I want to talk to you now some more about the Axioms.

The Axioms of Scientology are a list of usable or self evident truths and are a major part of the technical information of a Scientologist.

It's a remarkable thing that life itself can be codified in terms of axioms. It has not been done before. The first time it was attempted is when I wrote up the Logics and Axioms way back there, couple of years ago.

Having these we are now operating on just fifty axioms and definitions, where the Dianetic Axioms of 1951 were in excess of one hundred and ninety. We arrived at these fifty Axioms of Scientology through a great many changes, a great many major developments – all of them in the direction of higher workability and simplification.

Well, it's more than that; that's about three years ago. And I wrote these things up simply to give an alignment to thought itself. And as a matter of fact, copies of these Axioms were sent over to Europe and just a year ago I found them in Vienna, fully translated into German, which is quite remarkable. But over there they were terribly impressed, simply because it had not been done: nobody had codified life to this degree and nobody had codified psychotherapy. And they were not impressed as to whether they were right or wrong, it's just that nobody had done it before.

A student in training in Scientology is not expected to read these Axioms. He is expected to absorb them, quote them verbatim and by number, understand and apply them.

Well, we are not quite doing the same thing here. Those Axioms were quite complicated, and the Axioms which we have here in the summary of Scientology in the Auditor's Handbook are nowhere near as lengthy, but they pack a great deal more punch.

Webster's says that an axiom is a self evident truth.

Now, let's take up something very, very interesting. Let's take up proof of ultimate truth.

Comparing the Axioms of Scientology with axioms in another subject, these are certainly as self-evident as those of, for instance, geometry, which is actually a relatively crude subject in that it proves itself by itself, which is a limitation that Scientology does not have.

If we have reached an ultimate truth, then we have reached an ultimate solution. And who would ever suspect, really, that an ultimate truth or an ultimate solution could be subjected to mechanical proof? Who would dream this?

The Axioms of Scientology prove themselves by all of life.

Well, certainly I never would have dreamed it, and yet we have done just that. I discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate. Now, you'd better know what a perfect duplicate is. We get that in Axiom 20: Bringing the static to create a perfect duplicate causes the vanishment of any existence or part thereof.

In geometry we find the Aristotelian syllogism arbitrarily cutting across the whole subject. In Scientology we needed a better base than the syllogism and we have a better one.

You understand that – that if you can get a life form to make a perfect duplicate of anything, it will vanish. Now, that's quite remarkable. We have a perfect duplicate very, very clearly defined. It is an additional – now get that additional – it's an additional creation of the object, its energy and space in its own space, its own time, using its own energy. And we could append to that the considerations which go along with it because it couldn't be anything but considerations.

The platform on which we base our understanding is, if something doesn't work when applied we change what we are doing and find something which does work. We are certainly not bowed down to the great god No Change.

Now, this violates the condition that two objects must not occupy the same space, and causes the vanishment of the object. The second that you violate this rule which holds universes together, which is that two objects must not occupy the same space, and we make two objects occupy exactly the same space, why, we get a vanishment.

Well, true enough, these Axioms are self evident truths. But they are not so thoroughly self evident that they leap out of the page and introduce themselves to you. You have to introduce yourself to them.

Now, this is quite remarkable. But if you will ask somebody to simply make a perfect duplicate of something, well understanding exactly what a perfect duplicate is, if you ask him to make a perfect duplicate for instance, of a vase, just exactly where it sits, it will start to fade out on him. And he can do that to almost anything.

The first of the Axioms is a bit of understanding which if you did not have and did not actually understand very well you would not be able to do anything with Scientology.

Now, why doesn't it fade for somebody else? Why doesn't this perfect duplicate fade for somebody else? Well, it's quite remarkable. Do you know that everything in this universe is displaced or misplaced?

It's just as blunt as that.

Now, when we say "a lie," when we talk about a lie, we really don't mean that simply changing the position of something is a lie. We have to alter the consideration regarding it to make a lie. Now, it isn't really a lie that everything is so scrambled in this universe, but believe me, it's scrambled. Just in the last moment or two, several cosmic rays went through your body.

Axiom One: Life is basically a static.

Now, those were all particles. They emanated from someplace else and they came down where you are. Maybe they've been en route for a hundred million years – who knows. And there they are.

And what is this static?

Now, to get one of those cosmic rays to vanish, it would be necessary to pick its point of creation. And we would have to find its point of creation, and we would have to make a duplicate of the ray at the moment of its creation. And then we would have to make a duplicate of having done so. And instantly that cosmic ray would vanish. There is no doubt about this whatsoever.

Definition: a Life Static has no mass, no motion, no wavelength, no location in space or in time. It has the ability to postulate and to perceive.

There is how you make a perfect duplicate.

This is a peculiar and particular static, having these properties and a further peculiarity, which we find in the next Axiom.

Now, if you can make a perfect duplicate and make something disappear, why, you have of course achieved a vanishment. And this means, then, that you have achieved something which is quite interesting. It's very interesting to the physicist; it's very interesting to almost anybody. But it is demonstrable. You can do this.

Axiom Two: The static is capable of considerations, postulates, and opinions.

Now, I asked one of our better auditors the other day: he was foolish enough to sit down and let me process him while I was doing something else. And I told him simply to look over to the wall over there, and pick a very small area and get the atoms and molecules in the wall there, and put an attention unit – you know, a little attention unit, a remote viewpoint – next to each one and follow it immediately back to where it had been created.

You can't measure this Static.

And he came off of the fender of that car as though he had been shot, because the object itself, this tiny portion of the object, started to disintegrate. And he rushed over to it to hold it into place. Well, it was an interesting experiment. Because he'd heard all this and he didn't quite believe it. But the second that he realized that, it was fine.

When you find something which has no mass, no location, no position in time and no wavelength – the very fact that it can't be measured tells you that you have your hands on Life itself.

Well now, why doesn't the whole universe vanish? Well, let me point out to you that probably on the very site of this building there was another building once. Where's that other building? It's been broken up and the bricks have been moved, and part of it's out here in the street, and there's part of it still in the ground below you, part of it maybe has – oh, I don't know – some brick dust got on somebody's suitcase who went to World War II and part of it's in Germany and… In other words, it's spread all over the place.

You can't measure it, yet all things measurable extend from it. From this Static all phenomena extend.

And here are all these waves and rays going all over the universe. And to get each one of those at its moment of creation, in the time and space of moment of creation, using itself as its own energy, would be quite a job. And it's not an impossible job. It merely means that it's a job that requires an ability to span attention like mad.

You cannot measure a dog by his biscuits and you cannot measure this Static by the phenomena extending from it.

You would get, then, a physical object to disappear so thoroughly that everybody else would know it was gone if you got all these various parts. You see, it isn't true that an object sitting before you at this moment – or your chair – has always been in that position; nor it isn't true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position; nor is it true that the atoms which made up the materials in their raw-material form were always in that particular ore bed or in that particular tree. So you see, it's quite complex. This universe is very mixed up. It doesn't mean you can't make it vanish, however.

Space is one of these phenomena. You could say that Life is a space-energy-object production and placement unit because that is what it does. But when you measure these you do not measure Life.

Now, the second that we get this perfect duplicate and the second we can produce this phenomena, we know we have an ultimate solution. Now, we will go into that much more deeply here when we get to the last part of the Axioms. But I merely want to call that to your attention right here: that the perfect duplicate was the little latch string hanging out that opened the door to an ultimate truth.

A thetan is very, very close to being a pure Static. He has practically no wavelength.

Well, what would an ultimate truth be? Well, we'll take that up a little bit later. But an ultimate truth is a static and an ultimate solution is a static. In other words, an ultimate truth and an ultimate solution is nothing. You get the as-isness of any problem, you make a perfect duplicate of any problem, and the problem will disappear.

Actually a thetan is in a very, very small amount of mass. From some experiments conducted about fifteen or twenty years ago – a thetan weighed about 1.5 ounces! Who made these experiments? Well, a doctor made these experiments. He weighed people before and after death, retaining any mass. He weighed the person, bed and all, and he found that the weight dropped at the moment of death about 1.5 ounces and some of them 2 ounces. (Those were heavy thetans.) So we have this thetan capable of considerations, postulates and opinions, and the most native qualities to him – in other words the things which he is most likely to postulate – are these qualities which you find in the top "buttons" of the Chart of Attitudes. "Trust", "Full Responsibility", etc.

Now, you can subject that to truth, too. So if you can make a problem disappear by simply getting its as-isness, then you've got the solution to all problems, haven't you? Well, the mest universe itself is just a problem. And if you could make it all disappear just by getting its as-isness, it would disappear. It'd disappear for everybody.

So we have then actually described a thetan when we have gotten Axioms One and Two. Without these known well an auditor would have an awfully hard time exteriorizing (Exteriorizing: exteriorization: the state achieved in which the thetan can be outside his body with certainty) somebody – because if you thought that you reached in with a pair of forceps and dragged someone out of his head, well, this it not the way it is. You would not be thinking of a thetan. To exteriorize something that can't possibly be grabbed hold of, that's quite a trick.

All right. Let's study that and get that very good and get what a definition is, there, in the Auditor's Handbook. And let's get that definition of a perfect duplicate and let's understand it very, very well because contained right in that is the total solution, by the way, to a mental therapy, Dianetics, of which you may have heard something.

A thetan has to postulate he's inside before you can have him postulate that he's outside. But if he heavily postulated that he's inside, now your trick as an auditor is to do what? Override this thetan's postulates? That would fit into the field of hypnotism, or maybe you could do it with a club, but the way we do it in Scientology is a little more delicate than these. We simply ask him to postulate that he's outside, and if he can and does, why, he's outside. And if he can't, why, he's still inside.

And the vanishment of engrams, the vanishment of ridges, of all energy forms and manifestations, can simply be accomplished by making perfect duplicates of them. That doesn't mean that you should go around trying to make nothing out of everything or get your preclear to try to make nothing out of everything. But it just can be done.

Thetans think of themselves as being in the MEST universe (MEST universe: the physical universe, from the initial letters of matter, energy, space, time). Of course, this is a joke, too. As the Static they can't possibly be in a universe.

If you wanted to make a mest Clear, you could use the principle of the perfect duplicate to do it in a very short space of time. He'd not only be Clear, he wouldn't have a body, either.

But they can postulate a condition and then they can postulate that they cannot escape this condition.

All right. Let's take up number 21: Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication. The understanding that we have of an understanding is, of course, a broad collection of data – that's what we would consider understanding. "I understand this data."

Axiom Three: Space, energy, objects, form and time are the result of considerations made and/ or agreed upon or not by the static, and are perceived solely because the static considers that it can perceive them.

Well, let's get understanding just a little bit better. Do we understand that understanding is simply the ability to get the as-isness of something? In other words, you go around and you say," I don't quite understand this car." And we walk around it – "Don't quite understand what's wrong with this car; it just won't start."

The whole secret of perception is right there. Do you believe that you can see? Well, all right, go ahead and believe that you can see but you'd certainly better believe that there's something there to see or you won't see. So there are two conditions to sight, and they are covered immediately here in that you have to believe there is something to see and then that you can see it. And so you have perception. All of the tremendous number of categories to perception come under this heading, and are covered by that Axiom. So that Axiom should be known very, very well.

And we walk around it, and then we find out we haven't turned on the key. And we turn on the key; we have understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key.

Axiom Four: Space is a viewpoint of dimension.

Now, that actually is practicing alter-isness. If we walked around this car and said, "I don't understand what this object is, I don't understand what this object is… Ah! It's a car," we would feel immediately relieved; we'd feel a lot better about the thing.

Do you know that physics has gone on since the time of Aristotle without knowing that! Yet we read in the Encyclopedia Britannica of many years ago (the Eleventh Edition, published in 1911) that space and time are not a problem of the physicist. They are the problem of one working in the field of the mind. And it says that when the field of psychology solves the existence of space and time why then physics will be able to do something with it.

But if we were to get its total as-isness, it would just be a hole sitting there. So understanding is as-isness. And understanding, in its entirety, would be a static. And so we have the fact that life knows basically everything there is to know before it gets complicated with lots of data, merely because it can postulate all the data it knows.

And all those fellows with their Ph.D.'s – not for centuries actually but a number of decades (it seems like centuries if you've ever listened to their lectures) – going back to the days of Wundt, The Only Wundt – about 1867 – they didn't read the Encyclopedia Britannica and find out that they held the responsibility for identifying space and time so that physics could get on its way.

In other words, all knowingness is inherent in the static itself. A thetan who is in good shape knows everything there is to know. He knows past, present and future; he knows everything. This doesn't mean he knows data. This merely means that he can as-is anything. And if he can as-is anything, believe me, he can understand it.

And because they avoided this responsibility we have to pitch in here and discover and develop Scientology – not to work in the field of physics, however, but to work in the field of the Humanities. But it so happened that I discovered very, very early while I was studying nuclear physics at George Washington University that physics did not have a definition for space, time and energy. It defined energy in terms of space and time. It defined space in terms of time and energy, and it defined time in terms of energy and space. It was going around in a circle. I first moved out of that circle by putting it into human behavior – be, do and have, which you'll find in Scientology: 8-8008, but the point is here that without a definition for space, physics was and is adrift. One of our auditors was recently talking to an engineer in an Atomic Energy Commission plant, and happened to remark, "Well, we have a definition for space." This engineer said, "Uh, you do?" and got instantly interested. Of course we didn't make this definition for nuclear physicists, but they could certainly use one. The engineer asked, "What is the definition of space?" and the auditor said, "Space viewpoint of dimension." This fellow just sat there for a moment, and he sat there, and then all of a sudden he rushed to the phone and dialed a number and he said, "Close down number five!" He had suddenly realized that an experiment in progress was about to explode and one of the reasons he knew it was about to explode is that he had found out what space was. This is of great interest to nuclear physicists, but they will get one of these definitions and then they will start to figure, figure, figure, figure, figure. They don't take the definition as such and use it as such. They figure-figure, and they lose it.

Man's salvation, I have said several times, depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well, let's misinterpret that just a little bit and say," Well, man's salvation (if you wanted to mean save him from the universe) would depend upon his ability to make an as-isness of the physical universe, at which moment he wouldn't have a universe.

Using the process R2-40: Conceiving a Static*In The Creation of Human Ability by L. Ron Hubbard gives an understanding of exactly why, every time they get rid of one of these definitions they lose it.

And this would be total understanding.

Axiom Five: Energy consists of postulated particles in space.

Well, this understanding has three parts, and this is affinity, reality and communication. Well, I've mentioned that to you before. And we know quite a bit about that. As a matter of fact, there's a total book on this subject. It's an old book and doesn't contain as many refinements as we have today, but affinity, reality and communication are very, very useful to the auditor. You should understand them very, very well. That's A, R, C.

Now, we've got space: a viewpoint of dimension.

Now, you can actually take ARC and you can compose, out of ARC, all the mathematics there are. You can combine ARC into mathematics. You can do anything with ARC that you want to do. Symbolic logic, even calculus could be extrapolated from ARC. It's quite interesting.

You say: "I am here looking in a direction." We've actually got to have three points out there to look at, to have three dimensional space. If we only had linear space we would have only one dimension point. One point to view. And energy consists of postulated particles in space, so we'll demark these three points out there to have some three dimensional space and we'll have these particles which we will call Anchor Points, and we'll have energy.

Affinity depends upon reality and communication; reality depends upon affinity and communication; communication depends upon affinity and reality. And as I used to say, if you don't believe this, try to communicate sometime with somebody and don't have any affinity at all. Just get real mad at somebody and try to communicate with him. You won't.

And so we come to objects.

Try to get somebody to be reasonable when he is very angry, and you'll find out his reality is very bad. He cannot conceive of the isness of the situation. He will give you some of the weirdest things. There is no liar lying like an angry man.

Axiom Six: Objects consist of grouped particles.

Now, if you raise somebody's affinity, you will raise their reality and communication; if you raise somebody's reality, you will raise their affinity and communication; if you raise somebody's communication, you will raise their affinity and reality.

If we just kept putting particles out there and pushing them together, or if we suddenly said, "There's a big group of particles out there," we'd have what is commonly called an object. When an object or particle moves across any part of a piece of space – in other words a viewpoint of dimension – we have motion.

And the keynote of this triangle happens to be communication. Communication is more important than affinity and reality.

And we come to the subject of time.

All right. Now, let's take up number 22, and find out that: the practice of not-isness reduces understanding. In other words, something is there and we say it's not there. That's a lie, isn't it? We're running down the road like mad and there's an enormous boulder lying in the middle of the road, and almost anybody, just before he has an accident, will say the boulder is not there. And by golly, it's there.

Axiom Seven: Time is basically a postulate that space and particles will persist.

And this makes him feel that he's a bum thetan. He's failed. Well, the funny part of it is, if he were to say immediately, "As-is a boulder in the road," instead of denying the situation, and if he could do this – a perfect duplicate – well, the boulder would disappear.

Time in its basic postulate is not even motion. The apparency of time – an agreed upon rate of change – becomes agreed upon time. But for an individual all by himself is simply a consideration. He says something will persist, and he has time. Now if he gets somebody else to agree on what is persisting, the two can then be in agreement. And if the items are motionless then they can't have agreements about how slow it persisting or it get them moving. And this gives fast or how this gives them a clock or a watch. And so you carry a watch around on your wrist.

But he doesn't do it that way. He sort of puts some energy up there and sort of pushes against the boulder and he says, "It's not there. It's not there. I deny it."

But time is not motion. Let's escape from that one right now. It is an error. We'll call that a heresy.

Well, he'll have a mighty thin understanding of the whole thing. He doesn't want to communicate with it, so he says it's not there. He doesn't want to have any affinity for it at all, so he said it isn't there. And believe me, his reality cuts down.

But this gives us another Axiom:

After somebody has lost something or been through an accident, you would be surprised how poor their perception is, how poor their reality is. Everything looks very dim to them. They don't like it. That means their communication is off, their affinity is off, they don't like the world, they feel sad and so forth.

Axiom Eight: The apparency of time is the change of position of particles in space.

Well, the practice of not-isness reduces understanding. And that is what man is doing all the time. He's trying to avow that something that isn't there is there, and he's trying to avow that something that is there isn't there, and between these two things – giving it no asisness at all or alter-isness or new postulates of any kind – he's having a lot of fun. Well, I don't know; some people claim it's fun anyway.

Now if we see particles changing in space we know time's passing, but if you had a piece of space and some particles, and you were simply sitting there looking at those particles and there was absolutely no change in them whatsoever, you would be very hard put to describe even to yourself whether any time was passing or not.

All right, number 23: The static has the capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC.

And so the apparency of time is the change of position of particles in space.

Well, we've just covered that. Here we have a condition of existence which is as-is. That'd be total knowingness. Well, if we had somebody who could say "As-is" to everything and trace all parts of everything back to the original time, spot, and so forth, and simply get them as they really were, we of course would have nothing left but a static. Naturally. We would not have anything else but a static. We would have zero. We wouldn't even have space.

Axiom Nine: Change is the primary manifestation of time.

Now, that's why we say the static has capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC. By the way, if you wanted to make this whole universe vanish, you would have to be able to span this whole universe. You would have to be as big as the universe. And that isn't, by the way, very hard to do. You can drill somebody up to a point where he can do that.

If you were looking at motionless particles you would not be able to tell whether time was passing or not because you might be looking at one time or another. Then to prove time you could say they moved this far at such and such a speed or something of the sort. And you could say, "Therefore this much time has gone by." So we can say that change is the primary manifestation of time. Now, oddly enough you have your "Black Five", occluded case ("no pictures, only blackness") right there. A Black Five is trying to change himself simply because he's in agreement with particles in motion. That's all. He's simply acting on compulsion or obsession to change, and if you asked him very suddenly in which direction he's trying to change he would not be able to tell you. He has no real goal. He doesn't particularly want to be better, he doesn't particularly want to be worse, but he's got to change. He's frantically got to change. Well, why has he got to change? Because he has these particles all around him which are dictating change to him. They're saying, "Time… time… time… time… time… change… change… change."

But if you go into that to get him to make an as-isness of it, would you please let me know first? I've got a couple of old hats and a motorcycle, and so forth, that I'd like to alter very quickly at the moment he does this, so I'd at least be left with those.

In other words, he's in agreement with the apparency of time, and he has fallen far, far away from the mere consideration of time. So he doesn't conceive what time is. He becomes a nuclear physicist.

Now, number 24 is: Total ARC would bring about the vanishment of all mechanical conditions of existence. Now remember, all mechanical conditions of existence. It wouldn't bring about the sudden death of everything. It would bring about the exteriorization of everything. It would mean the vanishment of all space and all form. The mechanics.

Axiom Ten: The highest purpose in the universe is the creation of an effect.

Now, you want to differentiate between a consideration and a postulate and a mechanic. Now, you want to get the difference between a quality such as complete trust, a quality such as full responsibility, and the mechanics.

We could do a tremendous amount with just that one Axiom, and in processing we would discover then good reason to have space and to have particles and how all these things get there. People want to create an effect, and they get into very interesting states of mind about this sort of thing. They say to themselves, well, let's see now – I caused that effect but that effect is horrible, Therefore I can't admit that I caused that effect, so I'll introduce a lie here and say I didn't cause that effect. And then – they become an effect. If they can't be at cause they become an effect. They are the effect of what they have caused without admitting they caused. But it can get even worse than that – worse than being at total effect. They get way down the line, to the point where they're the cause of any effect. They blame themselves, in other words. A man in Sandusky falls down and breaks a glass of pink lemonade and cuts his little pinky, and this person who is in San Diego at the time hears about that and knows he must be guilty. That's complete reversal.

Now, you get somebody who is a Step V or Step VI or Step X… And you'll get one of these fellows, and he will be all out for mechanics and he won't have anything to do with considerations. And he will believe completely that considerations are – well, they're no good: "Mechanics are the thing. You know, you can put your hands on it. You can feel it, you can touch it."

A person can get into a state where he's cause and effect simultaneously. That is to say any effect he starts to cause he becomes that effect instantly. He says, I think I'll kill him, and he feels like he's dead. Just like that. Now we've got to have time in order to witness an effect. As an example of this one could observe that science is dedicated to observing an effect and does not have any other real goal. Once in a while you see a scientist who is also an idealist. He wants to use his materials to improve Man. But science at large and particularly when it got over into the field of the mind. was simply a goal-less, soul-less pursuit, the totality of which is just to observe an effect. They are not really even causing an effect. They just go around observing effects. And they fill notebooks and notebooks and notebooks full of effects, effects, effects, effects, and you find they carry on experiments – not to prove anything, not to do anything, but just to observe an effect. They go around and put a pin in the tail of a rat, and the rat jumps and squeaks, and so they say "Ah," and they note it down carefully: "When you put a pin one inch from the end of the tail of a rat he moans". Actually the rat squeaked. Well this was observing an effect – the way it's recorded by science. This goes so far that a leading scientist of the day – an Einstein – says that all an observer has any right to do is look at a needle. If they were just going around observing effects, eventually they could build an atom bomb, and say "Well it isn't my fault. I'm not to blame." The few scientists who did feel badly about this and joined organizations to try to do something were promptly fired by the government. They had some responsibility.

Well, he has to be made thoroughly acquainted with the existence of these mechanics before he could as-is them enough so that he could get up to a point where he would have the ability to consider. That's why Opening Procedure of 8-C works. He has sunk below the level of mechanics.

Axiom Eleven: The considerations resulting in conditions of existence are four-fold.

Well, when we say mechanics we mean space, energy, objects and time. And when something has those things in it, we're talking about something mechanical.

And here they are in exact axiom form: (a) AS-IS-NESS is the condition of immediate creation without persistence, and is the condition of existence which exists at the moment of creation and the moment of destruction, and is different from other considerations in that it does not contain survival.

All right. That's all that would vanish if you as-ised all of existence. It would just be the mechanics. And you could turn right around and postulate them all back again, too, with great ease.

1. Alter-Is-Ness is the consideration which introduces change and therefore time and persistence into an As-Is-Ness to obtain persistency.

Only, if you do this, why, don't postulate them back with any politicians. We've had too many of them. Generals, too – you can omit the generals. Don't give them any mechanical forms.

Number 25 of these Axioms and definitions: Affinity is the scale of attitude which falls away from the co-existence of static, through the interpositions of distance and energy, to create identity, down to close proximity but mystery.

My, isn't that complicated? That is very, very complicated. Well, let's get this fairly straight, and let's realize that we probably could simplify that particular Axiom. If it's complicated like that, we probably don't know all there is to know about it. I probably got a blank spot here someplace.

Axiom Twelve: The primary condition of any universe is that two spaces energies or objects must not occupy the same space. When this condition is violated (perfect duplicate) the apparency of any universe or any part thereof is nulled.

But affinity is simply a matter of distance, in terms of mechanics. Now, the second we get out of considerations and go into mechanics, what is affinity?

Alfred Korzybski in General Semantics was very careful to demonstrate that two objects could not occupy the same space. In other words, he was dramatizing "Preserve the universe, preserve the universe, preserve the universe". Now this statement tells you that if two objects can occupy the same space you haven't got a universe, and sure enough if you just ask a preclear repetitively: "What object can occupy the same space you're occupying?" he'll work at it and he'll work at it and work at it, and the first thing you know, why, he's capable of doing many things which he was not able to do before. His space straightens out.

Well, affinity is basically a consideration, so it isn't a mechanic at all. But it does represent itself mechanically. There are mechanical representations of it. For instance, total knowingness goes down to lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well, that's different than simply knowing without looking.

He can create space again – merely because this MEST universe has been telling him so often that two objects cannot occupy the same space, he has begun to believe it. And he believes this is the most thorough law that he has. So we find a person perfectly contentedly being in a body believing he is a body. Why, he knows that he, a thetan, could not occupy the same space as a body. He knows this is impossible. Two objects can't occupy the same space.

Now we go down to looking.

He's an object, and his body's an object, so the two can't occupy the same space.

And now we go just a little bit lower than that – this is, by the way, an affinity scale – we go into emotion. And look, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking, we have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it, do we dislike it – emotionally? There are particles in emotion. "I don't like it. In other words, I have some anger particles about it or I have some resentment particles." By the way, a preclear has his bank full of these emotional particles.

This is very interesting because you'll find that two universes can occupy the same space and actually do occupy the same space. You'll find the universe of a thetan is occupying the same space as the physical universe, but once he declares that the both of them are occupying the same space, you get an interesting condition.

Now, if I have to feel it to know it's there, I've gone immediately into effort. My affinity for something would be good if I could feel it and it would be no good at all if I can't feel it. You get a Step V who is swearing by mechanics and swearing at all life forms (and who builds atom bombs and things like that), and we get this Step V telling you that he cannot contact life. He cannot contact life, so therefore – you know, we can't contact this thing called static, so therefore he can't believe in it.

Now, I'm not going to try to take up at this point the perfect duplicate but it's enough just to say that two objects are occupying that space – identically occupying that space – and poof, it's gone. That's the way you make things vanish. That is to get its As-is-ness, and this is why As-is-ness works and why things disappear when you get their As-is-ness. This is an important Axiom.

Well, this is very interesting. You ask him why. And he says, "Well, I can't feel it." Well, he's twisting the snake around so it'll eat its tail or something. He's proving it all upside down and backwards.

Now here is the oldest thing that Man knows: Axiom Thirteen: The cycle of action of the physical universe is: create, survive (persist), destroy.

He says he can't get the existence of something he can't feel. Well, the odd part of it is we can measure electronically the existence of life. There is a little meter which we have run some tests on, and we can actually demonstrate that one individual can turn on in another individual, at some great distance from him, a considerable electrical current – enough to make this little machine sit up and sing. And the other person can turn it on at will, and the person on whom it is being turned on can't stop it. Here's a manifestation which can be measured. We've done the impossible there, too. We've done the impossible in many places in Scientology.

Now, that's the oldest thing Man knows, that it went on the basis of death, birth, growth, decay, death, birth, growth, decay, death, birth, growth, decay and so on. He knew he had time involved here, on a linear line. The odd thing here is that you've got to postulate death to get a cycle of action, and you've got to postulate time to get a linear line, so we're dealing here with one of the most intimate things of existence. We find this by the way in the Rig-Veda. It's been with Man about 10,000 years that I know of and we find that this is the cycle of action of the physical universe – create, survive destroy.

You can't measure a static, but we've done so by making one person at a distance bring a mechanic into being.

In Dianetics, I isolated just one portion of this line as a common denominator of all existence, which was Survive, and sure enough any life form is surviving. It is trying to survive and that is its normal push forward. And that has, incidentally, terrific impact, but this has two other parts and those are create and destroy. Create, survive, destroy. And survive merely means persist. So all of these things are based on time, and we have underlying Axiom Thirteen this primary consideration that there is time.

Now, affinity is this scale. It goes down through effort. When a person gets down to effort, then he's into a level where he's got to work, everything has got to be work; he's got to touch everything and feel everything before he can know anything. A person in that band, by the way – as he gets to the lower part of that band – has facsimiles. He will even do weird things like this: he will get a picture to know what's happening to him. In other words, he will get a picture of an incident to get an idea. He gets the picture and then he gets the idea. He doesn't get the idea and then get a picture.

Now we can go on and find that the conditions of existence fit these various portions of the survival curve. And this would be given as follows: Axiom Fourteen: Survival is accomplished by alter-is-Ness and Not-Is-Ness, by which is gained the persistency known as time.

You want to watch that. Sometime or another you'll find a preclear who is doing this. You'll be saying, "All right, now get the idea of being perfect." And your preclear will sit there and say, "I got it."

That's a mechanical persistency. In other words we keep changing things, saying they aren't, and changing them, and then pushing them out and re-forming them and trying to vanish them. Using energy to fight energy, we'll certainly get survival. We'll get persistency.

You want to ask him "How did you do that?" – that's a wonderful question to ask a preclear at any time – "How did you do that?"

Axiom Fifteen: Creation is accomplished by the postulation of an As-Is-Ness.

And he will say, "Why, of course, just like everybody else. I got this picture and this picture came up, and I looked at it, and the picture said, 'Be perfect' and so forth, and it showed me a circle. So a circle, that's perfect, so…"

Now all you have to say actually is: "Space, energy, time, As-is. That's the way it is, and, it's now going to persist." You've added time to it. If you immediately after that simply looked at it and got its As-is-ness again it would vanish. All you had to do is get it in the same instant of time with the same time of postulate and it would disappear. You could create it again and it would disappear. It would As-is.

That's the way your preclear was doing that. He wasn't making the postulate at all; he was waiting for a picture to come up and tell him what it was all about.

Axiom Sixteen: Complete destruction is accomplished by the postulation of the As-Is-Ness of any existence and the parts thereof.

Well, now we go down from effort into thinking. And we get our figure-figure-figurefigure-figure case. Now, he's a hard boy to get along with because he can't work. His thought… Thought, by the way, is a colloquialism. Life is not composed of thought, particularly, it's composed of space and action and all sorts of things.

Complete destruction would simply be vanishment. You wouldn't have any rubble left. When you blow something up with guns you get rubble. Ask anybody who was in the last war. There were certainly an awful lot of broken bricks lying around. If anybody had really been working at this in a good sensible way, and he'd really meant total destruction, he would have simply gotten the As-is-ness of the situation and it would have been gone and that would have been the end of that. If he'd wanted to declare the whole As-is-ness of a country, if he'd been able to span that much attention and trace back that many particles that fast to their original points of creation, he would of course have a vanishment and that is complete destruction. So complete destruction is As-is-ness, and As-is-ness is simply a postulated existence.

The static can do all these things. It's not necessarily pure thought. If you've got a hangover about pure thought from a field of Christianity, why, get rid of it. Because thinkingness comes in clear down below effort. And it comes in as figure-figure-figure-figure-figure.

What we're looking at most of the time in this universe is: Axiom Seventeen: The static, having postulated As-Is-Ness then practices Alter-Is-Ness and so achieves the apparency of Is-Ness and so obtains reality.

Now, a person can postulate without thinking about it. If that's what we mean by thought, that's fine, but usually what people mean by thought is figure-figure-figure-figure. I'll just figure this out, and I'll get a computation, a calculation, and I'll add it up to "Now, let me see. Can you go to the movies? I don't know," they said when you were a little kid. "Now, let me see. I'll have to think it over. Give me a couple of days."

In other words we get a continuous alteration, and we get this apparency called Is-ness.

We don't know how all of this mechanic got into a postulate, but they've let it get in there. So that's our level of thinkingness.

Axiom Eighteen: The static, in practicing Not-Is-Ness, brings about the persistence of unwanted existences, and so brings about unreality, which includes forgetfulness, unconsciousness, and other undesirable states.

Now, we go downstairs from thinkingness on this scale, and we get into symbolizingness. Symbolizingness is very interesting. A symbol contains mass, meaning and mobility. What is the definition of a symbol? A symbol is something that's being handled from an orientation point – a point which is motionless in relationship to the symbol (you know, it's motionless; the symbol is in motion) – and the symbol of that orientation point has mass, meaning and mobility.

Quite an important Axiom and a very true one.

"Where are you from?" "I am from New Jersey."

Axiom Nineteen: Bringing the static to view as-is any condition devaluates that condition.

This fellow is telling you that he is from an orientation point called New Jersey, and it's motionless. And as he runs around the world he's always from New Jersey. He has mass, meaning and mobility; he has a name, he has mass, and so forth.

Well, when a person drops down the line below figure-figure, they're into a point of where they figure with symbols. Now, that's a condensation, isn't it? Now, each one of these was a condensation.

The next one down the line below symbols is eatingness. You know, animals eat animals. Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols. And they think they have to stay alive merely by eating other symbols.

This is real cute, and eating is quite important (of course, it can be a lot of fun). But here you have a real condensation. In other words, effort got so condensed that it turned into an inverted kind of thought. And that became so condensed that it packaged thinking, is what took place there; it became so condensed it became a symbol. A word, for instance, is a whole package of thought.

So packaged thinking is a symbol and packaged symbols are a plate of beans. Got that?

All right. Now, below that, when a person doesn't believe he can eat anymore, when he thinks he's not going to survive and so forth, he will go into the sex band. Now, as a witness of that, oh, if you starve cattle or something like that for a while, they'll start to breed. And if you feed them too well they'll stop breeding. It's quite irrational, but then who said any of this was rational?

Cattle who are starved or lacking certain food elements will decide, "Well, we'll live again in some other generation," and they'll breed up a lot of calves. Of course, there's nothing to feed the calves on, but they haven't paid much attention to that.

Now, here in Arizona we have an interesting fact. We have some very beautiful cattle who have stopped breeding. They've just been too well fed. The way you'd get those cattle breeding again, is you'd simply start starving them and you would get them breeding.

Down below sex, then – Freud, by the way, he was so condensed, he had to get clear down there to that condensation of sex – and down below sex we have a new level of knowingness. Only that, this time, is mystery and the level of mystery.

Now, mystery, of course, is a complete displacement of everything, which is in a terrific confusion. The anatomy of mystery, by the way, is unprediction, confusion and then total blankout.

You see, at first he couldn't predict some particles, and then this seemed awfully confusing to him, and so he just shut it all off and said," I won't look at it anymore." That's what mystery is, and your Step Level Vs, by the way, are very, very concerned about mystery. They are very concerned about thinkingness. They're trying to solve the mystery. Well, the mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. An ultimate solution, of course, is simply the as-isness of the problem. And the as-isness of mystery is simply mystery, and that's really all there is to it.

There really is nothing to know back of a mystery, except the mystery itself. It's just its as-isness, but it's always pretending there is something to know earlier than the mystery.

Okay.