Thank you.

The Axioms were basically written on a summary of information which began in November of 1938. And the basic Axioms of Dianetics were written at that time. It's interesting that the material at that time was called Scientology. It appeared in an unpublished manuscript called "Excalibur."

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

I had a great many calls, and have had a great many calls, to be permitted to read "Excalibur." So just as a joke one time I said, why, sure, I would give anybody a copy of "Excalibur" for fifteen hundred dollars. That's a little trick you use: When you're tired of saying no and no hasn't made any impression on anybody, then you just make it scarce. And that's the same as no, but they're so used to this society making everything scarce that it falls inevitably, then, that there would be no bids for it. So fifteen hundred dollars for a copy of "Excalibur" unfortunately netted two replies – demands for "Excalibur" – and this was quite interesting.

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

I had also qualified. I said a person had to be of extreme stability, and so forth, in order to read this book. So I had to knock those two out on insufficient stability.

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

The truth of the matter is that the raw, naked material of "Excalibur" has the effect upon Homo sapiens of uninhibiting him. And he suddenly realizes that all those things which have held him in a cage are shadows. And they're shadows of such flimsy character that about four cases out of fifteen, in reviewing the material, find themselves suddenly – they think – capable of doing anything they wish to do, and they promptly proceed to do it.

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

Well, that is not the case. One is not free in this MEST universe and in this society to do everything he pleases to do. There are some small regulations.

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

There is an organization known as the police, an organization which is addicted to making you do everything you don't want to do and preventing you from doing everything you want to do. And that is their motto. Their motto is "stop motion." A society – Homo sapiens – in this age could not exist without a very, very adequate police force – tremendously adequate. As a matter of fact, there have been much better police forces. The present police forces of Earth are a little bit in apathy.

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

The Mexican police force is the only one I know of that isn't in apathy, and it is so completely unregulated and untrammeled that it doesn't have to be. They have what they call a ley de fuego, which solves all of their police problems. That is to say, someone must obey the police, it says in the law-books. They must obey the police. And the other thing it says in there: if anyone runs, you shoot 'em. So it's a simple method, then, of handling anyone suspected, oh, of striking a match, anyone suspected of murder – same order of magnitude in Mexico. All you do is when you pick up the suspect you tell him to run: If he doesn't run, you shoot him, and if he runs, you shoot him. And so it's very effective and very simple.

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

But most countries are more in apathy than this, and they stop motion in many circuitous and devious and covert methods. Police merely symbolize the desire of a society, each one, to protect himself from all. Just why this is conceived to be necessary is inherent in the structure of the MEST universe.

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

The MEST universe is an extremely degraded universe. It is a universe which runs on force. If it were the only universe, this would be a pity and I would be in apathy. Because to discover what the MEST universe is, of what it is composed and that its basic law is nothing but force, that it has no truck with an ethic, that it cares nothing about sanity, that the crude force of a crashing cliff is about as high as it thinks – to discover that this would be the basic, that this is all we have to work with – would be heartbreaking. There would be nothing beyond that. And we could all go into apathy and just quit right there, because there's no future in it.

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

There's no future in simply collecting more and more facsimiles and erasing more and more facsimiles. There's no future in arduous and continuous work, work, work. There would be no future in one lifetime; one lifetime would be a very pointless thing. One would get born, he would become educated, he would have some children and then he would pass away by violence, by bugs or by just general decay and deterioration. That would be a wonderful thing, wouldn't it?

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

People have tried to patch that up in the past with guesses and hopes rather than facts. And they've said, "Well, you have a soul. And if you're real good in life, why, we give your soul a little ticket, and it presents it at a gate and then you get to sit still." Well, that was an answer. I mean, it was a little bit of hope.

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

They said, "If you're not good, we give you another ticket and we put you on a chute, and there's a fellow down there who has you dance on co... There are seven hells – seven of them – and one is hot and one is cold and one is this way and one is that way. And you stay there forever, too."

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

Well, they were saved and this was accepted mostly because man is incapable of conceiving of forever. But it was also, as well as a hope, a police method. Of course! You couldn't possibly have a wonderful method like that without turning it into a police method. So they said, "Boy, you better be good, because we can not only hang you here, we can hang you for an eternity. And boy, are you under control!"

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

Now, you all of a sudden tell people this isn't true. You tell them so convincingly, they get uninhibited suddenly. In many cases they get completely uninhibited, and they simply go – as we have called it and still call it – "up the pole." Now, perhaps you will see a member of this class go "up the pole." And if you do – if you do – be very sympathetic to him. That will pull him down quicker than anything else I know of!

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

Or let him have something, make him a present of something. Give him some MEST, or anything, or just let him go up the pole. It is inevitable that in three to six months he will come down that pole with a splash and a crash which would be the amazement even of a fireworks distributor.

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

That is going up the pole: It is the achievement of ecstasy without knowledge.

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

Now, in the field of mysticism, we occasionally have beheld this phenomenon. Someone suddenly says, "Why, it's only shadows." Boom! He's on his way, he goes up the pole and there he is. Maybe he stayed there for quite a while but he seldom stayed there longer than six months, because the lack of information could not help but result in his being booby-trapped by the MEST universe. As long as he stayed in a body, as long as he was still susceptible to the laws of economics in any way, as long as cliffs could fall on him, as long as he associated and went into ARC with other human beings, he was done!

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

So what is the answer to a mystic? The mystic's answer to this is "Let's see if we can possibly, by some strain of the brain, get up a pole. And if we can get up this pole, let's make awfully sure after that that we just deny the MEST universe, we deny eating, sleeping, we deny motion, we just stay off and we hold the whole thing off and live on a mountaintop or something, because otherwise we're going to come down the pole." And so they do all these things and come down the pole. There's really nothing more heartbreaking than coming down the pole once one has gone up.

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

The reason we call this the pole, by the way, is the mathematician's analogy of the two-dimensional worm. He sees man as a two-dimensional worm. And this two-dimensional worm lives in a two-dimensional plane. And one day he's crawling along this two-dimensional plane and what do you know, he runs into a pole. He runs into something, and of course there can be nothing there because it's two-dimensional. And he's run into a third dimension, and that can't be there. That's obvious. So he sort of backs off and shakes his head a little bit and goes off and ponders it and maybe he tells another worm about it and maybe he doesn't.

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

But one day there's some other worm crawling along there and he goes boom! And he says, "There can't be anything here. But by golly, maybe there is." And he speculates on this, and he tells some other worm about it and some other worm comes over and runs into this pole – wham! He says, "Gee, there is something here."

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

And maybe this third worm, by this time, has seen enough of it – there's enough agreement that there's a third dimension there, a pole there – that he goes up the thing like this. Very quietly, you see, he gets up a little higher and a little higher, a little higher, a little higher, a little higher – and then he holds on like mad and he looks down and he sees the plane down below him. And he says, "My God! My God! What am I doing up here?" Well, it was all right when he was going a little higher, a little higher, a little higher. Yeah, he was fairly happy then. But when he found out he was up there and there wasn't any other worm there – zzzz! Was this bad!

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

But he'll crawl down the pole and he'll go out and tell other people, "Look, there's a pole there; I've been up it."

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

And they'll say, "It's a what?"

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

Well, he'll say, "Well, I know it's a pole. There's a third dimension."

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

They say, "Well, what's a third dimension?"

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

"Well, it's something you go up."

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

"Go where?"

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

"Up."

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

"We know there's no up. What are you talking about?" And it finishes him. He's out of communication.

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

Maybe it takes generations and generations of worms before somebody goes up the pole and comes down again and makes a remark on it solidly enough that somebody else will believe there's a pole there. And then maybe somebody will go and sniff at it. And then maybe another one will see it and maybe another one will climb it. And if enough people go up this pole and fall down this pole, somebody sooner or later is going to get a communication line about this pole.

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

Well, horribly and ineptly enough, that's practically what I did. But the point is that if you suddenly were to present this pole and everything there was about this pole to somebody, and they all of a sudden jumped to the conclusion you were right but they didn't know why you were right – kaboom! They're up the pole, too.

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

You've got to have two maps for a pole. You've got to have a map which says "This is the way to get up a pole," and you've got to have another map and it says "This is the way to get down a pole." And if you don't have both of those maps, the subject's no good.

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

Now, the mathematician uses this analogy to explain fourth dimension. You know, I can tell you with a considerable sigh of relief that there is no fourth dimension. It's a wonderful mathematical symbol. You can run four simultaneous equations together and you can find that there's a w, x, y, z, but fortunately they're only theoretical. There is no w. It's not a fourth dimension. It's an infinity of universes. There is no fourth dimension, but there's your dimensions. And people go around straining to understand the fourth dimension. That's wonderful – there is none. If they had strained as hard to find out what is a universe, they would have known what the fourth dimension is.

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

So you'll hear of such things as space warps, you'll hear of such things as "Well, fourth dimension is really time. Yeah, that's what it is! Fourth dimension is time. And you flick from a time fourth dimension through and then you find yourself in the MEST universe; and then you change your mind somehow and you go out of the MEST universe – and that is a fourth dimension – and you keep riding in this other..." Oh boy, we can really get screwy on this one. We can go mad on this one with no trouble at all.

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

And preclears have. They've sat around and they've figured and they've figured and they've figured. And they start asking the E- Meter this and that and they start testing themselves this way and that and they figure some more and they figure. And what do you know? They wind up in a state that approximates that poor worm with no map down. And they say, "There's something here! I know there's something here! But I can't get off of it myself and I can't tell anybody about it!"

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

Well, gee, what do you know? We have a study of universes. And if I told you all these universes were the same? Nah. That's one of the primary points: Two universes are never the same universe. We're talking about universes. We're talking about the MEST universe as a specialized case, a degenerate universe. It's a sort of a trap universe to end all traps. It could be called the inevitable average, probably. The inevitable average of illusions would wind up as a MEST universe. You could always create a MEST universe. But the laws of creating universes, whether they apply to the MEST or another universe, are remarkably the same. But the universes could be remarkably different.

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

Now, how do you get away with all this? How do you square this around? If you were just studying the MEST universe, you might as well give up, because it's not worth studying and it will reward your study by kicking you flat. It's not worth studying – that's the truth – unless you had a better idea or a better goal in mind.

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

Every man there is, is a universe. You talk about God: The most you will know about God for probably a long time to come is you. If you want to know what God is all about, or if you want to know what you're all about, you want to know what the fourth dynamic is all about, you consult the essential elements of "you-ness." Not buried, unconscious, submotivated, libido-icated, bypassed symbolizations of the left hind ruddy rod, which we therefore graph and say, "It's all mysterious and you can't understand you, so therefore we can own you." We're not running that operation.

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

What you know and what you are, you know, and you are where you are at this moment. Step outside of yourself, you're suddenly uninfluenced by a tremendous number of ridges which match your wavelength. You all of a sudden are freer to think, you're freer to be and your beingness picks up – markedly picks up. But you're still you. You're nobody else but you. The horrible part of it is, you never will be.

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

Now, what are the essential elements of you, then? Now, when we say "What are the essential elements of you?" and "What are the essential elements of a universe?" we're talking about the same thing.

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

Now, we can take a preclear, we can tell him to step two feet outside of his head and get him squared around a bit, get his alertness and awareness way up. He all of a sudden looks around the body and he says, "Boom! I'm not a body, think of that. Gee. Hm! How peculiar. Never occurred to me before that I wasn't a body. Well, all right, so I'm not a body." But you haven't educated him even vaguely.

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

You just told him to do that. You just went out here in the street and you just got a guy and you said, "All right, step two feet back of your head."

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

And he says, "Do what?"

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

You say, "Well, be two feet back of your head."

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

And the fellow says, "...All right. What do you want? Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. I am two feet behind my head! What are you doing to me?"

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

Don't think for a moment that your preclear has to have any technology. You sometimes have to be kind of subtle about it. You kind of say, "You know, it's true that human beings have an immortal soul. And sometimes, in rare cases, men are their own souls. This has been known to happen. And sometimes if you merely ask someone to stand out from his body, he does it – if he's very intelligent he can do this. The lower classes can't" – something on that order.

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

You say, "Be two feet back of your head."

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

And the fellow goes bong! "Oh, I am? Isn't that peculiar? Isn't that... Oh, that – that's awful."

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

Or he'll say, "Whee, here I go! Goodbye!" Bong! The body's there.

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

And you say, "Hey! Where the hell is that preclear? Here I sit with a body on my hands!"

There's the field of Scientology.

I can just see the police now. It's a funny thing about police, they're awfully sticky. They insist that bodies have their hearts beating and everything else, if you can imagine such a silly law. Just as though they could do it. They insist that bodies be alive and so on. So anyway, sometimes your preclear does a bunk and he's halfway past Arcturus when you finally get the right word: "Well, think, then, of your poor auditor."

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

All of a sudden, bong! All right, he's back.

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

"What did you do it for? I was on my way. Hm, been waiting to do this for ages."

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

Well, he's outside of himself in universe time and space: partially his own universe time and space – for the first time contactable by him – and partially MEST universe time and space. There he is. And there, standing immediately in front of you, is the matter of a multiplicity of universes.

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

If this material could just do that and produce this phenomenon, it would be awfully interesting and it would be worth doing. It really would be. If you just knew that somebody could step outside the back of his head, take a look at his body and adjust whatever was wrong with his body, and step back in again and be well, this would be quite remarkable. We would have done a great deal and it would be perfectly justified. But unfortunately, this isn't all there is to know about it – or very fortunately.

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

You'd have to know the laws of universes. A Theta Clear is merely a thetan who is stable outside of his body. That's all he is. You can kick the body in the shins, you can punch the body in the nose, you can shake the body around, you could probably throw the body under a truck – he'd still stay outside. He'd still be himself He wouldn't snap into the body and go unconscious. That is a Theta Clear and that's all a Theta Clear is. It isn't an educated thetan nor a cleared thetan nor a thetan with his own universe nor anything. It's just somebody who can be outside of his body, know he is completely outside of his body, know that he is the life unit, know that he is still him and that he doesn't have to snap back into the body automatically every time the body gets hurt. That's a Theta Clear. Well, where do you go from there? That's not too difficult to achieve. On some preclears, of course, we'll probably bury them, thetans and all. They've probably been in the MEST universe so long that they probably will not be able ever to get out of it now. Probably when you put them in the coffin, pour in the formaldehyde, it'll probably leave the thetan there too – probably in a vague state of awareness; a very vague state of awareness. And then it'll probably come up into full awareness but be unable to move any part of the body, you see, and have to stay there in the coffin – I mean, probably... And formaldehyde smells so bad! I can't understand why such a preclear doesn't co-operate more. It's really his fault for not co-operating. I wouldn't be talking about anyone I see here.

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

Anyway, the point is, you've been in that state many times and you didn't know enough to go on in that state. You didn't think it was possible to. You thought you had to have a body. You thought you had to have this. In other words, this whole thing was booby-trapped. You died – boom! You said, "Where's a body? Where's a body? Where's a body? Oh, I got to report back to base. I've got to do something or other." And then you say, "Ah, finally got a body. Gee! Gee, now I'm in the know again." In other words, "Now I'm all set to be more aberrated than ever."

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

Vicious cycle – one that had a tendency to run down after a few thousand years, because, you see, you're in the last ditch. This is the last leg. The last leg is MEST body, Earth, 1952 A.D. That's sort of where you throw... Well, you say, "Poor old Bill. I know he was a teammate and everything, but he's gotten worse and worse and worse. And every time we put him in a doll, he sticks. So we'll just send Bill down to Earth and maybe he'll get to be a congressman or something."

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

Be it as it may, here you have, then, an entirely different thing. You have an educated thetan – educated thetan – who could not only perceive this universe but construct his own; who could not only monitor a body, but move in and out of one at will and do anything he wanted to it and still move out of it again. Or he could stand off five thousand yards and run a body through all of its paces and have it play the Moonlight Sonata. Um-hm.

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

Here you have an educated thetan, a thetan who knows enough to handle the problems of the MEST universe, knows enough about universes to handle his own, and knows enough to protect and handle his own universe when he has one. And knows enough of the track and what happens in the MEST universe so that it can't happen to him again.

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

What have you done?

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

You've read the book Science of Survival. It says theta impinges itself heavily upon MEST and then disenturbulates – withdraws and disenturbulates – saving what it has known and learned about MEST. Well, of course this is the end of the cycle, because it's the beginning of one.

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

A thetan has come down this track now for an awful long time, and there's been an awful lot of information accumulated and collected. And what is it? It is not a study of the MEST universe. We are not here learning about the secret of the MEST universe. We're learning about the basic laws of universes so that you can make one, so that you could have one, so that you could protect one. Sounds wild, doesn't it? Sounds pretty wide.

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

The science of physics or the science of chemistry are peculiarly applicable to the MEST universe because it's gotten so bad. But you could make a universe where they applied. Or, just for kicks in your universe, you could fix them so they wouldn't apply. Repeal Ohm's law. All right.

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

Therefore, you're studying two different subjects. You're studying (1) a process: Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 2 (not Issue 1). You're going to have the joke on the first class; you're learning a different process. You've got to know Issue 1, too. [See Standard Operating Procedure for Theta Clearing in the Appendix of this volume.]

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

Here we have, then, Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 2. That is how you make a Theta Clear. That's all there is to that. That's easy. I could tell you that tonight and explain it to you tonight, and the Instructors could talk to you about it for a couple of days and a couple of periods, and you could go out and do it. And we could turn loose an auditor or two on you and probably have you all cleared.

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

For what? And to what end? To make a Theta Clear. Great. Same thing as saying set you up in a shooting gallery – let's make ducks out of all of you on a shooting gallery. Because you'd run around as a Theta Clear, and you might last for a day and you might last for two weeks and you might last for six weeks and you might last for another lifetime and you might last for four or five lifetimes – and then one day, there you'd be on that doggone trap again. Or next week you'd run into a ridge and go kaboom! and go into apathy and say, "What am I gonna do now? Nothing. There is nothing that can be done about it. Move back into a body, I guess." That would be great, wouldn't it?

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

Well, there's nothing easier than this therapy.

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

You want to patch somebody up – somebody hasn't been able to walk for six years, or something of the sort. Tell them to step a foot back of the head. If they can't step back of the head, then they go to Step II, go to Step III, go to Step IV. And they finally do get a step [out] the back of the head, and then you have them patch it up again. And you say, "Move back in. That's fine. Okay." Pat them on the head and let them go their way. It's a fast process. It even works on the people who are complaining very bitterly now that they are unable to get out. There are two or three of these. But it works very easily. Actually, if they only knew it, the other auditors of the class have plotted against them. And actually, people have fixed it so they're unable to do this, and so on, and it's all plotted that way.

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

Well, actually, it might as well be. See, I could take any one of these characters and spring him in a very short space of time. I sprung the roughest case that ever walked in to a Foundation – that had had so many hours of processing that they'd run it up on a tabulating machine and broke the tabulator. And I started in with this case on Standard Operating Procedure 1950 and did a little bit for the case – did quite a bit for the case – but stepped in with Theta Clearing techniques and in approximately, I don't know, about three hours, had myself a halfway Theta Clear. Two other periods, maybe a half an hour or two hours – somewhere in between a half an hour and two hours more – had myself somebody doing a large part of the rest of the process.

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

And this preclear was over to Buckingham Palace the other day, trying to interfere with the British government. And I discouraged this preclear a great deal about this whole thing. I said, "I don't want the British government interfered with and you don't either. It's doing just fine. Doing just fine. And when speeches are given in the House of Lords, they ought to go the way the speech was supposed to be given, not get sensible. And you don't want, suddenly, somebody breaking forth and making declarations about the atomic bomb and so forth."

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

Preclear practically went into apathy, by the way, because all this M.P. did was stutter. Got the M.P. going and then he couldn't make his speech, he just kept stuttering. It was very embarrassing. He never stuttered before. Maybe he's still stuttering. I'll have to phone him up and ask.

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

But boy, that's really low-order stuff to put this thing to use on. I mean, here's a preclear, processed for a few hours, beautiful shape, the next thing you know, we're over in a member of Parliament – over in Parliament. Great.

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

God help Eisenhower, that's all I've got to say. I've heard more people say, "You know, I'm not doing anything tonight. I think I'll go over to America and..." Well, the dickens with this kind of stuff I mean, you'll find, eventually, that about all you can do for a government is let it evolve, not revolute. Let's evolute them, not revolute them.

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

Revolution never produces anything. Throwing something out of gear momentarily, the vast inertia of the people closes in again and patches it all up. Evolution can be fairly fast, but evolution is on a level of the people, not on the level of the government. A people get the government it deserves. You have to change the people to change the government.

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

So, it takes public education and a lot of other things. You're not going to go out here, though, and teach these people Theta Clearing. They're not going to believe you, in the first place. You're going to have to teach them how to raise better babies and how to keep their husband happy or how to make him unhappy, or you've got to do something with these techniques to make them immediately, instantaneously applicable to the everyday business of living. You can do that. But that's the solution if there's any such solution. It's along in that band.

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

Now, we're not handling the governments of the world, or even vaguely interested in the governments of the world, in this course. We're interested in the anatomy of universes. What's a universe? How does it get that way? How does it go off the rails? What are the basic laws behind them? What do you have to do as an individual with a universe? Are you capable of the manufacture of a universe? Can you regulate and modulate a universe? Those are questions which you will have to answer for yourself. The data is all here. When I say all here, I mean all here. I mean, we've got the information. Works!

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

All we've been doing for just ages now in Dianetics and Scientology – all I've been doing is simply shuffling the deck again and dealing it, taking the factors involved and dealing them a different way and taking the factors involved and dealing them a different way. And that way you can get thousands and thousands of techniques.

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

But you only get one set of Axioms. It should be quite important to you, because it tells you there's a finite number of data for you to learn and know well.

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

If you learn this data and know it very well, you will be able to answer yes to all those questions I just asked. You have to prove it to yourself. But at no moment, anywhere in this course, are you going to find me forcing any datum down your throat.

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

I'm teaching you two different things. There's two different lines of data going out here. One is simply fact, data. This is the datum and that's all this is – this is a datum. And then you'll hear that datum evaluated in its proper place: That, I have never under any circumstances perverted in any way. I have never slanted data in any way. I give you data as it is just for the sake of data. And the other is my opinion of the datum. I'll give you my opinion of the datum. That really is relatively worthless to you. Really. Makes life interesting, about all.

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

What I tell you about "governments should evolute," yeah, you can learn that the hard way, but it happens to be more or less my opinion. It's none of my business what you do with this information really. It's just data. Just data. And as a result, when I give you this data, I'm not giving you opinion. When I'm giving you data, I'm giving you data: The data is tested, the data works, the data is inexorable as geometry. And then to make life more interesting, I very often give you my opinion of the data.

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

My own philosophy, my own method of existing is far, far different, perhaps, in many cases than the data itself, because I've selected out, after all, certain randomities.

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

There are certain things which I have decided to be mad at in this universe. I've decided to be mad at psychiatrists. There is no reason why I should be mad at psychiatrists. Really, the sensible thing for me to do about psychiatrists is simply go over and talk to them, make a couple of patients well, show them how they can make bigger fees, pat them all on the head, and you've got Dianetics and psychiatry. But there's no randomity there. No randomity at all.

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

They're never going to hurt a preclear, really. I can rave and rant about electric shock and prefrontal lobotomy – you can pick them up in the next life and they'll be as good as new.

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

All right.

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

Therefore, what I give you is data. The data in these Axioms is pointed up very sharply. And you can tell very easily what is my opinion or what is my side comment or my randomity, and what the datum is. The data stands, as itself, as close to pure knowledge as is available.

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

This data I'm giving you now on the Axioms falls into three categories. The first is what we're going to call the Q list. There's nothing in mathematics even vaguely approaching this, but Q means the top level from which we are now working – the top level from which we're now working; the highest echelon from which all other things are derived. Knowledge is a pyramid, and knowledge as a pyramid gets itself a common denominator which evaluates all other data below it. At this point of this pyramid, this top point, we have what could be called a Q, and it could be also called a common denominator. It is in common to every other datum in this pyramid full of data.

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

Now, at any level of this pyramid – any level – we have a greater complexity of knowledge. At any level in this pyramid, as we descend down the line from that common denominator, we find it less and less able to be recognized – this common denominator – in the data. It's less and less obvious what its common denominator is, but that doesn't make that common denominator any less a common denominator or any less workable. And the Q from which we're operating now evaluates all the data in the material universe.

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

That's a small statement, but I'll make it bigger. The Q we're operating from now evaluates all the data in any universe, and it's not near high enough as a Q. There's a higher Q than this, and I'm fishing for it now. Have it one of these days and what do you know, we'll have a simpler pyramid. Right now the pyramid is pretty simple.

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

So, if you can envision knowledge as this pyramid – and that's one of the oldest symbols there is for knowledge, by the way. You see in Masonic emblems, you see in Egypt, all over the place you see pyramids, conical objects, that sort of thing. That's what they're trying to represent. The datum I am giving you first appeared here on earth eighty-two hundred years ago. The analogy of knowledge and the pyramid. They've been stumbling along with it ever since. You even find it in Mayan culture, and so on.

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

Well now, if you could envision, then, our datum here, you can see that we're dealing with something which can be found in every scrap of knowledge or action or material or space or time or beingness of any universe.

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

Now, we had an earlier pyramid. It was no less applicable, but it had a lower-level Q, or CD, and that is survival. Survival is our past Q. We were operating from "life is survival": goal of life is to survive. To survive employs space and time. And that word survival, by the way, evaluates this life, it evaluates most things. But it doesn't evaluate everything. The thing it doesn't evolve is all universes, because you don't have to base a universe on the tenet survival. You can have an instantaneous universe which has no time in it. Hence the word survival was betrayed.

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

Now, what is this other Q? We've had two or three, by the way: There was this survival and then there was the higher level of self-determinism as beingness. And now we have the Q of self- determinism defined.

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

Q simply means the most common datum that sums all other data and the point from which we are operating. It does not say there is no higher point. It does not say that point does not exist. Q says that point up here above the pyramid is probably attainable, but we aren't there. We aren't there. We're operating from here. And this, by the way, is quite satisfactory as an operating point at the moment. If it weren't satisfactory as an operating point, there wouldn't be any subject of Scientology or Dianetics. This is Dianetics and this is Scientology. They're operating from a higher Q. All right.

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

And we get the first of the Qs, the first of the list of Qs: The common denominator of all life impulses is self-determinism.

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

The common denominator of all life impulses is self-determinism. And that's Q 1.

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

Q 2: Self determinism may be defined as the location of matter and energy in space and time, as well as a creation of time and space in which to locate matter and energy. Got that? That's self-determinism. Nice high Q, isn't it? Works, though. Oh, that's terribly workable.

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

I got this, by the way, by watching empirically the behavior of what they laughingly call electricity – and suddenly spotted what was left out of it. And what was spotted and left out of it was the fact that every electrical generator has a base and is entirely and completely dependent upon its base. And the electrodes, in the absence of a base – the terminals, in the absence of a base – simply snap together and you get no electrical flow. And the essential part of any generator is its base. And what does a base do? That's actually the metal base of the motor, you see? It's fastened down to Earth and Earth is fastened down in the gravity system of this solar system, and that's fastened down in the universe in some fashion or other. And what's that base doing?

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

That means that everything in this universe, actually, by succession of points, is appended to that base one way or the other. And it says that that base is imposing space and time upon the terminals in an electrical generator. So it says, therefore, that all of these fancy formulas about electricity have had a missing element in them. And maybe that doesn't impress you, but we just got through upsetting – with that, the entire study of elementary electricity becomes upset; you've added something new to it. From James Clerk Maxwell on to present time has not seen very much added, but plenty down here in the field of complexity.

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

Now, let me give you another example of this. Down here, this big field of complexity. And anybody can get more complicated. Any dope, any fool, can come along and say, "Well, let's see, you've got it nice and simple, now let's make it complicated. Now let's get it more complicated. Now let's say that in order to study Scientology, you have to master the Siamese alphabet backwards. Now, let's see, after we've known that, let's go on and get a more complicated datum and an even more complicated datum and an even more complicated datum, and this is the stuff from which we're now going to jump off. The complicated of the most complicated that we can possibly complicate, and we're going to jump off from this point that E=mc2 by the square root of mice. And how you ever get this back to the other, we're not interested in. We're going to go from that point... If you don't know what that point means, just to hell with you. Just the dickens with you. We don't want anything more to do with you. If you don't know that E=mc2 divided by the square root of mice, why, you got no business studying this subject, and we flunk you right now." Typical. Typical in the evolution of a science is to go on and get more complex and more complex and never dream for a moment that you'd better look for a simplicity.

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

And you think I'm just talking about modern scientists, but I'm not. I'm talking about the boys that came after the lads eighty- two hundred years ago in the upper highlands of India, and the later people from there, the Vedic people, and the later people than that, the Runa Vedic, and the later people than that. And boy, they really got it nice and complicated. Do you know that every essential datum – every essential datum – of evolution, of anything and everything you want to think of, is contained in mysticism and in the basic Hindu writings and in the Vedic writings? Do you know evolution is in there? Do you know the Darwinian theory is in there? You know everything is in there? I don't know anything that's left out. They're all there.

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

There isn't any reason, really, why you shouldn't be studying mysticism right across the boards – no real reason at all – except for one thing: they booby-trapped it or they didn't know. And for every correct datum in mysticism, there are a dozen incorrect data. For every correct datum in mysticism, there's a misevaluation. For every correct datum in mysticism, there's a reversal of fact, so that if you enter in and use that data, you will be smacked flat. If you want to finish yourself completely and utterly, get standard works on mysticism and practice them just exactly the way it says and you'll be a dead duck one day. And the reason for this is very simple: (1) nobody wanted to integrate the information completely, because it was much more fun some other way; and (2) boys along the line had no slightest desire for anybody coming after them to really know. They had no desire for that, and so they booby-trapped it just as though they'd laid land mines across the line.

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

Let's take the subject of the chakra – very interesting. There are seven of them. And what do you know! It says right at the beginning there, "Man is a mind who owns a body. He is not a body who owns a mind." It says, "This is the crown chakra. The crown chakra is in the head, it's in the skull. There are seven chakra in all. And now it's the last one which one approaches."

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

"The crown chakra is the last one which one approaches." Get that. Says that right there. There's the true datum and the false datum. If you took it as the last one to approach, and if you did to the other chakra in the body – the other zones or centers, which are not really beings but which we call entities – if you did nothing but process those and you took up the crown chakra last, the crown chakra would not come free with any ease at all. It would take a terrifically specialized technique.

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

If you started in with the crown chakra and said, "Beat it, bud," he would. But if you address the other, if you address chakra number seven and work backwards up the line toward the crown chakra, you would probably have your preclear in a condition whereby he was so stuck in his body that only super-super-human- being techniques would free him. That's the way you pin him down.

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

If you get your preclear to deny the MEST universe and deny it and deny it, you start up a one-way flow of the uncontrollability of force and he will be unable to manufacture enough energy to keep himself afloat. The data is all there; it's all there. It's been there for eighty-two hundred years.

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

Now, it should strike you as very alarming that somebody would really booby-trap this line. But let's be kinder about it and let's merely say, "Well, they didn't have a process." And you'd probably be closer to the truth, because there's so much truth in it that the added booby-trapping goes unnoticed. And when people try to practice it – oh, boy. You are going to find this out: When you have a preclear who has been deeply, deeply steeped in mysticism, he's going to be much harder to work. Because those things are angled toward pinning him down, pinning him down but good. All you have to do is reverse mysticism and handle him that way.

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

So, where you see these techniques crossing, remember this: that we are studying a Western extrapolation from basic mechanical principles learned almost entirely and wholly from basic studies of electronics, but with at least very sufficient knowledge of mysticism and Hinduism to suddenly recognize these data when they show up and suddenly say, "Boy, that is why!"

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

I spent a lot of time when I was a kid watching little matches float around the bowl. I could push them around a bowl once. I could sit still and do this and read minds and read books. But it's very funny; they've got it fixed that if you do them the way they say, the technique will leave you, the ability will desert you. Isn't that horrible? They tell you all these things are possible and then fix you up so you can't do them. The way you're supposed to practice them is the way that ends your doing of them.

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

Now, you don't have to take my word for that. You'll see before the end of this course if you want to go back and study that material. That material is rich, though. And I'm not condemning the material, I'm just warning you in handling it that you might as well be sitting on a lighted bonfire juggling skyrockets. It's just about that safe. I'm just warning you, don't cross them up until you've got your track very straight and you know this orientation which you're handing out very well. And then pick up that subject if you want for a scholarly study and look it over, and you will, I'm sure, be saying much what I'm saying: "Gosh! If they just hadn't booby-trapped the line, if they just hadn't misevaluated this data, look where we'd be today! Look where we'd be. Isn't it a shame!" And I know you'll be saying that.

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

All right. So your Q 2 reverts right back to elementary electricity, and it tells you that the law of alternating current has to have an additional factor in it in order to make it work: a base. And what's this base got to do with it? Well, it's got a lot to do with it. It tells you that your preclear, in trying to operate, is actually operating with energy, and that you make energy by locating it in space and time. You make energy, you create energy.

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

But the MEST universe has the most remarkable factor about it. And this is not a Q; I mean, this is just a comment on it. It has a remarkable factor. And this factor I'd hate to think was completely true, but it just kind of seems like it is. As far as this universe itself is concerned, you can create energy into it but you can't destroy energy out of it. It has a self- perpetuating law in it called the conservation of energy, which makes it an expanding universe, because you can actually create energy into it.

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

Now, they try to tell you you can't, but it's a very, very silly thing that no proof in any laboratory ever showed up on production of energy. They haven't got that one rigged. They can show you the conservation of energy once created – that once energy is created it is conserved, and it's conserved from there on out. But here's the other one: They try to infer that you can't create energy, but they have never proven it. They have never proven it.

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

Now, once an atomic bomb has blown up, the laws of conservation of energy go into effect. But it's a great question as to whether or not the laws of conservation of energy also say you can't create energy. Nobody's entered that side of it; they kind of haven't – let's leave that one alone. They say once you blow up energy or try to destroy energy it'll merely convert and the energy is still there. And that's perfectly true. And that's a hideous fact. Here you've got an expanding universe that is unkillable. And when you have licked this law of the conservation of energy, you have licked the MEST universe for once and for all.

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

But there's a big joke about it: You don't have to lick the MEST universe. All you have to do is change your space-time ratio. Change your space-time ratio and the MEST universe isn't there. You just create some space and time that's not MEST-universe space and time, the MEST universe disappears. That isn't even for you. I don't know but what we all did this, it wouldn't disappear forever. I had a friend that used to say, "You know, I think if everybody suddenly believed that Ford cars wouldn't run, they wouldn't run."

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

All right. The next Q is something there isn't; Q 3: The identification of the source of that which places matter and energy and originates space and time is not necessary to the resolution of this problem. Not necessary to the resolution of this problem. And you can add to it, at this time. In other words, that simply says that the source of this Q is not necessary to the resolution of the problem at this time. And true enough.

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

So if you want to really go mad, go chasing after the source of what locates matter and time. And every time you try to do this, of course, you're going to say, "Well, it exists in matter and time, but it doesn't exist in matter and time because it can make matter and time. And then you've got a seniority to matter and time." And you're chasing from here, and looking – you're looking in matter and time for something which is not matter and time. And that would be the silliest thing there was. I mean, frame of reference.

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

Now, you ask somebody why he's on the track. He isn't going to be able to tell you why he's on the track except in terms of time. He's going to always be looking for prior cause – prior cause, prior cause, prior cause, prior cause, prior cause. And that's "reason why" – means there's a reason that goes before this moment. Cause is before this moment. Every time you ask, "What's the reason the MEST universe..." the cause lies before this moment.

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

Now, of course, if you chase that down to moment zero, there's got to be a cause for moment zero. Well, the way they've shilly-shallied around with this and double-logicked it out of existence is say, "Well, it's really circular. And when you get back to the beginning of it... Therefore, you'll find it all there, and that's the way you go backwards around this thing."

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

It's a big joke. The space-time is created. And it's created not by something esoteric, not by something strange, but it's created by a beingness which is most remarkably like you. As a matter of fact, it is you.

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

And we get to Q 4 which is: Universes are created by the application of self determinism on eight dynamics.

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

And we get to Q 5 (it's really just a reversal): Self determinism, applied, will create, conserve, alter and possibly destroy universes. And now that's the one cautious point I just gave you a moment before. I said I'm not sure that this material becomes destructible, simply because the MEST universe has this silly law of conservation of energy in it. The law is observably there.

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

All right. Those are the Qs and that's all the Qs there are.

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

You want to evaluate these eight dynamics, they're simply the eight dynamics and they come in later when we talk about the MEST universe. When I said they're applicable to all universes – and we just said that – of course, we find that they're applicable in a specialized case to the MEST universe. That's a specialized case.

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

Now we get into the Logics. The Logics are the forms of thought behavior which can, but do not necessarily have to, be used in creating universes. These Logics have been used in creating the MEST universe; that's obvious. But they do not necessarily have to be used. We call these Logics. And this could be called "How to Think," and it's a very specific section.

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

And I want to call your attention to the Qs, just the Qs – when I said Q 1, Q 2, Q 3, Q 4, Q 5, the sentence which immediately followed those – boy, call each one of those a datum; call them a datum of considerable importance to you. And it doesn't have anything to do with opinion. That's data. That's usable data and you need it.

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

Now, a graduation of importance is you're going to use the Qs and the Logics just like mad in processing. I mean, you've got to be able to practically see everything through the Qs and the Logics, just all the way along the line. You've got to evaluate material with respect to these data that I'm giving you, one right after the other. Otherwise your processes will bog down. You will be confronted with things which are to you unknown merely because you're not operating along the line of the Logics. You've run in on yourself some arbitrary of which you may or may not be aware. But these are the least arbitrary of arbitraries. The Logics now could be called "How to Think"; they could also be called "How to Evaluate a Preclear." They could also be called "How to Diagnose." They could be called a large number of things. And each one of these data is quite important to you in processing.

Now, actually, you will be expected to know, as professional auditors, the Qs and the Logics by just rote: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give an example of this: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What a bore! I mean, on that level. Yeah, well, this is easy as saying food is necessary to man: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

These data should be that ordinary to you. Make them ordinary and used and stirred up and misused and abused and kicked around and evaluated any way you want them until finally, by golly, they're your data. Because if you know these data, you can actually list thousands of projects. Thousands. That's interesting, isn't it?

You can invent all kinds of techniques with these. And you can do this with these: you can use these in the field of pretense – like mad. You can leave one of these factors out of what you are saying, and what you are saying will appear to be entirely logical to somebody else and will be utterly unworkable.

You could take these and leave one out or use one in some fashion or other to apply to and evaluate the whole field, let us say, of surgery, and evaluate the whole field of surgery this way and write a book about surgery. And three quarters of the surgeons in existence would read that book, let's say, and they'd read that book and they would be very struck by your tremendous command of this problem. Oh, they'd be delighted. And the other quarter of them want to kill you. Or maybe there'd only be a quarter of them that'd be delighted and the other three quarters would want to knock you off.

But if at any time you find that your knowledge of this has not made you more powerful or has not made your beingness more hardly felt by others, or if you find out that you're having a little bit of a difficult time trying to convince somebody of things, you just haven't learned one of the Logics, that's all. Because these all alone on an educational basis – if your education was oriented around these, you would be a vicious character, that I guarantee. Vicious character. Nobody could have coped with you. You'd have been able to say, "Well, Mama, da-da-da."

Mama would say, "Oh, my God, I've got to give him another shilling." It'd be totally unanswerable except by one thing: force. But there's even a way to get around that.

There's a technique for children. Teach them sometimes and watch what happens to their parents and nurses. It would be horrible. But it's by the application of the gradient scale. We'll talk about gradient scales here in a moment. But the application of gradient scales has, in such an application – just inexorable. I mean, it would just march through anything.

The little child says to Mama the first day, "Mama? Mama, do you want to kill me?"

"Oh no, of course, Johnny. No, no! Whatever put such ideas in your head? Hrrww!" (What's this child been learning? The idea!) "Of course I don't want to kill you. The idea, huh! No!"

"Are you sure, Mama, that you don't...?"

"No!"

Daddy comes home, goes in, talks to little Johnny. Says, "Johnny, we're not trying to kill you." He halfway wants to send for a psychiatrist or something. He's worried. He gets real worried. He wonders what's happened at school. They question him.

Well, you just warn Johnny that all this catechism is going to take place, and you say, "It's going to cause a terrific hubbub, but just keep on asking the same question. Don't vary it, don't extrapolate on this, don't get fancy, don't invent anything. Just say, 'You sure you don't want to kill me?' And you keep that up for a week."

"And the next week you start in, 'Do I have a right to live?' And all week long, at odd intervals through the week, you say to your parents, 'Do I have a right to be alive?'"

And they say, "Of course you have a right to be alive! Oh, my God! Oh, the idea! Well... Poor little fellow, he's been overworked too hard," or something of the sort. But boy, he makes the point.

Then, "Do happy people live longer than sad ones?"

"Well, yes, Johnny, of course they do! Of course, you have to take life this-and-that, but happier people live... I mean, a person has to be happy to... What are you trying to get me into, Johnny?"

"Well, I just wanted to know. Are you sure of that? Well, then, do I have a right to be happy?"

"Yes, of course. Blah, blah, blah..."

Well, then the next week following that, "Do you want me to be happy?" Gradient scales, see?

Little more, little more, little more – you're making the parents, the teachers, make a postulate, a postulate, a postulate, harder and harder. They finally are totally convinced that their lives are going to be practically devoted to the life of this child. And he swings it in this way: he explains, "Then, I don't have a right to own anything, do I, Mama?"

"Why, yes, of course you do! Your dolls and so forth."

"Well, if you owned anything... I could have something I owned, couldn't I? I mean, if I owned something, wouldn't I have the control of it if I owned it?"

"Well, of course."

"Well, do I have a right to own anything?"

"Well, of course you have a right to own anything."

"Well, stop bawling me out about my shoes then. Are my shoes mine or aren't they?" You see how insidious this is? This little kid would wind up – it's a lead-pipe cinch – with the household running. How is he doing it? He's making them make, by gradient scales, stronger and stronger postulates in his favor. And you just draw a curve, and what stronger postulates there are, it'd get to a point where, yes, he should help his father share the profits of the business, if you wanted to go to that. And the parents would not quite know what had happened to them.

Now let's work it in reverse: Let's want to deny somebody some power or some ability or an ownership. Just cut it back one shade every week or every day – just cut it back a hair. Ptock! Just a hair: a little less, a little less, but so tiny in the cuts that he would never quite notice this, and get him each time to agree to them. Because, in essence, that would be it. Each time he must agree that this is the best thing to do.

And how do you do that? You keep saying harder and harder how hard he works, how much responsibility he has to carry. You sympathize with him and you gradually get him to turn over more and more, and you get him to rest oftener. And as you walk in on that track... What do you want to do to this guy? Kill him? Because he'll quit after a while. He'll give you all of his business, he'll be so happy, he'll be so grateful that you did it. And he'll go off someplace and sit down, and then gradually, because times are hard, the next thing you know...

Now, the best example on this is the camel that walks into the tent. The camel that walks into the tent is a beautiful example of gradient scales.

How do you use these things, then? You look for, in the real universe, problems, or you find problems in the real universe, or you find problems in the universe which you have created, which is your own universe. How do you solve them? These Logics will help you out, to understand and to resolve problems. When I say your own universe... You know, you've really never lived in any other universe than your own? You are trying to put your own universe in contest with the MEST universe. And you're trying to make the MEST universe gilded by your own universe or straightened up by your own universe or otherwise. And the MEST universe keeps saying to you, "I am real and you aren't. And the reason I can do this is because I can hurt you. I am the MEST universe and I can hurt you, I can crush you. You have to agree with me; I do not have to agree with you."

And so a fellow breaks down eventually and has no universe. The universe has demonstrated it's so powerful and it's so strong and it's so unreasonable that it can do anything.

All right.