Having these Axioms we are now particularly interested in this whole subject of truth and its actual use in auditing. We see immediately that any problem of any character or scope is the basic business of a Scientologist. If you have someone who wants to know about solutions, you had certainly better give him not a solution to a problem but the solution to problems, and that of course would be a basic and ultimate truth. Well, if you can describe a basic and ultimate truth, and describe it exactly, you have no problem at all in solving problems.

It is a remarkable thing that life itself can be codified in terms of Axioms. It has not been done before. The first time it was even attempted was in 1951 when I wrote the Logics and Axioms, which I did simply to give an alignment to thought itself. And as a matter of fact copies of these Axioms were sent over to Europe and in 1953 I found them in Vienna fully translated into German. It's quite remarkable. Over there they were terribly impressed simply because it had not been done before. Nobody had before codified life to this degree and nobody had codified psychotherapy. And they were not impressed with whether the Axioms were right or wrong, it was only that nobody had done it before. In these Scientology Axioms we're not quite doing the same thing. Those 1951 Axioms of Dianetics were quite complicated and these fifty Axioms we now have are nowhere near as lengthy, but their reach is greater and they pack a great deal more punch.

We see that failure to discover truth brings about stupidity. A person begins to believe he's stupid if he can't As-is.

We come here to the interesting subject of a proof of ultimate truth. 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. We have done just that. We have discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate.

We see that the discovery of truth would bring about an As-is-ness, by actual experiment, and thus we see that an ultimate truth would have no time, place or form.

Axiom Twenty: Bringing the static to create a perfect duplicate causes the vanishment of any existence or part thereof.

Whatever we had there would simply disappear if we discovered an ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is a perfect duplicate and therefore a Static. And, operationally, to achieve a Static would be to make a perfect duplicate.

If you can bring someone to make a perfect duplicate of anything it will vanish. We have a perfect duplicate clearly defined:

We see that a lie as we understand it is an alteration of time, place, event or form, and that only lies persist.

A perfect duplicate is an additional creation of the object, its energy, and space, in its own space, in 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.)

We have to have a basic postulate, and then another postulate, before we get time. Two postulates. We can't have time with one postulate unless it is the postulate that there will be time. That could be one postulate. But normally in operation we find that two postulates are necessary to achieve time.

And: This violates the condition that two objects must not occupy the same space, and causes vanishment of the object.

Now which one of these postulates is going to persist if the two postulates deny each other: the second one is going to persist, because it is the time postulate.

If you ask somebody to simply make a perfect duplicate of, for instance, a vase, just exactly where it sits, it will begin to fade out on him, and he can do that to almost anything.

Lying becomes an Alter-is-ness, and becomes stupidity. In other words, we don't discover where the thing is, we don't discover exactly how it is, so we can't unmock it, and there we are. The only thing that we can do with it possibly is to Not-is it or Alter-is it some more or do what a Black V does – just stir it around and hope it will disappear. He doesn't As-is it. It doesn't disappear.

Why doesn't it fade for somebody else? This is quite remarkable. Everything in this universe is displaced or misplaced. 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. It isn't really a lie that everything is so scrambled in this universe. It is scrambled. Just in the last moment or two several cosmic rays went through your body. Those were particles which emanated from somewhere and they arrived where you are – they had been en route for a hundred million years. To get one of those cosmic rays to vanish we would have to find its point of creation, and we would have to make a duplicate of that ray at the moment of its creation, and then we would have to make a duplicate of having done so. At that instant that cosmic ray would vanish.

Oddly enough, lying will develop into a stupidity. It also develops into a mystery – into this blackness which individuals are so upset about. It's just an alteration of time, place, event or form after the fact of its having been created.

This is very interesting to the physicist, it's very interesting to almost anybody, and it is demonstrable. Yon can do this. I asked an auditor one afternoon simply to "look to the garage wall over there" and to choose a very small area, and "find the atoms and molecules in the wall there, and put an attention unit" – a remote viewpoint – "next to each one, and follow it immediately back to where it had been created." He was leaning on the fender of the car, and he did this – and he came off the fender of that car as though he had been shot. The object itself, this tiny portion of the object, had started to disintegrate. And he rushed over to it to hold it in place with his hands! Why doesn't the whole universe vanish? Well, probably on the very site of this building there was another building once and that building has been broken up and the bricks have been moved and part of it is out there in the street, and part of it is still in the ground and part of it – maybe some brick dust – got on somebody's suitcase who went to World War II, and part of it's in Germany and it's spread all over the place, and here are all these cosmic 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, and to make a perfect duplicate of all this, would be quite a job. It's not an impossible job. It requires an ability to span attention. You would get a physical object to disappear so thoroughly that everybody else would know it was gone.

There would be two kinds of lie here. A mechanical lie does not lead to blackness.

You see that it isn't true that an object sitting before you at this moment, or your chair, has always been in that position. Nor is it true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position, nor is it true that the atoms which made up the chair in 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 scrambled.

Mechanical lie: we mock up some space, and we put an object in that space and then we move it. The moment we've moved it we've lied about it. We've said it's over there when as a matter of fact it was created in the first location. Now in view of the fact that there is only consideration this of course would bring about mechanically a lie. It doesn't disappear, it doesn't do anything peculiar simply by moving it around. The mere handling of energy does not bring about a stupidity. It takes another consideration than simply moving something to bring about an occlusion.

That doesn't mean you can't make it vanish, however.

Now, anything to persist must avoid As-is-ness, and thus anything to persist, really to persist, must contain a lie. And we get the next Axiom:

As we can produce this phenomenon, we know we have an ultimate solution. The perfect duplicate was the little latch string hanging out that opened the door to an ultimate truth.

Axiom Thirty-Nine: Life poses problems for its own solution.

Well, what would an ultimate truth be? 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. Get the As-is-ness of any problem, make a perfect duplicate of any problem, and the problem will disappear. You can subject that easily to proof. So if you can make a problem disappear by simply getting its As-is-ness, then you've got the solution to all problems, or the ultimate solution. Well, the MEST universe itself is just a problem, and so if you could get its As-is-ness, it would disappear. It would disappear for everybody. Well, let's study that one, and get that very well and get what the definition is there, in the Axioms and Definitions. This is the total solution, by the way, to the vanishment of engrams – what we were handling in Dianetics. The vanishment of ridges, of all energy forms and manifestations, all these can simply be accomplished by making perfect duplicates of them. That doesn't mean that you should now make nothing out of everything or get your preclear to try to make nothing out of everything, but that it just can be done.

Now what do we find here, in a problem? We find something which is persisting, the As-is-ness of which cannot readily be obtained, and would be the definition of a problem.

Axiom Twenty-One: Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication.

Now to solve that problem it would be necessary to get its As-is-ness. Well, how do we prevent something from being As-ised, in other words vanished? We introduce a lie into it.

We understand understanding a bit better when we see that it is simply the ability to get the As-is-ness of something. For example we could say "I don't quite understand this car.

Axiom Forty: Any problem, to be a problem, must contain a lie. if it were truth, it would unmock.

Don't quite understand what's wrong with it. It just won't start." And we walk around it and look at it and then we find out that we haven't turned on the key. And we turn on the key.

When the preclear is being a problem, we know very well that there's a lie somewhere on the track that he's trying to obtain the As-is-ness of. It's not necessarily his lie, but it certainly is a lie. And under Axiom Forty we get: An "unsolvable problem" would have the greatest persistence.

We've understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key (which actually is practicing Alter-is-ness). If we walked around a 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, but if we were to get its total As-is-ness there would just be a hole sitting there.

It would also contain the greatest number of altered facts. To make a problem, one must introduce Alter-is-ness.

So understanding is As-is-ness 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. 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.

In other words, this problem must have been moved and shifted and shoved around considerably to be unsolvable.

Man's salvation I've said several times depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well let's misinterpret that just a little bit and say Man's salvation – if you want to 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, and this would be total understanding.

Axiom Forty-One: That into which alter-is-ness is introduced becomes a problem.

Understanding has three parts: Affinity Reality and Communication.

Any time you Alter-is something you've got a problem on your hands.

You can actually compose from ARC all the mathematics there are. You can combine ARC into mathematics. You can accomplish anything with ARC that you want to do.

This whole universe, then, is a problem. Therefore this whole universe must contain alie to go on persisting the way it does. It certainly does contain Alter-is. It certainly does contain a lie. It contains a variety of lies about its creation, and there are all sorts of things about this universe which cause its persistence, and all of those things boil down to the one fact that it must be based upon a lie and it must be very definitely altered.

Symbolic Logic, even calculus, could be extrapolated from ARC.

Axiom Forty-one tells us that it was alteration which brought the preclear into having a problem. Thus we find any child who has moved extensively, who has had his home changed, who has been shoved around to various parts of the world, eventually becomes a problem, first to the environment and then to himself.

Affinity depends upon reality and communication. Reality depends upon affinity and communication. Communication depends upon affinity and reality. If you don't believe this try to communicate sometime with somebody without any affinity at all. Get real mad at somebody, and then try to communicate with him. You won't. Try to get somebody to be reasonable when he is very angry and you'll find out that his reality is very poor. He cannot conceive of the situation. He'll give you some of the weirdest things. There is no liar lying like an angry man.

Axiom Forty-Two: MEST (matter, energy, space, time) persists because it is a problem.

If you raise somebody's affinity you will raise his reality and communication. If you raise somebody's reality, you'll raise his affinity and communication. And the keynote of this triangle happens to be communication. Communication is more important than either affinity or reality.

It is a problem because it contains Alter-is-ness.Your physicist is busily at work trying to unmock it but he is unmocking it by Not-is – ness. He's using force to alter force, and because he keeps altering it, it all naturally just gets worse and worse. He will solve nothing with an atom bomb. He will simply make things go worse, more complicated, more confused, more dispersed. The atom bomb is a dead-end track and is folly, it is great folly.

Axiom Twenty-Two: The practice of not-is-ness reduces understanding.

If an atom bomb were introduced into a war the number of particles and the amount of MEST which would be altered, we would discover immediately, would have introduced a great number of lies into the situation, it would have deteriorated the society and everything else. If we were foolish enough, for instance, to atom bomb Russia, or if Russia were foolish enough to atom bomb the United States, enough confusion would have been introduced into the cultures of earth so that probably there would be no other choice but to sink into a barbarism, in the absence of an understanding of life itself.

In other words, something is there, and we say it's not there.

Axiom Forty-Three: Time is the primary source of untruth.

Someone is driving down the road like mad and there's an enormous boulder lying in the middle of the road, and almost anybody, just before the crash, will say the boulder's not there. And by golly it's there. And this makes him feel he's a weak thetan. He failed. The funny part of it is that if here were to immediately 'As-is – a boulder in the road', instead of denying it's there, and if he could make this a perfect duplicate, the boulder would disappear.

Time states the untruth of consecutive considerations.

He doesn't do it that way. He sort of puts some energy up and pushes against the boulder, and says, "It's not there, it's not there. I deny it." Well, he'll have a mighty thin understanding of the whole thing.

I call your attention to interest, as an interesting thing to observe. There are two classes of interest, and we want to know why we're thinking about this in terms of time, and this is because time is the basic lie behind all lies. We believe there are consecutive moments. We see consecutive motions and this all very pleasant – we agree to this – and it's only when we have masked them with some vicious intent that we really get a kick-back from the progress of time.

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 says it's not there. And believe me his reality cuts down.

But we discover here in the matter of interest that we have two facets: one is "interested", and the other is "interesting".

The practice of Not-is-ness reduces understanding, and that is what Man is doing constantly.

A thetan is interested, and an object is interesting. A thetan is not interesting. He is interested. And when a person becomes terribly interesting he has lots of problems, believe me. That is the chasm that is crossed. That is the chasm which is crossed by all of your celebrities, anybody who is foolish enough to become famous. He crosses over from being interested in life to being interesting, and people who are interesting are really no longer interested in life. It's very baffling to some young fellow why he can't make some beautiful girl interested in him. Well, she is not interested, she is interesting.

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 As-is-ness at all or new postulates of any kind, he's having quite a time of it.

Axiom Forty-Four: Theta (the static) has no location in matter, energy, space, or time. It is capable of consideration.

Axiom Twenty-Three: The static has the capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC.

We have put it right in there again just to drive it home well. There's no time in this Static. Time is a lie.

Here we have a condition of existence which is As-is. That would be total knowingness. Well, if we had somebody who could say "As-is" to everything, and trace all parts of everything back to their original time, location, and simply got them as they really were, we of course would have nothing left but a Static. We would have zero. We wouldn't even have space.

Time can be postulated by the Static but is only a consideration and thereafter a thetan gets the idea that he is persisting across a span of time, and he is not.

If you wanted, by the way, 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. You could drill somebody up to the point where he could do that.

He is not persisting. Objects are going across time, and energies and spaces are changing, but he is not. At no time does he actually change. He has to consider he is in a head before he can be put out of one, and that he is out before he can be out.

Axiom Twenty-Four: Total ARC would bring about the vanishment of all mechanical conditions of existence.

A Step V, or Black Five, is quite interesting in this regard. He is always thinking the auditor's going to reach in and pull him out of his head. He's waiting for something else to do it! Of course you could probably hypnotize him and tell him that he was, and he'd probably react in various ways, but he has to say, "I am now out of my head," and then he will be out of his head. But "waiting to see" whether or not he's out of his head is complete nonsense. The only way that he can get anything done, is to consider that it is done, or consider that that is the condition which exists.

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. Mechanics.

Axiom Forty-Five: Theta can consider itself to be placed, at which moment it becomes placed, and to that degree a problem.

Differentiate between a consideration – a postulate – and a mechanic. Be sure to get the difference between a quality such as complete trust, a quality such as full responsibility, in other words the qualities along the top of the Chart of Attitudes – and the mechanics. A person who is all out for mechanics, and won't have anything to do with considerations, believes completely that considerations are of no worth and that mechanics are the thing ("You can put your hands on it, you can feel it, you can touch it") – this person would have to be made thoroughly acquainted with the existence of these mechanics before he could As-is them sufficiently to reach a level where he would have the ability to consider. He has sunk below the level of mechanics.

Any time we fall away from Axiom One, which is repeated as Axiom Forty-four, we discover that we have less of a Static than before. In other words we just place this Static, and it's less of a Static. A thetan, then, can have a problem, just by being placed. Quite in addition to that he ceases to be quite as interested.

That's why 8C Opening Procedure, which acquaints the person with his immediate environment, works as it does.

He himself, placing himself, can get away with it. This isn't very hard for him to do.

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. That's all that would vanish if you As-ised all of existence – just the mechanics – and you could turn right around and postulate them all back again too with great ease.

And he can perceive from this new place, and so forth, but as long as he is placed, he will be less than the Static. Just remember that. He is to that degree a problem.

Axiom Twenty-Five: Affinity is a scale of attitudes which falls away from the coexistence of static, through the interpositions of distance and energy, to create identity, down to close proximity but mystery.

Axiom Forty-Six: Theta can become a problem by its considerations but then becomes MEST.

Affinity, in terms of mechanics, is simply a matter of distance. Affinity is basically a consideration, but it does represent itself mechanically. For instance, Total Knowingness goes down to Lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well that's different from simply knowing without looking. We go down to Looking, now we go just a little bit lower than that. (This Know-to-Mystery scale is by the way an Affinity scale.) We go into Emotion, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking. We have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it – do we dislike it. 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" – and by the way a preclear has his reactive mind full of these emotion particles.

A problem is to some degree MEST, MEST IS a problem.

Now if I "have to feel it to know it is there", I've gone immediately into Effort. And my affinity for something would be good if I could feel it and it would be no good at all if I couldn't feel it. You get a Step V, a Black V, who is swearing by mechanics (and swearing at all life forms) and builds atom bombs and such things – and he tells you that he cannot contact life. He can't contact this thing called the Static, therefore he "can't believe in it". This is very interesting. You ask him why, and he says, "Well I can't feel it." He's twisting the snake around so it'll eat its tail. He's proving it all upside down and backwards. He says he can't get the existence of something he can't feel. And the odd part of it is that we can measure electronically the existence of life. There is a little meter on which we ran some tests, 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's being turned on can't stop it. Here is a manifestation that can be measured. We've done the impossible there too. We've done the impossible in many places in Scientology. You can't measure a Static but we've done so by having a person, at a distance, bring a mechanic into being.

What is this MEST? We find that an interested thetan is a thetan, but an interesting thetan has become MEST. What is MEST? Well, it's actually simply a composite of energies and particles and spaces which are agreed upon and which are looked at.

When a person gets down to Effort on this scale then he's into a level where he's "gotta work", everything has got to be work. He's got to touch everything and feel everything before he can know anything. A person in the Effort band, by the way, as he gets to the lower part of that band, has facsimiles. He's got mental image pictures. He'll even do weird things like this: he will get a picture to know what's happening to him. In other words, he'll get a mental image picture of a past incident in order 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. You want to watch that. Sometime you'll find a preclear who's doing this. You'll be saying "All right, get the idea of being perfect." And your preclear will sit there and say, "I got it." 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?" And he'll 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 it showed me a circle, and a circle – well, that's perfect." That's how your preclear was doing that. He wasn't making the postulate at all. He was waiting for a picture to come and tell him what it was all about.

We have the difference between inflow and outflow. A thetan who is being interested is simply outflowing. Interested – outflowing. Interesting – inflowing. He wants the attention of others to flow in to him: interesting. That's MEST. Attention of others flows to it. That doesn't tell you that all MEST is a series of trapped Thetans.

Now we go down from Effort into Thinking, and we get our "figure-figure" case. This case is hard to get along with – he can't work. Life is not composed of thought, particularly.

It says that it is a type of life which is being interesting, as opposed to something which is being interested in it.

It's composed of space and action and all sorts of things. The Static can do all these things and is not necessarily "all pure thought". Thinkingness comes in down the scale at the level below Effort. And it comes in as figure-figure-figure-figure-figure. Now a person can postulate without thinking about it, and if that's what we mean by thought, that's fine. But usually what people mean by thought is figure-figure. "I'll just figure this out and I'll get a computation and a calculation and I'll add it up to… now let me see… can you go to the movies? I don't know," – the kind of answer a little kid gets. "Now let me see. I'll have to think it over.

Now, Number Forty-six: Theta can become a problem by its considerations, but then becomes MEST, is followed by this, that MEST is a problem, and will always be considered a problem, and is nothing else but a problem. MEST is that form of theta which is a problem. That's all. Therefore, it is that form of theta which has a lie introduced into it. And so, of course, it is a problem.

Give me a couple of days." We don't know how all of this mechanic got into a postulate, but they've let it get in there. So that's the level, Thinkingness.

Axiom Forty-Seven: Theta can resolve problems.

Now we go downstairs from Thinkingness on this scale and we get into Symbolizingness. A symbol contains mass, meaning and mobility. A symbol is something that's being handled from an orientation point – a point which is motionless in relationship to the symbol. It's motionless, and the symbol is in motion, and has mass, meaning and mobility. "Where are you from?" "I am from New Jersey." This fellow is telling you that he is from an orientation point called New Jersey. It's motionless and as he runs around the world, he is always from New Jersey. He has mass, meaning and mobility. He has a name. When a person drops down the scale below figure-figure, he is into a point where he figures with symbols. Now that's a condensation, isn't it. Each of these was a condensation.

Axiom Forty-Eight: Life is a game wherein theta as the static solves the problems of theta as MEST.

The next one down the line, below Symbols, is Eatingness. Animals eat animals.

Now that means that theta is the Static, and theta is the object? Yes, indeed. It can be both ways.

Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols and they think they have to stay alive by eating other symbols. This is real cute and eating is quite important of course and 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 – that's 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.

It all depends on which one is being interested and which one is being interesting. And we find that a preclear gets more and more solid the more interesting he becomes, and the more problem he becomes; and the more problems he has and the more figuring he does on his problems, the more solid he is going to get.

Below that, when a person doesn't believe he can eat any more, when he thinks he is not going to survive, he will go into the Sexingness band. If you starve cattle for a while they'll start to breed, and if you feed them too well they'll stop breeding. 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. 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 to get those cattle breeding again would be to simply start starving them. Freud by the way was so condensed he had to get way down there to that condensation level of Sex "in order to find out".

Axiom Forty-Nine: To solve any problem it is only necessary to become theta, the solver, rather than theta, the problem.

Below Sex we have a new level of knowingness, the level of Mystery.

That is a very, very important Axiom. That tells you why SOP 8C Opening Procedure works. It works because the main form of theta which we find desirable, which has mobility, which has freedom, which is happy, which is cheerful, which has all those qualities on the top of the Chart of Attitudes is an observer of problems and a solver of problems. So if you get somebody to simply look around the environment, he will cease to be a problem and will become the solver of problems. That's all. Just looking.

Mystery of course is the complete displacement of everything, and everything in a terrific confusion. The anatomy of Mystery is unprediction, confusion and then total blackout.

Get him to look around and recognize a few problems and he will feel better.

First he couldn't predict some particles, and then it all seemed awfully confusing to him and then he just shut it all off and said "I won't look at it anymore". That's what Mystery is, and your Step Fives by the way are very, very concerned about Mystery. They're very concerned about Thinkingness and trying to solve the Mystery. Well the Mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. The ultimate solution of course is simply the As-is-ness of the problem. And the As-is-ness of a Mystery is simply the Mystery. 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 As-isness. But Mystery is the level of always pretending there's something to know earlier than the Mystery.

Somebody then who is worrying about himself constantly – well, he's all mixed up in a problem and his affinity is at a closure with this problem. He's having an awful time. Then let's take this and turn it around the other way and let's have him observe himself as a problem, and we get that part of the process which is "Problems and Solutions". And naturally, if we asked a thetan to be a solution often enough, he would eventually become a Static. That's all. If we asked him to observe problems long enough he would simply become a Static. In other words he would go out of it both ways.

To sum this up we have, under Axiom Twenty-five: By the practice of Is-ness (Beingness) and Not-is-ness (refusal to Be) individuation progresses from the Knowingness of complete identification down through the introduction of more and more distance and less and less duplication, through Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness, Symbolizingness, Eatingness, Sexingness, and so through to not-Knowingness (Mystery). Until the point of Mystery is reached, some communication is possible, but even at Mystery an attempt to communicate continues. Here we have, in the case of an individual, a gradual falling away from the belief that one can assume a complete Affinity down to the conviction that all is a complete Mystery. Any individual is somewhere on this Know-to-Mystery scale. The original Chart of Human Evaluation was the Emotion section of this scale.

A Thetan could become a problem, more of a problem, more of a problem, more of a problem, more and more and more and more and more and more – static. You see he could go "out the bottom".

Or, he could go: less of a problem, less of a problem, less, less – static. He could go either way. So there's no avoiding it, you're going to survive anyway, and so are your preclears, but we're going to have a better world doing it.

Axiom Fifty: Theta as MEST must contain considerations which are lies.

In other words, there isn't a single piece of MEST in the world which isn't to some degree lying.

Looking at that, then, we find that the only crime that you could possibly commit in this universe is being there. It doesn't matter where. This is the only crime that you could commit.

And this is all your parents objected to, and this is all the preclear objects to when you're auditing him and he growls at you. They add tremendous significances into this, but all they object to is being there. Now if you ran SOP 8C, Opening Procedure, and you ran it very, very definitely with that postulate: to get the fact that the wall is there. Get the fact that the chair is there, that something else is there, etc., you'd be likely to knock your preclear flat at some point. I am not advising you to use this form of Opening Procedure. It's a violent process. If you get almost any preclear and just have him stand in the middle of the room, and say "get the idea", to that empty space out in front of you there, "that it's there", it's there, it's there – his mother will show up and eight or nine of his wives and all sorts of other things will show up all the way down the line. He'll have all kinds of people standing in front of him.

They're all "there". But that's the only crime a thetan can commit. It's a lie, you see. That theta can be there is a lie, and that's the only bad thing that anybody has ever done is to be there. Now, that's all, actually, that the body is doing. He's got a body and he's visible. He is being there.

And we must have introduced a lie. And the basic lie which is introduced is Time.

It is interesting to note that it is the second postulate which persists, because persist means time, and it's the second postulate which introduces time, and this becomes elementary.

Now let's look at this one: let's take this fellow who's awfully sick. He's terribly sick. Boy, is he a problem. He's a problem to himself, a problem to his family, and a problem to his auditor. He is a problem. He's terrific.

You know that he must have had an original postulate that he was well before he could make the second postulate that he was sick. And you know the postulate that he was sick must have denied the postulate that he was well, and so his original sickness was a falsity and he knew it at the time he made it – he actually knew it well. He knew – when he said he was sick that day to keep from going to school – that it was a lie. He knew it was a lie and he got a persistence of the sickness and now here he is eighty-nine years of age and all crippled up and we find out that the basic postulate was the fact that he was well. How could sickness ever get any power except through wellness? Now we look underneath every lie to find out that it was the truth – the Static itself – which gave it power. The lie has no power itself because it is a perversion. Persistence has no power that is not based on the Static itself. So we have the basic lineup at all times and in all places, that the lie is empowered by truth. Truth must have existed and a good condition or quality must have existed prior to a bad condition or quality.

As we study the problem of goodness and badness in the world, we find out that we must be studying the second postulate, because that is all that persists.

Now let's take a situation where something is persisting – and it's good. We could say that that looks as if it must have been based upon a prime postulate which was bad. But you can't make a prime postulate which is a lie. If you'll just get the idea that there are no postulates, that you've made no postulates of any kind, that there are no postulates which have been made – now make a postulate. That would be a prime postulate. That postulate can't be a lie. Now make a second postulate denying the one you just made. That's a lie. Now which one of these two is going to persist? Of course the second one. And it is going to get its power from the first postulate.

It would not matter what the prime postulate was. That is not the point, here. We're not going on the basis of badness or goodness. A consideration is a consideration.

Now, do we mean reach back on the track, and find these postulates? – reach back and run it out with straight-wire? No, because there is no time, and all address to the past – every address to the past and every address to the future actually is validating a lie. There's only now. There's never been anything else but now. There's a consistent change and a consistent series of postulates going on which give us a continuance of now, but the continuance of now is a lie.

You can move objects around. That's quite honest compared to a contradiction, but we're looking at two kinds of a lie here. We discover that when we are trying to make a condition change we simply have to postulate, as though it exists in present time, the opposite condition.

So somebody who hates the human race – he must have loved them desperately by prior postulate. There's no hatred like that which can exist between two brothers or a nation torn asunder in war. Well, that's because they loved each other so well, you see. And so they can hate with violence. But what is their hatred depending on but the fact that they loved each other? So if we have somebody hating madly somebody named Bill – we would say, "Now, get the idea of loving Bill." Grrrrr, he'd go. "Now, get the idea of loving Bill." Grrrr. "Get the idea of loving Bill." Grr. "Get the idea of loving Bill." "Well, he's not too bad a guy." We wouldn't necessarily restore love, but we'd certainly run out the hatred for Bill.