I want to give you some basic material on Effort Processing. I won’t go over this very broadly or widely, but I am going to give it a quick skim with some new basic axioms to lead in and then I will give you an example of what might possibly happen to you in this process.

At this moment Effort Processing is an experimental procedure. Back in Elizabeth, whenever we had an experimental procedure the students would take to this experimental procedure rather than learning standard procedures and there would be consequent tumult. So this was taken into account by all of the staff and it was finally announced that the best thing to do with an experimental procedure was to keep it under hack — be very careful with it and not let anybody know about it. Then things would really become very interesting, because some little factor of this experimental procedure would leak, and the students would hear about it anyhow and the preclears would hear about this wonderful new gimmigahoojit and nobody would know anything about it but they would do it anyway. So things got more interesting than otherwise.

Therefore, the wisest course on any line like this, when an experimental procedure is in the offing and it is fairly well established that there is something there, is to start talking about it as much as you know when you know it. That is easily the wisest course. Then people who start experimenting with it at least know as much as research knows about it. And they also know that it is experimental, not that “something is being kept under lock and key because it is so good that it would invalidate the textbook” or “because the instructors want to keep it to themselves so they can make spectacular recoveries in cases, which the students can’t.” I have heard some interesting speculations on this.

Now, in mathematics there is the analogy of the two-dimensional worm. A two-dimensional worm would be a worm who was two-dimensional who lived on a two-dimensional plane. This plane would have length and breadth but no depth, no height. It so happens that a two- dimensional worm would be very alarmed if he suddenly found a three-dimensional pole in his environment.

This analogy is used by mathematicians to cow people who dare question the existence of a fourth dimension. They say, “Trying to find a fourth dimension would be, to a person used to three dimensions, like a two dimensional worm finding a third dimension, you see?” That confuses everybody, so people let mathematicians go around happily saying “a equals b and the square root of Boolean algebra as turned over to the ruddy rods makes and demonstrates equatively1 a fourth-dimensional existence.” Nobody dares say, if they know about the two- dimensional worm, “That’s the lousiest mathematics I ever saw” — which it is.

But this analogy has a much higher level of workability in Dianetics. Man was going along on a two-dimensional basis. He didn’t think there was any third dimension. The third dimension might be considered to be life.

Man has known he was alive but, particularly in the last hundred years, he has been building things which were “alive.” He has built some very beautiful locomotives; they are alive — obviously! “They die, don’t they? You let the fires go out in them and they are dead. So you could start and stop life, and life after all is just an engine. Man eats, and you stuff food into a locomotive, don’t you? So, naturally, all human beings are just machines; they are carbon- oxygen engines.” And he didn’t find anything else sitting there, so he said, “Well, now we’ve got it all solved.”But there are nineteen million people in the insane asylums, there is a steady parade of people with psychosomatic illnesses walking in and out of the doctors’ offices at vast expense, there is war and politics; all of these various things are taking place in the society and “science” is going along very happily saying, “You see, we’ve got the problem all solved. Man is just another engine; he’s a heat engine. And that’s all there is to it; we don’t have to worry about it any further.”

You say, “Hey, what about the nineteen million insane and psychosomatic illnesses and so forth?”

“Well, they don’t exist! If they do exist, it’s just because the machine’s parts are wrong.”

Therefore, that gives you the way you cure psychosomatic illnesses, insanity and so forth. You have an engine and everybody knows the way you fix steam locomotives is to take off the left drive wheel, put it on the right drive-wheel side, then put it on a machine-shop lathe and cut it down a little bit and put it back on; or you put a little bit more bushing on a piston or you put a little bit more stuffing in or you clean out the flues.

That clean-out-the-flues idea is very interesting. As a matter of fact, I think the clean-out-the- flues theory kept radio solvent for about twenty years. And this clean-out-the-flues theory was a very interesting theory from another standpoint. Have you ever, when walking down the street, seen these turning, red-and-white-striped barber poles? If you look carefully at one you will see, in its symbolised design, a basin. That barber pole spins and there is a basin there. That is the symbol of medicine; it means “Here we let blood.” And of course when you clean out the flues you are in fine shape. So the best way to clean out the flues, if you can’t do it any other way, is to cut a man’s artery or a vein and let him bleed for a while, collect this blood, and then he is obviously well.

Of course, nobody ever got well from this process but everybody knew that all you had to do was clean out the flues of a steam engine and it would run better.

There may not be any validity of any character whatsoever to comparing your data with the real universe. This might not be a useful procedure; certainly it comes into question because it has been neglected so often. So people go on cleaning out the flues and carving up the parts — ”Too many gimmigahoojits on this engine; we’ll throw three away.”

Now, medicine has been unable to build any parts back into the body. With plastic surgery they occasionally replace skin. But this is the idea of rebuilding the part; medicine has not been able to do this. They have hopefully tried to; they have done transplantation of parts but they have not created a part to transplant into the human organism. So all they can do is take away parts, and even in medicine there is a statement made concerning this process. They call it sacrificing: The way you make people well is by causing them to sacrifice. “You have got to give up cigarettes, you have got to give up eating, you have got to give up this; you mustn’t work so hard, just take it easy, you must take a rest” — in other words, take away a person’s work, take away his interest and so on.

They got all this from the basis of taking parts off the steam engine. If a fellow has a wart they burn it off. That isn’t so bad, but if the fellow has skin which might possibly be cancerous, they cut it off. If a fellow’s hand is suffering from gangrene, they chop it off. If, now, his arm isn’t doing so well or it gets in trouble, they chop it off. The only limit on the sacrifice technique is, of course, the whole body. And then the undertakers can make money with it.

The point here is that they applied this to the mind! That is what is wonderful — that they would take something they knew nothing about whatsoever and start to cut it up or shoot electricity into it. You start to add up all of the data and you find out nobody gets well with these techniques. But obviously you fix a steam engine by blowing the flues out or taking a new piston and putting it in place of the old one, or you find out that the levers aren’t working quite right so you put a new connection on the levers and cut out the old complicated connections and so forth. Obviously this is the way to fix steam engines. So they go ahead and carve on the prefrontal lobes and carve on this and carve on that and burn it up with electricity and carve on something else. But nobody is getting well; everybody is getting sicker on this treatment.

People who formerly would get angry and scream and so on get fixed up so they don’t get angry and scream. Then the doctors write it down in their medical record and say, “Improvement was noticed in this symptom.” But they don’t add on to the same column “This patient was no longer able to control any bodily function.” So, nobody got well with this technique, nobody compared it to the real universe, but it kept on being done.

All I am trying to demonstrate to you is that about a hundred years ago the whole field hit a dead end. For a hundred years or something like that the two-dimensional worm had been walking on a two-dimensional plane, and once in a while somebody like Freud would walk along this two-dimensional plane and all of a sudden run into a pole. There was not supposed to be anything there! There would be a third dimension. But there was no third dimension, therefore there was nothing there. And the person would go away happily and explain it all by “. . . the ruddy rods and gimmigahoojits, and the rabbits come out of the hat anyhow and you have seen it on the stage, so it is just another sort of a situation and we should just abandon the whole thing. Obviously nothing can happen.”

Then another two-dimensional worm comes crawling along and hits this pole — bang! No pole there, obviously. The next worm comes along and he hits the pole. The first few worms go off and say to all the other worms, “Hey, there’s a pole back there, a third dimension.” And the other worms all say, “Yeah? You been to see your psychoanalyst lately?” And the other worms go over and walk all across the area, but they don’t find this pole so they say it isn’t there.

That is what we have done in Dianetics, essentially. We ran into this pole and started up it. We are in the process of going up the pole.

Now, any worm who gets up this pole any distance is liable to get rather dizzy. He starts looking around and he tries to tell the other two-dimensional worms about it and they say, “No, you’re not up any pole; it doesn’t exist.” So he begins to wonder about himself.

The process of research in Dianetics has been a better and better identification of this pole. And the name of this pole is life “energy.” It exists, but it doesn’t exist. But it does exist. It is wonderful. It is an energy that doesn’t follow the rules of other energy; it doesn’t have wavelength, mass or weight, which immediately strikes it out as existing in the material universe. If it existed in time and space but had no wavelength, mass or weight, of course it wouldn’t exist, which would immediately throw it out. But it does exist because there is something there.

This is the level of the second echelon. We are taking this viewpoint on how life is operating in the material universe and looking at the material universe from this point of operation. We are a little way up the pole. At this time all we are looking at is the two-dimensional plane. We know there is a pole and we know that as long as we consider there is a pole there we get good results. But the second we say “There is no pole here,” we don’t get any results. So by test alone we know there is a pole. What this life energy is — its identification, isolation, conduiting of it, whatever else can be done with it — is a second echelon of research.

So we are taking the viewpoint of this borderline between echelon one and echelon two in research and looking back at the material universe and finding out what this energy is doing to the material universe. Taking that viewpoint and doing that permits us to accomplish a considerable advance in knowledge. It permits us even to examine knowledge itself. We have cracked something that people have been trying to crack for a long while: epistemology, the study of knowledge.

What is knowledge? We find that first and foremost knowledge and life energy are identical — that thought, knowledge and life energy are the same order of magnitude from the same source.

They may be different facets of the same thing but they are more or less the same thing. When you think of knowledge you can think of it as being life energy. When you think of thought you can think of it as being life energy — because what you are studying is the effect of this Q factor, this theta (theta is just, after all, a mathematical symbol applied to something which is inexactly known) viewpoint on the material universe. The moment we get that viewpoint we see some very interesting things. The whole physical universe starts to take on a different complexion to us and we start to be able to handle it much better.

I will give you a few very basic axioms concerning this.

Basically, all thought is concerned with motion. That is an axiom: All thought is concerned with motion. Now, this might seem very strange, but it is concerned with what motion? It is concerned with physical-universe motion. It is concerned with vibration in space and time. The concern of thought with this motion is the calculation of effort. That is all anybody ever thinks about: the calculation of effort.

Effort is motion and direction. That is to say, you channel motion into a certain direction, and this is channeling effort.

I want to give you a very small example of what I mean when I say that thought is concerned with effort. One takes a lot of data and he makes a conclusion out of this data. Conclusions are directed toward the inhibition, maintenance or acceleration of efforts — in other words, the calculation of effort and the direction of effort (the effort has direction anyhow).

A man walks up to a table and he says, “I’m going to pick up this table.” He makes a calculation of how much physical effort he is going to put forward into picking up this table and he picks it up.

He calculates effort to pick up the table; he looks at it and experience tells him the table weighs so much, the tension has to be so much, his hands have to be in such and such a place and so on. All this calculation is done automatically. There is no difficulty; he picks it up very easily. He is right! That is being right.

Or he makes a calculation of how much effort it takes to pick up this table and then he leans over and says, “I’ll pick up the table,” but can’t do it; he has done a wrong calculation of effort. That is being wrong. That is all there is to being right and wrong.

Or he walks over and makes a calculation of effort, and he calculates that this table is terrifically heavy when it is actually very light, so he picks it up and it flies up in his face. Did you ever feel particularly silly from having calculated that you were at the bottom of a step and then finding your foot hanging in the air? That is the physical representation of being right and wrong.

Now, a datum is a thought facsimile of a physical action. A datum, in other words, is an observation of physical action. You get a lot of data together — you have a number of observations of physical action — and from this you can postulate a conclusion. That conclusion has to do with nothing but effort. That is all. No matter how complex the problem, no matter how high the imagination flies, no matter what morals, ethics or anything else are involved in this, it is nothing more nor less than a calculation of effort.

There are many types of effort which can be calculated. They all stem from physical effort. Thought is estimate of effort; words are descriptive of physical effort. And there is the interesting fact that on the basis of the amount of effort which has been expended in the past one learns what effort can be expended in the future. One learns from what effort has keen received in the past, or counter-effort to his own efforts; from whatever counterefforts have been received in the past one can estimate future counter-efforts.

The whole test of whether or not one’s calculation is correct is solely workability. Does it forward his conquest of the physical universe? If it actually forwards his conquest of the physical universe along all his dynamics, that is a good calculation. If his calculation does not forward this, it is wrong wherever it fails to accomplish his conquest of the physical universe. A solution is as wrong as it fails to aid any of the dynamics.

Now, the calculations are directed toward (1) the inhibition, destruction or decrease of hostile counter-efforts — efforts which are hostile to survival along any of the dynamics — and (2) the increase and promotion of assisting efforts — prosurvival efforts. The organism is trying to build up, multiply, enhance, maintain or increase all of those existing efforts in the physical universe which will assist it in its survival, and it is trying to destroy, knock out, remove, inhibit, kill, dampen, put aside, vanquish or make vanish any effort hostile to its survival along any dynamic.

Aberration is measurable by this factor alone: whether an individual accomplishes the destruction and inhibition of hostile things or doesn’t. An individual who encourages or fosters hostile things along any of the dynamics is aberrated. An individual who kills, depresses or suppresses any of the dynamics or any action in the physical universe which is friendly to the dynamics is aberrated. And he is aberrated to the degree that he reverses this optimum solution.

For instance, an American suddenly harbors an enemy spy. That is aberrated, obviously, because as an American it is in his interest to favor his country. There, supposedly, his best survival lies, and not only his own survival but that of his dynamic answering this. He is all of a sudden favoring and multiplying something which is hostile to his country. That is aberrated.

Or there is somebody who is favoring murder, killing and so forth. He is favoring the murder or death of individuals who are needed by other individuals, therefore he is aberrated.

Now, this gives us the difference between aberration and sanity. Sanity is the measure of how ably an individual assists things which assist survival and inhibits things which inhibit survival. That is sanity. And insanity is an individual assisting things which inhibit survival and destroying things which assist survival. In other words, an insane individual assists what shouldn’t be assisted and inhibits what shouldn’t be inhibited.

This is calculation of effort; it all boils down to calculation of effort.

You can see, then, that an individual who is ignorant can give a manifestation of insanity. An individual who doesn’t have data can go out and make the most fantastic blunders. For instance, little Willie goes out and gets in the car; the car is in gear and it has the brake on. He turns on the car key, steps on the starter and the starter gears fly off like somebody’s teeth in a dentist chair. He doesn’t give a darn — it is nothing to him. Only it sure is! That car is used for going to the grocery store to get groceries, and little Willie is fond of eating. That car is used for taking Papa to work where he makes money which buys groceries and pays the rent, and little Willie is very fond of having a dry house to sleep in. So Willie’s data is all haywire. This is why children look insane to so many people; they just don’t have data, so they do weird things.

However, a lot of kids go out and do these things, well knowing their result. They have been turned around to a point where they are trying to destroy their own families. People say, “Well, it’s quite accidental. It’s just childlike for him to go outside the window every night when I come home, and scream while I’m trying to read the newspaper. This is just children; that’s the way they are, you know.” Then they walk out the front door and find the roller skates on the front step or something: “Well, it’s just that children are careless.”

This child has had it demonstrated to him that everything around him is so anti-child-survival that he has begun to strike back in the only way he knows: covertly, with roller skates and so forth. From the viewpoint of the child, the adult who inhibits the survival of the child is crazy to do this. And from the standpoint of the adult, the child is crazy to do what he does. It is very aberrated both ways.

For the lack of data, a person can be very aberrated.

Take troops, for example. Troops are usually very ignorant. They come into a city and they blow up its libraries and draw mustaches on all of the masters’ paintings in the galleries and so forth. They do this because they are stupid. They just have no data. They don’t see how art applies to a city or how art helps anybody’s culture or helps any survival in any direction. To them “Art’s just sort of nonsense. Anybody that would paint is a darn fool.” They just never got the data!

It may seem to you that saying the mind is concerned wholly with the estimation of effort would be a rather extreme statement, but it is not. It is a very basic statement, terrifically basic, and I will show you why this is.

We have a universe of motion. From the point of view of theta — without identifying theta too well — we have a universe of motion. The only way we can do anything with this universe of motion is to take the inherent forces and natural laws of that universe and turn its forces against itself. The energy comes in and life turns it around and sends it back at the physical universe.

Life is doing the same trick as the fellow who plays a very good game of tennis and who knows how to make a bucket out of his racket. He is holding his racket up, the ball comes over at just about the speed of light, and if he immediately faced that ball and hit it as hard as he could hit it, it would probably go right on through the racket — unless he rolled the ball off the racket. In other words, it comes in on one side of the racket and as he hits the ball, all he has to do is roll his racket a little bit and the ball will come in and go right back on its own velocity: That is a reflection of direction. He changes the direction of the ball and uses some of the energy in the change.

That is what life is doing. Theta takes facsimiles of all of this force, all of this effort and direction and so forth in the physical universe, and then fits these facsimiles together, and every time the physical universe fires another volley, theta fires it right back at the physical universe. The first thing you know, theta knows a lot about the laws of the physical universe.

An engineer goes out and sees a great big roaring river like the Columbia and he says, “I think I’ll put a dam across this thing and I think I’ll fix up this whole plain here and make a lot of new agricultural land and make a lot of electricity and new wealth.” How does he do it? One of the first ways he does it is by damming up the river and using its force. He makes the river’s force dam it up in the cofferdams. He uses the force of the river to do many things. And some other river someplace has already been conquered, so it is furnishing force and furnishing electricity and making tools. And the engineer takes these tools and conquers this new river.

At no time does theta apply any actual direct energy to the physical universe. But at all times theta takes physical-universe motion and energy and applies it to the physical universe, and in order to do this it takes pictures, facsimiles, of the stuff and uses these to measure the incoming forces and throw them out again.

The conquest of the physical universe is learning a little bit about the physical universe and turning it back on itself again. Then theta knows more and has more weapons, so it does more about it.

It is very hard for anybody to conceive what happens in the manufacture of a culture. How does a culture come into being? How many factors are contained in that culture? How much knowledge is contained in it and how much physical-universe force is there which has been thrown into that culture and redirected back into the physical universe again? It is fantastic, the terrific quantity of it.

If you suddenly dropped some atom bombs on American cities, you would knock out a carburetion plant here, a plant that made the clamps that made it possible to manufacture copper wire there, a radio shop someplace else which was the only radio shop that really knew how to solder, a big steel corporation someplace else and the little guy who does all of the figuring on computers for the Burroughs Adding Machine Company — and suddenly holes would appear all over.

War, rolling destructively across any nation in the past, was destructive to that nation — not by destroying men, but by destroying the techniques by which that nation caught the physical universe on the fly and threw it back at the physical universe. There was a tremendous network of culture and all of a sudden war rolled across it. There went the Greeks and there went Rome. If somehow or other you could preserve this culture, it would be all right.

How long does it take to educate one man in college? (This is beside the point of whether it is worthwhile or not.) How long does it take to educate him?

The Germans very practically used police dogs for scouting duty. And they said very practically, “It takes two years to build and train a dog. It takes twenty-one years to build and train a man. Therefore it is more economical to use dogs.” This is the very unemotional computation of which only Germans are capable.

Two years ago, 280,000 young men and women graduated in this country with the degree of Bachelor of Art. It is beside the point whether or not they were artists. The point is, these are people who have been given an enormous amount of technology and who can apply that technology in their average everyday living. It takes years and years, scores of years — really, hundreds and thousands of years — for a culture to come up from scratch to a point where it learns just this one thing: How do you calculate the counter-efforts of the physical universe and translate them and reconquer the physical universe with those counter-efforts by putting out your own efforts? In comes a counter-effort, you turn it into an effort of your own and it goes out again.

How anybody could contemplate blowing up civilisation I don’t know. It makes one tired to think of trying to put together a civilization like this; it is a very exhausting thought. One would think offhand that if all civilization on the face of the earth were destroyed, life would never rise again. It is not even true, though, to say that if all life were destroyed on the face of the earth, life organisms and man would not come into existence again. But it would sure be a setback!

The modus operandi of conquering the physical universe doesn’t exist very much with earthworms. They do pretty well; they keep the soil churned up so that trees and grass and a lot of other things can grow. It isn’t very solidly in the hands of tigers. It certainly isn’t in the hands of donkeys. But not one of these species is capable of gross conquest, big conquest, like taking a mountain that sits in the middle of a town and then going into it with hydraulic hoses and steam shovels and moving the mountain over someplace else. Man is capable of that.

Life can exist as a graduated staff. First is the little unit which can live on sunlight and minerals, and that supports a unit which is a little less basic and a little more complex, and that supports one a little less basic and a little more complex. Each one as it goes up has a little bit greater mobility, until they finally work up to a point where there is a good workable organism which can translate effort analytically and handle it — in other words, accomplish gross conquest. You can look at this, and what is it all the way on up? It is a calculation of effort. Right down there in the most basic efforts is the effort of taking sunlight and minerals and making biochemical byproducts, which is a wonderful gimmick. I sometimes wonder if the algae and plankton might not know a lot more about life than man does.

So, as you work it on up into a staff of complexity that gets higher and higher and more and more complex, each step is a calculation of effort, more and more effort. And that is what all these life forms are doing.

Any life form, then, is supported, down to this basic unit, by other life forms. This shows the importance of a life form to life. A life form is as important to life as it itself conquers the physical universe or as it supports whatever is conquering the physical universe as a life form. It is either important for supporting or important for doing. And we get a tremendous, complex, coordinated effort — which is not very random, when we really think of it — supporting man’s conquest of the physical universe.

Some fellow decides he wants brown bread. He is going to sell brown bread because people have heard that brown bread is healthier than white bread. Therefore he is going to color white bread brown and people will buy more of it. Whether or not this is desirable is beside the point. The point is that a lot of little bacteria will really get in there and slug for him and the next thing you know, he has the finest brown dye in the world and he can color that white bread.

All around us we see life forms which are using the forces of the physical universe, and each one of those life forms is in the same position of viewpoint. It is observing the motion of the physical universe and is coordinating that motion into effort and utilising it for further conquest of the physical universe. Each species, each entity, takes what is inhibitive to its own survival and seeks to destroy it and takes whatever assists its own survival and seeks to support it. It is a very beautiful, complex plan. It really makes sense when you look at it from this standpoint. It makes sense if only from this viewpoint: that by knowing these things you can make a highly complex organism such as man much more effective in his operation against the physical universe by disenturbulating the individual from the effects of past upsets when the counter- efforts were too strong or were too weak to support him.

Now, that is what we are doing. We are fixing it up so that individuals can better assist those things which assist them and inhibit those things which inhibit them. And we are fixing it up so that we as individuals aren’t surrounded by a lot of life forms that have been hit by so much countereffort in all different directions that they begin to assist things which are inhibitive to survival and inhibit things which assist survival. That we call insane, crazy, Serrated and a lot of other things, and that is all insanity, craziness and being aberrated is.

A man is as intelligent as he can calculate effort. Intelligence also consists in bringing alignment into randomity.

We will cover randomity as a definition in the next part of this lecture and go into Effort Processing from there.