The Axioms of Scientology are a list of usable or self evident truths and are a major part of the technical information of a Scientologist.

It is a remarkable thing that life itself can be codified in terms of Axioms. It has not been done before. The first time it was even attempted was in 1951 when I wrote the Logics and Axioms, which I did simply to give an alignment to thought itself. And as a matter of fact copies of these Axioms were sent over to Europe and in 1953 I found them in Vienna fully translated into German. It's quite remarkable. Over there they were terribly impressed simply because it had not been done before. Nobody had before codified life to this degree and nobody had codified psychotherapy. And they were not impressed with whether the Axioms were right or wrong, it was only that nobody had done it before. In these Scientology Axioms we're not quite doing the same thing. Those 1951 Axioms of Dianetics were quite complicated and these fifty Axioms we now have are nowhere near as lengthy, but their reach is greater and they pack a great deal more punch.

Having these we are now operating on just fifty axioms and definitions, where the Dianetic Axioms of 1951 were in excess of one hundred and ninety. We arrived at these fifty Axioms of Scientology through a great many changes, a great many major developments – all of them in the direction of higher workability and simplification.

We come here to the interesting subject of a proof of ultimate truth. If we have reached an ultimate truth, then we have reached an ultimate solution, and who would ever suspect, really, that an ultimate truth or an ultimate solution could be subjected to mechanical proof. We have done just that. We have discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate.

A student in training in Scientology is not expected to read these Axioms. He is expected to absorb them, quote them verbatim and by number, understand and apply them.

Axiom Twenty: Bringing the static to create a perfect duplicate causes the vanishment of any existence or part thereof.

Webster's says that an axiom is a self evident truth.

If you can bring someone to make a perfect duplicate of anything it will vanish. We have a perfect duplicate clearly defined:

Comparing the Axioms of Scientology with axioms in another subject, these are certainly as self-evident as those of, for instance, geometry, which is actually a relatively crude subject in that it proves itself by itself, which is a limitation that Scientology does not have.

A perfect duplicate is an additional creation of the object, its energy, and space, in its own space, in its own time, using its own energy. (And we could append to that "the considerations which go along with it", because it couldn't be anything but considerations.)

The Axioms of Scientology prove themselves by all of life.

And: This violates the condition that two objects must not occupy the same space, and causes vanishment of the object.

In geometry we find the Aristotelian syllogism arbitrarily cutting across the whole subject. In Scientology we needed a better base than the syllogism and we have a better one.

If you ask somebody to simply make a perfect duplicate of, for instance, a vase, just exactly where it sits, it will begin to fade out on him, and he can do that to almost anything.

The platform on which we base our understanding is, if something doesn't work when applied we change what we are doing and find something which does work. We are certainly not bowed down to the great god No Change.

Why doesn't it fade for somebody else? This is quite remarkable. Everything in this universe is displaced or misplaced. When we talk about a lie, we really don't mean that simply changing the position of something is a lie. We have to alter the consideration regarding it to make a lie. It isn't really a lie that everything is so scrambled in this universe. It is scrambled. Just in the last moment or two several cosmic rays went through your body. Those were particles which emanated from somewhere and they arrived where you are – they had been en route for a hundred million years. To get one of those cosmic rays to vanish we would have to find its point of creation, and we would have to make a duplicate of that ray at the moment of its creation, and then we would have to make a duplicate of having done so. At that instant that cosmic ray would vanish.

Well, true enough, these Axioms are self evident truths. But they are not so thoroughly self evident that they leap out of the page and introduce themselves to you. You have to introduce yourself to them.

This is very interesting to the physicist, it's very interesting to almost anybody, and it is demonstrable. Yon can do this. I asked an auditor one afternoon simply to "look to the garage wall over there" and to choose a very small area, and "find the atoms and molecules in the wall there, and put an attention unit" – a remote viewpoint – "next to each one, and follow it immediately back to where it had been created." He was leaning on the fender of the car, and he did this – and he came off the fender of that car as though he had been shot. The object itself, this tiny portion of the object, had started to disintegrate. And he rushed over to it to hold it in place with his hands! Why doesn't the whole universe vanish? Well, probably on the very site of this building there was another building once and that building has been broken up and the bricks have been moved and part of it is out there in the street, and part of it is still in the ground and part of it – maybe some brick dust – got on somebody's suitcase who went to World War II, and part of it's in Germany and it's spread all over the place, and here are all these cosmic waves and rays going all over the universe – and to get each one of those at its moment of creation in the time and space, and to make a perfect duplicate of all this, would be quite a job. It's not an impossible job. It requires an ability to span attention. You would get a physical object to disappear so thoroughly that everybody else would know it was gone.

The first of the Axioms is a bit of understanding which if you did not have and did not actually understand very well you would not be able to do anything with Scientology.

You see that it isn't true that an object sitting before you at this moment, or your chair, has always been in that position. Nor is it true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position, nor is it true that the atoms which made up the chair in raw material form were always in that particular ore bed or in that particular tree. So you see it's quite complex. This universe is scrambled.

It's just as blunt as that.

That doesn't mean you can't make it vanish, however.

Axiom One: Life is basically a static.

As we can produce this phenomenon, we know we have an ultimate solution. The perfect duplicate was the little latch string hanging out that opened the door to an ultimate truth.

And what is this static?

Well, what would an ultimate truth be? An ultimate truth is a static, and an ultimate solution is a static. In other words, an ultimate truth and an ultimate solution is nothing. Get the As-is-ness of any problem, make a perfect duplicate of any problem, and the problem will disappear. You can subject that easily to proof. So if you can make a problem disappear by simply getting its As-is-ness, then you've got the solution to all problems, or the ultimate solution. Well, the MEST universe itself is just a problem, and so if you could get its As-is-ness, it would disappear. It would disappear for everybody. Well, let's study that one, and get that very well and get what the definition is there, in the Axioms and Definitions. This is the total solution, by the way, to the vanishment of engrams – what we were handling in Dianetics. The vanishment of ridges, of all energy forms and manifestations, all these can simply be accomplished by making perfect duplicates of them. That doesn't mean that you should now make nothing out of everything or get your preclear to try to make nothing out of everything, but that it just can be done.

Definition: a Life Static has no mass, no motion, no wavelength, no location in space or in time. It has the ability to postulate and to perceive.

Axiom Twenty-One: Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication.

This is a peculiar and particular static, having these properties and a further peculiarity, which we find in the next Axiom.

We understand understanding a bit better when we see that it is simply the ability to get the As-is-ness of something. For example we could say "I don't quite understand this car.

Axiom Two: The static is capable of considerations, postulates, and opinions.

Don't quite understand what's wrong with it. It just won't start." And we walk around it and look at it and then we find out that we haven't turned on the key. And we turn on the key.

You can't measure this Static.

We've understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key (which actually is practicing Alter-is-ness). If we walked around a car and said "I don't understand what this object is… I don't understand what this object is… AH! it's a car!" We would feel immediately relieved. We'd feel a lot better about the thing, but if we were to get its total As-is-ness there would just be a hole sitting there.

When you find something which has no mass, no location, no position in time and no wavelength – the very fact that it can't be measured tells you that you have your hands on Life itself.

So understanding is As-is-ness and understanding in its entirety would be a Static and so we have the fact that Life knows basically everything there is to know before it gets complicated with lots of data, merely because it can postulate all the data it knows. All knowingness is inherent in the static itself. A thetan who is in good shape knows everything there is to know. He knows past, present and future. He knows everything. This doesn't mean he knows data. This merely means that he can As-is anything and if he can As-is anything believe me he can understand it.

You can't measure it, yet all things measurable extend from it. From this Static all phenomena extend.

Man's salvation I've said several times depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well let's misinterpret that just a little bit and say Man's salvation – if you want to save him from the universe – would depend upon his ability to make an As-isness of the physical universe at which moment he wouldn't have a universe, and this would be total understanding.

You cannot measure a dog by his biscuits and you cannot measure this Static by the phenomena extending from it.

Understanding has three parts: Affinity Reality and Communication.

Space is one of these phenomena. You could say that Life is a space-energy-object production and placement unit because that is what it does. But when you measure these you do not measure Life.

You can actually compose from ARC all the mathematics there are. You can combine ARC into mathematics. You can accomplish anything with ARC that you want to do.

A thetan is very, very close to being a pure Static. He has practically no wavelength.

Symbolic Logic, even calculus, could be extrapolated from ARC.

Actually a thetan is in a very, very small amount of mass. From some experiments conducted about fifteen or twenty years ago – a thetan weighed about 1.5 ounces! Who made these experiments? Well, a doctor made these experiments. He weighed people before and after death, retaining any mass. He weighed the person, bed and all, and he found that the weight dropped at the moment of death about 1.5 ounces and some of them 2 ounces. (Those were heavy thetans.) So we have this thetan capable of considerations, postulates and opinions, and the most native qualities to him – in other words the things which he is most likely to postulate – are these qualities which you find in the top "buttons" of the Chart of Attitudes. "Trust", "Full Responsibility", etc.

Affinity depends upon reality and communication. Reality depends upon affinity and communication. Communication depends upon affinity and reality. If you don't believe this try to communicate sometime with somebody without any affinity at all. Get real mad at somebody, and then try to communicate with him. You won't. Try to get somebody to be reasonable when he is very angry and you'll find out that his reality is very poor. He cannot conceive of the situation. He'll give you some of the weirdest things. There is no liar lying like an angry man.

So we have then actually described a thetan when we have gotten Axioms One and Two. Without these known well an auditor would have an awfully hard time exteriorizing (Exteriorizing: exteriorization: the state achieved in which the thetan can be outside his body with certainty) somebody – because if you thought that you reached in with a pair of forceps and dragged someone out of his head, well, this it not the way it is. You would not be thinking of a thetan. To exteriorize something that can't possibly be grabbed hold of, that's quite a trick.

If you raise somebody's affinity you will raise his reality and communication. If you raise somebody's reality, you'll raise his affinity and communication. And the keynote of this triangle happens to be communication. Communication is more important than either affinity or reality.

A thetan has to postulate he's inside before you can have him postulate that he's outside. But if he heavily postulated that he's inside, now your trick as an auditor is to do what? Override this thetan's postulates? That would fit into the field of hypnotism, or maybe you could do it with a club, but the way we do it in Scientology is a little more delicate than these. We simply ask him to postulate that he's outside, and if he can and does, why, he's outside. And if he can't, why, he's still inside.

Axiom Twenty-Two: The practice of not-is-ness reduces understanding.

Thetans think of themselves as being in the MEST universe (MEST universe: the physical universe, from the initial letters of matter, energy, space, time). Of course, this is a joke, too. As the Static they can't possibly be in a universe.

In other words, something is there, and we say it's not there.

But they can postulate a condition and then they can postulate that they cannot escape this condition.

Someone is driving down the road like mad and there's an enormous boulder lying in the middle of the road, and almost anybody, just before the crash, will say the boulder's not there. And by golly it's there. And this makes him feel he's a weak thetan. He failed. The funny part of it is that if here were to immediately 'As-is – a boulder in the road', instead of denying it's there, and if he could make this a perfect duplicate, the boulder would disappear.

Axiom Three: Space, energy, objects, form and time are the result of considerations made and/ or agreed upon or not by the static, and are perceived solely because the static considers that it can perceive them.

He doesn't do it that way. He sort of puts some energy up and pushes against the boulder, and says, "It's not there, it's not there. I deny it." Well, he'll have a mighty thin understanding of the whole thing.

The whole secret of perception is right there. Do you believe that you can see? Well, all right, go ahead and believe that you can see but you'd certainly better believe that there's something there to see or you won't see. So there are two conditions to sight, and they are covered immediately here in that you have to believe there is something to see and then that you can see it. And so you have perception. All of the tremendous number of categories to perception come under this heading, and are covered by that Axiom. So that Axiom should be known very, very well.

He doesn't want to communicate with it, so he says it's not there. He doesn't want to have any affinity for it at all, so he says it's not there. And believe me his reality cuts down.

Axiom Four: Space is a viewpoint of dimension.

The practice of Not-is-ness reduces understanding, and that is what Man is doing constantly.

Do you know that physics has gone on since the time of Aristotle without knowing that! Yet we read in the Encyclopedia Britannica of many years ago (the Eleventh Edition, published in 1911) that space and time are not a problem of the physicist. They are the problem of one working in the field of the mind. And it says that when the field of psychology solves the existence of space and time why then physics will be able to do something with it.

He's trying to avow that something that isn't there is there, and he's trying to avow that something that is there isn't there, and between these two things, giving it no As-is-ness at all or new postulates of any kind, he's having quite a time of it.

And all those fellows with their Ph.D.'s – not for centuries actually but a number of decades (it seems like centuries if you've ever listened to their lectures) – going back to the days of Wundt, The Only Wundt – about 1867 – they didn't read the Encyclopedia Britannica and find out that they held the responsibility for identifying space and time so that physics could get on its way.

Axiom Twenty-Three: The static has the capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC.

And because they avoided this responsibility we have to pitch in here and discover and develop Scientology – not to work in the field of physics, however, but to work in the field of the Humanities. But it so happened that I discovered very, very early while I was studying nuclear physics at George Washington University that physics did not have a definition for space, time and energy. It defined energy in terms of space and time. It defined space in terms of time and energy, and it defined time in terms of energy and space. It was going around in a circle. I first moved out of that circle by putting it into human behavior – be, do and have, which you'll find in Scientology: 8-8008, but the point is here that without a definition for space, physics was and is adrift. One of our auditors was recently talking to an engineer in an Atomic Energy Commission plant, and happened to remark, "Well, we have a definition for space." This engineer said, "Uh, you do?" and got instantly interested. Of course we didn't make this definition for nuclear physicists, but they could certainly use one. The engineer asked, "What is the definition of space?" and the auditor said, "Space viewpoint of dimension." This fellow just sat there for a moment, and he sat there, and then all of a sudden he rushed to the phone and dialed a number and he said, "Close down number five!" He had suddenly realized that an experiment in progress was about to explode and one of the reasons he knew it was about to explode is that he had found out what space was. This is of great interest to nuclear physicists, but they will get one of these definitions and then they will start to figure, figure, figure, figure, figure. They don't take the definition as such and use it as such. They figure-figure, and they lose it.

Here we have a condition of existence which is As-is. That would be total knowingness. Well, if we had somebody who could say "As-is" to everything, and trace all parts of everything back to their original time, location, and simply got them as they really were, we of course would have nothing left but a Static. We would have zero. We wouldn't even have space.

Using the process R2-40: Conceiving a Static*In The Creation of Human Ability by L. Ron Hubbard gives an understanding of exactly why, every time they get rid of one of these definitions they lose it.

If you wanted, by the way, to make this whole universe vanish, you would have to be able to span this whole universe. You would have to be as big as the universe. You could drill somebody up to the point where he could do that.

Axiom Five: Energy consists of postulated particles in space.

Axiom Twenty-Four: Total ARC would bring about the vanishment of all mechanical conditions of existence.

Now, we've got space: a viewpoint of dimension.

All mechanical conditions of existence. It wouldn't bring about the sudden death of everything. It would bring about the exteriorization of everything. It would mean the vanishment of all space and all form. Mechanics.

You say: "I am here looking in a direction." We've actually got to have three points out there to look at, to have three dimensional space. If we only had linear space we would have only one dimension point. One point to view. And energy consists of postulated particles in space, so we'll demark these three points out there to have some three dimensional space and we'll have these particles which we will call Anchor Points, and we'll have energy.

Differentiate between a consideration – a postulate – and a mechanic. Be sure to get the difference between a quality such as complete trust, a quality such as full responsibility, in other words the qualities along the top of the Chart of Attitudes – and the mechanics. A person who is all out for mechanics, and won't have anything to do with considerations, believes completely that considerations are of no worth and that mechanics are the thing ("You can put your hands on it, you can feel it, you can touch it") – this person would have to be made thoroughly acquainted with the existence of these mechanics before he could As-is them sufficiently to reach a level where he would have the ability to consider. He has sunk below the level of mechanics.

And so we come to objects.

That's why 8C Opening Procedure, which acquaints the person with his immediate environment, works as it does.

Axiom Six: Objects consist of grouped particles.

Well, when we say mechanics, we mean space, energy, objects and time. And when something has those things in it we're talking about something mechanical. That's all that would vanish if you As-ised all of existence – just the mechanics – and you could turn right around and postulate them all back again too with great ease.

If we just kept putting particles out there and pushing them together, or if we suddenly said, "There's a big group of particles out there," we'd have what is commonly called an object. When an object or particle moves across any part of a piece of space – in other words a viewpoint of dimension – we have motion.

Axiom Twenty-Five: Affinity is a scale of attitudes which falls away from the coexistence of static, through the interpositions of distance and energy, to create identity, down to close proximity but mystery.

And we come to the subject of time.

Affinity, in terms of mechanics, is simply a matter of distance. Affinity is basically a consideration, but it does represent itself mechanically. For instance, Total Knowingness goes down to Lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well that's different from simply knowing without looking. We go down to Looking, now we go just a little bit lower than that. (This Know-to-Mystery scale is by the way an Affinity scale.) We go into Emotion, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking. We have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it – do we dislike it. There are particles in emotion: "I don't like it" – in other words "I have some anger particles about it" or "I have some resentment particles" – and by the way a preclear has his reactive mind full of these emotion particles.

Axiom Seven: Time is basically a postulate that space and particles will persist.

Now if I "have to feel it to know it is there", I've gone immediately into Effort. And my affinity for something would be good if I could feel it and it would be no good at all if I couldn't feel it. You get a Step V, a Black V, who is swearing by mechanics (and swearing at all life forms) and builds atom bombs and such things – and he tells you that he cannot contact life. He can't contact this thing called the Static, therefore he "can't believe in it". This is very interesting. You ask him why, and he says, "Well I can't feel it." He's twisting the snake around so it'll eat its tail. He's proving it all upside down and backwards. He says he can't get the existence of something he can't feel. And the odd part of it is that we can measure electronically the existence of life. There is a little meter on which we ran some tests, and we can actually demonstrate that one individual can turn on in another individual at some great distance from him a considerable electrical current, enough to make this little machine sit up and sing. And the other person can turn it on at will, and the person on whom it's being turned on can't stop it. Here is a manifestation that can be measured. We've done the impossible there too. We've done the impossible in many places in Scientology. You can't measure a Static but we've done so by having a person, at a distance, bring a mechanic into being.

Time in its basic postulate is not even motion. The apparency of time – an agreed upon rate of change – becomes agreed upon time. But for an individual all by himself is simply a consideration. He says something will persist, and he has time. Now if he gets somebody else to agree on what is persisting, the two can then be in agreement. And if the items are motionless then they can't have agreements about how slow it persisting or it get them moving. And this gives fast or how this gives them a clock or a watch. And so you carry a watch around on your wrist.

When a person gets down to Effort on this scale then he's into a level where he's "gotta work", everything has got to be work. He's got to touch everything and feel everything before he can know anything. A person in the Effort band, by the way, as he gets to the lower part of that band, has facsimiles. He's got mental image pictures. He'll even do weird things like this: he will get a picture to know what's happening to him. In other words, he'll get a mental image picture of a past incident in order to get an idea. He gets the picture and then he gets the idea, he doesn't get the idea and then get a picture. You want to watch that. Sometime you'll find a preclear who's doing this. You'll be saying "All right, get the idea of being perfect." And your preclear will sit there and say, "I got it." You want to ask him, "How did you do that?" That's a wonderful question to ask a preclear at any time. "How did you do that?" And he'll say, "Why, of course, just like everybody else. I got this picture and this picture came up and I looked at it and the picture said, 'Be perfect,' and it showed me a circle, and a circle – well, that's perfect." That's how your preclear was doing that. He wasn't making the postulate at all. He was waiting for a picture to come and tell him what it was all about.

But time is not motion. Let's escape from that one right now. It is an error. We'll call that a heresy.

Now we go down from Effort into Thinking, and we get our "figure-figure" case. This case is hard to get along with – he can't work. Life is not composed of thought, particularly.

But this gives us another Axiom:

It's composed of space and action and all sorts of things. The Static can do all these things and is not necessarily "all pure thought". Thinkingness comes in down the scale at the level below Effort. And it comes in as figure-figure-figure-figure-figure. Now a person can postulate without thinking about it, and if that's what we mean by thought, that's fine. But usually what people mean by thought is figure-figure. "I'll just figure this out and I'll get a computation and a calculation and I'll add it up to… now let me see… can you go to the movies? I don't know," – the kind of answer a little kid gets. "Now let me see. I'll have to think it over.

Axiom Eight: The apparency of time is the change of position of particles in space.

Give me a couple of days." We don't know how all of this mechanic got into a postulate, but they've let it get in there. So that's the level, Thinkingness.

Now if we see particles changing in space we know time's passing, but if you had a piece of space and some particles, and you were simply sitting there looking at those particles and there was absolutely no change in them whatsoever, you would be very hard put to describe even to yourself whether any time was passing or not.

Now we go downstairs from Thinkingness on this scale and we get into Symbolizingness. A symbol contains mass, meaning and mobility. A symbol is something that's being handled from an orientation point – a point which is motionless in relationship to the symbol. It's motionless, and the symbol is in motion, and has mass, meaning and mobility. "Where are you from?" "I am from New Jersey." This fellow is telling you that he is from an orientation point called New Jersey. It's motionless and as he runs around the world, he is always from New Jersey. He has mass, meaning and mobility. He has a name. When a person drops down the scale below figure-figure, he is into a point where he figures with symbols. Now that's a condensation, isn't it. Each of these was a condensation.

And so the apparency of time is the change of position of particles in space.

The next one down the line, below Symbols, is Eatingness. Animals eat animals.

Axiom Nine: Change is the primary manifestation of time.

Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols and they think they have to stay alive by eating other symbols. This is real cute and eating is quite important of course and it can be a lot of fun, but here you have a real condensation. In other words, Effort got so condensed that it turned into an inverted kind of Thought, and that became so condensed that it packaged thinking – that's what took place there – it became so condensed it became a Symbol. A word, for instance, is a whole package of thought. So packaged thinking is a symbol and packaged symbols are a plate of beans.

If you were looking at motionless particles you would not be able to tell whether time was passing or not because you might be looking at one time or another. Then to prove time you could say they moved this far at such and such a speed or something of the sort. And you could say, "Therefore this much time has gone by." So we can say that change is the primary manifestation of time. Now, oddly enough you have your "Black Five", occluded case ("no pictures, only blackness") right there. A Black Five is trying to change himself simply because he's in agreement with particles in motion. That's all. He's simply acting on compulsion or obsession to change, and if you asked him very suddenly in which direction he's trying to change he would not be able to tell you. He has no real goal. He doesn't particularly want to be better, he doesn't particularly want to be worse, but he's got to change. He's frantically got to change. Well, why has he got to change? Because he has these particles all around him which are dictating change to him. They're saying, "Time… time… time… time… time… change… change… change."

Below that, when a person doesn't believe he can eat any more, when he thinks he is not going to survive, he will go into the Sexingness band. If you starve cattle for a while they'll start to breed, and if you feed them too well they'll stop breeding. Quite irrational, but then who said any of this was rational? Cattle who are starved or lacking certain food elements will decide, well, we'll live again in some other generation – and they'll breed up a lot of calves. Of course there's nothing to feed the calves on but they haven't paid much attention to that. In Arizona we have an interesting fact – we have some very beautiful cattle who have stopped breeding. They've just been too well fed. The way to get those cattle breeding again would be to simply start starving them. Freud by the way was so condensed he had to get way down there to that condensation level of Sex "in order to find out".

In other words, he's in agreement with the apparency of time, and he has fallen far, far away from the mere consideration of time. So he doesn't conceive what time is. He becomes a nuclear physicist.

Below Sex we have a new level of knowingness, the level of Mystery.

Axiom Ten: The highest purpose in the universe is the creation of an effect.

Mystery of course is the complete displacement of everything, and everything in a terrific confusion. The anatomy of Mystery is unprediction, confusion and then total blackout.

We could do a tremendous amount with just that one Axiom, and in processing we would discover then good reason to have space and to have particles and how all these things get there. People want to create an effect, and they get into very interesting states of mind about this sort of thing. They say to themselves, well, let's see now – I caused that effect but that effect is horrible, Therefore I can't admit that I caused that effect, so I'll introduce a lie here and say I didn't cause that effect. And then – they become an effect. If they can't be at cause they become an effect. They are the effect of what they have caused without admitting they caused. But it can get even worse than that – worse than being at total effect. They get way down the line, to the point where they're the cause of any effect. They blame themselves, in other words. A man in Sandusky falls down and breaks a glass of pink lemonade and cuts his little pinky, and this person who is in San Diego at the time hears about that and knows he must be guilty. That's complete reversal.

First he couldn't predict some particles, and then it all seemed awfully confusing to him and then he just shut it all off and said "I won't look at it anymore". That's what Mystery is, and your Step Fives by the way are very, very concerned about Mystery. They're very concerned about Thinkingness and trying to solve the Mystery. Well the Mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. The ultimate solution of course is simply the As-is-ness of the problem. And the As-is-ness of a Mystery is simply the Mystery. That's really all there is to it. There really is nothing to know back of a Mystery, except the Mystery itself. It's just As-isness. But Mystery is the level of always pretending there's something to know earlier than the Mystery.

A person can get into a state where he's cause and effect simultaneously. That is to say any effect he starts to cause he becomes that effect instantly. He says, I think I'll kill him, and he feels like he's dead. Just like that. Now we've got to have time in order to witness an effect. As an example of this one could observe that science is dedicated to observing an effect and does not have any other real goal. Once in a while you see a scientist who is also an idealist. He wants to use his materials to improve Man. But science at large and particularly when it got over into the field of the mind. was simply a goal-less, soul-less pursuit, the totality of which is just to observe an effect. They are not really even causing an effect. They just go around observing effects. And they fill notebooks and notebooks and notebooks full of effects, effects, effects, effects, and you find they carry on experiments – not to prove anything, not to do anything, but just to observe an effect. They go around and put a pin in the tail of a rat, and the rat jumps and squeaks, and so they say "Ah," and they note it down carefully: "When you put a pin one inch from the end of the tail of a rat he moans". Actually the rat squeaked. Well this was observing an effect – the way it's recorded by science. This goes so far that a leading scientist of the day – an Einstein – says that all an observer has any right to do is look at a needle. If they were just going around observing effects, eventually they could build an atom bomb, and say "Well it isn't my fault. I'm not to blame." The few scientists who did feel badly about this and joined organizations to try to do something were promptly fired by the government. They had some responsibility.

To sum this up we have, under Axiom Twenty-five: By the practice of Is-ness (Beingness) and Not-is-ness (refusal to Be) individuation progresses from the Knowingness of complete identification down through the introduction of more and more distance and less and less duplication, through Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness, Symbolizingness, Eatingness, Sexingness, and so through to not-Knowingness (Mystery). Until the point of Mystery is reached, some communication is possible, but even at Mystery an attempt to communicate continues. Here we have, in the case of an individual, a gradual falling away from the belief that one can assume a complete Affinity down to the conviction that all is a complete Mystery. Any individual is somewhere on this Know-to-Mystery scale. The original Chart of Human Evaluation was the Emotion section of this scale.

Axiom Eleven: The considerations resulting in conditions of existence are four-fold.

And here they are in exact axiom form: (a) AS-IS-NESS is the condition of immediate creation without persistence, and is the condition of existence which exists at the moment of creation and the moment of destruction, and is different from other considerations in that it does not contain survival.

1. Alter-Is-Ness is the consideration which introduces change and therefore time and persistence into an As-Is-Ness to obtain persistency.

Axiom Twelve: The primary condition of any universe is that two spaces energies or objects must not occupy the same space. When this condition is violated (perfect duplicate) the apparency of any universe or any part thereof is nulled.

Alfred Korzybski in General Semantics was very careful to demonstrate that two objects could not occupy the same space. In other words, he was dramatizing "Preserve the universe, preserve the universe, preserve the universe". Now this statement tells you that if two objects can occupy the same space you haven't got a universe, and sure enough if you just ask a preclear repetitively: "What object can occupy the same space you're occupying?" he'll work at it and he'll work at it and work at it, and the first thing you know, why, he's capable of doing many things which he was not able to do before. His space straightens out.

He can create space again – merely because this MEST universe has been telling him so often that two objects cannot occupy the same space, he has begun to believe it. And he believes this is the most thorough law that he has. So we find a person perfectly contentedly being in a body believing he is a body. Why, he knows that he, a thetan, could not occupy the same space as a body. He knows this is impossible. Two objects can't occupy the same space.

He's an object, and his body's an object, so the two can't occupy the same space.

This is very interesting because you'll find that two universes can occupy the same space and actually do occupy the same space. You'll find the universe of a thetan is occupying the same space as the physical universe, but once he declares that the both of them are occupying the same space, you get an interesting condition.

Now, I'm not going to try to take up at this point the perfect duplicate but it's enough just to say that two objects are occupying that space – identically occupying that space – and poof, it's gone. That's the way you make things vanish. That is to get its As-is-ness, and this is why As-is-ness works and why things disappear when you get their As-is-ness. This is an important Axiom.

Now here is the oldest thing that Man knows: Axiom Thirteen: The cycle of action of the physical universe is: create, survive (persist), destroy.

Now, that's the oldest thing Man knows, that it went on the basis of death, birth, growth, decay, death, birth, growth, decay, death, birth, growth, decay and so on. He knew he had time involved here, on a linear line. The odd thing here is that you've got to postulate death to get a cycle of action, and you've got to postulate time to get a linear line, so we're dealing here with one of the most intimate things of existence. We find this by the way in the Rig-Veda. It's been with Man about 10,000 years that I know of and we find that this is the cycle of action of the physical universe – create, survive destroy.

In Dianetics, I isolated just one portion of this line as a common denominator of all existence, which was Survive, and sure enough any life form is surviving. It is trying to survive and that is its normal push forward. And that has, incidentally, terrific impact, but this has two other parts and those are create and destroy. Create, survive, destroy. And survive merely means persist. So all of these things are based on time, and we have underlying Axiom Thirteen this primary consideration that there is time.

Now we can go on and find that the conditions of existence fit these various portions of the survival curve. And this would be given as follows: Axiom Fourteen: Survival is accomplished by alter-is-Ness and Not-Is-Ness, by which is gained the persistency known as time.

That's a mechanical persistency. In other words we keep changing things, saying they aren't, and changing them, and then pushing them out and re-forming them and trying to vanish them. Using energy to fight energy, we'll certainly get survival. We'll get persistency.

Axiom Fifteen: Creation is accomplished by the postulation of an As-Is-Ness.

Now all you have to say actually is: "Space, energy, time, As-is. That's the way it is, and, it's now going to persist." You've added time to it. If you immediately after that simply looked at it and got its As-is-ness again it would vanish. All you had to do is get it in the same instant of time with the same time of postulate and it would disappear. You could create it again and it would disappear. It would As-is.

Axiom Sixteen: Complete destruction is accomplished by the postulation of the As-Is-Ness of any existence and the parts thereof.

Complete destruction would simply be vanishment. You wouldn't have any rubble left. When you blow something up with guns you get rubble. Ask anybody who was in the last war. There were certainly an awful lot of broken bricks lying around. If anybody had really been working at this in a good sensible way, and he'd really meant total destruction, he would have simply gotten the As-is-ness of the situation and it would have been gone and that would have been the end of that. If he'd wanted to declare the whole As-is-ness of a country, if he'd been able to span that much attention and trace back that many particles that fast to their original points of creation, he would of course have a vanishment and that is complete destruction. So complete destruction is As-is-ness, and As-is-ness is simply a postulated existence.

What we're looking at most of the time in this universe is: Axiom Seventeen: The static, having postulated As-Is-Ness then practices Alter-Is-Ness and so achieves the apparency of Is-Ness and so obtains reality.

In other words we get a continuous alteration, and we get this apparency called Is-ness.

Axiom Eighteen: The static, in practicing Not-Is-Ness, brings about the persistence of unwanted existences, and so brings about unreality, which includes forgetfulness, unconsciousness, and other undesirable states.

Quite an important Axiom and a very true one.

Axiom Nineteen: Bringing the static to view as-is any condition devaluates that condition.