Want to talk to you about not-knowingness. I've already talked to you about knowingness. It seems rather odd that we would talk about not-knowingness, except that any Scientologist knows that it's more important to be able to not-know than it is to be able to know.

Give you an example of this: Why does the patient who has fallen down in various psychotherapies come around looking for a Scientologist? Well, he really isn't doing what he should be doing. He should be trying to remember something but he really isn't doing that, he's trying to forget. And although he will obsessively sit there and maul over his memories, he has found them sufficiently painful that he thinks he needs some aid and assistance to eradicate them.

The commonest, you might say, mental handling that people do in a society is to forget something that they don't like to confront. They put that all behind them. This works so avidly that I've known people that when they did not like another human being, they would actually go so far as to forget his name, even though they knew the person well.

Now, the mechanism of the mind is actually geared in the direction of not-know, it is not geared in the direction of know. Someone is trying to overcome the painfulness of all that that happened to him by learning about it or how to handle it. That's a rather upstairs, superior attitude, quite, quite superior. The ordinary one, you will discover, is they are trying to forget all about it and everything connected with it and push it out of their minds. This is a reactive application of not-knowingness. The old-time psychotherapist would much rather brainwash somebody than put his memory back together again. Much rather cut his brain out than to give him something more to think with, you see? You'll find this trend of not-knowingness all around us.

The very good reason for this is because, essentially, it is a postulate that is made by a thetan so that he can have a game. He not-knows something so that he can, then, have a mystery, he can know about it, he can do things with it. And he is so good at not-knowingness that he not-knows at an automatic rate, probably 186,000 times a second. I mean, it's quite rapid.

The basic machinery on which he's operating is actually not-knowing the past and not-knowing the future and knowing the present and not-knowing the past and not-knowing the future and knowing the present and not-knowing the past and not-knowing the future and knowing the present. So, you'll see at once that he does twice as much not-knowing in a lifetime or in any given period of time as he does knowing. He's not-knowing all the time.

How could he see the wall unless he would not-know what it looked like a moment ago? This is an elementary question and as soon as you start to tangle with it, you tangle of course with your own machinery that is doing it, and you get hung up on the time track and start puzzling over it.

There is a direct exercise which is an outside process, whereby you take the preclear and you ask him what he wouldn't mind not-knowing about that person. When you run this process, you mean at once that the individual does know something about the person. If he not-knows what he already not-knows — see, he doesn't know the person's name, so on — he is liable to end up in a confusion.

The phrase "don't know" was the first phrase used in this and it was used successfully on exterior work. It was quite interesting that it was successful but on a subjective level it turned into a debacle, because confusion itself consists of a series of don't-knows.

What is a confusion? A confusion is a composite body of don't-knows. If you have enough don't-knowingness you're in a very interesting confusion. One of the ways to unconfuse it is to know some datum in it that you didn't know before and it ceases to be a confusion. That's quite interesting because you just have the stable datum and the confusion at work here. This is above the level of particles.

You could don't-know whether your sweetheart is being faithful and you could don't-know where they went and don't-know where they were going to go and don't-know what their constancy would be, and all of a sudden, you get a manifestation something like jealousy. It's merely a composite of these inabilities to discover. And an individual, then, in such a case finds out — this is, by the way, jealousy is one of those — one of those funny things, one of those foolish things. It's based on the contrary rules of evidence which exist in this universe. And the rules of evidence in this universe may very well be posed in somebody's constitution that the innocent shall be innocent until proven guilty.

Truth of the matter is, this universe proves somebody guilty by this mechanism: you can always find evidence of guilt. In other words, if somebody has done something, there is then evidence. But if somebody has not done something, there is no evidence. We could get the fact that he was somewhere else and have a bunch of people swear to it, but this could still be doubted. But if he's found there with blood in his hands, why, of course he did it. It's as simple as that.

So, we have this oddity that there is no such thing as negative evidence, no really such thing as negative evidence. In other words, we assume that he was not guilty, we prove that he was guilty — sort of a way the universe is overweighted in that particular direction.

Well, jealousy works like that. It's very, very easy to prove somebody unfaithful, you see, very simple to prove somebody unfaithful, but almost impossible to prove them innocent. He was gone for two and a half hours. He might say that he was out buying a newspaper but where was he? Then he says, "Well, you can ask Joe." Well, that wouldn't do any good, Joe would always lie concerning him. Don't you see how that could go on and on and on, and how it does go on and on?

Well, this is because of the rules of evidence as they exist in this universe. And therefore, they make justice a very hard thing to accomplish or establish. But justice is really something that is accomplished, it isn't something that is simply written up in a lawbook.

Now, here we have a singular case. All of these "don't-knows" have a relatively few knows that go with them. Just extend this into don't-know and not-know and know, and we find out that there can be a great many more don't-knows than know. The datum no longer exists, for instance. "Just who was it just who was it that pulled me out of the river," or something of the sort. "It was a dark night and the battle was waging hot and somebody grabbed me as I went into the river and pulled me out again and I'd like to say thank you. Who was it?" Well, he doesn't know who you were and you don't know who he was, and that's the end of it. So you have two don't-knows which match up and they never or rarely meet.

Life consists of an enormous number of discontinued or unfinished stories. We're always being yanked off the time track before we find out what really happened. It's unlike storybooks. It's enough to drive a man to be an author — he sits down and finishes these stories.

But if you think of the fascinating, very titillating, bits of this and that: "And she walked out of the house and slammed the door."

"Well, then what happened?"

"Well, I don't know."

You had something confided in you by a friend and he has told you that he was in a terrible amount of difficulty. He was either going to prison or he was going to be shot or something was going to happen to him and he confided this great amount of trouble to you and then went away. And a year later, we still haven't seen the man again. We don't know the end of that story. Maybe we never see him again. Did he go to prison? Did he go free?

It's very often quite disheartening to have some tremendously dramatic incident of this character which has been pointed out to us by somebody, have him turn up three, four, five months, and say, "Oh, well, that all worked out." And he just dismisses it. He's had us on edge.

This is the way life runs, not the way storybooks run. If you wrote a storybook the way life runs, you would write half of the first chapter and then skip that chapter, change to a new set of characters and begin another chapter. But you wouldn't begin this new chapter, you would have it going on — it had gone on for some time at the moment you entered it and it would contain an — large number of factors that were never explained in that chapter at all. That chapter ends with a question mark. The next one we just leave blank. And that's because there can be so many more don't-knows than there can knows. Why? Well, just from that basic fact: there are just twice as many not-knows as there are knows. And thetans sit around inventing things to know about and then forget what they were supposed to know about them, and that becomes very puzzling too.

Now, one of the more powerful processes which work on this don't-know­know basis is one you've probably never heard of before, but this is an interesting process; it has to do with this just running problems.

See, the basic problem is a don't-know. And if you get the individual figuring out what he is going to do about it, if you can get him to feel, in this problem he has invented, the don't-know, you see, he's — "Can you figure out if that would really be a problem? Could you get yourself really figuring on that?" You have to ask him to do that, because that puts the don't-know in it. And it's very tricky, but you're just injecting not-knowingness into the bank. You're taking not-know off of automatic and putting it on to a self-determined effort when you are running problems. (I was joking. You have heard about this, problems, but maybe you never looked at it exactly in that light.)

Now, there's another one which is a little bit different; it's curiosity. And you just say, "What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?" Naturally the fellow goes on with a curiosity, curiosity, curiosity, merely which — it just sums up to a whole series of don't-knows, you see. And you're making him on a lower harmonic run not-know. See, they belong — all these processes belong on this same scale. All right.

We take this fellow out here and we have him look at another human being and we ask him this question, "Tell me something you wouldn't mind not-knowing about that person."

Now, he says, "I — I — I wouldn't mind not-knowing his name."

That is not the correct answer. The correct answer is — the fellow has a yellow topcoat on with a pink collar, or something of the sort, and an orange hat. And he says, "I wouldn't mind not-knowing the pink collar." It has to be something that is there that he can not-know. Follow me?

Well, it's quite amazing when you start off on this line of action, working it on a gradient scale, asking him every now and then to "Look around the environment and tell me something here that you could have," which repairs his havingness. You understand that if everything is more or less based on not-knowingness, you start running much not-knowingness, your havingness starts down. Now, not only does it start down, but whole objects start disappearing.

You would be a very bad auditor if you did what almost every auditor does the first time this happens to him: the pink collar disappears. And the fellow says, "It's gone."

And you say, "It — it went?"

And he says, "Yes."

And you — "Well, what else wouldn't you mind not-knowing? Well, take that woman over there in the purple chemise. What wouldn't you mind not-knowing about her?" you know.

He says, "Well, the purple chemise — she's gone!"

"You mean the whole person is gone? What's the matter? Isn't she still there? Can't you see her?"

Auditors have been very upset by this. Because the next thing you know, people, buildings, much less clothing and ornaments, just start to disappear at a mad rate. And if you keep on running the process, you recover in the preclear the ability to simply not-know the whole universe — boom. Then he has to postulate that he knows it in order to see it again. Now, it doesn't disappear for you, so why should you worry?

Probably the classic blunder of all of this was running this subjectively. It's not a good subjective process at all, it's a very poor one. It just eats up things like mad. But a preclear was running this subjectively and said, "Ha! What do you know? I did. The data which I — I — I don't even — I can't even tell you about it now. It's gone!" And the auditor obligingly told him what the data was. Hate to tell you who the auditor was and who the preclear was. Anyhow. It was pretty wild. It was very upsetting. Not-knowingness didn't work on this preclear for about twelve sessions. He was very upset.

He should have been taken out and given not-knowingness as an exterior drill, which is where it belongs. It belongs outside and it belongs on objects and it should be accompanied with the — something like the basic Trio command "Look around here and tell me something you could have." And you'll find that it's quite workable.

Well, now, its workability is at first an automaticity, and gradually this automaticity gets under control. But very many peculiar visual phenomena turn on, very many. And amongst the first and foremost of these, your preclear is liable to discover something about this universe, and there is something to discover about this universe.

This universe does not happen to consist of a number of well-lit objects. This universe consists of enormous amount of space, most of which has very little if any light in it at all. This is a black universe. It's a terrifying fact, by the way, when you first start to run this on a preclear. You run Solids in this fashion: you turn off the light, draw the blinds, darken up the room and you say, "Okay. Make that wall over there in front of you solid."

He can't see it. How could he make it solid? Well, that's a silly thing to have him doing. He has to see something to make it solid. You keep it up. You tell him, "Something on your right — that wall on your right now, make it solid. Good. Wall behind you, make it more solid. Good. Wall on your left, make it more solid. Good. Now the ceiling of the room, make it more solid. Good. The floor, make it more solid. Good."

All of a sudden, your preclear says, "Dzz-zuh-zuh-zuh-zzz. I don't like this at all. This is something I can do without."

And you say, "That's fine. Keep it up, now. The wall in front of you."

And he says, "But I'm getting scared." He might only be getting apathetic at first. He comes up on the emotional scale. But he is running the truth. That is the truth. The walls are black. The ceiling is black.

Somebody comes out of his body and looks at his body and says, "It's just a black mass," he's absolutely right. It is a black mass. What else is it? Because until light hits it and it reflects something, it is black. It has no integral light-developing characteristics of its own.

A thetan can walk up to something and do a firefly, you know, shine, and he'll see the object. But this universe is rigged so that when the sun does not shine, when electric lights or other means are not employed to cause a reflection to take place all objects are black.

Therefore an individual gets sold on this idea there must be light. Why should he be sold on that? Why do people go blind? They go blind because they begin to avoid light.

Now, this is the dirtiest trick that you can do to a thetan: You start shooting juice at him with lots of light in it until he avoids light and he'll go blind. That's all. Why does he go blind? Because there is nothing to see by if he is allergic to light. It's as simple as that, you see. This is one of these idiotically simple propositions, which is so idiotic and so simple that there practically is no thetan on Earth today who knows it. It's just to that level of knowledge, that fundamental.

All objects are black, planets are black, and just below their surfaces, suns are black. You don't imagine that just below its explosive fire, its fission, that the sun is anything else but black, it certainly — there's no light inside of it. I don't know how deep light goes into objects, nobody has ever measured that. They write books about it but they've never measured it. But it is on the order of milli-milli-millimeters. It hits the object and it flashes back and you're looking at a reflection all the time — reflection, reflection. Now you begin to object to reflection.

Did you ever get annoyed at sunlight flashing on a car window as it passed you? Well, that's just one little step on the road to blindness. You didn't like light. You said at that moment, "I don't like that light." Lightning strikes near at hand and whether God had anything to do with it or not is beside the point. But it certainly didn't leave your vision in very apple-pie order. Your vision was a little bit worse after that, because everything had it — a tendency to be on the chain of lightning.

Now, why do your facsimiles dominantly include lightness? Why are they all light? Well, that's because they're pictures of the surfaces of things. And you have just as many facsimiles on this planet, if not more, that have no light in them as you have with light in them. Simple as that.

Now, you take a vacuum — all of a sudden, crash! All of this bright light feeds into some supercold object in front of the chap, something like that wham. He says, "I don't like that." And he himself generates some blackness to cover up all that light and after that he wonders what happened to his visio. A tolerance of blackness is then necessary to vision. And a tolerance of photons or any kind of light, fluid or particle, is equally necessary to vision.

Now, I won't tell you offhand the best, finest way in the world to remedy these things, but once you know the anatomy of something, it's rather easy to adopt processes that straighten it out.

Allergy to brightness and allergy to darkness are alike destructive of vision. Now every once in a while you get a black visio preclear. I've had a visio — black visio preclear that had a sense of smell that was very acute and could smell engrams. That's right. He could get their odor. But he could not get the sight in them. All right. Allergies of one kind or another become suspended on the track this way. You'll find preclears that have a consistent, horrible odor. You'll have preclears that have sound which just runs on continuously.

Sound, as well, in this universe is an interesting phenomenon since it depends on air. And out beyond the sphere of Earth, there isn't any sound, except in an electronic flash. If someone were to explode some electronic charge in your vicinity and the waves of it hit you, those waves would carry the sound, whether there was any there — there or not. So one basically associates sound with light and it's not unusual to have somebody get the two of them mixed up so that he sees sounds and hears light, because they both came together in the first — in his first encountering of the phenomena.

Now, keeping in mind that it is no effect on the thetan — effect over thataway, all effect on something else — you run these processes, of course, with him creating this effect on various things and objects. And as he does this, you find his guilt complexes and a lot of other nonsense are liable to run off. This is an objective use of the process. Have him make objects black. Have him resist light. Have him deny light to certain objects and so on and you get much of the phenomena of the not-knowing process. The reason prenatals are so interestingly difficult to do anything with is they have no visio.

To many people, to see is to know. If they can't see, they don't know. And that's very silly because a great many of the animal kingdom are involved exclusively in knowing by smelling, in knowing by hearing, and there are even some of them that know only by vibration of one contact another.

If you said, "One knows of the existence of a far object by motion," you would then have the common denominator to all of these varieties of perception. The common denominator to all perception is motion. When a person cannot tolerate motion, they are then incapable of perceiving, to a very marked degree.

And let's look over our rest point with motion on both side of it — picture of some preclear who is sitting too still. It's for sure somebody has been too much in motion in his vicinity and he has tried to set the example — almost all aberration comes about from setting an example. He sets an example of motionlessness in the hopes that this thing will duplicate him and sit still. He tries to do it by mimicry, don't you see.

So the more — if a person is allergic to children, the more the children run around the house and get into a commotion, the stiller the person will sit, you see, until he's almost a log and impossible to do anything. He's trying to stop those children.

You'll find many a schoolteacher is in very interesting condition. They've turned off their perceptions, they're going half-blind and so forth — there's all that motion out there. Well, they do not feel that it is right to stop a lot of that motion. They know they're supposed to be kind to the children but, actually, basically they have perhaps a tremendous intolerance for that much motion and between the two of them, they have an awful time.

We had a chap, one time, had a hearing aid, who was the teacher who normally took over study hall in a large high school. And he had a hearing aid and his hearing aid almost every week had to be turned up a new notch. And we took his hearing aid away from him simply by bringing into light this one factor only — nothing else was done for his case, just a little bit of Straightwire and two-way comm. And he was the coach of the football team as well as the study hall supervisor and, as a result, he didn't want his boys there in the study hall when they were in the study hall to get too upset with him, so he was just trying to make them be quiet without really bawling them out or anything, and he just turned his sound right straight off. If he didn't hear them, of course, he wouldn't have to object to what they were doing, and so he made himself nicely deaf on this basis. But basically, this would have been discovered to be an intolerance of motion.

If you want to turn on insanity — the feeling of insanity in somebody temporarily just synthesize it, mock it up. You don't have to feed them LSD or some other preposterous witch doctor potion. What you should do, is get them to get the idea that they must reach but can't reach. You see, that's a stop point, if you ask them to get that idea, or that they must withdraw but can't withdraw. And just ask them to synthesize that and to get the effort to withdraw but the feeling they must not, you will get them feeling this thing called a glee of insanity. It actually can be turned on that synthetically and then it just passes off and that's the end of that. It doesn't do the case any damage. A thetan should be able to do anything — even go nuts and recover. All right.

The other one is therapeutic. (This is just a drill.) You'll find somebody who is dramatizing sanity (and this is very germane to you auditors, very germane), he doesn't have much perception and he doesn't want to do very much in the way of a process! He gets a feeling of franticness. Well, now, that's just motion. He just starts — you take him off the rest point and push him into the motion, he'll get frantic.

But there's a special variety of this that you ought to know about and this special variety is an interesting one — very, very interesting. It is insanity, motion of.

Now, insanity is evidently some kind of a very tricky implant on the track. It is an electronic, it is of no vast importance but it is something special. You see, insanity is not the gradient scale of "When I get totally unable, I will be insane." That's not correct.