All right.

Thank you.

Want to talk about now, in the second lecture of this series, the elements of the problem, the problem itself and the number of things which were involved in the solution of the problem.

And hello, all of you. I’m very happy to see you here.

And this right at first glance might seem awfully dull material, but it nevertheless might give you some idea of what an individual was faced with in terms of no data.

I want to welcome you to Philadelphia and the First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists and hope that I’ll be able to talk to most of you personally. And I hope during this series of lectures that you will be able to see very clearly intensely usable technology. And I hope that in the seminars and the Group Processing you will be able to see yourself that these technologies work.

The problem itself consisted of apparent discrepancies and continuous disappointments between the evident desire of life and the things which occurred to life in this universe. Wide discrepancy there: life says it is doing this and it’s trying to do that and always winds up with the reverse. This makes a puzzle. It is what is commonly known as a paradox or an enigma. And this has been upsetting to living beings now for quite a while. Ever since people started a little bit down Tone Scale, they began to be concerned about this: that they hear on every hand that there should be ethics, that people should be honest, that man should love one another, that the society itself should be just and fair; and on every hand apparently this is not what is happening. One sees betrayal, dishonesty – many, many things – war, idiocies in general.

All we’re interested in here in this congress, really our first, foremost thing, is to put into your hands a simplicity with which you can achieve maximal effect And if I can succeed here and if your group leaders can succeed in clarifying this material for you, I’ll be very happy. If it does something for you personally, I’ll be very happy about that I see the past extremely well exemplified here, that all has not been lost in the last three years. I look around and I see former wrecks able to sit in a chair. And I have made in the last half an hour or so at least three errors in identifying people. Thought one girl was one old lady’s daughter; it turned out to be the old lady herself. Yeah, so that’s very, very gratifying.

You go down to a court of law, you find there will be a number of individuals there, particularly in night court, or one of these quick court sessions and parked away in some corner of the town – nearly every town has such a court. Men are brought in there, they walk through, the judge says, „Guilty? Or not guilty?“

The first lecture of this series is called „The History and Development of Dianetics and Scientology.“

The fellow says, „Well, not guilty, Your Honor,“ the usual.

I actually shouldn’t have to go into this very deeply with very many of those present But I’ll skim lightly over the cataclysmic and sad events of the past in order to bring us up to present time. I might even unstick one or two on the time track. And I hope in this very short introduction that I might possibly demonstrate that the changes which have taken place did have some reason and purpose.

„Well, look guilty to me.“ Pam. „Thirty dollars, thirty days. If you don’t have thirty dollars, thirty days.“

I know that there is doubt in some minds. They think that one does this sort of thing – keeps changing techniques – solely to escape the entrapment of an old reality. And whereas that’s very laudable, I’m not that afraid of theta traps.

And the fellow says, „But I have a wife. And I couldn’t afford an attorney.“

So, in the history and in the development of, one can say now, this science, a great many changes have been very, very necessary. You know, it’s quite remarkable to sit in the ivory tower of a person who was trained as a scientist and who had sunk to the very, very lowest state of being a fiction writer and to find that his skill in both led toward one conclusion, and that was that people didn’t know quite all there was to know about the human mind. Now, that was a remarkable conclusion to reach, because we are assured on every front that this has all been solved in, I think, 1786 by a fellow by the name of Heimstätter or something of the sort, who invented Dianetics at that time. (And for those who haven’t gotten their sense of humor yet…) You know, I’d think this was a British audience here, the lag on the thing, but maybe I’ve got to readjust to American humor.

„Well, haven’t any time for trial by jury here. I mean, that’s…“

Anyway, somebody – some laughable character – not too long ago, put out a long writing on the history of Dianetics, whereby it was concluded that it was all invented in 1786, except none of it had been thought up then. It had – thought up by me later, but it had all been done in 1786 or something of this sort. And I was very interested in this, because I went and tried to find the book and the Library of Congress doesn’t know of it But it was a good try.

You think this doesn’t happen because it says in all the history books and storybooks and things like that that this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

The whole time track is saturated with this sort of thing, so we’ll pass over – pass over lightly on this.

People are picked up by the police on the streets and they are arrested solely because they don’t have a dollar in their pocket or they’re not nicely dressed or they’re loitering or something of the sort And they go to court, and because they are dressed the way they are, and because they don’t act the way they do and so forth, the next thing you know, they find themselves in jail Just like that That’s not justice, that is adjudicating the Tightness and wrongness of a person in direct ratio to his buying power. Why, it doesn’t seem to have too much to do with it, but it’s the only rule that has been found workable, evidently, in courts of law. And you’ll see it there directly – if you cared to go down at this moment to the courts here, the night courts here, you would see this going on, and you would sit there horrified.

I came out of an ivory tower, I will say, which was very happy with the pure knowledge of a coil, the pure knowledge of Ohm’s law. Ohm’s law is beautiful, you know. And you look at these things that nobody has to think about them, you don’t have to argue about them at all, they work. And out of the somewhat detached studio where you sat down and you wrote, „Bow wow, barked Bill’s pistol and another redskin bit the dust, which he chewed reflectively,“ and you sold this at some remarkable number of cents per word, for years. And I moved out into what I laughingly thought at the time was the American scene and which turned out to be a Roman arena. (The blood of Christians is still all over it; they’ve never thrown sand over it They’ve still got some of the bodies hung up on crosses around in the society. It’s really dreadful.)

You would say, „This couldn’t possibly happen in a just society. Just because this fellow isn’t well dressed, he’s in jail.“ And yet that’s the only conclusion that you can draw.

But anyway, here was Dianetics. Done in an ivory tower and applied without ever naming it, to an enormous number of people, actually, by myself and codified, as far as I could tell, so that it was perfectly understandable. I understood it People got well and this was fine, and so I didn’t think there was any more to it than that I wasn’t calling it a science at the time. It didn’t have a name yet I had to cook up the name one – late one Saturday night when somebody kept insisting it was a science and if it was a science it had its name. So I sat back and I thought real hard, and I remembered something about Greek and I remembered that „Dia, that’s ‘through’ – ’through,’ dia. And that’s through, through – yeah, that’s right ‘through mind.’ That’s all there is to it“ „Dianetics,“ I said, „is the name of this science. And you’ve heard of it of course.“ He, of course, said he had, being from Bell Labs, not from RCA Victor.

He can’t hire an attorney, he can’t pay anybody anything; there’s no trial by jury for him.

And we moved into the sphere of telling people about it instead of working with it And the next thing that happened was a publisher said, „If you will say that everybody can do it, why, I’ll publish a book on it, and this will be a very interesting book and probably sell five or six thousand copies.“ And I was very happy about this, because I was getting tired at that time of explaining it I thought if I only had a book, you see, I could just say, „Well, here’s a copy,“ you know? And go off fishing or something.

The thing down there in Washington called the Bill of Rights – we all agree to that Bill of Rights; we think that’s wonderful. And the president of the United States a few years ago dared forward himself into great unpopularity by advocating that it be enforced fat a change. That’s a fact. Why, you had states of the Union saying they were going to secede – just oh, wonderful. We were going to enforce the Bill of Rights, and yet that Bill of Rights isn’t as complete, if you thought it over, as you would like to see it.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The plans of Homo sapiens and rodents aft gang agley. And as a result, people kept buying this book. And the publisher didn’t want them to buy the book. Every time they bought a copy of the book his interest in the publishing house sunk terribly, because he was trying to buy the publishing house, you see, and the publishing house was getting wealthy on this book. And this made him very angry with me, and so on.

That Bill of Rights should have two other clauses in it one, a man has a right to his own sanity and, two, a man has a right to his own life. And that, in its narrowest sense, should be in the Bill of Rights. I don’t mean any of the philosophic meanderings which could go on from those two things, but just those two things: a man has a right to his own sanity; a man has a right to live and not be killed.

Everybody got mad at everybody. This is a love-hate universe, you see. You start out by loving everybody and end up by hating everybody. That’s the frame – cycle. And by the time you hate everybody, that’s good and solid and that’s MEST and you’re matter then. So anyway, it ran the cycle as far as the book was concerned.

And yet a fellow walks down here to a hospital the other day – a young man, he’s in good health, but occasionally he has bad headaches. They took him and said, „Well, the thing for you, so-and-so and so-and-so. Oh, I guess, oh, go to Room 13,“ and so on. They turned him in and put him on an operating table and says, „We’re going to adjust something in your head.“ And he said he didn’t want this. And he says, „Well, the doctor says you’ve got to have this.“ And he said he didn’t want it. So they gave him a shot of morphine and wheeled him down to the operating room and killed him dead with a transorbital leukotomy, because he had a headache.

But very shortly after all this happened, a bunch of people came to me and they said, „Let’s have a big organization that can take care of all the servicing that’s going on.“

There’s no data on record anyplace – nowhere, nowhere is there any data on record that a transorbital leukotomy, a prefrontal lobotomy has cured a headache. It’s cured a man’s life, it’s cured him of living, it’s cured him of moving, but it hasn’t cured a headache the way we understand curing a headache, which is to say, making somebody feel good and not have a headache after they’ve had a headache.

So I said, „Fine.“ Big organization, that sounded good to me. And I said, „Let’s have a big organization.“ So they had a big organization. You’ve been recovering from it ever since. Well…

Today I was informed of this – a very reliable authority – by a medical doctor that I asked to investigate this matter. I spent a great deal of money, by the way, in the last three years getting the records straight There’s a lot of things on record; we can hazard a lot of guesses.

Anyway (he said with no responsibility for anything that’s gone on), the whole past has actually been a social experiment by which one tried to find out the channel and the level of understanding and the optimum technique for the use of Homo sapiens. How many people are there in the British Empire? I know quite a few people in the British Empire, too. There is a country over there named Great Britain, and you add that to the hundred and fifty million in America, and that’s actually about the number of people that were involved in this thing. Because the strange part of it is, is everybody was reading the wrong things about it there for a little while about three years ago.

I had a research chemist review – also had, by the way, a degree in English – review the records of electric shocks, transorbital lobotomies and other psychiatric treatments. Review the hospital records and the journal records and nothing else, and without an opinion – the hospital records and the journal records – and compile them to find out if medicine was saying what it knew. And it was saying it every time: that a person is at the complete mercy in this society of mental treatment for political reasons. Fascinating, isn’t it?

And the best, the very best magazine – I mean, the magazi…, your magazines that are just the soul of truth (I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about these magazines). Time magazine has never, in its entire career, uttered a single colored truth. Never a single truth of any kind has ever been published by that magazine. Anyway, I was counting up the columns one day which they had invested in the subject of Dianetics, and I was somewhat thunderstruck to find out that for the same period it was more than they had invested in the private life of the president That was very interesting to me. You would be amazed if you went back through all the copies of old magazines how much space has been devoted to Dianetics. It’s fabulous.

Reminds me of an officer – all due respect to the United States Navy. I like the United States Navy. I was a navy junior myself, been in the navy. A good organization, a good outfit, best navy in the world, but it’s a navy.

Now, the social experiment was what was important, and the effort to keep going with investigation and keep learning from what was happening. Many times people have turned to me and accused me, very bluntly, of simply letting a thing run off the wheels, just go off the edge of the road just to see what was going to happen. And I looked at these people thunderstruck; I was hurt I said, „How could you possibly think such a thing about me?“ But it was true. And so, a great deal was learned.

The United States Navy had a little – well, they had an accident, a small accident called Pearl Harbor a few years ago. And there was a commanding officer with a brilliant combat record in World War I; excellent condition this officer was in; beautiful fellow. He was out of port at the time Pearl Harbor happened, and for six months he’d been saying, „The increased signs of Japanese military activity in the Pacific demonstrate that we had better be extremely alert.“ Nobody was alert So he went out and got alert. And he was smart enough not to be in that harbor.

What does it take to make Homo sapiens come upscale? Well, you first have to find out where he is. And you know that I didn’t know that till a few months ago. Fantastic! With all of the tremendous certainty I pack into a paragraph, I didn’t know a few salient points.

So he sailed back in, and he went up to headquarters and he said, „My God! What have you done?“ „Now,“ he said, „let’s patch this up right away and let’s get the squadron I have here alert We’ll get those aircraft carriers, and we’ll at least repair it to that degree, because you people have made a terrible mess of things.“

I invented a technique known as Acceptance Level Processing; it is a variation of Expanded GITA. One can take this technique, and using brackets, which is to say, have the preclear mock up for himself, have another mock up for himself and others mock up for others what is acceptable. You will find out that that which is acceptable, which the person desires will, when mocked up, even on an occluded case, go into the bank with a crash. It’s as though one had a vacuum cleaner working in the preclear. And when you give him something that is really acceptable to him, it simply disappears by collapsing into the bank with great speed. And you can establish by this exactly what the acceptance level is of a preclear.

You know what they did to that officer? It wasn’t Monday morning after December the seventh when that man was in a hospital room, under detention as a dangerous psychotic, and was shipped to Saint Elizabeth and retained there until it wasn’t likely that he would give any story to the press.

Now, the acceptance level of the society at large was also under study. There are eight dynamics. And the society at large had a tremendous lot to be known about it. It was wonderful how little actually was known about the society at large.

I know that man. I’ve been down there several times around Saint Elizabeth’s, and it’s interesting the use which is occasionally made of insanity. All you have to say about a man in the society is, „He’s crazy!“ Everybody says, „Well, then, the guy isn’t talking right.“

You have people like Warner Brothers or the Saturday Evening Post who would give anything, including their grandmother’s false teeth, to know what the acceptance level of the public is. Because if they knew the acceptance level of the public or if they knew that the acceptance level could be established, they could then fill that need, and filling that need they could then reap a fortune.

Of course, an awful lot of – there’s enough truth in this, you see; there’s an awful lot of crazy people that do say very crazy things. But a man has a right to his own sanity.

Hollywood today is falling flat financially because it doesn’t know that acceptance level. The amount of advertising has dwindled in the Saturday Evening Post simply because it, again, does not know that acceptance level. These magazines, these movies are shooting all over the sky in some sort of an effort, some sort of a rule of the thumb to establish it.

A Korean veteran married a little high-school kid. She didn’t know anything; the psychiatrist says to her, „Now, your husband needs electric shocks, and you’ve got to okay it“

William Randolph Hearst went way upstairs and caught the upper fringe of the American public acceptance level. Back in 1897 or something like that he sent a photographer to Cuba, and the photographer sent – to get pictures of the war. And the photographer said, „Why, there’s no war down here.“ And Hearst sent him a very angry cable and said, „You get the pictures, I’ll get you the war.“ And he did: 1898, Spanish-American War.

And she says, „Is that best? Will that cure him?“

Now, today you can go out here on the corner and find the upper fringe of acceptance level in the lesser yellow journals. Fantastic. The acceptance level isn’t where those people think it is at all. You’ve got to go down to the five-mile deep and then take a submarine lower to find the public – snap (snap) – acceptance level of fact.

„Oh, yes, yes, yes. Always cures them, cures them. Now you just sign on the dotted line. And if you don’t sign and if you don’t give us permission to give him electric shocks, we’ll kick him out of the hospital.“ She signed and he died.

As soon as you know this principle, by the way, anything that is a problem to you about another person – parents, anything like that – ceases to be a problem. With the data which had been assembled and with the material which was to hand in Dianetics and Scientology one could then very easily integrate what is the acceptance level of a large public, as well as the acceptance level of an individual.

He didn’t have the right to say whether or not he was going to get an electric shock or not.

Now, to give you some sort of an idea of an insight and what this suddenly does to an individual: what is the acceptance level of a psychiatrist? You see, it immediately reveals itself. You would take a psychiatrist, if you were to ask him to mock up acceptable people, he would mock up the people he is treating. Then do you expect this man immediately afterwards to bring these people to another level which is not acceptable to him? No. It’s too much to ask of the man to shift his acceptance level in actual play. That’s a shuddering sort of a fact.

Does this picture – and of course, I’m emphasizing the mind rather than wide, broad injustices – does this picture agree then with what you commonly suppose to be healing? Well, just in that little field it doesn’t agree. Well, in the broad field it doesn’t agree either.

Now, if you can – you can establish this for any profession or any entertainment with great ease. If the result is shocking to you and if man’s mental anatomy is then lying before you in its somewhat impure state, why, blame me. Everybody does. All right.

A man is a good fellow; he works all his life, he tries to help people, he does this, he does that, and sure enough, why, at the last minute somebody picks up a club from behind and fixes his clock for him but good. The universe demonstrates a discrepancy: what it says it is doing is opposed to what it is evidently doing.

During this period a social experiment was conducted in one of the smaller cities of the country in one of the smaller states of the country; place named Los Angeles. And Los Angeles, California, had in it, at one time, a Foundation. The Foundation was almost broke because it simply couldn’t get itself together or pulled together in any way. And I gave the Foundation its head completely, and turned it into a socialist cooperative experiment and watched what happened. And learned by looking at that group of people what happens in cooperative experiments and what people will be subjected to.

Now, what we consider a downscale operation is where these condemned activities on the whole, in a society, occupy greater number of incidents than the activities which we supposedly uphold. And when a society cracks across that 50 percent barrier it starts down very rapidly, and this we know as a dwindling spiral.

It is a very conceited thing for a man to suddenly say to himself, „Why, I can forecast exactly what the reactions of everything and everybody will be before I have ever seen those reactions.“ That was the sort of conceit I was operating in, in 1949. I’m not operating in that conceit today; I’ve seen what can happen.

Yes, the first thing we face is that life is evidently not doing what it says it’s doing in this universe. It says it’s doing one thing, it’s evidently doing something else. It’s at least doing something else a lot of the time. When a doctor of medicine considers killing as good as curing, this is real weird, isn’t it?

You have to look. Does you a great deal of good. When you’re walking across the street you – if you want to stay alive, if you’re amongst that small minority – look at the traffic lights and you’ll find out whether or not they’re green or red. Elementary step, isn’t it?

Somebody goes to a place which advertisedly helps people and gets his spine broken or is disabled completely. And he doesn’t have anything to say about whether or not it’s going to happen to him. Big discrepancy.

But you could sit in the hotel lobby and say to yourself, „Now, when I go out across the street there will probably be a short in the main switchboard of the police department, in such a way that there will be no traffic lights, so they will all jam red, and I will go out of the lobby and walk across the street and I won’t have to look at the traffic lights.“ It’s always a good thing, in this universe, to look at something. Well, I’ve had three years of looking. In those three years I have seen techniques which were pretty good techniques – a lot of them – misused, abused, turned wrong side to, misunderstood, shaken up, re-explained. I’ve also seen them used very expertly. But in those three years, until a few months ago, there was no technique that one could say, without much doubt in his own mind, „If this technique is put into the hands of an individual, it does not and will not carry with it a great deal of damage if misused, and will, if used properly, do about all the good that can be done in this universe.“

In the matter of the state, people are continually, over and over, betrayed by governments. Over and over. This is the oldest story in Latin America which can be told. The government rides in on a great rosy mist of „Everything is going to be better,“ and as soon as it is there, immediately turns on the people and enslaves them to an even greater extent than the last government. That is the usual cycle.

The technique is one thing in its theory. It is another thing when I apply it. It is another thing when it’s taught and an auditor applies it And it’s quite another thing what happens to it when it gets to the fifth-, sixth-stage and way out into the public It’s important to know that, you see. A technique itself does an evolution by being handed on from person to person. And you have to go out there to the fifth-, sixth-, eighth-, fifteenth-stage and look at the technique after it arrived there – not to suddenly make up your own reality about it, but to look at it for what it is, what’s it being used for and what’s it doing in people’s hands. And when you look at that you’ll go back immediately and sit down in your office and say, „Let’s see, let’s have a considerably different technique about this. Ahem.“

Then there’s something wrong, if this happens over and over and over.

It’s very wonderful that these techniques have produced in the hands of people who are quite sincere, very excellent results. It’s also quite remarkable how far they have often gone off the track. But today, we can sum up the whole of processing in a sentence: Don’t think, look! That’s Scientology. That’s all there is to it Don’t think, look.

Yes, there’s something wrong all right, but one had to look pretty deep to find out what was wrong.

You think that’s simple? Well, girl delivered little Diana to us while we were down in Spain. And perhaps she was a little tired or something, but I kept asking her – trying to find out a couple of very salient points, and she never answered the question asked – very remarkable degree. You say, „Weather?“ And she would say, „Well, historically speaking…“

It sounds funny, possibly might not meet your eye instantly, but (this is a horrible thing to tell an audience), but a thing, a being or an entity which is immortal and which cannot do anything but survive is made to fight like mad because it is afraid it can’t.

That’s what? That’s just not looking. They get to a point where they not only don’t dare look, but they don’t dare think about what’s to be thought about They can’t communicate about what’s being communicated about And that is just the lower stage of „Don’t look,“ you see?

It is utterly impossible for a thetan to do anything but survive. And so we have to add some duress to it As soon as you recognize that, the problem will fall apart in your hands.

„Don’t look,“ then, becomes a gradient scale of „First – think about it first, and then look.“ That’s why you have roadmaps. They tell you all about it before you get there. That’s the trouble with the whole – trouble with an occluded case: he has to know before he goes; he has to know, think about it before he can be and he’s so busy thinking about being that he never is. It’s simplicity itself. You see this?

Survive as the basic drive of existence answers up all necessary qualifications for Homo sapiens. It describes what he’s doing. What he’s doing can immediately be reduced understandably to survive. Yes, he’s trying to survive against the obstacles imposed upon him by the MEST universe. That’s what he’s trying to do, he thinks. But we look behind that scene, we get this discrepancy of he says he’s trying to survive and then is succumbing all over the place.

So we move out a little bit deeper into this problem and we find out that he isn’t just thinking before he goes. He’s setting up the problem before he thinks about it Oh, this is really getting interesting. We’re into the field of science now. You set up the problem before you think about it and then you accumulate data, which preferably is not related to it And if you accumulate enough of this data and you put it on enough pieces of paper in enough files, it’ll impress somebody. Science. Now, that’s a little bit hard on science. Science was struggling along without a lot of things, but it could have looked. All right.

Do you know that it’s quite a trick for a person to walk across a street and not see the traffic light? That’s quite a trick! A person has to work awfully hard to get hurt in this society. The whole society is rigged so that he can’t get hurt. He can’t get hurt You see that? You see what a dreadful conflict and what a logical mess this would make out of everything; trying to force, whip, beat, nag something into surviving when it can’t do anything else. That is the terrible pity of it! That is the worst thing that could happen to anybody.

Now, we get the person who is worried about having to set up the problem before they think about it. Now, we’re getting toward normal now. And then we have the person who, of course, doesn’t dare worry. He doesn’t dare worry, because if he worried he’d have to set up the problem and if he set up the problem, then he’d think about it, you see. And then if he thought about it hard enough he might look. So you go out here in the street and you see people walking up and down the street, they’ve got big thick glasses on. That’s to help them look. And you ask people, „What are those glasses for?“ And they will say, „For looking, of course.“ That’s just it; they expect the glasses to do all the looking. Back of the glasses they have a pair of eyes, which do the looking through the glasses for the person. In other words, let’s get this removed as many times as we can get it removed so we don’t have to look.

The Greeks had a play – I remember there’s a young fellow, he wanted eternal life. Oh, he lived a thousand years, and one by one – and here he is beautiful, young, and he watches all of his friends dying off and things change and he’s dropping out of it and dropping out of it, and he can’t die. Terrible. And of course, he finally winds up just begging the gods and sacrificing everything and anything just to die.

Now, we say what about feeling? If looking is so important, what about feeling? Well, I’m afraid you’re dealing with the same thing. Feeling is condensed looking. If you just shorten up the time span of a glance, you will get waves jamming up dose enough together to produce feeling. Looking produces a sensation. If you can’t get a sensation by looking at some of the girls that you see on the streets here in Philadelphia or who are right here in this congress, I feel for you. I’ll give you the address of a good auditor.

If that were written in this society at this time, the end of it would be that – the final solution was that he couldn’t die. And it would end on that solemn note of apathy.

Now, see how far we have gone in the history and development of Scientology. See where we’ve gone exactly; we’ve gone that same track. Went way back in the past. Example of Sigmund Freud: Fool around with a person’s past long enough and he’ll get into present. There’s some truth in that If you wipe out enough past, he hasn’t got any past to think about; and that was Dianetics.

But that’s what’s happening. Everyone is hiding this fact. But one can survive at different levels; one can live at different levels.

Now, we had there a workable therapy. It is a therapy which is fully as workable as… Well, I know this; I don’t think a therapy can be worked out about the past that we haven’t beaten around one way or the other. I set it up all one day on symbolic logic and worked out the equations of all possible therapies, and then just started dealing them off the top of the deck – not the bottom of the deck as some auditors think I do – but deal them off the top of the deck to a number of auditors. Sure, they’re all workable. Some things are much hotter than others, some things are much cooler. But the point is that therapies which wipe out the past ended with Dianetics.

And when a society becomes entirely too intense on the business of surviving, it gets very, very, very unhappy. It gets worse and worse and worse, and its level of survival, the interest in living decreases markedly. And in order to reach up to a goal where people can be a bit happier and a bit freer is the desirable goal, not just the goal of nuking somebody survive because he can’t do anything else.

I don’t think anybody here will disagree with me when I say that Dianetics does quite a piece of work in the matter of Lock Scanning, running engrams, processing out efforts. The bulk of the cases to which it’s addressed, something will happen to that case to improve it, because of this alteration of the energy pattern of the past That’s Dianetics.

But you could evidently take somebody and with various duress make him insane. He wouldn’t die, you understand. And that’s the only non-survival thing that theta, life can do: go mad. It’s the final answer: „You’ve made me mad. I’m insane now, I’m done. Stop punishing me.“

We had to move out from that, however, because the answer is not contained therein. The answer is in a field above the echelon of modern scientific definition as it existed in 1950. One had to go ahead and find out a very, very great deal about this thing with which we were dealing, which was life in a universe consisting of space, time, energy, matter. And we found out that just by taking the pattern of life’s behavior in this universe and by tracing that very carefully we could find out what life was trying to do in the universe. And if we found out what it was trying to do and how it was doing it, we would, of course, obtain from that a process which would be intensely workable and which could get out to fifteenth-hand without going too far wrong.

And insanity itself comes about when a person can’t destroy himself in any other way; he has to become insane and unconscious and unknowing. And that, in a very small package, is insanity. That’s the one thing that can happen to life. It’s a dreadful thought, isn’t it? There isn’t any route up, but there’s a route down.

How could it get to fifteenth-hand without going too far wrong? Well, it’s because the vectors of existence would be so consistent with the processing itself that life itself would hold the process true to itself. You enlist for a „police force“ on the process, in other words, the whole of beingness.

A being that has been over a certain curve can come in, evidently, into a new life, according to para-Scientology, and for a short time on the hope that things are going to be all right, will carry on and survive and then fall off even much more rapidly again because things aren’t He can’t survive as Homo sapiens.

In 1950 – I was running across some old tapes and notes, said, „The closer we can approximate the function and action of the mind with the process itself, the better the process will be.“ It was a good forecast because that’s what we’ve done. Now we find out even more intimately what life is trying to do, and we know and have workability that we did not possess before. Very well.

So you have this discrepancy of the basic knowledge which is hidden from everyone, even from himself, that he can’t do anything but survive; he can’t do anything but survive – because it’s really too horrible to face. And he says he’s got to survive as the answer. And these two facts do not equate, and they drive one into the franticness of delivering cruel punishments, injustice, betrayal, destruction, misery as a revolt against an untruth that one has to work very hard to survive when one can’t really do anything else but survive. Do you see that clearly? It sounds like almost idiocy, and yet it explains so much.

The history of Dianetics and Scientology, because history books stress organizations, is conceived by many to be the history of organizations. Other people who are individual-conscious conceive it to be, maybe, the history of a man. And neither one of these things is correct This isn’t a history of me. I have nothing to do with this as far as a life cycle is concerned, because this would have eventually happened somewhere. I don’t know, maybe I made it happen a couple of months earlier.

By being a body, life can at least go through the motions of dying. Most societies will make this – when they really get downscale, they make this more and more beautiful. Lay out these corpses and so forth, and they burn candles and joss and they – the older the society gets, the more – till they finally even get noisy about it like the Chinese. Terrific ceremony.

But the point is, sooner or later life itself would have gotten fed up with this deterioration in this universe and would have made a wild line rush to come up. Sooner or later this inevitably would happen. And as I say, maybe I’ve just speeded it up a little bit. Very well.

I’m not asking you to buy immortality, but as you process a preclear, you cannot help but find out this terrible fact that this preclear is afraid of surviving, and he can’t do anything else. And he’s telling you the truth all the time in that his activities are motivated by survival. He’s telling you the truth. And so you get these terrific discrepancies of „The way to survive is to succumb,“ „The way to succumb is to survive.“

The line rush has been made. This does not say that there is not a future of development, but it does say that we can sure be awfully comfortable about what’s been dropped. There’s an enormous number of things left to know, and none of them with any great high priority. We can know these things a long time in the future and we’ll still be all right. Because what we’ve come up to is a process which itself delivers into the hands of the person processed a knowingness about existence. And so we don’t have to teach what existence is; this person comes to know what existence is.

So, you get Schopenhauer saying, „The way to handle life is to die.“ And so, we get Zeno back in Roman times in his apatheia, saying, „Why do anything about it because you can’t do anything about it anyway. And that is why you shouldn’t strive or try, because striving and trying is what they try to get you to do so as to prove to you that you can’t do anything about it“ – apatbeia*apatheia: a reference to one of the central themes of the school of philosophy founded by the Greek philosopher Zeno (ca. 334-ca. 262 B.C.). It taught that man should be free from passion and indifferent to emotion, pleasure and pain, but not without rational feelings. Apatheia means without feelings.

If you process somebody – if somebody wants to do some research, the best way to do some research is just get processed and get processed more and more and more and more and more, and you can really process out to the thin wavy nothingness with great ease in one direction – that’s the direction of thinking about it Now, you can probably process out to the point where you can throw lightning bolts around. I don’t know, I haven’t seen any lightning bolts lately and I myself am rather lazy about lightning bolts; they’re so easy to manufacture from the public service company.

Now, we have in all of the philosophies of the past the succumbers: „Let’s all die. Please, please, please, let’s die.“ And we have the survivors, who are saying, „Well, not only can we live, but we can live well and be happy about it“ And so these two philosophies immediately derive.

But you can go into the direction of how do you make matter and what’s its composite, or in the direction of how do you think about it, with great ease in processing, either way, and answers start turning out faster than a public stenographer could possibly take them down. And any one of these answers would be really eye-openers to somebody operating without any knowledge of what we are doing here. If you suddenly walked in with a few paragraphs taken from some preclear concerning the formation of this or the formation of that, you would undoubtedly find somebody, whose science applied to that, very interested in it (I’ve had this experience several times lately.)

Unfortunately, the impossible philosophy is the succumb philosophy; that’s an impossible philosophy of „Let’s not live. Let’s try to live low scale enough so that we can pretend we’re dead even though we’re still alive.“ It’s really not workable although out through the society you will find it being attempted at every hand.

It’s much better to have the formula of knowing how to know than it is to have the data which is to be known. I think you will agree with that Well, that’s the direction we’ve been going.

You go into a beer joint, and here in this beer joint you’ll find fellows who have a very happy solution: They’re just unconscious.

Now we’ve run a gradient scale from the past on up to the present. The whole past is very complex; the present is very complex. But in the midst of these complexities there were certain simplicities which, when known, delivered into a person’s hands a great deal of information which he could use in the business of living.

You go aboard a train… I don’t know why this is, but almost every time I go on board a train or a boat, at least one passenger will say to me, „You know, they ought to have a capsule or something, and you take it as you get on the train and it wears off as you get off the train.“ And the last one was quite inventive and he said, „You ought to have a series of capsules which are issued with the ticket and measured according to the destination.“ The answer is, of course, to be unconscious and to not know that you’re surviving.

The history and development of Dianetics and Scientology is a natural evolution. It is not an invention, it is not a creation; it is a natural evolution of at least some part of life getting very fed up with running the same cycle. And life sooner or later would have burst through with these things and delivered from some quarter or another, I think, almost identically the answers which I am giving. Because these answers are tremendously fundamental.

Now, on the acceptance level on processing – is very interesting if you start on most preclears to feed them, in mock-up form in brackets, anesthetics, morphine, anything that will induce unconsciousness. It just seems that you just process and process and process and those quantities – you just can’t get enough of them mocked up to satiate this craving.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica of, I think, the eleventh edition – certainly the thirteenth edition – you will find an article under the heading, „Time and Space.“ It’s a beautiful article. It doesn’t start with the words but it certainly starts with a feeling of no responsibility and ends with the final line of no responsibility concerning time and space or information therefore. It says, ‘Time and space are not a problem of science. They’re a problem of psychology.“ No responsibility.

The fellow, first he has to waste it, you see, because he can’t have it, he knows he can’t have it And you finally get him so that he actually can have things that make him unconscious, and then you get the Pacific Ocean all full of beer, and you get all the space between here and Arcturus completely full of phenobarbital, and he takes that, and the bank is just insatiable on this. There is a terrific desire for unconsciousness. And if you didn’t know this about this preclear, you would go on trying to make him more alert.

I’m rather interested, by the way, that they say that time and space is not a problem of science, that it’s a problem of psychology. That’s very beautifully stated, but the main point here is that the thirteenth edition was saying, „We don’t know a definition for time and space. Time and space are problems of psychology.“ Oh!

Communication depends upon a greater awareness and the ability to put out further space. And you take somebody whose entire ambition is tied up in being unconscious so that he won’t survive and you say, „Come on now, fellow, let’s have some more space.“ Oh no. No, he doesn’t want any of that That will make him survive!

The last time I looked the people that were really using time and space were the physicists. And they couldn’t move off of their left foot without knowing what space was. They just couldn’t move so they haven’t gone anyplace. They’re around playing with popguns or something – atom bombs. They’re fooling.

Now, maybe you don’t see completely how this problem is idiotic. It’s even turned away at the present time to the extent where, although most people will vaguely admit that there is such a thing as a human spirit, and this in most of the lands of the world, it’s a sort of a disgraceful thing.

What’s time? What’s space? Everywhere you look, physics textbooks, anyplace else, it says, ‘Time is change of position in space.“ And „Space is associated with time.“ And „Energy is the change of a particle in space.“ And ‘Time is a manifestation of space and energy.“ And „Matter is a manifestation of space and energy.“ And „Space is a manifestation of time and energy.“

„Well, yes, when I was younger I went to church,“ they will always say. I don’t know quite what church has to do with this. I’ve been puzzled about this lately. But they will say this: „Yes, when I was younger I used to believe in this. But of course then I realized that…“

Did you ever hear about the old – the snake, you know, that grabbed himself by the tail and ate himself up? Well, that’s what happens in that definition. Yes indeed, it was a problem of psychology; I don’t know who needed the psychologist.

Scientific world today is tremendously interested in teaching people, teaching them, see, „There’s no such thing as a human soul. You understand that Of course, you can make up your own mind about it, students, but there really isn’t any such thing as a human soul. You know that.“

Well, what were time and space? Well, if life didn’t have a good statable definition for time and space which did not immediately reevaluate itself in two other definitions which evaluated themselves in the first definition… That’s, by the way, no answer. If you did mathematics that way (the way they’re often done), you would get the answer as just the answer, which would be the answer which you had already said you would get before you got the answer. So you would have the answer before you got the answer, and this would be useless to you. So they’d had to stay below that echelon and have been penalized rather heavily for it Because they didn’t include, then, the mind into the field of science.

And if you were to go into a physics classroom and try to convince the students there that something existed in this universe which could manufacture energy without using other fuel, he would say, „It’s against the law of conservation of nature.“ And you could ask him in vain which Senate or House resolution or bill this was.

In past societies, as nearly as I can judge, when the mind has been included at all into the field of science it has been „How did one make a slave with less unit time per individual?“ That was the main idea. The emphasis was on training, discipline, punishment, and that of course was naturally a sort of a dwindling spiral. It would run itself out sooner or later.

He would ask you, by the way, probably to change the mass of something by creating its energy, because he’s demonstrated many times that he can take time, space, energy, matter one way or the other and show you that they’re still there.

Now, therefore we were dealing with restriction every time we dealt with the mind, and we got a closer and closer restriction of the mind and limitation of its liberty, limitation of general freedom, and so we got the cycle of the MEST universe. Uniformly got the cycle of the MEST universe, which is birth, growth, decay, death.

They have very cute experiments. They take something and burn it and trap all of its gases and ashes, and they weigh it before they burn it and they weigh it after they burn it and it weighs the same, outside of the moisture which has been lost through heat. And they demonstrate this conclusively: that matter cannot be destroyed.

Even the Vedic knew that The Vedics were very, very naive people. They were very clever people, they were very young, they were enthusiastic, and they thought life was worth living! And they gave forth many formulas of this character. And one of those formulas is that cycle of creation-destruction. It’s a very, very wise, usable thing.

And when you buy that one as a preclear or when your preclear buys that one as a preclear, the next time he tries to rub out this facsimile – brrww. Shocking.

But this sort of thing had never been integrated with modern science. If you said, „The Vedic people“ and tried to get into science on this phrase, somebody would have said to you, „Oh, you mean, oh, you’re studying ethnology or anthropology?“ Something of the sort. And they wouldn’t have admitted that you were studying science.

But you go around and you find other people that just go whoo-whoo, and they’re all gone! All this energy is gone. But the fellow who really buys conservation of energy, he’s in a bad way, because he’s bought the fact that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be converted. And that’s what this universe would love you to believe. It’s really survival conscious; it’s going to survive in spite of anything. Its space is going to survive. The great protagonists of this universe advocate the fact that space is space is space is space. That’s their definition of space: space.

The evolution of a match as you strike it is just that: birth of the fire, growth of the fire, dwindling of the fire and vanishment of the fire. Everywhere you look in this universe you’ll see that same cycle, same cycle. All right.

And „Space is space,“ and ‘Two things couldn’t occupy the same space.“ Korzybski. He’s wrong, unfortunately wrong. Two things can occupy the same space or one thing can be in two different spaces. But not in this universe. He didn’t add that He was a man of lots of words.

Life, sooner or later, would have gotten dose enough to the bottom of the cycle to make an explosion on the subject of knowledge itself. And evidently did.

Now, when it comes to understanding life by studying the behavior of the MEST universe, it’s somewhat like learning all about cows by studying cowbells or something, because it doesn’t work out.

The funny part of it is, is – by the way – I never went into this cycle for the reasons that turned out. In other words, I never started to study this because I thought that the world was in terrible shape. I started to study it because it seemed to be awfully neglected.

You don’t understand life by understanding mud. And the test for this is entirely empirical. I believe, thirty-five hundred years of written history, men have been trying to solve life by saying it was mud. And some guy decided that the human spirit, as advertised and sold in certain packages by certain organizations in the world, was not quite what the human spirit was, and that life did not necessarily have to be the material universe, and he decided that things didn’t necessarily have to be, and so he looked at the problem. And then all of a sudden you could change the mental attitude and physical attitude, to a large degree, of a human being. And up to that time, the changes were very limited. You could put him on a chopping block and cut his head off, and that sure changed him, but that was not considered nice.

I remember the first time I considered it was neglect – it was the field of aesthetics that interested me, not the field of the mind. I remember going into the English department of a university where I was unfortunately incarcerated at the time (as so many of you have been in universities) and I said, „I’ve just discovered something very interesting, that Japanese poetry and English poetry register with more or less the same pattern on a Koenig photometer.“ (Very crude device. Today we have oscilloscopes, and so on, which do much better work.) The old Koenig photometer consisted of four mirrors which rotated and showed you the pattern of the variation of a gas flame as you spoke against a diaphragm. Very, very old device.

Now, we look at all this and we find out that we’re involved with studying something which is nothing in this universe. And so, of course, it’s very hard to study. But that doesn’t say it’s nothing in every universe and that we just needn’t get so arbitrary about it. Just because we look around and we see one universe is no reason why we suppose that there’s only one universe.

And you got, more or less, the same tape for all kinds of poetry. This told you that there was something about language and rhythm which was recognized by every mind, no matter where or how trained. It told you that you might find that to be the case. That was science tying in with the mind, the aesthetic of the mind.

You can immediately – can experience three universes. Immediately. There’s your universe, and you know that doesn’t necessarily agree with this universe. And if you look around at all, you will find out there’s probably somebody else in the world, and his universe doesn’t necessarily agree with your universe, or haven’t you ever had an argument? So, there’s three universes you can experience and three different kinds of ideas.

And the English department, they looked at me blankly. And they said, „Yes, we can see these two tapes are alike. What did you say these are two tapes of? Of what?“

A mathematician can draw up a great many symbols which will represent all sorts of situations that wouldn’t apply to this universe. So, it is fairly safe to assume that we aren’t dealing with one universe or three universes, we’re probably dealing with a lot of universes. Fairly safe to assume such a thing. Much safer than to assume there are only one, three or two universes. See, that’s not a safe assumption. Was considered a safe assumption once.

I said, „It’s a device they have over in the physics department…“

A fellow by the name of Piazzi, I think it was, walked out and discovered the eighth planet He was careless. He had a telescope and he pointed it at the sky. And the world was running a wonderful cycle of „don’t look.“

„Oh, you’re from the physics department What are you doing over here in the English department? The physics department…“

I’ve forgotten who it was, I think it was Hegel. Hegel had just written a book proving conclusively the number of planets available in this solar system consisted of eight – seven. And here was somebody with the eighth. And he had proven conclusively „because seven is a mystic number and is a whole number and doesn’t factor itself,“ or something – that there could only be seven planets. And he proved this without looking. And Piazzi pointed a telescope up there and saw the eighth planet and reported it Everybody said, „We know there can’t be one. Hegel said there wasn’t any more. That’s that“ Do you know, it just took years for somebody else to find that eighth planet again.

That was my introduction to specialization. I found out that you weren’t supposed to think about things in another department when you were working in one department, no matter what you found out You got this beautiful picture of the snake devouring himself by his own tail.

It’s not a safe thing to do to say there is only one of anything, or that it is conclusively ended. Something always comes along. That can also apply to me, by the way. All right.

Well, we have – the whole field of the mind having – has been shunted, sent over this way, sent over that way. It’s been sent… (I don’t want anybody to laugh here because these microphones are sensitive, both are very sensitive and a blast of laughter might hurt Mike’s ears here. So let’s be careful on this one.) They turned the field of the mind over to medicine. You see? And medicine, naturally, realized their responsibility for the field of something which in the Encyclopaedia Britannica says is the basic fundamental of physics. But medicine has never pretended to be a science, except when Morris Fishbein writes. (Morris Fishbein. He’s a little known character of the dinosaur area – tyrannosaurus rex species.) Anyway, they turned the mind over, then, when medicine wouldn’t have anything to do with it – the medical doctor, he kind of ran.

Let’s take a few of these elements of this universe and find out how it is that life, from whatever universe it is or whatever thing it is, how can it exist in this universe. It isn’t that life is this universe necessarily and it isn’t that life is coincident with this universe completely, but there must be something in common at least between life and this universe, otherwise they would never get together.

Sigmund Freud came up and said, „The mind belongs to medicine first“ And the doctors sure fixed him, if you want to read his history. And medicine eventually sort of took a little fragment of it and then they sort of handed it back, and they gave it over to a specialized field which is called psychiatry. And the psychiatrist, he had it for a little while, he had a little corner of it. He could see it was obvious to him that an insane person jerked. (This, I believe, was his single contribution to the field.) And the surgeon.

So life then must have some sort of an idea about time. First thing, it must have some sort of an idea about time, otherwise nobody would ever get anyplace at the same time or a lot of things – not that they ever do. But you wouldn’t get a general agreement on being there. You know, you wouldn’t have any present time if life, you see, wasn’t in some sort of an agreement about time.

Over in Bavaria there was a blacksmith – you think I’m being disassociating here when I talk this way – but over in Bavaria there was a blacksmith. He was an idiot. Idiot blacksmith over in Bavaria. And he was standing in front of a forge one day, and the forge blew up and a crowbar went through his head, entering in one temple and going out the other temple. And this was written up in a journal (probably the American Weekly, published by Hearst – where they get most of their ideas in medicine and surgery). It was written up as having happened in Bavaria. (I think – you know, they always see ghosts and have strange things happen, and so form-it’s always in Bavaria. Probably you can’t get in there or the communication lines have been down there for so long nobody can challenge you.) But this crowbar blew through the blacksmith’s skull in Bavaria, and it was written up and it got into publications in the United States. And so they said, „We now have the answer to the human mind, which is the prefrontal lobotomy.“

Well, you’d never have anything coordinating with anything in terms of matter. For instance, electrons flowing and other things flowing have a terrific coordination in terms of time. So that life has a concept of time, and this MEST universe has a concept of time, and these two universes then can come into confluence because of the mutual concept of time. And we look a little bit further, and we say, „What is time?“

I know that you, researching this, would have to really research it to find out, incredibly enough, that that is exactly what occurred. That story from Bavaria does not say that the idiot blacksmith became less of an idiot All it says is he lived. And this, as far as I can find out, is the entire background technology of the prefrontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy and the other „delicate surgical operations which are engaged upon to make the sane of America more sane,“ according to psychiatry. Except practically all the patients either die or lie mo…

"Time is change in space." Well, that’s fine, but time must be running someplace. You ask anybody where tomorrow is, and you ask anybody where the future is, and he’ll tell you in this society, by the way, that it’s over here on the right side; down low and on the right side normally – that’s the future. And if you ask the Chinese, it would probably be over on the left This is established entirely by your reading habit that time has a location. Because the future of any book is over to the right, and you’re always reading into the future from left to right Time has no location.

But it is the interest – it is the very interesting thing that it keeps people from jerking. They lie there like a piece of protoplasm afterwards and that’s that And so, it has been handed over to the field of the surgeon.

But if you could consider the MEST universe as coordinated in its motions and these motions merely continuing, and if you could conceive of life not as a flowing mass or energy, if you could conceive of life as a sort of a pointer which hung over this change of motion… A pointer like this hung over this change of motion. Here’s the flow of change of the MEST universe. And life has a coordinated viewpoint on the flow of change, and life stands still and observes this change, instead of looking at it in reverse. Life, you see, is obviously the one thing which can mobilize MEST, so that one rather thinks of life’s concept as something that moves all around.

Everybody’s been playing this game so far of no responsibility, no responsibility, no responsibility on the field of the mind, until it might bring you to the somewhat dangerous and untenable conclusion that the society at large plays very hard at the game of no responsibility. It might be that the society doesn’t take good, solid responsibility for various things.

If you could see life as a single viewpoint on this coordinated change, you would get the idea of what a flow of time is. It doesn’t go anyplace, time doesn’t, it doesn’t move in any direction; it changes in its atomic structure, its particle structure and so on, and it’s just this consistent interchange. And as it changes life observes these changes and then life measures this as change and doesn’t move in space, but these things move in space, and you have a fairly good idea of what time is.

Well now, it was very unfortunate, it was very, very unfortunate that the psychiatrist turned it over to a machine. The machine was an electric shock machine. And the second they said an electric shock machine did something to the human mind, they turned it over to me. It was an electric machine, wasn’t it? Well, I have some training in electronics, and that’s that So you see, I inherited it.

You could go into that and think about it for a while and it becomes very plain; there’s nothing much to that. But much more important than that is what in the name of common sense is space?

Because we were the most advanced class, at that time, in electronics, which is to say higher level of electronics, which is nuclear fission – we called it atomic molecular phenomena in America – about the first class that was taught in this country. And everybody there, you see, the whole group really represented the higher level of electronics in the United States, and nobody there would take any responsibility for the mind or what it was doing except myself. So you see, I inherited it perfectly honestly. And I can show you its deed. Show you the deed of title and transfer, because the day I read, „The psychiatrist uses an electronic wave to do something to the human mind,“ I became very interested.

The utter conceit of any Greek (much less anyone from MIT) of using the word „space“ without saying what he meant anywhere in his own work, and using symbols for space in his mathematics without saying what space was, is a conceit which should have a monument built to it, real big monument Gutzon Borglum or somebody should build it.

I said, „What do you know. The medical doctor, the psychiatrist can now tell me some things I want to know. I want to know what is the smallest wave possible?“ And of course, it is very easy to establish that the human mind has in it the smallest wave that we’re going to find anyplace, because it can store such an enormous amount of data in such a little tiny place.

Because this is as bad as a streetcar conductor driving a streetcar without knowing what one looked like. Yet they’ve had this beautiful idea that „Everybody must know what space is because we all agree that we know the word.“ Well, believe me, that’s not good enough, not half, and not for anything, because we know this word space: „It’s a hollow spot with indefinite boundaries,“ evidently. You read physics and study it for a while and you find out that’s what it is: it’s sort of a hollow spot with indefinite boundaries, in something.

Therefore it must be stored in tiny, tiny wavelengths, smaller than we know about in electronics or nuclear physics. They must be much smaller, by the way, than the wavelengths of ultraviolet. Because, you see, just capacity; because you figure it out and you figure out that the human mind cannot store more memory than a person will need in three months. It can’t store more than three months’ worth of memory if the wave is as big as we have to have it in the field of nuclear physics. So this was beautiful to me. And I went immediately into the field of medicine to ask them, „What’s the length of the wave?“

So, going back in this problem, one was faced with something very horrible: he didn’t have a basic definition; that was astonishing. And this definition was said by the physicist to belong in psychology, and was said by the psychologist to be a problem of physics, and that was as far as it went. What’s space? Well, you had to solve – get some idea what space was. All right.

Now, it might sound funny to you, but do you know, I thought they’d tell me. And I was astounded to discover that the field of the human mind had been inherited by a machine and nobody else was taking responsibility for it And if you wanted to do anything for it at all, you would certainly have to move in and find out why electronics influenced the human mind.

There was a missing basic definition: What is space? Boy, nothing easier. Space is a viewpoint of dimension, and that isn’t just mixing words up, because the second you use that definition you can actually just crack cases with that definition. It’s a viewpoint of dimension. That’s all it has to be. The Doctorate lectures cover this at great length. But here, we’re just concerned here with that awful simplicity. That’s a very stupid sort of a simplicity to say something is a viewpoint of dimension and we immediately know more.

(Sigh!) That’s a terrible thing to have happen to anybody. Very, very bad. Because you found out that although everybody looked very impressive and although they wore very nice clothes (tweeds usually) and they spoke with this greatest of impartiality about it all, they didn’t know a damn thing.

Well, you can, of course, have several coincident viewpoints of several different dimensions, because life can make space with great ease, only life can make static space. Ah, something new – static space.

It was wonderful to behold what was considered data. And it outraged anybody with a scientific training or a background to see what was „data,“ be called data. And ever since, I have been trying to demonstrate the fact that I was not wrong in trying to find out. So if you’ll bear with me, why, I’ll tell you in the rest of this series what’s finally been discovered about the matter. It’s all very simple.

Why, the physicist knew all the time that he was working entirely with a static space; the physicist knew all about statics. We’ll get that – a moment He knew that space was static; this was nothing strange that a being could make static space; space was static. Or was it?

But ragged as this dissertation may be on the history and development of the mind, it is not even vaguely as ragged as the work itself. For instance, the records I did keep were used to plug up rat holes or something – various people’s – and I seldom accumulated large notebooks full of material, you know.

I wouldn’t like to go on very broad record saying this, because somebody might pick this up and build a bigger atom bomb. And we wouldn’t want that.

I was severely scolded, one day, by a scientist (excuse me, „scientist“ – psychologist) very, very sadly and seriously brought to task for not keeping records. And this fellow said he’d kept records. He showed me where he’d kept records on every electric shock case that had entered into the sanitarium, and he’d kept them for years. And there was the patient’s name and there was the patient’s address and there was the age of the patient, sex of the patient, the general measurements of the patient, how long the patient had been crazy, how many times he’d been put in the sanitarium and how many times he was shocked by an electric shock machine and what kind of a machine it was and exactly what the voltage was on the machine.

The funny part of space in this universe is, it is not static space. We’re not living in static space. The rate of creation of new space in this universe is – MEST universe – is probably one over c. New space. And that gives you apparent motion on the part of anchor points in a consecutive and continuous line.

And I said, „Yes, you’re saying you kept these records. Well, tell me, what did you do with these records and how did you add these records up?“

You go back and throw this into the Einstein theory and it’ll work I mean, it’s fascinating, but here’s space. Space is going „new space, new space, new space,“ see? „New space, new space“; all the time new space, brand-new space.

He said, „How did I what?“

And of course, in every brand-new space it’s a brand-new space because you have a change of position of particles. That’s why it’s new space: particles of light, which are the most fluent particles which we observe in this universe are traveling at a certain speed – particles of light. All right. At each new position they are a new anchor point And they assume a new position at a very high rate of speed, measured by themselves, with life viewing it.

„No,“ I said, „what was the purpose in keeping the records? What did you intend to find out? You know, find out from keeping the records.“

Here is something which, to some degree, we get to an upper limit of understanding, because we say, „The speed of light is.“ You see? We say it’s 186,000 zum-zum-zum miles per second. That’s the speed of light But we’re saying „miles per second“ and the second we say „miles“ we’re talking about space.

And he says, „What do you mean? Are you trying to come in here and tell me how to run my business?“

But if we considered each particle creating new space every time there was new relative position amongst the particles – new relative position amongst the particles, you have a new space, you see? We would then see that space was being created at the rate each particle was moving.

Well, his defense was not adequate. And I went so far as to take hold of these sheets of paper, and going over several of them I noticed that it referred to the admission-discharge records of the sanitarium. And I went and asked a girl if she would let me see these. And you know, I worked for about a half an hour until this fellow stopped me rather impatiently and says, „Well, I know what you’re saying there and what you’re finding out I did draw a conclusion from these. I remember now. Two or three years ago we drew a conclusion that a person who was shocked with an electric machine uniformly stayed in the sanitarium three weeks more than a person who was never shocked on an electric machine.“

Don’t look so lost It’s not important.

I said, „Wait a minute now, you’ve given me a very wonderful conclusion. What conclusion did you draw from this: that electric shock was harmful to the human brain?“

The only thing that’s important about it – if you want to build an atom bomb. Energy is the flow of particles, and energy condenses into matter and we’re off into the material universe again. We can have a wonderful time with this. But these particles are anchor points, so we get lots of relative spaces rather than a pack of anchor points. You see how this is?

He looked at me very blankly. And for the first time I realized this man did not know he was treating the human brain – or the human mind. This was a new thought to him. What he was doing was making records of things that were wheeled in on an operating table and put in a machine and you pulled the switch. And you made these proper records and you put them back in the files again. He was not treating the human mind. This did not occur to him.

Instead of saying we have this space which is full of anchor points which are all smashed together making a solid object, we’ll say this solid object is a bunch of relative spaces; makes more sense because it works better in processing.

You don’t believe that You don’t believe that anybody could operate like that and remain that shallow. Well, I think they have to remain that shallow in the face of consistent and continual failure, to remain sane. They couldn’t immediately say to themselves, „We’re here to help people’s minds.“ If they said that to themselves and said, „That’s our goal,“ it would mean immediate failure, and man doesn’t like to fail So he says, „We’re scientists. We keep records. We have a sort of a sanitarium here; it’s a jail.

But let’s get down here to the very, very important omission: to leave a fellow without any definitions was the dirtiest trick that heritage could do, and I’m going to get even with heritage sometimes.

And when people are jerking, why, we bring them in and we cut a section of the brain or we give them a shock and what do you know, they don’t move afterwards. In fact, it is so successful that we usually have to send a trained nurse home with them at sixty dollars a week or thirty dollars a week in order to care for the body needs of the patient for the next twenty or thirty years.“ Pretty sad.

I had a Book of Knowledge when I was two years of age; my father bought me a Book of Knowledge. I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it; I couldn’t lift one of the volumes. And there was a very, very beautiful young girl, I remember, on the cover plate of one of the volumes, and this beautiful young girl was reading probably a Book of Knowledge. And it said as the caption under that, „The Heir to the Ages.“ It should have been „heiress,“ but it was „heir.“ „The Heir to the Ages.“ And they disinherited me, because here were terrific essentials which didn’t seem to be present And the one that wasn’t present was the one that said it was absent, which was zero; there was no zero.

Well, the history and development of the human mind is a contest between mercy and brutality. Somebody comes along who is foolish enough to say that it is bad to abuse human beings, that things could be better, that we could do something. And he says this into the teeth of a stream which is sweeping away the years and the lives and the happiness of peoples by too many millions to count And of course, it’s quite a shock to suddenly start going up against that stream. This universe is rigged to follow that stream; it is explicitly designed as a trap which goes from the cycle of greatness to nothingness, which is exactly backwards to the direction life tries to go.

You know, everybody came along and they said, „Well, zero. You know what zero is. You want to flunk arithmetic? You better know what zero is. It’s a goose egg. And you put it down on a piece of paper. That’s all. And if you don’t know that, you’d better quit“ And that’s about all a mathematician knows what – about zero.

And that is the only way life itself can fight and contest this universe. It’s trying to turn the cycle around. And yet life itself becomes suborned and becomes so beaten that it starts going down the track, downstream, and every once in a while makes a faint effort or a strong effort to turn around and go up what is upstream for this universe. Life at large has, evidently, an enormous urge toward cooperation, love, goodness, mercy, ethics, justice and other things which are pretty hard to find. It evidently has a large and inherent amount of these things.

But mathematics unfortunately came into the picture immediately, because mathematics turns out to be a servomechanism of the human mind. Or the human mind – if a mathematician won’t agree with that, because mathematics are godly, we know that. So we’ll just put it this way: „Let’s make the human being a slave.“ The human mind is a servomechanism to all mathematics, because mathematics is something which man uses to solve problems; the human mind is that servomechanism to all these mathematics. Therefore and thereby and therein, let’s observe something once and for all, right now, that there isn’t any problem with that microphone, that there isn’t any problem with that glass of water, there is no problem with this platform, there’s no problem with these lights; with the management of the hotel there’s a problem, but not with the hotel. There’s no problem until there’s a mind there to conceive a problem about it Now, that’s a hard one, sometimes, to get home.

Now, it comes up against a formation and a structure which says, „Force, viciousness, brutality, uncaringness, individuality in terms of heavy mass, empty space,“ and you get the contest And part of life could be said to operate on a beaten level. It agrees that force, brutality, love, justice are bad things – that love and justice are bad things, that force and brutality are good things. It agrees on this. And agreeing, of course, just merely becomes a part of the universe.

You go down and drive down the street and you realize there’s no problem about any one of those cars, but somebody comes along and tells you, „Well yes, one of those cars might run up over the curb and might run into another car and might smash the other car.“

And on the other hand, life fighting back up against this, trying to uphold a moral, ethical level has a pretty hard struggle. Because in a society which has already begun to believe that the machine is greater than the man, you have a society which has already decided that force, brutality, injustice, betrayal and hate are the best things to have around. It’s already decided that.

You say, „Who is that a problem to?“

Now, you turn around and tell this society about justice, and so forth. The society at large will agree with you. „These things are good,“ they will say, but they say to you, „are they attainable?“ And that is the main contest.

„It’s a problem to the drivers.“ They start to say, „It’s a problem to the cars.“ It’s no problem to those cars. Whether or not they break down, improve, have less gas consumption, more gas consumption or run across stubble fields, it’s no problem to them at all They never think about it; they just do it And if they break down and that’s the end of them, well, they have broken down and that’s the end of them; there’s no problem, in other words.

And that is the story and that is the history of Dianetics and Scientology. It is simply the history of life trying to turn around and go upstream again.

And you see neon lights flashing, and these neon lights say – I won’t put a commercial plug on here – let’s see, these neon lights say, well, „Coca-Cola.“ (That isn’t commercial anymore, that’s just highway robbery.)

Let’s take a break.

You see this big sign down here, neon sign and it’s flash-flash-flash, „Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,“ you know – flash-flash-flash. And you say, „There’s no problem about that sign.“

Somebody would say, „Well, yes there is, it might go off! It might stop shining!“

You say, „That’s a problem to the sign, huh?“

„No. No. It’s not a problem to the sign. But it would be a problem to the fellow who maintained the sign!“

And you say, „He presumably has a mind.“

All of a sudden, the fellow starts to get a new viewpoint on MEST. This stuff doesn’t think.

The engineer loves to build up tubes and plug in sockets and oh boy, cranks and wheels and shiny dials and call it an ENIVAC or a UNIVAC or something less publishable. But when it comes to that machine solving problems, remember, that machine never solves a problem that isn’t fed to it A mind thinks of a problem and feeds it to the machine.

Yes, you could set the machine running so that it would go on solving problems endlessly and you could go on setting it so that it would go on solving problems endlessly on the basis of the fact that it had been set to solve problems endlessly, and it would hand out answers, but there would – not a single one of them would be what we classify a problem, because they all would have been started in concatenation by a fellow who combined some MEST and who set the machine running in the first place. And the answers would not be answers till somebody came along and read them. And then they would be answers.

But somebody says, „Well, they go into books and they’re published and they’re sent all over the place, and it’s all automatic, it’s all automatic, it’s all auto – – and we got to have everything automatic.“ But the point is, MEST doesn’t think.

So, this tells you immediately that there’s something wrong here with mathematics in general if they say, „Mathematics exist as mathematics, have always been mathematics, will always be mathematics, and are entirely independent“ – we all get down on our right knee at this moment – “and are entirely independent of the human race.“

Oh no, they’re not I saw an arithmetic textbook in a ruined cabin one time; been lying mere for years, hadn’t solved a problem all the time it was there.

So life takes these things in symbols, combines them, does things with them, changes them and creates problems with them. And if life immediately says, then, „Well, there must be a why to the reason MEST is running this way, and there must be a reason. There must be a reason.“

I could tell you what has more reasons than anything else that you know about at the moment The thing which has the most reasons is the human body. It’s got a reason for everything. Boy, it’s really got reasons!

And is it daffy! Oh, but it’s got lots of reasons. And these reasons, all added together, add up (if you want to run it back far enough) to what? The survival of something which can’t die. Hideous, huh?

Well now, let’s look at this mathematics, and we’ll realize that there is something else about mathematics. Mathematics are very strange. In the field of algebra, an algebra professor will be the first one to demonstrate to you that one equals zero. He’ll be the first one to tell you this, because he could prove it to you very proudly. He’ll write up his algebra equation and then say, „Well, of course, you divide anything by zero, and of course that makes an error.“

Does it always make the same error?

„No, because by dividing by zero you can always make one equals two.“ He could make two equal twenty by dividing by zero. Any time he divides by zero he gets a different answer. The jerk. It’s a wild variable!

There’s a gradient scale of zero, and any mathematical equation which unqualifiedly contains zero as zero is going to solve in different ways, and then we get quantum mechanics. That’s the safe and stable mathematics with which they are building the atom bomb.

Zero is a gradient scale.

All right, do you mean zero right now? All right, we mean zero right now, and zero – don’t write it down on a piece of paper, then, because the second you write it down on a piece of paper you’re writing zero for the future.

Is there always going to be a zero of apples on that table? I’m afraid you can’t guarantee that So, zero then becomes nonabsolute.

Have there ever been apples on that table? You can’t guarantee that either. But the second you say „a past zero“ you have a nonabsolute. Well, that’s just there.

Now, you mean a „zero of what“?

Well, a zero of nothing.

What’s nothing?

Well, it’s nothing of course; it’s not anything.

Well, if you want to say what’s not anything, you will have to say not anything past, present and future. Whoo! We have an unobtainable goal. And we got a wonderful maybe, yes. All right.

We’ve got zero, then, something else. Zero where?

And therefore, if a mathematician wrote „nonlocated zero, geographically located zero,“ if he put it on a piece of paper which was going to be moved, it would become a variable, because a zero to be zero would not have any geographical location. None. That would be a real zero, so any time he says, „A zero of apples on the table,“ there’s still something there; there’s a point on the table.

And therefore, zero is a wild variable in all mathematics. That would be very disheartening for a mathematician to realize that, because he’s been pinning his faith for years – at least he had zero.

Now, what’s that got to do with us? Well, we find out that life to this universe represented zero but didn’t behave like zero should. He had no location, no wavelength, had no time element in itself; it didn’t have any mass, and we examined it and we found a theoretical, absolute zero, as far as this universe was concerned. But this didn’t mean that it didn’t have a somethingness elsewhere. It has a nothingness here, and in this universe it begins to identify itself with space.

The first thing with which a spirit identifies itself is space, so the space has nothing in it so the being thinks he is nothing. And that’s your first identification and he starts off from there, and of course, he isn’t there from there on after.

This, in short, was the heritage with which one started to solve the problem: life as a function and behavior in a society which did not know what time was, space was, energy, zero or mathematics. And this is a very poor heritage for a physicist to start out on.

Well, I don’t say I’ve solved these things. I’ve merely pointed out some of their idiosyncrasies and have succeeded in divorcing us from a great deal of superstition, because the one thing that happens, as far as we can find out, when a person can’t look, he has to think. And a person who does an awful lot of thinking isn’t looking. And the person who does the most thinking is crazy.

And if we want people to be happy, we’ve got to get them to a point where they can see, because this stuff doesn’t bite; doesn’t bite them. Might hurt their shins.

And we find out such astonishing things – that work is desirable; that’s fascinating. Nobody in America would believe that. Work is desirable, pain is desirable, impacts are desirable. Action of anything, any characteristic is intensely desirable. And so, some of these weird things about life begin to explain themselves.

And how do we find out about this?

Well, we just look.

We have processes which bring a person up from thinking about it to looking at it And the second he looks at it, why, it all blows away, all the clouds and worries and doubts, anxieties which he had.

But believe me, he can think of enough reasons about enough problems to avoid looking for an awful long time. And I think he’s avoided it very successfully that – for forty-five hundred years mat I know about, and I have been trying to figure out ways and means of breaking the habit of not looking.

And if all we did with these processes, if all we did with these processes was to make better drivers, we would still have reason to be here, because all the drivers on the highway are busy thinking. Ooh!

Knowledge is an instinctive truth, really, and one never figured himself in any direction but deeper into another problem.

If you want to know, Me, in its purest sense, knows pervasively and instinctively, and you don’t find out about knowing by thinking, you find out about knowing by being able to look.

And the first stage is you know how to look and then you become free enough so that you know. And it’s the most elementary problem in the world, idiotically elementary. And that was why nobody ever wanted to solve it Nobody wanted to solve the problem, because nobody wanted to look like an idiot As a matter of fact, it is as much as a man’s pride is worth to solve this problem. All right.

There are the various elements. We have a life which approximates zero in this universe, which is busy surviving, madly surviving and hoping nobody will recognize the thing that it can’t do is die.

But a thetan can do all sorts of things in going upscale and downscale and sometimes getting down to a low, low level, that it just can’t bring itself back up again. But it’s still surviving in spite of the fact that it’s at that very, very low level, it’s still surviving.