Want to talk to you now about the basic theory which underlies instruction and indoctrination. Just want to give you a few items quite rapidly here which might be of some importance to you. This is, you might say, demonstrable material or doctrine, or anything else you want to call it.

Now here is the most fundamental fundamental that there can be fundamental below the level of consideration. I haven't written very much about considerations. There really isn't very much to say about the subject of consideration. If anyone is confused on the subject it is because consideration is consideration and all things are a consideration of the consideration so that if you consider something which is considerable, why – you have considered it.

The first one is: Considerations take rank over the mechanics of space, energy and time. Considerations take rank over these things. These mechanics are the products of agreedupon considerations which life mutually holds.

Phenomena such as space and energy, time, matter and so forth are produced on the basis of consideration.

The reasons we have space, energy, time, objects, is because life has agreed on certain things, and this agreement upon these certain things has resulted in a solidification, you might say, of agreement. And so our agreed-upon material is then quite observable. It's very, very observable to us. They're still basically considerations, but because they are agreed upon they are very observable.

Consideration of A is senior to A. Consideration of R is senior to R and consideration of any and all parts of C are of course senior to any and all parts of C.

You can, by the way, start somebody into the matter of agreement. You can make him agree with somebody else about something. You can build a fact this way. I've done it experimentally with a group. We have just gone round and round, at first facetiously, and then more and more and more – just the mechanics operating there just beautifully. They were agreeing with one another that there was a chair sitting in the middle of a completely empty room. And when they got through, they finally saw the chair. Curious.

When you're dealing with A, R and C (Affinity, Reality and Communication) you have entered into a very early level of anatomy as far as the business of life is concerned, but you are not into the first and immediate level of anatomy as far as mechanics are concerned.

That's the formation of this universe as far as we can tell.

There is a level lying between considerations and A, R and C and this is Is-ness. It's the consideration of Is-ness. Things are because you consider that they are and therefore something that is, is considered is. If you don't consider that it is, it of course can be considered to be something else. But if you recognize that it is a consideration you only have to recognize that it is. And if you recognize that something is, then you have recognized merely that it is a consideration. As soon as you have recognized that something is, IS, you have reduced it to a consideration, and that's that. One has affinity because he considers he has affinity. One has reality because he considers he has reality. One has agreement because he considers he has agreement. One has disagreement because he considers he has disagreement.

The mechanics have taken such precedent in man that they have become more important than the considerations. Mechanics have taken a tremendous precedent in man and have become so important that they are more important than his considerations.

One has a Dynamic (A Dynamic: any one of the eight subdivisions of the Dynamic Principle of Existence – Survive – which are: The urge to survive as, or to the survival of, (1) Self, (2) Sex and family, (3) One's group, (4) Mankind, (5) Any life forms, (6) MEST: Matter, Energy, Space, Time – the physical universe, (7) Theta, spirit; the Thetan, a spiritual being, thought, etc., (8) Supreme Being – the "Infinity Dynamic") – one has a Dynamic because one considers he has a Dynamic.

"Doesn't matter what you think!" You see? In other words, the mechanics of space, energy, objects, time, rooms, houses, Earth, space – anything like this – electricity, Ivory soap, these things have a greater value than man's considerations. In other words, he's inverted. Having agreed upon these things so long that they are so solid, he is now below the level of having agreed upon them, so his considerations do not apparently pack as much power as his immediate environment.

Any of the eight parts of the Dynamic Principle of Existence, any part of the Cycle of Action, of Create-Survive-Destroy, of Affinity-Reality-Communication (The ARC Triangle), the Chart of Attitudes top and bottom – (Chart of Attitudes: a chart on which in 1951 L. Ron Hubbard plotted with the numerical values of the Emotional Tone Scale the gradient of attitudes which fall between the highest and lowest states of consideration about life. Example: top – Cause; bottom – full effect.) the entire scale of emotions (The Emotional Tone Scale), the Know-to-Mystery Scale (Know-to-Mystery Scale: the scale of Affinity from Knowingness down through Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness, Symbolizingness, Eatingness, Sexingness, and so through to not-Knowingness – Mystery. The Know-to-Sex scale was the earlier version of this scale) – all these are preceded by a consideration. In other words they are postulated into existence. But right with consideration we have the most native and intimate mechanic which precedes all other mechanics and that mechanic is Is-ness. We have to consider that we can consider before we can consider an Is-ness. One considers that one considers and therefore what one considers is, IS!! Anything that is, is considered as being. What is, is, as it is considered to be.

Now, this is what overpowers a man's ability to act freely in the framework of mechanics. He can't act freely in the framework of mechanics, although he invented them, because his considerations are now of less impressiveness than the mechanics with which he is operating. In other words, the agreement is more solid than his new consideration.

Now the moment you recognize, then, the Is-ness of anything, it will disappear. To have something, to have anything over a long period of time particularly, you have to beware of recognizing what it is. Because if you look at it with a recognition of what it is, simply its Is-ness, this simple recognition will of course vanish it. So you have to be careful, if you want something, not to recognize what it is. Now one of the best ways to have something for a long time is to put something in your pocket and then forget that it is there and you'll have something in your pocket. You'll have something in your pocket even though you've forgotten it's there. And that's the safest method of possession, to forget that you have it, because if you remember that you have it you won't have it.

And so he makes a new consideration, and he runs into the mechanics of existence: space, energy, objects, time, his agreements with people and so forth.

Now this would all be hopeless if there weren't another factor way above consideration, and that is Knowingness. You know anything you want to know and you know anything that has gone on.

The goal of processing is to bring an individual into such thorough communication with the physical universe that he can regain the power and ability of his own postulates.

Now let's take the person who is using facsimiles (Facsimile: A mental image picture) in order tell him what has happened. He looks at the facsimile, the facsimile has certain pictures and symbols in it, so then he knows what took place. Well, he had to know what took place in order for a facsimile of that incident to be created. Now, he did know what took place, so he could create a facsimile of the incident, and he does this on an unknowingness level.

All right. We discover this individual in an inverted state. That is to say, his considerations have less value than the wall in front of him.

And above this level he can then look at the picture and know what took place. But he had to know what took place before he made the picture.

Now, the goal in processing is simply to put him into sufficient communication with this wall that's there in front of him so that he can then see that there is a wall in front of him – this is necessary, you see? – and he's graduated upstairs, you might say, to a recognition of what his postulates have created. Now, he can go on from there and graduate up to where his considerations again have precedent over mechanics.

Now if the picture was gone utterly and completely he would still know what took place, unless he had the consideration that he has to have a picture in order to prove to himself what took place.

You see, the mechanics are so much in his road, they are such observable barriers, that he has become unacquainted with them.

Anybody would know anything that was going on if he didn't have to prove it. Proof, conviction, is itself a very early level of aberration. As soon as you have to start proving things and convincing people of things, why then you have to get into agreement with them and in order to do this – you have to Alter-is. You have to have something persist long enough for them to see it, so that they can then understand what it is. So in order for them to really understand what it is you can't possibly put up something that they understand what is, because if they saw completely what it was it would disappear, so you would not have been able to have proven it.

Now, it would seem that it wasn't necessary to do this at all. All one would really have to do is get an individual simply to change his mind enough to all of a sudden have an individual who can change his mind – and it doesn't work this way. It's just not workable that way.

I hope you follow this very closely! Because actually what I am talking about here makes sense easily if strung together and looked at in a rational way. But if you try to Alter-is it, if you try to change it around, then you'll be able to remember it perfectly, but if you merely accept exactly what I am saying at each and every point, you know this already, so it won't exist. Now this is a very bad thing, I realize, so the best thing for me to do would be to color, if I really wanted this material to be remembered, to color the material so that it appeared to be something else than what it was. I could do that, for instance, by talking about your egg libido, and your re-conscious. I could quote authorities who didn't exist. That's always best, you know. That's really a curve, you see. Nobody could ever see those, so they can't ever disappear. And I could quote these authorities which didn't exist but which you couldn't disprove and we could go on about the counter-reflex of the seratopol palsy and the og libido, the bog libido, the sog libido and the mog libido and how we would categorize these things as explanatory to the behavior of a feeshee preservation on the part of young alligators, and this nonsense of course would then be utterly comprehensible because it could be so remembered in every detail particularly if it were altered from what I was really talking about – in trying to talk to you about turbo-electric systems, for example, with that amount of data injected into it.

The way it does work is to get an individual into thorough communication with the environment – with his solid agreement of his called reality – get him into thorough communication with that, and then, when he has lost his fear of that, to demonstrate to him that he can change his mind.

We could go that far afield and you would find that you would start hanging up on these non sequitur facts. You have experienced this sort of thing.

But unless you get over his blindness, his unreality about something he has already agreed to, he is going against his own agreements. He is fighting his own agreements. He has agreed that there is a wall there, so there's a wall there. And now he's fighting that agreement and he is saying, "There is no wall there," and so on.

As a person becomes unable to recognize the Is-ness of things he can't get jokes any more. Every datum that comes in must have a significance. It never occurs to him that it doesn't have a significance, and he is sure there must be a deeper significance so that something will remain. This accounts for the badly jammed facsimile bank (Facsimile bank: mental image pictures; the contents of the reactive mind; colloquially, "bank") of an individual, particularly when that facsimile bank of the individual is badly jammed.

In other words, he is fighting his own postulates. So his own postulates are therefore very weak because the wall is there because that's his own postulate. And now without undoing that postulate, he's trying to change his mind about it and say "There is no wall there. There is no wall there." And there's a wall there, all right.

He will add significance to everything and he will certainly achieve a preservation of data. He, in adding all that significance to things, is Alter-is-Ing. So he gets: preservation of facsimile bank.

So this is the state in which we find 99 and 89/50ths of our preclears. They've agreed that there is a physical universe, and then having agreed upon it they are sorry for it. And now they want to change their mind about it but to change their mind would make them wrong. An individual who has already said there is something there, if he now says, without changing the first postulate, that there is now nothing there, of course, has got to make himself wrong before he can be right; and if you're wrong your postulates don't stick. That's what man's up against.

Now let's look at the various categories of Is-ness. We find that each one has a gradient scale and first there is As-is-ness. This is the first level that we encounter and is actually the disappearance level.

We're trying to just clarify this, give it a very fast rundown in case there's any question about this material. Scientology is the science of knowing how to know answers. It's extended a little bit further. It's actually the science of knowing how to know, but we had better say what we are trying to know. "Answers" is there, observably, but we'll just add it: it's the science of knowing how to know answers.

As we are content with and can accept things as they are, they won't exist. That is ab-solute.

A Scientologist is expected to be able to resolve problems in a great many specialized fields, of which auditing is the first field he addresses. If you know the principles, for instance, of ARC as the modus operandi and the mechanism of agreement, which has been agreed upon itself, you could then take an organization, an industry, a store, a troop of Boy Scouts and so on, and you'd sure know how to straighten out this mess. I mean, if we know the anatomy of confusion… Confusion starts in with an unpredictability and that goes into a confusion and that becomes a mystery. That is a mystery.

Why? The simple recognition of their existence would blow them into a consideration. A wall. What wall? When we really know what a wall is, there isn't going to be a wall.That's As-is-ness, and we can see that mechanically. We have a lower, mechanical strata on that which is a perfect duplicate. If we make a perfect duplicate of a wall – boom – no wall. All right, that may be just for the thetan but it's certainly no wall. Anyway, I at least will lead you down the track to believing that you are not about to destroy the physical universe.

And we know why this is such a mystery to these people. That's because basically it was evidently such a confusion to them, and if it was such a confusion to them, it was because they didn't predict something. And this made them wrong, so that's why they think these things are so mysterious.

I wouldn't want you to shy off from the processes which come from this data just because they knocked out the physical universe.

The only reason they think they are mysterious is because in the past they didn't predict them and then something happened; they said, "I didn't predict that," and this made them confused. And this confusion became intolerable to them – the amount of unpredictability became very, very high, so they closed it all off and said, "It's a mystery and we now don't know anything about that."

The next stage down the line from As-is-ness is Alter-is-ness, the effort to preserve something by altering its characteristics. We make it as a simple consideration and then we alter the method by which we made it. In other words "Let's dodge on it." Having mocked it up we will now dodge and say Joe mocked it up. Well this is just as far from truth as is necessary, to get something to exist, but you have altered an As-is-ness slightly in order to keep itfrom being perfectly duplicated in its own time, its own space, with its own energy and mass, thus ceasing to exist.

And the anatomy of mystery, there, if an individual knew that and ARC and a few other things, he would see this troop of Boy Scouts or this business or this disaster area or anything else that we were connected with, and he would see it would be necessary for the individuals in it to follow a certain pattern in order to regain a communication.

So we enter into the field of Alter-is-ness as a method of preservation. And one seeks, when he makes an object or a space, to get it to exist simply by saying somebody else did it, or it is a different kind of space, or its method of construction was different. The consideration is altered just enough so that one will get a continuation of it.

And having regained communication, why, he knows that other matters would remedy themselves. He, in other words, would not have to be an expert in turbines to straighten out a factory which made turbines. All he would probably have to do is get management in touch with the foremen, and the foremen in touch with the workmen, and the workmen in touch with the management and the plant would make turbines, you see? He would be a specialist in knowing how to know answers. But this does not mean that he would have to accumulate an enormous amount of technical information. What he would do would be to get the people who had the technical information and put them into communication, and the job would get done.

We say "God made it", or anything that would throw somebody off this track. Well, supposing God did make it, that would be all right. It would then cease persisting if you looked at it recognizing that God made it.

All right. The world is every day more violently impressed with mechanics. Oh, it is impressed today with mechanics. The little wheel that goes spin, spin, spin is far, far more important than the little boy who is going spin, spin, spin. The care of the body and the transport of the body, the conduiting of electricity is far more important than any activity life itself could do, so much so that an engineer today working with electronic brains is very swift to tell you "Why, this brain is accurate. This brain is wonderful. This brain…" He doesn't say this but he implies it: "Why, you should actually get down on your knees there and worship this here machine (because if I had the power to do so, you sure would)." But anyhow, "This brain is accurate and it's not like the human mind. Oh, that's capable of enormous error, and it's always wrong and it doesn't come up with good answers." He completely fails to recognize that that electronic brain was conceived by a human mind and that it runs only as long as the self-determinism of at least one mind is feeding it problems to get answers to. And when that no longer occurs, the machine neither has activity, nor use, nor anything else. And if everybody forgot about the machine and wouldn't look at the machine anymore, and didn't use the machine and cut off its power, the machine would probably disappear. Probably right there in the middle of the plant floor it would just pffff – be gone.

People get in to Alter-is-ness – simply by the experience of having had too many things disappear.

The world, then, is very, very impressed with these mechanics. It's so impressed with space and energy and machines, objects, that any of these seem to be more important than a mind – the mind which makes them. And this is curious. But it brings a person down – as he gets more and more impressed with mechanics – brings him down to lower and lower levels of being mechanical. So if you could conceive it, a life-energy production unit has actually dropped out of sight to such a degree that people don't even know they are one anymore.

So we see a person who has lost many things then trying to change everything. He's trying to shift the As-is-ness of everything. He's trying to shift from As-is-ness to Alter-isness and he's got to change the significances and structure and background and everything around him so that then these things will continue to exist, and that is his first impulse.

Now, that is attributable to a dependency upon mechanics and a validation of mechanics. It isn't that you just withdraw from mechanics, you understand, and leave them all alone and "Let's all go off and quit." No, an individual has to be put back into communication with them, mostly because he's afraid of them. And after he's done this he says, "Why, look-ahere," he says, "I don't have to depend on these things. That's nonsense." And the next thing you know he has regained some of his own power and ability.

For example, we build a brick house and then cover it up with shingles, and then insist that it is built out of lumber. You would get into enough of an argument with people trying to buy the house who could observably see that it was not totally a lumber house for them to get upset and worried about it, and that house is likely to persist in one's ownership for some time, if he just did that sort of thing. So we see Alter-is-ness then, totally mechanically, as a method of getting things to continue their existence, and that's an important fact.

Now, when it comes to atomic fission, you are producing of course in this society an enormous mystery. You couldn't help but do so; it's unpredictable. In other words, the first bomb was dropped without any warning. This is an unpredictability. Nobody even knew one was being made. That's nice and unpredictable, isn't it?

Although the nomenclature here is simply chosen at random it's a pretty good nomenclature because it says exactly what it means.

Well, the world is living in an expectancy of an unpredicted atomic attack. Well, that looks interesting too, doesn't it? I mean, more unpredictability.

The control case, the person obsessively controlling things, and himself, is an Alterist.

Now let's take up the confusion aspect. What do you suppose is the picture of all of these electrons and protons and morons exploding in all directions on a random pattern with great violence? Do you look upon that as a confusion of particles? What would be your chance, by the way, of tracing each one of those particles individually all through the entire mass?

He's got to change, change. Well he's lost too much. Now he's got to change everything but he's not satisfied with anything. If he were walking down the street in a limber and loose fashion he would think he had to walk in a tight fashion, etc. He's become anxious about things disappearing so he of course has to alter everything he sees in order to keep these things from disappearing.

Well, your chance, if you're in good shape, is very good of doing that. But Johnny Q. Public out here knows that he can't trace one card while it's being dealt across the table. That's what cardsharps thrive on. And much less, billions and billions to the billion power electrons and morons exploding all over space – and that's a confusion to him! You see? So here you have an unpredictability and a confusion.

Now let's get to the next category – Not-is-ness. Here is someone who has altered things up to the point where they are beginning to persist. In fact he's upset about their continuous persistence. He doesn't think this is a good thing, to have a black box staring him in the face all the time, or to have the walls of the room appear to be 180 feet tall although they're only nine feet tall. It's not a good thing, that Alter-is-ness, he has concluded. He has changed too many things and lost track. He isn't quite secure about what the things were in the first place, he's shifted them so often. He's like the small boy who's told so many lies that he can no longer remember what lies he has told and so he's stuck with the lies – and so becomes a human being. Now the next step along that line, Not-is-ness, is manifested as and is in itself the mechanism we know as unreality.

Now, what follows after that? Mystery. And so we have everybody being very secret about all the formulas of fission. They're only in all of the library textbooks that are in all of the libraries in all the world. They're very secret. They are so secret that the notebook of anybody who has studied nuclear physics and so forth, abounds with the basic-formula material of atomic fission. It isn't something somebody suddenly discovered. They just decided to do it. It took billions of dollars to do it and it took a long time for somebody to put up that much money. But they're being very secret about formulas which have been public property – some of them, for heaven's sake, for fifty years. And all of the material that the U.S. had on the manufacture of an atomic bomb has already been transported, by a couple of spies who got executed for it, over to Russia. So who are we keeping it secret from?

There is a category of just plain Is-ness. This of course is not a bad thing. This, in its highest level, is what we call reality. But we could spell this with bigger and bigger caps. We could keep spelling "IS" there with bigger caps and bigger caps and finally give it an exclamation point – which would represent a psycho. There is a dragon in the middle of the room, and he knows this. There are many other things which he doesn't know, but he knows this. If you ask him to mock up an anchor point to define a space he makes a pyramid out of solid iron. And when he is asked to move one of his own mock-ups, a knowingly created object or space, he knows he doesn't have that much strength. The world is too real.

Now, that's a problem!

Once in a while when somebody's just about to kill you or cut your throat or eat you up or arrest you or do something of this sort you get an enormous flash of Is-ness, a recognition of the situation. Boy, this is it is real – Gulp! A moment after that you're likely to get or postulate an immediate reaction of Not-is-ness. "It's not real". A fellow will flare up and daze from Is-ness to Not-is-ness very swiftly in a sudden emergency.

Well, maybe we're not keeping it secret from anybody. Maybe it's just a mystery because it is unpredictable and confusing. So it's a mystery, so therefore we'd better lower all of our communication lines. And before you know it, the U.S. government is going to be almost totally out of communication with its own people. Just on this basis: you get just more and more communication-cut lines, cut lines, cut lines, cut lines.

Now Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness would be then the categories which can be aberrated but remember these are not basically aberration. They become aberration only when they go entirely beyond the ability of the person to re-recognize As-is-ness. When a person has lost his ability entirely to recognize As-is-ness, he's gone. He's stuck with and has only Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness – all three, or one or two of the three – some such combination – with no As-is-ness left. Therefore he gets everything persisting around him.

There's a big mystery coming up. Well, how would you solve this? The way I would solve it, unfortunately, would be to simply point out the fact to the government and to people that atomic disaster was not going to ruin the entire world and that if you accepted a disaster and predicted what was going to happen, then you could resolve the disaster.

He gets everything less and less changeable, and he goes into a dwindling spiral, because he has lost his quality of As-is-ness. That is all he has lost.

Next thing I would do is ask that we make the study of the manufacture of atomic fission a third – or fourth-grade subject, so that we could get in there, you know, and get the children indoctrinated into this great mystery real quick – so it wouldn't scare the kids. Actually, really, all they're doing is scaring the kids these days, which is not an honorable activity for big, grown men.

And what do you do with a psychotic? Have him touch a few walls. You just have him go around and touch walls for a little while and all of a sudden he'll say, "It's a wall!" And right then he feels much better.

Now, the role of Scientology is to impede any disintegration which is going on in the realm of knowingness, so on – just to impede it. But if disintegration occurs, why, people who know Scientology ought to just be ready to pick up the pieces.

He knows he's in communication. Well, he has a case of Not-is-ness – "There are no walls" – or Is-ness – "There are walls all through the room and all through my mind and I have barriers everywhere, everywhere, everywhere", or "There are no barriers anywhere, anywhere, anywhere". Just variations of Not-is-ness and Is-ness. And you've now shown him that there were walls and these were agreed upon walls and of course that's way up scale because you have demonstrated to him something closer to an As-is-ness. Now each one of these is a gradient scale and you know that you can recognize poorly enough the actual As-is-ness of something. You just draw back just a tiny bit from the As-is-ness of something, in other words indulge in just a little bit of Alter-is-ness or just a little bit of Not-is-ness or just a little bit of Is-ness – making it a little bit more – and it'll persist with great satisfactoriness. Of course if you walk up to it and simply hit it with As-is-ness it's not there any more.

What do we mean by disintegration? We could mean on any dynamic, in any direction. Now, you could have a society so rigged and so operating that it didn't disintegrate people so quick; you could have one where freedom itself could be achieved. But if you all of a sudden looked at a complete smear-in on the part of a state or a county or a nation or something like that, you still, knowing principles of communication and so forth, could play a very large role in picking up the pieces resulting from that disintegration.

Follow this very carefully – because it's quite important, although the technology which we're using is elementary – and you discover that many philosophies could be adjudicated out of these four categories. And believe me, any philosophy there is has been adjudicated from these four categories. This is the root of all philosophy as well as all existence and you're standing right there at the tiniest co-point between mechanics and considerations that we have so far attained.

Now, as far as the political significances of Scientology is concerned, I would say offhand probably that it would hew to a democratic line – not Democratic party, but democratic principles – because of our self-determinism. But that does not make it necessarily possessed of a political opinion. A body of knowledge cannot have an opinion on something; it simply extends what is found to be true wherever it is found to be true into greater truths. That's all.

You could then develop many philosophies out of this and the first and most dangerous of them would simply be this one: "Well, I just have to accept everything as it is and therefore what we're really supposed to produce out of this is an apathy, because if I had to accept everything as is there would be nothing left but apathy because if I can't… or… something or other…, but I'll go into apathy. Yeah, I know what the auditor wants, he wants me to be apathetic about the whole thing." This is too easy a philosophy. This is the philosophy of Zeno. You can't do anything about it so you might as well accept it and everybody go into apathy and cut his throat anyhow.

And if something is true, that's all right. And if something is false, well, one simply recognizes that's false. So that as far as a political opinion is concerned, Scientology as such could not have and does not have a political opinion. It knows that certain types of government could be very disintegrative to a people. It knows, for instance, that fascism, military control of areas, and so forth would result in a knockdown of communication lines, which would be very, very unhealthy for that particular area. But this is in the field of Scientology that it is talking, not in the field of politics. And you should remember that rather carefully.

We have an enormous number of things which we could say, list or categorize in terms of the philosophy of this and this is only one of those which will hit your preclear. You see he has to be able to accept his own restlessness before he can be restless. He has to accept his own dislike of things before he can dislike things. He has to accept something before he can have it, because he has to get back some As-is-ness before he can have any As-is-ness. He has to get back some As-is-ness before he can become fluid in his practice of As-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

Scientology has no political opinions or allegiances. If one political practice works better than another one according to Scientology, that's fine. But what's working is Scientology, not the political practice. You see that? Don't ever get detoured on this one. Because if you do, you get lost.

The business of life requires that he be quite able in all four categories, not just As-is-ness.

Now, the next one is: Does Scientology have any religious conviction? Well, again we have the matter of a body of data having an opinion, and it doesn't have an opinion. I know a lot of witch doctors who make more sense than a lot of priests, and I know a lot of priests that make a lot more sense than a lot of preachers, and I've seen the history records and found out that the Roman Empire didn't kill many Christians. As a matter of fact, in one year, Christians killed more Christians in the city of Alexandria than the Roman Empire executed during all of the existence of the Roman Empire. Yes, one hundred thousand Christians were killed in one year by Christians in Alexandria. Well, that's because of a conviction without wisdom. Because there must have been some kind of a conviction running counter to some kind of a conviction. This demonstrates – this demonstrates there must have been real bad ARC around there someplace. The fact that it might be slightly amusing to you as a datum actually means nothing to the body of data.

You're not particularly specializing in this. But when it comes to this universe you will discover that as you return your preclear to As-is-ness things disappear. That may be regrettable, it may be interesting, it may be this and that but those things too, just like opinions of art are merely considerations.

So a Scientologist's political and religious convictions would be those that he held to be true and that he had been trained in. I mean, so he's trained to be democratic in his viewpoint, and he's trained to be a Protestant. Why, he's certainly democratic in his viewpoint and a Protestant, unless he sees fit to alter his convictions to some degree or another because a greater wisdom seems to have penetrated those very convictions. But what would he do in that case? He'd probably simply modify or better his convictions.

Now the first step that we would adventure upon in this would be a step which would be immediately addressed to such a thing as exteriorization. Recovering the thetan's ability to be, outside the body. You would merely in auditing find what part of the body was acceptable to the preclear. What part of the body was he able to accept as is. And we would go on asking this question and asking this question and asking this question.

Now, one of the oldest things that was ever given into the training of wise men, that I know of, was simply this: The basic faith in which the individual was trained and the basic political allegiance of the individual must not be tampered with by the order training him. And it was the order itself which laid that down.

We could vary it by asking what part of the body would he be at liberty to alter as to its position or shape.

That's an old, old one. They were training very wise men, and that was the first thing that they made sure that they did. They did not tamper with their early religious convictions or their political allegiances – did not tamper with these things.

Or what part of the body would be acceptable to him on an absent basis. What part of the body would be acceptable to him on a much more present basis – for instance, just a hand walking around all by itself.

If the individual cared to alter these things himself, nobody was going to tell him to or tell him not to. Nobody was even going to vaguely persuade him to. It might be in the course of his study that he found certain things that men did laughable or confusing, or he found certain things that men did remediable, but nobody was standing around trying to lead him in to a higher religious or political conviction.

Indicated processes. Actually this processing is so good that you can almost take any part of it and just work with that. An indicated process on As-is-ness is simply done with that command, "What part of your body is acceptable to you?" or, "What part of the environment would be acceptable to you?" And you merely have him improve his considerations, and if he hangs up too long you could say, "Can you accept your dislike of…" and of course it just involutes. He could just watch it. It just sort of goes away. It's terrible! The first thing he can recognize is the fact that he disliked the environment? All right. Well can he accept his dislike of the environment? The second he does this he has recognized the As-is-ness of his dislike, at which moment it will blow. You can get him to recognize the existence of anything as such and it'll disappear. Just getting him to accept parts of the body on this simple auditing command, "What part of the body could you accept? Give me another part of the body you could accept" – there are tremendous comm lags on this. You could say, "How would it have to be altered for you to accept it?" or "What would it be fine to have absent about this body?" Then we can turn around and say, "What's the acceptance level (Acceptance level: the degree of a person's actual willingness to accept people or things, monitored and determined by his consideration of the state or condition that those people or things must be in for him to be able to do so) of your body about a thetan?" He doesn't do this by mock-ups, you understand.

And that is the case very much with Scientology – very, very much the case. If you were to teach a bunch of tribesmen on the banks of the Yap-Yap River, Scientology, and they believed in the great God Boogoo-Boogoo, you would just be wasting your time to start in by training them on the basis that the great God Booga-Booga was nine feet tall, not twelve feet tall. That's about all you'd probably accomplish, too. You would probably convince them he was not quite so tall or something of the sort. You have no business fooling around with a savage tribesman's political or religious convictions or a very, very cultured or supercultivated Oriental potentate's religious or political conviction. His customs, and so forth, are definitely his. What do you want to do, tear up his whole bank? That's not a way to clear a man.

That's the trick. Get him to concentrate on the actual body. Does it accept the thetan this way or that way or how? "What distance could your face tolerate to a thetan?" What distance could your face tolerate to a thetan?" We already have this on exteriorization processing, but without this one fact stressed, which in this case makes the difference between a workable technique and a non-workable technique. What distance is acceptable? What distance would be comfortable from your face to the thetan? Where would your face accept a thetan? And the first thing you know you have spotted the preclear (the face seems to have spotted him) then he spots himself. But the whole thing would run out without any such complexity of command at all. You would merely complexity of command at all.

There are very, very many ways to live. All of them can be derived from the same source and from the same sources. And just because they can be doesn't mean they're not different; they are different. So Scientology does not tamper with an individual's religious or political convictions.

You would merely ask him, "What is acceptable to you in the environment?" Look around, and simply go over it one item after another item and his considerations will improve, which is the modus operandi behind 8C Opening Procedure. Do this long enough on a preclear and he would find the entire environment he'd been working in it, certainly very, very acceptable to him.

The total empire of a Scientologist, and of Scientology and its organizations – from my viewpoint, the total empire is an empire of wisdom. No political empire of any kind. There is no effort on the part of Scientology to own or have the allegiance of billions and billions and billions of people or to have thousands and thousands of tons of masonry piled up, with Scientology written across the top of it or to have certain governments of Earth giving their allegiance to Scientology or something of the sort. This is very, very dull indeed. The empire of Scientology is 100 percent the empire of wisdom and there is no other empire envisioned.

We could just continue to run this as "What part of the environment is acceptable to you?" and he would begin to check them off and he would eventually get down to his body and having gotten down to that and taken care of the space around the body – we'd take it by parts of the body – what parts of the body are acceptable to you, and just on and on and on – and he'd be out there standing in back of his head. Now that's the easiest method of exteriorization I know and the method which I commonly use when I am balked by a preclear. It's an easy and certain process. It's a rather short process, really. You just ask him to pick up the Asis-ness of his environment and body and if he really recognizes it believe me he will be outside. Once in a while he says, "Well, I really dislike" this and that. Run "Can you accept your dislike of it?" This'll involute it, which is the only additional command I have ever used. So we have As-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness. All cases fall into these categories.

Now, on the basis of mechanics, an auditor is expected to follow the Auditor's Code of 1954. That is part of the Auditor's Handbook and is a very, very solid compilation of things an auditor can do wrong. These are the common denominators of why processing goes wrong. Each one of those things has considerable importance, but the one which tells you to run a command until the comm lag is flat and the one that tells you to run a process until the process is flat, are the two most important parts of that code – very, very much the two most important parts of the code.

So you should know that code. That code was put together to keep you from making mistakes. It depends for its authority only upon this: that when it is disobeyed in processing, an auditor has a lot more work to do. And that's its total authority; it enforces itself.

Not so the Code of Scientologists. The Code of Scientologists is put together on this basis: The entire field of Scientology has suffered by preclears walking around from one Scientologist to another, doing the thing which preclears do best: cut affinity lines. And the society tries to keep the organization, and organizations of Scientology, cut to pieces by cutting their affinity lines. And the first part of the Code of Scientologists is simply an arbitrary slid in front of this one. If we don't permit our affinity lines to be cut, auditor to auditor, auditors to organization and organizations to auditors, we will certainly thrive much better and we will survive much better and we will certainly be a lot happier.

And as we go down the line on those various things, that again is simply material which if we had followed – some years ago had started following this material – today we would have far less difficulty than we do have, just with the public at large.

And the last one says: Don't enter into unseemly conversations on the subject of Scientology with the uninformed. Well, that's no effort to keep the material of Scientology – I will just explain that one real quick. That's no effort to keep the material of Scientology closed up. No, keep those lines open, keep it flowing. But somebody comes along and he's a major in phrenology at the university of something or other, and he says, "Well, I don't believe…" and "Is your conviction…"and so forth. And you just start talking about the weather.

That is, please, an invitation not to go into a fight on the subject of demonstrating, to somebody who doesn't have any brain to talk to anyhow, all about Scientology. In other words, it keeps it out of the argument class. You'll find out that we would have been a lot further ahead if we had never sat down and entered into verbal fisticuffs with everybody who disagreed with us on the subject of Dianetics or Scientology.

You know, I mean the guy started talking about it, and you know, and "It couldn't be true," and "That couldn't be…"He hasn't any information on it. Now, you're going to sit there and give him a complete HCA course?

Well, do you have any idea of how much trouble it is to bring somebody up along through the level of HCA – bring them up to that point? There's a lot of work expended in that department; takes a lot of weeks. Nowadays, with codified training it can be done easier, but you're not going to do that in a drawing room. And it says please recognize this, and don't make the party awful for eight other people while you and a psychologist argue.

Reporter comes in, he wants to know all about it, why don't you tell him all about the weather. Why enter into a big discussion of Scientology with people who cannot hear you? That is not an apathy, that is about the snidest method of handling it you ever heard of. It will make people frantic. It will make them frantic and it will also make citizens out of them.

Now, you will find that a scarcity of preclears sometimes dogs one's footsteps if he's practicing professionally. A scarcity of preclears depends upon the indigence of the auditor, that's all. If an auditor is pretty good, he doesn't have any scarcity of preclears. He can go out and dig them up. Good auditors dig up lots of preclears; there isn't any doubt about this. I mean, it's something that happens.

You should never depend on anybody's industry with regard to the society at large or carrying the word in the society – never depend on anybody's industry but your own. Other people, other organizations and so forth are going to help you all they can, but don't depend on that help. Depend on yourself.