1. "Epistemology" is a word which could be said to mean almost the same as "Scientology". Like "Scientology," "Epistemology" is a coined word which was not found in the original language (Greek) from which its components are taken. It might be interesting to discuss for a moment the formations of these two words, in order to differentiate them usefully.

The word "Epistemology" is a more pleasing word to the purist than the word "Scientology" since "Epistemology" is formed entirely from Greek root words, whereas "Scientology" is formed from a Greek root and a Latin root, as was explained in the first lecture. The mixing of roots is frowned upon in the best word-coining circles. However, the best circles are not very large, and their opinions have been flouted repeatedly by the coiners of such words as "criminology, "mineralogy", "sociology", etc. Therefore, we may accept the formation of the word "Scientology" as on a par with these, from the point of view of proper word formation.

Although "Epistemology" means, according to Wcbuter, "The theory or science of the method and grounds of knowledge…" which is an approximation to tile meaning of "Sclentology". The verbal road by which "Epistemology" arrives at this meaning is 90 different from that by which "Scieiitology" arrives that it bears furtlier examination.

With "logy" we are quite familiar by now, and so we may pass on to "episteme", which means "knowledge". "Episteme" is formed from the verb "histemi", which means "stand", and the preposition "epi", which is a versatile word, meaning at various times "on", "upon", "in", "by", "near", "before", "toward", "against", "opposite", etc., etc. The Greek verb form is "epistamai", and the most literal translation of this verb would be "stand to". The thought is that the attention of the individual is placed close upon the subject to be known, like a bird dog watching the rustling grass. "Episteme", then, is the knowledge which results from attention to a subject. If the individual will apply himself to the subject, knowledge will follow.

The above lengthy, and possibly tedious, examination of this word has been made in order to bring out the point that "episteme" does not contain the idea of differentiation, which is contained in the word "science". One important difference, then, between "Epistemology" and "Scientology" is that the latter recognizes the importance of differentiation in thinking, while the former does not.

Another important difference is the historical difference, the date. "Epistemology" has been used to indicate so many different past attempts at the co-ordination of knowledge, some of them brilliant, some of them half-hearted, some of them downright stupid, that its signification has been dispersed and diffused. It is a vague word, which does not refer to anything into which one can sink his teeth, so to speak.

"Scientology" is a new word which names a new science. Just as Scientology is the successor to what has gone before in knowledge about knowledge, so the word "Scientology" is the successor to the word "Epistemology", which has seen its day. Epistemology is history. Scientology is today.

2. What is the relationship between memory and aberration?

An individual's self-determinism is directly propertional to his ability to handle his facsimiles.

The better an individual can remember, the saner he is. Remembering better does not mean remembering more often. Sometimes newcomers to Scientology hear that processing improves memory, and they are taken aback. They say, "Well, I certainly wouldn't want to keep thinking about the past all the time. My memory is good enough now. " But this is like saying, "Oh, no. We don't want a fire company in this town. It would be terrible to have those screaming sirens running up and down the main street day and night." In reality, the fire sirens sound only when there is a fire, and good memory is memory which is under the individual's control, which stands ready for his use whenever he wants it but does not bother him when he does not want it.

3. The goal of science is the creation of knowns. Superstition is a belief which centers about some natural phenomenon, usually a dangerous phenomenon, which is a false and unprofitable way of explaining or dealing with that phenomenon. Science is dedicated to the differentiation between what is useful and what is not useful in superstitious beliefs. It is dedicated to analyzing old wives' tales and picking out the'truth which usually lies hidden and perverted within then, lost to human use.

When the modern age of science began, with Bacon and Newton, a movement toward creating knowns began in the world, and gathered momentum. Our technology has grown out of that movement.

We might say that the difference between the United States and the great populous and poverty-stricken nations of Asia, the difference in wealth, is due mainly to that movement toward knowing. We say, "Although there are a few things which we do not know yet, there is nothing which is ultimately unknowable. " Whether or not this attitude is justifiable, it has produced some startling results in the world of MEST.

This attitude has been dimmed somewhat in the last seven years. When the Hiroshima incident occurred, the people of the United States were shocked. They thought of one hundred-thousand human beings losing their lives in the space of a few seconds, minutes or hours. They viewed this sudden and vastly destructive blow in a frame of reference which did not include immortality, and so they felt at last that they had perpetrated a serious overt act upon their fellow man. Considerable regret was generated, and the people looked around for someone on whom to place the blame for this event. They found, among others, the scientists who had invented the mechanical device which had made this blow possible.

Their logic then ran this way: Science seeks to know all, science has produced this overt act, science has made us wrong; to be right we must blame science and nullify it; the first step in nullifying it is to proclaim the truth that there are some things into which the mind of man should not pry. Here and there, in sermons and fiction and science fiction, the idea that some of the secrets of nature are beyond the limit of what is allowable to human curiosity begin to appear. Individuals proclaim that they have nothing to do with the atomic bomb, that they wash their hands of it, that the blame for its use must fall upon those who have made it and used It. This is a familiar pattern. The effort which has been made Is seen to have harmed one of the dynamics. The effort is disowned. The responsibility for it is shifted elsewhere. The protesting individual renders himself no longer CAUSE, but effect. And the effort becomes a counter-effort and may return painfully against the individual.

The position of the United States, insofar as it is high and powerful, has come through being responsible, through being cause, through seeking to know more and more, and through thinking that there is nothing which cannot be known.

4. Superstition is a subject upon which there is much agreement in the United States. The general opinion is that superstition is bad, old-fashioned and out-of-date. And yet, there are segments, large segments, of the population which are deeply superstitious. How can these superstitions persist in the strong light of science?

The answer is twofold: (1) the light of science is not always shining so strongly as its professed users would have us believe, and (2) every superstition, or nearly every superstition, has either some truth buried within it or some compulsive reason for existence. The job of science is to find the truth or eradicate the compulsion.

Science has gone a long way in its search for the truths within superstitions, but until now it has done little to eradicate the compulsions.

5. The most stultifying superstition that has existed about life and thought is that they are wholly products of MEST.

The most important single step in Scientology was throwing away that superstition. Immediately after, things began to happen, and they have been happening ever since.

6. Earlier, it was thought that memories were recorded in the cells of the body. Then, memories which could not have been carried on the protoplasmic line, memories of former deaths, turned up in pre-clears, and the cell-recording theory had to be abandoned.

A human being is as sick as he gives a stimulus-response reaction to his environment.

8. The "stream of consciousness" is a concept of thought as a continuous procession of experiences and memories through time. This concept defines thought as a function of Time, which is MEST, and is therefore in agreement with the life-and-thought-are-MEST superstition.

Stream-of-consciousnes stories and novels (like ULYSSES and FINNEGAN'S WAKE, by James Joyce) portray, sometimes with much skill and art, this picture of human thinking. The hero or heroine (or more properly, the central character, since there are very few heroes or heroines in modern intellectual novels) rises in the morning with a stream of verbal mental activity which resembles more than anything else in the world of reality a news-service teletype machine dutifully clacking out the result of a mixup of ten news lines and four lines which have been joined to linotype machines on which pornographic booklets are being set up. This jumble continues to pour out upon the pages throughout the day of this character. Occasionally there is some dialogue, which shows the influence of the stream of consciousness upon the behavior of the individual. He picks out a thought here and a thought there from this stagnant stream and verbalizes it.

The attempt to render in words the totality of thought at any given moment presents difficulties. There are many words which would have to be invented or reassessed to make it possible, thought being a rather wide band of perceptions at its simplest. These difficulties, however, usually are not apparent to the writers of stream-of-consciousness novels, since many of them apparently are under the impression that human beings think in words as well as in a stream of association.

Unfortunately, there are human beings who do think both in a stream of association and in words. These human beings are not sane, except by the most flexible standards. The stream-of-consciousness idea was borrowed from psychology, which has been a study of the processes of thought as they are found in neurotic and psychotic human beings, in the main. It has been a common mistake in both literary and psychologic efforts to make the unwell a standard for the comparatively well, and the stream-of-consciousness story is only one example of this.

The idea of the stream-of-consciousness is an interesting one. It reveals several things about the people who employed it to explain human thought.

It reveals, first of all, that their memories were not very good. Only in a mind which was mostly turned off could the calling up and rejecting of memories take such a lone; time that it would be noticed by the individual as a procession of ideas. Even in a person who qualifies no higher on the tone scale than high, normal thinking does not take so long as this, The man who is doing some kind of rapid and difficult work calls up and rejects so many different memories in one second that it would take at least a page to give a satisfactory list of them. And this brings us to the second revelation which this idea makes.

The people who employed it were in very poor control of their own thoughts. Whenever, in the thinking process, a thought foists itself upon the thinker and will not be put aside, but persists in spite of his wish to be rid of it, that thinker is in trouble. If his whole thinking process were as arbitrary as this, he would be obviously insane. Sanity is directly proportional to the individual's control over his own facsimiles. He must be able to call up any facsimile he wants and put aside any facsimile he does not want. He must be able to call up many at once or concentrate on only a few. If the facsimiles appear to have any will of their own about this, it is obvious that the individual is very low on the scale of CAUSE and effeet.

Association is not a very useful concept, since it stresses what might be called the background activity of the mind instead of the foreground activity, which is differentiation. It is as though we complimented the sculptor on having a wonderful quarry but neglected to praise his finished work.

If association is such a useful thing, then why not have total association and be done with it? The individual need only call up all his memories at once to be the wisest man in the world. But what would be the result of that? He would just have more data than he could handle. He would have to begin differentiating before he could do any useful thinking.

Only in a mind almost completely occluded can association be a valued thing. The sculptor has lost the key to the quarry, and so every poor, cracked piece of stone that he finds outside it is a treasure to him. But if he could get into the quarry, he would be concerned with picking: the best piece, the piece which would be of use to him.

Only in a mind almost completely effect could association be considered the inevitable and complete process of thinking.

9. The stream-of-consciousness theory is part of the stimulus-response approach to thought.

1O. If the student will look again at the Hubbard Chart of Attitudes, he will see that all of that part of the tone scale to which manifestations have been assigned lies below the 22.0 mark.

The axioms of Scientology express the equation of thought and motion which makes life. The motion in this equation is qualified in terms of randomity. This means that It is possible for a motion to be too random, too undirected, too intense; that it is possible, on the other hand, for a motion to be not random enough, to be productive of not enough change. It means, also, that there is, for any given organism at any given time, a randomness of motion which is just right. This is called optimum randomity.

Since randomity applies to organisms and the tone scale applies to theta, there is a paradox in the rating of randomity on the tone scale.

At 0.0, or death, on the tone scale, randomity is said to be either too great or too little. This is called plus-or- minus randomity. At 22.0, randomity is considered optimum. In the higher reaches of the scale, randomity again becomes plus-or-minus, until at 40.0 the top static is attained. In other words, optimum randomity is not at the highest tone, it is at 22.0. This is because randomity applies to theta's control over MEST, and not merely to theta as theta.

11. What takes place as the individual rises above 22.0 on the tone scale ?

One thing is that he begins to withdraw from the physical universe. If his controlling relationship with the physical universe is at its best at 22.0, then it must not be so good above and below that point. We know, on the one hand, what happens to that relationship as the individual descends the tone scale from 22.0. His relationship with MEST becomes less and less one of controlling MEST and more and more one of being controlled by MEST. But what happens above 22.0?

We may suppose that it Is as though an individual had spent some time learning to play gin rummy. At first, the cards may have seemed mysterious and fascinating to him. The red spots here, the black spots there, the faces of the king, queen and jack, and so on. He may have had some trouble with the rules of the game, and he may have lost the first few games. But then as he gained greater and greater knowledge of the game, his successes would have mounted, until he was practically unbeatable. He would have reached the peak of his success, 22.0 on the tone scale for gin rummy. Though acknowledged as the best player on the block, he may have preferred to spend his time with a pretty girl, condescending only now and then to take time for a game and, of course, winning whatever games he took time for. In the end, he might give up gin rummy altogether and enter upon matrimony.

The individual who rises above 22.0 on the tone scale has greater and greater abilities to cause, to know, to survive, to be right, to be responsible, but he does not care, evidently, to exercise the abilities with respect to MEST. Just what, then, he does care to exercise them with respect to is an interesting question, the answer to which would cause a lot of data to be added on the chart in the top band, which is now empty.

12. What bearing has this scale upon memory? How does the individual's ability to control the motion of the physical universe relate to memory?

It is simple. A memory is a recording of physical universe motion. The individual's ability to use and control that recording matches his ability to use and control MEST. His ability to use and control his own memory is a direct index of his self-determinism.

Now, since we have observed this parallel between MEST and recordings of MEST, perhaps we may go on to say that when the individual rises above 22.0 on the tone scale, not only does he begin to lose interest in MEST, but also he begins to lose interest in his recordings of MEST; not only does he enter upon an existence for which MEST is not at all necessary, but also he enters upon an existence for which facsimiles of MEST are not at all necessary. If the highest band of the tone scale involves a being who KNOWS, inherently, experience should be of little value in that band, and the individual might wish not to use it, or hardly to use it.

Two possibilities then occur. Either the individual can put aside his memories, so to speak, in a place where they may be recalled if he ever needs them; or perhaps he can merely become un-written-upon again, and all his facsimiles can be erased, so that he remains a being who potentially knows all about MEST, but actually has not yet (in terms of MEST time) taken the trouble to impinge this power of knowing upon MEST.

The techniques which have been worked out in Scientology to date are below 22.0 techniques. This Is fortunate for most of us, who are below 22.0.

When an individual is low enough on the tone scale to have trouble with some of his facsimiles, we may help him to rise on the scale by reducing the effect of a few of the particularly bad facsimiles upon him. The best way to do this, of course, would be simply to raise him up the tone scale, but at present the means for doing this are somewhat limited, and so we try to take the pressure of the facsimiles off him, so that he can rise a little of his own accord.

There are four techniques, broadly, for doing this. They are counter-effort processing, effort processing, emotionn processing, and postulate or thought processing.

Of these four processes, emotion processing is the workhorse. The most satisfactory over-all effect which can be produced in the average case is with the running of emotion.

Each of these four affects the other three, but they are in an order of importance. The least important is counter effort, the most important is thought.

In any facsimile, the target of the auditor is thought even though he may have to run emotion or effort or both before the thought can be reached.

SEMINAR QUESTIONS

1. What arbitraries would you prefer to designate positions on the tone scale ? Why ?

2. What does the word "Scientology" define?

3. What would happen if all your memories were before you at once?

4. For what National event, or policy, do you feel guilt?

5. What facsimiles does stream-of-consciousness writing contact, if any? Explain.