Want to talk to you now about the basic theory which underlies instruction and indoctrination. Just want to give you a few items quite rapidly here which might be of some importance to you. This is, you might say, demonstrable material or doctrine, or anything else you want to call it.

The first one is: Considerations take rank over the mechanics of space, energy and time. Considerations take rank over these things. These mechanics are the products of agreedupon considerations which life mutually holds.

The reasons we have space, energy, time, objects, is because life has agreed on certain things, and this agreement upon these certain things has resulted in a solidification, you might say, of agreement. And so our agreed-upon material is then quite observable. It's very, very observable to us. They're still basically considerations, but because they are agreed upon they are very observable.

You can, by the way, start somebody into the matter of agreement. You can make him agree with somebody else about something. You can build a fact this way. I've done it experimentally with a group. We have just gone round and round, at first facetiously, and then more and more and more – just the mechanics operating there just beautifully. They were agreeing with one another that there was a chair sitting in the middle of a completely empty room. And when they got through, they finally saw the chair. Curious.

That's the formation of this universe as far as we can tell.

The mechanics have taken such precedent in man that they have become more important than the considerations. Mechanics have taken a tremendous precedent in man and have become so important that they are more important than his considerations.

"Doesn't matter what you think!" You see? In other words, the mechanics of space, energy, objects, time, rooms, houses, Earth, space – anything like this – electricity, Ivory soap, these things have a greater value than man's considerations. In other words, he's inverted. Having agreed upon these things so long that they are so solid, he is now below the level of having agreed upon them, so his considerations do not apparently pack as much power as his immediate environment.

Now, this is what overpowers a man's ability to act freely in the framework of mechanics. He can't act freely in the framework of mechanics, although he invented them, because his considerations are now of less impressiveness than the mechanics with which he is operating. In other words, the agreement is more solid than his new consideration.

And so he makes a new consideration, and he runs into the mechanics of existence: space, energy, objects, time, his agreements with people and so forth.

The goal of processing is to bring an individual into such thorough communication with the physical universe that he can regain the power and ability of his own postulates.

All right. We discover this individual in an inverted state. That is to say, his considerations have less value than the wall in front of him.

Now, the goal in processing is simply to put him into sufficient communication with this wall that's there in front of him so that he can then see that there is a wall in front of him – this is necessary, you see? – and he's graduated upstairs, you might say, to a recognition of what his postulates have created. Now, he can go on from there and graduate up to where his considerations again have precedent over mechanics.

You see, the mechanics are so much in his road, they are such observable barriers, that he has become unacquainted with them.

Now, it would seem that it wasn't necessary to do this at all. All one would really have to do is get an individual simply to change his mind enough to all of a sudden have an individual who can change his mind – and it doesn't work this way. It's just not workable that way.

The way it does work is to get an individual into thorough communication with the environment – with his solid agreement of his called reality – get him into thorough communication with that, and then, when he has lost his fear of that, to demonstrate to him that he can change his mind.

But unless you get over his blindness, his unreality about something he has already agreed to, he is going against his own agreements. He is fighting his own agreements. He has agreed that there is a wall there, so there's a wall there. And now he's fighting that agreement and he is saying, "There is no wall there," and so on.

In other words, he is fighting his own postulates. So his own postulates are therefore very weak because the wall is there because that's his own postulate. And now without undoing that postulate, he's trying to change his mind about it and say "There is no wall there. There is no wall there." And there's a wall there, all right.

So this is the state in which we find 99 and 89/50ths of our preclears. They've agreed that there is a physical universe, and then having agreed upon it they are sorry for it. And now they want to change their mind about it but to change their mind would make them wrong. An individual who has already said there is something there, if he now says, without changing the first postulate, that there is now nothing there, of course, has got to make himself wrong before he can be right; and if you're wrong your postulates don't stick. That's what man's up against.

We're trying to just clarify this, give it a very fast rundown in case there's any question about this material. Scientology is the science of knowing how to know answers. It's extended a little bit further. It's actually the science of knowing how to know, but we had better say what we are trying to know. "Answers" is there, observably, but we'll just add it: it's the science of knowing how to know answers.

A Scientologist is expected to be able to resolve problems in a great many specialized fields, of which auditing is the first field he addresses. If you know the principles, for instance, of ARC as the modus operandi and the mechanism of agreement, which has been agreed upon itself, you could then take an organization, an industry, a store, a troop of Boy Scouts and so on, and you'd sure know how to straighten out this mess. I mean, if we know the anatomy of confusion… Confusion starts in with an unpredictability and that goes into a confusion and that becomes a mystery. That is a mystery.

And we know why this is such a mystery to these people. That's because basically it was evidently such a confusion to them, and if it was such a confusion to them, it was because they didn't predict something. And this made them wrong, so that's why they think these things are so mysterious.

The only reason they think they are mysterious is because in the past they didn't predict them and then something happened; they said, "I didn't predict that," and this made them confused. And this confusion became intolerable to them – the amount of unpredictability became very, very high, so they closed it all off and said, "It's a mystery and we now don't know anything about that."

And the anatomy of mystery, there, if an individual knew that and ARC and a few other things, he would see this troop of Boy Scouts or this business or this disaster area or anything else that we were connected with, and he would see it would be necessary for the individuals in it to follow a certain pattern in order to regain a communication.

And having regained communication, why, he knows that other matters would remedy themselves. He, in other words, would not have to be an expert in turbines to straighten out a factory which made turbines. All he would probably have to do is get management in touch with the foremen, and the foremen in touch with the workmen, and the workmen in touch with the management and the plant would make turbines, you see? He would be a specialist in knowing how to know answers. But this does not mean that he would have to accumulate an enormous amount of technical information. What he would do would be to get the people who had the technical information and put them into communication, and the job would get done.

All right. The world is every day more violently impressed with mechanics. Oh, it is impressed today with mechanics. The little wheel that goes spin, spin, spin is far, far more important than the little boy who is going spin, spin, spin. The care of the body and the transport of the body, the conduiting of electricity is far more important than any activity life itself could do, so much so that an engineer today working with electronic brains is very swift to tell you "Why, this brain is accurate. This brain is wonderful. This brain…" He doesn't say this but he implies it: "Why, you should actually get down on your knees there and worship this here machine (because if I had the power to do so, you sure would)." But anyhow, "This brain is accurate and it's not like the human mind. Oh, that's capable of enormous error, and it's always wrong and it doesn't come up with good answers." He completely fails to recognize that that electronic brain was conceived by a human mind and that it runs only as long as the self-determinism of at least one mind is feeding it problems to get answers to. And when that no longer occurs, the machine neither has activity, nor use, nor anything else. And if everybody forgot about the machine and wouldn't look at the machine anymore, and didn't use the machine and cut off its power, the machine would probably disappear. Probably right there in the middle of the plant floor it would just pffff – be gone.

The world, then, is very, very impressed with these mechanics. It's so impressed with space and energy and machines, objects, that any of these seem to be more important than a mind – the mind which makes them. And this is curious. But it brings a person down – as he gets more and more impressed with mechanics – brings him down to lower and lower levels of being mechanical. So if you could conceive it, a life-energy production unit has actually dropped out of sight to such a degree that people don't even know they are one anymore.

Now, that is attributable to a dependency upon mechanics and a validation of mechanics. It isn't that you just withdraw from mechanics, you understand, and leave them all alone and "Let's all go off and quit." No, an individual has to be put back into communication with them, mostly because he's afraid of them. And after he's done this he says, "Why, look-ahere," he says, "I don't have to depend on these things. That's nonsense." And the next thing you know he has regained some of his own power and ability.

Now, when it comes to atomic fission, you are producing of course in this society an enormous mystery. You couldn't help but do so; it's unpredictable. In other words, the first bomb was dropped without any warning. This is an unpredictability. Nobody even knew one was being made. That's nice and unpredictable, isn't it?

Well, the world is living in an expectancy of an unpredicted atomic attack. Well, that looks interesting too, doesn't it? I mean, more unpredictability.

Now let's take up the confusion aspect. What do you suppose is the picture of all of these electrons and protons and morons exploding in all directions on a random pattern with great violence? Do you look upon that as a confusion of particles? What would be your chance, by the way, of tracing each one of those particles individually all through the entire mass?

Well, your chance, if you're in good shape, is very good of doing that. But Johnny Q. Public out here knows that he can't trace one card while it's being dealt across the table. That's what cardsharps thrive on. And much less, billions and billions to the billion power electrons and morons exploding all over space – and that's a confusion to him! You see? So here you have an unpredictability and a confusion.

Now, what follows after that? Mystery. And so we have everybody being very secret about all the formulas of fission. They're only in all of the library textbooks that are in all of the libraries in all the world. They're very secret. They are so secret that the notebook of anybody who has studied nuclear physics and so forth, abounds with the basic-formula material of atomic fission. It isn't something somebody suddenly discovered. They just decided to do it. It took billions of dollars to do it and it took a long time for somebody to put up that much money. But they're being very secret about formulas which have been public property – some of them, for heaven's sake, for fifty years. And all of the material that the U.S. had on the manufacture of an atomic bomb has already been transported, by a couple of spies who got executed for it, over to Russia. So who are we keeping it secret from?

Now, that's a problem!

Well, maybe we're not keeping it secret from anybody. Maybe it's just a mystery because it is unpredictable and confusing. So it's a mystery, so therefore we'd better lower all of our communication lines. And before you know it, the U.S. government is going to be almost totally out of communication with its own people. Just on this basis: you get just more and more communication-cut lines, cut lines, cut lines, cut lines.

There's a big mystery coming up. Well, how would you solve this? The way I would solve it, unfortunately, would be to simply point out the fact to the government and to people that atomic disaster was not going to ruin the entire world and that if you accepted a disaster and predicted what was going to happen, then you could resolve the disaster.

Next thing I would do is ask that we make the study of the manufacture of atomic fission a third – or fourth-grade subject, so that we could get in there, you know, and get the children indoctrinated into this great mystery real quick – so it wouldn't scare the kids. Actually, really, all they're doing is scaring the kids these days, which is not an honorable activity for big, grown men.

Now, the role of Scientology is to impede any disintegration which is going on in the realm of knowingness, so on – just to impede it. But if disintegration occurs, why, people who know Scientology ought to just be ready to pick up the pieces.

What do we mean by disintegration? We could mean on any dynamic, in any direction. Now, you could have a society so rigged and so operating that it didn't disintegrate people so quick; you could have one where freedom itself could be achieved. But if you all of a sudden looked at a complete smear-in on the part of a state or a county or a nation or something like that, you still, knowing principles of communication and so forth, could play a very large role in picking up the pieces resulting from that disintegration.

Now, as far as the political significances of Scientology is concerned, I would say offhand probably that it would hew to a democratic line – not Democratic party, but democratic principles – because of our self-determinism. But that does not make it necessarily possessed of a political opinion. A body of knowledge cannot have an opinion on something; it simply extends what is found to be true wherever it is found to be true into greater truths. That's all.

And if something is true, that's all right. And if something is false, well, one simply recognizes that's false. So that as far as a political opinion is concerned, Scientology as such could not have and does not have a political opinion. It knows that certain types of government could be very disintegrative to a people. It knows, for instance, that fascism, military control of areas, and so forth would result in a knockdown of communication lines, which would be very, very unhealthy for that particular area. But this is in the field of Scientology that it is talking, not in the field of politics. And you should remember that rather carefully.

Scientology has no political opinions or allegiances. If one political practice works better than another one according to Scientology, that's fine. But what's working is Scientology, not the political practice. You see that? Don't ever get detoured on this one. Because if you do, you get lost.

Now, the next one is: Does Scientology have any religious conviction? Well, again we have the matter of a body of data having an opinion, and it doesn't have an opinion. I know a lot of witch doctors who make more sense than a lot of priests, and I know a lot of priests that make a lot more sense than a lot of preachers, and I've seen the history records and found out that the Roman Empire didn't kill many Christians. As a matter of fact, in one year, Christians killed more Christians in the city of Alexandria than the Roman Empire executed during all of the existence of the Roman Empire. Yes, one hundred thousand Christians were killed in one year by Christians in Alexandria. Well, that's because of a conviction without wisdom. Because there must have been some kind of a conviction running counter to some kind of a conviction. This demonstrates – this demonstrates there must have been real bad ARC around there someplace. The fact that it might be slightly amusing to you as a datum actually means nothing to the body of data.

So a Scientologist's political and religious convictions would be those that he held to be true and that he had been trained in. I mean, so he's trained to be democratic in his viewpoint, and he's trained to be a Protestant. Why, he's certainly democratic in his viewpoint and a Protestant, unless he sees fit to alter his convictions to some degree or another because a greater wisdom seems to have penetrated those very convictions. But what would he do in that case? He'd probably simply modify or better his convictions.

Now, one of the oldest things that was ever given into the training of wise men, that I know of, was simply this: The basic faith in which the individual was trained and the basic political allegiance of the individual must not be tampered with by the order training him. And it was the order itself which laid that down.

That's an old, old one. They were training very wise men, and that was the first thing that they made sure that they did. They did not tamper with their early religious convictions or their political allegiances – did not tamper with these things.

If the individual cared to alter these things himself, nobody was going to tell him to or tell him not to. Nobody was even going to vaguely persuade him to. It might be in the course of his study that he found certain things that men did laughable or confusing, or he found certain things that men did remediable, but nobody was standing around trying to lead him in to a higher religious or political conviction.

And that is the case very much with Scientology – very, very much the case. If you were to teach a bunch of tribesmen on the banks of the Yap-Yap River, Scientology, and they believed in the great God Boogoo-Boogoo, you would just be wasting your time to start in by training them on the basis that the great God Booga-Booga was nine feet tall, not twelve feet tall. That's about all you'd probably accomplish, too. You would probably convince them he was not quite so tall or something of the sort. You have no business fooling around with a savage tribesman's political or religious convictions or a very, very cultured or supercultivated Oriental potentate's religious or political conviction. His customs, and so forth, are definitely his. What do you want to do, tear up his whole bank? That's not a way to clear a man.

There are very, very many ways to live. All of them can be derived from the same source and from the same sources. And just because they can be doesn't mean they're not different; they are different. So Scientology does not tamper with an individual's religious or political convictions.

The total empire of a Scientologist, and of Scientology and its organizations – from my viewpoint, the total empire is an empire of wisdom. No political empire of any kind. There is no effort on the part of Scientology to own or have the allegiance of billions and billions and billions of people or to have thousands and thousands of tons of masonry piled up, with Scientology written across the top of it or to have certain governments of Earth giving their allegiance to Scientology or something of the sort. This is very, very dull indeed. The empire of Scientology is 100 percent the empire of wisdom and there is no other empire envisioned.

Now, on the basis of mechanics, an auditor is expected to follow the Auditor's Code of 1954. That is part of the Auditor's Handbook and is a very, very solid compilation of things an auditor can do wrong. These are the common denominators of why processing goes wrong. Each one of those things has considerable importance, but the one which tells you to run a command until the comm lag is flat and the one that tells you to run a process until the process is flat, are the two most important parts of that code – very, very much the two most important parts of the code.

So you should know that code. That code was put together to keep you from making mistakes. It depends for its authority only upon this: that when it is disobeyed in processing, an auditor has a lot more work to do. And that's its total authority; it enforces itself.

Not so the Code of Scientologists. The Code of Scientologists is put together on this basis: The entire field of Scientology has suffered by preclears walking around from one Scientologist to another, doing the thing which preclears do best: cut affinity lines. And the society tries to keep the organization, and organizations of Scientology, cut to pieces by cutting their affinity lines. And the first part of the Code of Scientologists is simply an arbitrary slid in front of this one. If we don't permit our affinity lines to be cut, auditor to auditor, auditors to organization and organizations to auditors, we will certainly thrive much better and we will survive much better and we will certainly be a lot happier.

And as we go down the line on those various things, that again is simply material which if we had followed – some years ago had started following this material – today we would have far less difficulty than we do have, just with the public at large.

And the last one says: Don't enter into unseemly conversations on the subject of Scientology with the uninformed. Well, that's no effort to keep the material of Scientology – I will just explain that one real quick. That's no effort to keep the material of Scientology closed up. No, keep those lines open, keep it flowing. But somebody comes along and he's a major in phrenology at the university of something or other, and he says, "Well, I don't believe…" and "Is your conviction…"and so forth. And you just start talking about the weather.

That is, please, an invitation not to go into a fight on the subject of demonstrating, to somebody who doesn't have any brain to talk to anyhow, all about Scientology. In other words, it keeps it out of the argument class. You'll find out that we would have been a lot further ahead if we had never sat down and entered into verbal fisticuffs with everybody who disagreed with us on the subject of Dianetics or Scientology.

You know, I mean the guy started talking about it, and you know, and "It couldn't be true," and "That couldn't be…"He hasn't any information on it. Now, you're going to sit there and give him a complete HCA course?

Well, do you have any idea of how much trouble it is to bring somebody up along through the level of HCA – bring them up to that point? There's a lot of work expended in that department; takes a lot of weeks. Nowadays, with codified training it can be done easier, but you're not going to do that in a drawing room. And it says please recognize this, and don't make the party awful for eight other people while you and a psychologist argue.

Reporter comes in, he wants to know all about it, why don't you tell him all about the weather. Why enter into a big discussion of Scientology with people who cannot hear you? That is not an apathy, that is about the snidest method of handling it you ever heard of. It will make people frantic. It will make them frantic and it will also make citizens out of them.

Now, you will find that a scarcity of preclears sometimes dogs one's footsteps if he's practicing professionally. A scarcity of preclears depends upon the indigence of the auditor, that's all. If an auditor is pretty good, he doesn't have any scarcity of preclears. He can go out and dig them up. Good auditors dig up lots of preclears; there isn't any doubt about this. I mean, it's something that happens.

You should never depend on anybody's industry with regard to the society at large or carrying the word in the society – never depend on anybody's industry but your own. Other people, other organizations and so forth are going to help you all they can, but don't depend on that help. Depend on yourself.