Thank you.

The subject of tonight's lecture has unfortunately been cancelled. I forgot my notes, and you know how necessary they are.

Factually, I want to talk to you about something very fundamental. Possibly you'll find this a much better lecture than the one that was thought up for me.

I want to talk to you about the differences between Scientology and other studies which have taken place on this planet. And I think you very well might want to hear my viewpoint of that. Not necessarily that it's your viewpoint at all, but you might find my viewpoint interesting on what I conceive to be the differences in the current study of man and those that have been attacked or attempted before. Would you like to hear about that?

Audience: Yes.

The basic — first basic difference is that Scientology started out on the assumption that nothing was known. And if you read a book, Dianetics: Evolution of a Science, it talks a great deal about "everybody knows." There were certain things that everybody knew. Everybody agreed that these things were true, and having agreed to these things, they were thereafter not inspected.

The studies of Scientology started out on the basis that there weren't any.

Now, it's a singular triumph to discover an humbleness — a singular triumph to discover an humbleness of finding out that you're stupid. It's a tremendous blow to your pride and a tremendous gain to your intellect.

Starting out on that basis we had launched something directly and immediately opposed to every other supposition that I know anything about that had been made in former studies of life and man. These things started out on some grasped positiveness, some tremendous positiveness, and took off from there.

Now, if you don't believe this, why, it's all right; go and look.

You take most of the fields of the spirit. They have been clouded by the fact that there were supposed to be, or supposed to have been, a great many people around who knew all about it and who knew a great deal more than you would ever know.

Even in the field of philosophy, to say nothing of the field of religion, we had one that went like this: "There are unknowables." Transcendentalism. "There are unknowables. No matter how smart you get and no matter how much you learn, you're still going to be stupid." We didn't start from there.

The other hidden assumption, you see, of course, that it was possible to know. And that's a very interesting assumption because it says, "If you are ever to be the effect of anything or if anything is ever to be the effect of you, it is rather obvious that some communication will occur." You grant that? Must be a communication from you to it or it to you before you can ever be any of the — ever be an effect of it.

Well, that gets us down simply to the very interesting fundamental of simply discovering those things which we are going to affect and those things which are going to affect us. It can't possibly exist that there will ever be unknowables that would ever have any effect on anything as far as you were concerned. So if there are unknowables, then they could be totally neglected until such time as we'd looked up and found a bullet going through our head or something of this sort and said, "One more knowable coming up."

Now, there's the fundamental difference. It's a viewpoint of "hope to know something," not the fatalism of "There are a great many things which we will never know." That's a fundamental switch. It starts from the basis of "We don't necessarily know anything but we can inspect."

And oddly enough you'll find this cycle-of-action repeated, this cycle of knowledge is repeated every time a person is processed. It's quite amazing. From tremendous wisdom, enormous pomposity of knowingness, he all of a sudden finds out he doesn't know a ruddy, blasted thing. And by that we make our first progress. Beginning to know that one doesn't know is not a lesson in humbleness but one in wisdom.

Let's see the difference now between that and some university teaching. Professor comes up to the rostrum: "Hhmm, hhmm. Now, you students must realize that there are a great many men who have lived and that anything that you find out in this field has already been found out before."

Well, that's what we call enforced humbleness.

Now, compare that with this idea: If it is true for you, it's true. And if it's not true for you, it still isn't true. Not even if Ron told you is it true. It's just not true, that's all.

And any time somebody comes along and says, "Faith. You must have faith," he's not talking Scientology. He might be talking something else but he's not talking Scientology.

Now, let's see how a person would make his gains in this field. He would make his gains in this field by being shown a way. But how far could we show him this way? We'd have to show him the way in such a way as it didn't invalidate him nor bring him to a preconclusion.

Now, believe me that's delicate ground right there. And that is so difficult of solution that all of auditor training developed over a period of thirteen years, has been devoted to grooving that in so that the auditing occurred with the maximal freedom of the preclear to find the truth, the minimal walking off into confusions, the maximum gain in terms of truth, the minimum education. Now, that is a very interesting tightrope.

Now, this thing "the way" or "the road to knowingness" is sown with many pitfalls and very possibly the intentions of many earlier endeavors might have been in this sphere. But in showing "the way," they also began to map the pavement and put up the milestones. And after a while, when they became modern enough they did not neglect advertising posters on both sides of the right of way saying all sorts of things, such as, "If you drop enough pennies in the poor box your soul will . . ." Well, I won't go into that. These little advertising posters. "Now, you are perfectly at liberty to recognize the truth of our teachings, but if you for one single second do not espouse the whole of them, we're going to do something awful nasty to you. But, of course, you have the perfect truth in the thing."

This kind of an approach where Ferdinand of Isabella fame could have all manner of people tortured, maimed, ruined, burned, just because they thought there was a different syllable in certain lines or should be another syllable someplace else. These are the pitfalls of showing the way. After a while, why, everybody becomes certain this is the way, and then just make sure that all the signposts tell the person what he is to conclude while traveling on that way. And when you've got that, you've got a road down and a road to slavery.

Freedom of truth is something man has not been noted for. He's not been noted for this at all. He's been noted quite the contrary for a slavery of something somebody said was true. And that is a very, very vastly different thing than freedom of truths.

I don't care what you conclude is true. I haven't the slightest wish about it one way or the other. And just within the last year we took an interesting turn technologically, a fascinating turn technologically. We started out — it was a double reverse. We started out — and in Dianetics, which has to do with mental anatomy — you will find in Dianetics that it says man is basically good. Unfortunately, it also has something to say about the fact that everything is wrong with him is what's been done to him.

Now, all these years went by and we began to get the idea that he must be a sort of an evil pup if he was doing what he was doing, until we found something new — but it was something which was just run into — and that was the only harm he can ever come to in the long run is that harm he has done to himself. And we can prove this, within a limited scope of the word proof.

It's proved quite conclusively that these profiles which you have been shown, which you know about, improve fastest if we take the viewpoint that all that is wrong with the person is what he has done to others that he didn't like to do. And that's all that happens, apparently, to a person. I said apparently, but this is simply a truth that we ran into along the line of technology, but it is not true unless it worked for you. We're perfectly prepared for you to be entirely different and to be a victim.

No, evidently — evidently the only person that ever did anything to anybody at the widest outside look was the person himself. And why did he do it? He apparently did it to restrain himself, or he apparently did it and then recognized that he had to restrain himself, and his recognition of the fact that he could apparently do evil was so overwhelming to him that he decided to withhold his actions more and more and more and more. Why?

Well, apparently the fantastic reason behind this is that he's basically good. Well, you have to kind of reach this conclusion. Providing you look at it from all sides and become totally familiar with it and see how people respond and see how they don't respond, you find out that man is basically good.

But I'm not even trying to sell you that conclusion. I'm just telling you that within the experience of processing and technology it's rather turned out that way. And for me, I'm quite happy about it, quite cheerful about the whole thing.

Now comes the fantastic thing of: if he is basically good, how can he commit so much evil? Well, apparently he never commits any evil, but he becomes someone else and his ideas of that person are that that person is capable of evil actions and that he has to restrain these actions; and he is so busy restraining these evil actions that he begins to do evil actions because he can't restrain them. And we discover that when a person is no longer himself, he is no longer responsible for his actions.

Now, how does he cease to be himself, for heaven's sakes? Well, that's another study. How does he cease to be himself? Well, he pulls himself all out of shape trying to restrain himself from being himself if he thinks of himself as evil. All these are very interesting conclusions but they are not conclusions unless they work for you. I'm just giving you this idea — that's the type of thing.

Now, man is apparently worried about a great many things. He's worried about good and evil. The question I've just talked to you about is a philosophic question of some length and magnitude. Is a man good or is a man evil?

Now I say to you, "Well, man is basically good." And you look at me and you say, "Well, that's fine. I'm glad Ron thinks so." I hope you say this, and not "Aha! Ron says man is basically good. Therefore they are basically good and that's all the thinking I have to do on the subject" — you lazy bones.

No, this is a philosophic question: "Is man good or evil? What is good? What is evil? What is the nature of life? What is death?" These are all questions that come up along the line and have been coming up along ever since man, on this planet certainly, had any language with which to express himself. He has been worried about these things. He's thought about these things._

"Is there a God? If so what's his name? What's prayer? Do I pray or not? Can I defend myself? Am I just a little chip on this vast sea of things or is there anything I can do about it? Am I a prisoner? Do I have to lay aside my own honor in order to comply with civilized existence?" You know, all these kinds of philosophic questions. And the odd part of it is, is they are not the questions of the classroom. They are not the questions of the classroom at all. The ditch digger, the little kid walking down the street — these are tremendous, unresolved problems to them which endlessly confuse their days. You'd be amazed.

"Well, they say George is going to die. What is going to happen to George when he dies?" You get the idea? "They say he will some day." "They say Mama is going to die some day. Well, 'die,' what is that?" You know? "What happens to Mama when she dies?" You see? "And what would happen to me?" And see, all kinds of involvements. Worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry. And all of these worries come from uncertainty, tremendous uncertainties of one character or another, which simply is the fellow has never made up his mind as to what is truth. He has all of these problems rocketing around inside and he can't make truth out of any of them and his life becomes a chaos.

And what questions are they? Well, it's those questions basically that Scientology best tackles. And I myself have never given you a list of what those questions are, but they are questions of this nature: "Is man basically good? Is he evil? Are the intentions of the world, and so forth, toward me this way and that way? Is there such a thing as God? Did my mother and father really love me? What is love?" You know? Goes on and on and on in one long, confusing, squirrel cage. And it generally winds up as logic, thinking, philosophy, working the road through all this morass, somehow or another succeeding in spite of it all. Tremendous amounts of study. "Maybe if

I go and be a ditch digger for four years or if I sit on a pinnacle in the middle of the desert and eat dried soup or something of the son for fourteen months without ever speaking to anyone, maybe all these things will resolve," you see, and extraordinary solutions of one character or another coming along.

Well, what does Scientology do about these things? Do you realize that Scientology is a distant cousin — it so now establishes itself as a distant cousin; it isn't a full-blooded thetan relation.

The earliest traces of this sort of thing is probably Dharma.

I was very amused the other day. There's some book that has come out that has decided to be a total mystery. It's a total mystery with craggy knowingnesses hidden beneath the waves. The waves are quite dark. It misdefines all of these things, this book does, for its own purposes. I picked it up. It's just out of the bookstore; it's very current. It's supposed to be something about Indian philosophy, and so forth.-

Well to show you how far things can go off, it doesn't even accurately define the terms of Indian philosophy, you see. So Dharma is found to be something that has to do with the inner knowingness of self-righteousness. Well the last time I saw Dharma that wasn't what he said.

Factually, Dharma, basically and originally, was the name of a monk who is now known as a legendary monk who lived approximately ten thousand years ago and who was interested in telling people that there was a way out of it all.

That came down along the line. The next big point we hear about it is a fellow by the name of Gautama Siddhartha, over in northern India, sat under a Bodge tree, hence Buddhism. That's right. That's correct. And this fellow found out he wasn't in his ruddy head. That's what he found out. And he made up a lot of good reasons, and he was a very, very intelligent fellow indeed. And he explained this various ways. That's come on forward more or less till now.

But look, many of the things which we know in Scientology are known in Taoism, they are known in Buddhism; but there are eight billion more things known in Taoism and Buddhism that we don't know. Different, huh?

Now, there is a tremendous number of things in Scientology that _ appear in a tremendous number of places. Naturally, because very, very clever intelligent men have been thinking about life for a very, very long time, and if they didn't dig up some answers, that was pretty stupid of them. Don't you think so? It was inevitable that they dug up some answers, inevitable.

The only thing that's new about Scientology is it says "Why don't you dig up some?" And, of course, that's not totally new either. Zen Buddhism is supposed to dig up answers.

There's a lot of these ramifications to this sort of thing. If it's true for you, however, it's true. And if it isn't true for you, it's certainly not true. It isn't, either.

And Buddhism has fallen a bit by the wayside by saying, "There is such a thing as exteriorization. A man can be three feet back of his head." Or they don't quite put it in those terms. They say, factually, that a person is himself and is not a body, only they have as a goal, ending the cycle of bodies, ending the cycle of going from life to life and having a new body in each life and going on this tremendous life cycle and just going on and on and having more bodies and more bodies. And that's what they are upset about.

Ah, but Buddhists don't even know how to exteriorize somebody so that that other person can find out. They say, "Sit down and meditate for a while." And I've known a lot of people that sat down and meditated for an awful long time and I've asked them, I've said, "Have you flown out of your head yet?"

So, they started taking it all on faith. They got lazy. Maybe back in the days of Gautama Siddhartha, maybe he said things like this. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't; we never know, duplication being so poor on the track. But they started taking it on faith. Oh, wow! All this does is start some more "everybody knows." Don't you see? It's just, "It's true because the Dalai

Lama says so." Oh, no. Oh, no. He's not living in your head. Look, you'll see he's not there.

And therefore, you can get prone to all sorts of errors. And after you've got everybody totally believing that they can take it all on faith and be comfortable because there's enough truth in what you are saying to make them very, very comfortable about it, then is the time to start putting up billboards on the side of the "Tao" or "the Way" or something like that. Advertised facts. The slight political advantage of getting everybody to believe, also, this little tiny point is also true.

Well, they never find it out because they have no tradition of finding out things for themselves or recognizing truth when they see it. And when they have no tradition left of that, they become slaves.

And when all lines of reason have become a tradition of accepting the faith or accepting something somebody else said, unexpected [uninspected], as truth, you have to do what we have done here in the last couple of decades, and that is simply decide you don't know a ruddy, blasted thing and start all over again. And of course, when you do, you start out on a road of the freedom of truth.

If you have no political pitch, if you have no vested interest, if what is being codified is being codified totally and only for the sake of true or not true, you become freed of these "for everybody knows"; these "everybody knowses" drop out.

And there is no slightest advantage in getting somebody to believe some great fundamental truth totally uninspected. The only thing you can do, basically, is say, "In this vast sea of knowledge, this ocean which is full of raindrops, each one of which very like the next, each raindrop is a datum, and there's an ocean full of these data. Actually, there's a way to sort these data out for yourself, and that way is by familiarization and inspection."

And the only way that we have in Scientology is a sort-it-out thing called auditing which permits the individual to inspect certain basic important data which will lead him to certain conclusions, if he cares to have any conclusions, and if he makes any solid, irrevocable conclusions, will also lead them out of him._

All that processing is, is an invitation to inspect. That with which you become familiar you can know. Now, that is one of the basic and early assumptions of Scientology. That with which you become familiar you can know.

That with which you do not become familiar is pretty hard to know. I think you can agree with that; that's a very easy one.

Familiarity. Inspection of something without fear will certainly bring you to any existing truths about that thing. Right? Inspection of something without fear.

So all auditing does is release the person's ability to inspect, and when he can inspect without fear, he can know the truth of things. And the odd part of it is that once you know the truth of something it can't bite. Now, that's an added bonus.

We first began to smell this one a long time ago. We found out that when we audited somebody on a present time problem and got him to totally inspect all the facets of this problem and got him used to the idea of having problems similar to that problem and got him so he wasn't afraid of problems anymore and he inspected the problem, the problem disappeared. But it didn't disappear in him; it disappeared in the physical universe.

And auditors used to tell me, "It's the most astonishing thing. There was a girl in here the other day and I processed her. And what do you know, she's always had trouble with her brother who is out in Wyoming, and a long way away. She's always had trouble with him and he won't communicate with her, wouldn't write to her, wouldn't have anything to do with her. She was very worried about him. She had trouble over an estate. I processed her on her brother and got problems like her brother, got her to invent these problems, and what do you know: the brother wrote to her and offered her an equitable settlement."

What's going on here? Well, evidently what's going on here is we can only injure ourselves. And when we have eradicated self-injury, other things apparently recognize it.

I'll give you an idea of this. If you had an army — supposing you had a whole army and you became totally familiar with just one army. And I do mean totally familiar; I don't mean totally respectful. And you became totally familiar with this army.

A Scientologist to do this would get you familiar first with a private. And if you couldn't face a private, he'd get you familiar with one of the private's buttons. And having familiarized you with one soldier, he would get you to inspect a couple of more. And the first thing you know you would even be able to confront a second lieutenant and that takes some doing. By gradient — in other words, taking a little bit at a time of the same class of thing and inspecting this class of thing a little bit at a time — actually a person could be totally familiar with a whole army.

And do you know I'll bet you that not only would that person never again get drafted, but he probably couldn't be shot. I can see it now. He himself apparently creates the back-communication from the world. That is to say he creates the evil communication or the bad communication. He makes these things himself.

I've watched one dear old lady now for some little time get herself into the soup in all directions and I began to be interested. She was getting into so much soup that it was splashing on the carpets.

So I watched just how she was getting herself into this soup. She really had to work at it. It might have been very esoteric and unobservable to her how the whole world was against her, but it sure wasn't unobservable to an outsider looking at it. She would just work like mad before she had finally created a war. And then she would say, "See what they're doing to me and here I stand innocent." No wonder her apron — just absolutely a mass of bullet holes. Not only would she start the war, she would then immediately postulate, "Look what it's doing to me." Fascinating, you know.

Well, it might have been a funny game at one time or another on the track, we've also learned something else: that you can get along without this game — get along just fine without this game, as a matter of fact.

Life has certain basic fundamentals. Any truth about life, any of these fundamentals surrender anything they have in the way of answers if a person totally inspects something. Now, this is not inspection by electronic computer. This is just inspection, straight away.

We had an old one, "Look, don't think. Look, don't think."

My boy and I one time were tearing around on a motorcycle and the headlamp went out on the motorcycle. So, just that day I had made a lecture on the subject of "Look, don't think." And we had this motorcycle and we brought it in alongside the steps. The headlight wouldn't work, so he and I took the cover off, took the bulb out, took the wiring apart in back of it, traced the wires all down, pulled all the wires out from underneath the tank. We had a horrible example of the truth of that day's lecture. The battery terminals had never been connected. And for another two hours we were hard at work trying to put back together again the headlamp. And he looked at me and he says, "Well," he says, "look, don't think."

But that was very true. If we'd just simply familiarized ourself with the motorcycle, and kept our hands off of it, it would have been immediately apparent because the cover to the battery box wasn't even fastened down and any idiot could have seen it. But we were electronics people, we were. We tore it to pieces. "Look, don't think." It's very interesting.

No, by increasing one's familiarity with any zone of existence — not by any — through any particular system; just by increasing one's familiarity, all manner of things can occur.

Miracle healing occurs just exactly on that button — just increase one's observation of existence. If miracle healing is going to occur, it's going to occur on that particular basis line. It's going to recognize what's there, not what is not there.

This is a fantastic thing, and it's in the experience of any Scientologist. Touch Assist. He burns his finger, and he goes "Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Well, I better process that."

Now, sometimes he'll stand there and run through the engram that has been created by burning his finger, which is a familiarity with the incident. But oddly enough, he can also get there quite remarkably simply by inspecting his finger.

The Touch Assist is easily the best for this. Just look at these fingers through this finger, see. Just keep touching this new wound here, you know, and each time getting the idea of looking at this finger through this finger, you know. Just look at the finger, look at the finger, look at the finger. You find — you don't have to say, "Look through this finger," because soon after a while you find out you are looking through that finger. And just look at this finger, look at this finger. Just get the idea of looking at his finger, looking at his finger, looking at his finger. And factually speaking, blisters and burns and all kinds of things just go right on down.

Now, the danger is simply this: If he kept it up another fourteen or twenty hours, would the finger disappear?

It's quite interesting. Somebody the other day was saying, "You know, I used to have three warts on my fingers and then I took to sitting here just looking at a finger through . . . And I haven't got any warts anymore."

Well, a cure for warts. What do you know? But it's not just a cure for warts. The real warts in life have to do with tremendous facts that everybody knows and that they must adhere to utterly and must never get rid of and must be so respectful of that they never dare inspect any part of them that might unsettle them at all.

People go through life and their confusion is a sea of uninspected data, uninspected facts.

The only thing that you can do for anybody in the final analysis is get him to inspect his own life and his own environment. And if he inspects his own life and his own environment in any kind of an orderly way and — you know, not running away every time — he looks over here and then runs away and then looks over here, and two years later gets courage enough to look over here again. No, you can help him out by every time he runs away you say, "Look." And the guy says, "Well, I don't know, I — it's pretty dangerous, pretty dangerous."

There's tremendous, almost unlimited methods of self-deception, almost unlimited methods of delusion. Man is probably richest in the numbers of ways he can make suckers out of his fellow man with lies.

Hard words, but when a man here doesn't know what's the truth, then what he says to the man over here certainly doesn't relate as any truth.

In the final analysis all you can get anybody to do is inspect himself, his environment, life, and find out what's true for him. And those things that are true for him, they'll be pretty true. And you'll find out that if he does it all the way, then we all agree on what's true.

But the second we all agree on what's true and that these things are truths, then we can get very lazy and we never have to think of it again,-and Ron can all write it down in a book, and the next generation that comes along only has to memorize this so they will know what the truth is. Well, that I don't think any of us want to have happen.

That's Scientology as I see it from my own particular viewpoint.

It doesn't say that the numbers of truths in life are limited or that they are very few. It doesn't say anything except that if we look we can learn.

And all it says, in the final analysis, is that as far as we've gone we found out that it paid off very, very well. By looking, we learn.

When we finally get through looking, I'm afraid if we look hard enough there won't be any universe left here. But I haven't noticed any matter disappearing lately just because you were looking at it But you let me know when it starts to cave in. Will you?

Now, I have probably never given a very basic and simple rendition of exactly what I thought Scientology was or how it worked or how we looked at it again. And I'm sorry if I have shattered any preconceptions as to what a tremendously top-heavy and overpowering structure it must be.

But you would be surprised how little language there is in any formal language of Earth which is designed entirely to communicate the truth. We've had to invent a little language in order to communicate the truth because the way to reach the truth had not been identified very well. So we've identified some of the signposts.

Very often somebody gets all mixed up in the signposts. "Engram, preclear — what's this, what's that? Oh, you Scientologists, you just have too many terms."

Funny part of it is, a naturopath told me that not too long ago. He told me, "You Scientologists have just too many terms, that's all. It's just too confusing," and so forth.

And I said, "How many special terms do you have in naturopathy?" He didn't know. I says, "Well, we know how many we have, 472. Thank you."

Well, we have 472 terms. Most of them are not even used. The vocabulary of Scientology is probably, in active, actual use, somewhere down around 125 words; which of course is perfectly all right because we are a bunch of people that found out we didn't know. And therefore when we start to talk, why, we start to talk in terms that we have some agreement on that we do know. And I think that's excusable. But you don't even have to know the terms to do any inspection. You don't even have to know what these terms are to do any inspection. All you have to do is look.

Now, I will say that there's some liability in looking because you often get your head half beat off. So the second lesson you have to learn is, having looked, get up nerve enough to look again. And having looked again, why, get up nerve enough to look again. And because this is sometimes a very lengthy process, why, it's kind of best to have an auditor. He is looking at us, making sure that we keep looking, not flinching.

Wherever we have gone, whatever we have learned has simply been along this process line. What is valuable that we have is valuable because it shows how to look without totally getting your head knocked off.

The gradient scale of looking. Showing you directions that you can inspect. Keeping you from getting lost totally in the confusions of where people have thrown enormous edifices to be inspected and when you get all through you find it is an enormous edifice that was to be inspected. There was no truth in it, neither was there any value in inspecting it, but it sure did arrest the eyesight as you walked down the road. I won't name any particular subjects like medicine or anything like that. I'll just .. .

Wherever anyone adventures on the road to knowledge, he of course makes lots of mistakes and falls on his face and goes anaten, all sorts of things happen. The only thing I'm really proud of in Scientology is we have fallen on our face such a few times that it's actually a very proud record. We could have fallen on our heads consistently and continually every five minutes of the day and night for a very long time but we didn't. We were more right than we were wrong, therefore we can increase IQ, increase personality and do other things.

And the total fruits of these things is simply made possible by the fact that we kept at it. We were more right than we were wrong; we're still here. We are taking off to a higher level, a new height, organizationally and internationally, so forth, than we have ever attained before. Big things are happening. They are great big, very complicated things. And in the midst of all these complicated things it's a good thing to look around and realize that we are actually, basically simple people, even sometimes idiotic people. And remember that the subject itself is basically very, very simple and it's within grasp of everybody.

And somebody that says he doesn't understand Scientology has made a terrible confession. All he has said is that he can't inspect, because that's all Scientology asks you to do.

And if Scientology says, "Why don't you inspect something?" and the person says, "I don't understand Scientology," that person did what? He failed his first gradient.

Well, that's all it is and that's all it means.