Because of the importance of the principles and material contained in this lecture, it was issued in the Dianetic Auditor’s Bulletin of July 1951, entitled “Education and the Auditor,” and again in the Ability magazines of February 1959 and June 1962 under the title “How to Study Scientology.”

There is a big reason we have to have MEST Processing at this time: We have validated the aberrative effects of language more heavily than language really deserves. We have validated it too heavily. We have gotten people to thinking that “Stay there” is such a holder that people who have the holder “Stay there” stay there, and so forth. We have given language too high an importance level.

The whole subject of auditing, as far as an auditor is concerned, is good or bad in direct ratio to his knowledge of his tools. The first thing an auditor has to find out for himself and then recognize is that he is dealing with precision tools. It isn’t up to someone else to force this piece of information on him. It is definitely up to an auditor to find out how precise these tools are, not just fog around about it and scratch his head and say “Maybe it’s right and maybe it’s wrong,” or something of the sort, and be hazy about it.

I have noticed this coming up in Dianetics. As a matter of fact, when I was processing lots of people, somehow or other I never paid any attention to action phrases. I didn’t do very much about action phrases. One of the reasons I didn’t was that I was building up the preclear and rebuilding track and doing a lot of things with the preclear, and I had him pretty high up the tone scale by the time we hit the first engram. If he got sticky on the track and a few other things, then I would try to build him up somehow so he wouldn’t do that.

He should, before he starts to discuss, criticize or otherwise handle a technique, find out for himself whether or not the mechanics back of this technique are in existence and whether or not this technique handles these mechanics adequately.

The discovery of action phrases is a rather late discovery. It came about because in the field of Dianetics, when people read the book and they go around talking to each other, it evidently triggers off a general aberration about the importance of language and the importance of listening. This also gets punched up in the society: “If you don’t listen to me, you little fiend, listen to every word I say, I’m going to beat your brains out. Now, what I say to you is important. When I say ‘mind’ I mean ‘mind.’ Now, you listen to what I tell you.”

He should first make up his mind about each one of the three principal kinds of entheta: the lock, the secondary and the engram. Do locks exist? Do secondaries exist? Do engrams exist? There are two ways he has of answering this: by finding them in a preclear to his satisfaction or by finding them in himself to his satisfaction. That is a fundamental which every auditor should undertake to discover.

Evidently language, in its discussion in the Handbooks and particularly in Dianetic groups, begins to take on great importance by keying in this training of how important language is. We are trained to believe it is important, so when somebody comes along in Dianetics and mentions the fact that action phrases are really important, it begins educationally to assume greater and greater importance.

This doesn’t then put Dianetics in an authoritarian category whereby I stand up on a lecture platform and say, “Now listen, you guys! There is such a thing as an engram. If you don’t believe it I’m going to beat your heads in.” In other words, I don’t want to teach this like they teach psychiatry.

Actually you could run engrams out of a person like mad and educate him like mad as to the terrifically aberrative factors in language, and you would keep him just about level on the tone scale. This is another reason a preclear stays level on the tone scale. He has found out how vicious “Stay there” is; it has been validated for him. In other words, the words stay there are terribly important. You and the preclear, in that case, are both making an error of accepting the symbol for the thing.

In the field of medicine they tell you, “Multiple sclerosis is the decay of the nerve fibers, and they can’t be reestablished. People die in a very short space of time. This is the way it is and if you don’t answer it this way on your examination paper we are not going to give you your ticket, and if we don’t give you your ticket you are not going to eat. Your old man is going to be disappointed, too, having paid all that money to send you to medical school and so forth, so you had better take what we say about it.”

Count Alfred Korzybski recognized that words were not the objects, that labels were not the objects. He built a very large system out of this fact.

That is not instruction; that is obstruction. In the first place, nobody in the medical school knows anything about multiple sclerosis. In the second place, it is curable. In the third place, it is not fatal. But I wouldn’t even ask anybody to accept that statement without finding himself a case of multiple sclerosis and doing something about it.

Early in Dianetics I conducted a series of experiments which tried to pick up the time each word was defined. You can do this if you are using light hypnosis with an individual; you can actually pick up, in the usual run of the case, the first time the word was defined for the child. And by picking up and knocking out the definition of the basic words which would cause a person trouble, I sought to deaberrate him. It was a failure; it doesn’t work. I coasted along for a long time before I gave much more thought to language.

Now, there are two ways men accept things ordinarily, both of them rather poor. The first is accepting something because authority says so and says it has to be accepted. That is the usual method of instruction. The second is by preponderance of agreement amongst other people. In other words, if twenty people around the Foundation agreed upon whether or not some fact were true or untrue, the twenty-first person — who had not investigated it or examined it — would have a tendency to accept that fact. This is public opinion at work.

But in the face of the increasing awe of language which is felt by preclears and in the Foundation, it is time that language be put in its very proper place, and that is a relatively insignificant place.

By the way, this is the general public test of sanity and insanity. Somebody walks in the door and he says, “Oh look, a twelve-foot spider on the ceiling!” and we all look up and there is no twelve-foot spider on the ceiling. We contest the fact and we tell this fellow, “There is no spider on the ceiling.” He says, “Oh yes, there is!” and he starts to get angry and he fights usbecause we tell him there is no spider on the ceiling when he says that there is. Of course we say he is crazy.

I have been talking about mechanics, now, since last September — the mechanical aspects of auditing, the mechanical aspects of aberration, the quantity of engrams, the mechanics of key- in, entheta, the mechanics of valence, the mechanics of accessibility, ARC and so forth. I havebeen talking about all of these things. People are very, very slow to abandon the importance of the English language in favor of the importance of the mechanics of aberration.

The chances are if he insisted on this very broadly and kept on insisting on it we would probably put him in an institution — particularly if he beat up people who wouldn’t agree with him about that spider. We would institutionalize him.

MEST Processing, then, ties in the not inconsiderable sphere of general semantics; it increases that to include the whole field of perceptics and ties it into basic Dianetic theory. That is a considerable jump. It is important for you to understand clearly what language is, how language is learned and how unimportant it is.

The basic definition of sanity, unfortunately, in this somewhat nebulously learned society, is whether or not a person agrees with everybody else. The first thing that is hurled at an individual who comes up with something new is “You are crazy; that couldn’t be true.”

When you do MEST Processing you are going after the physical actions of the organism, or organisms, in MEST which gave meaning to language. What is important there, then, is the action and behavior and interactions of organisms in matter, energy, space and time. How they give definition to words is just a kind of secondary thing, but you have to understand this because it is the bridge to language.

Practically the only test of insanity is whether or not a person agrees in his actions, statements and beliefs with the rest of society, That is a very sloppy way of accepting evidence. In other words, this idea, that where the majority of the group are agreed upon something and one person differs he is therefore crazy, is their primary measuring stick. This is the plan of testing scientific data which is used in biology, archaeology, paleontology — all these fields.

Any phrase or series of phrases in the language can be reduced to a concept of the organism, or organisms, in matter, energy, space and time. Any language concept, no matter what you want to name, is reducible to MEST — an action in MEST and the handling of MEST and the MEST handling of the individual, the MEST handling of the group, and so forth.

“Does Dr. Blow agree with this fact?” “No.”

You can take any aberrative circuit command, like “You’ve got to protect yourself” or “I’ve got to protect you for your own good,” and reduce it to a MEST concept. Sometimes it is a little bit difficult for your preclear to grasp this, but nevertheless it is not really difficult. Pick up a moment when he was protecting somebody for his own good. The next question you ask him will tell you that he has defined it in language.

“Then it cannot be so because he is an authority in this field.” “Do the scientists at Cornell believe in the algae?”

This whole confounded human race is so far at sea in language, they haven’t reduced it back to what it is. What is language?

“No, the scientists at Cornell do not believe in the algae.” “Then the algae cannot exist and anybody who says it exists is crazy.” A fellow by the name of Galen once dominated the field of medicine for several centuries. Another fellow by the name of Harvey came along and upset Galen, but the people of Harvey’s day had been agreeing with Galen concerning the tides of the blood and other strange things. They knew nothing about the heart action; they did not know that the heart circulated blood in the body at all. They had no concept of this. But they had been taught, and without observing anything at all, had agreed with one another and with Galen that the heart caused a tide to flow and that the heart action really had nothing to do with it. And boy, you talk about esoteric theories: you could try to shove this down the throat of a five-year- old kid and he wouldn’t buy it! The theory was that stupid. Then Harvey came along. He was the king’s physician working in the Royal Medical Academy. What Harvey did was go in for vivisection; he did animal surgery, and he found the beating and the mechanism of the heart.

The preclear gives you the phrase “I’ve got to protect you for your own good,” and you ask him to get a lock on this. You don’t ask him to find this phrase in an incident; you ask him to give you a circumstance that would demonstrate this, and he will give you a bunch of conversation between him and his mother or his mother and his uncle or some confounded thing.

He was sensible enough at first to keep it absolutely quiet. It wasn’t until twelve years after he had discovered that the heart was the organ which circulated the blood and that the blood did circulate that he published this data. Leonardo da Vinci had said this, but he was a “crazy artist” and nobody would believe an artist. William Shakespeare said it too in 1608, and Harvey was a member of the audience of that play. Harvey was really the first man to follow it up.

Then you really have to get down and explain what you want him to understand, which is a physical action of protection with the body, with a shield. For instance, I had a MEST counterpart which would give that phrase meaning; there must be a whole chain of things that would give it meaning, but a very late lock on that chain was the process of catching a girl who had caught her heel at the top of a flight of stairs. She was way at the top, caught her heel, and plunged headfirst down these stairs, and I was at the turn. There was a ledge with a sharp iron corner and her head was coming right toward that, and I reached out and pulled her and made her fall the rest of the way down this stair instead of bashing her brains out on the corner. I had to protect her for her own good.

Anyway, Harvey did all this experimentation and published this new theory, and immediately dead cats, pieces of wine jugs and general professional venom began to fly in his direction in a solid avalanche. One of the doctors of that day said that scientific experiment or no scientific experiment, he would rather err with Galen than be right with Harvey.

That is the MEST type of lock which gives meaning to that phrase. It isn’t “I’m not going to let you drive that car because that car is dangerous,” yak, yak, yak.

That is a “sensible” way to look at things, isn’t it? That is a method, though, of accepting facts: Don’t look for the fact yourself, but go find out what the preponderance of opinion is about this fact, and if you find the preponderance of opinion in favor of it, then accept it. Man would probably have made an advance of exactly zero if this had been the only method of testing evidence. All along the line of man’s progress there have been rebels who had another method of finding and testing data, and that has been to look, observe and accept the evidence that one has observed and then test it again.

This society is so thoroughly glued down by the seat of the pants to seats of automobiles and chairs that it has mostly forgotten that there is a world to move about freely in. It is a very pinned-down society.

I imagine the first man who made a flint ax looked over a piece of flint and decided that the thing could be chipped in a certain way, and he tried it and chipped it. And I imagine he went back to the tribe and said, “Look! Flint when struck in this way will chip. You don’t have to pick up accidental pieces of stone. You can now make a flint ax.” I imagine they stoned him out of camp. I can see that poor fellow standing around in the woods with his flint ax until, finally, he managed to convince another fellow he met, and they managed to go out and — carefully holding a third guy down — chipped a piece of flint and said, “Look.” And I imagine they finally got up to a point where fifteen or twenty tribesmen agreed with this manufacture of flint axes.

It has to do, in time, with reporting to the job at nine and getting off at five. This society is restricted; it has clocks and its space is all cut up. Some fellow says, “I’m a big shot because I have a fence around this piece of ground” — he has some space and he has some matter. “I’ve got to pay the bill for the electric light” — he is handling energy in some direction, but that electric light has a meter out there and that meter is going whir, whir, whir, and it is saying nickels, nickels, nickels. It is standing there with a big whip and saying, “Brother, don’t you get fired from that job!” And the cash register down at the Safeway is beating out the time that keeps him moving in MEST through a regularly prescribed routine; he has to go down and push a time clock. His energy is being handled.

Then it very fortuitously could go along the way human nature has been traveling. These twenty men would have made themselves an abundant supply of flint axes, declared war and by decree caused the rest of the tribe to agree. After that there would have been no doubt whatsoever in anybody’s mind that a person could chip flint and make an ax with it.

Man, by the way, is liable to be pretty aberrated when he gets into a society at this level, for the excellent reason that he is accustomed to something a little less definite which has a little more danger and a little less certainty in it. For most of man’s history he was a hunter; his greatest term of life in any one type of society was in a hunting-type society. A little later on for a relatively brief period he was agrarian. He developed the whole code of morals which we handle today, or people hand to us. But we are now in an industrial society. We have only been about 160 years in this industrial period.

I am not talking just about Dianetics now, I am talking about data. Man has not known very much about that with which his mind is chiefly filled — data. What is data?

We have really got MEST nailed down. Every time you pick up MEST it has somebody’s ownership tag on it; it is either yours or his or theirs. Every time you try to tap in on a little energy, that energy is conserved or regulated by somebody else. You take some space: that belongs to somebody else and rent has to be paid for it, it has deeds on it or it has no- trespassing signs around it. When you go out to shoot a duck — which ought to be anybody’s MEST — you have to buy a stamp down at the post office that costs you matter, energy, space and time. They even have wildlife nailed down.

The evaluation of data is very important. For instance, somebody will come along and tell you, “They knew in psychoanalysis that if you remembered childhood experiences you could get well from things. So Dianetics isn’t new.” They think this is sequitur! But if you stand there at a loss it will only be because you don’t appreciate this fact of evaluation of data.

It is really getting overcrowded around here. I can remember my grandfather telling me, one time, that his grandfather moved. He moved out to the Nebraska territory because Tennessee had gotten too crowded. He had come from Connecticut, and he had left Connecticut for good reasons: It was too old and staid for him and they wanted him to keep on working in the bank. So he went down to Tennessee someplace and built a nice house, and he had some good horses and he was going to build up some racing stock and everything. But somebody built a house within view! He could look over there any morning and see a plume of smoke; the country just got too crowded for him. So he went to Nebraska, and there he got in sight of a wagon road and two or three days a week you would see people on it, and it was getting to a point where you couldn’t meet anyone without his talking and so forth! The space was all used up! So he went west where he could be free.

Here was one small microscopic fact. How was it evaluated? Breuer gave Freud this first idea in 1884, but Freud didn’t buy it till 1894; it took ten years to convince Freud. Breuer was the one in this case, by the way, who made the stone ax, and he finally convinced Freud, and then Freud convinced a lot of literary agents. Then medicine fought Freud almost to a standstill, and we eventually got psychoanalysis. But for all those years that they were working with psychoanalysis, nobody was evaluating data. You will find all of those books written on the authoritarian principle. You will find out “Freud said.” Who cares what Freud said? Is the data valuable? If it is valuable, how valuable is it?

These people were pretty rugged individualists. Their self-determinism was pretty high. Earlier than that they were writing something called the Declaration of Independence. I can just see this

You could say that a datum is as valuable as it has been evaluated; a datum is as good as it evaluates other data; a datum can be proven in the ratio that it can be evaluated by other data, and its magnitude is established by how many other data it clarifies. So, if you get a great big datum — the biggest datum possible — it would be one which would clarify and identify all knowledge known to man and in the material universe.

1. society today finding a politician who would have signed that Declaration of Independence in the face of authority! Today’s politician would say, “Oh, no! We’ll have to think this over.” There would not be any John Hancock standing there saying “I’ll sign my name big enough

In other words, if this datum was big enough it would clarify and evaluate everything for you. Unfortunately there isn’t any such thing as a prime datum. There would have to be two data, because a datum is no good unless it can be evaluated. So there has to be a second datum alongside of the first datum to evaluate it. This datum has to be of a similar magnitude. That is to say, you can’t very well evaluate a mountain by comparing it to a grain of sand. It is possible; they are in the same frame of reference; but you point out this microscopic grain of sand to somebody and say “A mountain is several billion to the billionth power times that big,” and he is liable to say “Oh, a mountain is six feet high, huh?” You couldn’t identify a mountain for a person that way.

...”

You could identify and describe a mountain in terms of a great cavity in the earth or you could identify a mountain in terms of two or three hills. You have to have some data to evaluate data by.

Those people back there considered the East a pretty crowded place. There were thousands of people on Manhattan Island!

Man, in the past, every time he got up along the strata of trying to evaluate data, would get up to some point and say, “Above this point it is just God, and God did everything from here on down and you can’t go any further than that.” Then he would push back the frontier of knowledge just a little bit further and he would say, “Beyond that is God. God starts right in here,” and he would use that to evaluate data.

Now, when you start closing in on MEST and getting a price tag on everything in terms of so much MEST, people start to feel pretty constricted. You watch societies which get over owned and constricted and overpopulated and underfed and so on, and you will see them go through a curve of aberration — down. The culture spins in. This is one of the reasons it spins in. There are a lot of reasons that we know of in Dianetics; we can look them over and evaluate them. But this is a very obvious, on-the-surface reason of why that culture goes to pot.

This is somewhat unworkable because there are not two data. That is why man was having trouble. But there was a second datum there all the time: there was the devil. This fits in with the double-data system. The basic unit of knowledge is two. You have to know there is a man before you can know whether or not a man can be aberrated or not aberrated. How do we describe the devil? The devil is evil and God is good. We can describe, then, and we can get some conception of magnitude, of comparative data and of value. It is very simple.

Therefore, it is natural that, as MEST gets larger and larger value, the language which lies on top of MEST gets more and more important.

People worked out this system and then they never bothered to state how they worked it out, and they missed this fact that it does take two. It is a double-god system that we use. I don’t think even a priest would argue with you very long about it. “Yes,” he would say, “of course, but you have to make it simple for people.” That is one of the places where knowledge falls down — having to make it too simple.

Who cares anything for space when he can ride three days without seeing anybody? Who cares a heck of a lot for time when there is nobody paying him any salary for it? As far as matter and energy are concerned, all the energy a person would probably need is enough to drive a sharp arrow into a pretty good plenitude of game, and his food situation would be solved.

Data is your data only so long as you have evaluated it. It is your data by authority, or it is your data. If it is your data by authority, somebody has forced it upon you and at best it is a light aberration. Of course, if you went to somebody you thought knew his business and asked him a question, and he told you an answer that you thought was reasonable, that data wasn’t forced on you. But if you went away believing this from here on out and never yourself looked into the physical universe to find out whether or not that data existed, you were falling short of completing the cycle of learning.

That fellow wouldn’t be very aberrated on a language level, because action phrases are not important to him. Someone says, “Go here.” There is no reason to do that; this person doesn’t have any great command over him. This person can’t fire him or take his MEST away from him because nobody owns this MEST. And someone says, “You go so-and-so and do such- and such,” and this fellow says, “I’ll follow this guy as long as I like him” (in other words, have high ARC). “But when I stop liking this guy I can always go out and shoot my own game.”

The main thing wrong with the mind mechanically, of course, is the turbulence, the engram, physical pain and so forth. But the overburden of information in this society is enforced education which the person is never permitted to test. Therefore when I say “Don’t take my word for it,” I am really asking the majority of you to break a habit pattern that was forced on you when you were children.

That person hasn’t really got him; he can’t go down to the bank and say “I wouldn’t renew that note of Alfonse’s if I were you.” He can’t tell him “The credits that you have put up in my store now leave you owing me $2862.92, which means you will have to work for another seven and a half years at your present salary.” The things that happen in a highly civilized area cannot have such an effect on him.

I can tell you what I found and ask you to look. Unless you have looked you are not liable to have the fundamentals of Dianetics in mind thoroughly enough to be comfortable with any technique in Dianetics. That is why I stress theory when I talk to you; that is why I have to talk to you about theory. I can tell you what I have found to be the case, but at no time do I ask you to accept it. Let me plead with you otherwise; look for yourself and then find out whether or not it exists. And if you find that it exists you will be comfortable thereafter. Otherwise, unrecognized even by yourself, you are liable to find, down at the bottom of your information and education, an unresolved question which will itself unstabilize your ability to assimilate or practice something in the line of a technique, and your mind will not be as rapid on this subject as it should be. So I am not asking you this because I am being courteous. I am asking you to be much better auditors by resolving out your basic and fundamental concepts.

So the command value of action phrases and command phrases is low in a big-MEST society, and the value is very high in a society where MEST is owned, labeled and scarce, because when MEST is owned, labeled and scarce the individual can be more easily commanded. Language, then, is more important and more aberrative in a civilized area.

What quarrel you may have with theory is something that only you can resolve. Is the theory correct or isn’t it correct? You can answer that. I cannot answer that for you. I can tell you what I have discovered. I can tell you what other auditors have looked into and what they have seen. I can tell you what results have been achieved.

This starts to get reflected in parental training. The parents work hard to get MEST to do this, to do that, to run the home and all that sort of thing.

There are people who come flying around in Dianetics saying “Where is validation?” The second a man opens his mouth and says to me “Where is validation?” I know I am looking at a stupid ass, because he is saying abruptly and bluntly, “I cannot think for myself. I have to have authority.” Who is going to tell him this validation? Where could he possibly look for validation except, as himself, into the physical universe, in his own subjective reality and in his objective reality?

It isn’t the case of the old man going out hunting and the little boy saying, “Can I come, Pop? Can I come?” and Pop saying, “When you’re fourteen summers you can come along and learn how to be a man. But until that time I’m afraid you will have to just keep associating with the women.” Then when the boy goes out on his first educational venture to get that deer shot, he is really on the ball. He wants to know. “Pop, what are you getting on this side of the deer for? Why don’t you get on the other side of the deer?”

Unfortunately, Dianetics is surrounded by a world which calls itself a world of science and which is in actuality a world of authority. True enough, what they have as science today is far, far in advance of the Hindu concept of the world, whereby a hemisphere stood on the backs of seven elephants, which stood on seven pillars, which stood on the back of a mud turtle and it was mud from there on down. That was accepted once upon a time, by the way, as a scientific truth.

And Pop looks at him and says, “The wind. If the deer smells you, he will run off. Keep back.”

The world of science today depends to a very, very large degree upon authority. The reason engineering and physics have reached out so far in advance of any other science is the fact that they pose problems which punish a person so hugely if he doesn’t look into the physical universe. For instance, an engineer says, “Let’s build this tunnel through this hill. We have to build a tunnel through the hill in order to get this train from Wichita to Topeka.” (I don’t know where he would find the hill, but he says this.) So they go out to see if there is a hill there. What would happen if they planned to build a tunnel for this hill road and there was no tunnel to build? Men would just walk around and they would have wasted money and so forth.

Everything this boy is doing, he is very much in favor of trying to do. There isn’t anybody driving him and he has the whole outdoors.

But let’s say the hill was there. Now they have to drill a hole through this hill. If it is too steep the train simply won’t climb the grade up to this hole, therefore the hole has to be on a certain level. This is a demand being made of the engineer to quickly and accurately judge space. If he judges space wrong — if the railroad runs one place and the hole is over somewhere else, or if the railroad runs up on the hill and the hole is above or below that — he is not going to be able to get through that mountain. They will build the tracks up to one side of the mountain and start them on the other side and the hole will be in the wrong place.

But in this society you have a little house, and there isn’t any house that doesn’t get smaller and smaller as more children get in it. You can take a fourteen-room house and put one child in it and it immediately reduces to seven rooms. So, because their space is overcrowded, the parents have to start regulating the child’s space. They have to start regulating his time so the child can get educated because the society is very complex. The MEST is very valuable; therefore a person has to be very savvy and very, very wily in order to lay his hands on MEST, SO he is going to need a lot of education.

It is so observable, then, to one and all in the countryside that the engineer has made a mistake that the engineer takes care not to make such mistakes. He observes the physical universe. It so happens that if you dig a hole through a mountain and don’t shore it up properly, or if you misjudge the character of rock, the hole will cave in. This is considered unlucky and unfortunate on railroads. In other words, you are up against the old physical universe.

Then, the parents are giving out good, hard cash that came the hard way, usually, to buy the child toys and things like that. And this child says, “A toy!” and smashes it, and the parents say, “Look at what you did to that! “ It is MEST and the parents have been taught an enormous respect for MEST because it is scarce.

Now, there is another field that also calls itself science — biology — which has not really been worked out scientifically enough. But even biology has to be closer to a science than a lot of humanities, because in biology if a fellow makes too big a mistake about a bug, and he says “Now here we have this plankton and we inject this into the water supply in order to clean up the water supply,” and he doesn’t inject plankton in there but the typhoid germ, there will be an immediate and dramatic result.

Take a look at inflation. We have billions and billions of dollars of currency in circulation. Somebody comes along with a hundred-dollar bill, scratches a match, lights the bill, then just lights a cigar with it and throws it away.

Biology by and large doesn’t do too much, where school is concerned, in the practical sphere. But biology in practice moves over into a pretty solid engineering proposition. For instance, somebody comes along and says, “We want a dye that is going to work for bread. If we could just mix it up with a mold and the bread would be brown automatically — so the yeast could manufacture the dye too — then we would have brown bread which we could sell to the customers as a ‘health food.’ And it would be nicely colored and so forth, and we would save this process.” The biologist right then is up against the necessity of actually creating a yeast which will dye the bread in one operation. He has to find a yeast which not only behaves as yeast but which makes a dye as well. Now he has to deal with a practical aspect. Why? Because after he gets through, is the bread edible? That is the yeast test. And is the bread brown? That is the brown-bread test. And anybody can look at that, as any fool can plainly see.

In China, for instance, just at the last days of the nationalist regime, it cost eight million dollars to airmail a letter across the Pacific. That is the way the communists took China: they blew up the currency. We were sending in gold to help China, so the communists blew up the currency. That was very smart. But it cost eight million dollars for a two-bit stamp.

Now we start going around back of the barn and double-talking. Just to be absolutely ridiculous, we go into the field of politics and start looking into this field. The punishment for applying the science of politics wrong is so tremendous, actually, that this whole culture is on the verge of being wiped out. And people actually stand in universities and talk to students about political “science.”

MEST is the same way. Money is just a representation of it. If there is too much of it, it has no value. If it is very scarce it has great value.

By the way, if you ask these people who deal with this subject rather quickly some day, “What do you mean, political science? The science of politics and so forth?” they will say, “Well, no,” and then start giving you a lot of double talk to explain why they really aren’t talking about science in connection with politics but are talking about ruddy rods and so forth over here on this side of the fence, “because after all it is the amount of propaganda which a government cross-ratios into its taxes and . . .”

So you have in this society a definite need of MEST, and children get trained to believe it is terribly important; therefore they are being handled through MEST continually — adults change their minds, move them this way, move them that way, assign their time, make them go to bed at certain times, make them do certain things, make them learn certain things. In other words, children have to be manhandled through MEST continually.

You get this all figured out, and it is like economics used to be back in the Rooseveltian period: “If you spend enough money fast enough, if you keep enough people from getting work and if you inhibit capital from investing itself by making it unsure of its investment, then you can have relief. Now, this is highly desirable because it gets votes — oh no, we’d never think along in that line! The whole point of it is that the economic system of the United States must be supported at all costs, and let’s have four freedoms.”

The importance of the handling that is given a child — a good swat in the rear and a few other things like this — bears home the fact that he should move when shoved and he should come when pulled. But you understand that all this child knows, and actually all this human being will ever know, is that come means to move in the direction he is pulled. There is no magic connected with language.

It is just a hopeless maze. Any student who goes into this field and tries to select out data which he can judge by his own mind becomes so befuddled by its basic postulates (which themselves don’t exist) that he doesn’t have a chance.

Now, if we have two human beings and one human being wants to converse with the other human being and relay an idea from himself to the other one, how does he do it? Through MEST.

None of the books on politics, by the way, start out with axiom one. They start out with some kind of a strange definition that doesn’t really apply to the subject. In other words, they are not formulated.

There is undoubtedly in existence a theta communication system, but I am afraid that we are just about one inch below it as far as evolution is concerned. We are able to form into groups and to hold together in groups, and there are some slight signs of things like ESP, mass hysteria and so on to back it up. There are all sorts of things. But if man were going to use this as an exclusive communication system, he would certainly have to be advanced toward that further than he is right now. Right now he learns his words, one by one, solely in terms of MEST, and when he wants to converse with somebody he translates the thought he has — even if it takes him just a millisecond, he still translates that thought — into terms of motion in MEST, or MEST objects. He says words which represent these things and which the other person agrees on because he has also agreed on MEST, and the other person receives the information.

And yet there is punishment for failure, and this punishment is going to be leveled against a populace which has failed to grasp a natural law. There are natural laws of politics. These laws can be worked out rather easily. For instance, it is certain that if you cut all communication lines between the United States and Russia, Russia and the United States are going to understand each other less and less, and the first thing you know, they are both going to go into the anger tone and go insane and kill each other. That is a cinch.

And at a casual, unthinking glance (which glance was as casual and unthinking with me, until recently, as it has been with anybody) it would seem that the words he was uttering were important. We have gotten pretty clever: We can take ideas and translate them into words which are aligned and derived from the physical universe and which will untranslate as ideas to the other person. That is pretty smart, but those words are just symbols and that is all they are. So we have gotten very clever but it is still symbols we are using. We are using nothing but symbols!

If you demonstrate to people how the American way of life and the Russian way of life are entirely different, and demonstrate it to them continually enough, you will break their affinity.

When you are working your preclear. you are going to find out that he has assigned a tremendous value to words. But if you can get across to him this concept of the translation of words back into actual motion, ownership and loss and so forth of MEST, you will be getting what is important. You can get that across to him by making him dig up actual MEST locks, real ones — not somebody talking again, but actual MEST locks.

When you say that Russia and the United States are not in agreement upon any slightest political theory or the conduct of man or nations, you have practically finished the job.

For instance, “When was the first time that you can recall being denied some food?” “Food, food, food . . . Oh, I remember this girl told me . . .” and so on.

Actually, Russia is awfully low on the tone scale. She is a totalitarian sort of slave state; she is in a heck of a mess. She is about as safe to have around, that low on the tone scale, as a mad dog suddenly dropped in the middle of a room full of people. Any nation that low on the tone scale or any individual that low on the tone scale is not safe to have around.

“No. When were you denied food?”

Instead of talking about fighting Russia, we could be very, very clever. We could try to put Russia back together again so it would be a nation. We actually could do that. Here we are, a nation possessed of the greatest communications networks on the face of the earth, with the greatest manufacturing power and ability, with the best advertising men in the world, and we aren’t even trying to sell Europe or Russia an idea. All we are doing is handing them machine guns and planes in case Russia busts out. This is a mad and unintelligent picture.

“Well, my mother told me one time if I didn’t be a good boy I couldn’t . . .”

But this is Political Dianetics. Take a look at it and you will suddenly realize that you have to go over and reform Russia and that you have to take care of this state before it gets out of hand, and that the more threats you pose to it, the worse off it is going to be. The more guns and tanks the United States builds to fight Russia, the more dangerous Russia becomes to the United States. You watch this thing; it will get worse. It will go right on down the spiral.

Don’t get authoritarian and slap him, because this is what is going to happen. You are going to have to keep trying to translate this for him. He is going to stay on words in spite of hell or high water.

Nobody is ever asked to think in the field of politics. People say, “The politicians know best. After all, they all know best and everybody knows, of course, what politics is all about. And there is the American way of life.” What is the American way of life? Don’t ever ask that question, because people will drop through the floor on you. They can’t answer it! What is the American way of life that is different from the human way of life? We have tried to button up something which is terribly desirable — some political and economic freedom for the individual — and we have called this the American way of life. Why didn’t we call it the human way of life? So we haven’t even connected that up with what other countries are trying to do.

What you want is the time Mama or the dog or little brother or something like that came along, and he had picked up a bit of food and somebody took it out of his hand. That is the lock.

We are faced right at this particular moment with an Asia which is awakening. Japan awakened Asia. Perry and some others went over to Japan and sold them a bill of goods on how they ought to become a modern industrial nation. Japan did so and then went over into Asia and whipped up Asia. Everywhere Japan went, they said, “We are merely throwing off for you the yoke of the white men. We realize that we are committing suicide doing this. You will cry for us and sigh for us when we are gone. But we have freed you. Don’t ever forget it, and don’t forget us.” These are actual quotes from Japanese political propaganda in Asia. You should have seen the motion pictures they moved into Java and China and so forth. They never intended to win.

We want the time when the girl came out of the grocery store, put the groceries down on the seat of the car, walked away for two minutes and then came back and found the groceries missing. We don’t care what somebody said. We want the actual missing MEST. We want the real stuff now. These words are just shadows. We are liable to run her mother bawling her out when she came home without the groceries, and say this is a big aberration and so forth. You can run out millions of those, but there are not many times when she lost the groceries.

We woke up Asia. We said, “There is such a thing as freedom. There doesn’t have to be slavery straight through till the end of time. It doesn’t have to be.” And what was the first nation that took the cue from us? Japan. We tried to stop her imperial expansion and she committed suicide, and she knew she was committing suicide. We were involved in a very long and terrible war.

Now we have gotten onto lock chains which have fewer locks. There are not as many of these kinds of locks as there are word locks, because human beings talk a lot and act a little.

One gets confused after a while. What is the United States trying to do? Did it want Asia open? Did it want the democratic principles and the American way of life taught in Asia or didn’t it? Because as soon as they began to utilize some of the skill, they got kicked in the teeth.

I am trying to show you how tremendously important it is for you as an auditor to understand that we are not dealing with words, because I have tried to explain this to several people now and each time they kept coming back at me, the first two or three times I explained it, with “Oh yes, I remember losing some MEST. My mother told “

Then we held Chiang Kai-shek in over the top of China. He is one of the dirtiest dogs that ever got loose in the Orient. That is the truth about him. Everybody who has been an ally of Chiang Kai-shek’s has been shot in his tracks. That has been his history — a turncoat and a cutthroat. We sent some pretty smart generals over there and they took a look at old Chiang Kai-shek and they said, “This man is a dog. America has got to shift horses or do something.” Somerville, an old China hand, and Marshall were over there. Each one of these people said the same thing: “Get Chiang Kai-shek’s government out of the way or something awful is going to happen.”

“When did you lose some MEST?”

Politically, the United States kept pouring money into the hands of Chiang Kai-shek to support a falling government. We kept supporting a totalitarian fascist regime over the heads of a people we had taught through propaganda to be free and to fight for the American way of life — only we didn’t phrase it that way. And of course they blew up Chiang Kai-shek. They blew him right out of Asia. But what was there to take over? We had supported Chiang Kai-shek, so were our boys standing there saying “The American way of life really goes this way and if you boys want a razor and a radio, this is the way you do it”? No, we didn’t have a single man there, but there were a lot of Russian agents there who said, “Now you are all comrades, and the way to do this up properly is to take all the landlords and shoot them and then you get the land.”

“Well, I don’t know. I remember my father saying to me that if I lost...” “When did you lose some?”

Russia has been trained to think this way because Russian landlords have always been foreigners and Russian revolts have always consisted of shooting off the foreigners who held Russia in yoke. So they think that in every other country there are two races, the foreigners who have conquered the people and the people. They look at America and say, “Obviously there is the capitalist; he is like the White Russian who has conquered these poor Slavs, who are like the American people, the masses. And the American people will have to rise and throw these capitalists off.” That is the way they think and that is why it doesn’t make any headway in this country. They don’t appreciate the situation.

All of a sudden he says, “Well, I was on my way to the picture show; yeah, and a dime dropped — I was about ten and a dime dropped out of my pocket and fell on the sidewalk and rolled into a grating.”

But they walked into China, that we had opened wide to them, and took it over, and now we are complaining because we are having to fight China.

“All right.”

So when you get up into the field of humanities you see these things have been pretty badly adrift. But the rest of science has been almost this badly adrift. The reason is that they were going on authoritarian, unquestioned principles. Those people didn’t even question these principles enough to know they weren’t there and weren’t so. You can get such an apathetic attitude toward knowledge. That is real apathy.

If he has been educated in Dianetics with lots of words he is liable to try to tell you “And my brother said to me...” and so on. These are just perceptics. That is important, but what is really important was watching that dime disappear forever from sight.

Any person who accepts knowledge without questioning it and evaluating it for himself is demonstrating himself to be in an apathy toward that sphere of knowledge. This demonstrates that the United States Government today must be in a pretty bad state of apathy with regard to politics, in order to accept everything that comes along the way it does. This is true of every field.

Now, you will find that there is a loss under that. You start getting him to look at losses, one right after the other, and you can bring him right back down the line to times when he has lost material objects.

Now let’s tie this thing down a little closer. You see what comes about when somebody doesn’t find out what he is doing and then does it. You find out what happens to an individual who keeps taking data and never questions it, or who, maybe, is never permitted to question this data, and who then tries to erect the plans of his own lifetime or a profession on data which he himself has never evaluated. How can he possibly succeed? He can’t succeed any more than a nation can succeed.

But let’s not make the mistake, either, of thinking MEST means just a material object. When did he lose some space? He will say, “Well, I remember I was ordered . . .” and so on. He will start to tell you about a big conversation about something or other.

Fundamentals are very important. You have to learn how to think in order to really be sure of a fundamental. Thinking is not terribly hard to learn. All it is, is comparing the datum with the physical universe as you know it. What do you see around you? How do you find out if there is a lock? You can sure take somebody and run down a lock chain if you want to. I know enough people have done this — and I have done this myself — to leave this data unquestioned. But because I tell you it exists does not mean that it exists for you. Unless you have made up your mind that it exists for you, you are never going to be able to handle locks properly because you will only have them on an authoritarian basis.

You want to know when he lost space: “When were you living in a two-room apartment and you had to move into a one-room apartment?”

Authoritarianism is nothing if not a sort of hypnotism. The way it is done is, under threat of punishment or something of the sort, a person’s information channels are fixated on a certain line and he is stuffed, as if he were a snake being stuffed, with data. And he is told “This is the way it is, and never deviate from this line ! “ Of course, when he is through with all this and has imbibed all of this information, although his ability to progress may have been reduced, he will be very well “informed” and very “educated.” This is not very successful, unfortunately, because whatever the person does after that is sitting on a basis concerning which he was not permitted to think.

“Oh. When I was a little kid we moved out of a big house and into a small house (sniff). “ The first thing you know, you have a grief charge on this person, and there are no words. He cries because he has lost space. He had a room of his own in the big house, and then Papa lost MEST. This is the group. Papa got fired and there is a group loss.

So for heaven’s sake, in Dianetics, let’s not make the mistake of erecting our knowledge of what we are doing on the quicksand of indecision, because it is at best indecision which underlies that authoritarian statement “There is such a thing as an engram. An engram exists.” Unless you have looked into your own self and found out about it, or unless you have taken a preclear and actually run him into an engram, the realization (1) that there is a time track and (2) that physical pain can be stored, that it can be recovered and that all the perceptics are registered during those moments of unconsciousness, won’t be yours for sure. Your knowledge of the engram depends exclusively on what you have observed about that engram.

So now do we try to run out a lot of talking about Papa, what Papa has said to Mama and Mama said to Papa about this? No, let’s find the actual physical manifestations of what Papa’s loss of MEST meant to the group in terms of loss of MEST: no roller skates, they had to sell the bicycle, they had to move from a big house to a small house, they had less to eat and so forth. Let’s not have talking about it, though; let’s actually find the time when there was less to eat and the time when the bicycle was suddenly departing over the horizon, never to be seen again.

We talk about a technique of running the engram. There are several possible techniques in running engrams. There is one which seems to have worked out well. Make up your mind whether or not it works out for you. First find out whether or not there is an engram; you can get a technique that will discover that for you. But now let’s find out whether or not the technique of running engrams really runs the engram. Look it over and figure out what kind of a technique you would evolve if you were trying to handle this object, the engram. How would you go about it? Unless you have asked yourself that question and tried to do some figuring on it yourself, you will never come into agreement on the technique of running engrams. You will be doing an authoritarian rote.

The charge is not going to be found on — although the person might have cried on — ”I’m going to have to sell your bicycle, Junior.” The charge is on the departure of that bike, its leaving: loss of a material object.

You can learn how to run an engram by rote, but unless you try to think about it and figure it out you probably won’t be running an engram just because it is an engram. You will be going through some magic formula and you will make a mistake if you do that.

Then you ask, “Can you recall anything about having somebody take away some time from you?”

How would you run an engram if you didn’t know how to run an engram? The next thing is, what is a secondary? That a secondary seems to depend upon engrams underlying it is something that, as far as even I am concerned, is still open to question. I only know that every time I find a secondary I seem to be able to find the engram sitting under it. But this does not mean that a secondary could not exist independently. It does mean that you can find engrams underlying secondaries.

“Oh, yes. I remember a time when somebody said . . .” “No. Did you have to wait for a dentist lately or anything like that?”

What is a secondary? How does it have to be run out? Why can’t it be run out? These are questions you should ask yourself.

“Yeah. Boy, was he late! I had to wait for about forty-five minutes for a doctor the other day. I didn’t have it to wait either.”

Now, what are locks? How are they received? And how do you run them out?

“Now, remember an earlier period when you had to wait for somebody else.” Let’s get it back there. The first thing you know, you are going to find this poor character back in grade school, where he sat every morning at 9:00 and went through every afternoon until 3:15, every day, five days a week, year in and year out for eight years, and then four years of high school, and; so on.

What is this technique of straight memory? Why is straight memory validating? Why does the fellow when he really remembers something have a high sense of reality on it? Why does the reality level pick up?

People wonder why active characters don’t like school. Children can be made to accept education at kindergarten age. There are various levels of education: There is education you want to know, that you ask for and you come in voluntarily on; that is something else. And there is education that says “You be here and you learn this! “ But the child is far too young to know how this knowledge is ever going to be of any use to him at all and he is forced to sit there.

What is Lock Scanning? Why Lock Scanning? What will Lock Scanning do? You don’t need to wreck half a dozen preclears to find out these things. But you can find them out, and you should find them out! I would not classify you a good auditor unless you had done some thinking along in this line and unless you had tried to look and find it for yourself.

The less he understands that this knowledge is going to be of use to him, the more he is actually having MEST taken away from him and forced on him. By being denied all outdoors to play in, he is losing all outdoors; but by being given the small space in his seat, he is being given and forced to take that amount of space. That is a holder. His desire to negate against having that piece of space is a bouncer. The lead pencils which he has to collect, the books which he piles up, are groupers; the children in the class with him are a grouper; and the children he has to stay in line with and later on the people he has to line up in the army with are groupers. They are also holders. The time when he started one direction and somebody grabbed him and pushed him the other way is a misdirector. The time when he fell or almost fell is a down-bouncer. The time when he was pushed up in the air is an up-bouncer. Those are action phrases.

For instance, an auditor who does not understand Straightwire has no business lock-scanning because he could hardly know what the anatomy of a lock chain is. Furthermore, an auditor who is trying to do Validation Technique certainly must be pretty hazy in his fundamentals if he doesn’t realize that what happens in Validation Technique is simply that the preclear gets up a little theta and goes stabbing over into the entheta. The auditor will sit there and say, “All right, go to the basic. Now let’s run through all the analytical moments on the chain. All right. From the first moment there, where you are, to present time, begin scanning,” and then sit there for twenty minutes.

So, if you really want to bust the case up, first start devaluating language to the person and then make him start running these MEST lock chains.

That auditor has just never thought “What is a lock?” He has never looked over the basic postulate of Validation Processing if he is going to do a thing like that. If he understood that, it would just be something that he would automatically recognize. I wouldn’t have had to make a scale, a big schedule, and write down, page after page, do’s and don’ts for auditors to memorize and go through by rote. That is no way to learn.

I warn you, by the way, that on running these lock chains you will find that he is liable to pick up, as one of his primary holders, running into a brick wall or something, and that is an engram. You are liable to get him into some physical pain with this, but it isn’t anywhere near as arduous.

Of course your preclear is going to skid sideways into entheta — every time! And he will find out that he can’t keep from doing this. But the auditor knows, if he knows anything about Validation Processing, if he ever tested it out by hitting a few locks, that this condition will obtain. And because he knows this condition will obtain, he should know that about the third or fourth lock the preclear hits on that chain of analytical moments is going to drive him into entheta, and that from there on up the chain the preclear is going to go through entheta and he is going to get up near present time and be completely bogged in entheta. Then the auditor will say, “Now, did you go through all the analytical moments on this chain?” “Well, I kind of skidded over into entheta.”

Now, let’s say you get some fellow who can’t move on the track. He is having a hard time moving on the track, and he can’t perceive and he can’t do this and he can’t do that. You are going to have a tough time with this fellow because he is being too obedient to certain action phrases. You have to take the tension out of the action phrases. How do you do it? He has been terribly constricted in his prenatal area, obviously. He has a whole chain of that.

At this point the auditor who doesn’t know Validation Processing will look kind of disgusted, thinking, “Hm! He didn’t do what I said. He has got to be forced to do what I tell him to do!” And he will say to the preclear, “Now, you didn’t run all the analytical moments all the way up this chain. All right. Go back to the basic on the chain. Now go all the way to present time.” The preclear gets four locks up the line and dives sideways into entheta.

The worst part of an engram is that it robs the organism of its mobility; the organism is no longer self-determinedly mobile, and other perceptics in its vicinity take over its determination and move it. There is where self determinism starts to go by the boards in an engram, and that is the worst thing about an engram, not the fact that it has words.

Now what happens? The preclear has had a minor communication break because this auditor seemed to be a little bit upset or something of the sort, and the preclear has been asked to do something he cannot possibly do. So what does the preclear do? He is depressed on the tone scale, at least with regard to this auditor, and his next response is to run one thing and say he is running something else. The auditor has actually forced him into this deception because the auditor had not examined this principle of theta going over into the entheta. He didn’t know this happens. And this is basic fundamental; this is theory.

All engrams are holders, but a human being is supposed to avoid pain, so all engrams are potential bouncers. It is physical pain; therefore he should get away from it. But he was immobile when he was in it; therefore it is an automatic holder.

It cannot be done by rote. The auditor has to understand because too many factors can enter in, and if the auditor doesn’t know basic theory, he cannot extrapolate and figure out what’s going to happen. The auditor ought to be able to sit there and take a look at the preclear and figure it all out just from basic theory right there.

But it ruined time for him — it left a gap in time; therefore it aberrated the sense of time, because there is a piece of time track there for which he hasn’t got any data in the analytical mind.

No auditor ever ought to be tongue-tied. About the worst thing that can happen to a preclear is to get into something and have the auditor go, “Let’s see, was it page 62? I’m sure it was page 62, or was it page 63? And the question was — I just know the question was . . .” while the preclear is lying there suffering in agony saying, “Say something! Do something! Here I am with this knitting needle through my throat! What’s the next question?”

Because it interrupts self-determinism, it is also certainly a misdirector. The organism was going along this course and all of a sudden — crash! — engram. When it woke up it was going over somewhere else in an ambulance or something, so it has had its creative cycle of motion interrupted. That is a misdirector.

An auditor who is auditing by rote will make mistakes like that, because the preclear is obviously in a holder or something of the sort. The auditor shouldn’t have to try to figure out “Is it a holder? What are the holders it could possibly be?” or anything else.

A lot of engrams have drops in them, and there are pushes upward and so on.

Obviously the preclear is stopped in motion through time. Therefore something is stopping him in motion through time. What is it? He doesn’t have to think twice. All he needs to do is get the next phrase, or do something like that, and run it on through. All of a sudden he sees this thing isn’t going to reduce. What should he do? He ought to get lower on the chain and run the basic out on the chain. If he can’t get that he shouldn’t have been in there in the first place and he had certainly better get this preclear to present time by running him through some locks hurriedly and then scan off that session or straightwire off that session — make him remember each portion of the session — until that lock is all the way gone.

In short, an engram is, by its very being, a whole bundle of action phrases all by itself, regardless of the perceptics contained in it and certainly regardless of its words.

It is a bad auditor, by the way, who won’t take the session off after the auditing session by either or Lock Scanning. I should never have had to tell you that you can off a session by repeated memory of the various phases of the session. That is obviously possible. You can lock-scan it off, but if you have a preclear who can’t lock-scan easily, you can it off the same way. But you know basic fundamentals; you shouldn’t have to be told that sort of thing.

The words are terribly important to a word-minded society. They are important perceptics to get out because they mean things to preclears.

What I am asking you to do, principally, is examine your subject on a critical basis, a very critical basis. The only thing wrong with examining something on a critical line is the fact that people most commonly critically examine in this wise: “Let’s see, Doakes says that the amoebae is about 3 megatrons latitude Huh! Well, I was taught that it was 2.8 megatrons latitude when I was in school, and I learned in school before I read this book, so first fact takes precedence. So obviously this fellow is wrong. Therefore I criticize him.” You would be amazed at how many times this occurs!

One of the fast ways to run something out of a preclear is to run the chain of engrams which causes the preclear to do this and run those phrases out of it. But if you are just running phrases out of engrams and recovering a small amount of the pain, don’t you realize that you are leaving in the whole action content of that engram? Did the preclear get the concept of having been stopped in space at this point? If he didn’t, there is no sense in running “Stay there” out of it.

For instance, one of these so-called literary critics will tear through a book and say, “The cross section of life which this person attempted was something or other, something or other, and so on, and therefore . . .”

That is why you have to have the perceptics to run engrams: because the engrams will stop him, move him, misdirect him, confuse him and rob him of his time by physical pain. Furthermore, they usually take away some of the organism’s MEST by injury. They are really severe.

You ask this fellow “What is a novel?”

Theoretically, the fastest way to unburden one of these engrams would be to take the MEST locks off the top of it. Ask, “Do you remember a time when you had to stay there?” “Do you remember a time when you had to go when you wanted to come?” and so forth, and the first thing you know, you will start cracking the case.

“It is a cross section of life. A novel is a cross section of life. Obviously that novel was not a cross section of life, so it wasn’t a novel, so I didn’t like it.”

I sometimes play a trick on people at the Foundation. There are people down here who would occasionally like to be given a run by me, but I go out and I find bellhops, and I was working on the telephone man and working on the cook’s friends, because these people don’t know any Dianetics. They don’t expect to find something because you told them they would find it, so there isn’t a ghost of a chance that they will dub in a mechanism for you which isn’t there.

“Who told you that a novel had to be a cross section of life?”

I got a girl moving on the time track, who I don’t think had been moving on the time track for some time, by just running the simple series of locks of every time she had tried to get away from something. She started telling me, “I tried to get away from my husband. I used to say to him, ‘George — ”’

“Why, it is obvious; everybody knows that! There was my professor in literature. That was the definition of a novel. ‘A novel is a long work which attempts to give a cross section of life.”’

“No, no. When you -tried to get away from something.” We finally entered the top of this chain by getting the time her dress caught in the automobile door. She was trying to get away from the automobile and couldn’t get away from the automobile, and she remembered this.

Where that guy got his information, I don’t know. They haven’t even got a definition for aesthetics. They haven’t even got a definition for art. Why should they have a definition for a particular form of art? That is not learning, that is parroting.

“Now let’s try to find some time when you tried to get away from something else.” And finally we found her mother’s chief aberration: Every time the little girl tried to go outside she was stopped, “Now, you are going to stay inside,” and there was no reason why or anything. We don’t care what the words are on this, we just want the fact of this stopping. Every time the kid tried to walk away in a store to look at something — stopped. Every time the kid tried to go downstairs — stopped. Every time she tried to go upstairs — stopped. I finally gave her the idea that what I wanted were times when she had been physically restrained, because these times when she had been verbally restrained were so terribly important to her that she could hardly get off the subject.

The literary critic says the novel is no good because it does not compare with the opinion of somebody else. That is the only point I am trying to make with you. Don’t criticize something on the basis of whether or not it concurs with the opinions of somebody else. The point is, does it concur with your opinion? Does it agree with what you think?

We got over onto this clear line of stoppings, and we started counting them up. I was doing Repetitive on this, and finally we were getting to the point where we actually straightwired back down to a time when she was a baby lying on the bed and her mother was trying to put a diaper on her. She was maybe a year old or something like this, and she would try to turn away from it, and every time — stopped. I got her to present time.

You have all done observation of the material universe. You have done observation of organisms. Maybe you haven’t seen all there is to see about an organism, but there are plenty of organisms around. There is no dearth of organisms, I guarantee you. So there is no reason to accept the opinion of Professor Blotz of Berlin University who said in 1933 that schizophrenics were schizophrenics and that made them schizophrenics.

This is what I am talking about when I am talking about MEST locks. Actually, all I have been doing is trying to help you define better for yourself what a MEST lock is and how to go after it, and trying to disabuse you of any idea that it has anything to do with words.

You can see, for instance, any and every form of insanity you want to see in almost any insane part of the world. Right now, if you consider people for just a short time and study out the peculiarities of people around you, you wonder whether, if each one of these peculiarities was tremendously magnified, the fellow would still be sane. If you just sat down and listed all the peculiarities you could think of that you had ever observed in any human being, when you got through you would have a list of all the insanity’s, because each one of those peculiarities, magnified, becomes completely irrational and any one of those facets could take over and dominate a person wholly. You would have a more accurate list, by the way, than Kraepelin, the man who composed the list which is used in the United States. It has some umpteen dozen classifications and categories, and down at the end of it is a great big box that just says “Unclassified.” This is the standard classification of insanity’s.

The words come along and take on meaning to the child and then to the adult solely because the child has observed something being stopped and has himself been stopped. For example, he has seen a clock stop, and from the fact that the clock can stop, he begins to translate that time can stop, and he goes on out into a whole flock of extrapolations. The mind goes on and extrapolates to kingdom come on stopped and all the ramifications of stop, and you will find it branching out into an enormous amount of language to describe being stopped. For instance, on a construction job somebody says, “The rain came down and held us up for a while.” You start listening to the English language and start translating it over into MEST terms and you will certainly find out what a funny flock of symbols you are really dealing with.

In other words, if you just took the idea that insanity is irrationality (which is more or less what it is) and you tried to find out how irrational people could get on certain obsessions which you already saw in them — how they would appear if they were all this obsession — you would come down with a better and more complete list of insanity and its manifestations than is currently in existence.

You will find out that every phrase has MEST interpretation, that back of every action phrase which is giving a preclear trouble you can find a whole chain of these things. Find them and blow them. Blow them by, by Repetitive or, if your preclear is high enough on the tone scale, by Lock Scanning. Unburden stuff that way and I am sure your occluded cases will open up quicker.

Any one of you could do that. And yet the name Kraepelin flies supreme over all the field of psychiatry.

We are on a good, fast highway now.

If you care, then, to make a good examination of your subject, you will find that is the easy way out. The hard way is to sit down and memorize the third of a million words you will find in Science of Survival; that is the tough way to go about it.

This hasn’t anything much to do with Validation Technique beyond this fact: Validation Technique can be applied to any Dianetic technique. If you want to, you can start busting these locks without finding them. The only thing you do to break holders, for instance, is start running the times when the person was moving. You just start from today and find out he suddenly recognizes that he is moving, and he recognizes that he has been moving a long time. He has been so introverted on the subject of staying still — through parental training or some such thing — that he overlooks the fact that every day in his life he makes a great many motions in a great many directions that are perfectly free.

But that is the way the modern educational systems have rather insisted that you go about it. They insist that you go about it by sitting down and memorizing the whole book all the way through. Then you put it down on an examination paper and answer all the quizzes properly and answer the final examinations properly, and they give you an A and hand you your engineering diploma. Then you go out and build this tunnel and it falls in.

You can run him then on matter, energy, space and time enforced; matter, energy, space and time inhibited; or matter, energy, space and time validation, or sane. You can bust groupers by finding all the times in his life when he happily and gaily was tearing things to pieces and stretching them out all over the place. You will find that children have a natural inclination to tear things to pieces and strew them around the place. Of course, the reason for this is they know sooner or later they are going to be processed by Dianetics and that you are going to need an analytical moment to undo their groupers!

The subject of physics can’t be taught by this rote proposition. It will catch a guy every time. But biology can be to a large degree. You don’t dare think much in the field of biology. Elementary chemistry can go off along on this line very well, but you take a fellow who has done a lot of memorization on the way of his learning in chemistry, and he will come a cropper the second he gets over into organic chemistry where he has to start thinking a little bit in the laboratory, and the next thing you know, he will go appetite over tin cup. The fellow has to know his fundamentals. Unfortunately, not even chemistry is very well defined at the basic.

This, certainly, is the basic fundamental of language. It is a very amusing game for you to start taking language apart, and you will find its most esoteric concepts. For instance, take the concept of ghost. You know what a ghost is: It is a sheet combined with fog, of course, of somebody who isn’t there who you thought was there but isn’t. That is obvious. It is a person who was there but who wasn’t there, only it is represented by a sheet — but it is fog. Now, you do very esoteric extrapolations from there merely because you have so many other symbols.

Suppose you were to look for a basic datum on the subject of man and say “Here are living human organisms. Let’s look them over carefully and find out what makes them tick. There are a lot of ideas, and let’s be very fair about it. Let’s take several theories and look them over. There is the theory that all a man is is sex, that this is all there is to the business of living or anything else, and this is all there is to aberration.” If you think about it very long you will find that it obviously has left something out.

Don’t think that I am devaluating thought, because I am not. Inside our heads we have so far outthought and outstripped language that language is way behind us.

Examine the theory of whether or not a man becomes upset mentally because he is invested by demons. You have never seen a demon so it is kind of hard to test the idea, and it is not very susceptible to proof and so on, so you kind of drop that theory.

But language doesn’t begin to really describe thought concepts. We are thinking, and we are trying to translate the thoughts into language, and the language is based on observable agreement between you and somebody else. So your language is far below the level of actual thinking. Don’t ever let yourself get tricked into believing that language is up as high as thinking, because it isn’t.

Let’s take the theory that it is pain that does it. There is something about pain and this fellow avoids pain; he gets hurt and that means he will avoid what hurt him. Take that theory and begin to work it out along the line and observe it. Does a man keep pain around? Does he associate things with pain? The first thing you know, you will have extrapolated an engram. You can do it independently. And who knows, in doing that you might come up with some bright, brand-new concepts. You would then know that restimulation is very bad for people because it tells them that pain is in the vicinity — that they are in the vicinity of something that is going to cause pain. And if it is just broad shotgun restimulation all over the place, it starts to tell them the whole physical universe around them is full of pain, therefore they had better draw back. What do they do? They introvert. They stop looking out and start looking in.

And a person does not think only as well as he knows language; he thinks as well as he thinks.

You can go at this thing that bluntly; you can draw these blunt conclusions with regard to it.

Now, what are we going to do to get rid of this pain? We start to work it out and we find mechanics that postulate that if the pain is sudden and we stretch time on it, something happens with regard to it. In other words, it took a fifth of a second for this fellow to get a burned finger and we are going to stretch that burn out over a minute while he tells us about it. If we stretch time on this thing it evidently can then be assimilated somehow by the body or repaired, or the memory of it can be recovered. It disenturbulates in some fashion and it doesn’t hurt anymore, and furthermore, the perceptics associated with this are no longer considered dangerous by him.

We discovered these things. But I am afraid every auditor ought to discover them all over again. He might discover a lot more. What you have now is highly workable. It works. But it doesn’t work because I say so.

Look at preclears who don’t get well in Dianetics — preclears who keep on coughing, for instance. There is something wrong with the auditor. If there is something wrong with the auditor, there is something wrong with that auditor’s comprehension of basic theory. The auditor has not thought it out. If he hasn’t thought it out he is not going to understand it readily. If he is not going to understand it readily, if he is just taking it on an authoritarian principle, then the auditor when running the case is not going to think, since authoritarianism has as its first rule “Don’t think.” Something is going to happen to this case that is wrong.

Cases recover best when in the hands of those auditors who best understand basic theories and techniques.

It is appalling, for instance, that a technique like that one of running the preclear into a boil-off could circulate in Dianetics. Yet auditors all over the place were picking up that technique. If you start to extrapolate from basics, you don’t extrapolate into that technique. If you take that boil-off technique and try to work back to basic cause, you don’t get there. There is something wrong with the technique.

Something came out and people could produce a dramatic manifestation with it, and evidently that was all that people were looking for. As I told you earlier, I can give you some techniques that will really produce some dramatic manifestations. I can figure out a therapy that would have blood squirting out of the preclear’s ears. I can also produce another one which would curl a preclear up in a ball and keep him there for two hours — rigid, solid, unmoving. I could then prove to everybody that, because we are giving him this rest and returning him to a younger period in his life when his recovery powers were so much greater than they are in present time, while he is returned to this period in his life all rolled up in a ball he will heal up. And therefore the therapy is very good, and therefore we should return him to an early period and leave him curled up in a ball for two hours and then his recuperative powers will be such that he will heal up, and when we bring him to present time he will be well.

Furthermore, every time he is brought to present time we could tell him he is well, insist that he is well and show four printed references to prove he is well, and then kick him out on his face if he says he is not well — and we would have approximated some schools of thought I know of these days.

This has just been an effort to plead with you to review basics all over again; look them over. Find out where, if anyplace, you disagree personally with basic theory, or where you have accepted material on a highly authoritarian basis which you yourself have not observed in fact, and then compare it to your own experience and the world around you.