And this is January the 19th, 1954, first morning lecture.

I want to give you a very rapid summary of the elements of the theory which you are supposed to know. It’s very simple and you have had an awful lot of data.

Well, I like to go at this data every once in a while by giving you the central pins of this data to show what we’re walking out from, because we are walking out from a held citadel, you might say. And this goes into this: knowingness-just knowingness. The fact that knowingness is not data and that knowingness is the top echelon, that knowingness is that which we’re trying to achieve. And confidence, competence, certainty and all the rest of these things stem out of knowingness and these things are similar to knowingness.

Philosophy was not without good sense when it studied knowingness and it was with very, very bad sense when it departed from a study of knowingness. If you will read in philosophy, you will find that the main lines of philosophy make knowingness only one compartment and they cover that under epistemology. And right next to epistemology, they talk about ontology and they talk about rah-rahology and blah-blahology, bub-bubbology and yap-yapogy and it goes right on down the line. But they don’t put knowingness first, last or anything else. And yet, every philosopher there is, is simply trying to know or trying to tell people what he doesn’t know. And if they’d put epistemology up there and made a study out of it, they would have gotten somewhere with philosophy.

Funny part of it is, they didn’t get anyplace. There have been an awful lot of things said by philosophers, but somebody said one time, “There is nothing so absurd as cannot be found in the books of philosophers.”

The entire field of philosophy is actually a study of knowingness. And when we depart from that, why, we depart from anything sensible. We immediately depart from things that are sensible. We get into Kant’s transcendentalism and where “Everything that is worth knowing is above the realm of human experience, so why try, you little pup, you?” That was just about his attitude, too-1792-put the brakes on almost any reasonable endeavor in the field of philosophy, I suppose because he’d made it so ridiculous that nobody else wanted to be associated with it.

You take Zeno’s Apatheia-let’s go way back in philosophy and we find out that Zeno wrote a little book called Apatheia. And he was very popular, he was one of the most popular men in the later Roman Empire days-fine, fine fellow. His philosophy went this way: “You can’t win anyway, so why try?” That’s right, that was the most favorite philosophy of the later Roman Empire.

And then we get to Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer is ramming around saying, “Well, there’s only one way to defeat it and that’s quit. Refuse to procreate, just go on and die, die quick, then you’ll defeat the whole thing and then it will have lost.” We do this double take on this and we find that he’s over into some other compartment.

And here we go, left and right, and we get on up-the only fellow that really ever said anything sensible in this field that amounted to anything was Herbert Spencer. And Spencer said, “Well, there’s the knowable and the unknowable and we’ll take off from there.” In other words, he introduced the compartmentation of problems. And we are rather indebted to Herbert Spencer for his method of approaching a problem rather than anything else. Then he went ahead and he wrote a formula which is not very workable.

But there is no such thing in philosophy as “not very workable.” Things either work or they don't work. I mean, let’s make an Aristotelian problem out of this and say that there’s black and white, yes and no, two values-let’s crunch on the thing and just be arbitrary as the dickens and see if we don’t come up with something and sure enough we do, we do come up with something. We find that Man is trying to climb the ladder of knowingness and he has tried to climb it by philosophy and he’s tried to climb it by mysticism and spiritualism and “this-is-this-is-ism” and “that-is-isms.” But the final analysis demonstrates that he has made his greatest progresses in the field of knowingness alone. He has done modus operandi, you might say, on this MEST universe and all things are actually secondary to his knowledge of this universe-just as a purity, not as a knowledge of data. Science itself is a knowledge, it’s a classified knowledge. And when we attack the problem with knowingness there at its highest echelon, we get solutions.

And so it is that we can take “know” and “not-know” and no matter how crudely, run them out of the preclear, we get him exteriorized. You got that? I mean, if we just turn around and take what we’ve already learned about philosophy and so forth and we just apply it straight to the preclear, we find out that immediately, crunch, we can exteriorize him if we specialize and just come down with a hard hand on know and not-know with the preclear.

Now, if you’re looking for fancy techniques that will slide somebody surreptitiously out of his coco, you’re not going to have to look any further than that, because it will do it.

I took a case that had been stumbling, stumbling, stumbling-going out and getting in, and effort and tin-cupping and tricky methods of exteriorization and finally I just made him Match Terminal “don’t know,” “I didn’t know.” “Match Terminal the first time you discovered you didn't-know something and back and forth, all kinds of bric-a-brac on the subject of not-knowingness. All of his operations turned up in a jump-he didn’t know what happened during them. All of the puzzles that he had run concerning this MEST universe and its composition turned up and went poof! And with it went his fear. I exteriorized him, he exteriorized very stably with full perception. A very short time before that he’d been a completely black case.

All right.

Therefore, if we say that certainty and knowingness are themselves synonyms, if we can approach knowingness by saying it is certainty, we find out that the greatest mechanism that has ever been used against Man is to introduce uncertainty into his knowingness.

Therefore, we have a direct index for any individual as to what he considers his relative knowingness should be-not what his knowingness is, what his relative knowingness should be. He thinks his relative knowingness should be tremendous and his certainty is terrible, you know? That’s because he’s got to know so much and his certainty is terrible.

We get some other guy and we drag him out from behind a plow in one of the more barbaric tribes of Iowa and he does know what a clod is, it’s something you hop. And we say, “Be three feet back of your head” and pang he does with perfect certainty. This guy is idiotically certain of the darnedest things, but he has no horizon of knowingness.

And we get some other fellow that’s eighteen thousand times the guy and ninety thousand times as valuable and we say, “Be three feet back of your head” and he says, “What head?” Well, he knows there’s so much more to know-the essential difference between these two people and it breaks down to certainty. So, knowingness itself becomes a relative problem and, as such, should be more understandable to you.

A fellow can go into the field of butterflies and suddenly realize that he doesn’t know anything about the field of butterflies. Nothing wrong with this, but he can move right on into the field of butterflies and know something about the field of butterflies. But the first day or so that he’s in the field of butterflies, he’s the most uncertain of guys. He doesn’t know a Lepidoptera from an Aphrodite. His uncertainty is magnified many times, so he’s quite uncertain.

Now, that’s data-knowingness. It is more important to have the potentiality of knowing than it is to have the datum. These two things are quite significant in any case. Cases which have a tremendous potentiality of knowing are generally balked by society, not by blows but by denial of knowledge.

Some fellow thinks that if he went to the university and learned about a great many things, then he would be a very educated man and he’d be very knowing. Well, he might be a very smart fellow and he goes on up to the time he’s fifty years of age knowing that he’s not smart, because he didn’t go to the university. This is an idiocy of itself. What he doesn’t know is that in the university they don’t know. He has taken the assumption that someplace, somewhere, somebody knows.

All right.

Looking at this field of knowingness again, we find something very, very interesting about Units such as yourself. And we wouldn’t even approach this problem if we couldn’t solve it, you see? Your cases flounder along for the first couple, three, sometimes even four weeks. You’ve just entered the field of butterflies and you don’t know a Lepidoptera from an Aphrodite. And you feel then that you don’t know and that there’s a lot of not-knowingness in the air. See this? And so you have a less certain aspect for existence during that early period than you would ordinarily.

Any one of yous’ cases, of course, would progress far better if you weren’t entering a not-knowingness problem. But what do you know? Just as the fellow who enters the field of butterflies can know about butterflies and finally becomes the cockiest fellow you ever saw-somebody points out and says, “That’s an Anistopholese.”

And he says, “I’m very sorry, that’s an Aphrodite.”

And we get an immediate result then, through what? Through having tackled the field o£ butterflies and brought himself through to a confidence about the data of butterflies.

Now, that’s just in the field of data, you understand that?

All right. Let’s get the difference, then, between your case as it progresses in this Unit and the case of the preclear which you process in a Clinic somewhere. He walks in off the street, you process him-three feet back of his head-he goes off and he’s very happy about life. And you don’t spend too much time with him. He finds out a lot of things, he thinks about a lot of things, he’s in pretty good shape.

And you say, “Gee whiz. I wish my case would run like that.”

Well, you’re a slightly different breed of cat or you wouldn’t be here. That’s the long and short of it.

Your potential knowingness or thirst for knowingness must be much greater than that fellow you pulled in off the street. Must be. And to Clear you, “Be three feet back of your head,” get certainty, get perception, that’s all very well. Yes, that would increase your potential of knowingness, that would boost you way on up the line and leave you without any assembled data. And then what would you do? You’d start to run the same dwindling spiral that you got into when you first got into the dwindling spiral. And it’s a spiral of not-knowingness.

You start ramming around, you run into a theta trap. What the hell is this? Never heard of this. But isn’t that music beautiful? And here you go. And you aren’t amongst our ranks anymore. Cute, huh? You’re wiser than most.

There’s the fellow who has great courage but still wants to know before he goes. Now, when you get into this theta trap, why, you say, “Oh, it’s a theta trap-it’s a pole-type theta trap, what do you know? Ha-ha! What do you know, pole-type theta trap.”

“All right. Be three feet back of the theta trap.”

“Okay.”

“All right. Now, I’ll put a spot of beingness three feet above the theta trap.” “Now grant beingness to it very heavily.” “Now be it.”

“Well, this theta trap sure looks funny from up here.”

You’re not up against a wall of unknowingness. If you’re going to continue to live in this universe, you have to have a lot of its data. Well, several of you have already adventured out and snapped back in and so forth, because of what? No more, no less, you ran into something that was strange and apparently, as far as you were concerned, quite unknowable. All right.

So let’s just cut this problem across and realize that we’re not-while we are almost the same as studying butterflies, we’re actually tackling the problem at the darnedest level that anybody ever tried to tackle this problem, which is just simply this: The total mechanics of livingness. I’m not saying we’re attacking it there, we’re trying to attack it theremechanics of livingness.

Now, there’s several holes in what we know. Let’s not blind ourselves to the fact that there still exist certain holes.

We do not know, absolutely for sure, that the MEST universe is being placed there as an automaticity. This we do not know for sure. Everything seems to incline to that, demonstrably, but we don’t have a final proof of this. It doesn’t happen to matter if you can handle the MEST universe. Because if you can handle the MEST universe-that is to say, if you can go through a mountain without getting stuck and if you can have a couple of mountains fall on your body and yet go out and make or get another body without much disturbance, certainly the MEST universe doesn’t kind of get to be the big problem it was. And if you can materialize at a far distance, why, the problem of distance itself doesn’t become the bone crusher which it always was. You see that?

So that the final point in that will turn up someday. Someday we will know for sure whether or not-absolute certain-we make it! Or absolutely certain, “My God, there was a fellow named God after all and he’s sitting up on Planet Eight.” See? I mean, it’ll be that type of answer. It won’t be a bunch of balderdash which we stir up and mix up and so forth.

But that is knowingness in a category of data. Now, when we get potential knowingness, we get how much spread is this fellow willing to take on in terms of how big? In other words, how much knowingness does this fellow conceive to be knowingness, potentially? And that would be area knowingness, which is to say, he knows everything that’s going on in this entire solar system or he knows everything that’s going on, on 42nd and Broadway. See, an area of knowingness. Now, he’s got just this little area or this big area and the next fellow comes along and he isn’t satisfied unless he’s got the whole potential of knowingness of the entire MEST universe from end to end and what everybody’s got in his pocket on every planet, see? Now, that’s his potential of knowingness.

So, he goes into area knowingness and he adds to that data knowingness. But he might be carrying along wonderfully with potential knowingness and his potential knowingness might be very great, but because of data knowingness-you see, absence of data knowingness-potential knowingness great and the absence of data knowingness great, too, so we get him uncertain.

This is, again, relative knowingnesses.

Now, if you’re going to play a game, it’s a good thing to know all the rules. The MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. And when you get all the rules assembled as the rules are and as they exist, of course, you can play a much better game.

Did you ever run into a football player who didn’t know any of the rules of football who played a good game of football? Well, you never ran into a football player who didn’t know the rules of football in the first place. But the next thing we would get to that is a spectator of a baseball game who didn’t know anything about baseball. It’s a kind of a silly-looking hodgepodge to him.

Well, imagine being a player in a baseball game and not knowing any of the rules of baseball. Boy, you would be impressed every split second of the entire nine innings with your complete unknowingness. You’d finish up those nine innings feeling the most stupid person that you ever heard of but maybe with a little hope.

And that’s approximately what you’ve been doing, life by life by life. You see, you play the nine innings and then wind up with a little hope: “Well, maybe next time.” And each one is very convincing that you don’t know the rules, because somebody is always inventing some new rules or some more rules that they say are the rules. And the entire passion of other players in this particular game is “hide the rules.” Science has the single virtue of being a game called “find the rules.”

So, where we get a little boggy is just on this knowingness. But remember, perforce then, we must be making a different type of Clear out of you. It’s not that the state will be any lower eventually or it’ll be any higher. As far as this guy in Iowa; you see, you pop him out of his head and he’s perfectly Clear and he can do all sorts of things. He doesn’t know how he’s doing them and that’s the big hole that would be left all the way along the line in his processing.

Now, don’t mistake it, you’ve made him better than anybody has ever been made better. So it’s no small gain that you’ve made there, but how about you?

All right, by the time you get out of your head thoroughly, completely, with a tremendous certainty and have nothing left kicking around inside the body that you’re still trying to hold on to and no old mock-ups that you’re trying to hide from you and this and that and so on, you’ve got a terrifically clean vista. You are the thing which has never occurred before: a wise thetan. And so it takes just a few weeks longer to make a wise thetan than it does just a Clear.

Now, here’s what we’re up against, then. We’re up against knowing a bit before we go. It is actually a different type of clearing. You’ll run into this when you’re training people. You’ve just shown them all the things they didn’t know and then you say, “Be three feet back of your head.”

And they say, “What fog?” You see that? All right.

Theoretically you could approach this on the basis: as the person comes in, you just merely assume that he knows everything there is to know and you convince him that he knows everything there is to know and that he has the answers to everything. You can say, “Be three feet back of your head,” he would be.

Only trouble is, he wouldn’t have the answers to everything, because we have, again, at least two kinds of knowledge. We have data and then we just have knowingness-ability to know. But don’t mistake it. The ability to know a datum goes through the route of finding out.

Now, you’ve been looking for “spontaneous prefrontalizing” whereby you suddenly and completely know all the data that there is to be known about livingness. Well, it’s possible to do that, but it’s unfortunate that you never will. It’s too much fun finding out. And if you lost the game of finding out totally and completely, you would feel pretty lost, see? We always put a little more horizon.

Now, if knowingness is the top echelon, then you always would like to croche just a little bit further into knowingness so that you get up to potential knowingness. I can tell you in a breath what potential knowingness is: potential knowingness is that there’s nothing. And when you’d know that with entire certainty, you would be a very, very, very wise person with not a damn thing to do. The ardures you go through to convince yourself there is something is, in itself, the game called MEST universe.

So, we’re getting there. But we’re getting there on a much higher level of certainty because we’re getting there in terms of modus operand! as well as just beingness.

So when you step down one space from knowingness, you can get a beingness. There’s nothing cockier, for instance, than a six-months-old pup. He has elected to be a terrifically cocky, confident character. And he goes around and he’ll fight with any dog, he’ll walk up to anybody to be petted, he will eat anything.

Well, you look at this character and, as a matter of fact, a little bit of nostalgic sadness always comes over you because you know very well what this state is, since you pretend to it every time you hit that age. And you know how many guys are going to boot him in the skull before he’s very much older and how many meals are going to disagree with him. But the nostalgia is, is look at all the fun he’s going to have finding out.

Therefore, data becomes at once happy material and regretted material. Now, when we cover this subject from that standpoint, when we cover a person from a standpoint such as that, a great clarity of what we are trying to do, a certain singleness of purpose, immediately emerges in our work.

The human mind was a storage vessel and computer for knowledge—Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health. You know, it didn’t say it was knowledge. The thetan is himself knowledge. We’re closer to it, you see? So that we fulfill the goals of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, we know the anatomy of the human mind, as a human mind. You’re no longer working in the human mind, although occasionally you think you are. You’re working in the high level of knowingness of the thetan. And, of course, his potentiality of knowingness is total.

As you get up the line, you’ll have a harder time keeping yourself from knowing something than you will otherwise. For instance, every once in a while somebody gives me a wrapped-up present. I just have to construct a box around it and put an enormous piece of black space inside of it. I have to actually do a flinch and opaque the box in order not to know what’s in it. And then I open it up and I’m so surprised. But, of course, there’s always a little tiny lock shows up on it earlier. It’s just the instant that black space was going on there, of course, I saw it, so that had to be occluded. Well, that blows when I open up the package.

Thetan is always doing this sort of thing. You have a little tiny black box or something of the sort and he’s got it all rigged up that when he opens it, boy, will he be surprised. And a lot of your preclears have stashed all around their anatomy, you might say, these little boxes and little hampers and junk-just junk. They’re afraid they’ll get bored someday and they’ll have this stuff to open and, boy, will they be surprised! As a matter of fact, that’s one of the drills of 8-0: teaching a fellow how to surprise himself.

Well, when we get on the level of what we are doing and integrate from that level, we find that Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, the mind was the vessel and computer of knowledge. All right, if it was the vessel and computer of knowledge, why, then we were studying a vessel and computer and so we did study a vessel and computer. And we know pretty much-practically all there is to know about that vessel and computer, weirdly enough. I mean, in terms of theory and practice, you can do an awful lot of fabulous things with that vessel and computer, using, you know, most any of the technologies which we have. Whether it stays that way or not is actually beside the point. We can cause an effect.

We have knowingness, then, as the top echelon of what we’re trying to do and the Ц synonyms for it are confidence, certainty, competence. But as we introduce these other words, we introduce other facets of knowingness. Now, let’s take competence. Competence is no more than this: it is the ability to predict or move into line and predict the new position or new consecutive positions of two particles. That’s competence.

If you don’t believe that’s competence, go through this simple drill sometime: Drive your car out on a flat somewhere where there’s a lot of desert-you know, a lot of cleared space or a vacant lot and put up little flags (if you haven’t got any desert space) and just weave your way in and out amongst these flags doing this: you predict where you’re going to put the car before you even start to turn it in that direction. And you keep predicting you’re going to put it there and then put it someplace else and then put it someplace else and put it someplace else and then you’re going to put it someplace else and then you’re going to change your mind and put it yet another place.

You have a tremendous competence. It’s great, it’s not slight.

When you have employed your competence in the past to injure your fellow man or to injure animals, you have regretted your competence. And there is where your competence went. With great competence you took this bone knife and slit somebody’s throat, very expertly placed the knife blade exactly where it was supposed to go and slurrpp! Gone. And then you regretted your competence.

Actually, you saw the fellow sink before you and you had to duplicate sinkingness. And so you didn’t duplicate the sinkingness and you’ve never duplicated it since, accurately and adequately, and so you still regret that tremendous competence. You aren’t actually regretting competence at all, you see, it’s just the fact that you didn’t duplicate it. And in such a wise, we get this prediction of particles.

You can do this exercise, I said, by the way, you can do it with a horse, do it with a motorcycle. Again, you just make the postulate you're going to put the animal or the vehicle someplace and then put it there and then make up your mind you’re going to put it in such and such a place and then change your mind and put it in another place. And after a while, the vehicle will start to do things vehicles aren’t supposed to do. Your competence can just go up that high.

That would be the essence, by the way, of making a terrific jet pilot. You’d be surprised how much feeling there is in any individual that the vehicle or anything is itself acting. And an individual is as incompetent as he believes these particles are themselves self-determined.

Knowingness and competence. Of course, knowingness, that’s sort of knowing where it is going to go and so we’re into flows and energies and so forth. But this is the universe we live in. It is composed of flows and energies, so we certainly better have competence regarding them. If we’re going to deal continually with particles, then let’s be able to handle particles-not “let’s just shun particles.” All right?

I’m giving that a wider coverage this morning because, actually, we don’t have too much summary on knowingness-not as much as we have some of the other material which stems from it.

Very rapidly, the elements which are most important at this time, just as a quick summary (I might have left one out here, but probably not), as a quick summary, the other elements that we have been studying are knowingness and then we have duplication. And “duplicate or not to duplicate, that is the question.” And that’s the only question there is, in terms of form. See, the second we put knowingness down into terms of form, in terms of flows, we first get into competence and then we get into duplication. We also with competence, by the way, get into convincingness and proof and other aspects of knowingness itself. But when we get down to just plain modus operandi-I mean, just bric-a-brac and mechanics and that sort of thing-we’re immediately into duplication.

Exact communication is one which is exactly duplicated. A communication is as good as it is exactly duplicated.

So communication is a specialized thing which uses space and uses duplication. It is a certain way of making a cause become an effect. You see, it’s a very certain, specialized way of making a Cause become an effect. In just plain knowingness there are other ways of making causes become effects. So, then we have beingness which is space and we have doingness which is energy and we have havingness which is time. And then we have everything we know about beingness, of course, just as such, and doingness just as such, and havingness just as such, and space just as such, and energy just as such and time just as such.

But we have that coordination of these six elements. And that coordination is quite important because you can translate, id terms of experience, some of these things. And many a time you’ll be looking blankly at a preclear, wondering what the devil he’s doing, when it will suddenly occur to you that this individual’s laziness has something to do with energy and you will begin to probe jus't a little bit on the subject and you will find that the individual, early in life, perhaps, was a lineman for an electric company. Oh-oh. And now he’s lazy. Why, that’s peculiar. And these two data are immediately and intimately related. And there is where the case crosses and there is where his cross-up is. He’s worried mainly, and so are you, about his laziness. He can’t work, he says and so on. And we find these two coordinated data and we clear it up and he starts working like a steam engine-he’s just going in all directions. You just merely cleared up the fear of electricity across a line.