There are a certain number of things which you may have been given as your technique of Effort Processing; most of them are right, but one of them is wrong and I am going to cover that right away.

Some of the data have been squirreled up a little bit on ARC. The definition that has recently been handed out on ARC is, just between ourselves, bunk.

ARC is still ARC, and don’t doubt that for a minute. What happens is that ARC sags into belief. As soon as the apparent absolute of a belief starts entering into ARC, there is unfluid understanding and it doesn’t become understanding at all; it becomes belief. Belief, on the lower ranges, to an organism which has to be in motion to support itself, is of course apathy, because belief is no motion and ARC is motion. I will make that much clearer to you. But don’t start abandoning ARC just because it can sag into belief.

I am going to give you a very brief resume of the Axioms themselves, and I will give you a little bit higher level of initiation of the Axioms than is given in the Axioms themselves. It is contained actually in a definition of Dianetics: Dianetics is a science of statics and motions pertaining to human thought and behavior. Statics and motions: Don’t get so static that you ignore motions in Dianetics, and don’t get into such furious motion that you ignore statics.

The whole of the postulate of statics and motions has to do with the fact that the highest echelon which is now contactable has been an echelon which has been contactable in a nebulous sort of a way for a great many centuries. They have called it a number of things, but all it is, is a static. It is a thing of no motion, and that is theta. The difference is that we have built a bridge to it. It doesn’t make Dianetics a religion any more than it makes physics a religion, because physics starts with a static too.

So we start with a static, and it is a very strange static: it is causative. It is a causative static.

One has the choice in this of being cause or effect, dead or in motion. In other words, you have a point from which motion is entered, handled and controlled, and this point itself is not in motion. It is an anchor point. That point is belief, faith — it has been called a thousand different things. We are calling it theta just now, which is a mathematical symbol, not a new name for the human soul.

So here you have a static point. When a person dies, he loses physical universe motion; he is therefore static. In order to go into motion again, he would have to become alive.

It is beside the point whether people die and come to life again. The point is that there is an optimum motion as established by the range of tolerance of the human body. Your heart beats at anywhere from sixty to ninety times a minute and your temperature hangs between 95 and 100 — maybe lot, 102 — degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets much above that it gets to be pretty rough.

When you have a body which is alive, then, you have a body which should be moving somewhere in this rather narrow tolerance band. Man is on a terrifically small toleranceband. Actually, he goes up three or four miles and he is done for — he can’t breathe. He goes down in the sea two feet and he can’t breathe. He is in a tolerance band as far as space on earth is concerned and he has to get artificial thingamabobs and whatnots in order to exceed this tolerance band.

Right on the surface of the earth, it can’t be too cold or too hot or he perishes. Man is a delicate little microbe. His body temperature should stay at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. His body — not the causative force, but his body — is a carbon-oxygen engine. It doesn’t fit to say that because a person is a carbon-oxygen engine, there is nothing else there. That is something like saying “A railroad locomotive runs on steam” and then forgetting the engineer — pointing to it and saying, “You see, that runs all by itself! Now, that’s the way the human body is, and if you just cut out the engineer occasionally, why, that steam engine runs better,” and a lot of other odds and ends of strange conclusions.

To say a person is an engine is true only in the sense of his physical self. He is an engine in motion. He is a motor, engine, propulsion mechanism — he is a lot of things, but sitting along with that is what causes him to be an engine.

In the physical universe we have a science of physics, and physics tells you very adequately how this carbon-oxygen motor can work but it can’t build one. It is a very interesting motor. It is so fascinating that people haven’t been able to get their attention off the drive wheels and things in order to take a look at what makes it run. It is fascinating to see a motor which repairs itself, which is self-determined, which has a lot of very interesting variations in it and which produces biochemical products that are not duplicatable in the field of chemistry today by any other form or means than by employing life forms themselves. This is a very interesting thing.

We can take a look at this carbon-oxygen motor and find out that it is in motion and that it has to sustain a certain optimum motion. You try to make the thing go too fast or you try to make it go too slow and it ceases to go into motion, it ceases to be in motion; at the moment it becomes static, it dies.

So there is a cycle going on there of causation: This causative force, theta, starts in and something goes into motion; it follows this more or less optimum speed and it goes along with an optimum speed for a while, and then it stops and they bury it, and that is no- motion. So it goes from no-motion to no-motion through a rather narrow tolerance band of a certain type of motion.

It is interesting that there are little gradient scales, and here is where we get gradient scales coming in. The body objects strenuously to either side of an optimum motion: it objects to motions which are too swift and motions which are too slow — both sides.

Whenever the body is slowed down to a point where it is momentarily static (by which I mean the heart skips a couple of beats, the bloodstream doesn’t pulse quite right, the nerve energies don’t channel and align and the alignment of the cells themselves is destroyed, the alignment of axons and molecules inside the body is thrown out of kilter — in other words, a moment of stopped motion which is not followed by death), the person has come up against a static and he will behave thereafter to avoid that static, either to attack it or to get away from it or to do something about it. He will do something about that static. He doesn’t like that static!

The worst thing that can happen to a person is to stop altogether, so he fights any intermediate static. Any injury is a static. And he will also fight something which forces his heart rate up to 250 a minute or something like that. That also is starting to approach a static because it will go up to just so fast and then stop. So he fights away from the upper and lower motion band and tries to stay in the middle of it, and tries to stay in a tolerance level of operation. As long as he does this he is alive. As long as the organism can continue to do this, it happens to be healthy. When it can’t do this anymore it ceases to be healthy.

Now, the way that you “train” one of these organisms is you beat it and you put it in jail and you lock it up in closets and you slow its motion down any way you can, and after a while it gets obedient. Obedience is faith, it is belief; that is obedience — motion slowed way down or speeded way up. And when the organism falls over into either of these two statics — too fast or too slow as far as it is concerned — it goes into apathy and hands its own identity over to the counter-effort which forced it to do so. Hence, you get valences. (That will be much more clearly explained as we go along here.)

As long as this organism is moving within the tolerance band, it has understanding. But a stop or a threatened stop by “too fast” or “too slow” sets up a wave. At the very least it sets up a wave which is a noise type of wave rather than a smooth wave. You could graph sudden halts or sudden propulsions of the organism, and you would regard that as a jagged noise wave. But in the middle, between these two extremes, you have a harmonic wave with a certain amount of randomity to it, a certain amount of variation to it. This certain amount of variation varies, but in that band we have. affinity, communication and reality — only in that band. It is when affinity, communication and reality fall off into the zero motion of a static that it becomes a belief, and at that moment the body ceases to operate properly; it becomes sick.

Invalidation and domination are only efforts to slow down or speed up the body. They all come into that category. Some people are running faster than others, so they try to speed up the people who are running slower. People who are running slower try to slow down faster ones, and so forth. Within the species there is an effort, then, to control and keep going an optimum motion. So people who are moving too fast get into conflict with people who are moving too slow and you get a noise-level effect on ARC, and they go out of communication and so forth with each other to some degree. They can’t hook in on each other’s wavelength.

But when ARC is deprived of motion it can become belief. And what you are processing with Effort Processing is belief — not understanding, but belief.

There is a cycle in progress whereby you get belief, understanding; belief, understanding; belief, understanding. That is a cycle. It goes like this: Way up the tone scale is cause without effect. Greeks used to call this the Prime Mover Unmoved — cause without an effect. This is rather a weird sort of an idea, but actually, if you could just put down as a philosophy of existence “I am going to live as a cause and not as an effect of my own causes,” you would be a happy person. As a matter of fact, you can try to keep from being affected by your own causes.

When you self-determine non survival activities, you are, at that moment, becoming an effect of your own causes. You postulate; you say, “I am now going to . . .” or “From this moment on I decide that . . .” like people are supposed to do every New Year’s. Here you are as cause; you are postulating a cause. Now you step forward in time and become the effect of your own cause.

If you could just get up all the decisions a person ever made about himself you would have a well man.

Cause and effect: If we diagram it, we start with cause without an effect and then we have, below this, motion. That is the initial motion, and then we have another static and a secondary motion.

You can plot the tone scale just on the basis of statics.

The church is quite correct in saying “Above all is faith.” That is one of the thousand various ways of saying that cause is cause and shouldn’t be an effect of its own cause. But then they come down the scale and they say, “And you’ve got to have faith!” That is just great! That puts them into the position of being a causative agent and gives you to them as MEST, because they say “You’ve got to have faith!” The joke is on them: you have faith. Nobody can take that away from you. But they start telling you you have to have it, and that says you haven’t got it. And the second they say you haven’t got it, you don’t have it. This is one of the neatest little invalidation mechanisms known. It runs over into all fields of invalidation. You could extrapolate all invalidation’s from this.

Here goes a fellow — everybody likes him, he is cheerful, he is happy — and somebody comes along and says, “You know, you should be careful the way you treat people because I’ve heard lately . . . You’ve just got to be good to people. You’ve got to be kind to people.”

This fellow starts worrying. He says, “Gee, I thought people liked me.” He is made self- conscious at that moment.

There is almost no limit to what a human being can do as long as he doesn’t have this variety of stuff thrown at him in the guise of affinity, communication and reality. People are postulating new realities for him and every time he accepts one of these new realities, he is sort of sunk. He can have any quantity of engrams or anything else and he will be perfectly all right until he accepts one of these postulates that is handed to him, adopts it to himself and by his own self-determinism says, “From here on that’s the way it is.” That is a little boy suddenly saying to Mama, “All right, I give up, I’ll mind. I’ll mind.” He goes out of valence, he ceases to be alive; he has hit a static. He goes out of valence (you can watch this either in yourselves or in preclears) and his reality crashes. His perceptics shut off.

If you want to start turning perceptics on in the preclear. you want to find the effort to believe — ”What is your effort to believe?” — and he will turn on somatics, face slaps and every other darn thing. You want the effort to believe, not the effort to agree, because he is not agreeing, he is just believing; he is in a static state and here he goes, out of valence, and off go the perceptics.

Ask him for his effort to believe Mama at this point: “What is your effort to believe Mama at this point?” He will just go into apathy, but then all of a sudden, “To heck with her!” You have gotten the effort.

Now you want the effort not to believe Mama. Visio, brightness of the scene, a whole lot of recollections and everything come swarming in on him again. His childhood was blank. Everybody says this — ”My childhood is blank.” It is just as blank as he has had to believe without understanding. It is a sort of a slave-state philosophy to tell people that they don’t have understanding and that they must believe — because they have belief; what they have to acquire is understanding. The component parts of understanding are affinity, communication and reality. The modus operandi of theta moving into the physical universe is understanding, but unfortunately it is accompanied by an enormous amount of force, and it hits a great many statics. Every time an organism dies, it is in a new static. As a consequence, it keeps coming down the tone scale — statics, statics, statics. So all you have to do to a human being is convince him that he has to believe, and if you just work on him hard and tell him he has got to believe, he has got to believe, he has got to believe, and don’t invite any understanding — if he says “Well, I don’t see it,” you say “Well, I tell you, God is good and we’re going to kick your teeth in unless you believe it!” — the fellow gets into a bad state right away because he starts to sink down toward the static of a past injury. That has statics in it.

So when you force him into the static of belief, you are forcing him into this low level of theta and promptly you restimulate an old static. You can demand a person into a severe illness by making him obey.

You want to know why childhood illnesses are so frequent? There is a direct index between the illnesses in childhood which are long, arduous and severe, and the amount of blind obedience which a child has to go through.

Understanding is something else. Here we try to postulate something into the individual’s sphere of experience which he himself has observed. And from this sphere of experience we now get new data. We ask him to compare data and so forth.

There are two levels of training. One is every time a little child goes into the room and knocks over a vase, you knock his head off so that after a while he doesn’t knock over vases — you think. The funny part of it is, he will keep on knocking over vases. The other level is to let him go on knocking over vases until he knocks his silly head off on one, and then he will take a look at it and say, “Look, it’s the physical universe doing this to me. I evidently have to be a little slippier in the physical universe.”

On the matter of possessions, he keeps destroying his possessions and destroying them, and messing them up and misusing them (they are his possessions), and then all of a sudden one day he picks up something that he wanted and liked and he finds out that he broke that too. He says, “That isn’t so good. I guess I’ll have to stop breaking my possessions!” He has come to a conclusion now. He has postulated something that he should do and he promptly becomes the effect of his own cause. Later on you will find him trying to take care of the weirdest things.

But at the same time, that is the operation of training — he hits a little static himself. As long as he has a self-determined operation going, his health stays up pretty well, but as soon as you give him a lot of statics instead of training, instead of ARC, his health gets very bad. ARC is a very mysterious commodity in some respects. It has been derived from several places. It is based on the fact that the material universe is as it is because we agree it is. That is a fact — we do; we agree it is. We actually find that that is quite workable. Where you have agreement you have reality, and where you don’t have any agreement you don’t have a reality. Nothing gets constructed or comes into existence that is not agreed upon.

You and I agree that there is a chair sitting on the floor, and then somebody comes in and says it is a horse. We promptly look at him and have him locked up or something of the sort. (Actually, we probably wouldn’t; we would probably process him, but that is what would normally happen in the society.) That would be a level of disagreement; disagreement is unreality.

You can’t have a communication without an affinity, and you can’t have any affinity without an agreement on something, and so it goes.

Now, you can get a shadow of ARC by the creation of statics — belief: “You have to love Mama,” and so on.

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

That operation immediately starts the child down on the dwindling spiral. But this is what you are processing out of people; you are processing beliefs out of them.

I don’t want you to believe a single one of these axioms until you have looked it over and seen what you have seen in the physical universe. Otherwise, the same thing will happen here that happened in organized religion, and we don’t want anything to do with that. They say, “Now, you’ve got to have faith, and we’re going to explain to you so you will understand.” You might as well say “The reason why we have a can of lampblack here is because it’s all full of white paint — but it’s lampblack.”

“Have faith, and now you understand why you have faith.”

People say, “But I don’t understand why it is that Mohammedanism and Buddhism and Christianity are so much alike and yet they had all these fights.” They might as well save their breath. They are talking about faith and there is no understanding on the subject required!

Now, authoritarianism is a static. That is why it is not liked. Somebody says “Now, you’ve got to believe so-and-so and so-and-so about this,” and people say, “Why?”

A poor little child in kindergarten says, “But why do I have to believe this is the United States of America?”

Nobody takes him over to the window and says “Now, you see those trees and so forth out there? Well, that’s land and there is lots of land in the world. Here’s a globe and you can look it all up if you want to, but only one section of all this sphere is the United States.” No, what they tell him is “Well, you had better believe it and be quiet or go home,” or something like that — or give him a whack with a ruler. Right away he is off; his understanding is undermined to the degree that authoritarianism is employed upon him. They can generally get as badly off, even, as a modern university student. It could get that bad; you wouldn’t believe it, but it could.

I don’t want you to be under any misapprehension with regard to ARC and start thinking you have to process ARC out of people. Don’t do that. What you want to do is process out statics.

You can get statics just as quickly, by the way, by running somebody going too fast — flying through the air at such a terrific speed that a static is introduced.

Actually, statics are introduced by monotonous conduct; it becomes the same thing — the same wave, the same wave, the same wave — until all of a sudden it doesn’t appear that time is going by anymore. That is just the same action in the same space, and the same action in the same space, so it all looks like the same time and you get a static. That is why people get bored in life — because that repeated static of the same motion looks like they are dead to that degree. No time is passing. They have to keep convincing themselves time is passing, so they do it this way this time and then another way the next time, and then this way and then that way. As long as it is a smooth wave, let’s get some variation in it.

Take the pilot who flies from Albuquerque to Los Angeles to Albuquerque to Los Angeles to Albuquerque to Los Angeles for about ten years: he finally crashes. Why? He is dead. He was dead before he crashed because he had been doing a repetitive motion without enough variation for so long that he actually lost his skill.

Let’s start with the definition of Dianetics as a science of statics and motion. The two aspects of this science are static and motion, and the two component parts are theta and MEST.

By theta we mean a cause, energy, or whatever it is, which is impinged upon the physical universe. And from that we get our first axiom:

Life is an “energy” of peculiar and particular properties.

And, believe me, they are peculiar. It took a long time to drag them out. The oddity is that right here at the beginning we have a static. This static is a true static. They don’t have any true statics in physics, but in Dianetics we have an actual true static. It doesn’t have wavelength, so it is not in motion. It doesn’t have weight, it doesn’t have mass, it doesn’t have length, breadth or any of these things. All it has is a symbol. It is motionlessness.

It is very difficult sometimes for a human being to conceive motionlessness, merely because he doesn’t want to look death in the eye. Death is motionlessness .

But here is, nevertheless, an emanation point, a motionlessness from which motion itself is attacked.

This is different from saying — and this was an old theory — that it is an emanation point of motion. That point we are not making. It is not an emanation point of motion. We don’t have this tiny point of whatever it is and then have all motion of the physical universe emanating from it. That is an old, old theory and it is cracked and weather-beaten. It dates from before the days of Sir James Jeans; l he had some interesting ideas on this. It is a very old theory. I know of its being about forty-five hundred years of age, anyway. You will find it in, I think, the second Medic hymn. They postulate a static and then have motion proceeding from the static.

Our thinking is different to this degree: We have a physical universe in chaotic motion which is, as far as we are concerned, interdependent with theta for its life organisms but independent utterly of theta as far as its motion is concerned. Perhaps theta and the physical universe both come from another dual source. Perhaps they are the same order of magnitude. Whatever they are doesn’t matter; it merely matters that the physical universe is in chaotic motion. But theta is a causative theta which impinges upon that physical universe. All the motion there is comes from the physical universe. But all the cause there is — so far as life is concerned — comes from theta.

Axiom 2: At least a portion of the “energy” of life is impinged upon the physical universe.

You can envision theta as a small entity which is impinged or is trying to impinge itself on a larger one. If we have the physical universe — MEST — on one side and theta on the other, we can see a mergence of some sort. Theta seems to be making an encroachment upon the physical universe. The physical universe seems to be sort of non causative, random and chaotic, and theta oddly enough has the property of animating and mobilizing it and bringing order into it. And you can see the incursion of theta, a sort of mergence, at which time all theta becomes as thoroughly static and chaotic and so forth as the physical universe. But it is heading, via motion, into the static of complete order.

What else theta is doing, in what other direction, we know not what of, but we should not neglect to mention that it probably is doing something. There are probably infinities of universes. Theta is probably going in many directions.

As far as we are concerned, here on earth, theta has certain aspects. It is doing certain things and it is doing them in a certain way. It might be doing other things in other ways in other universes.

There is no point of impingement between theta and the physical universe for the excellent reason that they do not have their space and time in common. But this does not say that theta does not have matter, energy, space and time of its own, since it does in some peculiar fashion.

For instance, the matter of theta is a codified idea. We have theta matter lying out across this land in the form of a culture. It is quite solidified; it is definitely matter. Furthermore, an idea — which is really collected and aligned theta — has velocity and theta mass. An idea will spread in ratio to the amount of truth contained in it. It is very interesting stuff, theta. There are a lot of rules and laws that can be worked out concerning it.

Theta, as far as we are concerned then, is merely a causative static which depends for its motion upon the chaos in the physical universe.

Axiom 3: That portion of life energy which is impinged upon the physical universe has, for its dynamic goal, survival.

Theta is moving in on the physical universe. I haven’t any idea at all why theta is trying to survive through MEST time; that is an imponderable. It is a strange thing that it should be trying to survive through MEST time. But theta evidently depends to some degree upon MEST itself for its survival. We look over all of the aspects of life organisms, we look over the phenomena, and we find those phenomena divided into the dichotomy of survive or succumb. Phenomena do not lie outside these fields, so far as we can tell at this time. And the inspection of all life behavior extrapolates up into higher orders of survive or down into lower orders of succumb.

Now, a fellow really has to be pretty blind to say “I think there are higher things in life than just survival — take ethics, for instance.”

You could say, “Well, do you realize that the existence of a thing depends to a large degree upon its ability to approximate truth?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Wouldn’t you say something would survive a lot better if it was closer to truth?” “Well, sure, but this doesn’t have anything . . .”

He is hung right there, because the truth of the matter is that truth is somewhat approaching some optimum motion or optimum alignment or optimum codification. Bodies of men which operate on good, sensible codes survive longer and their individual members survive longer than those that don’t. This is interesting. It doesn’t at once postulate that for this reason all men on earth are good. They could only be potentially good.

The point is that theta does have this factor, this modus operandi, and survival as a postulate is embracive. Of course, it has to have its second datum of the same order of magnitude, which is succumb.

Axiom 4: The physical universe is reducible to motion of energy operating in space through time.

Not even the physicists would argue a little bit about that one, because they don’t know. Poor old physics, it got to be such a beautiful static. It got to be such a wonderful static that all the physics professor had to do was say, “Now, you work out this problem according to page thirty-four, and it always works according to page thirty-four, and you never do anything else but page thirty-four, and it covers everything, and we’re all so content and happy about the whole thing.” And then the Buck Rogers boys blew the whole thing up in his face, so that the basic mathematics now of physics is quantum mechanics.

This is wonderful stuff. You work out a formula in quantum mechanics and it runs clear across the blackboard several times over, and you keep throwing in figures like .0032, 15 billion squared, 85, and so on. You finally ask the physicist, “What are these figures here in the midst of these xs, ys and alphas and things?”

“Oh,” he says cheerfully, “those are bugger factors.” And you say, “What are those?” “Well, the equations don’t work unless you throw those in.”

“But what are they?”

“Well, we just found out that when the equations worked they had these figures in them, and so we just keep putting them in.”

That is the way they figure the critical mass, by the way, of plutonium. You couldn’t hire me to go near Oak Ridge. They don’t know what its critical mass is except empirically, and one of these days they are going to build a pile that is much bigger than any other pile; they are going to figure it all out by quantum mechanics and somebody will forget to throw in a couple of “15 billions” in the right place, and the whole thing will blow up and New Mexico will disappear off the face of the map. Then somebody will say, “Darn those quantum mechanics anyway!”

The day of being able to be invariable in the field of physics has been over for some time. The general public, though, still has the idea that physics is invariable. They should just take a survey of the number of bottles of aspirin bought by atomic scientists. They would find out this is no longer true.

Sir James Jeans and some of the other boys, such as Dirac, postulate that the physical universe consists of motion. I don’t know how you reduce time into motion exactly. I tried it once and about five pages later I mopped the perspiration off my brow and said, “Whew,” and threw the thing quickly away, because the further I went, the more I found that I wasn’t figuring time into motion, I was figuring the physical universe out of existence, and this isn’t done.

As far as I am concerned, according to the various theories that I can get hold of, there is no physical universe. But there is motion of nothing in the physical universe. And a motion of nothing is a wonderful thing to have.

You all have a motion of nothing. A chair, a table — these things are motions of nothing. There is no basic unit of motion. The Greeks carved it all down and they said there was such a thing probably as atoms. We came along and found out there were atoms, and everybody said, “Hurrah! We’re down to the big basic. Now, the basic building block of the universe is an atom.” And then they started taking atoms apart, and now they can take the particles apart that go to make up the particles which go to make up atoms, and it has gotten very complicated. But all that is there is motion. That is wonderful.

As far as life is concerned, life takes advantage of this motion without static and injects a static into it to produce the motion known as a living organism. I hope you understand that. That is more of a postulate than it is an axiom; however, it is working out very beautifully and it merges in toward being an axiom, so let it stay that way for the moment.

Axiom 5: That portion of life energy concerned with the life organisms of the physical universe is concerned wholly with motion.

That is all there is; it is the concern of the static called theta with the motion of the physical universe.

Axiom 6: Life energy has as one of its properties the ability to mobilize and animate matter into living organisms.

This is very wonderful, because you don’t find anything else in the physical universe which can animate matter into anything. You will find chemicals trying to reach some sort of a balance amongst themselves. For instance, sodium doesn’t like itself; you get too much sodium together and it looks like a communist rally. And you get too much of this or that — the upper-weight metals like uranium and plutonium — and bad things happen like Hiroshima and so forth.

On the lower bands, however, you get things trying to form compounds. Iron is always trying to team up with oxygen.

The other day I became rather interested to see that somebody had gotten a good look at Mars through Mount Palomar’s big 200-inch telescope and that he had been observing the changes of seasons. The color of the surface of Mars changes according to the season: spring, summer, white in winter and so forth. It is just as though there were climate and living organisms and so forth. But the whole surface of the planet is red; evidently the soil is red and so on. What has happened there is that probably the bulk of the oxygen has been taken out of the air by all the iron, and so all this iron oxide is lying all over the place.

This action of course can occur in the physical universe. And it appears to have a plan, until you look it over and find out it doesn’t have a plan. Everything sort of merges with everything else and it all looks so orderly, but it is not very orderly; it is highly chaotic. Atoms are going in all directions; they are banging into each other in the most random fashion. The planets seem to go spinning around so regularly, but you look them over and you find out that they are out of orbit one way or the other way. For instance, earth has about eight motions instead of two. It is quite chaotic, all told. The pattern that is laid down is a very scattery one.

The closest thing to order I have seen brought into the physical universe, I think, is Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements — the old periodic chart. That is a wonderful thing. I don’t know how the old boy figured it out; it is just gorgeous. Nobody ever gives him any credit — you don’t hear his name; you know the name of Paul de Kruif but not that of Mendeleev. You have heard of all sorts of important and terrific people, but somehow or other this old boy’s name got lost.

But his work is the only piece of order I ever saw detected in the physical universe. The rest of it is pretty random motion going in all directions; it forms up in various ways and it blasts itself apart. It is very crude and there isn’t any element in it which actually mobilizes any other element to amount to anything. And certainly after it mobilizes it doesn’t animate.

In these patterns, as far as we have looked, you just don’t find anything animating anything else. That is why we have the postulate of theta. It is something that is not peculiar to the physical universe, which yet uses the motion of the physical universe. Also, because of the chaos of the physical universe and because of the action of theta, it is quite obvious that the physical universe is not planned by theta, because theta does another kind of planning — unless theta just took the physical universe and sort of threw it up in the air like confetti on the president’s head when he rides down Broadway and said, “Now, we’ll go gather it all up again and sweep it up to give the street cleaners work.” It doesn’t look like that would be a good plan either.

Axiom 7: Life energy is engaged in a conquest of the physical universe.

Now, I wish you would put in your books one star after Axiom 1, one star after Axiom 4, four stars after Axiom 5, and four stars after Axiom 7. This gives you an evaluation of importance. Those four-star axioms are very important; they hang together a complete pattern, just the few of them. The rest of these axioms more or less delineate the four-star axioms.

You can say whatever you please about “life should be kind and life should be good and life should be this and life should be that,” but the point is that life is apparently doing this thing of animating and mobilizing matter. And watching the way it is encroaching upon it and watching the voracity of theta as it organizes motion, one is impressed with the fact that nothing short of a conquest is in action here.

Of course, it is a very impolite thing to talk about conquest these days. Fellows like Hitler are unpopular. The Russians with their conquest, running at 1.1, tell us that it is nasty to have any conquests. You may run into a little argument about conquest, because what you are supposed to do is sit down and let everybody walk on you, especially those people who tell you that is what you should do.

When we say conquest, however, we mean just that. It is a dynamic conquest. You observe life in action, living organisms in action, and you will find, for instance, trees sweeping up over the mountain ranges taking over enormous areas. You give a man a square mile and he will try to expand it into a continent right away. Life on a higher band of the tone scale, stripped of most of its statics, artificial statics — that is to say, artificially imposed statics like operations and things like that — goes out unquestioningly on a line of grabbing more MEST: matter, energy, space and time. It cooperates beautifully with those life forms which will help it conquer MEST, and it is absolutely murder for those life organisms which won’t assist it. It does awful things to them.

This is just empirical observation; you can see it yourself. Life is engaged on a conquest of MEST. This is extremely important.

You extrapolate from that what life is trying to do to MEST. It is trying to do every action verb there is to MEST. You work that out and use that as a Straightwire, and preclears will start popping up and getting well and getting oriented like they never have before. That is a very interesting therapy. And that is the formula of derivation for it. It explains to a large degree what you can expect out of life.

Axiom 8: Life energy conquers the material universe by learning and applying the physical laws of the physical universe.

It might seem rather odd to you that that is so close — right next door — to pain. Life goes into MEST. A static gets introduced into the motion of the physical universe; there is a collision, an enturbulence; then there is a separation, and what that static brings out to use is a law of the physical universe. Theta — the static — can make a facsimile of this collision and so learn a law of the physical universe, and then use that law and the force it accumulated from that impingement to go out and conquer more physical universe.

The static of theta itself has no force, so far as MEST is concerned, but it keeps borrowing MEST force and turning it back against MEST. It gets a few ergs of energy here and it shoots them out there, and it keeps doing that.

The engineer who dams a river uses other dammed rivers to dam this river. It took life quite a while to get a leg up to the point where it could utilize physical energy force through an organism like man. Man can now go out and convert and change things way beyond his own body, and he certainly does. He can change the physical face of earth at a great rate right now and he is doing so.

The way he has done it is not because theta has any force, but because theta has borrowed the force of the physical universe and converted it to a conquest of the physical universe. So there is a continual transmission of physical-universe force into the conquest of the physical universe.

Naturally the first thing theta would learn would be physics. It would work and work until it got physics and chemistry; that is all it would be interested in. Only after it got physics and chemistry well started would it say to itself, “What am I?”

Because theta’s attention is toward the physical universe, you will find that right now our orientation in Dianetics, from this region of the first static, is toward the physical universe. There is no reason, however, when that is licked, that theta can’t turn around and look the other way, because there are two directions of operation as far as a life force is concerned. That static proceeds from itself into the motion of the physical universe, and it possibly proceeds from itself into the motion of another universe on the other side, although why you have to postulate space and position and direction for a static, I don’t know.

Axiom 9: A fundamental operation of theta in surviving is bringing order into the chaos of the physical universe.

Apparently an organism does not bring order — apparently. We are building atom bombs in order to bomb Russia and so on. But life has a very special way of bringing order: Life destroys those things which do not assist it to bring order and it enhances those things which assist it to bring order. It does both only within the limit of its own experience. So if it does this only within the limit of its own experience, some other viewpoint might find life doing some interestingly erroneous things. Life only does this according to its own viewpoint, but life will destroy what it itself considers contra survival to the goal it has in mind, and it will preserve what is prosurvival.’

Out of that you get a very, very important formula in processing preclears. If you would just start picking up the times when people that he didn’t like have walked away from the preclear. and times when people that he did like have walked toward him, you could probably blow a case higher than a kite without ever running a grief charge on it. That is the physical side of the thing: The fellow is acquiring people he wants and he is losing people he doesn’t want.

You reverse that and you get entheta processing: He is acquiring people he doesn’t want and he is watching people he wants to stay with him go away. That is how you blow grief charges and so forth. But they have a tendency to resolve automatically if you run the validation side of processing.

The amount of order that theta brings in gives us evolution in MEST, evolution in theta, and an evolution in organisms — three evolution’s. These are covered in Science of Survival; there is no reason to go over them again.

Axiom 11: A life organism is composed of matter and energy in space and time, animated by theta.

In short, there isn’t much reason for you at this stage of the game to go processing theta. What you are processing is motion — effort. Effort has motion in it.

The theta will take care of itself; we just sort of notice that. It inherently will go back to a causative static when it is relieved of the static motions which have been imposed upon it. Whether it lives or dies isn’t for us to ask; it at least goes back into a happier state. We extrapolate this from the fact that preclears get more and more well before they disappear! We assume that they are very well after they disappear. That is a reasonable assumption.

Axiom 12: The MEST part of the organism follows the laws of the physical sciences. All life is concerned with motion.

That is again the same thing.

You should mark Axiom 11 with about three stars. This is merely, more or less, a restatement of it. But it stresses the fact that we have two things in operation. We have a carbon-oxygen motor which animates itself with carbon-oxygen-produced energy, which handles its arms and legs and goes along, and which is in motion. Its motion is caused by these things, but that doesn’t say that that motion motivates it. That has been an error and has produced a lot of erroneous things, such as the prefrontal lobotomy, such as psychiatrists; it has produced a heck of a lot of errors.

Now, the MEST side of the organism, the MEST portion of that organism, is directly related with the physical universe and the physical sciences. Newton’s three laws of motion are very observable in the physical organism, but not in the theta side of the organism. And there must be a hundred people who have beaten their brains in since the days of Newton trying to figure out all life in terms of the three laws of motion; after they get all through, nothing happens. They figure that thought follows the laws of acceleration, interaction and inertia; they get it all figured out and when they get it all figured out, nothing happens. For all their efforts they haven’t gotten anything.

That is like trying to solve a problem about a store, where you have a store building without any stock in it. You keep looking at the store building and wondering why you never have any customers, but you never bother to look and see whether or not there is any stock. You just neglect the stock and of course you get no customers. That is just about what happened in these various efforts in that direction.

Some of these efforts are really magnificent. The reason these efforts are interesting at all is that an individual’s mind makes a theta facsimile of the physical universe, and then he has a tendency — but only a tendency — to handle his thoughts as he handles objects in the physical universe. If you can’t get a person to throw something away, that person is doing the same thing with his theta facsimiles. He won’t throw them away. You get a psychotic who busily holds on to everything, you observe this fact that he is holding on to things, and you know immediately that this psychotic cannot be straightwired into any kind of a relief because he is going to hold on to every thought. They handle their thoughts like MEST.

But that doesn’t say immediately that thought behaves on the three laws of motion. It behaves on facsimiles of the MEST universe which follows the three laws of motion, and thoughts don’t follow the three laws of motion. They definitely do not. They contain physical universe, but that does not mean that they are physical universe. They do not have velocity, space, speed — any of these things. They don’t even have wavelength.

That is the best reason in the world why you should never put an electric shock machine on a patient’s head.

Axiom 13: Theta, operating through lambda (living organisms) converts the forces of the physical universe into forces to conquer the physical universe.

This has been covered earlier, when I went over Axioms 7 and 8.

Axiom 14: Theta, working upon physical-universe motion, must maintain a harmonious rate of motion. The limits of lambda are narrow, both as to thermal and mechanical motion.

I described that a little bit earlier. What you are trying to do is get your preclear to an optimum motion. You will find, oddly enough, that this optimum motion is a lot higher and faster in terms of physical behavior than you supposed — even though it is fairly fixed in terms of heartbeat — and that people actually are built to move faster and think faster than “normals.” They are built to move and think quite a bit faster.

But here you get the speed of use of the machine. This society has gotten down till it is almost static in the use of the body, with its use of automobiles and so on — static! And it is reflected in the degree of aberration in the society, because as the body begins to approach a static state it begins to think that it is in a static position.

Now, as long as an organism, a human being, can pick up motions and actions, turn them around and fire them right back, utilize them and bend them to his own wishes and will, he is healthy. A more severe motion has a second effect: The organism takes the motion, damps its action and kicks it out. He takes the motion, slows it down a little bit, and kicks it out. Or he holds it and dampens it. Or he receives it and then tries to equalize the body with it, somehow, but still stay in action with it. Or he blocks this motion off; he lets it in and then blocks it off interiorly. Or he just lies back and lets the motion raise the devil with him, which is succumbing.

I will go over that scale again. At the top of it we have the top of the tone scale: A person receives motions and throws them back. You try to hurt this person and he doesn’t even know he has been hurt. He doesn’t residually receive this stuff and throw it back again.

He is hurt a little bit at a level where action is damped. He just receives it and damps its action and throws it back. He is hurt a little bit. But when he holds it and dampens it, how does he stop it? What is the dampening factor? He is dampening motion and motion contains time, and the second he dampens down motion he has gotten a holder on the track because he is stopping time to that degree. You take this person over the track again and you will find an area where he caught some motion and held on to it and tried to dampen it, and you will find that he is sitting right there on the track. There was a holder, because he tried to stop something that contained time, and the second he tried to stop something that had time in it, he stopped.

Now, when he tries to equalize with it, that is just endurance. It is traveling at a certain rate of vibration, so he goes into the certain rate of vibration and tries to ride it out. That is what is known as endurance.

The next step down is that he gives the motion a portion of his body; this is physical medicine. When he gives it a portion of his body, that is a sacrifice to it. He really is whipped at about this point. He is really way down below 2.0 when he says “It keeps hurting my hand; therefore we’d better amputate my arm,” or “It keeps hurting my appendix; therefore we’d better take out my appendix.”

And when this motion comes along and forces the motion of the physical body to accord with the foreign incursive motion, the physical body succumbs on its self-determinism. It comes under the determinism of the foreign motion; the body itself becomes static as far as its own self determinism is concerned and it then obeys. That is a static. There is death. There are holders, groupers and all the rest of them.

A person can apparently get suddenly and wonderfully well overnight, peculiarly, without any processing. What happens to him? His concept of his own ability to move, his concept of his own motion, rises up high enough on optimum to make him believe (a static) that he can simply throw back incoming motions, and then all counter-efforts impinged against his person disappear. And there go psychosomatic illnesses. His static postulate with regard to them is “I don’t have to endure.”

Now, all you have to do to a human being is just convince him he has got to slow down and take it easy — take one of these dynamic fellows with ulcers and say, “Now, you’d better slow down and take it awful easy and get some rest. Don’t work so hard at your job; I know you’re interested in your job, but don’t work so hard at it” — and you will bring him down the scale to where he will pick up incoming motions and hold them to damp them. You will finally get him down the scale to where he will just succumb to them. All you have to do is tell this fellow to slow down and he will get sick. Also, if you tell him to speed up beyond a point where he can speed up, he will get sick. But it is much harder to speed somebody up into getting sick than it is to slow him down into getting sick.

It is an odd thing, for instance, that a whole army can go out, fight a battle, endure enormous fatigue, have wounded all around and so forth, and they will think they are all right, until they all of a sudden find out they lost. The general made a report to Washington and Washington went and told somebody else, then the word finally came back to the troops, “You know, you lost the battle.” The oddity is that recovery rate of casualties goes right out through the bottom. You bring news of a defeat into a field hospital and the incidence of mortality goes up.

In addition to that, if you take a soldier back from the front lines into the rear echelons and send him to a base hospital a thousand miles away from the front, he will probably die. He might have had a chance of living up within the sound of the guns, but you take him to a base hospital and he will kick the bucket. He was a part of an army; it was traveling at a certain speed. When he is wounded and stays in close association with action, he keeps going at a high enough rate to get well. But then you say, “Now, what this fellow needs is rest, “and ship him to a base hospital way back, tell him to be calm and quiet, give him nothing to do, nothing to occupy his mind, nothing but rest, and you have got a sick soldier on your hands. If he is going to die from this thing he will die.

We were doing that in this last war. We would kindheartedly pick up wounded soldiers and send them to Yosemite. We would send them almost anyplace — the fellows who had ulcers and skin diseases and bullet holes in them and so forth — and they just got so they weren’t worth a darn after a while. That is a fact. They would just lie around the hospital for about four months, and that was just as good as getting killed in action. I have watched them do that; I finally was ready to blow my top on this stuff, until I got four or five men very, very interested in moving very fast, you might say, along certain lines. And these fellows got impatient and they got well and they left the hospital.

That is where people make the mistake of saying “We should get him interested in something; let’s let him follow some hobbies. Nothing serious, let’s not let him get interested in anything serious, but if we can just give him a few hobbies or something so that he’ll walk down the corridor every day and walk back to his bed, he will undoubtedly get well because we’ll have picked up his interest in life.”

Now, this is what motion goes into. Pain is merely a contradictory incoming motion to the motion of the body. It produces a randomity and the phenomenon is pain. What will happen, then, if you keep telling preclears to lie very still, to be quiet, to approximate these various forces, is that the forces will move right in on them, because the forces are not in them. The forces are in the theta facsimiles which they are still holding to them to compare with their own velocities.

So, you have this fellow and you want to exhaust this force and counter effort and so forth; if you exhaust his own self-determined effort, this force will disappear. You don’t have to build this force up to full magnitude.