It may be of interest to you that all of the material in Dianetics continually stays in an evolving state. There are a number of drawbacks for such a thing to be in that state, but it has been so since 1930. (I didn’t even know I was working on it, actually, in 1930.) In 1938, ‘40, ‘45, ‘48, ‘49 or ‘50, this material at any point could have been cut off and we could have said, “Well, that’s it.”

Now, does one just stop thinking or working in this field for the benefit of a stability? I believe the stability in it would be zero. I believe that a body of ideas is alive as long as it is being contributed to and being consistently reformed. An old Greek said, “The mixture which is not shaken stagnates.” Nothing could be more true for such a body of ideas.

This poses a difficulty to some degree in the field of instruction. The instructor’s problem is that he has got to put through a certain amount of information, and it would be very nice and comfortable if he could just take this body of information and for the next century teach nothing but that. That happened, for instance, in the teachings of Aristotle. They remained constant and practically unchanged for about eighteen hundred years, and all of a sudden they were awfully out of date. They stultified the whole field of education. The remnants of Scholasticism can still be found around in the modern universities. (Did I say remnants?) In other words, a body of information moves forward rather rapidly.

An oddity in looking over Dianetics, however, is the consistency of its changes, because no effort whatsoever has been made to be very consistent. If tomorrow we were to find a technique which would sweep all the engrams out of the bank in fifty hours, although it violated five principles that have been laid down practically with a club into the professional class, believe me, that technique would be released as soon as proven and tested. There would be no block at all on its advance, even though the instructors would probably feel like blowing their brains out and the certified auditors in the field, out of touch momentarily, would find themselves enormously lagging.

This is true, though, of any progressive society, which is a parallel. A progressive society is a group of ideas as well as a group of individuals.

For instance, in any big company such as Western Electric, there is always a better, more up-to-date model in the research department than there is on the construction assembly line and being sold to the public. I know that in 1928 there existed radios which didn’t make their appearance in the general society before 1936. At this moment there exist many things back in the laboratories which, survival permitting, won’t make their appearance for perhaps another five years.

There is a danger in advancing too much material too fast and in changing too fast and getting too little agreed upon before one releases it. For example, a lot of things were developed about phonographs and recordings and so forth very early in the war, and some of them were brought out. All of a sudden at the end of the war we had 45 rpm records, 331/3 rpm records, tape recordings, wire recordings, and we had the old 78 rpm records too. At the same time the Dictaphone company was still using cylinders. All of these types of recordings got into the general public at a moment when it was unproven and unjustified as to which was which and which was best, so the person who wished to play records had to be equipped with a machine able to play this terrific barrage of sizes and types. Actually, there is no machine built which will play all of these. I think record sales probably suffered because there was a lack of agreement, and therefore a certain lack of reality about it.This is not actually comparable to Dianetics. Dianetics keeps coming along a line of advance which was codified about 1938. Everything which has come away from that point has had a consistency, oddly enough. That is to say, it was workable at any moment from there on. When the processing came out and processing techniques started to evolve, the advance was just in the interest of making it faster and easier and not requiring as much brilliance, perhaps, in the auditor. The techniques that kept coming were refinements; however, the reason these new techniques kept taking place was because the philosophic echelon kept advancing. There is an actual correlation there.

Now, the prediction of new techniques is a very simple thing. Anybody who knows his Dianetics can take just a glance at a technique — he won’t even have to test it or anything else — and he will know whether it will hold together. There is that strange consistency about this body of knowledge. It keeps on advancing, and just because one gets to milepost 135 on this road is no reason why milepost 15 should have vanished. I attest by that that it must be a fairly solid road. I hope that it will keep on evolving out in that direction.

Every once in a while, however, I get a protest about the fact that it keeps on advancing. As a matter of fact, it is advancing faster than a body of information really should, but so are the times advancing rather rapidly. Certain urgencies in this make it necessary to go on and to bring the new technique which is in the research department and the technique which is being used very close together.

There are actually refinements in advance of what I have been talking about. They are still a trifle nebulous but I want to give you just a taste of those to show you what I mean by an advancing philosophic echelon.

It is a fact that it doesn’t matter what numbers you put on these dynamics as long as they are more or less in the same order that they are numbered. One can very easily, for instance, begin with number one as big theta. Let’s use big theta, bluntly, in terms of God (of course, there would have to be a comparable magnitude there) — that would be number one. Number two could be considered, and number three could be considered little theta, which is the pure thought line and is a segment of big theta but is not the side of the picture. It comes down then to number four, life; number five, mankind; number six, groups; number seven, the family; and number eight would be the individual. One dynamic is not, as far as the dynamic within the individual is concerned, particularly of more importance than another.

Now, one could say that the end product of all this was the individual; and one could look in the opposite direction, as people have looked, and say the end product of all of this was the real big theta, which is plus little theta — in other words, God. Here is your infinite number. It depends on which way this thing goes. There is something wrong, always, with assigning numbers of order. However, these things are in an orderly progression in that list.

Then there is the question of what comes after the individual, or what comes before God, in this. There is some slight evidence being worked on at the present moment that the individual who is here as an individual in this life was many times an individual in the past. There is an early-lives project going on right now. We keep telling people that these early lives are dub in and so forth, but the point is that we don’t know yet, completely, and until we have a lot of validation material one way or the other we won’t be able to tell. It is not necessary, evidently, to run those early lives — but if one does get into one he had better run out the death of it, otherwise it will restimulate!

For centuries the question has been asked, “Who made God?” There seems to be a fixation on the idea of “Who made?” That is not pertinent to the problem. The manufacture of, the manufacturer of God — these are not really parts of the problem at all. There might be other big thetas in dimensions and in terms. As far as big theta is concerned, little theta combining with and going into harmonics with, and so forth, may not be all the purposes of the big theta. Maybe this progression goes out in a wheel fashion. Maybe other progressions go out from

God, which are little thetas out there and there and there doing these various things. An infinity of progression is possible.

The reason you consistently get the assignment of four dynamics is simply that those are the dynamics intimate to man who is alive. Those are the life dynamics. As such, that is a relatively low order of magnitude of observation, because life is little theta plus. Little theta plus — that’s life.

Little theta plus, for instance, would be the first bracket. Little theta plus is your future and your family. Little theta plus would be the overall composite of the group. And as far as mankind is concerned there could be little theta plus again. In other words, those are life; but then life itself is little theta plus. Then as we begin to expand out on this, of course is, and little theta is little theta, and big theta combines these two.

We are actually not going out on a very orderly progression of magnitude or combinations. We are going out in terms of trinities. The individual, little theta and make a trinity, and it builds up into the bigger one of the family, the individual and the unit of life itself. Now we go out on the next dynamic and we get three more and three more, only they are enlarging magnitudes, each one of which has a substitution of the last one in it.

There are all kinds of mathematical patterns which can be offered to explain this. There is not one, as far as I know, that cannot have holes found here and there where it is not quite as orderly as it ought to be. But no hole so far found was a hole of error which invalidated the past system. All it did was make more workable and make a little bit bigger the present system. It is a problem of filling in unknowns, rather than a problem of shooting out errors.

As we go up this line we find that we could regard the individual as being the most intimate connection to big theta which we will know. In other words, we could consider the individual as an actual segment of God, and a very close one. We could consider, for instance, as one religion does, that the closest we get to a knowledge of big theta is in the individual himself. Therefore man could very well worship man as a god; part of man is God. Now, this is also expressed in terms of the soul, the spirit. There are any number of these concepts. The individual is very important because he is a basic unit that holds the rest of these things together, but he exists interdependently with all the other individuals.

As we look over the problem we cannot say “Now we are going to deliver to you the ultimate truth which man will ever know and everything he could possibly reach in the way of knowledge.” This has been the big mistake in the past.

This was somewhat the tone of Aristotle in some of his lines, really: A sturgeon was a sturgeon, and the description of the sturgeon was so-and-so and so-and-so; if the student didn’t accept this description he was flunked. The reality was Aristotle because everybody agreed on Aristotle, and nobody thereafter was supposed to look at the world of life and matter. So the old joke arose that if a professor were giving a lecture about sturgeons according to Aristotle and had his Aristotelian sturgeon drawn on the board, and a sturgeon from some other part of the world had walked in on it, he would have turned and said, “If one of you gentlemen will remove this strange beast I will continue with my lecture.”

In other words, this material was not to be compared with the real world. That is the basic definition of authoritarianism. Anything which one is forbidden to compare with the reality he sees around him is authoritarian. It is laid down as an arbitrary. It leads to an enormous number of errors.

We are going out on an entirely free line. Nobody is laying down this material as authoritarian, saying “This is the way it is and you are not to compare it to the real world.” Compare it to the real world, and if you find discrepancies in it, that is up to you to remark upon. For heaven’s sakes, remark upon it!

So the material is very fluid. On any such material which is not being held in line authoritarianly you can expect evolution and change, and that evolution and change will go forward and better the subject until such time as it is laid down, for some strange reason, by somebody who is being very forceful, as the authoritarian line. The second that happens the whole field stultifies.

Commander Thompson told me that Sigmund Freud was one of the easiest men to converse with that he ever met. Freud kept thinking and changing things around and wondering and postulating. But talking to Freud’s disciples was a horrible proposition because it became an authoritarian line: Freud had said this, therefore it was true and it was not to be compared to the real world. So, the whole field walked directly away from comparing these things to actual observations.

You find, for instance, in books on Freudian psychoanalysis, “A kleptomaniac when unable to steal anything always burns down the house,” or “A kleptomaniac, when she steals anything, always has an orgasm.” I am quoting to you directly from some of the works which came from the works of Freud; these are secondary works. There is nothing more idiotic than those two statements. They are not true. And yet some line had been found in Freud which nobody had bothered to look around.

So, in all the information I have given you on the line of Dianetics, I have demonstrated to you — by showing that these things reverse in number and that they can be considered as triangles (you can actually go into this on the line of Dymaxion geometry and compare these philosophic principles one way or the other) — that it is a plan of thinking and of looking at a problem, and as such a plan it is producing results. But don’t confuse the statements themselves as being the plan of thinking. This is a way of looking at things, it is a way of arriving at new answers. They are just as good as they are workable, and they are no better.

If discrepancies begin to show up anywhere along this line of thought, believe me, say so. I will be the first one to shift any viewpoint on this.

However, we must be advancing along the line of a relatively solid idea because it is predicting new data within its own body continually. It is an evolving idea, and one could consider it as a growing idea; it has actual growth. Like a child, it keeps growing, and that is more or less its goal: to grow for a long time.

Now, we have the consistency of this; there have been no marked inconsistencies. This is not particularly complimentary, it is merely quite remarkable. The codification’s of processing I have discussed in these lectures have been themselves a codification and an expansion of existing principles — expanded mainly in the line of easier communication of what can actually be done, rather than any new discovery. So one doesn’t immediately abandon everything which has occurred in the past, but it is in a better shape to relay.

As far as the philosophic echelon is concerned, the new thing which entered in here is the consideration of a group as actually a little theta. Considering the group as little theta, we have very workable predictions because we can look around and see that it resolves problems.

I don’t want to belabor this point; I just want to give you my own viewpoint on the philosophy and the science of Dianetics today. I hope that just because I have done so these things are not immediately closed to question. I have noticed some of that lately, and it should not be so.

If any of these tenets go in and agree with medicine or medical practice, that is fine. Dianetics is not versus medical practice. It will modify medical practice, but Dianetics as a philosophy, a body of ideas, information and discovered facts, will go out in ratio to the degree that it is able to contribute to existing bodies of knowledge. And Dianetics should be able to receive contributions on its own from those existing bodies of knowledge. If it does that consistently and clearly, it will continue to be a growing idea, an expanding idea and an accepted idea; and the group which is Dianetics, as represented by the Foundations, will continue to expand and grow.

However, any new idea which is suddenly thrown at a body of ideas, at large numbers of groups, and at individuals — many of whom have not been trained to evaluate freely but have been taught and trained instead on authoritarian lines — will have trouble. Dianetics has come up against that, but it can understand that and appreciate it, and it can also go right on through it.

The point is that points of agreement have to be established. This is the central turmoil of Dianetics going out in this society. Not enough points of agreement have been established to make Dianetics, as itself, a startlingly large reality in itself. To those of us who study it, who see it in operation as a process, there is not much question about its reality.

However, every once in a while we walk up to somebody and he says, “Well, I’ve never run an engram but I’ve run them out of a lot of other people.” Sometimes people will say, “Well, I’m not sure about engrams. I don’t know what they are completely,” and they are a bit foggy about the subject. But that is just addressing the engram and processing side of it.

Dianetics is a big body of knowledge. It is not merely a process of processing individuals. It emends into groups. It is an examination of thought as such, and is a science of thought, not a science of removing aberrations.

There is the first point of misunderstanding with past schools of mental healing. Because they are centered completely and closely on mental healing, they look at Dianetics and say, “That’s all it does, it heals these aberrations.” They take out their selected parts, look at that and say that’s all it is. That’s all right; just let them do that.

But Dianetics — and don’t underestimate this, because I have already seen it in operation — is a highly contagious body of knowledge, merely because it maintains and continues along a line of evaluation of bodies of knowledge. Dianetics initially is a science of thought which includes as its first echelon epistemology, the philosophic study of knowledge itself; so of course it enters into bodies of knowledge and studies them, but it clarifies and amalgamates with them.

A doctor, for instance, in looking at Dianetics, might wonder “How does this compare with the ‘umpty-gump’ treatment of arthritis?” He starts looking it over and so on. Then if he is shown that Dianetics does influence arthritis, he suddenly has the viewpoint “Hmm, umpty-gump theory — no wonder it works! It moves the person on the time track, certainly. Oh, yeah, that’s why that works. Well then, the stuff we’ve got here, that moves a person in time — hey, wait a minute! We don’t want anything to do with this Dianetics — that’s foreign stuff!” and so on. “But of course, there’s no other explanation for that. I wonder if it couldn’t be moving a person on the time track. Let’s put somebody who has arthritis on a couch, and we’ll give them some cortisone too, and we’ll see — no, we shouldn’t have anything to do with that!”

Only, ideas are not. They can’t be laid aside. An idea enters — there it is.

So the validation program on which the Foundations have been embarked is an all-out rush. There are people vitally interested in gathering evidence such as this: “Mary Jones was sick. Here is laboratory evidence” (perhaps an X-ray or electrocardiograph) “and a doctor’s statement as to her condition. Then, right in the middle of her illness, she was given twenty-nine hours of Dianetic processing. Then we have another doctor’s certificate of examination, and it says ‘Mary Jones is well. Her state of health has been stable and she appears to be in excellent condition.”’ That is just the truth of the matter, by the way, yet to gather the pieces of paper together, to persuade somebody to actually verify that these records are in existence, has just been a gruesome task.

In August the confusion of the Foundation itself was enormously multiplied by the fact that we threw into an already staggering operation the processing of twenty persons selected by a psychiatrist. The staff said, “We haven’t got enough people to do this. We can’t do this well. It will probably be done poorly.” Yet these people had to be processed, and because I knew very well that no psychiatrist was going to say these people were sane and stable until they had remained so for about six months, it meant that that series would not be valid until the spring of 1951.

The whole operation of the Foundation shook and staggered under the impact of this. There weren’t enough auditors to supervise it and it was difficult getting the psychometry. The Foundation is just now beginning to come out of this, because that wasn’t all that was thrown at it. Research on nutrition and several other projects were going on at the same time.

I wanted these twenty people to be processed for ten days and then for thirty days, to be given Rorschach, TAT, Wechsler-Bellevue, Minnesota Multiphasic, complete medical examination with X-rays, laboratory tests and all the rest of it. The rush of the operation and the lack of proper administrative skill — which, by the way, couldn’t be supplied just like that, one just did it anyway — created an enormous amount of confusion. And this has cost the Foundation about

$2,500 per person. That is all to create a reality of Dianetics, which is supported by the definitions of other people who are disinterested.

The instant one creates the reality of Dianetics, it of course can’t be stopped as an idea, because people look at it and say, “It’s a real idea.” The velocity of the idea depends in a large measure upon its reality; in other words, on how much agreement there is on this idea.

We get the doctor to agree that this person was sick and he was well, because the public accepts and agrees that doctors are supposed to know something about people, sick or otherwise. Agreement. We get them processed by psychometry, and everybody in the field of psychometry in the public agrees that intelligence tests measure something. They don’t know quite what, but the tests measure something.

We have changed people’s scores on these tests, which heretofore have never been changed to this degree. There is interesting data all the way through that is being collected, but it is being collected in terms of creating an agreement. That agreement creates the reality. It assists the communication. Terrifically wide communication of the information cannot exist until the moment that the reality exists. But let’s not be angry, in Dianetics, at these various other fields, because communication and reality can’t exist without some affinity too.

Fortunately there is always the affinity of what a man wants for himself personally. For instance, several psychoanalysts were perfectly content to have their wives processed by Dianetics. That was for themselves, not on a professional level. This was not in the body of their own ideas. This was in the family, and that was vital.

The creation of this reality is already underway. There is a pamphlet being made up which we plan to send out to about eighty-five thousand people over the country. It contains psychometry on one series of sixty-one cases, one series of eighty-six cases and one series of seventy-six cases. It also has some specialized case histories showing changes in personality, mental health, self-adjustment, social adjustment and other things, in individuals processed for only a few days in Dianetics. It shows some astonishing results.

You process these cases, and you give them psychometry before and after the processing.

Psychometrists in the field of psychology say that psychometry will change on an individual from day to day. Personally, I can’t get it to vary the way they say it does. It is fairly stable; the variation is plus or minus a very few points, not anywhere near what they sometimes claim. Of course, if you wake someone up in the middle of the night and give him psychometry when he is still half asleep you can get a wild variation, but by being consistent and giving it at the same time of day you don’t get this.

So, you take these eighty-six cases and sketch it across the boards, with the “before” tests and the “after” tests, and what you get is a solid line of advance — a marked and remarkable line of advance. Nobody has seen the likes of this before in psychometry.

Very little of this is on a medical validation line. This first pamphlet is mainly psychometry. This puts reality into the subject so it communicates faster.

There is another program going forward on validation; in this one we are restimulating engrams, with before-and-after psychometry. One takes a person back down the track, gets him into a hot engram, runs him halfway through the hot engram, gets it restimulated and brings him up to present time. The person has had psychometry before this point, and after it he takes some more. He is taken back down the track after his second psychometry and run through the incident again. By the way, he gets a medical examination, too.

Working this, you could probably shoot up the person’s temperature or blood pressure temporarily, change his posture and do various things like that. I’ve had a medical doctor get so worried watching two of his patients being run that he was practically tearing his hair out. I was working these two people rather late in the evening and he was watching. I had sent them down the track and they had gotten into a boil-off, and since I was working both of them I didn’t have time to run them all the way through the boil-off, so I brought them up to present time.

One of them worked up a fever and the other one got all hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked and looked like he was about sixty, but he sat there perfectly content.

The doctor said, “Let’s lay off of this now and do something about it tomorrow or in a couple of days.”

I said, “What are you trying to do, kill these people?”

“Well, they look to me like they are pretty bad off.” He took their temperatures and showed me, took their pulse, and showed me they were exhausted, and so forth.

So I took them, one after the other, back down the track (the boil-offs were over), ran out the engram at the bottom of the line and got a good reduction on it, brought them up to present time and ran a couple of pleasure moments.

There they sat, with their faces nice and bright. The doctor thought he was watching black magic. But it isn’t black magic or anything of the sort. Something is only magic when someone doesn’t understand quite what’s going on.

The results of many of these projects will be included in a hard-cover book that will be out next spring.

The Foundation, as a group, is dedicated to the dissemination of an idea and of some techniques which reduce aberration, increase health, and generally can pick up the tone of the society. That is a part of its mission. So far it has run along more or less with that as a statement of what it was trying to do. It was trying to get up this information and hand it out into society. People who weren’t immediately interested in validation programs would get out of touch with them and they wouldn’t realize they were still going on. They would say, “There couldn’t possibly be any research going on because I’m not there doing it.” Every man was operating as a whole Foundation himself, personally.

As we look over this situation, we find out there couldn’t possibly have been a group anywhere along this line. It was not a group. It didn’t have all the rules and laws of groups contained in it, or any proportionate or large part of them. The Foundation was being asked to operate as a group, and people looked at them and wondered why they weren’t a group, why they didn’t function as a group and why the Foundation didn’t operate smoothly. Do you see that the name Foundation immediately postulates that there is a group? It had been named, but it wasn’t a group because it lacked several things which a group needs, on definition lines.

What did it have, as itself, which was a goal for itself and for the individuals within it? How far did it cover the spectrum, in other words? It hardly covered it at all. People that were working hard were operating on the third dynamic, maybe for the nation, or on the fourth dynamic, for mankind, but not so much for the third dynamic for the Foundation. They were working for an idea, but that idea was not a group idea. It was a philosophic and a processing idea. So it was the rocky road to Dublin all the way along the line, until one sat back and looked it over carefully and analyzed what on earth was going on and what was wrong. I did so immediately after developing these tenets on Dianetics, but I haven’t put all this into effect yet to make the Foundations a group.

The first act in this was that two of the Foundation executives started to amalgamate the Los Angeles Foundation into the first stage of its evolution — an actual living group rather than a dependency upon a number of individuals all of whom had the same idea. That isn’t a group. I went back to Elizabeth and put the first evolution of the tenets into effect.

Now, the test of anything is whether or not it works, as far as we are concerned. And in Elizabeth we figured out the group situation, put it into certain lines, just using these tenets, and said this is the overall group structure. This, and several other factors entering in (making it not quite a plain experiment), picked up the morale of the eastern Foundation and its workability. It came right on up, because it was starting into the first evolution of becoming an actual group.

Los Angeles has about a ten-day or two-week lag on that (to give you some kind of an idea how fast these things can happen). This organization is nowhere near being in as good a shape as Elizabeth is right at this moment, but it is coming up to it. Because it is being evolved more rapidly, though, it will probably go past Elizabeth. Elizabeth then will have to be picked up along the line.

Up to a certain point, everybody was my assistant in the organization. That isn’t a group. The organization unfortunately — and this shouldn’t have happened — was called “Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation.” That was put on there perforce by the Board of Directors when they first got together, to make it possible to hold on to the name so that Dianetics wouldn’t get dispersed and infiltrated. It had to be laid down by an individual. Then I stepped back off the thing and I did practically nothing more about it. And then the papers started lambasting Dianetics by lambasting me, and calling it a cult and all sorts of things, saying things about me which just simply are not true. And I had to come forward and make a defense of myself, so again it went into a Hubbard line.

Dianetics doesn’t belong to Hubbard. This group is not under Hubbard’s authority. Hubbard could possibly have, exclusively on an authoritarian line, pounded the thing together as a controlled extension. But that is what a dictatorship is — a controlled extension — and that is a very bad way to go about anything, although one has to sometimes tend in that direction in order to pick up the immediacy of a situation. Any group which evolved along those lines would be a sick group, because it isn’t existing as a group, it’s existing as a man. When it begins to exist as a man and something happens to that man — he gets to feeling badly on Friday, or has a hangover on Monday — the whole group reacts, just like that.

You can tell an authoritarian organization by this: How much does it reflect the personality, the ups and downs, and the stress and strain on its head? For instance, you go aboard a naval vessel and look it over and find out that maybe it’s a very unhappy ship. Let’s look at the commanding officer. He is an unhappy man. In other words, you get this authoritarian line where orders are delivered without qualification of any kind whatsoever. The group is not living on ideas. Its own ideas are not being perpetuated amongst it. It is living on orders. These might be ideas, but they have got in them so they are not ideas. They are mixed up. They have force in them, because if these orders are not executed, then material universe force is going to be entered against these people, bang! They will be threatened as to their survival, and so forth.

I am using the Foundation and demonstrating with it as a pilot project of a group. Even as one of my preclears will occasionally suffer by having five engrams run just once over simply to find out what would happen, so, I’m afraid, has the Foundation suffered a little by being a pilot project. It wasn’t even aware that it was a pilot project, but it is.

A group is not the extension of an individual, nor the extension of an idea. I have been at this longer than anybody else but that does not mean that I can do it better than anybody else, nor that I can get better ideas than anybody else. And it certainly does not mean that a large number of human beings shouldn’t have perfect freedom of action within their own self-imposed (as a group) rules, regulations and authorities. An authority to the group is only really a workable authority when the group itself has evolved it and tested it. This is the factor which makes a short-term group look so strange. It hasn’t had the time to pick up its own mores and precedent in the line of evolution.

Law comes about in this fashion: First there is a sort of a need for it, and so somebody sets up a custom. This custom gets originated there and it exists amongst the people. It gets modified as they use it, it carries along, and then as a custom it is codified by somebody. Then it is written down, and then it becomes a law.

Only laws which have gone through that cycle can be validly imposed. Laws which are arbitrarily laid down suddenly without having gone through that cycle aren’t worth the air that it took the legislators to discuss their passage. They can’t be enforced.

For instance, it was not a custom in American society not to drink. It was a slight custom in the society to be secretive about drinking in some places, and it was a custom to be mad about it once in a while, and it was a custom to do a lot of talking about it. All of a sudden somebody passed a law that said “Prohibition: Nobody can drink. Liquor is not available.” That law was not only never enforced, it might as well have never existed. The society as a whole was being subjected to the exact point in the evolution of custom that liquor had progressed to — do it in secret, and get mad about it. That was where the custom had progressed to in the group; suddenly it was frozen at that point. The custom didn’t get a chance to progress, and the law, of course, could not be enforced.

The law does not make the ideas of the group; therefore, an authoritarian organization can’t exist as a group. It is all right for a person to get ideas and for people to agree or disagree with those ideas or even to accept and amalgamate them, but that isn’t enough to make a group.

The survival value of societies is practically nil in a dictatorship or a nation which has suddenly gone into an authoritarian law level. The Roman Empire was dead very shortly after it had its first dictator. The Roman Republic had lasted a thousand years, but then, in two or three centuries, it went down the dwindling spiral by being made an authoritarian group. The people were bought into the group, finally, with corn and games, but that group didn’t belong to those people and they acted as such, and it fell flat on its face because of it.

You could predict the end of any nation by its first appointment of an authoritarian regime. Also, you can estimate the place on the tone scale of that nation by its suddenly adopting an authoritarian regime.

The tone scale in terms of nations is terribly interesting. It is covered to some degree in the Handbook, and that is still valid. High on the scale the group is highly analytical. This postulates that the group (not the individuals in it, but the group itself) has a very high survival value, and it also postulates that its thought is very fluid. People can join into this or take away from this very easily. They can change the general idea of the group. The group must be in the process of being enormously contributed to by everybody in it and it must be in the process of contributing to everybody in it. But there is a mean. If it ceases to let people contribute to it, but contributes to them like the United States is doing to Europe, it is an authoritarian proposition. It is buying them. There has got to be a two-way concourse.

After a while some force gets entered in because something goes wrong, and the group gets down into a lower band. Then somebody enters some more force, and the group’s ideas are no longer quite alive, because the second the group itself starts to punish the individuals within it, it goes into a dwindling spiral. As it continues to decline, at a certain point it revolts as a group. It goes completely over and changes polarity.

The revolution of the group is exactly the same thing as thought changing polarity, because the group is thought; it can change polarity. The people in it are sort of sucked into the idea that there is a revolt. It is going down the tone scale.

An individual might have come along as one of its leaders who just suppressed the life out of it, or another nation may have come along and crushed against it; so the thought itself, the group thought, reverses polarity and becomes reactive thought. The idea turns inside out. About this time it really has to be picked up by a dictator or something of the sort. That is the natural evolution.

The revolution inevitably produces this dictator. People in a group are often persuaded to revolt so that they can be free, and they inevitably get an authoritarian regime. This is not so much that somebody intended it this way (men have better intentions than you would suppose) as it is that the person who gets into the position, not knowing these principles, is unable to give the people back their own self-determinism, the self-determinism of the group, and send them back up again. If he could do that he would be able to bring the tone scale and the survival value of his nation back up the line.

When a group is on its way down it has used up quite a bit of its material, a lot of its, the soil is very often quite exhausted, the leader has got various problems, individuals in the group have been suppressed by it and the ideas which are brought in are not big enough. So it continues to decline, ordinarily, although it will fluctuate back and forth for quite a long time. Finally it will be dying.

This is the tone scale of an idea, not the tone scale of the individuals in the idea. Because people are authoritarianly pressing against this idea, the individuals themselves become terribly apathetic. But they don’t die. They can wander off and join other groups, various things can happen, but they get apathetic and the tone scale of the idea comes down very low.

Now, strange things can happen at this point. This is what we could call the “messiah point.” Somebody comes in and starts talking about a new idea. If it is a defeatist idea, the group will perish. If it is a negating idea of “Let’s escape and run away,” the group will perish. But if the messiah point is reached and all of a sudden an idea is entered into the group to the effect that “we must attack” (that is what the idea must consist of), this group goes on up the line again unless its natural resources and so forth are considerably exhausted, and even then I think it could pick up. It is driven up to the top. And when it gets up there it starts to get spinny; there is too much in it because it has come up to the top and has had a lot of entered into the turbulence, so it starts on down the line again.

A new group starts high on the scale and is driven up along the line with a “we’ve got to attack” idea. Actually the Foundation is attacking although they haven’t recognized it. They are attacking a second echelon of — aberration — which is the turbulence between thought and the material universe. As a group they are attacking that, but it is a nebulous sort of a thing to attack, so it has to be formed up a little bit better as a recognition. It is not up to me to formulate it, but rather to the Foundation. If it formulates itself as a group, it will start on up the line, not because somebody has told it to go up and not because I have told it to go on up, but because its attack on the problem can bring it on up to the top of the tone scale. It has to be an attack on the problem as a group.

Now, every time in the past that men have started up as a group (they have a group, an idea — the idea being an entity, and the group being the entity), by the time they got to the top they were still terrifically active as people. But when they got up to the top they didn’t see an immediate goal to attack beyond that point. In the going they had gotten so much in turmoil with that when they got to the top the physical activity of the people, and the actual perpetuation of the ideas of the group to reach that goal, kept the engrams received by the group (the collisions with and force) from being thoroughly keyed in. And these were kept from being keyed in up to the moment when no goal was possible. Then the concentration and the necessity level of the mind of the group itself — of the idea — lowered, and key-ins started to occur. There is the golden age. The golden age in the past has been the end of a group, not its beginning.

The group has generally fought, in the past, for survival in terms of luxury, possessions and material objects, and they finally get completely bogged down with these to the point where nobody is submitting any new ideas because there is nothing new to attack. The group immediately starts on the dwindling spiral of keyed-in engrams, and this idea deteriorates because it has engrams which are keyed in. Eventually it will come down to the bottom of the line again and die. That is the cycle of a group. It has tremendous force and pressure.

When the group has reached the top of the scale, the only thing which would save it would be for somebody to give it a new goal. With a new goal, a big enough and bright enough idea, and people who could see suddenly that they didn’t have everything they needed, that there had to be a new goal, that they had to have some new target, something new to think about, or some new reason to be, that group would keep on going up. Or if they had, as part of their mores and their knowledge and their culture, ways and means to keep engrams on the group level from forming on the way up, they would arrive at the top as clears — in other words, if they could pick up their engrams as they went on up the line. I am talking about engrams in the group, not in the individuals of the group.

To find out how a group survives, one has to be able to exactly define the engram of the group, and for the survival of the group he has to have a process by which the processing of the group itself, not as individuals, can be done. Fortunately, the group borders over into the individual to such an extent that group engrams are quite normally little groups inside the big group which sort of act as engrams and points of contagion.

One has to clear those. This is done by merely letting some light into the idea and clarifying the thought line. Any group that starts up has immediately three strikes on it, you might say, by being thoroughly connected to all the engrams of the past. Therefore a group would have to be pretty learned about what had been going on to really keep up. What is needed is lots of knowledge, lots of information, no secrets, no communication interruptions and nothing hidden. If it went on along that level it would succeed, providing it had a specific goal.

The Foundation went along fine up until the moment when they reached Plan “B” in the Handbook. They had not had anything assigned as a Foundation beyond their own creation. There was no goal assigned beyond their existence. Now what were they to do?

Actually they had some things to do. One of them was to validate Dianetics. A lot of people are working on that, but not everybody. So one of the palpitating heartbeats that keeps the group going is just this validation project, which will go on for a long time. That is a heartbeat but not the central goal. It doesn’t occupy enough space. This is how we are going about the business of surviving, not what we are surviving toward. What is our goal? What are we going to reach? What is the end product of all this work and formation that we are doing here for the individual group? Where does it end? What is it supposed to do? What does this group offer the individuals who are in it? What do the individuals in this group offer to it? And what is the goal? Yes — what is the goal?

Now, as soon as that goal is defined thoroughly and adequately and is an agreed-upon thing amongst the people who are members of this group, which is an entity in itself, then the idea — the entity — becomes that much bigger. So the Foundation at that moment would in actuality become a group. Its government would be government by its own election.

As a matter of fact, no group could possibly exist long as a self determined organism which wasn’t able to exercise a good, solid power of choice on what was going on.

Actually, groups do exercise a power of choice even when somebody is appointed to take care of them. If somebody is appointed to take care of the group and the group gets restive, then that person can, in the interest of efficiency, no longer take care of that group. But this requires that the group have a bigger thought above it to keep it fixed up, so it had better be stable in itself. That doesn’t mean that it would be stable in itself. So there has to be some power of choice within this group.

Tremendous confusion arises in any group where any point from which ideas are emanating is suddenly confused as the point of authority for action and being. In other words, it could be thought that authoritarian action should be expected from the source of an idea.

Groups evolve ideas. The Foundation is always evolving ideas. I stand with the group and I pick up ideas, formulate them and work with them and so on. I am working on various ideas of processing. People immediately turn around to me because I work with ideas.

If I want a favor done, the group will do the favor. It is far better to have it on the line of a favor than to have it on the line of an order, because the second that this idea starts to become authoritarian on the individual, then these people are not contributing to that group because they aren’t the substance of that group. The body of the group then is laid away a bit.

Now I will just show you how an authoritarian regime would go, using this as an illustration. The point would be “He must certainly be the administration of this group because he is a source of the ideas of this group. He therefore must be the source of authority for this group.” It could work that way, very easily.

So a man who is furnishing ideas to the group is put in a very serious position. A fellow by the name of Lenin got poisoned for it! There is an interesting aspect there: He had picked up Karl Marx’s work and he was furnishing all kinds of ideas, and everybody kept pushing him forward as administrative executive. They were in a point of turmoil and confusion, there was not much time, and the only way he could regulate the group, he thought, was by an elective line. But this group did not need an elective, self determined thing at that moment. It was at a point on the curve where it was in the throes of a revolution, and it couldn’t be selective itself. It was impossible. At that point on the tone scale it had to have an authoritarian punch!

Lenin died. It wouldn’t have mattered who killed him. The group would have killed him one way or the other. The group expressed the fact that it killed him by accepting the leadership of the man who has very often, by rumor, been declared responsible for having done so — in spite of the fact that this group loved Lenin! It shows the amount of convulsion which can go on when some of these simple tenets are completely overlooked.

Let’s return to the analogy of the Foundation. It has to be a group. What are its purposes? What are its ideas and so on? It doesn’t have a foundational goal! The idea of Dianetics is to do this and that, but as a group it has to have additional goals which will take care of the people within it all the way around the clock, because there are other things vital to the business of living. And a group, to be a real group, must care for practically everything there is in the periphery of life. The group is a true group in ratio to the extent it does compare with these things.

For instance, a university is not a group. A university only occasionally furnishes the future of its individuals. It is assisting an individual, as a man-to-man sort of an effort, to go out and work with a group. It is just giving an assist. Furthermore, the university does not offer within it such units as the family, and so on. It doesn’t have the center units necessary.

One of these social clubs, like the Elks Club, will get started and begin calling itself a group and try to behave like one. It wonders why people don’t dash in suddenly and join up, and people will starve and sweat along trying to get this thing to work as a group. But the essentials are missing, so they have an awful time.

Without all these essentials as a group it does not exist. It is not necessary for the group to own a single piece of land. It can have an occupancy, just exactly as much land as the people themselves have, but the group itself doesn’t have to own that land. This is another mistake that government makes. All that a group can do is protect the land the individual owns. If it protects the land the individual owns, it will continue to hold sway over the individuals. It offers protection.

We look over a national government in the light of these tenets now, just as we’ve looked over the Foundation, and we find out what it offers and what it doesn’t offer. We find that a national government is taking far more in contribution than it is giving back in service, by means of the income tax and so forth. For instance, it is taking contribution on the pretext — or the fraud if you want to call it that — that it will protect the personal property and the persons of the individuals who are dedicated to it. Supposedly, 36.6 percent of the United States tax dollar is dedicated to protecting the person and property of individuals from incursion by other elements, groups or individuals.

The only trouble is the weapon of today cannot be so defended against. The moment the atom bomb was delivered onto the national stage, nations ceased to be able to fulfill their full functions as groups. Individuals have’ more or less sensed this to some degree. They have become rather lackadaisical right now about war, infantry and so forth. They are waiting for the big punch.

In other words, the United States has got this tremendous budget which is supposed to protect the citizens from the incursion of other nations. Why then do we find civil defense motions?

People are suddenly very interested in civil defense. I was in New York City about a year ago, and all of a sudden I got completely roped off in the traffic. The American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and several doctors were practicing evacuation of an atom-bombed area. They had permission from the government of the city of New York to do this.

One small organization outside of Philadelphia issued a little notice in the paper and said they were holding a meeting to discuss civil defense — and the place was crammed! A place which was to accommodate a couple of hundred people received a couple of thousand. People are very serious and practical about the whole thing.

The government has taken the attitude that we are very tender-minded, that we must be protected from these shocking horrors and so forth, but nobody knows better than the authorities themselves that there is no protection against this thing to amount to anything, and they are in a complete state of apathy about it!

For instance, we found out that the city government of Los Angeles had put one man, part time, and a couple of secretaries under the Parks and Memorials Commission, and this was the atom-bomb civil defense program. The newspapers are having a holiday with this.

The officially designated groups to which we are dedicated are suddenly not only not protecting property but are actually in a state of apathy about their ability to do so. But the citizens aren’t. People study, study, study. One of the best sellers on the market right now is a little pocket book about what to do in case an atom bomb drops.

I am afraid that the government hasn’t an element in it which can be supported by the people at this time. There must be something missing; the idea is decaying but the people aren’t. Here we have an elective type of government. Certainly, if there was a solution being offered by the government, we would be putting it into effect. The people themselves are evidently trying to work under a new cooperative idea, and you get the first germs of its evolution in the fact that you get public meetings without government sponsorship, and public interest in a governmental function — the protection of the person and the property against foreign invasion. That is the first germ of a new idea.

Anybody could come along and start pushing this idea — it’s right there waiting to be pushed. In the ordinary course of human affairs, if left alone, it would evolve very easily into a new kind of a government. If it weren’t hit from abroad, if missiles didn’t hit it, it could evolve into a new idea.

We are in a period of change, but it is not going to get a chance. The second that this country suffers an onslaught from a foreign source, an atom-bombing or something like that, it will be a shock, and it is going to be an engram laid against the federal government which will practically nullify it. We’re not interested in the horror tale of whether it will kill off half the people all at once. (I notice Japan is very much of a going concern.) The point is that there is no defense against it, and it will catalyze. There will be something else. One of the main reasons is that the center of the federal government probably will cease to exist.

It is interesting what ripe, ripe ground this is for a revolutionary. The people and the whole group idea at that time will be down into the tone 1 band. Somebody could hit this country on an authoritarian line and actually do remarkable things on this line. It could happen that some general of forces will find himself in possession of an untouched army corps somewhere in the continental limits of the United States.

I’m not just writing science fiction now. I’m showing you what the score is with regard to something like this.

So the government goes out; but the second that first bomb hits, the trust and faith of the people in the government vanishes because they know there are no radar screens out there to intercept these bombs. The government hasn’t got them to put up. Here is a weapon against which there is no defense. Now somebody else has got the weapon. On specious or spurious grounds of some character, but mainly just because there is disorganization, somebody will insist that what we need at this time is not a self-determined state; and “In view of the great emergency of the situation . . .” and the fact that he has the Fifth Army Corps or something at his back, some joker with a few stars glittering will undoubtedly move in. There goes the first spark on this group.

Now, a new group idea, not having been postulated at that moment, will be absolutely vital to this operation. Unless it exists, the survival value of the group is very bad. It will go down into apathy. It will skid down from the dictatorship instead of going up, because a dictator cannot possibly introduce back into the society authority which he took away from it so suddenly and quickly, and suddenly relax and withdraw, unless he has taken away also the aberrations which made it necessary for the setup to take place.

Claudius I, for instance, tried very hard to give the Roman Empire back to the senate and back to the people. He worked on it diligently but he was not able to do so. He had not realized that he was dealing with a philosophical principle: a tone scale. The people of Rome were fluctuating around the lower end of the scale and nobody had pushed them up, and they certainly weren’t en route up to the top of the scale. They didn’t have any future goal. After all, the Roman Empire had conquered the world. Where else did they have to go?

Alexander had gone out and conquered the world. Where else did he have to go? All his army could do as a group was to fall back. They had reached their top scale and they were on their way down.

It isn’t a question of whether or not this country would get atom bombed. The second it starts talking about throwing atom bombs — and it was the first one to talk about it — it is just inviting them. I am afraid that the future could be better thought about in terms of having a new set of goals ripe and ready.

It wouldn’t be up to me to outline any goals, or even to you as an individual to outline any goals, but it might help if somebody made suggestions with regard to what these goals might be. The goals should not include just plain self-preservation, which was never the first law of nature. The self-preservation thing which says “Because we’ve been slapped we gotta fight back, we gotta kill ‘em, we gotta kill ‘em, we gotta kill ‘em” is not sensible. A group could only have this as a momentary resurgence. That is your relapse into apathy at the end of a war.

People don’t realize how much of a borderline this whole idea has been going through since World War I — the psychosis of war and relapse. The goals get more and more basic as more and more enters against thought and ideas. The general tone starts coming down, to the point where the only time a country has a goal is when it is fighting.

Actually, you can see that the societies of men have been insane for a long, long while if you measure them on the tone scale, because they are going from tone 2 down to tone 0 and back up to tone 2, and there has never been one yet which really, one hundred percent, went up to a

4. It has been a very low order of fluctuation.

What the society needs at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of a goal for the whole society. (This isn’t including Dianetics at all.) What are they really going to do? What is the country going to do as a whole? The United States had a big goal as long as it was moving west. Then it hit the Pacific Ocean. “Oh, what do we do now? Well, let’s develop everything.” “Well, we got everything pretty well developed. Now what do we do? Well, lets fight!” But this kind of thinking isn’t very good thinking in the periphery and arena of the world.

I can visualize a General Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom saying, “In view of the existing emergency — the death of the president of the United States, the vice president and all cabinet members except three (whom we have just executed) — the government of the United States is hereunder and hereafter to be conducted in the forms of martial law until the civil populace can be rescued!”

And people will go on being rescued, being dragged up here and there. Then they will say, “You know, I don’t think that this Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom is a good guy.”

This is reported to Zachariah by his subordinates. He will say, “Who said that?” “Oh, a fellow by the name of Smith, and another by the name of Jones, over there.”

“Well, what town are they from? Well, is there any more dissension over in that town? What’s the name of the town?”

“Jenkins Center.”

“Any more dissension in that town?”

“Well, we don’t know. Somebody over there said this morning he didn’t think that last communiqué of yours was very . . .”

“They said what?”

By this time the man has really been slugged around. I don’t care which Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom it is, administration is a tough job and it makes men nervous! All of a sudden he is faced with this, faced with that — emergencies, emergencies. He has found out that one man can run things in a very, very short space of time and can get an awful lot accom- plished. The communication lines all come in to him, and he has dispatch riders running out, and it all goes across his desk. But then he has to back off that spot.

Management, by the way, is the process of backing off consecutive spots.

So he backs off that desk, but then a high priority comes in and he has got to form another desk. That gets too tough, so he steps back further. The first thing you know, every piece of information he gets comes from one, two, three, four, five, six posts; and these fellows are trying to hold their jobs and they have got relatives and their own pet vendettas. One of these assistants — number five in this particular case — was through Jenkins Center as a boy, and the doggoned gas station attendant spilled some grease on his pants. He doesn’t quite remember exactly what happened, but he knows this town Jenkins Center isn’t so hot, and now he hears of these subversive activities.

So of course Zachariah has no other choice but to say “Well, let’s see, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Military Police Divisions with their armored tanks are just too fully occupied. You’ll just have to do something about Jenkins Center. We’re not quite sure what, but its obviously a foments of rebellion.”

So a couple of police go over and say, “What’s the matter with you people? You’re talking wrong. You’re saying the communiqués aren’t any good. You know those are the best-written communiqués that have ever been issued. Now you know that!”

And the others say, “No, we don’t know it. The literary prose is terrible. It’s awful! And quite in addition to that it says that all city reservoirs shall be twelve feet deep, and we’ve got one nine feet deep, but it’s all right for our town. But you say they’ve all got to be twelve feet deep because there might be water shortage. I don’t know what you guys are talking about! There’s no water shortage around here! Haven’t you heard? This is Jenkins Center, northern Oregon! No water shortage up here!”

“Well, we have got to take care of those deserts down there in the south.” “Well, what are you sending us this order for?”

“Well, it’s all right. Overall administration — these things have just got to happen, that’s all! Well, you go out and fill that reservoir up to the proper point where it’s supposed to be filled or we’ll blast it up. And by the way, you’re fired.”

It starts small. This person didn’t like the idea of getting fired. The next thing you know, somebody else gets sour on this thing. He gets a communiqué that says, “Hereinafter, at four o’clock all shoes shall be polished by somebody named Betty.” And there isn’t a girl named Betty in the whole town!

Yes, it is just about like that, because administration is a tough job. Until you are in an administrative post, you don’t really realize how confused it can get. Information is colored by self-interest, it’s colored by bad things, it comes from various sources. Finally you hire an intelligence corps that gives you more information — only their reports make even more administration. And then you get some administrators to administrate the intelligence corps so that they can administrate the administrators, and soon it is so complex that everybody is passing around paper clips and going slowly nuts. So this sort of thing cannot be run efficiently on an authoritarian basis beyond the point where easy communication is possible amongst all members of the group.

Easy communication makes for the development of the ideas, the heartbeats upon which the group members are working to accomplish their highest goals. Communication makes it possible for the idea itself to live and survive. We find out that ease of communication necessarily makes for a high affinity level. Affinity is just another word for little theta.

When we find this is the case, a group quickly slops over its natural dimensions, unless it is so thoroughly amalgamated throughout the society by easy communication channels that it can actually set up many groups more or less doing the same thing. Then if they are still in easy communication with each other the agreement can still exist, but not on an authoritarian level.

There is a natural group size, although I don’t know what it would be. It is that group size in which ease of communication currently is very possible. That keeps the affinity of the group up and their agreement goes along beautifully. In other words, the big idea runs.

An authoritarian line, every time a forceful order goes down, chips off a little piece of affinity, which cuts off a little more communication, which knocks down a little more reality. They go into this dizzy dwindling spiral.

A dwindling spiral is simply on this triangle of communication, reality and affinity. When we break some of this affinity, a little bit of the reality goes down, and then communication goes down, which makes it impossible to get affinity as high as before; so a little bit more gets knocked off affinity, and then reality goes down, and then communication, and then a little bit more dwindles off affinity and all of a sudden reality goes down, and so on. This is a marching line of consecutive triangles, and there is your dwindling spiral in progress, until it hits the bottom — death — which is no affinity, no communication and no reality.

When any group embarks upon an authoritarian line, where administration is not compared to the general idea on which the group is operating, where everything is enforced by orders given without consultation with the group itself, and where the administrator does not exist because the group wants him and is not practicing as a servant of that group — a point of service to that group — you get an authoritarian type of regime and enter the dwindling spiral.

Now, there are moments of emergency (and these are inherent in the evolution of groups) where an individual will suddenly arise and say, “This is the thing to do! “ He is followed because it is a good idea, not because he is a particular person. He is as good as the idea, and he should be followed as far as the idea and no further.

So, in other words, when we talk of putting a group together, we see how one is going to be taken apart.

Let Us speak of an atom-bombed nation. A central government, which has been operating more and more on an increasingly authoritarian line all the time, which is trying to put up the semblance of contributing too much to certain members of the populace and which is taking too much from other members of the populace, which doesn’t have a parity of interchange for all the individuals in it, which is creating classes and various things on an authoritarian line, gets hit suddenly and savagely by something which it cannot prevent. At the moment that happens the admission is right there that the government was not preventing it. That will be a moment of rage and revolution against the government even though it never fired a shot. Even though the government is gone and now can’t be revolted against, people are going to get sore. They are going to be mad.

They might be kept from revolting, if their attention can be suddenly focused on something far away. A fellow says, “Russia did that to us. The solution to all this is to go to fight Russia. Let’s go to war with Russia right now!” and he centers all of this rage which has suddenly accumulated, and channels it and sets up an artificial short-term goal. And these short-term goals, of course, start into the dwindling spiral. You’ve got to have long-term goals to succeed. You have to think to get a long-term goal; that’s why very few governments ever evolve them.

The line of the dwindling spiral coasts into nothing. But each time there is a revolution a strong man will pick it up. A strong man can catalyze a group. A group can be catalyzed and is continually catalyzed by the few effectives within it. But it can only be catalyzed by them. The group itself must be catalyzed into a point where it carries itself, where it governs itself, where it operates with its own consent and evolves its own goals. If it is to go up the line, it has to be able to keep itself, as a group, processed of the things that happened to it in the past, and if it does that, man might possibly be able to get up to a tone 4 and get a continuous golden age. Until that time he will be unable to do so.