agreed with the American

Now, of those definitions, the last is the valuable one. No definition which does not give cause, use or solution, inherent in itself, is worth a darn.

Medical Association not to run any past deaths, and you’ll just have to keep your lumbago. I’m sorry,” you will have to refund his money and let him walk out the door. That is the only alternative.

Any science which pretends to be a science and uses these other three is a hoax. It doesn’t know. It says, “Measles: face gets covered with blotches, temperature goes up. Measles.” “Schizophrenia: runs around halls and screams.” From the full knowledge that these definitions are inadequate, there can be a highly authoritarian attempt to make these definitions designate a wisdom in the field which does not exist. You take Latin and Greek phrases, you put them together into inarticulacies and apply them to all sorts of things, and when you get all through you have something that sounds like a Latin chant — but it still will be nothing but a descriptive definition, a differentiative definition or an associative definition. No matter how much language or complexity goes into a definition, it cannot thereby become a dynamic definition.

On none of these people do you have to enforce any understanding of what is happening to them. You don’t have to say “Well, what you’re running is a past death.” They won’t need any of that information. They will gasp and sigh and choke. But you do have to know when they are in one and you have to go ahead and process it out.

A true science has within its embrace, then, dynamic definitions, if it is trying to define something which has use for people.

It is a very nice thing, by the way, that when a preclear skids into one of these things, theta is released by the gallon. A preclear will jump way up the tone scale if you get all the effort out of a past death. It takes you some little time to run a past death; it takes you a couple of hours sometimes to get a past death run out completely clean. Sometimes it takes you longer than that if it is very late. But all you want out of it is the effort; that effort has theta wrapped up in it.

This is a system of logic not unlike other systems of logic which have been put forth into the world a few times. It is all by itself. It is relatively unimportant; it depends upon many other systems of logic which have gone before, but it is a clarification of them. It is distinct to itself in that it is a codification of how we are going to think about this subject.

So if your preclear is stopped somewhere on the track and it happens to be in a past death, you haven’t got much choice about the matter. You just start asking him for the effort to like this chronic somatic.

So if you are going to describe something, know that your description will be inadequate unless you delineate, with that description, cause, purpose and solution. Then you can communicate and only then can you communicate. To try to communicate by perception alone is inadequate.

He will say, “Huh?”

You know you have a dynamic definition, then, if it will answer this last one — cause, purpose, solution. If it has these things then you are saying something; otherwise, it is just words.

And you say, “Yeah, the effort to like it. Well, now, can you get any inkling of any kind of an effort? You know how it is when you pick up a table, or you know how it is when you get up out of a chair — that is physical effort. Now, can you get any kind of a physical effort of a feeling of affinity for your mother, there, as she beats you?” — something like this. (It is sort of like teaching him to wiggle his ears sometimes.)

So Dianetics can be defined as a system of coordinated axioms which resolve problems concerning human behavior and psychosomatic illnesses. That says what it does; it says what it is. It is a system of axioms — a whole — which do a certain thing, which solve a certain thing. Therefore that is the definition of Dianetics.

All of a sudden he will turn this on. “Oh yes, yes,” and his tone will dive down to the bottom of the scale. “Yeah, I can get that.”

Very often you may have tried to define Dianetics to somebody and given them a descriptive definition of it. Always give them an action definition. They say, “What is this thing Dianetics?”

“Now, let’s get the effort to agree with her as she beats you,” and again he goes sliding down tone. And you say, “Now, let’s get the effort to communicate with her, the desire to communicate with her.”

You say, “Well, it’s a funny thing. Down at the Foundation they have a chart. And you can look on this chart — Dianetics includes such things as this — and find four or five things that a human being does, and from that you can always tell what he will do in the future.”

The fellow will say, “I haven’t got any.” He is down in apathy.

And he will say, “Yeah?” “You know whether he’ll leave his wife, beat the baby, or any of these things. You know all that in the future. And they have it all on a chart, and anybody can use it, and you just look at it.”

You say, “All right. Now can you get any effort to disagree with her?” He is starting to get this in terms of physical motion, and it is actually the physical motion of wriggling around and trying to avoid the switch and so forth, or just sitting still. You get this effort to like and to agree with the engram, and there is just no motion connected with it. But when you get the effort to dislike, you start to get the action and the somatics.

He will say, “Yeah? Gee, I wonder where I am on that chart.”

So you start in with almost no effort and then you graduate up into actual effort. And when you start to get his effort to disagree with Mama, his reality on Mama will come way up, until you say, “All right, now, let’s get the effort to make this effort,” or something like that. He will very happily say, “Oh, sure.”

You get that kind of a reaction. You have invited a communication. By doing what? By saying what Dianetics is for and what it does, not by saying “It is a system like psychology.” Then they would have to understand what psychology is in order to understand what Dianetics is — and nobody understands what psychology is, so you would be sunk.

“Now can you get the effort to like this effort you’re making?” You have backed him up one step.

Now, all systems of thought would have a system of logic in them. Even if a system of thought doesn’t state what its system of logic is, it inherently has one.

“Sure, I . . . Injuns!”

Up to this time, an engineering textbook on physics should have included “This book is built on three-valued logic.” It should have said that in the beginning of the book in order to have been exactly precise. Yes, maybe and no — that is three-valued logic; that is more or less what engineering logic consists of. I say that, not because it is less or more workable, but because if you had asked engineers a relatively short time ago “What kind of logic do you use?” they would have said, “Three-valued logic.” You could have asked, “What kind is that?” and they would have said, “Well, you know, just like Boolean algebra. That’s the way the brain works — Boolean algebra.” They had it all figured out.

Don’t show any surprise. Just go ahead and say, “All right. Let’s like this effort to look at these Indians.”

In Dianetics we introduce infinity-valued logic, and this is our second logical postulate. You have probably seen this before. It is in earlier notes and lectures. I will go over it very briefly in order to give you just a little review.

“But I don’t like it! “

On one side we have right, on the other we have wrong. On each side we have infinity. On the side of wrong we have succumb, on the side of right we have surmise and in the center we have maybe.

“Well, all right. Get your effort to dislike it, then.” Reality turns up, he hears arrows going over his head and he thinks he is in a cavalry picture. But it isn’t; he is actually in the Stone Age or something. But who cares?

It is not whether something is right or wrong, in Dianetics; it is whether it is righter or wronger than something else. All values of logic are relative to something. Every datum has to be evaluated by another datum. So the mind more or less thinks on this basis: It gets a question and then it compares it to the material universe and it says, “Well, that answer is two units wrong.” Then it gets another datum which is five units right and another datum which makes this solution six units wrong. The mind then adds it up and says, “That’s pretty wrong; we won’t do that.” All data is being evaluated as it comes up to the computer in this fashion.

The point is that you just want to get all the effort off this case. Wherever you can get the effort off this case, get it off. This is a very hard-boiled, uncompromising attitude, I am afraid, but it is just the attitude of accepting what the preclear thinks is real as far as his efforts are concerned. Whether they are real or not is none of your business; that is his self- determinism talking. So you just let it run and you exhaust the effort completely and you will find him going on up the tone scale.

This is thought. These evaluations are done by the introduction of theta facsimiles of data in the physical universe. Theta facsimiles of data in the physical universe compare, recombine and so forth, and give solutions which are righter or wronger.

There are various reasons why this happens; I will go into them later in explaining the Axioms and so on. I just wanted to give you a brief resume and tell you what to expect.

Something was really pushed off on us with Hegelian grammars that had absolutes in it. The word correct, the word accurate, the word right, the word wrong — these are all back there and impinged upon our good old Aristotelian logic, to which our old friend Korzybski (God rest his bones) objected so violently but supplanted with so little.

Actually, the quiet theme of these axioms on logic and so forth has nothing to do with whether or not past deaths exist. Any bright boy in a university who looks these things over and looks over the phenomena and finds that those phenomena exist can go ahead and examine the subject.

Korzybski introduced the data behind axioms of logic of this type. Where general semantics applies to Dianetics is as a shadow background to these existing axioms on logic, not on thought; it doesn’t go further on thought. It is very valuable, though.

Nothing is being said about past deaths or anything like that in these axioms as they are to be released. But it is obvious there have to be if the thing holds at all, and there are, in fact. We will just let somebody else make the discovery.

Don’t let anybody tell you that general semantics and Dianetics are similar; they are just vaguely similar. General semantics has to do with a word and a thing, and a lot of other things that we are not worried about in Dianetics. We even define words differently. We have a definition of words: Words are theta facsimiles of physical-universe actions or states of being.

But you as auditors will find yourselves confronted now with this phenomenon, and the process which you are using you will find to be very efficacious. You will find that you can turn off chronic somatics with it fairly easily. And so you are going to, whether you like it or not, occasionally turn up one of these past deaths. If you can avoid it, fine; if you can’t, that is tough. Run it. And you are not even interested in how many words are spoken or in anything like that; you just want the effort, that is all. It runs fast.

There is a system of logic. Logic depends on viewpoint — on who is making this up. The United States says, “Communism? Well, let’s see, there aren’t enough bars on this graph here, but it’s wrong!”

Now, Dianetics is in a form of organization which is a logical step-by-step process as far as its logic, its axioms, its explanations of human behavior and so on are concerned. The Axioms are embracive of the whole subject of Dianetics, not just Dianetic processing. These are the axioms of the first echelon of Dianetics. We want to organize them in a book. The first axiom will be across the top of the page in italics; then there will be a little graph of some sort and an explanation of the graph. Next will be the phenomena which prove up this axiom, the logic behind it and how it joins up with other axioms. That will be on one page. The next axiom will be on the next page in italics with a graph and an explanation of the graph. The whole thing will be laid out, in other words, just like a geometry book.

Over in Russia they say, “Capitalism? Well, there aren’t enough bars here, but that’s wrong!”

The material is being organized in this wise and it is going to be put on the shelves of university libraries. The boys in psychology can have a good time with it and they can be very disgusted with it until they look and see that there are phenomena outlined and delineated there which they can look for. They like an empirical science, so they can go and see if this phenomena exists. Of course, that sinks them!

You can’t then say rather thoughtlessly, “Well, they both think it’s wrong, somebody must be right.” Nobody is right and nobody is wrong; there isn’t any such absolute. But there are rightnesses and wrongnesses according to viewpoint.

Nothing is said in these axioms about past deaths as such and nothing is said about various odds and ends of processing. Just phenomena are pointed out in order to point up the axioms.

Now, you take some preclear who has the viewpoint of succumb, who is outward bound to succumb: if you try to give him a process which will pick him up and make him survive, believe me, you are wrong. With somebody who is outward bound to survive — on that side of the ledger — if you give him a process which is going to make him succumb, you are wrong. It all depends on viewpoint.

So there are two levels of instruction that I am trying to give you. One of them is just the Axioms per se so that you will know the subject of Dianetics. Once you have the Axioms you will know the subject; you will be able to say “Yes, that means so-and-so,” and act very learned. You will be able to show your student the whole circuit of the first echelon of Dianetics. You can show him where everything fits and he can argue with you and try to get isolated phenomena that disprove this or that. He will come in dragging a dead horses — something out of psychology that says, “Every time a kleptomaniac cannot steal something he burns down the house” (one of the phenomena mentioned in psychology) — and say, “Now, that’s not covered by the Axioms.”

This is a highly flexible system of logic; it is quite useful. It has a mathematics or two — or six or twelve — wrapped up in it. It is simple, though. You find out that if anybody were absolutely wrong — if you ever reached absolute wrongness — the whole universe would disappear, because everything in the physical universe is so interdependent on everything else in the physical universe that you can’t have an absolute which affects everything in the universe as wrong. If everything in the universe were wrong you wouldn’t have anything.

Of course it is up to you to prove to him that a kleptomaniac does not always burn down the house but maybe one did one time or another, and this was just an engram in operation.

Over on the right side, if anybody were absolutely right — like Papa and Mama used to pretend they were — the whole universe would become immediately static and fixed forever in that shape.

What you know about the behavior of engrams is very valid in terms of human behavior. It is just that processing has advanced on a mechanical level to a point where it can be ignored. But you know behavior, you know why people do these things, and nobody can take that away from you.

Now, these axioms are ultimates along a certain compartmented area, and that is all. They are right within that area, and I will show you what that area is in a moment.

The point in all this instruction is just to invite your level of understanding on this subject and to place in your hands, in as automatically codified a process as possible, a way to knock out chronic somatics or to free all the theta which is “enthetafied” in the individual, if you want to take off two or three weeks and work somebody, or a couple of weeks anyway — or maybe just a week: I don’t want to exaggerate and give you an idea that you can collect fees for three or four weeks just working on one preclear; I don’t know whether you would find that much stuff.

These axioms don’t have exceptions known to us at this time. When somebody — whenever it happens, in the near or far future — finds a new simplicity, a higher echelon from which to branch out, many of these axioms will go by the boards. But until a higher simplicity is reached, these axioms are rigidly fixed without exception.

Now, you can discount anything wild that you have heard about this new process; it is actually quite simple — not very difficult to follow. But it is very startling. You don’t pay any attention to line charge, boil-offs (you occasionally get a yawn off somebody) or any of these enMEST manifestations to amount to anything, because they are not necessary. They are not contained in the body. Those things are just theta facsimiles, so why worry about them? What has been discovered is this: It is the preclear himself who keeps the engram in present time. He himself determines the engram into present time. When you knock out his determination to keep the engram in present time or to hold on to the engram, it goes by the boards.

It is an unfortunate thing that I am introducing to you a lack of randomity in the subject just now.

Maybe after we have worked this for a while we may get a complaint from part of the celestial heavens and somebody will say, “Hey, what’s the idea of kicking all these theta facsimiles loose so they can never be picked up again? You’re getting this whole place cluttered up with theta facsimiles.” We will wait till we receive such a complaint.

Next is the third logical postulate: A datum can be evaluated only by a datum of comparable magnitude.

The point is that these things don’t have to be run! That is what has been discovered. All that has to be run is a fellow’s effort to agree and disagree, to have affinity with and not to have affinity with, to communicate and not to have communication with — in short, to understand or not to understand — the engram. And that is a physical effort that comes from some earlier engram. All you do is knock out his effort with regard to the engram, and then all of the efforts and everything everybody said and did and the enMEST manifestations and so forth go by the boards.

It should be interesting to you that there is no sense in trying to compare the behavior of a nation with the behavior of an ant. There is no sense in trying to tell somebody how big a mountain is by showing him a grain of sand.

This stuff disappears. I don’t care where it goes. Maybe it can be found again — I don’t know. We haven’t even bothered much to look for it. But as far as the preclear is concerned, you start peeling this stuff off him and he evidently contacts a pure theta source somehow or other and he starts rolling.

This single-datum postulate is something on which logic and the humanities have been splitting their keels ever since people tried to launch vessels in that direction — the single datum. Originally, every time they came up against a higher echelon which they couldn’t resolve they would say, “Well, above that is God.”

You can take a preclear and you will find that he is resisting efforts. We call these counter- efforts. You have the preclear and there is a counter-effort coming in against him, but there is resistance to that counter-effort. That is a physical-action resistance. That is called self- determinism.

You march the evolutionist back to his amoebae and to his ammonia seas and so forth and then ask, “Now, what came before that?” and he will answer, “Well, God!” — just as, if you asked the ancients what caused everything, they had a good pat answer; they said “God.” They didn’t say the mechanism by which he caused it.

He has to keep some self-determinism on this counter-effort in order to keep it in place. If you could just keep him from putting his self-determinism on that counter-effort he wouldn’t restimulate.

This is no invalidation or validation of God. It merely says that they had a single entity sitting up there. How could you evaluate something that only had one datum? With what do you evaluate God? God wasn’t very understandable till the Christians came along and gave us the devil. Then we had a datum of comparable magnitude and people could be happy. We knew what God was: God was an absence of evil. We knew what the devil was: the devil was an absence of good. The devil was positive evil, God was positive good.

Now, here is the mechanism: A truck runs into him one Tuesday, dents his back somewhat, and he goes into apathy immediately. He says, “All right, truck, I agree with you; go ahead and kill me. I agree with you, I agree perfectly and I’ll communicate,” and it hits him. He tries to stop time at this point because he is trying to stop the truck’s motion, trying to stop the motion of pain inside of him, and so forth. He just holds on to time or he wishes himself out of the time he is holding on to or does both so that he apparently goes off someplace else, but he is still in the engram. And he forgets all about this.

Now we can interplay these two and we can extrapolate from there and we can get an entire system. It is a highly workable system. True, false or indifferent — that has nothing to do with it; I am just showing you how high you can get up along the level, and everybody happens to know this datum about God. Don’t ever make the mistake of suddenly postulating, on any echelon, one datum, because it won’t resolve. The basic unit of the universe is two.

Then one day, five years later, he sees a red truck; he happens to be very tired that day and it is the same kind of truck that hit him. He evidently has scanners in his mind in operation consistently and continually, and they scan, scan, scan: “Is there anything dangerous about this environment? Is there anything dangerous about this?” All of a sudden they say, “Wait, wait, wait — red truck!” Bong! “Oh, it’s a dangerous truck. Good. I don’t feel well.” That is really the whole mechanism.

There is a comparable mathematics to Dianetic logic in Dymaxion geometry which is a very amusing geometry of how you fill up space.

The auditor’s mechanism is to take the preclear’s scanner and knock out his effort with regard to that engram, and the red-truck engram disappears. The engram still has the preclear’s determinism to agree with the truck in it. As long as that first engram has an effort to agree, the preclear’s scanner in present time can switch down across the bank and it can find “Hey, I agreed with this one,” and put it right up in present time. “I’m in affinity now with being hit by a truck.” The preclear wants to be hurt.

Logic 4: A datum is as Valuable as it has been evaluated. And God rest our weary bones — everybody seems to have missed this one.

There was an observation in the first book that said a person couldn’t be aberrated unless he agreed to it. This self-determinism is his agreement with it. That is all there is to it.

A datum is no confounded, cockeyed good in the world unless it has been compared! Now, do you know where that comes from and why there should be any violence behind that statement? People keep coming around and saying, “You know that phenomenon you mentioned there? They knew about that in mysticism about three thousand years ago. Everybody has known that straight along.”

Now, the auditor will find in a preclear these counter-efforts. The preclear is madly holding a counter-effort out there and he has been holding it out there for years. He is agreeing with it, and agreeing with it puts him a little bit out of valence. If he agrees with it he goes a little bit out of valence because he can’t be himself and agree with it; it will kill him if he is himself. He has to disagree with it to be himself; but it has put him into apathy, so he can’t be himself.

You just say quietly and gently, “Yes, but it wasn’t evaluated. Its relationship to other data had not been adequately established.” They don’t quite savvy this.

Here he sits, just a little bit out of valence. He sneaks into valence a little bit, then he gets hit and he goes out of valence. He has been doing this for years. He never gets over where he can be hit by the truck, so he stays out of valence.

The point is that a datum which sits out all by itself in a resounding, heaving sea of data and which doesn’t have an evaluation tag on it is no good to anybody, unless that person gets himself some sort of a systematized effort that sorts out this data automatically and builds bridges to it — in other words, evaluates it. Then the data becomes very valuable.

That truck is the counter-effort; the counter-effort is always there. This is very easy for you to find in a preclear. Take a look at your preclear and find a physical deformity or a psychosomatic illness and you have a counter effort, right there. Either the preclear is bulged out at the spot to resist this counter-effort, or he is caved in at the point of the counter-effort.

So somebody says, “Well, Freud already said that there was prebirth memory — nothing new about that.”

Take glasses, for instance: There is something coming toward a person who has glasses; there is a counter-effort there with which he has agreed. He has a self-determined effort that that counter-effort be there. In other words, he has the counter-effort coming in and he has an effort to agree with it because it put him in apathy.

You say, “What did he hang it to?”

Now, the way you get a child to mind is to beat the devil out of him — ”everybody knows” that. As a matter of fact, I could throw you into apathy by just asking you to repeat “Okay, I’ll mind.” You would go right down the tone scale, because you would be going toward a moment when you agreed against your own survival. And you agreed because of a counter effort, basically. You didn’t agree out of data — that is something else, another brand of ARC entirely. This is apathy ARC; we can distinguish it that way. It is enforced agreement and so on.

“Well, he said so. It was right there in the book.”

So what you do is look at a fellow who has glasses and say, “What is the physical effort to understand any pressure you might have on your eyes?” That is all you have to do. “What is your physical effort to understand that?” (Don’t do it, by the way; you would go half blind right this minute.) Get him to working on it and get him to sweep it back and forth. Of course there is no reality on it: he is out of valence.

Of course, he also said above and below that a thousand disrelated things which didn’t have any truth in them. He hadn’t evaluated this thing, so he hadn’t said to a student “What is true about this? Or what is false about it?” And a student, wading through all this material, could only then commit it to memory, and he could not use it in the physical universe. If you are going to teach anybody anything, you had better teach them how valuable their data is.

You will find that as you ask him to resist it, it might flick on for him. But of course agreement is practically no effort in his own position, so he can get out of valence a little bit or something. If you can coax him to be almost motionless you will find this counter- effort — where he is almost motionless.

There is a book on navigation called “Dutton.” I imagine many a young officer has felt like blowing his brains out at the naval academy the moment he ran into “Dutton.”

Now start asking him, “How does your right foot try to agree with this pressure on your eyes? How does your left foot try to agree with this pressure on your eyes? How does your left shoulder try to agree? How does your right shoulder try to agree? What does your right hand think about it? What is the physical effort of your right hand with regard to any pressure on your eyes? What is its effort to agree?”

The reason why is that “Dutton” is a complete monotone of data. It starts in with paragraph one, chapter one, and announces important or unimportant facts in the same tone of voice throughout about a 450-page volume. You commit it all to memory and then you get aboard ship and discover that all you had to find out was that you don’t wipe the lens of a sextant, or something. That was the important datum. That is a fact. And ensigns almost go crazy with “Dutton.” But an old-line navigator comes along and he picks up “Dutton” and looks it over, and he says, “My boy, this is one of the finest books on navigation you ever want to read.” Of course it makes sense to the old-line navigator — of course it does; he has all the evaluations. He knows enough not to wipe the lenses of a sextant eyepiece with a dirty handkerchief, and other important stuff. He knows that it is twice as important to take the sight right as it is to figure it right.

The preclear’s attention will go to all of these various areas, and all of a sudden you will have taken his self-determined attention and pulled it off that somatic. So it hits him and he goes promptly out of valence.

Yet you will find ensigns who go out and they worry and they work, and they get their tongue between their teeth and they figure out the position of the ship down to the last breadth of an inch — only their sextant sight is twenty miles wrong. You show them this — ”Hey, look, why don’t you take an accurate sextant sight and knock off those decimal places on that computation?”

You say, “All right now, what does your right foot feel about it?” and so on. But every time you get that thing to come in you exhaust it a little bit. So you just shift his attention around to various parts of his body and get his effort to agree, his effort to understand, his effort to like, his effort to communicate with — all of these things — and you keep running them any time you want.

“But that computation is accurate!” There is no evaluation of importance. This guy will run you aground if you don’t watch him. He will be out there taking a good, solid shot of a truck light, and then come in and report that he has now shot Arcturus and that your position is ten miles south of Cincinnati. Those are some of the liabilities of not evaluating data in a field.

All of a sudden he says, “I don’t want to communicate with this thing.”

Now, a lot of these axioms are necessary to a flow of thought; they flow through. But out of all of these axioms, there are only eight of them of excruciating importance. I will point those up when I get to them.

“All right. Let’s get your effort to disagree with it now.” His tone will come right on up on that pressure, and then you take his glasses off and throw them in the wastebasket and take his three, four, five thousand dollars — whatever you charged him — and let him walk out. That would be fixing up a chronic somatic.

But if you are composing a system of logic or if you are trying to study a field of logic, you will mainly be trying to evaluate somebody else’s data. And if you are having trouble with that field, the only reason you are having any trouble with it is because the data in it has not been evaluated. Therefore, if the data hasn’t been evaluated, you know it hasn’t been compared to anything and the field isn’t oriented. So skip it.

Now, take somebody who has a blemish of some sort, something that looks like a tumor, maybe. That is just a counter-effort You get his effort to understand it, his effort to like it and the effort of his right foot to like it, or anything you want. There are many variations; I am giving you the very simplest one. Get his efforts to like it and he will turn on a physical effort someplace.

Logic 5: The value of a datum is established by the amount of alignment (relationship) it imparts to other data.

If a fellow can’t get any physical efforts, by the way, you say, “What is your effort to think?”

The whole of life in the physical universe can be represented by a cone. The point of the cone is the high point from which we are viewing other data. So we have here, the value of a datum is established by the amount of alignment it imparts to other data.

“Why, just like everybody else, my effort to think is . . .” “Well, go on. Get your physical effort to think, now.” “Well, it’s just like everybody else. I mean, I grit my teeth.”

Consider that this cone is filled with random data, all sorts of data. Nobody knows what sits at the top. The data becomes more complex as you go down the cone, becomes less complex as you go up the cone. So if somebody can find the datum that sits at the top, at the highest level of simplicity about the rest of this data — the datum that says “The reason ants build houses is . . .” “You build ships by . . .” and so on — then all of a sudden you have got this datum up here and it aligns two facts. That is a very important datum.

“Well, go on and grit your teeth,” and all of a sudden — bong! Sky rockets! You have gotten his physical effort to think.

Mathematical and logical search is concentrated upon the search for high-echelon simplicities, not low-echelon complexities. When a mathematician makes a mistake and fails to contribute to the body of knowledge, it is because he cuts in at the level of complexity. You say, “How about getting a solution to this datum and this datum and this datum? That line that you’re figuring from there doesn’t align enough data.”

You will find people have physical efforts to remember, physical efforts to do almost anything, if they are very badly aberrated.

“All right,” he says, “I’ll figure it out. Let’s see, I’ll add twenty-five more equations on to this situation.”

Anyway, here is this counter-effort on any kind of a tumor or something like that. All you do is take the fellow’s self-determined effort off it. First get his effort to agree, because he is in apathy about it (otherwise it wouldn’t make a blemish on him), and then knock out his agreement and make him disagree with it. Reality will turn on in the sequence, you get him to present time and that is all there is to it. If he went down past it on the track afterwards, he wouldn’t hit it.

“But look, that doesn’t explain all of this data down here. Now, what are we going to do about that?”

The trouble with locating counter-efforts and efforts is that you start locating efforts within efforts within efforts and you march him right straight back down the time track; you will wind him up in birth or anything else, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about where you wind your preclear up. Just don’t worry about it anymore. Don’t worry about winding him up in birth or in operations and so forth, because running effort won’t stick him on the track the way other kinds of processing will; it was only effort that could hold him there.

“Well, we’ll add about fifteen or twenty more equations.”

Of course, you want to try to run early engrams; it is much better than running later engrams. But don’t worry about it. Just ask for the effort and you will get it. You won’t hurt the preclear; you may have to work with him for a while.

And this creates such a complexity that it itself has to be aligned. His direction of approach and your direction in the solution of a problem should be upward toward simplicities, not downward into complexities.

Now, working this on an event level, you work all the efforts out of a single event. If this fellow got hit by a truck — this fits best into your frame of experience — you get the effort that connected with the truck hitting him and you work out the whole engram on an effort basis. It is fairly rapid; you don’t have to ask him about the words or anything like that. All you are asking him is what does he think about it? What is his self-determinism with regard to this? That is all you are interested in.

There is also a law of an economy of factors — ”law of parsimony” they call it: If you have two theories which seem equally valid, take the one which requires less data to support it. Just automatically take the one which has fewer factors in it.

This brings up the point that all there is, practically, is self-determinism. Of course, self- determinism is caused by some other counter-effort someplace in the past, but nevertheless, it is self-determinism. It is only self determinism.

If you want to resolve a case, for instance, you have to figure like this: A person always has to try not to survive; it is no effort to survive. What it is an effort to do is not to survive. That is what is rough, because that is an effort to overcome efforts which were not-to-survive efforts, and it gets very complicated under that basis.

This can go off into a Straightwire of this character: “When did you agree to be ill?” In short, “When did you want to understand a contra survival condition or action?” is the full idea. “When did you want to understand it?”

So, you could ask the preclear for the effort of each word in the English language. You could actually ask him for the effort and he would resolve it for you, but it would take quite a while.

That means when you went into apathy about it. Only those things which were dangerous have to be understood, actually.

But if we know this law that says “It is the effort not to survive which is aberrative,” then we simply ask, “What is the effort not to survive? Let’s get the effort on that.” He will play you all sorts of efforts off on that one and he will shoot out the whole bank with it.

So you can give a fellow Straightwire: “When in your life did you decide to be ill?” “Oh, I never decided to be ill — I wouldn’t think of such a thing! “

This is applicable in therapy. Always take the question which gives you the maximum amount of data, not the question which gives you the minimum amount. Get the broadest, widest explanation in the least words. Go toward simplicities of explanation, not toward complexities, in thinking, and you will find yourself solving a lot of problems that you perhaps wouldn’t otherwise crack. It is a good postulate.

“Well, how about school?”

Logic 6: Problems are resolved by compartmenting them in areas of similar magnitude and data, comparing them to data already known or partially known, and resolving each area. (For resolving what cannot be known immediately one can address what can be known and use its solution to resolve the remainder.)

“Oh, yeah, yeah, it was — yeah! I remember a time I said I was ill so I didn’t have to go to school.”

That is awfully simple.

It is just fascinating how much effect this decision had on the fellow’s life. He made this decision then; you will find him making decisions elsewhere, and you will find him making decisions to be ill so that he can propitiate somebody. Some other child is ill, so he decides he will be ill. Some other child is stammering; he feels sorry for the other child, so he starts to stammer to show the other child he is in sympathy. He has decided to do that, however, of his own free will.

I was just telling you a short time ago about theta. We don’t know all there is to know about theta, but we can take what we feel is known about it. We know a lot about the physical universe right now because we have the whole science of physics. So let’s take it from where theta impinges on the physical universe and study it from that quarter, and resolve that. And then with what we learn there we can resolve the next step, and so forth.

What we have been looking at are the causes of these postulates, the physical forces that cause a person to make these decisions. But as far as Straightwire is concerned, they only become effective — these past actions and decisions — when the preclear himself makes up his mind that they will be effective. That is the only way they can become effective upon him.

In other words, you don’t have to know anything about the unknown item; just find out what it relates to and then solve what it relates to and that will solve the unknown. This is very simple — it is a method of thought. You can use it with considerable profit in thinking.

So you only have to go back over his track and find when he decided to be this, when he decided to like somebody, when he decided to talk to somebody — the first time he decided to talk to somebody, the first time he decided this, that and the other thing.

Now, Logic 7 is self-explanatory — the introduction of an arbitrary. Any time you have to throw an arbitrary into a situation to make it work, you are going to have to have other arbitraries introduced in order to keep it resolved, and it will just get more and more complex.

“Now, when did you decide that what you were doing in life was hard work? When did you decide this?”

If there is something you don’t understand about a case and you decide to use force on that point, you are just going to have to introduce new force factors. You don’t know how to resolve a psychotic case, let’s say, and you have a psychotic who is screaming around and so forth, so you say, “Well, we can’t solve this right now, we can’t solve this right now — we’ll have to do something, do something, do something desperate, do something desperate,” so you introduce an arbitrary: you give him a sedative.

And the fellow will say, “Oh, I never — well, wait a minute. When I was a kid they used to tease me about never working hard enough. Oh yeah, I started to tell them how hard I worked. Oh, yeah! Yeah!”

You have introduced an arbitrary and it will introduce further arbitraries of what is said in the preclear’s vicinity. Now you will have to give the preclear two sedatives in order to quiet him down next time, and then you will probably have to give him electric shock and some more sedatives and then a prefrontal lobotomy.... You get the idea of the arbitraries? It is a fan.

This fellow hasn’t done any work for days, but the next morning he goes down to work and really starts turning it out. You call this to his attention — you say, “Well, I noticed our little session did you some good.”

You introduce one arbitrary into a case and you will have to keep introducing arbitraries. So the devil with these “quick, simple methods.” They aren’t quick and they aren’t simple because they lead to the introduction of further arbitraries.

He says, “I didn’t notice.” It is too easy.

This is also applicable in any system of logic. Any system of mathematics works in this fashion.

But this is the kind of Straightwire you use: “When did you decide to like the kind of a woman who is giving you trouble?” “When did you decide to like the kind of man who is making your life miserable for you?” “When did you decide . . . ?” They will give you the moment when they decided, first, to feel affection for, next, to agree with and next, to communicate with this person with whom they are currently going. You have it right there. But let’s find now if they decided to go into ARC with anybody earlier on this same subject; you will find a bucketful of them.

For instance, a government passes a law saying all criminals must cease to exist, without understanding what criminals are or what criminology is. Then they have to pass a hundred thousand laws, year in and year out, in order to enforce the law that criminals mustn’t exist. They go into further and further complexities.

The first thing you know, the stuff which, in the past, we would have had to get cried off the case in gallon buckets is coming off this preclear quickly and easily.

Now, this system of logic I went over — the cone going into simplicities — is driving toward natural laws. As soon as you start to introduce arbitraries into a problem you just keep going into further and further complexities and it gets tougher and tougher and tougher; there is less and less alignment of data. The first thing you know, you have a completely out-of-vector problem that doesn’t align anyplace and nobody understands it — and you are a psychiatrist!

“When did you decide you liked your grandfather?” “Oh, I can’t get any visio on my grandfather at all.”

Don’t ever let Dianetics start going in that direction.

“What is the physical effort of agreeing with your grandfather?” “Well, I don’t get any visio on him at all; how can I give . . .”

Logic 8: An abstract postulate must be compared to the real universe and brought into the category of things which can be sensed, measured or experienced before it can be classified as workable.

“Well, just this: Will you get a physical effort now? What is your physical effort to agree with your grandfather?”

That is actually just a definition of what we mean by workable. We mean workable in the physical universe, workable visibly, workable in terms that we can sense, measure or experience.

And the fellow all of a sudden says, “I don’t know. I sort of feel my head going like this.”

There is a lot of data behind that one, some interesting data. There is such a thing as three bins of data. Down in the third bin we have what man thinks he knows right now. He thinks he knows how to make good ice cream and shoes, he can make pretty good cars, he can make power dams and he can get women to whistle at him by driving a fancy car. These are things known — data. That is what he calls data. This data seems to work empirically or by derivation in the physical universe, so he says, “Fine. Fine, this data works. I’m all set.”

Now you say, “Can you feel how you agree with your grandfather now? Can you feel how you communicate with your grandfather? Can you feel how you like your grandfather?” and so forth. You get this all turned up, and the fellow says, “But I don’t!”

Only he isn’t, because there is always a randomity of data — some of these are going to cross. One datum will argue with another one. He will decide to go to the movies but his wife doesn’t want to go and he doesn’t want to go without his wife. But he wants to go to the movies. How do you solve that? So he takes up yoga!

“Well, can you get your effort to disagree with your grandfather?” “Yeah, that’s this way.”

Whether it is the science of physics or any other field, I don’t care — metaphysics, mysticism, algebra, democracy, anything — the second bin is composed solely of routes toward new data. It is by these routes that we discover new data from the great unknown.

The second you get that disagreement you have come up from an apathy-level ARC, which you could call enturbulated ARC or commanded ARC. You can get that rising up into actual ARC and the reality on Grandpa will turn on.

This top bin may be unknown, but it is not unknowable. Every datum in it is true. Just because we don’t know it is no reason it isn’t true. There isn’t such a thing in these as a datum we will never know that will never have any effect upon us, because if it is never going to have any effect upon us then we will never be able to sense, measure and experience it. So as far as we are concerned it doesn’t exist — Kant to the contrary.

This is what you have been fighting for, for a long time.

He was a “great” philosopher. Those boys — Hegel, Kant — I wonder that they didn’t get terrible headaches. Kant’s transcendentalism stated, “The only real data transcends the bounds of all human experience. Now that we have announced this, the rest of you dogs have to take our word for it.” What a wonderful way to get on top and stay on top.

Now, I will give you how the sessions are run, described briefly.

Nobody ever thought to ask them, “Now, how is it that you know, if it transcends the bounds of all human experience? If you are never going to sense, measure or experience this, how do you know about it?” No, he twirled his monocle too well or something. Nobody ever asked him. I would love to know what his answer would have been.

The first session you more or less work with the preclear to get efforts of various kinds and you finally get real efforts. You want to be careful that the preclear isn’t just sitting there expanding and contracting his blood vessels for days, because this is not effort on his part. He just thinks it is effort, and it is actual physical effort you are looking for.

The point is, in this first bin are all sorts of data. Here are better ways to make ice cream, better ways to make airplanes, rocket ships, women, everything. It is full of data and every datum is true. But by the time you get a datum from here and pull it down by one of these routes in the second bin and compare it to the real universe, it is liable to slightly change on you.

By the way, one of the tricks you can use with a fellow who has glasses on is to say, “If somebody were pushing you in the face, which way would you be pushed?”

You ask, “How true are these axioms? They have been dragged out in that fashion; how true are they?” They are as true as they are workable — no truer. They work. If they work, then they are workable.

“Oh, that way.”

However, you should understand that the Hindu theory of how the universe was created was also considered very workable once upon a time. Somebody came up to the priests and said, “What is this universe all about? You boys are supposed to know.”

“Well, can you get that motion?”

They said, “Well, it’s a hemisphere. There you are; go along now.”

The fellow foolishly will say, “Sure, sure.”

People went along on this for a few generations and everybody was happy with this. Then one day some curious, rebellious, sour individual came up and said to the priests, “What is the hemisphere standing on?” The priests went into a big powwow and got together and figured, and they figured and they figured and they figured, and then they proudly released the answer: “It is standing on seven pillars.”

“And now can you get an effort to resist that motion?” “Yeah — o-o-o-w-w! “

A few generations went by and the country changed. Somebody came in and said, “What are the pillars standing on?”

You just keep that effort up with him until all of a sudden you have his effort to resist this other motion. Just that simply, you can do it. Now he knows what an effort is.

They said, “The backs of elephants.”

You ask him “If something were pushing you at this moment, which direction would you have to move?”

Then after a few generations someone asked another question: “What are the elephants standing on?”

He will say, “Well, I’d have to move this way.”

By this time the priests were sick of the whole thing so they said, “The elephants are standing on a mud turtle and the mud turtle is sitting in mud, and it’s mud from there on down!”

“All right. Now let’s practice moving this way” — with the counter effort. That puts him out of valence — it makes him the counter-effort.

That passed for true data once. These axioms, I am very sure, will some day be in that category. Right now they aren’t. Right now they are out so far in front that nobody is going to catch up with these things for a while. You will be arguing about these things in your old age, I am sure.

“Now, which way would you have to move to go against this?”

So, true data comes down by these routes, no matter whether they are mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, physics, chemistry, induction, woman’s intuition, anything. Any way you can get data, that is the way it comes down. But it always has to be compared to the real universe before you can say “This is a datum. This is a datum which we have found some workability for.” You can say “This is a guess,” so long as it remains in an abstract state.

He says, “Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” or something like this. He is in apathy about it.

One of the main things wrong with mathematics and mathematicians today is that they make this error of putting their other foot up here in bin one. They very happily had a foot down in bin three once upon a time and a foot in bin one; then they put the other foot up in bin one, via the route of mathematics, and they forget to keep a foot in each bin. They pick the foot up that is in the third bin and they put them both up in the first one, and you never hear of them again.

You just coax him to stand there and be pushed and like it. So he likes it, he gets the effort to like it — which is no effort. He is getting it good, and then all of a sudden he says, “I don’t like it.”

They actually do that. They get into the abstract, they forget to compare data to the real universe, and the second they do this they are done for, as far as their system is concerned. They just get more and more esoteric and so on, they don’t tie anything down and their theories start shooting out in all directions. Somebody comes along and says, “I wonder why that fellow isn’t getting anyplace with the problem?” He just took his foot out of the bin of known data.

“All right, what motion would you have to make to resist it?” “Well, I’d sort of have to go like this.” So you let him go like that.

This is a useful thing to know — that you can get slogging around in the abstract to such a degree that you don’t bother to nail down anything. And when you don’t nail something down every once in a while and compare it to the real universe, you can really go adrift.

You train him into doing it, more or less; you get him running nicely in the first session. You turn on all his perceptics in the second session; that makes him feel better.

Therefore, when I give you these axioms, you are going to go out and look at phenomena; you will see a lot of phenomena. If you don’t find phenomena to compare with them, the devil with these axioms: they are too abstract.

You run him out of whatever place on the track he is very badly stuck, or release his major theta in the case, in the third session. Maybe the fourth session you get his conceptual levels on self determinism, but you had better be careful about the fourth session. I would knock off after the third session myself unless I were going to carry him through for four or five more days, because people get so they want to come back on this stuff and they want to get some more processing, and you don’t want to have to spend all of your time monkeying with one preclear! So give him a yo-heave after a certain space of time. It is a good thing to knock off after you have turned on his perceptics or done something like this; it is a good thing to knock off as soon as you turn off his chronic somatic. If he has a chronic somatic that has been worrying him, turn it off and let him go off for a while.

If you can find phenomena that proves them up, you say, “That’s fine.” But axioms, rules, data — these things are no good until you can find a comparison in the real universe! When you can find a comparison in the real universe you can say, “That’s workable,” and let it pass for the moment. Until you have done that, no abstract postulate under the sun is worth a tinker’s doggone.

Then when he comes back to you again you can always say, “Well, you don’t have your ‘spinal curvature of the left orifice’ anymore.”

Somebody out here can tell you, “But it’s a well-known fact that the human soul is purple with orange dots.”

But actually you will probably want to go on beyond this point, so you just keep stripping out efforts, efforts within efforts within efforts within efforts, and exhausting them probably on an event level each time, cleaning them up very nicely, leaving the track in good shape and releasing this sort of thing. But don’t expect to stay in concourse with the human race very long.

And you say, “That’s fine. Where did you get that?”

It is very interesting, but you get a different set of values doing this. This is what you have been working for, for a long time. On the first echelon, if a fellow got swamped up all the way, we would call him Homo novis, because he has jumped a sort of an evolutionary gap. We are not quite sure what happens to him but it is interesting. Then as soon as we penetrate the second echelon a little bit more, we will have another level of Homo novis. There would have to be a date on this: right now I am talking about Homo novis of October 8 at nine o’clock. I might get another idea before the lecture is over and change all this stuff.

“I got that in a dream. I have these dreams very often; they always work alit You say, “Show me one.”

Fortunately the direction is toward simplicity and it is carrying along on its own extrapolated line. You have to know all this if you really want a good command of the subject. It looks to me, however, as though we have done the complete circle and we are in the second echelon. You needn’t be worried about what theta really is anyhow; we can go sailing off and sit down and worry about that one for months or weeks or something before we solve it.

“Don’t have to. Dreams always work out.”

As far as the theta-MEST relationship is concerned, it appears to be buttoned up. I have asked the research auditors and they seem to understand about it, so I guess you can.

You are just in a complete closed circle as far as this fellow is concerned. He isn’t keeping a foot back in the real universe.

It is a bit of a compliment that, in view of how long it took to process somebody with the earlier techniques, anybody hung on at all — except that you could get results. You got results and that is fine, but what you mainly got was experience.

If he could say, “Yes, I can show you one. Step over to this voltmeter. I get this phenomena and I explain it on the basis that souls are purple with orange dots, because — look — the dial turns a bright purple.”

You are never going to see phenomena like this again. Probably nobody else will ever have to look at it again.

You say, “So it does! I’ll be a son of a gun.” But it still has to be compared to another datum like it and it still has to be evaluated in terms of the rest of the physical universe before. it is any good to you.

Another thing that is going to happen is that, for those auditors who pan out on these new techniques — know their subject well, pass an examination in the mathematics of Dianetics and so forth — we are trying now to see if we can achieve some means of securing a doctorate. That is not a promise, but just something that may be shortly in the offing on it.

Have you ever met these people who go around with little items that “nobody could do without,” data that we “must have,” like “Pike’s Peak is 14,110 feet high; Mount Rainier is 14,410 feet high”? You will be having a nice conversation with such a person and all of a sudden he will say, “Well, the new Chevrolet goes ninety-six miles an hour.”

I am very happy to be able to give you this material. I want you to get a good solid grip on it. The best way to do that is to get it working for you.

You say, “I wasn’t talking about Chevrolets.” “But it will.”

If any of your preclears think they are going into high manics or something like that, it doesn’t work that way. Actually, Effort Processing winds a preclear up in what he thinks is a permanent low apathy for a few minutes, then it hits him into what he thinks is going to be a terrifically high manic. He will go all over the tone scale.

Or you are having a nice discussion at dinner about things like that and he says, “Did you know that Persian cats originally came from Samarkand?”

But the tone scale is 40.0 down to at least — 3.0, and we are using the whole tone scale now — all of it. We knew by extrapolation that there was this much tone scale. So I don’t want to see any more of these low-toned tone 4.0’s hanging around anymore!

You say, “Yes” — you expect him to go on and tell you some sort of a witty anecdote about Persian cats — and you sit there and you wait and you wait, and he says, “And silver costs

$9.02 a pound in the Transvaal.” This is wonderful. It is just as silly to get up there into the abstract and then not nail anything down. There is a famous book that only a few people have ever read. I wouldn’t break it out and give it to people, and the reason I wouldn’t break it out and give it to people was that it was all up in the top bin — every single bit of it. It has taken thirteen years of hard work and experience to get that book down to where you can put one foot in the bottom bin and put a foot in the top bin.

Now we can do that, and that is why we have these axioms. But thirteen years ago, in that book, these axioms almost existed in full — with no route built to them. There was nothing in the second bin — no route. We had no map and we had no phenomena observed in the physical universe to prove it up.

It is utterly fantastic to me that it happens to work out as it worked out thirteen years ago. This is just an accident — a complete accident. But that was a philosophic induction which all of a sudden turned out to have enough data in the known universe to fulfill it. It was an accident; it shouldn’t have existed. That philosophic echelon all by itself was good reading, but there was no bridge built to it.

Now you can go out and you can look in the field of mysticism, and by golly, you can find more data! And it is workable data that will point up more phenomena for you. Why? Because a bridge is built to it. You can study Dianetics and then go study psychology, and a lot of it will make sense. That is a fact — it will! In other words, almost anything can happen.

I have also covered Logic 9: A postulate is as valuable as it is workable. I mentioned this earlier in the talk this evening. We have not had to predict any phenomena which don’t exist in order to give you these axioms, nor at any time here have we had to neglect existing phenomena.

And we haven’t found anything in this physical universe at the moment which happens to fall outside these axioms. I hope somebody does sooner or later because this is almost a deadly picture, with no randomity in it, no mistakes. There must be some such phenomena, but what it is I am sure I don’t know.

In addition to that, these theories really test up like a true science in that they extrapolate. You can take these axioms and you can figure, “Well, he says these axioms are right; then such-and-such should exist as phenomena.” Go look and you will find it.

Logic 10: A large body of aligned data which has similarity in application, deducible or inducible from basic postulates, may be considered to be a science.

As much as the world uses the word science, it has hardly ever been defined. It could be defined as many things, but this is, to some degree, a dynamic definition of a science. How do you make a science? You get some basic postulates and you induce and induce, and compare it to the real universe, and if it is all lined up you have a science.

If that is a dynamic definition of a science, some sciences had better look to themselves. Even chemistry, the old grand pappy of everything, that started back in the field of alchemy, is so far out of alignment right now that the physicist, with his postulates about atoms and so forth, can go into the field of chemistry and say, “You know, I’ve figured out that in your field so-and-so....”

The chemists say, “That can’t be true. That doesn’t work according to our postulates.” “Well, it works according to my postulates.”

“Well, that’s fine. We’re getting all sorts of beautiful results according to the postulates of chemistry in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena. And they are entirely different than the field of physics.”

The chemist believes an atom is built in a certain way and the physicist believes it is built in a different way; they are both getting results and they are both merging closer and closer toward some kind of a goal. But they are still in violent disagreement. That is because they have not aligned their fields according to new known data; they haven’t realized the field had to be realigned. As a matter of fact, even basic physics ought to now be realigned. The law of conservation of energy seems to have been kicked overboard.

Now, Logic 11 is one which should interest you a great deal: The problem of human behavior, psychosomatic illness, mental aberration and the phenomena of life is susceptible to solution.

A fellow in the old Foundation wrote a letter to a scientist who was very interested — whose name I have guaranteed never to mention in the field of Dianetics. He had protested that somebody had mentioned his name in some publication and I promised him that we would never use his name in connection with it, so we won’t. But he said, “Any time I hear the word cure, universal, used, I always file whatever I hear about it in the circular file.” It is very interesting that people would work in a field which they consider unsolvable. And yet that has been true of all of these fields of the humanities. They didn’t have Logic 11. They didn’t believe the solution was there, and as a consequence they never made a steady, solid drive toward it. They just keep monkeying around the edges. If they had believed the solution was there, they would have laid down a logical pattern. I am not the only one in the world who can lay down a logical pattern. Nobody even tried, so they were in a field of complete defeat. It took the verve of physical science to push into that field in order to bring alignment to it.

Logic 12: It is possible to resolve the problem of how life is surviving, without resolving the problem of why life is surviving. That is what we mean by the first and second echelon of Dianetics.

Here we have — who knows? — a hole in space. But it is certainly a static line of some sort which contains a zero, which is an infinity — an interesting gimmick. It is theta, whatever it is.

Now, this top bin — I don’t know at what level — probably contains a “why.” It says, “Life is surviving, and this is why.”

You say, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that earlier?” But right now it looks terribly imponderable. Why is life surviving? Why all this effort? Why all these ramifications and so forth? This is a rough one.

Earlier we had an axiom, a postulate, about the compartmentation of problems. This is where the problem of Dianetics compartments. It is “how.” People in the past kept saying, “But why is there this and that, and why is it doing that, and why is it doing something else, and so forth, and why, why, why?” Occasionally they would ask a “how,” but they never differentiated how from why. As a consequence they never got an alignment of data, because the why is an imponderable. At the moment why is imponderable but we can answer how.

So let’s separate the sheep from the goats, the alphas from the betas, and get the field squared up and just look at how life is surviving. And that is what we are doing this very moment.

It is very interesting that only low-tone-scale people will ask you why.