I have some information here for you which will be the backbone of the new popular book which was promised at the congress, and of course, you are entitled to have this right crack off the bat.

[Editor's Note: The popular book referred to here was The Co-auditor's Manual of Scientology which was published subsequent to this lecture. The data which was covered in this manual has since been issued in Hubbard Communications Office Bulletins which can be found in the Technical Bulletins Volumes.]

This simplifies and rather revolutionizes basic theory. It's Axiom 53, called "the Axiom of the stable datum," and although it has not been worded in its final form, its sense is this: A stable datum is necessary for the alignment and order of data. Isn't that an innocuous sort of mild, little axiom?

Stable datum is necessary for the alignment of data. And let me assure you that the pattern of all aberration, all aberration of any kind is the pattern of stable data which has been a - used in situations as the datum on which all other data will be aligned.

Let's look this over. Let's get the idea of somebody in a room which is turning upside down, going at odd angles. This person is in a chaos. He doesn't know what's going to hit him next or from where or why. In order to bring any order to the scene whatsoever he has to have one stable datum.

Now you understand that that is superior to a desk, superior to a chair, superior to the sky or the moon. Get this now: Data - we are in the field of pure knowledge. Very important for the science of knowledge to have the basic fundamental of the alignment of knowledge, isn't it? Very important.

Now, many a time an individual is going to receive shocking news or is receiving shocking news, he will hold on convulsively to the edge of the table or the sides of the chair. Why? That's a stable datum, see? His location is a stable datum. Well, that is junior to just a purely stable datum. Just datum without mass, location, space or anything. See that? The seniority in this ease belongs to thought and although you can see in Locational Processing that a person gets to feeling better and better and better and better just by locating things, there is a superior field and that field is pure thought.

In order to align an environment of thought it is necessary to have a stable datum, one datum on which all others can be oriented, so there's one datum there that's going to be true. One datum is going to be true or we will assume one datum is true and then we will align all other things on that.

Wherever we have achieved an aberrated pattern of thought, wherever we have achieved a combination of thoughts which lead to aberrated conduct, behavior, thinkingness or performance in any way, we will find that the basic of all that aberration is a stable datum.

Now, we said a stable datum. We didn't say a good datum or a bad datum, did we? We didn't say a true or an untrue datum, did we? We just said it was stable and how could you make any datum stable? By the consideration, if you please. We consider that datum to be stable and now we are going to align all other data to that datum.

And let's see what would happen to somebody's life if he aligns his whole life on this datum: All horses sleep in beds. That would be quite interesting, wouldn't it? Let's say that he came by this datum in this fashion. He went into the house and he found a horse asleep in the bed. Of course, horses aren't supposed to be in beds and this was very upsetting to him so he just makes this postulate, see, he just considers at this point: "Well, I can resolve this problem very easily. All I have to do is assume that horses always sleep in beds and that is what beds are for, for horses to sleep in." Now, that's a ridiculous example. But he would have aligned the situation, wouldn't he? He suddenly finds a particle - a horse - in a wrong particle - a bed. He's dislocated and he explains this and keeps himself from getting rocky on the situation merely by saying, "Well, of course, horses sleep in beds." Now, later on, he gets a job in a livery stable and insists that it be provided with big beds. People would say, "You know, he's crazy," and they'd be right. But to this fellow it's reasonable and the one thing that is quite remarkable about all aberration and insanity is how terribly reasonable is the conduct of the individual to himself and how unreasonable it is to others.

So, it merely says this: That where individuals are not agreed upon the stable data on which they're operating they consider each other eccentric. At any point where there is no agreement upon the stable data on which we're going to think, compute, build, construct and live we're going to have differences, we're going to have apparent aberration, we're going to have unworkability and irrationality. But it's going to be a very rational-looking thing to the individual and he won't himself be able to conceive why he's so far out of order and why nothing really goes the way he should think it goes, and why nothing figures out nor - and why things keep falling off of tables and so forth. He's working on stable data.

At one - sometime or another he found himself in a chaotic condition.

Maybe there was pain and unconsciousness in addition to this chaotic condition, you see. I mean, maybe he himself was experiencing pain and unconsciousness and everything else was going mad around him, you know -chaos - and he seizes upon a datum. Evidently to prevent himself from becoming completely disoriented he'll make a postulate [snap]. And, brother, is he stuck with that postulate.

And now we as auditors, Scientologists, we look this fellow over and he doesn't compute! He doesn't compute worth a nickel. He keeps standing in the middle of the floor and screaming at the top of his voice and that's not sensible. Why is it not sensible? It's not sensible because nobody else screams at the top of his voice. It isn't done, in other words.

That individual, we will discover, is operating on a stable datum: How do you handle a chaotic situation? You stand in the middle of the floor and scream. Now if the universe appears to this individual chaotic for a moment, he'll start to scream. That's the stable datum. You see that? Therefore, that's very aberrated conduct as far as we're concerned but as far as he's concerned that's the thing to do. That's how you get out of all this.

You'd be surprised how many times this works. It worked when you were a little kid, don't think it didn't work - stable datum. How do you keep your parents from ruining you? Stand in the middle of the floor and scream.

Now, if your universe continues chaotic from that point on and there are very, very few moments or - of peace and there's continued misalignment of thinkingness, why, one of course may arrive at the age of fifty still standing in the middle of the floor and screaming. It's a stable datum.

Now let's just unhook ourselves from Dianetics on its - on this angle, that because it happened once it then compulsively or obsessively continues to happen forevermore as an engram. The engram is only how you make the stable datum stay in effect and it is almost a conscious effort to keep a stable datum afloat. So these are the mechanics of the stable datum and are junior to the stable datum.

This - the engrams of standing in the middle of the floor and screaming are simply how you get your body to stand in the middle of the floor and scream. So we can just drop them. We can just drop mechanics some way. The individual when subjected to pain, discomfort or chaos stands in the middle of the floor and screams. Now that's what he says to himself. Now, he has all these mechanical things that make him go ahead through all the motions and we say, well, it becomes unthinking and it becomes irrational. The individual doesn't know about it anymore. It goes into that horrible invention called the subconscious - gorgeous invention! Freud had the cure for sanity. [laughter] (I thought you'd get it after a while.)

Now, what do you know! If you hit the right stable datum in a case it's not unconscious! It's not buried anyplace. It's sitting right there. Only he is operating on one set of stable data, since there are many stable data which go up to make a complete pattern of thought, and you're operating on another pattern of stable data so you don't think to tell him to look at this fact for the excellent reason that you know you don't have that as a stable datum, so therefore, he doesn't have that as a stable datum.

You get what your stable data is?

Male voice: Yeah.

Your stable datum is, "My behavior is a monitoring and measuring behavior for all other people, and therefore, I know what other people are doing because I know what I do." Now get that as a stable datum! It's not necessarily a reasonable datum at all. It happens to work, particularly in a society where all men are equal.

I had a fellow almost faint the other day when he suddenly realized that if all men were equal in this society and the society thought men were pretty bad that it would work the other way, not to ennoble but to degrade. He was quite shocked to realize this.

But if we had this as the stable datum forever and if we all believed it implicitly that we were all equal and we all had the same stable data, we'd all go nuts! We'd get 1984 for sure, because nobody eventually would understand anybody else, unless you had the two basic, stable data on which the whole human race operates. Now, if you had that you would have what has been called in Rosicrucianism (which doesn't know these data), which has been called in various tomes (which should be in tombs) the secret of this universe.

One of them appeared in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health: The Basic Principle of Existence is Survive. That's one stable datum which life holds in common. But before the year was out I had the other one and never stressed it very much because we didn't have Axiom 53 and that is this: The Basic Principle of Existence is Survive or Succumb. Two stable data.

They're the two basic decisions of this universe: survive, succumb. And those are the two stable data and that is why somebody could read Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health - living in - he's lying in a hospital bed, he's living in misery and pain and he reads Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science or something like that and he all of a sudden says, "Hey! Wait! This - bang!" and he gets up and he's not sick anymore. Magic! Pure magic! It really is one of the two stable data.

Now, the other stable datum, tiny bit less magnitude, is succumb, see?

Just those two. Now those are the two data on which life aligns itself and any misalignment with those two data will result in aberration. And all other stable data are some form of one or the other of these two stable data.

Now, you see survive and succumb are very dramatic. They're very sudden. It's a decision to live or to die. Now let's just modify it and see how else it can - how about the decision to paint or not to paint for a painter?

See? He - there he is, he could paint or not to paint - that's to survive or succumb, isn't it? But those two are stable data. He can make those stable data. How does he keep on eating? He seizes upon the stable datum, paint.

That's how you eat, that's how you live, that's how you get girlfriends, beautiful models - to get Freudian on you. I wonder what kind of people Salvador Dali associates with, come to think of it.

But to paint, see? That's the datum. So that life to him becomes to paint or not to paint. Somebody comes around and tells him "Don't paint" or "You haven't painted" and they've said to him "Die." So somebody comes around and he says, "You know, I don't think that last - last thing you did should have had a maroon sky. It would have been much, much better if it had been a royal purple," and wonders why the artist immediately reaches for one of his prop swords or daggers and goes chasing them around the room. Wonders at this fury or counterblast or tremendous upset that this tiny, little criticism gets. Hah! He's talking to somebody who has the - a stable datum: paint-survive, see? And you've just said to him, "You didn't paint." So you've said to him in magnitude, "You're dead." Have you got this?

All right, we take some girl who's decided she wants to be a housewife, she wants to be a mother, she wants to take care of things, she wants to get married; everything's going to go along fine. Stable datum, isn't it? Out of the chaos of her own parental home, out of the upset of an economically misoriented society and so forth she finally says, "I can get married. I can be a mother. I can raise kids. I can do this." See? She seizes upon that as a stable datum or she isn't even impressed into it by chaos since she doesn't have to be. She merely says this is an ambition, this is a goal and you've got ambitions, goal and stable data aligning together.

All right. So she says this is what I want to be and then she marries this fellow and he says, "You can't cook, you're no good, you're a bum. What do you mean? Why don't you keep these kids straight? Why don't you keep those kids quiet? I have to work and slave. You're just not doing your job at all." And next thing you know, why, she just kind of goes dzzzzzz and she's liable to wind up in a spinbin.

But certainly, merely criticism of her housework or trying to break her down on the subject of housework or even a sympathetic, "Dear, you don't have to do that work," - see, any one of these variations shouldn't wind up on her with this violence. So, we in research would go looking for something else, wouldn't we, huh? We'd go looking for some murder and sudden death, wouldn't we? We'd go plumbing her subconscious, you know, with air drills trying to find out what is behind this because it's a violent condition; therefore, it must have some violent causation and merely the fact that her husband was critical of her housework is not violent causation. The hell it isn't! Her husband has said to her continually, "Die, die, die, die, die"! Why?

The stable datum of her life which says live is simply this one: I can be a wife and a mother and take care of my house.

So as an auditor we'd go chewing into this case and we'd start plowing up birth and prenatals and every other darn thing you think of and certainly we can produce results one way or the other, but we produce results in straightening out this person's thinkingness just to that degree and no better that we hit, knock out and supplant or change or provide mobility to a stable datum. And we hit one of these stable data right on the head which is not necessarily the make-break live or die but the person thinks it is - that person will suddenly do one of these brighten-ups and become very sane.

They say, "Gee! H-hah! It's a relief." Every once in a while a preclear says to you, "You know I can do something else besides teach school. Well, come to think about it when I was a kid I used to want to go to Africa. Wonder what the fares are?" What have you done? You've given him liberty. How do you give him liberty? You give back into his hands the right to change the stable data of his life. You've given to his hands once more the right to alter, change or shift stable data. And the one place he is unable to change is the stable datum, because he feels if he changes it that all will then go into the chaos which it was in before he seized the stable datum. You got that?

There's many a person who doesn't know anything about Scientology at all who simply has hold of Scientology as a stable datum and then some jerk out wearing a - wearing a MD PDQ or something of the sort rushes up to this person, says, "Scientology is no good and auditors are no good and nobody's any good and kill everybody and grrrrrr," so on and so on. And this person just goes-they don't - they defend Scientology for a short time and all of a sudden they just spin.

What you do, if you want to drive people mad, are take what they're using rather well as stable data and defame them.

So you see, this could happen: a person couldn't eve - wouldn't even know anything about survive-succumb, auditing, basic theory or anything; they just knew they had a friend or something and this friend was interested in Scientology and it was a great thing and people got better and felt better because of this thing. They just know this and this is in the world and they feel good about this, you know, and they say, "Well, if anything happens to me so that I start to spin, there's always Scientology." Got the idea? Then somebody comes along and says, "You haven't got that." You get the idea?

How about these people that go around telling you all of the time that you don't have a stable datum? If you can produce enough chaos - it says in a textbook on this subject - if you can produce enough chaos you can assume the total management of a psyche - if you can produce enough chaos.

The way you hypnotize people is to misalign them in their own control and realign them under your control, which necessitates a certain amount of chaos, don't you see?

Now, the way to win through all of this is simply to let the guy have his stable data, if they are stable data and if they aren't, let him have some more that are stable data and he'll win and you'll win.

So there was a way out of the trap. There was a way and we've consistently taken that way, and therefore, there is no more chance of Scientology losing on this planet, short of all of its population being knocked off by electric shocks or atom bombs, than there is of the moon suddenly be - growing nothing but avocados. There's - just isn't any chance of Scientology going by the boards because it's doing these two things rather instinctively: It lets the fellow have the stable data he's got but if he doesn't like them he can have others. And this is a much clearer statement than "the individual can preserve his own self-determinism and should better his self-determinism," and so forth. What do you mean by self-determinism? It'd be choice of stable data.

Little boy says, "I want to be a fireman." His mother says, "You don't want to be a fireman. They have to stay down at the firehouse all the time." Says, "Well, I'll be a minister." "You don't want to be a minister. They don't make any money." "Well, I'll be president." He's going to be big now. He's going to make nothing out of her - give her something she can't make nothing out of.

"Well, ha-ha, you be president. If you don't learn how to be good to your little sister you'll never become president." This'll be used as an operation for a little while, and then when it's worn out and he finally says, "To hell with being president," in other words, "I don't want to have to be good to my little sister all the time," why then, he turns around and he says, "I don't want to be president anymore," so he says, "I'll die." He finally says, "I'll die," you see? People work on him - on him until he says, "I'll die." And then it puts him under control - now he's under complete control.

It never occurs to people that they have complete control only if they continue a person's choice over stable data - this is wild, see. If you go ahead and knock a person's stable data apart with malice aforethought and intent, you see, to crumple him up... I don't say that you as an auditor shouldn't knock apart people's stable data; you certainly should, but not with a malice, intent and forethought of getting him all confused and upset so that then you can throw in a new stable datum, see? That's another operation. Psychiatry does that with their electric shocks and prefrontal lobotomies. They've gotten so frantic about it that they even go into this level.That shows how incompetent they are.

Gee, I remember when I was in college, I didn't have any trouble upsetting people's stable data or creating chaos, either one. I had the whole mathematics department one time in chaos. I wrote an article about the Einstein theory. Sure created enough chaos and I noticed after that, why, everybody was awfully nice to me in the mathematics department. Should have been the reverse, shouldn't it have? I created enough chaos. I said the only one of twelve people in the United States who understood Einstein was in the mathematics department of GW and wrote this up as a very nice article and then explained the Einstein theory in full so everybody understood it.

Anyway...

Now, it wasn't that he never forgave me, he was so taken aback he never dared speak to me crossly, thereafter. I was dangerous.

Now, here we have in any human being, then, a collection of actual, which we would say, agreed-upon or workable, stable data plus a collection of aberrated stable data. See, "all horses sleep in beds," you know. And he's saying, "A fellow ought to get up and go to work in the morning. Horses sleep in beds," see? "Children should be made to mind. Nobody should ever speak crossly to policemen."

By the way, you get an awful lot of trouble if you keep on being nice to policemen. It reacts terribly on them. They're so unused to it. You think, of course, the right way to talk to - that's a stable datum in this society: You must be nice to policemen; it doesn't work. Here's an interesting thing. No, you've got to talk to a policeman as a public servant and get him in line and he does mostly what you say, if you do that, providing you're not - don't carry a label called criminal, whatever that is.

Now, wherever we look in a person's past we'll find the only periods where he was really in apathy were those periods when he was without a stable datum.

Let's say he used Mama as a stable datum. This is a silly thing to do, but he did. Mama was the stable datum in his life and she up and kicked the bucket. He's been no good since, been sick, upset, and so on. So we could get Freudian and say, "Oedipus libidos yappitus complex on the left-hand side of the rubidus and that is actually what's the matter with him." That isn't it at all.

Now let's look how this matches up with orientation points. You know the theory of the orientation point? An individual thinks there is a point from which all space is being made but when he loses all the points one after the other that he thinks space is being made from, he eventually runs out of space. See, he starts in and he says, "This crib is the point from which all space is being made." He just says that as a stable datum. That keeps him oriented, and then somebody comes along and takes him out of the crib and moves him to Kansas City. Ssah!

So finally he comes to the conclusion, town after town, that each one of these is the place all space proceeds from and then finally runs out of towns, goes into apathy on that. He can't find a single town that's a stable datum.

Get the idea?

But this is stable datum at work in mechanics, you understand. This is below the level of a stable datum - you see, that's in mechanics. So he gets himself of a frame of mind that he'd better have a person as a stable datum.

Actually, he uses it this way: Space is proceeding from Mama; Mama is making all the space, see? The viewpoint of dimension is Mama or the viewpoint of dimension is Grandpa or Grandma and finally the viewpoint of dimension is my wife, she makes all the space. And we wonder - we look with amazement why this wife says, "Well now, dear, I really - I really think you ought to quit that eight-thousand-dollar-a-year job and go to work down here in the foundry for twenty-four dollars a week," and he does.

We look at this, we wonder why our advice and processing and everything just isn't functional. Well believe me, it's not functional. You see why? I mean, the person from whom all space proceeds has announced this fact. In other words, all - this person's universe is all the universe there is. Well, we get that when we move a person around from one location to another in space rather consistently, you see, and they eventually will seize upon a mobile space point. That's how dippy it gets after a while; they assume a mobile viewpoint of dimension. Anybody but themselves. When they first started in they knew who was making the space: They were.

All right, now, that's in the level of locations and positions. Now let's go upstairs into thought and considerations and postulates which actually create these mechanical conditions and let's find right away that it's a stable datum which becomes represented after a while as a stable location. See, first there's a stable datum and then there's a location. A stable datum, an idea, must proceed prior to the mechanics of matter, energy, space and time. An idea is always primary, it's not secondary, but after a person gets so upset by mechanics they invert again and ideas are now on a figure-figure basis, see.

See, that's an inversion. First they translate all ideas into mechanics and then they take mechanics and translate them into ideas and you get the inverted figure-figure case. You start processing him and he starts reeling off all kinds of stuff.

When he starts reeling these things off he has chosen some mechanical datum - stable datum. He's giving you the opinions of his father or his mother or his wife or something like that, in other words, see, his stable datum. And then he might give you the opinions of his - the hometown and that sort of thing. In other words, this is a stable location and after a while he would tell you one of the higher-level mechanical postulates, that there should be a point in space from which to make space. This isn't necessarily true at all but he tells you this. That's the way we do it, is to assume there's a point in space and then we make space from that point.

All right. So let's look over this problem of the stable datum and let's discover that it translates as a theory into the solidity of mechanics and then retranslates again into the figure-figure band, see? It can invert. Individual loses all his points and now he'll really start seizing stable data that really should appear in a book of cartoons. Right here at first any datum could be called a stable datum and then we get into mechanics, and they are the orderly data of science and behavior and all these things that we consider usual or routine or ordinary, don't you see? And then he will invert from them and get on a no-space basis and the stable data which he will then pick up are some of the darnedest things you ever saw in your life, see. I mean they're wild.

Now, a person who is in the mechanical level will receive some bad news and he will hold onto the chair, he will see that there's a room there, he will have a tendency to just be very quiet and calm about the whole thing because he does have some mechanical spatial data, see? He has some mechanical stability so he can withstand this idea. But after a while he no longer has this mechanical stability. He doesn't say, "There's a room" or "There's a chair" or anything. If he's pounded enough and so forth he will assume something else. He will assume something else as a stable datum. He will assume, "Well, airplanes won't fly through here, anyway. Whatever else is happening, airplanes aren't going to fly through here." Completely random, you know.

After a while you'll get an obsession. He won't go near flying fields.

Well, this sounds awfully dopey, doesn't it? It sounds very disconnected but it isn't at all. He has for some reason or other by some association suddenly conjured up a stable datum, and he's stuck with it and you'll find that stable datum as the root of any aberration which he has.

So that we have actually three things with which we're dealing. We're dealing with (1) the basic theory of sanity or ability and that is: A stable datum is necessary on which to align other data. That's the basic theory.

Now, right coupled with that are the two basic data which are in common in this universe because they themselves are the ingredients of time. And one is survive and the other is succumb and these are two stable data. And succumb is stop time and survive is continue time, and so we have the continuation of the universe.

So between this pure theory of a stable datum is necessary for the alignment of survival, and activity and behavior, we have as the bridge survive and succumb. And we'll find out that all stable data can be one way or another categorized under one heading "survive" or the other heading "succumb." Isn't this cute? We've got this-we've got a trio here now, see. We've got three things: stable datum, survive and succumb. And out of that woof and warp, with what we already know about considerations, postulates, the other Axioms and that sort of thing, we get the - - a very, very nice look at a universe of people. We get a very nice look at them. And much more important than that, we understand insanity completely.

I gave up on insanity a few months ago. I said they couldn't understand insanity, it was an ununderstanding thing. But what do you know, I had the answer in the vest pocket all the time. One of the few wild statements I have ever made on - as far as theory is concerned. I make optimistic statements. I don't very make - make very many uncorrect statements but that was an incorrect statement that insanity was unsolvable, because we just got through solving it. Kind of a hopeless, stupid thing for me to say at the time.

I felt stupid, by the way, saying it. I said it at an auditors' conference. I was using it more or less to persuade people to lay off treating the insane and then reached too far because insanity, anatomy of, is a very simple thing: insanity is that chaos in which exists no stable data. That means anybody could go crazy for a moment.

Let's take a Boy Scout - nice, little Boy Scout, nothing wrong with him at all. We take him out on the - in the woods, we blindfold him, we turn him around eight times and set him down next to trees he never heard of before, take the blindfold off and we're gone, too. If you don't think hell go nuts! Maybe just for an instant. Then he may say, "Let's see, more moss grows on the north side - no, it's the south side. You go downhill along - you go downhill with the brook, you find a - go downhill and you'll find a brook and then you go downhill with the brook and you come to civilization and that's the way you do it," something. You come out of it one way or the other. These are all stable data he's been given in the first place for such a situation. But for an instant certainly he will have ddddduh! Trees completely unfamiliar, ground, hills, nothing recognizable, no stable object or space in his vicinity.

And man was in this condition about his own mind! Man was insane on the subject of the human mind. He had no stable datum! Just racially from border to border, coast to coast and pole to pole, he was nuts. And so we would get all sorts of wild stable data being proposed such as the Greek: The mind is actually in the stomach. We'd get Roman: If you just pray to the god Febris maybe she'll do something for insanity, too. The goddess Febris was the god of fever, sickness - insanity had nothing to do with it at all and yet they even started to pray to Febris about insanity. We get the psychiatrist saying, "All you have to do is give them a prefrontal lobotomy and they all get well, everybody gets well! Everybody gets well! Everybody gets well!" And I haven't found one yet.

You'll get oddball things against which you could protest if you cared to, such as a recent bill that passed through the House and Senate which says in its text that psychiatry cures 75 percent of the people who come to it and therefore should be given millions. You won't find one person anywhere -you'll find a person who has been helped a little bit one way or the other by talking to somebody or he's had the curse taken off one how [way] or another, but you won't find 75 people in the whole world who have been cured of anything by psychiatry and yet the society can be so psychotic on the subject of the mind that this can appear in a government bill and was passed and was not challenged, sitting as part of the law of the land right now - the part of the law of the land says psychiatry cures 75 percent of the people who come to it.

We can have the whole field of psychology being written up as dialectic materialism and foisted off as compulsory on all kids. We can introduce a stable datum like man has to conform to his environment. In other words, into this chaos we can shoot anything! Whether it's prefrontal lobotomies or quack psychology or the fact if you eat Wheaties seven times a day you'll never go nuts. I mean, you can just throw any stable datum into this chaos of the mind because it was operating without stable data. You see this?

Then there's really not much sense in becoming either rhetorical or upset or anything else about this subject because it's just inevitable that where there was no stable datum there would be some wild ones.

Now let's take the Messianic period of the Indian, which is an interesting period. He said, "In order to bring back the buffalo and get freedom and 80 that well best the white man, we'll fight him and kill him all off, all we have to do is kill off all the dogs," and the Indians promptly went out and shot Rover. They killed off all their dogs! And you know the buffalo didn't come back and the white man kept winning. The Indians were upset about this! Why? Look what they will accept in an insane state for a stable datum! That's all I'm trying to bring home to you. Look what they will accept.

The practices that are making tens of thousands of zombies in the US by prefrontal lobotomies, electric shocks that break people's spines, these are acceptable data because they occur in a field in which there is no stable data.

Now, any time we get an area where there's no stable data we have a spin -that is a spin, an area where there's no stable data.

You could drive the whole world of art mad by simply letting critics continue to criticize art. You could get Hollywood to believing that the cameraman and his plotting of angles was much more important than the scene designer.

Oh, you didn't - don't have any real stable data in the field of art so you can throw anything into art, any opinion will become a stable data. A person goes up on a stage and acts and because there's no real stable data on the subject of acting, why, people can say, "Well, actually, he ought to hold his hand that way, not this way." Everybody says, "Why is that?" "Well, that's because the ‘Ulupian theory’ which - a very ancient Greek practice of acting."

Or some Russian can suddenly jump up and say, "Well, if you do so-and-so and so-and-so, why, then you become an actor," and everybody does so-and-so and so-and-so and we have Hollywood. You get the idea?

In other words, you can take any sphere - any sphere which is relatively chaotic and throw almost any stable datum into it with enough of a statement and you will get an alignment of data on that stable datum. You see this clearly?

You could take an insane person and you could say, "There's a lion in the middle of the room," and because he is able to accept a hallucinatory data he's liable to heave a sigh of relief and sit down in the chair. You've just given him a stable datum: There's a lion in the room. This is outrageous and stupid and weird enough and it's hallucinatory, so, he - it's on his acceptance level and it's a lion in the middle of the room. I've had an insane person do some of the wildest things and calm down most interestingly on being fed some of the most fantastic data.

I had a drunk Indian on my hands once while I was investigating police work and - I was operating as a special officer and I finally gave him a stable datum. I told him he could have all - nobody would give him anything to drink and he was trying to kill everybody in the bar, so I told him he could have everything he wanted to drink, I told him he could have all he wanted to drink. If he'd just sit down to this table, I'd get it for him. Stable datum said with enough authority. He sat down at the table; I started feeding him glasses of water. He sat there and he drank them. I told him how good it was, asked him if it was too strong for him. He assured me he could take anything and tossed the next one.

See, everybody was protesting. They were saying, "You get out of here," and "We don't want anything more to do with you," and you know, nobody'd give him a stable datum. Now, I not only gave him a stable datum: I gave him a table, gave him a chair and gave him a glass. And of course, having done that it was then possible to tell him exactly what his other reactions would be and he would perform them. In other words, I could have had him dancing like a ballet dancer in there but I wasn't practicing in the field of Dianetics and Scientology. I was simply trying to quiet an Indian down.

You see, then, why your preclear goes home and listens to the wife who says, "Oh, I don't really think you're in such good shape. You look terrible!" Stable datum.

"Do I?" Go over to the mirror and look. Get the idea?

Now, he's used to receiving all of his opinions from the person who makes space or something of the sort. He'll just go on receiving these opinions unless you can sort out and restore his choice on stable data. The data on which he is operating is sitting there right with him and is totally known to him.

That's an interesting postulate and is adventurous on my part to say so since I don't have too much to back it up. And it may be found that an individual will all of a sudden pull this one, "Huh! Yeah. Well, that's the way I orient things; that's what I live by," and so forth.

And you say, "Well, you just found that out?" "No," he'll say, "I knew it all the time." Well, it may be that he didn't consciously think about it all the time; he merely had it sitting there all the time, see?

And you get this weird little thing of every once in a while running out an engram and the person says, "Well, I knew that all the time. I know that all the time," and was thereafter well. You brought it into some kind of a cognition and he blows it and reevaluates it. Instead of just knowing it he thinks about it and so it goes.

All right. This opens up an enormous number of doors but particularly opens up the door to the understanding of insanity, and when we look at an insane person we must realize two things, that he has two stable data on which he has been operating, no matter what version of these stable data it was, what version of these two things, he was operating on two: I can survive, I can succumb. See, he had those two. We killed them both off. We convinced him that he must not succumb and we convinced him that he cannot survive! He goes crazy. That's all there is to insanity. It's as simple as that.

Unless, of course, we add the postulate that hell go insane. See, we could do that. We'd have to add the postulate much earlier on the track that things can be chaotic. We have to add in a lot of other considerations to make life at all but then what are we adding up? We're just building up his condition. All these things are secondary to what has actually happened to him.

What has actually happened to him is simply this: that he has been convinced that he couldn't survive and he's now been convinced that he couldn't succumb. He's not allowed to commit suicide, he's not allowed to do himself in, he's not allowed to go on living.

So when you say to one of these bays - every once in a while, you say, "Come in here and give us a hand," we've had - some patient's had a fit or something of the sort-we say, "Give us a hand. Pick up his feet," and so forth. He's - all of a sudden he feels good. We've let him play the game. We've let him have a stable datum. We haven't held him as a complete outsider, anyway.

We've said, "Look, you can survive, third dynamic." You see what we've said to him? We've said, "You can help. You can survive, third dynamic." That's what we've said to him. Very often they'll just come right out of it — slurrpp — perfect condition. Fellow's all right, he found something he could help. You can put a psychotic on an E-Meter and sort him out and find out the things he could help and then let him help them, hell get sane on you.

All right. Now, the person has been inhibited from committing suicide.

He's been inhibited from killing himself gradually, from making himself decay. All psychotics are trying this one way or the other but they fail, fail, fail to make the grade. They can't kill themselves. They can't even successfully rot themselves away. They can't get disease and wipe themselves out.

They're just made to fail on every hand. Every time they got a disease a doctor came up with a needle - pssht. In other words, that's failure, failure, failure. They're knocked out on one postulate, then, aren't they? Hm? Which is "I can succumb." Now, one of the individuals I discussed this with says, "It's a very funny thing - very funny thing, very remarkable but every time I run into a tough problem I merely say to myself "this is too much for me" I say, "What do you do then?" "Oh, I go on and complete it." "Now, wait a minute. What do you do?" "Well, every time I get, you know, too tired and upset and so on, I just realize it's all too much for me and I go on and do it." What's the stable datum derived from survive-succumb?

Fellow says, "I can die. What do you know! I can die. I can make a decision along this line. I don't have to do this. I can kick the bucket!" Only you've said it to that tiny, little gradient. A person realizing this has been able then to orient from a stable datum. He's said, "I don't have to do this," which gives him enough stable data in the environment in which he's operating so that he then can do it because it doesn't have this much pressure and duress if he has to survive. You know, I have to get forward, I have to accomplish these things, I have to get all this done. And if that just goes on and on and on and the person never can say, "I can quit," boy, he gets on a stuck line, doesn't he? He is not permitted to quit.

He'll eventually get to the point where he realizes it's so exhausting or boring or upsetting to go on with this survival activity - survive, survive, survive, survive - it's so upsetting to him to go on with it that he'd just rather do anything than go on with it but he's got to go on with it because he cannot stop. That's the other datum. He cannot cease to survive at will.

We get the old Greek story of the young man who wanted to live forever and the gods gave him the right to live forever and he got to be about a - older and older and older and he was still young and youthful and his friends started dying off and getting old and dying off and civilization starts changing and everything; he's finally just begging to die.

We find Schopenhauer - this interesting character Schopenhauer saying, "The only solution is just to die and stop all life and die," and so on. In other words, he had it bad but he had one- half of it, didn't he? He at least was letting people say to themselves, "Well, I can die." See?

If you do not have the power within your hands to cease and desist as well as to persist you will get a derangement of your stable data and you'll start to seize upon gradients of these data of one kind or another - "Well, I can't die but I guess I could decay." See, an individual could say that and he starts to rot his own teeth out or something like that, see?

All right. He's not permitted to die but he can kind of wither himself away a little bit. Get the idea? Stable data. Any time you get an upset of stable data or you wipe out or forbid either one of these two stable data and take it completely out of the individual's sphere of choice you get an aberration - tiny or great, you get an aberration. And when you take out both of them you get insanity.

All right. Any case then is aberrative or inoperative to the degree that he cannot exercise free choice in either of the two fields, survive or succumb.

That's an awful argument in the teeth of a - of a civilization, isn't it? You mean to tell me that he would have to - let's look this over - he'd have to be able to denounce survival and he'd have to be able to execute succumb on the third dynamic, in other words, kill anybody he met? I'll tell you a secret - it's the only way he'd ever be nice to everybody he knew. And the only way to fix him up so he'd kill practically anybody he ran into is make it impossible for him to do it. In other words, put up enough resistance and a barrier to it to make it a solid postulate and a stable datum with him. Any murderer is carrying murder obsessive as the modus operandi - that is the way to solve things, that's the way you orient everything - you cut her throat.

Well, if you don't think that isn't an aberrated stable datum - it's nuts, it's really nuts because he wouldn't solve any part of the things in which he was engaged. And we get the fourth factor but probably more important even than these three other factors is the fact that we are engaged in playing a game.

Now, so we get such things as lined-up sides. And then, if we don't have any lineup, why, it all kind of turns into collectivist muck. But if there's nothing to fight and nobody to fight and nothing to overcome and so forth, it ceases to be a game, A person fights himself to the degree that he's not permitted a war. But people who look at this are so first dynamic themselves that they seldom realize that an individual exercises well only when he's in good communication with his environment and people in it and so forth. He only even does it - an army only does a good job of killing when it has good ARC in its own ranks. It's a very interesting thing.

So, this doesn't preach antisocialism as the cure, it merely permits the exercise of free choice. An individual could be terrifically rational and terribly sane if he could exercise these as free choices. Furthermore, people are liable to be more polite to people, too. It has its benefits. For instance, as long as - as long as somebody is protecting every member of the populace and is going to hang anybody who threatens every member of the populace then there's no vested interest in being nice at all, just go on being nasty. And then they find out to their shock and horror in the final - that the law didn't protect anybody. Get the idea? I mean, we put repressions and artificial barriers all over the place and we lose the rational view. The stable datum on the subject of murder is not "You will be hanged if you kill your fellow man." That's not a good stable datum at all. I'll tell you what is a good stable datum: "You will lose your opponent." Well, when we look over the picture that this makes we're seeing the mind in operation, we're seeing it casting its attention from one stable datum to another, trying to do an understanding of a situation - if it has no spontaneous understanding left in it - trying to understand every situation by finding which stable datum it fits in the past. That's a dumb way to do it.

We find that an individual who is clinging desperately to a stable datum must himself have had perforce too much chaos. Too much chaos and he must have had an earlier postulate: Chaos is bad, things have to be aligned, we must never have chaos, see? Never, never have chaos. That's an earlier postulate but remember it's just a postulate. We get the stable datum after this but we have an orderly society. We like to keep it orderly when it's supposed to be orderly and disorderly when it's supposed to be disorderly and when it's operating in this fashion, why, everything gets along fine.

The great oddity occurs when we realize that the survive is slightly senior to succumb on that Axiom which talks about the second postulate.

Now, we've never used the second postulate. I have to talk to you much more about the second postulate but we've never used it too much in auditing.

The second postulate becomes possible only because of the existence of the first postulate, see? If your first postulate doesn't exist your second postulate won't exist, but which one will persist? The second one will persist because it is timeless because it's being pushed forward by the first postulate. So we get a bundle of two postulates. So we have no less a situation than this in survive-succumb and we have this oddity: Straightwire on succumb doesn't work because you're auditing into no time. Succumb is no time, survive is time. But Straightwire on survive works. "Recall a time when you were surviving. Recall a moment of survival," and so on. And the individual, next thing you know, starts telling you all about these horrible deaths and murders and stops of all kinds. Don't pay a bit of attention to them, just find another moment of survival.

Now, if we ask an individual to look around the room and spot the realest object, we would be doing this same process of the first and second postulate, but how would we be doing it? To have an unreality there must first have been a reality. Unreality is a second postulate. And so we get all things that we consider bad not necessarily bad at all but they're stopped time things. They're a succumb class of things, you see. And as a society refuses to permit themselves or others to succumb and it consists more and more on survival at every hand and never lets anybody succumb, they will more and more crave or get obsessed in the succumb class of unreality, of - you know, they'll get into the second postulate.

In other words, here we have the first and second postulate in its first mechanical application: "I can survive - I can succumb." All right, we have this whole class of things called unreality, sickness, aberration, so forth - all these bad things are under the succumb classification. You see that clearly?

They're really not any more good or bad than the other but they are the second postulates, so all bad things are second postulates, all good things are first postulates. And the oddity is the bad thing derives its impetus from the good thing so you run this as a very interesting process: "Recall a moment of survival." This would be very interesting, this postulate.

Now, we have a fellow who's protesting about being old; let's have him recall a time when he was young.

Now, there's - a mechanical stimulus-response sort of thing is liable to add up in this thing too, but that's not what's doing it. It's actually kicking out the second postulates because they depend, for their continuous survival and carry on the track, on that first postulate. If the first postulate isn't there, the second postulate is [isn't] going to have force because the second postulate can have no force. It's stopped dead, see? It itself can have no force.

Only goodness gives force to badness. Fantastic that this works! All right. We take a writer who can't write. The wrong way to run it: "Give me a time when you couldn't write. Give me some reasons why you can't write." That's the wrong way to run it. Those are all stop-time things.

So they actually don't exist on the track at all.

You'll - "Give me some times you wanted to write." The first thing you know the individual wants to write. Does he want to write because you've restimulated his desire to write? Partially, but mainly you've kicked out the first postulate on which the second postulate was depending for its force.

There is no force in a dead thing, but a dead thing being kicked around by a live thing does have a lot of horsepower in it.

Two things then would happen in this framework if you - if you straightwired a writer on times he wanted to write. Two things would happen. You would get a restimulation to some degree of desire to write. Of course, this would fold up rather rapidly. You'd get a kick out of the second postulate of stop writing. That'd start deintensifying and you would get a third thing: You would get a reassertion of his power of choice on what he should do. And as soon as that choice is entirely free, he will be able to write.

Why did he stop writing in the first place? Because he had to write. He had no choice, he couldn't say, "I'll not write." So, "I'm not write" was a - "I won't write" was left as a total automaticity.

The second postulate is always an automaticity. Got it? He just left it there. But supposing we could hit this from another angle and we would suddenly say to him, "All right. Now, you know, you don't have to write." One time he might have fought this. But we might tell him this and suddenly have him say, "That's right, I don't." See, you know, "I - what do you know!" Somebody gave him permission to succumb. Get the idea?

We should actually, to rehabilitate his writing, give him the permission to not write, give him the permission to write and give him the permission to do something else. And when he's got all these, you'll have your writer back.

Got it? It'd be the same way with acting or with anything else. You'd change these factors.

Now, if you merely sorted out in the mind of an individual some of these stable data, just had him look at them - if you could communicate this theory of the stable datum to him one way or the other and just have him look at some of these stable data, he'd say, "Oh, no! I don't do that! Yes, I do. Ha-ha.

That's wild," he'd say, "that's wild. Yep. The only way to tell a good woman is if she wears a petticoat. Ha-ha-ha." It's nonsense. Stable datum.

Society has thousands of these. At one time they could all tell a good woman because she wouldn't - didn't have rice powder on her cheeks, and now we look around. That's the only way we could tell a good woman - she just didn't wear powder. I don't know how they got so creamy white but they managed it. You see this?

The whole society is liable to seize upon some stupid stable datum and thereafter this becomes a custom of some sort and you have the whole field of morals and mores and so forth stretching out before your view.

Well, I hope I've given you a little something to think about. This is the gist of the forthcoming popular book which won't be written for a long time and won't be published for a long time further. But - I know the history of these books - doesn't matter if I get them written - there's somebody can hold them up, up the printer way. Although a year is pretty good to write and publish a book if you get right down to think about it. It's better than most writers do. Want you to look over this whole thing of Axiom 53, the stable datum, and I want you to look it over in connection with the Axiom on the second postulate. See if you can't orient these things. Look at them real good, understand them real good, see if you can't think of some ways while you're doing Six Basic Processes simply to look these over with regard to the preclear.

You see, too, that by running a continuous certainty assessment on the preclear, you would knock out his stable data. You could just continue to do a certainty assessment on a preclear over and over, day after day and probably produce a considerable change of personality. But you would probably not produce a change in his ability to choose. See this?

Now, with these factors we work and with these factors we can understand a great many things. Remember this, I have not given you anything new. We've been living with this all the time.We just didn't have a particular cognition on this thing called a stable datum. We didn't see then what the full panorama of aberration was to this degree. It's merely an - a webwork of interconnecting interstices, you might say, amongst stable data. And if we want to look at aberration, why, we will simply look at the number of stable data which an individual is working with and trying to be rational about.

Now, a person rationalizes every stable datum he has - rationalization, reasons with it, around it, but he never tells it to you. So that's your trick as an auditor to find out.

I hope this data will be useful to you.

Thank you very much.