I want to talk to you about the application of Scientology to everyday living.
The best method of applying Scientology to everyday life is the simplest one, which is simply using the ARC triangle with its consequent Chart of Human Evaluation in everyday living. This takes into effect most of the manifestations which you see and which you can evaluate quickly.
This, of course, includes the communication formula. And an understanding of that communication formula would be an understanding of cause, distance, effect, and the fact that people who are at the cause point or source point are very often very reluctant to be cause, and people who are at the effect point are very often very reluctant to be an effect, in both cases, of anything.
And so they will do various things. They move out onto the distance between, and so they become a message. And you'll see people going around with tracts, or something like that, being a message. They're spreading a certain word, something like that, and they get stuck with this; they get stuck very easily with this.
You can go around and take all the wisdom you want to anybody without yourself being a message. Have the message in your hand if you are carrying something around, don't, yourself, be the message, see?
The people, as they go between these two points, get closer and closer to arrival. And there's the fellow who doesn't dare arrive, you see? He doesn't dare get to that effect point. And there's the fellow who doesn't dare go any further from that cause point. He'll get further and further, then, from being cause, whereas he will be more and more an effect. And you could get these two points pulled together more and more tightly, until they were not quite the same point.
But that is to say, you get this series of manifestations if you do that (just an understanding of this formula is very useful in everyday life – very, very useful in understanding life): You get somebody that, everything he is the cause of, he becomes the effect of. This goes back a long way down the track; the second law of magic could have been said to be, don't be the effect of your own cause.
Well, of course, it is impossible not to be the effect of your own cause. So that in itself is a booby trap. A fellow is a fool if he thinks that he can cause something without becoming one way or the other the effect of it.
He can cause anything he pleases as long as he's willing to be the effect of what he causes. And naturally, if you know of yourself, you're a static, you're a personality, you don't have mass, meaning or mobility as yourself. You are using a body rather than being a body. You naturally are capable of causing almost anything. But supposing you were standing there protecting a body, being a body, hiding in a body, anything you want, and you cause something. You wouldn't like that to happen to the body.
Supposing you pick up a book or something and throw it at somebody and give them a big bruise in the face, something like that. You don't like that. So you begin to resist, you see, being an effect. And you resist being an effect more and more and more and more.
Actually, you're making one body resist being an effect. And after a while, because of the makeup of this universe where anything you resist you get, eventually – anything you resist you become. Now, that's this universe's favorite motto. When you resist something hard enough you become it – in the absence of processing and understanding. Let's modify that to that degree. If you understand this, and if processing exists, why, that doesn't occur.
But here we have people going around and they become very, very unwilling to be the cause of anything. You'll find they won't give people orders, because they themselves do not want to be the effect of receiving orders. You see? And they won't give people orders. They'll do all sorts of very remarkable things to avoid upsetting people in their vicinity.
Why? Because they're afraid of being upset. You see? They have learned by experience what we used to call (and still call) the motivator-overt act sequence. You want to know why people get nervous, it is just because when they make the faintest overt act, you see, they get this tremendously exaggerated package of facsimiles saying "No-no-no-no-no-no. No, no. You better not talk to those people hard like that or it'll really cave in on you."
That's fairly normal; that's fairly normal in a society. It's one thing to be polite, because you can be polite. And it's quite another thing to let yourself be walked all over. It's quite another thing to be reactively in apathy, you see? Just blaahh, apathy.
Now, that's one manifestation. There's another manifestation which is even more curious, which you will see every once in a while. And that is, anything that happens in the vicinity at all, the person knows he is the cause of it – anything that happened in the vicinity.
Now, it starts out with anything that happened to him, he knew he caused it basically. Well, of course, this happens to be a salient truth. It is true that anything that happened to him, he was basically the cause of. But that's way upscale up here, you see? And now he just feels this reactively, that he has become an effect, therefore, he caused it. This automatically must be true.
You've got cause and effect so close together that they short-circuit. If there is an effect, he caused it. And he gets out to the broad environment, till you will find people sitting around in insane asylums worrying like mad for having caused all of World War II, or something, you see? He must have done something because there was World War II – must have been him. You see, he's playing the "only one" very hard, at this point.
All right. Even children will react on this one occasionally. We have an ally die, and the child will walk around worrying, worrying, worrying, wondering what on earth he did that killed his grandmother or his sister or something. He must have done something. He was the effect of it, wasn't he?
See how that is? He must have done something! And we get that as the entering wedge into superstition. "Now, let's see. I'm a victim. So, therefore, I must be guilty of something," and they dream up something on the order of original sin. Something like that. You see, it's all bad, so therefore you must be the effect of it. That's repent, repent. That sort of an attitude toward people is an effort to do that.
Well, actually, an individual only needs to accept the responsibility for his own acts; things will take care of things very nicely. And if he recognizes clearly the effects which he does cause, and if he's perfectly willing to cause effects which he dare be the effect of himself, why, naturally, he can walk through this bramble and brush with great ease, even as a body.
There is, there, a mode of conduct which is available.
Well, I want to call your attention to the Chart of Human Evaluation, which was organized very early in 1951, which has various columns and which gives behavior. Now, that is plotted out mathematically on the basis of ARC: When you raise the affinity of a person, you will raise their reality and raise their communication; when you raise their communication, you will raise their affinity and raise their reality; when you raise their reality of something, you will raise their affinity and raise their communication. Okay?
That whole chart is plotted out there and is a very good chart to use to predict people. It's particularly good for an auditor to use this chart, but it's a chart that can be used in everyday living.
Had an auditor one time who had studied this chart as theory, you see? He just studied the chart as theory, theory, theory. You know, it was interesting, too. You know, interesting. Having studied all this, why, it never occurred to him that it was true or real or anything else. He was perfectly in agreement with it as a mathematical problem.
All right. He went out one day and a thought struck him that it might be applicable to life at large. Is this possibly true? I mean, oh well, of course, people really wouldn't act like that. So he went into a bank and looked around and – just watching people go by, in the bank lobby, and watching the people behind the desk and talking to a couple of people, and so forth – he started putting them on the tone scale.
Well, he did this all one morning. And he came back to school horrified. It was absolutely accurate. But what horrified him was not the chart, but that people acted like this all the time and didn't know what they were doing, and they had no slightest inkling of what was going on here, you see?
The fellow was l.5-ing, acting exactly as a 1.5 should act, reacting across the boards. And he even went so far toward the end of morning to ask one fellow who was 1.5-ing – which is why I brought that up – how his arthritis was and how his heart and arthritis were.
And "Ohhh," the fellow says, "it's terrible." See? Hit it right on the head.
He was beginning to be able to diagnose simply by just the attitude this person had toward existence. You know, just an everyday – the way he would pick up a blotter.
Well, this was deadly to this individual. He had all of a sudden walked into a completely predictable world, where all the people were predictable – just as curious as that.
Well, that's pretty good if you could predict everybody.
You want to beware of this trap, though, in doing this: the reason why they're doing all these things. Let's just avoid the reason why they're doing all these things. The reason why they are doing what they are doing is ARC. And the reasons they give are the reasons which justify them against the social pattern in which they live.
You see? That is the totality of it. The reason why.
For instance, a cop acts like he acts because he is a cop. This bank president has to act the way he acts because he is a bank president. His first excuse is his beingness, or position, and his next few excuses down the line are this way and that. And you'll find out he acts like that because…
Well, now these things might have been causative and these are causative things in his life. That's very true that a person put in a position which requires, for instance, a 2.0 is liable to at least dramatize being a 2.0 on that tone scale right across the tone scale.
But this is a curious thing, that he doesn't have to believe it too. See, he could be at 2.0 across the tone scale, but he doesn't have to believe it. It's only when he takes all this seriously that he gets onto this scale.
Remember that it's ARC, then, not reasons why. If you fall into reasons why, you can just figure with the rest of them forever: the reason why he is doing this, the reason why he is doing that and so on.
You just look at this ratio. How much space does the person have on that communication formula? How much space has he got? What's his general affinity toward life at large? And what's his reality? What is he basically in agreement with?
And we look at that and, actually, we see these three corners of the triangle forming a plane. And as his space gets greater, he goes right on up the scale and right on out the top of the scale. And as his space gets less, why, the source point and receipt point of the communication formula come almost together, but it's like walking halfway to Chicago, if every time you walked halfway to Chicago, you, of course, never get to Chicago. The source point and receipt point do not coincide.
They will and can coincide perfectly at the top of the scale, at which moment you have achieved a condition which might be rather poetically stated as a brotherhood with the entire universe. But that's a total affinity, and it is not an enforced or compelled affinity. It never occurs under enforced and compelled affinity. If you've ever noticed, that affinity which is compelled and enforced, and so forth, does not persist. It simply goes downscale.
A free affinity for all of life, then, is quite a different thing.
Now, every once in a while an individual may start worrying about his sympathy for life. He realizes that he has some inkling of what ants think about and do. And he could look at them, you know, and he knows this. And knows that cactus has a certain emotion about it, too.
And he goes around, and he's liable to start worrying about this and try to pull back, you see, as he's afraid he'd become these things fixedly, you see, if he went into sympathy with all these things.
His passport to freedom is his sympathy for all life and its forms. Not compulsive, you see? I mean, just his free sympathy. If he were being forced to feel sympathetic toward young boys, we could be certain he would eventually, if he were a thetan, become a young boy.
Now, there we recognize in this chart that we have a terrific method of prediction, and in ARC in general we have a good scale of prediction. And an individual cognizant of these things can predict the activities of those about him.
Now, in view of the fact that these three items – A, R, and C – combined together, are symptomatic of understanding, the degree of understanding which a person has of existence is the same degree as he has distance possible in his communication formula. Therefore, we find understanding of existence increasing, increasing, increasing, as he goes upscale, and decreasing, decreasing, decreasing, as he goes down scale.
Now let's add beingness into this. And of course, we could add every factor of Scientology into this – but let's add beingness into this, and we'd find out that an individual is at first, in middle scale, completely free to be anything.
And then as he goes downscale, he is more compulsively being made to be something. And he finds himself something, and this makes him unhappy because he feels that it is not by his own choice.
Well, actually, we know by as-isness and the necessity of altering as-isness that he had to appoint an other-determinism to keep something – to go on persisting, you see? And he is more and more avoiding motionlessness, because motionlessness is dangerous to him.
Therefore, a consistent and continual beingness as something, is something he begins to fear. And when your individual is to a point where he has the horrible feeling that if he stood still for a long time in one place, he'd sort of grow roots, you know, or he'd do something peculiar like this – something bad would happen to him. Or if pain turns on, because of – he has to stand still for a while. You would have a condition there where you have compulsive beingness jibing with this one – which is the same thing – fear of motionlessness.
And that fear of motionlessness is making him more and more motionless. The more
frantically this individual goes into motion, the more he becomes a symbol.
Let's look at that. And of course, the more he becomes a symbol the more mass he accumulates. And the more mass he accumulates, the more meaning he accumulates.
And boy, when you get him down around about 0.5 on that tone scale, you talk about reasons! You talk about reasons why. They would be utterly non sequitur but, boy, would they be significant. Mass, meaning and mobility, then, fits in there, beingness fits in there.
Now, to understand life and human beings at large, you should recognize this: that every human being there is, is being – he is a human-being thetan; you know, as a thetan he is being a human being.
Well, that individual would never have become selectively and enforcedly a human being if he had no overt acts against human bodies. So he has enormous numbers of overt acts against human bodies – tremendous numbers of them.
As such, then, he is very, very pressed on the subject of protecting bodies, you know? He mustn't let a body be an effect of anything. He has these tremendous overt acts against bodies, you see, while he was still a thetan, and now he has got to protect the body from such things as himself.
So as he goes down tone scale, whereas he may worship some powerful spirit that'd throw lightning bolts at him, as far as an individual thetan is concerned, to let anybody be three feet back of their head or something like that, it means that a body is liable to be attacked.
You see, thetans attack bodies – he knows. They're bad. And we get an individual down scale like that, exteriorize somebody and he'll pull some kind of a trick like this: "Be three feet back of your head. Are you three feet back of your head? Well, all right. Well, are you sure you are now?" See, that "mustn't have any thetans around here" has hit him, you see?
And he says, right at that moment, he says," Well, why don't you put your attention on your nose. Let's see if we can't take your nose down a little bit in size" – boom! Terrific change of pace, you see, and it'll just hang a person in that particular incident. We get that kind of a manifestation taking place.
Well, there is something else that is taking place, is something-and-nothingness. A thetan is perfectly at liberty to have all the somethingnesses he wants to and any of the nothingnesses he wants to. He can communicate with somethingnesses with great ease. A thetan is something which is above something and nothing. A thetan isn't just nothing, you see?
He is something which can monitor somethings and nothingnesses. Well, if this is the case, then, we find that people would be doing one of two things when they get extreme and downscale: they would either be trying to concentrate on all somethings or they would start concentrating on all nothings.
And as a matter of fact as they go downscale they do this alternately. They fall out of all something, something, something, and then they go into a strata where it must be nothing, nothing, nothing; must be something, something, something. And then must be nothing, you see? And then must be something. And they're going on down this strata.
And you'll find human beings around who are utterly compelled to make nothing out of bodies, to make nothing out of cars, manuscripts, any remark which you say, any act which you pull. They have got to make nothing out of it. They have got to stand back there, and it would just kill them if they couldn't ridicule it, you see.
Ridicule is the very lightest method of just slapping you to pieces. You know? You come up with a favorite joke of yours, or something like that, and it has always been funny to other people around, and all of a sudden this person – "Yes. Well, so on, so on, so on," some snide remark on the subject.
Or you come in and you have just won the track meet, something like that. And boy, you're sure happy there. You got a ribbon there that was about a yard long, and everything is fine. You just won this track meet, and this person says to you, "Do you know, your shoes are muddy, and you have some dirt on your face, too?"
Nothing. See? Nothing. Make nothing there if we possibly can. Well, this is the biggest allowable nothing they can make. And they are being prevented from making nothing of things. In other words, they don't know any mechanisms to unmock things, really – just by effort, energy, you see, and they've got to make nothing out of things with energy. And the harder they try that, the further down they go.
Now, when they've got to make something because they have to make something because they have to have something, and so on, same way. They'll get into the same kind of a category.
You get some psycho, you ask him to put up a couple of anchor points. And he is just as likely to put up solid steel pyramids, you know – something. Just get this as an attitude.
Now, a thetan who is in very good shape could mock up a solid steel pyramid, and if he was in wonderful shape, you could probably see it, too. You see? But down scale he just compulsively has to mock up something, then all of his automaticity has gone into making something. And he is objecting to it. He is objecting to every part of it as he goes down.
Now, to understand people, then, we would have to understand what kind of a cycle is this person on. Is he on a somethingness cycle or a nothingness cycle? Neither one is any worse than the other, but the truth of the matter is that sane people – we categorize that just overtly as above 2.0 on the tone scale – sane people make something and nothings at will. You know, they don't have to. You know, they just do, to get some action in life, and so forth.
They can change their mind. They are not compulsively making somethings and compulsively making nothings continually. In other words, their conduct has a little randomity and difference to it.
Now, as far as sanity is concerned, there is not really such a condition as insanity; there really is no such condition as neurosis. I say that because these are simply two arbitrary words which were thrown into the society, and they were never defined. And the society so variously understands them that you get a couple of kids as sane as anybody standing there calling each other crazy, you see? It is just slang, and so on.
There is an emotion, however, called the glee of insanity, which is an intolerable thing to a person. And they'll get this turned on, and it will be a very upsetting thing to them. We could say a person in that state – or in such a state in relationship to energy, so that he could not take care of the first dynamic; you know, he can't take care of himself, he can't feed himself properly or take care of his body – let's just call that person insane. Either he has this terrific glee of insanity or he is utterly incompetent in taking care of himself.
And above that level – just to give it definition – let's call him anything else above that level which is irrational, compulsive, obsessive, so on, call it neurotic. Carry anything neurotic right up to 2.0 on the tone scale. And just call this stuff that's low on the tone scale, and so forth, insane if you want to. But again, I tell you it is just an arbitrary thing; it really has no definition.
Now, to understand and predict people at large, it is only necessary for you to know whether they make something or nothing out of things. And then remember, if you please, that their conduct is consistent – that they are consistent in their conduct.
Now, they might have a lot of reasons why, they might be very unpredictable, but they have a motive which underlies their conduct just to this degree: something and nothing. This person one way or the other is going to make nothing out of everything around them. See? Or this person, one way or the other, is going to make something out of everything around them.
Now, there are two other categories of human beings. And one is the category, upper scale, where things can be bad or good at will; everything on Know to Sex in the upper scale can be good, you see? But when they are on lower scale, everything on the Know to Sex Scale – which is Mystery, there, to Sex Scale – is bad. And when you get something where everything on the Mystery or the Know to Sex Scale is bad, you have somebody who is inverted – very badly inverted.
And when they are consistently and continually "everything is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad" – watch out. They are well below 2.0. They're using some kind of a mechanism: if it's bad, it's bad, it's bad, that's why we have got to make something, you see? Or it's bad, it's bad, it's bad, that's why we have got to make nothing. This is your 1.5. He is actually operating there 100 percent. He can only operate on emergencies.
"We are about to have this tremendous disaster, and therefore in view of the fact that we got this disaster, we have to have this emergency legislation, "and so forth." And therefore we can make something here. We can make this army so as to make nothing" – big compulsive sort of a reaction. You see?
But it's bad. All that reasoning is bad. The only reason we can do anything is because something is bad. They have lost concept of doing something because it's fun, and there's your last keynote.
Individuals who can do things, no matter whether good, bad or indifferent, or outrageous, simply because they are fun – an individual who can freely and with a clear heart do things because they're fun is a very sane person. And he'll be in good shape. And the amount of laughter which a person laughs – which is, by the way, not your harmonics of laughter. Laughter, you see, has a number of harmonics down the line. Rather upper scale laughter: a person, he laughs, he doesn't laugh because he's embarrassed, he doesn't laugh this way and that, he laughs because he thinks something is funny. And if a person laughs fairly often, and is very easy in that laughter, you got a sane man in your hands.
And they just go downscale and laugh less and less and less, or laugh more embarrassedly, or compulsively or obsessively, more and more and more, as we get clear down to the bottom.
Person down at the bottom doesn't laugh at all. He doesn't live, either. He just lies there, a lump of energy, being mass, meaning and no mobility. He's not even a symbol anymore.
The truth of that is, you go up and ask him what his name is, he can't tell you.
Now, there, in essence, if you care to study this Chart of Attitudes, and you care to apply this information to life as a whole, you'll find out that you can know human beings. But remember, you shouldn't expect them to know you, if that communication formula is very close together. They won't understand you. But that doesn't prevent you from understanding them.
So remember that a thetan can always handle symbols. Until they are exteriorized and in good shape – or any life form is in good shape and operating as a thetan – it is a symbol.
And symbols don't understand. They run around and act, one way or the other. Okay.