The Logics are as follows: The Logics are a method of thinking. They apply to any universe or any thinking process. They do not have to apply. You can get the doggonedest combinations simply by disobeying a Logic.

Some data which you should have in advance of the actual Logic, and one is the definitions of logic.

You are not spectators of, as are so many, but you are students of the human mind, not students of a process regarding the human mind. You aren't studying opinions about the mind. You are studying the mind. You are studying above that echelon really, but you are studying the mind.

So let's take three levels here. Let's take differentiation and let's take similarities.

Now, when we study the human mind, we're studying essentially a vessel of knowledge, a formulator of knowledge.

Now, in the general course of human events, these data have many times been covered in various ways. You will find a terrific rundown on this in Count Alfred Korzybski's work Science and Sanity, in a field that is called general semantics. The late Count Korzybski did a very splendid piece of work on this. And he analyzes identities of space and identities of time and identities of this and that. And his basic analysis of all this material is unparalleled. I give that to you without reservation; I have never read his work.

But when we study the mind and its ills and upsets and so forth, we can with accuracy call this Dianetics. Dianetics is a Greek word meaning "through mind." But why are we studying the mind? The mind is being studied simply because it is a vessel of knowledge and for no other reason. We wouldn't care if our best subject was the mind of a mouse, a rat — we would be studying that if it was the best example of knowledge, of a vessel containing knowledge or a computer of knowledge. We'd be studying that.

That's not said to be clever. The work was described to me in about 1945, I think. His basic tenets must have some degree of truth, because one day I was working out what general semantics should consist of and someone says, "Well, now, I see you've been taking notes out of Science and Sanity." I didn't have a copy of it, I've never had a copy of it. And here you have one of the tests of data: Can two people take the same basic data and by working with it, extrapolating, so to speak...

We wouldn't care what we'd study. If it were a teapot — if it were the best available vessel which could contain and compute knowledge, we'd be studying that.

That word simply means getting some more and some more and some more and some more application out of the same datum; you say extrapolating, that's just theoretical adding up of data, if you want to use that word. It's a good word. I don't happen to know of one that means, really, more precisely what we're doing, in the English language. But you get two people and they're extrapolating from more or less the same data and they get the same answers, you have a little better guarantee of the validity of the data. And if you get several people who do the same thing and arrive at the same point, it's starting to look pretty good. It's starting to look pretty good. Or if you get just one fellow who is extrapolating from data and he's just putting data together and he's going on and on and on putting data together and just keeps working, keeps working, keeps working, you know he's on a right track. But then go over this and take a look and see how you can apply it and whether or not you agree that it's on the right track. And if you see that it is on the right track, why, then you go ahead and use it. Or if you just use some of the processes that have come out of this, and you find they work, then you accept the body of data as a whole. I used to do quite a bit of this.

But Dianetics is the application of what we know to healing or curing or straightening up, de-aberrating the mind. Now, the word aberration means "crooked lines." And no word was ever more aptly chosen, since we find that the human mind becomes aberrated because the flow — the electronic flow lines from the thetan, as they cover the body itself and regulate the body itself — operate well only when they travel in straight lines, unimpeded by ridges. And so we're studying aberration, which means the crookedness or bends or enturbulent spots or confusions or crosses of the flow lines emanating from the thetan in monitoring the body or his environment.

Now, just working out, how do you think? Differentiation. The ultimate in sanity is differentiation; this is rivaled in insanity by disassociation. But disassociation is actually complete identification, and that's quite different from differentiation. A person can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. He can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. There are two cigarettes, and the person who tells you that they're the same is being sloppy.

Now we want those lines to be straight and unimpeded, and when we de-aberrate somebody, it's just exactly as though we did take all those flow lines and make sure that all the flow lines were flowing straight. And any time they flow crookedly or hit something and bounce off consistently, they are aberrated. That is to say, they are changed in direction. And that's the basic meaning of that word aberrated.

Now, Alfred Korzybski, in working with this data, gave you some extras that you really don't need, and that is a process. Because his process is based on trying to train people to differentiate instead of identify, and the reason they identify instead of differentiating is electronic. And the person who is thus trained becomes slower in thinking, not faster. His IQ drops; it does not rise. That is on test. So it's a mechanical proposition. It's very mechanical. Differentiation.

Now, our process in Dianetics is to make the flow straight, to de-aberrate, to straighten the flow. That's exactly what it means and there isn't anything more complicated to it than that. It's not esoteric, it isn't mumbo jumbo, it isn't anything at all; it means just that. It means that your thetan must have an unimpeded flow — flow in straight lines, not lines with spirals on them, not lines with rolly coaster loop-the-loops on them. They've just got to be straight, that's all.

Now, you've heard some people talk non sequitur. They say, "The submarines have the chrysanthemums because of the beer, no Empire State Building, after all," and look at you expectantly.

And wherever one of these lines is crooked, you will find several things. You'll find a ridge, you'll find a somatic, you will find a cross of other lines. You will find a person, by decision alone, bending or impeding a line. And the process is simply taking out impedances. Your process is really not an improvement of a thetan. It is taking out all the ways he got improved — (quote) "improved" — all the way down the track. Now that is what we're doing, and that's Dianetics.

And you say, "What are you talking about?"

Now in the field of Scientology we are studying knowledge — pure knowledge. We're trying to get to the highest possible level of knowledge itself and we don't care whether that knowledge is contained in teacups or tin cans. We don't care whether it's contained in thetans. We don't care whether it's ever contained in anything or not. We're just studying knowledge.

And you say, "Oh, again. Never didn't, did it?"

What's knowledge? There have been a lot of opinions on what knowledge is.

And they say...

Now, actually Scientology is an easy way of saying "epistemology." Nobody would ever face up to that word epistemology, and yet it's a very wonderful word which has been cracking the brains of scholars since time immemorial. Epistemology. It's spelled e-p-i-s-t-e-m-o-l-o-g-y and it is a proper and definite part of the whole field of philosophy.

Now, if you do that to a little kid and the little kid is a very bright little kid, he will look at you very brightly and he'll say, "Well, there's no spokes on the wheels!" Or he'll throw in something like "Well, Rolls Royce... Umhm." And you can go back and forth that way. And you have somebody come along the street with you, listening to this conversation going on, and you keep going on and you say, "Well, the ruddy rods are all on the left-hand side and that makes it far back of there."

But philosophy also says it has another field; it has several other fields. It has ontology, it has ethics, just as though these had some difference. All of a sudden we found out that it should have only had one part in the first place and that's epistemology because ethics comes under the field of knowledge. If a person has a high enough level of knowledge, he has ethics. If he doesn't have a high enough level of knowledge, he doesn't have ethics, he has to have morals. Morals are opposed to ethics. In the dictionary, you find it says, "morals: ethics." Then you go over and look at ethics and it says, "ethics: morals."

And he says, "But it's below that point."

We have gotten down the Tone Scale on the subject of conduct, if you please, until nobody is differentiating between morals and ethics. Oh, this is fabulous. George Bernard Shaw in all of his life never really made a more scathing, vitriolic comment upon man than that contained in the dictionary that says ethics are morals and morals are ethics. That tells you you are dealing with an essentially — a debased being. He has drifted way south from the time when he was a Greek, because the Greek knew there was a difference. And whenever you get an identification of A=A=A=A, watch out because you have insanity.

And you say, "Well, it's not really. It's liquid." And you go on and... If you find some adult who is listening to this...

Differentiation is the essence of sanity. Identification is the essence of insanity. He "rowed" a horse, r-o-w-e-d, would mean propelling a horse with a pair of oars. And he "rode" a horse, r-o-d-e, would mean getting up on top of a horse and going off someplace.

He has to have his material in this form, otherwise he can't credit it.

To an insane person there is no difference. Somebody says he rode a horse and this person will sit there for a moment and he'll get this foggy notion of a fellow sitting in the saddle with a pair of oars. Everything equals everything. It's like a complete short circuit all the way through the thetan. No straight lines are traveling in any direction, it's just a mass of interchangeable energy which interchanges without any differentiation.

People have what's known as a bullpen. Years and years and years after somebody has heard a joke, he may suddenly figure it out. He's got data waiting. He's trying to make the data add up to the data. And if he can't make the data add up to the data, he gets unhappier and unhappier and unhappier. Well, actually, there's no reason why he should get unhappy just because somebody walked up to him – schoolteacher walked up to him one day and said so-and-so and so-and-so, and he didn't add it up, he didn't add it up, he didn't add it up. And he goes along years later and all of a sudden gets this point – ptock! He's got that out of the bullpen.

Sanity depends on the ability to differentiate. So when we see, once upon a time, that philosophy was divided into ethics, into ontology (which is essentially a study of matter) and it was a study of epistemology (it was essentially those parts — there are some more parts to it), we see that once upon a time somebody knew there was a difference between morals and ethics.

But in an awful lot of people, particularly a person with no sense of humor, you have a larger, larger, larger bullpen, until the bullpen exceeds the size of the standard memory bank.

But we see there's evidently an essential error. None of this material was ever subject to proof. And in Scientology you are actually knocking against a door that broke in the knuckles of Kant, Hume, Locke, Nietzsche, old Zeno with his apatheia, Lucretius, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. Their bowed and bloody heads at life's end was their contest with the problem which you are facing with such an easy, cheerful mien.

And then this person does this trick on you: "Are you sure you really know that word? Now, does that word really mean that? Or would you say it..." Here you're getting a line of ideas – zzzzzzz – like this. And all of a sudden they'll stop you, and they want to, not get the definition that you have of a word, but they want to go over this word very carefully. You've stuck something in their bullpen when they do this. Now, that is upsetting.

The study of knowledge. Look how wild these fellows were once. Socrates, Aristotle — particularly Aristotle with his syllogism: A equals B and C equals D, therefore A equals D. Get that "equals." He said this was logic. But that's insanity. And by the way, you can prove anything with it. Anything. The syllogism is a most wonderful mechanism.

A person who is completely unworried about existence won't worry about you being sequitur or not. He won't care if you identify, actually. You can do anything you want to do.

Now they take geometry in school and they teach the little kids — they say, "Now, we're going to teach you how to think." Hah! In the latest geometry textbooks, do you know it says that? "This is essentially what logic is: logic is geometry." And you get two or three of the brighter boys who are in that class, and the kids don't dare tell the professor but they'll tell you, they say, "I don't think that way. I can't make myself think that way. I must be in terrible shape." No, they're sane.

And unless something he's trying to work out impinges on what you're saying, he goes ahead and he won't pay any attention to it. He just lets it ride – let it slide, dickens with it. He can figure it out because he can evaluate suddenly whether or not the situation is getting important. And if it gets important he will ask you for an identification of code. What symbols are you using? He'll want to know precisely what symbols they are, what they mean to you, exactly how this adds up, what the square root of all this is, and he puts it into this other problem – bing! – and he says, "Then that's what you mean?"

A equals B, C equals D. Now, if A equaled D, then B would equal C. Oh, no. No, no, no. You could say — in the first place, what are you dealing with? You're dealing with A and B and C and D. Therefore you're dealing with abstract symbols. And you can say anytime you want to, "Symbol A equals symbol B" and look very bright and happy about it, and say, "That's it, symbol A equals symbol B and they're equal." Nobody can contest that. That's true. It's only true by definition. You said so — that's the only reason it's true. You've just declared your terms.

And you say, "Yes." And then you look at it for a second and you say, "Sss! Gee, that's what I've been meaning on that for years."

You say, "Hereinafter from this point on, I am going to consider that A equals B." They wouldn't dare challenge that, because by definition that's what you're proceeding from. But they could say this — they could say, "Well, A what? What's A?" and then challenge you. But they have to go before the fact. Definition. That is thinking by definition and that is the root and basis of all mathematics today and it is wrong. And isn't it wonderful that man has gotten as far as he has gotten? Isn't it just wonderful he's gotten as far as he's gotten in the field of mathematics going on a basic error?

Now, he has made you do something that Voltaire often wrote that he demanded people do in arguing with him: "If you argue with me, you must first define your terms."

A mathematician, when he first hears about this, will practically blow — try to blow your brains out and then wind up blowing his own out. He gets in dreadful shape because you tell him, "Look, we are dealing in the field — when you say that, that's theoretical. You're dealing in the field of the abstract. You mean that there's a theoretical A which is equal to a theoretical B."

Now, in school they very often teach you that there is no such thing as a definition of terms, that every word means everything else to everybody else, and therefore there's no meeting ground of any communication, and so on. They teach general semantics in universities in the States, sometimes, and this is the general moral, is that "nobody can understand anybody and you're all out of communication anyhow, you little boob, and boy, are we fixing you up!" No other intention, really.

He'll say, "That's true."

The funny part of it is that the terms are terribly precise, and the oddity is, is that when we have lived through a certain similar strata of existence, our terminology becomes very exactly other people's terminology. You have no real trouble understanding it. But people in the teaching profession often wish to excuse their own lack of communication by saying nobody can understand anybody and they mean different things by all these different terms. No, they don't.

"Well, then why in the name of common sense don't you also add the other evident truth, that A will continue to be theoretical from now on to the end of time and is only a vague approximation of the real universe?"

The English language is the English language. If you met up with Shakespeare, you'd have to say, "Hm-hm."

He'll say, "Well, that isn't true. Mathematics is always true, it's always been true."

And he'd say, "And I mean that by that."

And you'll say, "Man invented it."

And you'd say, "Oh, is that what you're talking about?"

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

Well, just straighten out the code book. Because all you're doing is flying signals. Look at a naval code. Naval code says "This flag, which is yellow and blue, means turn. If it flies below the numeral, it means turn left; if it flies above the numeral, it means turn right." You see that naval signal – you know whether it says turn right or turn left. Bing-bing, there isn't any question about it. Because words are symbols of action in the MEST universe. And it's only when we get sloppy, sloppy signals .

... but be that as it may, when you say, "What's A?"

Supposing we had a signal: the TURN pennant over NINE meant "turn right ninety degrees." But the TURN pennant over NINE also meant "eat chow." But the TURN pennant over NINE also meant "retreat." Gee, it would start to get important all of a sudden, wouldn't it?

And the fellow says, "Well," happily, he says, "it's an apple."

So the enemy is over there and you have to TURN NINE to get over there – or NINE TURN to get over there – and somebody flies NINE TURN and half the ships retreat. It's just that it isn't a good code book, it isn't a good signal book. And so does language fall down in this classification. And language will very often interfere.

And you say, "Okay. What's B? A equals B. Therefore B must be another apple."

Homonyms: "through." There's "he threw" and "through." It can become very foggy, by the way – language can – only where it has homonyms. And a nation is found to be as aberrated as it is homonym silly.

And he says, "That's right," proudly, "apple equals apple, doesn't it?"

There is no more madder nation than Japan. And you walk down the street in Japan and you say to some Japanese, "Blah-d-blah, blither-blither," something of the sort. And he says, "I withhold my foul breath from your face," and "Yes," and so on. And he goes on down the street. And you told him that you were on your way home and you wanted him to go on to the office. And he took it that you were on your way to the office and you wanted to go home.

You say, "Just a min, you mean the word apple equals the word apple?"

It's supposed to be a terribly hard language. It's not a hard language. It's as simple as baby talk, really. It's an awfully easy language in terms of languages. Some of the Malay languages are a little bit rough.

"Well, if you want to put it that way."

But in katakana you have this great big character, which is a Chinese character, and then you have the little katakana stuff up at the corner of it (if I'm using the proper terms on this; it's been years since I ran into this stuff).

You say, "Wait a minute. The word apple is just a symbol again, and is a theoretical abstract and has nothing to do with apples, except it's a symbol." And he'll say, "Yes, that's true. That's true."

Anyway, they've got the character and then they say how it's pronounced in Japanese. But do you know that two Japanese can stand together and converse with each other for a little while and then all of a sudden find out they're talking about two entirely different things, and with a great surprise find this out, and they promptly break out their pencils and pieces of paper, and they draw the Chinese character for the proper words they're using. "Oh. Oh, I understand; that's very good. Yeah, very good, yeah. I so solly. Yeah." Whee! That's a rough one.

Now, you say, "Then apple equals apple. Now, give me two apples which are equal to each other."

They identify. And you will find that they're perfectly happy to do that. It makes bad communication. And they're perfectly happy to have bad communication. They don't want anything better than that. If you went in there and tried to straighten their language out and give them new words to support these, why, they'd be upset with you as all could be.

"Why, it's easy. Here's two . . ." Now you've got him on infirm ground.

Now, you take katakana is, I think, if I remember rightly, some forty-seven characters – just sort of fishing this out of the hat. It's been ages since I ran into this. Anyway, some forty-seven characters, something like that. And when they write them all down they don't space anything – when they're just a stream of characters. There's no spaces that separate any of the words they represent. And boy, that sentence can read any way. It can read "The boy milked the cow" or it can read "Dogs are forbidden here" or it can read "The steamer will sail at nine." They don't care. Well, you just sort of infer from the surroundings what it's all about.

Do you know that as long as the universe is old there has never been one apple equal to another apple. No two apples have ever been equal. Equal means exactly the same, and there'll be some difference in the billions and billions of cells which go to make up an apple. There'll be some difference between those two apples, just in number of cells.

And that nation has the highest rate of suicide, has the highest rate of thick-lens glasses and did the most suicidal trick a few years ago. It's the doggonedest country.

But there's another much more definite difference between the two, and that is: one occupies one space and time, and the other occupies another space and time. And even if you said this apple is equal to itself, you'd have to say when, so it would require another definition.

I can talk that way about Japan because actually I'm very, very fond of the Japanese. It almost broke my heart in the last war to be fighting the Japanese, because I consider them a very interesting and a very, very nice people, as a people. And all of a sudden I was – kaboom.

A equals B if A and B are the same object and if they both occur in "now." And on this crazy thing we're going to erect a mathematics? Oh, no.

That's a silly thing about war: You find yourself shooting up your friends and trying to explain to people that... They say, "Well, why should you feel bad about some of these bucktooth Nips?" and "They did this and they did that."

You do all you want with mathematics. But you will find out that it's a vague similarity — is considered to be, for practical purposes and application and never because it's true — similar to a vague similarity. And these two vague similarities are similar to each other for working and practical purposes in solving some of the simpler — only the simpler problems in the material universe. Now, isn't that a — that's a — really a qualified definition, isn't it?

And you say, "Didn't we? Didn't we too?"

And that definition appears and applies to arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, analytics, calculus, differential calculus. It applies to differentials. It applies to the theory of equations and it applies to quantum mechanics. And there isn't any more mathematics, really. There's symbolic logic. That's a great one, that is. They try to make up a mathematics which will approximate in terms of symbols what goes on in the human mind. That's great. One fellow says, "I think I will open the door." Now, to put this down in symbolic logic — well, there's about 9 pages and about 150 symbols. Oh, it's just wonderful. You try to approximate in terms of symbol what's going on in the real universe, it only has one value and that is one of the ways the mind thinks, but only one of the ways the mind thinks, and that's by approximation.

But they're crazy, those people.

A mind thinks by pervasion — that is going into things and getting their beingness — or by approximation; it just mocks them up. There's another way the mind thinks. We won't worry about that right now.

It's fascinating; it should tell you a great deal. It should tell you that the sanity of an individual is dependent upon his ability to differentiate clearly and cleanly, particularly in the field of communication.

It can actually pervade everything and see how it squares around, or it can simply just do a mock-up over here and say, "this mock-up is similar to the real thing and it's close enough in its similarity. Therefore I'll find out what's true in the mock-up and then just say, for the devil of it, that it's true in the — what we're drawing it similar to."

And what do you know? It has nothing to do with logic. In order to differentiate, you don't have to be logical. And what does this mean? It means that an individual who can differentiate to a tremendous degree can also create to a tremendous degree, and really is living in such instantaneous time (which will be covered later) that he doesn't have any real need to be logical.

And when you're doing that, by the way, you're more accurate. There's a greater accuracy.

Why does he ever have to figure anything out? He can create so much action that action always solves action: boom-boom-bing! Action, action. Or he finds out the whole universe is run wrong – boom! another universe. It does not make any difference to him. But here we have logic.

Now, absolutes are unobtainable, so I can say, "more accurate." I can say, "righter, wronger." This immediately proceeds, you see. If you can't say A equals B with truth, then you can't say, "It is right" and "It is wrong." You've got Aristotelian logic — and boy, the world has fallen on its face and man is in horrible shape today because really the only logic he had for a long time was Aristotelian logic.

Communication in essence depends upon logic.

And Aristotelian logic goes this way: A equals B, C equals D. Now, if B equals C, then A equals D. And that's told you this: The morals of the case are right and wrong. There's no gradient scale of rightness. There's no gradient scale of wrongness. And that immediately told you that there couldn't be any ethics. So the day that Aristotle introduced his beautiful syllogism, he kissed goodbye to the world of ethics, which are rightness adjusted by judgment and reason. Rightnesses adjusted by judgment and reason. Now, that happens to be ethics. And that rightness is always relative and it is never arbitrary. In order to have a man ethical, you have to have a man capable of reason and judgment. He has to be able to evaluate data and draw conclusions from the data in order to have society.

What's logic? It's a shade of similarities. It is never a shade of identities. Identities are theoretical things which exist in mathematics only and do not exist in the real universe. And mathematics is not directly applicable to the real universe but is only an abstract of the real universe, which makes it easier and handier to get some sort of approximation of what's going on in the real universe. Anybody can cast up any kind of theoretical mathematics he wants to cast up and he can get wonderful results, and he can also figure out all kinds of things that aren't there.

But if you have a society which is a moral society, it only needs this: it's right or it's wrong. Things can't be wronger than wrong or less wrong than wrong or righter than right or less right than right. No, no. No. You have right and wrong and therefore people have to run, then, on a code of morals.

It doesn't mean anything's wrong with mathematics; it means that mathematics has a greater virtuosity than even a mathematician suspected. It's wonderful. But if you start identification with a mathematical formula, you can follow almost anything out.

So you can't get any decent conduct and you can't have anything but a force society as long as A equals B, C equals D and if B equals C, A equals D. That's all you could have is a force society: a society that needed a police force to enforce its morals. That was the function of the church. That has been 99 percent of the function of the state — enforcing a moral code, whether they call that moral code the code of common law, the Code Napoleon, the Ten Commandments. I don't care what they call this code, it was an arbitrary. It said, "Thou shalt not, thou shalt not and thou shalt and thou shalt and thou shalt and thou shalt."

If you start identifying with zero, for instance – whoo! You get the Einstein time formula. Oh, I've forgotten what it is, but there's t0 in there. And then people come around and they say, "Einstein's time formula. You know, it's the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equation as used and modified by Einstein, and that demonstrates that nothing can go faster than the speed of light."

There's nothing wrong with having a code like this. We're not talking about rightness and wrongness. All we're talking about is the relative workability of it. Whenever you introduce an arbitrary into a society, into anything — when you introduce a solid arbitrary into an equation, you're going to have failure.

And you say, "Well, wait a minute, it's got the square root of zero in it."

There's the field of Scientology.

And they say, "Well, that's t0 and that's different. That means 'no time'."

Once upon a time the Great Chinaman of Konigsberg said: "Man will never know truth since truth is beyond the realm of human understanding and anything worth knowing is beyond the realm of human understanding and therefore this great truth which I seem mysteriously to know enough about to tell you about is actually beyond the realm of human understanding so therefore I am understanding beyond the realm of understanding and I am not human but you are and you'd better listen to me and therefore we have an arbitrary which we're introducing in the year 1792 called Kantian reason. And this is now going to dog the whole field of philosophy until 1950, when somebody is going to machine-gun it."

And you say, "Yeah," you say, "that's a zero."

And sure enough, when he introduced that arbitrary and when society actually paid some attention to the introduction of that arbitrary, we got static philosophy. We got no thought. Today you wouldn't run up to anybody who had studied philosophy in a university and ask him to do some philosophizing. No, you would go to him to find out what philosophers had said.

"Well, no, that's just zero time; that's the nonexistence of time. That's..."

So the whole field of philosophy became, in training, not making philosophers, but making people who knew what philosophers had philosophized about, which immediately was saying, "All that has been thought of is all that can be thought of." It's saying, "The only thing left in the field of philosophy is just to study what the philosophers have philosophized about. That's all that's left and therefore we'll make a Doctor of Philosophy by the simple expedient of making him know what all the philo."

And you say, "There's a zero in the formula!"

You'd think, offhand, that a good society would train people to philosophize, to figure things out. You'd think that a society couldn't get along without that. Well, they can't. What do you know? They can't. They have wars and famines and disasters and rebellions and everything else because there's nobody around thinking anything out. Everything's just kind of growing in a — or decaying, and nobody can change it because A equals B and thou shalt not and thou shalt. We have a society of statics which are pretending to be kinetics, and so the society doesn't go very far — doesn't go anyplace.

"Well," they say, "oh, I guess you could call it a zero. But this is mathematics and that's different."

Now, on this level you could get enormous advances in the physical science and you couldn't get a single advance in the field of the humanities. So all of a sudden in 1945, we woke up to the fact that we had an atom bomb, kaboom! and we didn't have anything in the humanities.

No sir. No sir, it's not different. Algebra – all you've got to do is throw a zero into the equation and what do you get in algebra? You can get 1=2, 2=12; you get any answer you want out of an algebraic formula if you just throw a zero in it – if you throw a slippy zero in it – that says 1-1=2.. And what do you know? It can be worked out so it will: 1-1=2, because 1-1 is zero. And any time you throw a zero in...

Now, this is a very interesting point. This means that we had no trouble controlling an atom bomb. Do you know there is no trouble at all controlling atomic energy? No trouble at all! When you push a button it goes off. When you don't push the button it doesn't go off. That's all there is to controlling atomic ... And you lead shield the places the stuff is stored and you do this and you do that and it's all under control. Nobody's worried about these atomic stockpiles anywhere in the world — because it's under control.

So, an identification is usable in the theoretical abstract. But if applied to the world of reality or universes, it's insanity. And what's the matter with the insane patient? Why is he in that sanatorium? Well, I'll tell you why he's there. He's there because he doesn't know the bed from the bureau from the chair from the attendant from present time from 1760. That's why he's there. He really doesn't.

The problem is not the control of atomic energy. The problem is quite something else. It's the control of the person who is controlling the atomic energy. And that problem isn't even vaguely solved. So if you were going to have atomic energy, somebody should have gotten up right away and said, "Hey, wait a minute. How we going to control the control of atomic energy?" Not how are we going to control atoms, but how are we going to control the beings who have these atoms in their grasp?

Now, some of the time he will know and he'll apparently differentiate beautifully. He'll know that you eat the food on the plate, not the plate. And he'll get along that way and he'll get along on some automatic responses alright. And he'll go into a dramatization. And this thing will run off like a phonograph record – it has no application to present surroundings. And what has he done? He's said that "this dramatization, this phonograph record which I am running off this way, that runs just this way, is applicable in this surrounding and solves the present problems." That's identification.

Because without ethics they can't be controlled. Without ethics they can't be controlled. You cannot control that broadly in the field of morals.

You could say a sane person has thoughts like this that he can connect or relate if he wishes. A logical person has thoughts, each one of which bears a resemblance to the last one, and that's kind of aberrated because it's stimulus-response thinking.

A moral will not work that well, because a fellow can always say, "Let's see. There's a moral that says thou shalt not kill. Hah-hah. There are people in the world who are liable to kill. Therefore it is up to me to enforce this fact, 'Thou shalt not kill.' Now, the best way to do this is for me to have some atomic bombs . . ." You see, the whole thing's defeated itself instantly.

Have you ever had anybody tell you that you really couldn't think of an original thought because it depended upon the last thought? Well, that is an operation – that is an insidious, black operation. They're trying to convince you that you have no ability to think an original thought, and if you can't think an original thought, you can't have an original universe, and that every thought you thought depended on some thought you had just thought before. Ooh. They're showing you, you have no illusion, that you have nothing of your own, really – it's just sort of all running off in an uncontrolled, horrible stream that just goes on and on, that you think all the time, that all your thoughts are connected to all your thoughts and there's some shadow of this... Nuh-uh, that's not true. Fortunately for our sanities that is not true. But gee, it sure is good.

The fact that the moral code is there means it has to be enforced. And when anything has to be enforced it requires weapons. The only thing which can control the atomic bomb is an ethic. Is it reasonable to bump off the better part of the human race? No. That's that! I mean, we have controlled the atomic bomb the second we've driven that through.

A ridge behaves this way. A ridge with facsimiles on it behaves this way, but not a thinking being. He can cut his thought line anyplace he wants to and start thinking about something else at will. It does not depend on earlier thoughts.

But how do we bring man up to a recognition of this reason after his many, many centuries of having been bogged down utterly — entirely different thing. Morals — A equals B. He's been taught, "Thou shalt not reason." It's right and it's wrong. It's white, it's black. These are absolutes, and so they will.

Now, you could also draw logic like this. You could say all these data are more or less related, you see? These are data, each one of these square boxes. And therefore, this thought is vaguely connected to that thought, see? And therefore, we have an association between those two thoughts.

So you see, you're actually studying the field of human knowledge, but way up above that you're studying knowledge. What's knowledge? What is knowledge? And we have answers. What is knowledge? See, good workable answers. They can do the strangest things. They can make people . . . You know that strata, you can make people well — if the truth be told, you could make them quite ill. You can make them happy. You can make them very sad. You can do most anything you wanted to with a human being, really. But because people come up the line in ethics when they study this, it's quite safe to release this information, particularly if there's a central core of people who know the whole subject well. That's your safeguard.

I'll give you a better example of that. We start talking about apples and that leads us into talking about apple boxes. And we say, "Well, let's box up these apples and sell them at the market." It's perfectly logical.

If this were merely published and published and published and published and no one was ever trained in it, it would be a very dangerous thing — nobody was ever trained.

Or we get this (this would be completely illogical): Man on a subway train, subway train's making an awful lot of noise, and he turns over to the other fellow and he says, "I'm trying to get off at Wembley. Where is it?"

It is upon the handful, actually — the very, very few who are being trained in this — that the burden of the application rests. They become, willy-nilly, "authorities."

The next fellow to him says, "This isn't Wednesday, it's Thursday."

Now, knowledge is knowledge. And if you will look at this knowledge in two sections, you'll get along better with it. One is this knowledge plus my own beingness and slant on existence. There's that one. You see, that's one subject, really: My own beingness and slant on existence interpreting this knowledge. And then there's the knowledge itself. And don't let the first one I mentioned blind you to the fact that there may be a lot more in the second one.

And the next one says above the roar of the train, "Well, I'm thirsty too. Let's all get off and have a beer." Now, you see, that's non sequitur.

There's the knowledge itself. And if anything was clean and pure and applicable in its raw state, Scientology is, just as Dianetics is.

To make that logical we'd have to tell it this way: The fellow leans over and he says, "I'm trying to go up to Wembley."

I can only caution you against applying this badly. I can only let my imagination show you some of the things which might occur if some of the basic elements were not watched carefully. But I can't blind you to the fact, and have no intentions to do so, that it exists as a body of knowledge. It's sort of like — I dug it up and there it is; and your own conscience, your own beingness, is really your only guide to your use and application of it. It exists as it is. And then it exists also as I interpret it.

And the fellow says, "Well, I'm not going there till tomorrow and it'll be Thursday. If you want to go there tomorrow, I will show you the way."

Now when I slant it, you will find my slants form up just like this — just these slants to it. One, play it on the good side. Use it reasonably to get man over the humps. Use it to straighten out the dynamics. Try not to aggrandize yourself because you know it. Try not to profit widely by it and be very humble about giving it to people.

And the other fellow says, "That reminds me, I haven't had a drink for hours. Let's all get off the train and have a beer."

Now, I can say all those things. Actually not one of them is necessary to the good application of this information. Not one of them. A man could probably ride through to the finest and highest degrees and office and state and so forth by being as rough, as crude, as mean, as selfish in the application of this knowledge as anybody could imagine and he possibly might get away with it. You might take this information and enslave all of mankind and bring him up to a higher state of existence simply by enslaving him. You might do an awful lot of things with this knowledge, but that's your opinion.

It isn't funny, is it? But it's logical. And that's the funny part of logic: it's not funny. And that's the funny part of humor. Humor is either complete identification or complete differentiation.

So I'm telling you where opinion stops and truth starts. The knowledge itself is truth. As I talk to you about it and as I try to teach you about it, you will find that it is slanted in the direction which I have mentioned it to you.

Now, you take the fellow on identification: We say he rode a horse, and he "rowed" a horse – r-o-w-e-d, he rowed a horse. That, by the way, is perfectly all right. I mean, to an insane person that would be logical – rowed a horse up the road.

This, by the way, is incomprehensible to a great many people out in the public. And they figure that if I slant this information in this direction I must have personally some terribly overt motive and there must be something awfully wrong with me — because they know what they'd do with it. Heh-heh. So there must be something wrong with me and I probably have a great many secret vices or something. I mean, there must be something awfully wrong. It's obvious that there is, because "If you knew how a man's mind worked," such a person would say, "if you could make him do exactly what you wanted him to do, if you could control him to that degree, you would, of course." A equals A. "If you could do this, you would. And that would be the best thing to do because you could."

All right, get those three categories.

However, if you tried to control mankind this way, you would wind up owning mankind, you poor, poor proprietor. You would wind up owning mankind, and I can think of no more dreadful fate or any redder or hotter hell than that one. You would wind up with the management of man in your lap if you started to apply this in the direction of acquisition and control. And you would seal the door against any happiness you would ever know, just as solidly and with the biggest spikes that you could imagine.

Now, that's identification.

Of course, this is only my opinion. But I know, to this degree. If I were talking to you as some fellow who had never commanded anything, who had never owned anything, that would be different. If I were just a little fellow — a little philosopher that kind of thought along and had stayed in an ivory tower and done it all theoretically — no, no. I'm not. I'm an engineer. I've commanded a great many things, a great many men have been under my command. I know the ins and outs of commands and the first in and out I know of command is, if you crave it, leave it alone. It's like a horrible drug.

Now let's take a look at these three compartments in terms of electronics. We could sort of say we have condensers. These cells, electronic cells, could be handled at will and any time; they are nicely insulated. One is insulated from another perfectly, they don't discharge one across the other, and therefore they can be controlled and regulated with great ease. Right?

Well, continuing this matter of the application and division of this knowledge. In applying any information, it depends a great deal on your own self-determinism. And your knowledge of the subject itself is best oriented by your demand of the subject. What are you going to use it for? For what is this subject going to be used by you?

On this one you don't have as thorough an insulation, but you do have an ability to link these things together to make a flow possible: the flow will go along here, you'll get some action on the flow. That's all right.

Now, I talk to you about command. I've commanded corvettes, I've commanded expeditions. And anybody who is foolish enough to want an exalted position above his fellow man is perfectly welcome to it. There is nothing wrong with it. As a matter of fact, it's a big kick. In this lifetime, I've practically occupied nothing else but posts of command. They require a strength of beingness the like of which you don't find in most people. They break you. They demand of you things that you ordinarily would never dream of having anything to do with at all. Fantastic. And when a person gets into a post of command because he craves it, there is nothing there but disaster for the command and disaster for himself.

But what about this one? That means a complete short circuit. Although this is in no wise connected with structure, it is peculiar to note that the protein molecules of the brain in an insane person are short circuited. A current entering any part of the head will evidently restimulate any part of the thinking apparatus. I mean, he starts thinking on anything, then he thinks of everything. But he thinks it all in the same time and without anything at all. So you get what is known as confusion, and that actually is the MEST universe – all force vectors going in all directions simultaneously: short circuit. Everything equals everything. Great.

Nothing ever must be approached with more humbleness than a post of command. And command is essentially control. Therefore, the desire to control one's fellow beings means the desire to command one's fellow beings. And raw experience itself will teach you the lessons with regard to this. Experience itself. I can sit here and play wise old graybeard to you, which I am not, and say, "Well, having done all these things and so forth, I can say that it isn't worthwhile." Maybe to you it is worthwhile. Maybe to you it is.

Now, you've got to have a differentiation, and you've got to pull this identification at least up to similarities to make an insane person well.

So, get your orientation points. You want to help your fellow man. I can tell you on that side of the ledger, there is nothing more thankless. You can actually, actually prepare yourself; if you're going to do nothing but help people, to do it for your own sake, because of your own desire for a feeling of well-being and job well done inside yourself — because Homo sapiens is never going to say to you, "Well done." He's never even going to say thank you.

The only thing you have to do to make an insane person well is to show him or have him recognize the difference between the attendant and the bureau. And I'm not talking just in nonsense; that is actually the best process. Get him to locate the attendant in time and space, get him to locate the bureau in time and space. Now get him to locate the bed in time and space, get him to locate his pyjamas in time and space. Now get him to locate his hand in time and space and his body in time and space. And all of a sudden he says, "I'm here and this is 1952." And that is the best technique I know of with which to treat the insane.

You can take the person who has the most hideous affliction and cure him most miraculously and utterly and he'll be very, very grateful to you for a very short space of time until it suddenly occurs to him, "Good heavens, if this person cured me, that makes him senior to me." And he will try in every way he can to remedy this situation. You will have preclears that you have done your best for and you have failed on. And you will spend many a racked hour thinking about what you might have done because you know you could have done better. And you will have preclears that you would rather not work with, who will go all around your neighborhood or all around your area telling people what a dog you are, what a dog you are, what a dog you are.

Now, identification, similarity and difference; then these are the three levels. All right.

Why? What will stop him from doing this? He'll say, "Dianetics is no good and this thing Scientology, that's just a chimera," and so on. "And that auditor particularly . . . I've heard it said that there are little boys, actually — that this auditor, you know, has connection — and horrible, and I understand that the real reason why that one went crazy and so forth is because this ..." And you'll say, "How in the name of God can you stop this person?" This person only wants one thing: processing from you. Now, isn't that wonderful, that he would go to this degree to get processing from you? He will damn you in every character. You're really dealing with a loop when you're dealing with Homo sapiens.

And by the way, you don't have to keep too close a record of this. You'd better keep notes on some of them, but we will have these in AP&A, which will be issued to all of you as soon as it's manufactured, and that will be in ten days or two weeks.

Now, actually you can use this information to bail yourself out of the MEST universe. You could become the best Homo sapiens anybody ever heard of. Or you could become Homo novis with it. Or you could even go further than that and bail yourself out and make a universe of your own. So you see, you- have a variety of choices. I don't think anybody's ever offered this many choices before. You have a variety.

Male voice: It is in AP&A already, isn't it?

So you want to make up your mind what you're trying to do here. Now, you could even study this on — "Well, I'll do anything that turns up. And anything that seems logical to me after I have this information, I'll reserve judgment because after I've been processed for a while I will know more." Oh boy, is that true. That's true. That's true. But that shouldn't keep you or halt you at any time; any thought like that should never halt you or halt a preclear from making a decision. Never, never give way to this one: "Well, I'll be saner tomorrow or I'll be better able to judge tomorrow and therefore I'll judge tomorrow."

We have this edition of it coming out here.

Nu-huh. Judge today. Figure it out today, right now. Always go on the basis, "Well, I'm always sane, my judgment is never wrong, I can't be wrong anyhow, I am always right." Because who knows — who knows, you might be righter than you know.

Logic 1: Knowledge is a whole group or subdivision of a group of data or speculations or conclusions on data or methods of gaining data.

Now, just because you figure it out differently tomorrow is no reason you can't change it, you know. And just because you said today, "This is final to the end of time," is no reason why something else can't be final to the end of time tomorrow that's totally contradictory to it. Because unless you are capable of changing widely, varying widely, shifting your goals, shifting your targets and so forth, you aren't pliable. And you'll continue to be aberrated.

We have said, in that, knowledge is data – knowledge is data. It's facts or data. And we don't, notice, say about what. We don't say it's data about anything, we just say it's data. A datum is a fact. It would have some identification, then, with space, time, energy or matter, or some combination thereof. And that would be a datum; it would be a descriptive thing. It could be the thing itself or it could be a symbol representing the thing itself See how wide our definition is here.

So don't worry about this. And furthermore, the pressure of life and death to you will shortly be a pressure no more. Therefore, the penalty for guessing wrong drops to practically nothing. You're in the horrible position of walking outside the field of penalty. Because you die as Homo sapiens, it works out, is no reason why you are going to die. If you died as Homo sapiens and never knowing that you were anything but Homo sapiens — yes, there is a chance that you would fly off to wherever the dead and departed go and come back fifteen minutes later. You'd be somebody else.

Now, Logic 2: A body of knowledge is a body of data, aligned or unaligned, or methods of gaining data. There it is.

But you could walk off from your body and be yourself and rehabilitate yourself. And actually, in the first fifteen minutes of play when you step out of your body, you know you're outside, you .know you're you and you know you're detached from it. And you know you're not it. That piece of knowledge takes place awfully fast when it takes place. Oh, does it take place fast. And you all of a sudden say, "Well, for heaven's sakes." The moment you say that, you're immortal.

Now, Logic 3 is: Any knowledge which can be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity is capable of influencing that entity.

And get the big joke: You're more immortal than any Greek god because those poor guys fooled around with MEST bodies and idols in temples in the form of human beings — they liked those idols — until they did a dive. They did a transfer, and you will find Athena and Loki somewhere in the line today. You will also find some other actual beings — they were actual once, they were thetans and so forth — and one of them is Lucifer. You'll find Lucifer somewhere in the line. The joke is that there were several Lucifers.

And that is a rifle shot straight into Kantian reason. That is a good, solid, big, heavy-caliber rifle shot. That is a declaration of independence over the types of nonsensical, mystical balderdash they were passing out 160 years ago, and which killed the ability to think in man more than anything else I know.

I would hate to tell you who else you'll find in the line. I would just hate to tell you who else you'll find in the line. But one of these days you're going to put somebody on an E-Meter — you're going to put a lot of somebodies on the E-Meter, and because they've done so many overt acts against some of these characters, they're going to be these characters.

The philosophy was one of the beautiful control mechanisms. It said "All knowledge that is any knowledge at all transcends the realm of human experience and therefore a human being can never contact it and never know it, so knowledge is beyond knowing for you. Back into the pit, you slave, back into the salt mines; you will never know."

You're going to put somebody on the meter and find out that they were a very high and exalted personage right here on Earth once upon a time. There are two sides to that picture — they were either part and parcel of the people who killed that exalted personage and then did a life continuum, or they were the person. And the first one is the more likely. You'll find lots of Cleopatras, for instance. Boy, did she have enemies.

And that was the byword: German transcendentalism. And that ruled the world of knowledge and philosophy and laid poor old Philosophy in her grave for about 162 years. Interesting, isn't it?

They say there were three hundred reincarnations to Buddha — the bodhisatta. You read the Jataka. The Jataka is very revealing — a book not very well known in the United States, if known at all. And I don't know whether it's well known here but it should be much better known here. The Jataka, J-a-t-a-k-a, the three hundred reincarnations of the bodhisatta. And they claim he (to be British colloquial) did a bunk and left this area afterwards. Or did they claim it? Or did he? Or someday on an E-Meter as you process somebody, are you going to find Buddha who fooled around one time too many and did a transfer? And my guess is that that is going to be the case.

They said all knowledge is above the realm of human experience. Well, just look at that for a moment, and you'll find out: How can knowledge be above the realm of human experience if the human being is even using the word knowledge to describe it?

My guess is that for this reason, the guy was unwilling to use force of any kind and got into the line that he got into by being unwilling to use force. And if he was that unwilling to use force he wound up on the wrong side of the ledger somewhere. Because every one of your great teachers along the line, early in his life was a dog! Oh, boy! Were they terrible! When Christ was about ten they had an awful time with him, according to the legends that kick around in that area today. That's the truth. His parents sort of had to move out of the neighborhood every once in a while because he was too rough. Here he was, a super-high-powered thetan that didn't quite know the limits of his strength, and all of a sudden woke up one day and found out that he came from what we call the northwest. All right . . . that's colloquial — that's just a part of the universe.

It says anything can be sensed by an entity which can influence the entity. Anything can be sensed by the being in some fashion or other, otherwise there isn't any such thing as a one-way flow.

And he became a great teacher. And he did miraculous and wonderful things. And when he died, he detached, and knew it, and went around and saw some of his disciples and said, "Well, goodbye boys."

That's what it says in electronics. It says a flow that can run this way on a wire could be rigged to run the other way on the wire. And it says if you get a flow coming this way on the wire, you can measure it as coming this way on the wire. That's all. And it says that we are not then governed as dirty little puppets of some sort or another, all busted up and kicked into the gutter and used any way anybody cares to use us. No, it says we are beings capable of knowing. And that's all that Logic says. We are beings capable of knowing. And that is actually something that will probably always go unremarked, but that is what broke the back of the human mind – just that.

Now, I'd hate to tramp on anybody's religious toes. You understand that I'm not doing so. There is no reason why we shouldn't say, "Boy, that was really something, and he was a great man, and he gave man a guiding light for an awful long time. Yes sir, he did a job. He did a good job." No doubt about it.

And the first statement I ever made on that was: They keep telling me in the psychology department, they keep telling me in India, they keep telling me here and telling me there that it's all too complex for anybody to know about. Well, I am affected by the activities of the human mind and the activities of other minds. And if I am affected by them, I know I can know about it.

Buddha did a good job. Buddha brought civilization to areas of this Earth that never would have been civilized otherwise, just never. So did the Greek gods do a good job. All these people did a good job. But just look at the first chapters of the New Testament, the way it has been — was either originally taught or the way it has been rewritten. And you know the Bible gets rewritten about every sixty or seventy years. That's the truth of the matter. You can go down here and find some original translations. They do not agree with the later translations. It's very interesting that the Bible shifts around the way it does, particularly the New Testament.

And everybody said, "Oh, no, no, no! Nnnnnn! Nasty, nasty, you must not touch." And boy, a lot of them are sorry I did. But don't let me catch anybody here falling in that same pit of saying it's all too complex, or agreeing with somebody saying we can't know about it, or we don't have the right to know about it, because experience has told us adequately, by this time, that we have every right to know about the human mind.

Now, it's very peculiar that they should have the Old Testament and the New Testament in the same covers, because Christ was, if anything, a revolutionary. He was telling people, "Was man made for the sabbath or was the sabbath made for man?" and so forth. The poor guy's revolution is sitting there in a continuation of the Old Testament in the Bibles which you buy down here at the bookstall.

And it's told us something else: That there are two additional rights that man has to have before he can achieve political freedom. And one is the right to his own life and the other is the right to his own sanity. And those had better be added to the rights of man. And if you today are fighting a revolution or find yourself fighting a revolution, it will add up eventually to fighting for those two rights: one's right to his own life and his right to his own sanity.

It's something like printing Karl Marx right up next door, or something like that, to the great proponent of all conservatism. Let's print Confucius and Karl Marx in the same volume and then say, "Well, this is a book." You can't imagine that, can you? Well, look at the New and Old Testaments together there. "I am a god of wrath." The second part of it says, "Our Father is a god of love." Oh great. I mean, there's not much difference.

Now, right here on Earth, right to one's own life would be quite revolutionary. But it applies to the whole MEST universe – the right to one's own sanity. Because throughout this universe, that is the line that has been denied. Nobody had any right to his own sanity. So the declaration is very simple. It says "You have a right to know. And if you have a right to know, you really should have a right to continue knowing." That, of course, is just an interpolation by me and an opinion by me. That's not necessarily data.

Actually, the Yahweh — you see, that's Jehovah, Yahweh. You can pronounce it any way you want to because the mystery of the case left out all the vowels — it's just a collection of consonants and then only the high priest would know how to pronounce the consonant, therefore his name could never be used in vain.

Now, a corollary: That knowledge which cannot be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity or type of entity cannot influence that entity or type of entity.

Now, unless you go widely out into the realm of study in this, unless you study it from all of its different sides, unless you take it from some of its original source which is India here on Earth, and see where these lines lead in, it becomes a very puzzling picture.

If it can't be sensed, measured or experienced by him it can't influence him. So let's have done with voodoo, mumbo jumbo and the great god WallaWalla. Just skip them. Because any time you feel yourself creepily wondering whether or not you aren't being influenced from some direction, go find your auditor. For two reasons: (1) You'd have to be in awfully bad shape to be so influenced, and (2) because 99 and 9999999 percent of the time... And 100 percent of the time you could identify it. So what you're protesting against would be your inability to identify. And if you can't identify something immediately, what do you know, it's not important.

But let's look at that old book itself, and look at that very interesting book. It's a fascinating book. Do you know that the Book of Job is probably the oldest written manuscript known to man and comes straight from India. It's an old, old book and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Yahweh. It just happens to be included in there. You see, nobody quite got organized on this whole thing. They just kept throwing these things together and you'll find Yahweh as a specialized case and then you find Christ following right after, teaching a god of love. Fascinating. That book is very confused.

So, just on the subject of knowledge, we are dealing with the level of knowledge. We're dealing with epistemology, actually, that branch of philosophy which has to do with identifying the identity of knowledge. And that, by the way, is Scientology; the therapy is Dianetics.

Now, I'm going to ask you bluntly to reexamine some of your possible conclusions along this line: not because God is good, bad, not because one should be an atheist, not because one should be holy, not because one should be anything. But let's take a look at it because the truth of the matter is that what you know of God, you know very intimately. Because that's you. The life that beats in you and thinks in you and is in you connects up directly and is a part and parcel of an infinity which we could classify as the Supreme Being.

Now, Logic 4: A datum is a facsimile of states of being, states of not being, action or inactions, conclusions or suppositions in the physical or any other universe.

Yeah, you've got a direct inside line on this. And you will find that when you say, "God is different than . . ." and "I have no connection than ..." and "I depend on the approval of a mysterious thing of which there might or might not be affinity, might or might not be a communication and might or might not be a reality," you have a wonderful confusion there. That's gorgeous, because that's aberration itself. Does he love you or doesn't he? Can you communicate with him or can't you? Does he exist or doesn't he?

I'm going to make a change on this. I have just a moment ago defined a datum for you. I said a datum was a symbol of, or the actual thing, of space, time, matter or energy in any universe. It was a symbol of space, time, matter, energy or any combination thereof. Or it was the matter, space, time, energy itself, symbol of. That's a datum. In other words, it is any scrap of or any combination of or a symbol of any scrap of or any combination of any universe: datum – no matter how great, no matter how small. And that's a datum.

Well, there's something to it if many billion men in the past two thousand years — there's something to what I say about confusion, if you examine the fact that billions of men in the past two thousand years have been killed in his name, murdered, raped, burned. Wonderful. There is no more savageness has ever existed on the face of the earth than has existed in the name of the Prince of Peace. So something is wrong.

So that change should be noted by you.

In World War I our troops kept walking across to the German lines after battles and there lay the German corpses and what did they have on their belt buckles? "Gott mit uns." And the German troops would look at our slain and they would see the crosses around the neck, the amulets and so forth. There was something wrong. And World War I broke the grip of religion upon the world because it took millions of men and it showed them that they were fighting millions of men of God. Wonderful. They couldn't have planned it better if they desired to break the back of organized religion on Earth.

A datum is not a facsimile. I am very relieved and pleased to tell you that a facsimile is not necessary to the process of thinking, but is a record of the process of thinking which is used by people in thinking. In other words, there was another method of thinking. And in better knowing that new method of thinking, we have much wider powers of thinking. But this was in the realm of discovering something new, whereas the facsimile system is actually – as all these datums were slanted – wholly Homo sapiens. That's how Homo sapiens thinks. And we're having to use this whole list of Axioms, and this is the changes you'll find in it: the whole list of Axioms now are applicable to the thetan. So we have a list of Axioms which apply to Homo sapiens, and the ones I'm giving you now apply to a thetan. They're up-strata each time, a little bit – a little higher knowingness.

And do you know that the calmness which had existed before in societies — there were things that could be done. One of the primary powers of the state, one of the ways of getting civilization on the road was religion. And it lost its grip in 1914-1918. And the world lost one of its primary civilization controls.

Now, Logic 5: A definition of terms is necessary to the alignment, statement and resolution of suppositions, observations, problems and solutions and their communication.

And what had to happen? Something had to happen. This one was pretty well gone. The church was no longer attended. It had ceased to be the tremendous power that it once was. It was in disorderly state as never before. People still went to church. They still dropped this. But back on the battlefields were belt buckles with "Gott mit uns" on them. The most savage denunciations were written, the most puzzled pleas appeared in papers to get some way out of this strange misunderstanding. Christ is on our side. Christ is on our side. No, it's on our side. No, we're fighting for Christ. Somebody, after the war, began to realize nobody was fighting for Christ, but somebody had sold a bill of goods and with an educated world — now the world was getting educated.

"If you'd argue with me, define your terms." That's just taken straight out of Voltaire's mouth and made more complicated. And we can change that Logic 5 a little bit this way: A definition of terms is necessary – a definition of terms. We can go worse than that and we can say a definition of data. You've got to describe what data you're talking about before you can talk about the data.

One of the primary factors of civilization which had given it its aesthetic, disappeared out of our civilized life almost wholly compared to where it had been. It's pretty hard for anyone here to remember back before 1914 directly in this life. But a man could be comfortable about religion in 1900, a man could be. And he could be comfortable about religion in 1850. And the world was kind of divided up two ways — there were good women and there were bad women. And there were holy people and there were unholy people. And there were pagans and infidels and Christians. And it was all — oh, it was beautifully — I mean everything was all categorized and understood and people had agreed upon this and one of the primary parts of the agreement structure of civilization disappeared. Something, some new understanding had to take place.

Definition (and by the way, this is a very, very slippy thing) – this is the definitions of definitions. A Descriptive definition: one which classifies by characteristics, by describing existing states of being.

And so we found Hindu philosophies coming into the Western world. It was wonderful that anybody would buy Hindu philosophy. Nobody in the Western world certainly, please not that.

Example: People are insane and there are five classes of insanity. One is schizophrenia, another is manic-depressive, another is dementia praecox, another one is oh, I don't know, over the barrel and another one is the polka. These manifest themselves by having that... the patient itches, and so on. What is schizophrenia? Schizophrenia applies to a patient who itches. Difference: some schizophrenics don't itch. Now get that, that sounds awfully wicked of me and vicious, but you know I had to wade through all that stuff. You don't have to and I had to.

I was a young, vital kid up against Hindu philosophy once. Mysticism, Krishna, nirvana, so forth. And I used to look at this sort of thing and I would say, "You know, there's just got to be something there. There just must be something there. But when I look at what it's done to this people, I don't want it."

I waded through it under the supposition that I could find something out. You know, I'd get bashed in and mowed down by these words, words, words. Well, that's definition by classification: describing different states of being. That's a very bad way to define.

And I found out in the temples of the Western Hills of China, in the foothills leading up to Tibet and in :India, a condemnation of mysticism that existed in the form of want, unhappiness, disease, lack of initiative, lack of aesthetic, which itself condemned the whole philosophy. And I developed a little maxim that said, "The more a society is addicted to superstition, the worse it will prosper. The better a society has knowingness about the factors of its operation, the more orderly and prosperous and happy that society will be."

Now, we get definition, Differentiative definition: one which compares unlikeness to existing states of being or not being.

Therefore, to rise high, a society must go toward knowingness, not toward superstition. And I've been going in that direction ever since.

"Smallpox: Smallpox is different from other illnesses because it leaves poxes." "Diphtheria is diphtheria because it is not like smallpox."

Now, we can talk about this being science. Well, it's not like any science anybody's thought of before. In the first place, it is in one chunk, it is well ordered and it's graded, and it's evaluated and it didn't keep dropping into place from here and there and here and there and changing. Now, that's an interesting thing about it because .science essentially stems from deductive reasoning. You take a mass of data and then you take some of the data and evaluate it and you get a fact or a law.

Well now, those are ridiculous examples of this type of classification. But it's circular reasoning. And you be careful of this when you start studying something. Read it over, and if it's just saying that it is classified by being classified, or by things that are like it, that's a pretty kind of a poor definition. And it's classified by things which are unlike it, that's a poor definition for the observable reason...

Almost the entire strata of what we're studying here is inductive reasoning. You say, "This must be fairly high as a common denominator, now let's see if we can find something in the material universe to support it. Now, let's examine thoroughly to find out if there are any exceptions in the material universe. Oh, there are not? Fine. We'll leave it at that." In other words, this thing is going exactly the opposite direction. It's actually and essentially the evolution of a philosophy. But it's a philosophy of what? It's a philosophy of knowledge which would make it automatically closer to a science than science.

Now, the Associative definition is: one which declares likeness to existing states of being or not being.

So when you try to classify this for somebody, you look it over very carefully, you're not going to be able to classify it for them. You just tell them, "Well, Scientology really means epistemology, you know." And when they look blank, leave them looking blank. The dickens with trying to go out along the line and explain to somebody, "Well, now, it's a science."

Now we get an Action definition: one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, inexistence, action, inaction, purpose or lack of purpose. That sounds complicated, but that's not.

And they say, "Well, deductive, you've got this mass of data and you selected this and that from it and these had to be inevitable conclusions. No, that hasn't been done that way."

A definition should contain within it both the cause and remedy – the cause, effect and remedy: "Measles is that illness which causes children to break out in rashes and is cured by serum so- and-so, so-and-so." You could then go on and say it's similar to some other things. But get that: it's a good definition; it tells you at least what cures it – kind of a little bit of what it looks like and then what cures it. That's a good definition.

He's right. It hasn't been done that way. No science was ever done that way, only he doesn't know it. The big joke is on him.

Now, if you could also say – you could say this with certainty – "measles is an illness which is caused by the virus measleus..." Nobody knows what causes it, by the way; they pretend to have taken some pictures with an electronic microscope of the measles virus recently and-hm-hm. Then they found a bunch more that were just like it and they didn't cause measles, and that was very upsetting. And then the ones they did find didn't cause measles invariably. But they released a big news story about it when they found it. Anyway, they never release the third and fourth news stories; that makes it tough for us. We come along, we have something new that will make you well and everybody says, "We know these things that are new and make you well that appear on the front pages of the papers never make anybody well the third week. So we know that they're not there."

Couple of chaps sat over here one day, at one time or another here in England. One of them, Bacon — Bacon writing with his quill pen one-day, was dashing off examples of what should be — "And this you'd call a science." So he says, "All right. We'll take . . ." I think it was botany; it was either botany or biology, I've forgotten which it was. Anyway, one page of this manuscript he said, "If you take, for instance — a science should be organized this way, and this would be the organization of it" — and we will say it was botany — "you'd do these steps and these would be the classifications of the science and you'd gather the facts and data about this in this order and that would be the s ." And what do you know? Today it is. Isn't that interesting? I mean, this fellow dished up a science in ten minutes one afternoon.

Well, anyway, descriptive definitions are just fine, but an action definition is what you want to demand. And learn to demand one of the physical universe. What's the cause of it? What's the effect? And what remedies it? Or what changes it? And demand that of your definition. And if you can demand that of your definition, there isn't a problem under the sun, in this or any other universe, that'll defy your understanding or resolution. Just demand those things: What it is, what causes it, what its effect is and how to alter it. And you can solve it. Any mystery of anything under the sun, by the way, resolves under the same conditions, just by definitions only.

There, complete. And I think it's the science of botany. It's all there. It's sitting there on a page of manuscript.

Now Logic 6 – and please know Logic 6! Please, please, I ask you this. If you don't know anything else in this subject, know Logic 6.

And you take Newton. Newton laid down the primary principles of physics and he laid down the primary principles of calculus, mathematics — that type of mathematics — just bang, bang. Sitting with his feet on a mantelpiece one day and said, "Well, I guess we'll have a philosophy and we'll turn it in and we'll call it a science and it'll be a science of motion. That's fine." Zing-zing, zing-zing. "Now, what'll really give me trouble is gravity and it'll take me several days to solve that." And he did.

Logic 6 is: Absolutes are unobtainable. There's no absolute universe. There's no absolute Clear. There's no absolute right, there's no absolute infinity, there's no absolute zero, there's no absolute wrong, there isn't an absolute black, an absolute white – nothing. And so don't let anybody say to you, "A Clear and yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yap."

And now we want people coming around saying, "Well, they accumulated a large mass of evidence and they worked for years and they did this." Well, it would be very nice and it would be very charming and inevitable if they sort of did but they didn't. You got botany in this fashion. You got — actually, natural history was almost completely organized by "Mister Aristotle." You got physics. And then there was some old fellow I — Mendeliev or Mendeleev, or something of this sort, drew a periodic chart and we had chemistry.

And you say, "Well, where do you get that?" And they say, "Well, it's yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yap, and it follows, therefore, they would be perfect. And this last person you processed – Theta Clear – came down and my wife was minding her own business and... Well, that's what happened. And therefore, he couldn't have been Clear because he wasn't perfect and good."

Just fascinating. I mean, these sciences which are supposed to have taken place with billions of workers slaving like mad and gathering up data the same way you would use a bulldozer, you know, and then somebody going over the garbage pile and trying to find some important data in it. That's supposed to be the way science is originated and that's a myth. That's sort of one of the ways that you keep sciences from originating.

Doesn't follow. It's completely a non sequitur identification of perfection with a term which you have. All Clear means in the first place is taking enough numbers off so you can add something else up on the machine. It's an adding-machine term; it's an electronic-computer term, is where it came from. It means to clear the computer so it'll think.

Now, the actual fact of the matter is that everything you have today that is called a science was dished up by one or two guys on a Sunday afternoon, sort of offhand, and he said it ought to be this way and it has been ever since.

And it doesn't say how well it's got to think now; you just clear it up so it can think better. You clear a human being up so he can think better and you have a Clear. You've done a clear. You can do a clear of this lifetime, you can do a clear of the whole track, you can do a clear of this person to such a degree that he can create his own universe, or you can clear this person in such a way that he's cleared of the MEST universe and can go then and create his own universe. In other words, you have terrific selection here.

Now, if you doubt me on that, go back and really look for the elements in these basic — what we call the basic sciences. And should strike you as peculiar that they keep rising in this fashion. And now all of a sudden we have a science of knowledge, if you want to call it a science of knowledge. But what does it stem from? It stemmed from many, many, many years, hard-working years of trying to find out what is the common denominator of knowledge? What's the common denominator?

Absolutes are unobtainable!

I had to look through twelve races, look through all of the present-day physical sciences, look through what we laughingly used to call the humanities (and then studied rats under that name) and so on, and finally found out that there was one word which didn't seem to be violated anyplace and that word was survival.

This is the primary error that Aristotle made. It doesn't seem to be a very important datum. But it can gum up the whole field of thought. They kept saying there's right, there's wrong. The world is laid out for most men in terms of black and white. And I'm sorry to say, for an awful lot of engineers, they let the thing categorize itself into yes and no and maybe. The yeses and the noes they use they think are absolutes.

Now, what could we do with survival? They were obviously all trying to survive. And then I tried for five years to disprove the word survival, and say there's something lies outside of it. Nothing lies outside of it in the MEST universe. In the MEST universe nothing lies outside of it, not even the immortality you reach as a thetan while still in the MEST universe lies outside the word, survival. And for the first time with this class we are stepping, really, beyond the scope of the word survival. We are going into the essentials of beingness as superior to the essentials of survival because we are examining the creation of time, and when we examine the creation of time we immediately step outside the basic definition of survival which is continuous existence along a span of time.

I took an engineer one night who was working on logical machines – he was working on strategy machines, rather. And he was working on these machines, and I explained to him, "You are working on three-dimensional logic just because you have such a thing as Boolean algebra which you apply to a telephone switchboard. The person's 'in,' 'not in,' 'maybe he's in.' 'Yes-no,' 'Yes-no,' 'Yes-no.'"

We suddenly step outside of a continuous existence along a span of time. We have something else, something new and that would be beingness which wouldn't have any relationship to the span of time called the MEST universe but would have something to do with spans of time, but not necessarily. Beingness could exist independent of a span of time. So that's where we're studying this subject and that's why it's gotten awfully simple all of a sudden. We're on a much higher common denominator.

I said, "Just because you're doing that is no reason it applies to logic. I can demonstrate to you that there's at least twelve values in logic."

Now you have to know about this common denominator of survival. And that's talked about in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Science of Survival, Self Analysis, Handbook for Preclears and Scientology 8-80. And that's survival, essentially. But we're creeping more and more out of that, and now we have a study of being. Survival is dependent upon having, and being is not dependent on having.

"Oh," he says, "no, no. There are only three values in logic," he says. "There's yes, no and maybe."

Now you get the general idea and the scope of your subject.

"No, no. There are twelve." And I proved to him utterly and conclusively – he finally agreed to me – that, well, if you wanted to be sticky about the whole thing, there were twelve values in logic.

Now, the technique which you are going to know about here is "Scientology 8-8008." And that's what we're talking about. And you're going to be taught Standard Procedure Issue 2, not Standard Procedure Issue 1. There's a modification so we'll call it SOP 2 to make it a little bit different than SOP 1. You've got to know SOP 1 too.

There was "not-so-maybe maybe," and there was "a-lot-more-maybe maybe," and so forth, and I could show him how you could work this out and make Boolean algebra come out a little bit better. And so he bought it; he bought it. And I did the meanest thing a guy can do when he does that: I sold him this thing lock, stock and barrel, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building and the president of the United States thrown in. He was all set to go out and build strategy machines which had twelve knobs on them instead of three, when I proved to him just as easily that there was eighteen-valued logic. That was very mean.

Because the truth of the matter is that logic is infinity-valued; there's an infinity of values in logic because logic is a gradient scale. And you'll take that up in just a moment. And I've just been talking about it – Logic 7: Gradient scales are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data.

And that's the one you're going to use in processing. And you're going to use that and use that and use that and use it and use it and use it in processing. So get it, get it well; know what we mean when we say a gradient scale. A gradient scale means a progressive scale from "none of," to a "slightly little bit more than none of," to "a lot more than none of," to "a lot more than none of" till "you almost got some" – just little tiny grades. Mmmmmm! And boy, you can connect any datum of the physical universe to any other datum in the whole physical universe with a gradient scale.

You can make, by logic, anything happen to anything. By logic, you could actually be circuitous and laborious enough to go around Robin Hood's barn far enough and to show that it was a gradient scale enough, of all the gradient scales that there were enough of, and you would come up in the end with a connection between, and prove to somebody completely and utterly, that Camembert cheese was the sole diet of rabbits – and if it weren't, it sure should be.

Now, that is an idiocy, really, and would show up in the logic as an idiocy. That's because it isn't a true gradient scale.

The true gradient scale with which you are working is the gradient scale between the static zero and the all-motion infinity of theta and MEST.

Theta is a theory – it's just a theoretical thing; it's a theoretical zero, an actual zero with no motion, no wavelength. And an all-motion thing would be something in the vicinity of MEST. That all-motion thing would be – let's see, something that would be terribly all-motion (I mean, would be way up the scale on it) – would be something like the stuff of which the companion star of Sirius is composed: one teaspoonful of the companion star of Sirius brought to Earth would weigh one ton.

Now, boy, that's getting up there to an all-motion. And I imagine that that would make plutonium look like a cap in a cap pistol. That stuff really must be unstable. But just exactly what element this would be or where it is on the periodic chart I wouldn't be prepared to say. But it's evidently there, by the behavior of that companion star.

But the point I'm making is, you're getting up toward an all- motion. Matter is almost an all-motion thing; it's getting heavier and heavier and there are more and more vectors, more and more vectors to less and less time, less and less space, time and space decreasing, decreasing, decreasing. So you've got a gradient scale from zero to all-motion, theta to MEST – meaning, by MEST, the MEST universe, this universe, this MEST universe. So you see what that is and how that works out? You've got a gradient scale running from zero to MEST. See where man stands on it?

You look at the tone scale. The tone scale is a gradient scale which runs from theoretical behavior of theta down to the complete MEST, which is much below where you generally pick up the tone scale – complete MEST: wavelength, motion, and so forth, of this character. All right.

What's the gradient-scale principle? It is more of it and more of it and more of it, or less of it and less of it and less of it on the same subject.

Now, how red is a red bicycle? The mind answers that. You can see that there's a pretty red, red bicycle, isn't it? I mean, there's a red, red bicycle there. How red is a red bicycle? All right. Let's take a look at a red bicycle and find out how red it is. Well, there's a gradient scale of redness, isn't there? So we'd have to know where we were on this pale pink up here to this deep, deep infra of some sort. It's a gradient scale of redness. It'd pass through Chinese red and it'd go through salmon down below it. Up above it, it'd go through scarlet, carmine. How red is red? It's a gradient scale of redness.

How sick is your preclear? He has no absolute illness. He's on a gradient scale. And every preclear is on the same gradient scale. He's somewhere on the scale and the behavior at that point of the scale is that behavior for that point of the scale. You know how bad off he is. And at the same time, you know how "enMESTified" he is. He's as bad off as he's bogged down in MEST. So you see what you have: a gradient scale between theta and MEST, which is also the gradient scale of sanity.

And how many things does this gradient scale represent? Well, it represents an awful lot of things. It represents the activity of energy; it represents a lot of other things. You should know about a gradient scale, you should be able to think in gradient scales and you should always know this about gradient scales: That when your preclear is bogged down, you didn't apply a gradient scale. You gave him too much. He can do whatever you want him to do if you give him little enough of it to do at first.

You can use a gradient scale in this fashion. If I never taught you anything tonight but this, it'd have been all right as a night well spent. And it's just this fact, just this datum: Your preclear can do anything you want him to do, providing you define what you want him to do – especially to yourself – and then give him a small enough bit of the gradient scale to do of it. And the process works like a dream if you do that. And if the process breaks down on you, it's because you don't understand the gradient scale or because you haven't given him little enough. There's [a] much-less point on the gradient scale.

You want him to imagine a body. You say, "Go ahead and imagine a body." And he doesn't imagine a body, he can't imagine a body. And you say, "All right. Imagine a head." He can't imagine a head. You say, "All right, can you imagine one hair?"

No, he can't imagine one hair. Don't throw in the sponge, because there's a lot more gradient scale left.

"Can you imagine a fingernail paring?"

"No."

"Well, can you imagine one cell in a fingernail paring?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes, I guess I could imagine that. Yeah."

"All right. Now let's see if you can get two cells."

"No, can't do that. I can just get one cell."

"All right. Well, get that cell and now put it over on the mantelpiece."

"Oh, I'm having an awful hard time moving it out of the center of the room."

You say, "Well, how about putting it over by the door?"

"Mmmm, I couldn't do that."

"Well, how about moving it over to the other chair right near you there."

"Doesn't seem to want to go."

"Well, how about making it roll over and go one millimeter?"

"Yep, I reckon I can do that."

"Now can you make it go two millimeters?"

"Well, I can make it go one and a half millimeters."

We eventually get this cell moved, and we get it moved to the door, we get it moved to the mantel. And then we find that we can get two cells and we can move them to the door and put them on the mantel. And then we get this other thing, and the first thing you know, you say, "How much cells you got on the mantel now?"

And he says, "Ulp! I've got several."

You say, "You got enough for a fingernail paring?"

"You know, I think I have."

"All right, put them together as a fingernail paring."

"Well, what do you know! I got a fingernail paring." Gee, it'll be so prized, he'll be so proud!

When you get up the line in tone, you won't really be in good communication with how tough this is for some preclears. You'll say, "Oh... ah, let's see. Let's mock up London and all the inhabitants and yeah, get it down to the last hair, and so on, and get the smell of the whole place, now."

Guy says, "Ha, I'm sorry, you must be talking to somebody else. I can't do that." And we finally get him down to where he has one electron going around the ring.

Boy, that's good. He's now got one electron going around the ring. By golly, once he gets something like that, too, it's hell to make him get rid of it.

Now you have to make him get two of it, three of it, six of it, eighty of it, millions of them. Gradient scales. If you can't create much, create a little. If he can't envision much time, have him envision little time. If he can't get out of present time very far with recollection, gradient scale.

"You say you can't remember people?"

"No.

"Can you remember your wife?"

"Mmm... well, not really."

"What's the last thing she said to you when you left home?"

"Mm-mm. No."

"Well, did she ever say anything to you?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure she did."

"Well, remember one of those times."

"No, I couldn't do that."

And you say, "Well, now, you say you don't remember people. Now, how about me? How about me? When you first walked into my office, you remember me sitting there?"

"I thought you were standing up. I... no, I can't remember that."

"Well, now, where were you when you walked into the door?" (You know, like these quiz programs? They give you all the answers?) "Where were you when you walked into the door?" You see?

"I don't remember that."

Believe me, his sanity depends on your getting him to remember some tiny gradient of time. And you finally work it down to this: You say, "See my hand there on the chair?"

"Yep!"

"Now note where it is."

"Yep!"

"All right. Now I'm going to move my hand back on the chair here. Where was it?"

The guy will say, "Right there. What do you know! Right there." And the guy's liable to brighten up and look like he's about to cry or something of this sort. You would be utterly amazed at the change that can come over a preclear like this sometimes.

You look at him and you say, "This isn't possible."

One fellow walked in one day; everybody had been processing him. He was from some God-forsaken place – New York or someplace. And he was... Everybody had been processing him and so on, and they never thought to ask him the magic question, "Can you remember something real?" This is the one question you must always ask a preclear if he appears even the least bit vague to you. "Can you remember something real? Can you remember a time when you were really in communication with somebody? Something like this – just a little scrap memory that you know is true, that is of the MEST universe?" Because that's the way you get him back on the MEST time track and then into his own universe. All right.

And this fellow had never been asked these questions. He'd been processed by auditor after auditor after auditor after auditor, and this fellow is sitting there with lenses to his glasses that you couldn't have measured with an ax handle! He's sitting there with his... with just... oh! Boy, he was in bad shape.

And I looked at him and I said, "Well, now, let me see. Can you tell me something that's absolutely real to you? Really real to you?" He thought and he thought and he thought.

"Well, can you remember a time when you were really in communication with somebody?"

He said, "Just now with you. Yeah!" He said, "Just now with you." Kaboom! Beautiful shape.

I said, "Now can you remember something real?"

"Yes!"

Something else, something else, something else – brrrrrrr, boom! Just like a big-toothed saw going through that reactive mind, or through those ridges – picking them up, picking them up, identification, identification. Saw him around the next few days, happy as a clam.

That is the break point of a case. Cases break in little, sudden jumps. You will see them happen. Sometimes you'll process this case and you will process it and you will process it and you will say, "Oh, no!" And you'll process it some more and you'll process . "Something must be happening," you say, "by the gradient scales alone. He must be coming up a little more slowly than I can notice it. I hope. And it probably isn't happening, probably isn't happening."

But one day he walks in and you say, "All right," rather wearily to yourself, "let's get a time when you were... Well, no, let's mock up...

Preclear will say, "What's the matter? You feel confused or something?"

And you'll say, "Well, no, not... not... not really. Of course, I've been processing you for a long..."

"Well," he said, "I didn't know." He said, "Am I making you upset?" He said, "Well, maybe I better run out all these sessions on you. Yeah!" And the guy will brighten right up and feel wonderful and go home and just be in beautiful shape and be at work the next day. And you'll ask him next time, you say, "How's your lumbago?"

"Oh, my lumbago is – oh, been ages since I felt any lumbago. I mean, wonderful st..."

You say "What broke this case?" Well, very amusing. What broke this case is you broke him on help. You see, a man gets bad off in various ways. But you could take any psychotic and you could put him on an E-Meter and you could find out something in the universe which he was still capable of helping. He's still capable of helping something somewhere. Maybe all eight dynamics are wiped out to 7.99999, but there's this one-millionth of a dynamic that he can still assist. And maybe that was you.

Or maybe it was the cat as he came in the door. And you didn't know how low this preclear really was. Maybe you didn't test him adequately or something. And all of a sudden you found something he could help. Now, it's just a tiny little thing, but if he can help that he could help something else, he could help something else, he could help something else. He could feel he could help a lot more than that. And all of a sudden he can help himself. And that's where you're trying to get him. He's just sunk on the whole subject of trying to aid anybody.

Why? Because all the people that have been around him since time immemorial have been convincing him that he was of no use to them. He was on an "I've got to be needed," and everybody kept saying to him, "We don't need you. You are of no use to us." And then suddenly one day he finds out he can help something.

Now, your process is definitely indicated there on a gradient scale. Help this, help that, help something else. And you can actually drill him on this and make him mock up things to help. And the first thing you know, by golly, he'll be a cock of the walk. He'll be in beautiful shape. Gradient scales.

If you can get him... his attention in any way, any preclear can find a little bit of what he has to do to get well. And boy, that's an important one, because it also permits you to figure out what's right, what is wrong. There's a gradient scale of rightness, a gradient scale of wrongness; there is no absolute right, there is no absolute wrong. Right above that, "Absolutes are unobtainable," and below that, "Gradient scales are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data."

Now, it's very possible that auditors, here and there, in the last class, might somehow have missed this datum, because I didn't stress it very hard. And I've been observing their work and I've been observing that their work fell down only on one thing, really: the gradient scale and a knowledge of how to use it. The gradient scale. They'll have the preclear mock up this, that, something else, something else, and then do things to them.

"I can't." He says, "I can't do it." And the auditor throws in the sponge! Hmm.

Next time I catch an auditor doing that I'll make a gradient scale out of him. Because if you ever made up your mind that you're going to have the preclear do something, don't leave the ground! Don't leave the subject! Don't leave the preclear until you make him do enough of it to keep him from invalidating himself! Because if you set up something for him to do and he doesn't do it, he goes eight feet below ground. But if he can do a little tiny bit of it, he's happy. He's real happy. Then he feels good.

And I won't mention any names – we just had the case of that this afternoon, the preclear in this case having a little bit of difficulty (not very much) getting out of a corpse somewhere on the track and out of his body in present time.

The auditor says, "All right." He says, "You say you'd let down all of your teammates – you'd let down all of these teammates if you did any of these things, and so on? Well, mock up your teammates and shoot them all down." Now, maybe he said only mock up a dozen teammates or maybe only mock up one teammate and shoot this teammate down. And maybe he might even have said, "Take this teammate and make him lie on his back." Maybe he got to that gradient scale. But it didn't work and the preclear couldn't do it. And the preclear was lower than a snake when I saw him; he was quite low. And he didn't attribute it to just that fact.

What was the proper thing to do? Well, this is a problem of teammates. You don't have to know its details, it has no real bearing on the subject or the case even. But here it is, the auditor has already, for some reason best known to himself, given the preclear something to do. And now he doesn't work down the gradient scale. He's asking the preclear to do the most extreme thing on the gradient scale: destroy. Destroy. That's tougher to do than create, any day – in processing. So he's asked him to destroy something that he has been given to believe is deterring the preclear from getting well. Now, aren't we getting interesting.

What he should have done is bring the fellow down to a point where he could handle the teammate, just handle him. Just move him in time and space a little bit or change his uniform buttons. Just change something about this teammate. And if he couldn't do something to the teammate, let him get a ring that belonged to a teammate. Or if he couldn't do something about a ring that belonged to a teammate, have him do something like cover up a footprint a teammate has made. And if he couldn't do that, have him go over and pick up a piece of bread that a teammate has just thrown aside. Or have him pick up an empty cartridge that the teammate has just fired and has thrown away – anything that has to do with spacing [placing] in time and space, and a little bit of it.

And that was what the solution to that problem was. And it comes under the heading of knowing what a gradient scale is and how to use it. If you can get him to do a little bit of it, you can always get him to do a lot of it – by gradient scales. And gradient scales solve right-wrong. They solve valuations for the preclears. He's on two-valued logic, and you're all of a sudden moving him over. He wants to know if something's right or wrong. How do you answer the question? Just tell him about gradient scales.

All right.