There is some difference between a theta line and an organism, the difference being that an organism is MEST universe. An organism is a carbon-oxygen motor, low-heat engine, runs at a temperature of 98.6, has a circulatory system. You could actually, in a biological laboratory, build and grow a muscle engine. Wouldn't have a bit of theta in it. A muscle engine. You could hook up a flock of muscles to a crankshaft and grow the muscles and it would run the crankshaft. I mean, as simple as that. A carbon-oxygen engine should therefore not be confused with the human mind.

Now, the human mind, again, should not be confused with a theta line. When you consider a mind, you consider a unit mind. It is a – in most of your concepts of the mind, you think of the mind as something which an organism has to pilot and monitor it. An organism – one organism has this one mind.

But we do care very much about this manifestation when we start tracking back preclears. The discovery of the existence of memory filed complete against time was in itself a considerable discovery, because it started to lead in toward a discovery of the source of individuals and individuation. An exploration of this line, of course, would naturally parallel to some slight degree any other search ever made on the subject. It would parallel biology, it would parallel religion, mysticism. It would to some degree parallel anybody or anything that ever thought along this line – the difference being that now we had a tool, we had a precision investigation tool. We had an application – a technique of application which could sort out delusion from actuality and which could recover any and every incident in the entire life span of the individual.

Well, that would be a subdivision of the theta mind or the theta line. The theta line would be a timeless, spaceless influence, capable of making recordings, capable of animating and motivating and controlling, forming, destroying, conserving: matter, energy, space and time. Now, that is theta, and you could consider that this sort of a situation existed.

The advent of this tool was a long time ago – about fourteen years ago, actually, and it was not in very full use, really, until about five years ago, and then it was in VERY full use. And the more it was used – the technique of discovering the recalled memories of an individual – the more was learned. And understand, it was being learned for the first time on a precision-tool basis. That is a bit different than other parallel lines of research.

You understand now that I am not talking to you from the field of mysticism. I am talking to you from an embracive field which also embraces the field of mysticism. This data neither admits the principle of mysticism nor debars the principle of mysticism. It neither admits the principle of science nor debars the principles of science as it is practiced today.

Now, you take mysticism. Mysticism was a HIGHLY valid line of research – HIGHLY valid. It, however, contained many speculations, and in itself said that it contained many speculations, and when employed would quite often throw the mystic into a very bad state of disrepair. As a consequence it was not a particularly safe tool, but it was a tool.

This is merely – these subjects, mysticism and so forth, are just routes toward discovery. A lot of data has been collected out of them.

The line of Religion was to some degree also a tool. I would hardly know where to define or divide mysticism and religion, except perhaps religion is a codified mysticism – codified and handed out sort of by rote.

Now, let's look at this subject both as to theta and the material universe and see if we don't have something vaguely resembling order coming out of the chaotic concept which most people have regarding mind.

You couldn't expect a population at large to be able to understand mysticism. It is a highly complex subject – VERY complex. It has many schools. But religion could be handed out, so perhaps – just a codification of what were considered to be good points of behavior, optimum behavior, and good catch points that would catch people's imagination or attention. These things put together in a package could be considered religion.

What I am telling you here is not necessarily true. It happens to be very workable and is relatively more true than anything which has been so far presented, since it embraces and organizes many fields which have been, in the past, merely specialized fields.

There have been many, many, many religions – oh Lord, just hundreds of thousands, millions of religions. The religions which we happen to be operating on, on earth today, are most of them about two thousand years old, oddly enough. Those in India are older than that. But all these religions are really very young. Compared to mysticism itself, they're all young.

Let us consider the subject – the whole subject of knowledge.

Mohammedanism, Christianity, Buddhism, to name three, are remarkably parallel. As a matter of fact, Christ is one of the prophets in Mohammedanism and is given joss for being so. Buddha paralleled quite remarkably and preceded, Christ.

Scientology would be the study of knowing, or the science of sciences. Therefore, the basic concept on which it is built should be of interest to you. This is an analogy which will tell you something about that.

Another religion, and way off from Christianity and the rest of it, is Confucianism. It's actually a philosophy of how to be a conservative citizen who is supposed to keep his nose clean. Let's be very colloquial about it, because there's no reason to treat these things seriously. This fellow Confucius said, "Well, let's all be mild and down Tone Scale and we'll all get along." And this philosophy pervaded China. Very remarkable. I think, probably since communism came in there, they've stopped it. But for many, many, many centuries the civil servant of China had to go down into the Confucian temple in Peking, and he'd sit there and read these enormous tablets and he'd have to know them all by heart. And if he knew them all by heart, then he could handle the post office inkwell or something of the sort. Rut that was more a philosophy than a religion.

Up here we have what we will call bin 1. Bin 1 is full of data. Knowledge is perforce concerned with data. If you consider a datum broadly enough to also include a motivation, a cause or an existence, then bin 1 up here has nothing in it but data.

Now, you start talking about religions, I've seen some interesting religions in my day, very interesting. All through the – in this life – through the South Pacific down to the south of here and so on. There are lots of them in existence. And always, the top bracket, the boy up at the top of the religion who was busy monitoring it and handling it for the populace, was a mystic. So, you see, there is where I draw my conclusion that mysticism sort of overlies religion.

But let's consider that bin 1 has in it nothing but TRUE data. Here, for instance, would be, if it exists anywhere, the data considered in transcendentalism – the organization of knowledge which exceeds and goes above all knowledge. In other words, all knowledge is above the range of human experience, according to somebody like Kant, Hegel, – Hegel particularly. Hegel haggled around and got himself to be a very confused boy, and he got himself so confused that he says, "I'm just going to abandon the whole shooting match, and I'm going to tell you and me that anything that is worth knowing is beyond the realm of human experience. It cannot be sensed, measured or experienced by a human being. That gets me out of my difficulty and you're stuck with it." Typical Scholastic thinking.

So here is a line of research, but nobody was willing to take this line. They would take religion. It didn't require any understanding; it just said, "You've got to have faith, fellow, And if you have enough faith, you've got faith, and && that's fine. Now just step up here to the rail, drop your nickel on the drum" and froth a little bit, and && you're all set," As a matter of fact, it works. It works.

And yet the world was stupid enough, by the way, for a hundred and some years, to let Hegel lie across the path of human advancement. For instance, the astronomer Piazzi discovered the eighth planet. Hegel simultaneously had published a monograph demonstrating conclusively that there could only be seven planets, because seven was a perfect number indivisible by itself and others and the Constitution or something.

There's no sense being light about it particularly, because it was a terrifically necessary tool in handling civilizations where one had no real insight into what made the mind work. You could take religion and you could say, "Well, we may not get you in this life, fellow, but we're going to get you in the next." And that would make fellows pause.

And so do you know that nobody went out and took a look! Nobody went out and took a look at Plazzi's planet, They just read Hegel, And the planet was up there. All you had to do was look through a telescope and see that it was in – its path was influencing other planets, and there had to be a planet there. But it took them a long time to get around to being smart enough to say, "What we can sense, measure and experience is more valid than what we can guess." Now, oddly enough, the ... You know Ohm's law – that very important law in electricity? Well, I've forgotten how long Ohm's law was considered to be beyond bounds, but it was fought and not used by people of Hegel's complexion. Actually here was a natural law, and a person like Hegel could come along and repeal it. Well, of course, nobody would get any electronicking done if you didn't have Ohm's law. Nobody bothered to measure it. They just said, "Well, it says here on page 86 that Ohm's law ain't, so it ain't." I'm sorry to use the word ain't, but it better fits with the complexion of such thinking – thinking quote unquote (laughter) – as these lads were using.

Now, for instance, any area which was punitively religious might be considered by you to be a very holy area. Hm-mm. An area was given religion to the exact ratio that it was bad, wicked and evil. And the more wicked it was, the more they gave it religion, until religion would look like a tidal wave after a while, trying to hit this place and knock it flat.

I had a doctor come in – he saw my name on a grip – down in Washington, DC, about a year ago. And this doctor came in and he was going to give me a shot. I'd just come across the country and I was coughing – probably had Service Fac One in restimulation. Anyway, a little penicillin would have fixed me up.

You take the accounts of the early days of America, and you'll find a thievish, cutthroat existence being lived by our Pilgrim Fathers, the like of which would sound awfully awfully bad to a Boston censor. And how did they get to him? How did they get to these fellows? Well, they got to them with religion – crush! Their punitiveness was actually an effort to make a civilization by codified laws. And that was the use of religion. And that IS the use of religion. And any thinker or philosopher back through all times agrees with that definition. It's not my definition. Religion is a mechanism for the control of the people. It is not an effort to promote understanding. Mysticism, however, was an effort toward reaching an understanding. That gives you some separation of data in the matter.

So I whistled up this doctor and he came in, and he saw my name on top of a grip. And he came in very sunnily, and the second he saw my name, he sort of froze up. And he said, "What do you do'" and "What are you?" and so on, He was a very nasty fellow anyway. And I said, "I'm an engineer," and – which is quite truthful. And he knew damn well who I was So he tried to give me a big breakdown on the fact – he said, "Well, there are people around that think things are useful just because they're workable and that people ought to have something to do with them just because they're workable." He says, "That's no argument at all" – jabs an eighteen-gauge needle into my gluteus maximus (laughter), and says, "I couldn't consider why anybody would work in that field anyway," pulls the needle out, doesn't bother to stop the blood flow, packs up his kit and leaves.

Now, I don't know of very many more routes of understanding that were punitively followed or pursued, beyond mysticism, magic. Magic, by the way, is a very precise study. Most people think of magic in terms of stage magicians or something of the sort. It's not. Magic is not. It is a method of producing effects by using, for cause, the supernatural. And there's spiritualism, as something which is not mysticism. These are routes, routes, routes.

In other words, we still have Hegelism around. They'd rather read on page 82 that this is so than go and look.

And what are all these people studying, and where are they trying to go, and what are they trying to get? They're trying to get the source of man and trying to discover the extent of, and recover the use of, all of his latent powers of personality. And that, actually, is the complete goal in this search. Not necessarily to uncover the gods and shake them by the right hand. Let's recover man and find out if man ever was a god. And if he was, why did he stop being a god.

Well, this bin of knowledge up here might contain absolute knowledge. It might contain absolute knowledge. And if it did, it would also contain all this knowledge which Hegel himself couldn't experience. There would be no limit to the amount of data contained in this, but it would all be true. It would all be true. It'd be close to absolute truth, if not absolute truth. Now, this is just for an analogy.

An effort to discover what is an individual: Is there such a thing as a relatively pure individual? If so, and if there ever has been, how did he get debased? Or, if there is a debased individual at the source, how do you purify him and raise him up?

Now, if we consider – consider knowledge to be a circle, we find out that we have a continuing line here. At this point on the circle – just draw this circle, and then from the center out draw a line. Now, on the right side of that line – exactly on the right side of that Line – is one datum known. One datum, that's all. Now, existing right with it, but perhaps a tiny bit out of alignment with it, would be another datum. There'd be two data known,

These are very serious studies, and these have been studied by man through all of his days, however many millennia that is. These things are actually studied by the Australian bushman, as primitive as he is. And they are studied by the head of a corporation in the United States, no matter how big and materialistic that is. Oh yes, he studies them, he very definitely does. He wants to know how to get good personnel and make them better. Oh, he hires people to give them tests and he hires morale experts and he hires this and that and so forth. He works on this ceaselessly: how to make these people better, how to make them cooperate better and so on. In other words, it's a material study, or it is a spiritual study, whichever way you want to look at it. But that's what you're studying in Scientology.

Now, as these would advance in a clockwise direction, we would find that we would be accumulating more and more data. This would be what would be known as thinking by figuring out a theory and then looking and seeing whether or not you found data to support the theory.

And I'm trying to bring it home to you that it hasn't been very long that we've had a tool by which to recover some actual data. In the first place, it was not known too well that man could pick up these memories, these facsimiles, complete and in their entirety, that they were all on file. Techniques for picking them up and examining them minutely were not known. As a result, man's knowledge lacked the sense, measure and experience factor.

Now, around the clock here would come more and more known, more and more known, more and more known, more and more known, until just before we got to that zero, we would have all things known – not a single missing datum. Everything known. They're right next to each other – everything known, nothing known, and two data known actually occupy the same spot. They actually occupy the same spot on this circle.

Therefore, what I tell you about this from here on is based on study using a new tool. The laws of delusion and the laws of actuality have been looked over very thoroughly. You can tell the difference between a delusion and an actuality; any day, you can tell the difference between the two. Laws of delusion follow certain definite laws, and laws of actuality follow certain definite laws. Sorting out carefully, and more carefully than was ever sorted out in the past, all hallucination and delusion from this body of data that can be sorted out from it, we examine, then, nothing but that which remains as actuality.

But as we move clockwise on this wise, we collect more and more and more and more data. And finally, as we go all the way around, it's all known.

And we discover something that looks like this: We discover that there is a main body of thought, just as there is a main body of potential knowledge. That thought and knowingness are themselves equivalents; they are more or less similar, they're the same order of thing. Data and knowledge, and the very thing on which one records experience, are similar things.

Now, philosophy, extrapolative thinking, that horrible word, pragmatic thinking... Pragmatism, by the way, used to be a good word until the universities got ahold of it, and now it says that it's – oh, the most wonderful definition. It says "humbuggery" and "bellicosity" and "thinking by induction" and it has about – oh, a whole bunch of meanings. I'm being jocular about what it says there, but there are all these meanings surround this word pragmatism. Actually, basically and originally all pragmatism meant is you just took some data and went out and found out if it was true by measuring it up against the physical universe,

Now, here we have this, what we call, main body of theta. Now, we find breaking off from this main body of theta (which, by the way, has no space or time) – we find breaking off from it and entering upon, to some slight degree, the track of time, a small bit of the whole universe. In other words, more or less the same thing, but on a smaller edition. Now, you – it's very hard to use words like smaller and bigger because, you see, something that has neither space nor time is neither small nor big. It doesn't either have portions as we know them in the MEST universe, but this does not mean that in its own universe it does not have portions.

Well, if we started backwards from all things known, up this way, we would just getting into the – be getting into the more and more theoretical. Now, it's very hard to advance from everything known and keep abandoning things you know – keep abandoning things you know, counterclockwise here, until you finally get down to two data. In fact, it's practically impossible to do that.

So, we take this little bit here, and all of a sudden it stands out there – it breaks away.

But you can start here with two data known and inductively locate phenomena in the physical universe. You can do this. You have, then, a yardstick by which you can find out what's known and what isn't known. And you can locate phenomena. You can say, "Well, look, this phenomena is supposed to exist; according to – according to these two data, that phenomena – there's a lot of phenomena that exists. Let's go and see if we can find it." So we go and look and it's there. Well, that's fine; we find a lot of phenomena.

Now, it inherently knows, it is cause, it is a high state of beingness, it is a pure theta entity.

But coming back this way, you're just dumping things off the freight car, so to speak, all the time, and you're not looking for new phenomena. You're trying to somehow explain old phenomena by throwing away what you have, and so on.

Now, many of these break off, many of them break off. There are lots of them. Lots of them break off, And each one at that moment of breakaway is in the first stage of its individuation. It has entered upon the track of time, and at that moment it becomes an individual to that extent that it is separate from other individuals. It possesses the potentiality and capability of animating and motivating matter, energy in space and time. And so it breaks off and enters upon this time track here, and it becomes a little bit of MEST to the degree that it is entered upon MEST.

The latter method which I'm describing to you is the method which, in all seriousness, science has been using for a long time, It results in such things as super specialization.

But it never ceases to be anything but what it is. But that it enters upon MEST merely means that it's being recorded on by MEST, not that MEST becomes a part of it. But the more recordings it gets – the more recordings it gets from MEST, the greater the effort it makes to align and straighten out the chaos which is the material universe, the more turbulent those recordings look, until it itself no longer completely knows. It knows less and less and less and less, the more and more and more it experiences.

Why. you go down a hall in a medical building and you check in and you say, "There's something in my eye."

Now, where it goes from here, one is not quite prepared to say, after it leaves this MEST universe at the end of ALL of its existences in this MEST universe. One is not prepared to say at this time, but one can guess. It either joins a new pool of theta over here which is changed somehow, or it simply goes back and joins that one. Now, we haven't, at this time, been there to that point where it finishes this line. So let's just talk about it from a time standpoint.

And the doctor looks at you and he says, "No," he says, "I'm an optic specialist and you'll have to go next door. An optic surgeon is next door, and what I handle is the cornea.

Here we are in time, and we find this entered in upon the material universe. How long does it stay there? Well, it stays there for a long, long time. And it becomes more and more individual; it becomes individuated. As it comes down Tone Scale, it becomes more and more individual.

And you go next door and you find out he handles the pupil. Well, this spot of dirt is in the white. And you have to shop around for quite a while, and you find somebody with this – that handles the white part of the eye, you see, and he takes the spot of dirt out ONLY if he is a surgeon for the white spot of the eye. By the way, I'm going along with old Doc Pottenger. I know the old man – he's a great old man. And he says, "If there was just some way we could break down this G. D. blankety-blank-blank specialization," he says, "maybe we could cure something."

Did you ever read anything by Charles Dickens? You will notice in those books that actually he doesn't characterize anybody. He uses an eccentricity, an aberration, and this aberration sort of walks around through the story and is a funny character. And by the way, watching this aberration parade through the story is very amusing reading. But there is individuation by aberration. The more and more aberrated it becomes, the further and further it separates, why, the less and less it has in common with its original intent and the more and more individuality it has, until it passes a center point – a low point (it's not center point, it's low on the scale) – and after that sort of reassumes a similarity to all other entities. And then – means it's just too deeply pushed into the MEST universe and it is mostly, if you looked at its recordings, just MEST universe.

Well, this method of thinking, then, going back here counterclockwise, is scientific thinking "Let's go and gather a whole bunch of data. Let's gather a lot of data and let's look at a lot of phenomena. And after we've gotten everything we can find on the subject, then let's go find a theory for it. And let's just take any old theory that happens to come along and see if it explains some of this data. If it does, we're all set."

That's somebody below 2 on the tone scale. They aren't even eccentric, really, below 2 on the Tone Scale. They have a horrible degree of similarity. Where you get your eccentricity, where you get your actual individuality, is between 32 and 2 on the tone band. And there's a terrific differentiation and difference in individuals along about 8 or 10. There's where you get your highest demonstrated individuality, actually, and below that it sags off pretty badly.

As a consequence, science won't advance around here counterclockwise, but just keeps sort of wandering off, and it gets off here and there and gets all confused about it. And it has been doing so, so that you get cytology arguing with biology, arguing with evolutionists. And these theories are all different. These theories were not arrived at inductively, and these theories do not predict new phenomena.

Now, its modus operandi – that is to say, the way it works along the space-time line – is quite simple. It has prepared for itself at the beginning of time a genetic line – a protoplasm line. Life has worked up protoplasm lines. It could even be a different – slightly different form of this theta works up these protoplasm Lines. But it knows enough to work up a protoplasm line, and so you get procreation – get and beget, and beget and get, and get and beget, and so forth, column after column. And this protoplasm line goes along through time. The funny part of it is, is there's a terrific desperation on the part of an unknowing theta which has lost its individuality to keep that protoplasm line continuous, keep it continuous.

Scientology is an effort to go around the clock clockwise – to take data and then look for material, look for the phenomena predicted by that data and see if it exists in the physical universe.

And actually, it is a reservoir or a treasure of structure – to a large degree it's inherent structure – and what has been learned about structure carries along this line. The horrible part of this is, however, that the protoplasm line, evidently, could be cut off sharp and theta, on one world, could begin all over again and still keep it rolling. And it probably wouldn't take it very many thousand years to have it back up to the present form you're in now. It would not be very disastrous, in other words, to have an enormous change. For instance, the surface of the earth could change so that it was uniformly 150 degrees Fahrenheit; it'd wipe out all life immediately. Wouldn't be very long before theta had readapted itself to the point where it had 150 degree capability in the organism.

Well, it's an interesting – an interesting field, Scientology, because all it's trying to do is pick up all the loose ends of people who were trying to travel backwards in this circle. It's trying to get a unification of science, combine it with a unification of anything – the humanities, religion or even mathematics, aesthetics. It's trying to bring these things all into the same field so that they can all be used.

Now, the point is, then, that here you have line one, which is a genetic line. Now here in this physical universe we have this genetic line. [marking on blackboard] This genetic line goes from conception, birth, procreation; conception, birth, procreation. Doesn't include the death line. Conception, birth, procreation – that is its cycle. That is strictly genetic. Genes, chromosomes, sperm, ovum, XY factors and so forth – that's a good solid line that keeps going there. Now, it's sort of the stuff that the theta line uses to build its houses.

Now, that all by itself is a worthwhile goal. It wouldn't have to have anything to do with processing or application, curing up anything in people, to be quite worthwhile as a goal. As a matter of fact, it does that. It does that.

Now, over here – over here paralleling it, is a theta line, and that's a theta body line. Now, this is the original stuff here. [tapping on blackboard] It's gathering all sorts of its knowledge. And its cycle – its cycle is preconception – severa1 days preconception – conception, birth, procreation, death – jump-off; preconception, conception, birth, procreation, death, jump-off. You know, I mean your death factor comes in there every time, so that your order of cycle is different.

It'll predict – by the way, you can take Scientology and you can predict what should be the whole field of biology and where it should mesh with cytology and where that should mesh with evolution. And you will come out with a package of data and phenomena which, if you presented them to the cytologist, to the biologist and to the evolutionist, you would find a point of agreement. They would agree on the data which you had there.

Preconception: it joins the line before conception. And by the way, you can run almost any preclear back into several days before the conception sequence, several days – oh, usually on either side. And you run them up to conception, then it runs on up the line; birth, runs up the line; procreation, up the line; death. That's the theta line. Then a NEW preconception – joining of the genetic line – and so on. In other words, this theta line is wandering along here in and out on the genetic line, and the genetic line is sort of like passengers getting on and off a railroad train. The genetic line is a consecutive railroad train and the theta line is a passenger line.

Now, I'm giving you that to show you that, theoretically, there is just one set of data, but that set is of infinite size, and if it were all true we would put it up here in bin 1. Bin 1, this square.

Now, oddly enough – oddly enough, not all of this theta does a departure on death. Very strange manifestation. You'll find this in preclears quite ordinarily. They do a departure, all right, at the moment of death, with most of the theta. I say "most of the theta." Some attention is still being placed on the body, and there is still some interest on the part of this theta body in the body that's being buried. And so you get another line, which is the dead man line. And there you have actually some attention still in the corpse.

Now, there would be a third bin, however. How do you get to be human? Well, as a matter of fact, the only way you can be human is by being wrong. Actually the wrongest you can get is dead, you see, but you're pretty close to it when you agree to be human. For instance, you sense that – a person, for instance, tells little social lies and he says – he's polite and he's this and he's that, and he doesn't exert his own self-determinism very much in social concourse with the rest of the human race. And as a net result, he is permitting himself to be thrown out of his actual course of existence. It's wrong – social lies are wrong and so forth. But he has to be wrong to be human. He couldn't be very right and be human.

And it's a most remarkable thing. You start to run some poor unsuspecting preclear back up the line – and all of a sudden he runs the death all right and then keeps right on going – in the body, in that body. And there he is in the casket and they bury him. And twenty-five years later what's happening to him, then, he's probably being troubled by seepage. (laughter) And then they run it along a few years afterwards and the chest bones cave in, and "Now, what's happening to you?"

Now its the same way with all this data down here. This is bin 3. Down here is bin 3. Now, bin 3 contains in it relative truths, workable truths, things you can sense, measure and experience. You don't have to be able to sense, measure and experience anything in 1, but down here in 3, that's human knowledge. And this is varying and shifting continually. And there isn't a datum in it which is absolute. Every datum in it has a little bit of wrongness about it. It's only relatively true; it can be sensed, measured, or experienced.

"Well, I've sort of turned to dust now," and so on. And I've picked up – have picked up funeral orations, & remarkable funeral orations & – and all sorts of bric-a-brac.

This includes how to make clam chowder. It includes what they will be wearing in 1953. It includes the field of biology. It'll include literature, anything – just data, data, data, data, data – all relatively true, subject to opinion, subject to viewpoint and so forth. But it's what has passed in the human race for knowledge.

Theta, in other words, is still keeping an eye on that body. Of course, there's no limit to what theta can keep an eye on or what it can give its attention to. And it actually isn't anything trapped in the body; it's just the fact that this theta line, having lived through that body for one lifetime, is accustomed to keeping an eye on it, so it just sort of – on the side, sort of keeps an eye on it.

It all depends on what strata of truth or what degree of truth you're demanding from this bin. And you can go out and get a lot of opinions – each one of them is data. You can learn all about painting simply by going and taking a critic's manual of the great masterpieces of the world and memorizing it. You don't ever look at the paintings. Something here is van Gogh, and it said there in the critic's manual – he's an authority; you just read that, that's a perfectly valid datum – he says in there, "Van Gogh was yakety-yakety-yak, wela-dee-da-blah-blah-blahdeblah-blah and showed at various times a tremendous inclination toward power and strength, but he blahdeblah-blah-de-dah-da-blah. Now, the list of his paintings are so-and-so. This is known in Europe. This painting is known here and that painting is owned there, and this painting is particularly good for being balanced on all seven tricycles," or something.

And you find some poor little kid five years of age, and Mama says, "Now, you have to sleep in the dark."

And you get this – you get a whole command of the subject of van Gogh without even faintly getting any command of aesthetics. But do you know, you could go out, with having memorized that entire manual on the famous paintings and paintings of history, and pass for a tremendously aesthetic person. You could. You could go around and any time anybody mentioned something by – well, some obscure Finnish painter, and you'd say, "Oh yes, yes, his Blue Girl, I always thought was terribly 'rankatewa' don't you think?" And they would look at you and they would say, "Hm, an authority, an expert." And they would be very polite.

Well, he's still got some of his attention, without knowing, you see – because individuation is a separation from knowingness – without knowing it, underneath his level of monitoring, he's got an eye on his old corpse. And "Mama, I see skeletons!" he will say, and he'll have horrible nightmares about it. And she'll come in, of course, and turn off the light and lock the door on him and punish him if he keeps this up. The point of the matter is, he is – he's lying there in a coffin someplace in East Yardsborough and seepage is troubling him, or something.

Now, you could know all there is to know about painting, about music, in that wise, without ever knowing how to paint, never knowing anything about music, really, and with knowing nothing about aesthetics, having no more taste than a cow, and yet get by. And all of that's perfectly valid information. That's all – that's a valid performance. After all, people have been acting like that for centuries. And it's a perfectly valid performance to memorize a bunch of this data and say, "I am now cultured."

One naval officer ran his mother, and lo and behold, way back someplace or other she had gotten stuck in a glacier. And the theta body had had so many facsimiles of trying to get her out of this glacier that a LOT of attention stayed on this body in the glacier. And mama was having chills and fever and chills and so on, and he never did get it completely run out, but he said, "That's all right. She's been stuck in it for the last couple of thousand years. Who cares?" (laughter) And Mama, by the way, was quite perplexed – quite perplexed to find herself a dead body in a glacier.

What's cultured? Well, that all depends on the time. For instance, a fellow couldn't be cultured two hundred years ago unless he was prepared to sit down and lose a thousand pounds every night at the gaming table. Well, our definition has changed – definition has changed. Now he has to lose it on dog racing or something.

Anyway, you can run anybody through this sequence if you want to fool with it. You'll pick up some very, very touching things. You'll pick up the widow coming to the grave and putting flowers on it and so on. Although the fellow is six feet under, you see, he can still perceive, because theta – it does not have a location in space or time. It just thinks it has.

But all of... You see, I'm giving you this to try to show to you that the word cultured – without any definition of what we're going to agree on to he cultured, well, we can have all sorts of oddities here. A fellow memorizes a book and becomes cultured. Well, then, what's cultured? It's just whether or not we've agreed on the formula one is going to pursue to get cultured. That agreement will take bin 3 and rearrange what a person has to know or do to be cultured, you see?

All right. I ran one, one time, of consecutive Confederate Memorial Days. Year after year they all came around and they give the same powwow about "our brave Southern dead" and so forth. So one day I wrote down the whole oration. It didn't vary. Boy, was that histrionic. God! It's no wonder I never wrote with that prose line.

So that a large segment of the human race that was more or less knowledgeable about data in the world could get together and sort of agree – sort of agree that hereinafter people who were to be considered in the line of the arts had to be able to practice the art. They had to know aesthetics and practice the arts – not memorize. And right away, all this alignment of data in bin 3 would change.

But don't become mistaken on the fact that theta cannot do a consecutive line, because it definitely can – a simultaneous line, a parallel line, and so on. Because it doesn't have location in space or time, it can be in more than one place at once. Because "one place," you mean that, that's MEST universe, and theta isn't in MEST universe, you see? At no time is it ever in MEST universe, so therefore it can be in body one while it is still in a grave with body minus one, while it is still on a genetic line or willing or ready to take off on another genetic line as another body. And even so, it can go over and do a life continuum for somebody else simultaneously.

The difference between bin I and bin 3, then, is what we happen to be using at the present time and what we've agreed upon is relatively useful to us. You see? That's all there is to it. In here comes fashion, styles, changes, and so forth.

It can do all of these things. It just means a great complexity to it. Problems. In other words, too many facsimiles don't jibe with enough facsimiles, and so it starts getting confused. It doesn't know – doesn't know what it's supposed to be monitoring in the physical universe, and it gets confused about what it's supposed to be monitoring.

For instance, fashions in physics have changed markedly. It was fashionable once upon a time to be entirely different and quite otherwise than the modern physicist. It's most fashionable now to use mathematics that he himself doesn't understand, and to sit around and hope that something won't blow up in your face. To – it's fashionable to say, "Well the law of conservation of energy is in question but it's not in question and so on. Fascinating subject right now. But just twenty-five years ago, this science – this exact science of physics – was quite otherwise, quite otherwise. It was a precision science. Nobody worried about a thing. All the data in here was just in beautiful condition – oh, wonderful! And nobody questioning it – everybody agreed on it. It was solid, It was almost a static. It was almost as though it was bin 1.

Now, the more it learns and the more it knows, the easier it is for it to control and monitor; the more it can coordinate. The more data can be brought together into the same package, the same bundle, the more it knows. And this doesn't say that it immediately becomes just one individual. It just knows more about who it is. And if you had somebody really cleared up the line, he could probably think as any one of three or four individuals and think in the past too, and he would not even be faintly confused about it.

And then, of course, somebody comes along and digs up a little more of Maxwell's work and Einstein's equations, and quantum mechanics gets invented and the Germans do this and we do that, and all of a sudden here's the whole subject – it's just up in air. You don't know from, actually, one month to the next, what's happening in physics: This month light is a particle, next month it's a wave and so on. And the fashions – fashions in the mathematics used in it change. So, again, the whole subject is in flux. It's random now as a subject.

But what – when he doesn't know that he is anything or is anywhere else than where he is, he gets these strange things happening to him and he gets very confused; he doesn't know where they come from. And as a net result, he can demonstrate far more aberration than he can demonstrate if he just knew what was going on.

So knowledge changes in bin 3 in accordance with what we've agreed upon about the physical universe. It doesn't matter what we've agreed upon, that data can get into bin 3. And we can agree that something is true which is utterly false, and it'll still appear as a datum in bin 3. We can agree that all of us can make the tides of the ocean overflow and drown the Land on Shrove Wednesday or Ash August." And we can agree upon this. It doesn't necessarily have to happen. It's a datum. Now we can work on that.

An unknown datum can produce aberration. And when theta – a theta body does not know what is going on, it definitely can exhibit very aberrated behavior. But if it knew for sure and with good reality that it was, for instance, inhabiting ten bodies – it was ten people simultaneously, right there – if it just knew that and if it knew for sure what its track was and knew more or less where it had come from and knew more or less what had happened to it, and knew it with some security, everything would go up Tone Scale for that theta body without running a single incident.

For instance, a lot of people agreed once upon a time that the Roman Empire – Rome itself was suddenly going to disappear in a boiling mass of lava, red hot lava, and that every Roman in the town was going to perish in that boiling mass of lava. And they agreed upon this and they agreed upon it and they agreed upon it, and everybody sat around and waited for it to happen. Every body hated Rome. And they waited for it to happen and they waited for it to happen and they waited for it to happen, and it just didn't happen! And this became discouraging.

Now the test of this – I have been giving you as a study or a scheme of theta – a test of this is does a person come up the Tone Scale and become less aberrated by just knowing about this and experiencing it himself? And the fact of the matter is, he very definitely does, So for my computations, this has worked out and past theories have not.

One time, by the way, they set fire to it just to make it come true, and then blamed the emperor. And then blamed him again when he crucified some people for having done it. Very interesting.

But the point is that they had agreed upon it. It was an accepted datum. It was so thoroughly accepted that men would have killed each other rather than to have overset this datum: "Rome is going to go up in a cloud of hot lava." And Rome didn't, so they had to invent hell. (laughter) And that's right; that is the source of hell. They finally said "So we're talking about a symbolical Rome." We couldn't make this town go, so we had to change data in bin 3. My authority for this is Edward Gibbon. Edward Gibbon is a thorough Christian – thorough. Only I'm very – I'm sure, I'm sure that the Church and so forth is very happy that he has written with such long words so that so few people read him. Actually, he reads like a dime novel, and his blasts on this subject are – they really char the paper.

But anyhow, there's bin 3 – even contains Gibbon. It also contains the endowment lists, that is – what do you call them? Oh, the index – what is that thing they called – what do you call it?

Male voice: "Index of Forbidden Books."

"Index of Forbidden Books"! Well, it's something like that. & I knew the Latin. & Well, just to be blunt here, we have the channels between 3 and 1, and those are the channels of search. Mysticism, religion – all of those things come on this second-channel level. That's 2. And those are the routes of knowing. And the data in 2 is just how you get data out of 1 and into 3.

Scientology is actually a route which pretends to embrace everything here in bin 2. It doesn't matter what route is used, will be used, can't be used or anything else, or what argument is against using it – that is bin 2.

And what Scientology is, is bin 2: How do you get knowledge from 1 to its relatively highest degree of truth, into bin 3?

I hope you understand that so that no holds are barred in this subject. If you can find out that the Arabs had a method of blowing sand into certain shapes and finding out what was in bin 1, believe me, that is in the sphere of Scientology. Just like a slide rule, topology, the science of physics, or US government orders – US government orders – they're all in the same bin. Now, they're all embraced by Scientology.

And I hope you get a little better understanding, then, of what we're trying to do. We're trying to get the highest level of knowing that we can get, and this is a system of trying to get that highest level of knowing. So, no holds are barred in this subject.