A brief afternoon lecture of the 26th of January. The process which turned on some snivels and so on should at least have demonstrated to you that processes can do something. [laughter]

Now, in the interests of you as an Instructor, rather than you as an auditor, you will discover that there are certain very sweeping simplicities with which we’re dealing. And if you’ll use those simplicities and derive other data from them, you will never get yourself lost with a student question because the truth of the matter is that when you have gone over the list here which I have been giving you day after day after day here, of knowingness; interiorization, exteriorization; beingness, doingness, havingness in terms of space, energy and time; communication, Cause and Effect; the scale from Know down to Sex; the cycle-of-action-the Create-Survive-Destroy cycle; the nothing-something characteristic of this universe, in other words the Theta-MEST Theory; the eight dynamics; ARC in general; the Tone Scale; and control itself, if you know those definitions (not that you have to think about them any further), but you will be able to derive the answer to any question any student might be able to ask. It’s up to you to know how to derive that.

We are dealing with some very finite material here. Sooner or later, day after day, you’ll wake up to this fact: this material is finite, not infinite. And at that moment you will heave a sigh of relief. You’ll say, “What do you know, we don’t have to butter ourselves all over the universe to find out what peculiarities of livingness there are, they derive right here.” Because we have a number of things which predict data which, when looked for, will be found.

Now, the sum total of what Scientology has added to the sum of human knowledge is not enormous and, therefore, it could be added to human knowledge. It was very finite. The definition of a static in physics (which I went over with you this morning) was completely unknown in physics.

In mathematics, the definition of zero was unknown. And where we have a scientific world that lacks these two definitions and doesn’t even suspect that there’s a tremendous hole and which thinks continually that it’s walking across a solid bridge, whereby it’s walking across a bridge with no boards in it-when their two most critical tools haven’t even been noticed in their absence, you’re not going to have any answers to livingness. Nobody is going to be able to cross that bridge. They’re just going to keep trying and milling around and wondering why they fail, until somebody comes along and takes a good look at it and says, “What do you know? These guys are using hammers, they say, and yet everywhere I look there are these fellows with their fists upraised and moving their fists up and down and there’s no hammer in their fists. And they keep complaining they’re not driving any nails. And they don’t even realize that this is idiotic.”

When you get somebody out here with the “know-how,” so-called, to build a giant computer which has more tubes than you could count in an idle afternoon and who doesn’t know the definition of the zero on that computer, you’re going to have a weird computer. It’s going to be awful complicated. It’ll have an awful lot of things set up to correct an awful lot of things which will set up so they correct an awful lot of things which

will correct the answer which will come back and then be adjusted. And sure enough, that’s what those big computers do. They correct what they correct so they can adjust it.

You take something like quantum mechanics-the mathematician’s nightmare. It wasn’t until he moved into these realms that he found out he was living in a nightmare. Every time he put down an equation in quantum mechanics, then he’d have to put down .822-you know, right in the middle of the equation. You come along and say, “Hey, what’s 822 doing in the middle of the equation?”

“Ho!” he says, “that’s the adjustment factor.”

“Oh? What do you mean adjustment factor?”

“Wellj the equation doesn’t work unless it’s got 822 in the middle.”

“Well, come on now, tell me, what does 822 relate to? Does this relate to cows or apples or particles or speed of light or ...”

“No, no. No, no: 822.” Because in quantum mechanics he was working with two-they call these things “bugger factors”-they were working with two unknowns that they didn’t know were unknown. One is the speed of light-c. They call it “186,000 thousand whup-a-whup miles per second.” That’s supposed to be the speed of light. And that’s an indeterminate factor. And they say that’s a constant. Now, that’s right there, they can measure that right to a hair. It’s okay until they start talking about something besides sunlight. And the second they start talking about something besides sunlight, they’re lost. So they think the c then is the end-all of light movement and particle motion and it sure isn’t. Nothing more variable than that factor.

And the other one is this business about zero. Every time they put down zero, they’re really putting down X, because it was some kind of a somethingness, it wasn’t a nothingness. All their zeros were a somethingness, not a nothingness. So they were dealing with a relative nothingness. And boy, when you’ve got a relative nothingness kicking around an equation, you don’t even suspect it’s there, you’ll get the weirdest answers and so they have.

The truth of the matter is they don’t know whether these piles will blow up out there or not. They make them by experiment. They pull little bars in and out and hope it will work. And then they set it all up in mathematical forms and send them back to the government just to show that they’re on the job-after they’ve done the problem, which is a funny way to work mathematics, isn’t it?

Well, all right. Here are two big factors. Now, why then, would the discovery of these two holes in the field of science then influence things to such an extent that you could predict human behavior? Real nice. I mean, how do you slide out of that one? Well, very easily. Because human behavior is in greater or lesser degree with the physical universe. And you can predict what its behavior is because of this scale of Be, Do and Have, which is space, energy and time. All right.

You can predict this activity only because you know these other two definitions. Now, you might not quite connect with that right at first glance, but look here-we know that reality, the closest we can get to reality, is in terms of agreement of some sort or another. Everybody agrees it’s real, so it’s real. This becomes quite obvious. Otherwise reality has itself a very nebulous value. And there was psychology, it was dealing with this thing “reality” and every time it turned around to a patient to say, “The trouble with you is you have to face reality,” there they were introducing a hidden standard.

What is reality?

[to student] What is it?

Female voice: Agreement, like a pattern is a pattern.

That’s right. Just agreement. All right.

It couldn’t get anyplace as long as it kept saying that we had reality and there was no reality. So there’s the field of psychology. Furthermore, the problem of space and the problem of time are problems of psychology, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Where the hell have the psychologists been, huh? Well, if the science of physics depended upon the science of psychology to solve the problems of physics, by saying what is space and time, before physics could then say what is space and time, if the psychologists didn’t know this and they weren’t even vaguely interested in what space and time were, but they were interested in something called reality and they themselves were not defining what reality was, why, gee, we got an interesting picture, didn’t we? We got these sciences pulling against one another.

So we couldn’t have a thing called “science.” We could have “the science of.” The science of this, the science of that, the science of something or other, because they couldn’t be one unit, because they were not in agreement. So there was no reality in the field of science.

Now, that’s a terrifically broad statement to make, but this is true. There wasn’t any real reality in the field of science beyond this: The fellow says, “By golly, I’ll put it together this way and if it works, it works. And then I’ll try to figure out some kind of a theory to see if I can explain why it did work.” And that, hit or miss, has more or less been science.

Newton came along and threw together something called physics. It was up to that time called natural philosophy. The Greeks had experimented with it and everybody had had a lot of fun. And they had a bunch of disrelated data that wasn’t tied together because nobody had tied together the laws of motion.

And the laws of motion are inertia, interaction, acceleration. And these laws are the laws of the movement of particles. And they’re very simple laws. But out of this and out of the calculus which he invented, Newton actually put the underpinnings under a science called physics and he straddled the two fields. He didn’t notice there was a zero missing there, because nothingness is something that you wouldn’t discover missing. It’s cute, isn’t it? All right.

One of the most interesting things is that every time I have had the list of Step IV, Expanded GITA, SOP 8 copied, the stenographer has omitted “nothing.” I’ve caught

her and put it back in, then it’s passed to the linotypist who has omitted “nothing.” So that to this moment in 16-G, I don’t think you’ll find “nothing” in that list of Expanded GITA, 16-G. See, it’s just something you can’t look at, of course, because there’s nothing there.

Well, the inability to look at nothing is the main trouble with Man. He struggles and struggles and struggles toward a something and he gets so obsessed with the idea that it doesn’t matter whether it’s bad for him or good for him or whether it’s any fun or anything else, it’s just got to be toward something. And these somethingnesses that he is struggling toward classify to the degree that he becomes insecure in his survival. The more insecure he becomes, the more selective he has to be about what he has. The less liable he is to survive, the more delicate he has to be about his choice of survival elements.

Well, let’s take a look at the fellow who has a bad stomach. Now, what does this fellow have to do? He has to be very careful of his diet, doesn’t he? Boy. Well, that’s Man at large. Do you know that men can’t digest nails? They say so every once in a while, but they can’t do it. They can’t even digest glass-somebody was trying to at the party and it was very hard. He’s tremendously selective. He has to digest something which has been tested.

It might not have occurred to you, but the reason you eat animals and vegetables is because they have served as proving grounds. It’s safe. You have interposed, between MEST and you, a whole bunch of screens so that the material is all screened out and changed and altered and refined and made very delicate and made this way and that way. There isn’t any real reason why you couldn’t pick up a handful of sand and say, “Well look, I’ve got to have nourishment” (which is a laugh itself), “I’ve got to have nourishment.” And you pick up this handful of sand and choke it down. Why not? Lichens and moss do. I suppose their digestion is worse than yours. Lichens and moss, algae, these various things, they just-algae picks up a handful of chemical saturated water and has himself a square meal. A few beams of sunlight, he’s all set.

Now, as much as we theorize on the big reason behind all this, we find this factor is always interposing before our view: Every time you find a reason why, you look earlier than the reason why and you’ll find out there was an inexplicable somethingness and after that, we had a reason why. You take this funny little thing in What to Audit-the Grim Weeper, the Boohoo. You know, he just couldn’t help but get his nose full of salt water. He just couldn’t help it. And pretty soon he has to have a reason why.

Well you see, the salt water in your nose lubricates the tissues of your nose so that they do not become irritated and so that they will select out and pour away dust particles which are getting into your air stream. Oh no! I mean-well, look-a-here, let’s have the kind of an air stream ... Let’s get a good reason why. Let’s design an air stream and it would be an air stream that would be walled like a rhinoceros hide or better. So that it wouldn’t matter what you dragged into your lungs, it wouldn’t matter what you dragged in, one way or the other, nothing could possibly injure the nasal passages. Well, wouldn’t this be sensible? But no, we’ve got to have a reason why, so we have this “mucus washing machine.” But we look prior on the track and we find out that there was a great deal of mucus early on the evolutionary chain and now we’ve got a reason for it.

Before the fact is an inexplicable incident or an inexplicable combination of elements and then life gets an explanation for it. And so we find life happily, busily, going backwards. That’s what you call down spiral. We get the happenstance and then the reason for it. We don’t get the reason and then the happenstance, because that would be causative.

Now, when you get cause, the fellow merely says, “It will now all be purple” and it’s now purple.

Then some other fellow comes along and he sees this purple-now he’s the effect, you see-and he has to say, “I wonder why all this is purple?”

“Now, let me see. Um, well, it probably combines very easily with the magenta, which the grass is. And the reason for that is so that there will be some kind of a hyperbolic disassociation between the animalcules. And by George, you know, that’s very good. They do hyperbolatize across the animalcules and as these things connect, why, you put a resistipator in the line and you’ve got it.” And now he’s got the reason why. But the first fellow-all the first fellow did-he didn’t even have any reason why, he just said, “It’s all purple.” All right. The difference between cause and effect.

After a person has been an effect, he wants the reason why. Until he’s been an effect, he doesn’t give a damn what the reason is. Now, you’re trying to run a preclear backwards to the way he’s going. He’s sitting in front of you wanting to know the reason why. Well, there isn’t any reason why. And that is the colossal and horrible joke of this universe. It is the grimmest jest in the world. There’s no reason. There isn’t any explanation for it, it’s just here.

Well, of course it’s very tricky, it’s very significant probably, but it’s just here. And until a preclear can take a good solid look at that and just observe the fact: “Hey, what do you know, it’s here!” Why, he’s having an awful time. He goes around all the time, “chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, I wonder what the reason why? I wonder what the reason why? Pocketa, pocketa, pocketa, pocketa, think, think, think, think, think.” Because thinkingness is that thing-rather, it’s differentiated, the way we’re using it here, from thought.

Thought has been very carelessly used as a word. It covers thinkingness and it covers livingness. Well, we can’t have a word that means two different things which are entirely different, so let’s use thinkingness and let’s use theta and we’ll get the two in their proper perspective. Theta is something that can endow things with life, it can know, it can cause, it could also be an effect, it can do all sorts of things. But that’s quite distinct from thinkingness. Thinkingness is trying to figure out the reason why. There isn’t any.

So here, of course, we had this horrible picture of science going round and round, trying to figure the reason why of nothing. You see, nothingness, no reason why, and science, all it can do is go on and figure because it's got that one pin missing, see? Nothingness is missing from its computation. It hasn't ever taken a look at nothingness. You had to look at nothingness to see nothing was there-to see how nothing the nothingness was.

Fellow says, “Well, there’s nothingness between thee and me.” Well, the hell there

is.There’s air and there’s space and a lot of things between thee and me. You can look through this stuff all right, but there’s quite a bit.

Well now, somebody else comes along and says, “ Well, that isn’t nothingness. Nothingness between the two would be not even you looking through anything at.” And he’d try to define it that way. He’d try to define it backwards in terms of “reason why,” you see? And you can’t define a nothingness in terms of reason why. A nothingness is simply a nothingness. The grimmest jest of this universe and the deepest secret of this universe is that there is no significance and no secret. Well therefore it should be very easy to plot our way through this.

But what do you know? We had to add to this enough material so that we got this fact, down to the reason-why stage-was to pilot this nothingness or this static down to the reason-why stage-and we had to do that if we were going to make any escape hatch for existence or if we were going to multiply existence in any way. You see, in other words, some guy keeps asking you the reason why, the reason why, the reason why.

Well, you say there is no reason why and this becomes balderdash to him. He doesn’t believe you, he doesn’t get well. It’d be very nice if you’d simply tell somebody that and he would immediately be Clear. But what do you know, these individuals have gone over and their certainty is an impact.

Now, the reason certainty is an impact is very plain. The second that you start processing

it,it becomes very, very plain. You find that you have a theta investment in a mass. And if the individual can’t create energy anymore-it’s very simple, you see-he can’t create energy anymore. Therefore, he has to cherish what energy he’s got walled up in these barriers, these old impacts. See, that’s stored energy of some sort and there you have terminals. That’s all there is to a terminal. The individual has received an impact and now he values it so that he can hold it apart from another impact and between the two they will get a flow and he will have some energy. All to do what? To keep from causing it. Well, there’s no real significance why he doesn’t cause it, except he doesn’t think he has enough attention. If he hasn’t got enough attention to cause it, he just-you know, he wants to run an awful lot of things, so he uses this system.

Well, when you’ve looked at that system of certainty, you see the most certain thing there is, is theta itself-unimpacted. Now, the second we start knocking it against it, you might say, we get a picture of solidity. And therefore, the person becomes certain because there’s so much theta in it, there certainly must be something in it, see? And that’s-he’s certain.

Now, the second we draw that little bridge across from the massive object to the nothingness (the nothingness to somethingness bridge) and the second we demonstrate to people that life and existence is made out of these terminals, these impacts, and that an individual gets as bad off as he’s depending upon them (you know, dependency), why, we’ve drawn a little bridge there that this fellow can get over from his “got to have the reason why” back to the nonsignificance of significance, his exteriorization-interiorization.

Now, it’s very silly, people interiorizing and exteriorizing, if you want to know the living truth of the matter, because an individual can interiorize and exteriorize at will. What are you going to interiorize in the first place?

“Well, his source-point.”

“But the source-point doesn’t have any mass. Of course it can interiorize in everything.” “Well, all right. Can it do so knowingly?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how do you get this source-point out?”

“Well, this source-point is close to static, so it doesn’t have any mass, so it can get out of anything. It isn’t in anything.”

And the fellow says, “Well yes, it is too. I’m in my head, I know I am.” And sure enough he does, he knows he’s in his head. Now, he sits there and waits for somebody to get him out of his head and get him to know he’s not in his head.

Well, the way you do that is just to tell the guy to be three feet back of his head, which is to say, relocate your observation point. Sort of-you’d say the same thing, “Be three feet back of your head,” as “Hey, fella, how about relocating where you’re looking from.”

Well, he’s liable to do this in peculiar and runabout ways. He’s liable to relocate it by making up a new viewpoint and putting it over in the next room and looking back into this room and say, “I’m over there”-all sorts of escapes and dodges.

Well, that’s just the game of existence. He’s doing all sorts of escapes and dodges because there’s nothing to escape and dodge from. But by golly, when he’s dedicated to and convinced by impacts that things exist, believe me, it ceases to be funny. He is the effect of the game. And he knows he’s the effect of the game and what he knows is that he can’t do anything. That’s what he mainly knows.

I ran into somebody who was having a lot of trouble exteriorizing. I said, “Get the greatest certainty you can get on your ability.” And the guy kind of choked on it and he thought this over for a little while and “Gee,” he said, “the biggest certainty I can get is that I don’t have any.” And sure enough, there is your-your fellow sets up things “to be able.” Well, he’s able, doggone it! He doesn’t set up something to be able for him. And so we get into this tangle of language and how all things start equaling all things and we start running around in circles and the problem looks very confused, but it’s not confused. You’re coming right straight out of this one factor: definition of static-definition of theta and its combination in such ways as to form randomities and automaticities out of these terminals, these impacts.

Well, you can take this data-this that I just read off to you-you can take this data, you can combine it in various fashions and you get the doggonedest pictures of existence. Oh boy, can existence be complex! Wheel If anything should attest to the tremendous ability of a thetan, it's how complex existence can be. What an imagination! And how certain he is of that imagination. Oh yes. He’s certain that’s true.

A little boy comes in and says he didn’t do something.

And Mother says yes he did too do it. How does she know he did it? Well, she saw him. And she expects him to actually accept that as proof. To her it is illogical, utterly illogical, that he should argue on this fashion: “Just because you saw me do it is no reason I did it.” And you know, that’s proof and she will eventually get him to agree with her that that’s proof, but it wasn’t proof until she got him to agree. Lord knows what she saw before that point and Lord knows what he did, but when he agreed, why, he was there and that was that.

Now, as the past becomes true and imaginative things become unconvincing, why, an individual gets deeper and deeper and more into the “reason why” and more into trouble. Don’t mistake yourself, a person can get into trouble there is no doubt about that! He didn’t all do it himself either, he just kind of floundered around and fell over himself and you get this many tangled factors and you throw them together and you can just by pure accident have somebody in trouble.

All right. We look at these factors, we find out in terms of processing they combine an enormous number of processes. Oh I, just before lunch, gave the group here a process which was about the-well, it comes close to being a very pure process, which is to say, the damnedest, slightest significance in it imaginable.

And this process goes like this: You just take the eight dynamics, which are the component parts of the cycle-of-action, and you ask the individual to get what he’s most certain of on each dynamic. And you just go through the list over and over and over and each time what he’s getting most certain of.

And you’ll find out that the individual who is having a rough time with his case, quite often-and sometimes an individual who is having a rather easy time with his case-will suddenly go into a dope-off of some sort and begin to look groggy and begin to get a little bit confused. Occasionally this will occur.

Why does this occur? Well, it’s because he’s been taking all these impacts for his certainty and that’s the least certain thing there is. So as he started running over it and he took a look at those impact points, those old terminals, they started to pull apart-there he went. He tried to get energy out of something that didn’t have any energy in it and he expected to get energy out of it, so he went unconscious. See? And this just pulls apart ridges like mad, it just tears up the bank. It doesn’t particularly upset anybody, it’s a terrifically simple process. It’s combining a synonym for knowingness, which is certainty (and a very, very good synonym for knowingness-certainty), with the eight dynamics. Now boy, that’s really elementary. Component parts of existence are-and then the most simplified version we have here is just the eight dynamics. All the eight dynamics is, is a codification which embraces the most important factors of existence. So we just apply this and we get a simple process.

And the only real point I’m trying to make with this talk I’m giving you here, just adds up-nails down to this: you’re dealing with a simplicity. That does not mean, immediately, that these things don’t connect. People believe they connect, they’ve agreed upon them connecting, so therefore they do connect to that degree.

Therefore, existence itself connects to that degree. And we have arrived and could get to a state of case where it all begins to look this way, not because we’ve been told so, but we can process people in the direction where there’s very little significance, simply because we know these elements which I have just listed to you. You know, knowingness, duplication, interiorization, exteriorization, Tone Scale, dynamics, something-nothing, scale from Know down to Sex, so on. You get the picture?

We know these things because we’ve actually taken the anatomy of existence apart and we’ve said, “Now look, it can be nailed down in these categories and can be processed in this fashion.”

Okay.