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

We come here to the interesting subject of a proof of ultimate truth. If we have reached an ultimate truth, then we have reached an ultimate solution, and who would ever suspect, really, that an ultimate truth or an ultimate solution could be subjected to mechanical proof. We have done just that. We have discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate.

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

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

A perfect duplicate is an additional creation of the object, its energy, and space, in its own space, in its own time, using its own energy. (And we could append to that "the considerations which go along with it", because it couldn't be anything but considerations.)

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

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

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

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

You see that it isn't true that an object sitting before you at this moment, or your chair, has always been in that position. Nor is it true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position, nor is it true that the atoms which made up the chair in raw material form were always in that particular ore bed or in that particular tree. So you see it's quite complex. This universe is scrambled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key (which actually is practicing Alter-is-ness). If we walked around a car and said "I don't understand what this object is… I don't understand what this object is… AH! it's a car!" We would feel immediately relieved. We'd feel a lot better about the thing, but if we were to get its total As-is-ness there would just be a hole sitting there.

So understanding is As-is-ness and understanding in its entirety would be a Static and so we have the fact that Life knows basically everything there is to know before it gets complicated with lots of data, merely because it can postulate all the data it knows. All knowingness is inherent in the static itself. A thetan who is in good shape knows everything there is to know. He knows past, present and future. He knows everything. This doesn't mean he knows data. This merely means that he can As-is anything and if he can As-is anything believe me he can understand it.

Man's salvation I've said several times depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well let's misinterpret that just a little bit and say Man's salvation – if you want to save him from the universe – would depend upon his ability to make an As-isness of the physical universe at which moment he wouldn't have a universe, and this would be total understanding.

Understanding has three parts: Affinity Reality and Communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He doesn't want to communicate with it, so he says it's not there. He doesn't want to have any affinity for it at all, so he says it's not there. And believe me his reality cuts down.

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

He's trying to avow that something that isn't there is there, and he's trying to avow that something that is there isn't there, and between these two things, giving it no As-is-ness at all or new postulates of any kind, he's having quite a time of it.

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

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

If you wanted, by the way, to make this whole universe vanish, you would have to be able to span this whole universe. You would have to be as big as the universe. You could drill somebody up to the point where he could do that.

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

All mechanical conditions of existence. It wouldn't bring about the sudden death of everything. It would bring about the exteriorization of everything. It would mean the vanishment of all space and all form. Mechanics.

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

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

Well, when we say mechanics, we mean space, energy, objects and time. And when something has those things in it we're talking about something mechanical. That's all that would vanish if you As-ised all of existence – just the mechanics – and you could turn right around and postulate them all back again too with great ease.

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

Affinity, in terms of mechanics, is simply a matter of distance. Affinity is basically a consideration, but it does represent itself mechanically. For instance, Total Knowingness goes down to Lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well that's different from simply knowing without looking. We go down to Looking, now we go just a little bit lower than that. (This Know-to-Mystery scale is by the way an Affinity scale.) We go into Emotion, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking. We have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it – do we dislike it. There are particles in emotion: "I don't like it" – in other words "I have some anger particles about it" or "I have some resentment particles" – and by the way a preclear has his reactive mind full of these emotion particles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols and they think they have to stay alive by eating other symbols. This is real cute and eating is quite important of course and it can be a lot of fun, but here you have a real condensation. In other words, Effort got so condensed that it turned into an inverted kind of Thought, and that became so condensed that it packaged thinking – that's what took place there – it became so condensed it became a Symbol. A word, for instance, is a whole package of thought. So packaged thinking is a symbol and packaged symbols are a plate of beans.

Below that, when a person doesn't believe he can eat any more, when he thinks he is not going to survive, he will go into the Sexingness band. If you starve cattle for a while they'll start to breed, and if you feed them too well they'll stop breeding. Quite irrational, but then who said any of this was rational? Cattle who are starved or lacking certain food elements will decide, well, we'll live again in some other generation – and they'll breed up a lot of calves. Of course there's nothing to feed the calves on but they haven't paid much attention to that. In Arizona we have an interesting fact – we have some very beautiful cattle who have stopped breeding. They've just been too well fed. The way to get those cattle breeding again would be to simply start starving them. Freud by the way was so condensed he had to get way down there to that condensation level of Sex "in order to find out".

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

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

First he couldn't predict some particles, and then it all seemed awfully confusing to him and then he just shut it all off and said "I won't look at it anymore". That's what Mystery is, and your Step Fives by the way are very, very concerned about Mystery. They're very concerned about Thinkingness and trying to solve the Mystery. Well the Mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. The ultimate solution of course is simply the As-is-ness of the problem. And the As-is-ness of a Mystery is simply the Mystery. That's really all there is to it. There really is nothing to know back of a Mystery, except the Mystery itself. It's just As-isness. But Mystery is the level of always pretending there's something to know earlier than the Mystery.

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