Today I want to talk to you about the Axioms of Dianetics — just as simple as this, the Axioms of Dianetics. Very many people have in the past been enthusiastically using this word Dianetics, bombastically using it, doing various strange and peculiar things connected with the word Dianetics. And yet, if you were to walk up to the bulk of these people and said, "Give me the first Axiom of Dianetics," he would look at you and his jaw would drop, and he would say, "What is Dianetics? Isn't that a speculative science? Well, you know, like psychology, you know? It's like psychology, isn't it?" You'd say, "No, Dianetics is a science of a different type." There are two types of science, and one is what they laughingly called, in the old days, the science of the humanities. And these were speculative philosophies. You see this? Speculative. It's, "Well, we don't know, and all we know is, really, that nobody knew, and nobody knows, and we don't know. But we can figure, and our figuring tells us that nobody … we don't, of course — we realize the human mind . . ." By the way, this is a direct quote from one of the leading psychology textbooks of modern times: "We realize that the mind is so complex that it can never be resolved." Then what is he pretending to do? He is there, he's supposed to know something about the mind and he opens his book up by saying it's so complex it can't be solved.
Well, having said this, having uttered this ponderous pomposity and this utter stupidity, this person then starts out and starts to write about a science? You don't start to write about something by saying the problem isn't solved and can't be solved, and then go and write for a hundred thousand words — only an idiot would. Well, so that's been this field of humanities.
Now, there's a different type of science. There's another type of science, the type of science that an engineer is very used to, that a mathematician wouldn't be able to get along without, and that is the science which precisely integrates itself after proceeding from an original assumption.
It makes an assumption — starts somewhere — and then it proceeds from that assumption in a thoroughly reasonable, logical line which could be equated mathematically, and proceeds to resolve a certain body of human experience.
Now, we might say physics is not a body of human experience, but actually it is. And it starts out with the assumption that the universe is here and that it's real. That's its first assumption. And then it starts out from that and continues along the line by assuming that certain laws in the universe are constant.
And the first thing it tells you in physics textbooks, ordinarily, is the laws of balances, starting out from that ancient Greek that said if he could have a fulcrum long enough, and something to rest it on, he could move earth personally.
It starts out from this assumption, goes on in fulcrums and balances — the discovery of this ancient Greek — it proceeds on, but it never loses sight of its central motif or the point from which it started. And even though we are today into the field of nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, we still have never lost sight of the basic laws of physics.
One of the basic laws of physics, rightly or wrongly, is the conservation of energy. That applies to the real universe. If you handle the real universe with the real universe, the conservation of energy is a law, and it's an immutable law — if you handle the physical universe with the physical universe. Only then is conservation of energy correct as a law.
But it started from a certain assumption, didn't it? Carried on through logically, it invades various fields — motion, kinetics, statics — and is able to serve man.
The field of chemistry, while not as precise, nevertheless is based upon the fact that a man can isolate — or a person can isolate — certain compounds and can recombine them and obtain other compounds, and that he can combine certain elements and combine them with other elements and achieve compounds.
It starts … Its basic assumption is, really, that there are certain different elements in the real universe, and that these can be computed and predicted and found, and that they are combined into various molecular structures. From atomic structure they are combined into molecular structure, and the molecular structure is combined into compounds. And we go on from there.
But we have never departed from the reasonable assumption that some-thing can be done with these various elements, you see. We've never departed from that fact. Therefore, it's a constant. It is rational. It is a sane science, then, you see. It's not a speculation. People don't come around in the field of chemistry and speculate and wonder whether or not there are ninety-six elements, or something of the sort. They've already spotted them.
They don't speculate very much about the whole line. They are there to act, and these are sciences of action. These are the sciences which build motorcars and airplanes. And these are the sciences by which, actually, men live, and women live, too — although women are rather unreasonable about it; they don't assume as often as men that they have to live by the rules and laws of physics.
Yet if a woman drops an electric iron on her toe, it will drop, and the transfers of heat, and so forth, will burn her toe. And she will suffer from the laws of physics whether she's agreed with them or not, rationally, right where she is.
In other words, it's a science which is discoverable whether you believe in it or not. Now get the difference. You know, it doesn't matter whether you believe in this science or not, or whether you have been educated or not. If you're alive, and if you're part of the track of agreements which brought this universe into beingness, then you can be the effect of this science — not so, psychology; not so, social science; not so, economics, or any of these other speculations. They do not start from an agreed-upon assumption. There are as many schools of psychology as there are psychologists; just as there are as many schools of economics as there are economists. And they've never agreed where they start.
Now, those people who wish to go on speculating endlessly in the field of Dianetics are in the wrong field. They're in the wrong field entirely. They belong over in the field of psychology, and they should go back to psychology.
People are perfectly at liberty to speculate on anything under the sun, moon and stars. But after you've demonstrated the constancy of a phenomenon, after a constancy has been demonstrated, and demonstrated again and again and again and again and again — and we've gotten person after person after person after person; and we've hauled them all in and demonstrated the phenomenon continued to occur — it doesn't look to me like we're in a speculative science anymore. It doesn't even vaguely appear to be a speculative science. Does it to you, if this could happen?
We can show you the overt-act-motivator sequence. This is a very advanced part of Dianetics. We take an overt-act-motivator sequence — you can plot it out. People do not know that they are being subjected to this particular phenomenon; it's noumena, now. They don't know. But this lady goes out, she punishes her child, see. Overt act. She doesn't know anything about overt-act phenomena, overt-act-motivator sequence. You can absolutely count on the fact that in the next few minutes or in the next few hours or in the next few years — sometime in the future — she is all of a sudden going to feel very sorry about it and, without knowing why, feel guilty because of this child.
Why? She used the facsimile outbound. She doesn't get one inbound. It doesn't balance. The kid can't defend himself, he can't protect himself, he doesn't strike back. The debt is never cancelled out; therefore, the overt-actmotivator phenomenon will hang fire.
I processed a man one time who had been through an entire war and he had been shot down. And many horrible things had happened to this fellow. And he was having a lot of trouble with his mind. He'd gotten so he couldn't remember, he couldn't think, he couldn't do anything of the sort.
And finally, in plowing around, I discovered that he had struck his father when his father was seventy. He'd come back from the war, this boy had, and his father had come to live with him, and his father had gotten drunk. And he had many, many, many tallies against his father — you know, he figured his father had always been mean to him one way or the other. But this was what he was telling me. And he had struck his father violently and had broken his jaw. And the old man was in pretty bad state for quite a while.
I ran this simply as an overt-act-motivator sequence. He knew this had nothing to do with his case. He knew this, this preclear did. That had nothing to do with his case at all. He'd forgotten it. He knew that was, well, what happened but that the old man had done a lot of things to him, and that was balanced out. Actually, it was that terrible treatment he got in that prison camp in the war.
Well, listen, the terrible treatment in the prison camp at the war might have softened him up, but it was actually balanced out. How about the terrible treatment he gave an awful lot of enemy pilots, huh? However, that overt-act-motivator sequence was balanced out as far as the war was concerned — give and take.
So he'd finally caught it. So what! This was of no great moment, one way or the other. But when he struck his father, he then dreamed up a great many overt acts that his father had done to him when he was a child. He dreamed them up out of whole cloth. His old man treated him very, very well.
Why, this preclear sat there and driveled and blathered about actual sexual attacks from his father against himself. It's no wonder Freud went into the field of sex, because when they want to get anybody really in Dutch in this society, sex being verboten, why, they just simply use sex, you see, as … The darnedest line of stuff you ever listened to. I simply ran him through old-time Effort Processing. I ran him through the efforts of striking his father.
And we just kept at it, and we looked in vain for his father striking him. It was a one-way flow. This man had been sick ever since, and he could never compute this out. It just didn't make sense one way or the other.
There was phenomena, but it was a demonstrable phenomenon. We found that the one place in his life where he had committed a sin without any reason for it — see, no good reason — he then tried to fill in the breach with hallucination. His whole life became full of hallucination.
He was trying madly to justify this action which had no justification at all. And it finally turned out that he had come home and his father had tried to help him to bed because he was drunk. And he had all of a sudden turned on his father and beaten him. And the cops had come up and arrested him, and so forth.
This had made him think of the prison camp, and had gotten things into restimulation, and so forth. But let's just take overt-act — motivator phenomena. You think this is single and individual to people? You've got a hundred people, and every fifth one you're going to find something of this phenomenon? Oh, no. That is not what you're going to do. This is Dianetics. If there is such a phenomenon, and it's carried in the body and field of Dianetics, you are going to discover it in one hundred people — just like that.
Even the most calloused, hardened sinner is himself a chaos of committed overts with no motivators. You know? Or some fellow goes on and can be very bad toward the whole society. Why? It has given him so many motivators.
One time he was perfectly innocent. He was a kid; they accused him of stealing apples from the fruit stand; they branded him a juvenile delinquent and threw him in the clink — he was innocent.
He went out the next time, he got to running with a gang of kids, and this whole gang got rounded up. And he had not taken any part in the service-station robbery, but they threw him in the clink too.
And he went to school, and he had this big, tough teacher in this detention home. And this big, tough teacher one day accused him of doing some-thing or other, and beat him over the head with a club and knocked him senseless.
Oh, huh! Our whole basic training here has all done what? This person hasn't done anything to the society, but the society has been doing things to him, hasn't it?
And what do you think he is licensed to do now? He considers himself to be in receipt of sufficient motivators to be able, now, to commit any number of overt acts against the society with no feeling of guilt. And that is the state of mind in which you find most criminals. And it is the overt-act motivator sequence delivered in that direction which makes the criminal.
It is the underprivileged child who is abused by society: tried to get along, tried to be social, and kept getting kicked in, knocked down, kicked in — for years and years and years. And all of a sudden he has all the right in the world to kill a man. He has all the right in the world.
It's "all the society out there," in a combined unit, has been victimizing him. And now, without any conscience or anything of the sort, he can turn around against that society and do whatever he likes to it.
Any time you get an imbalanced situation on the overt-motivator sequence … You've got to have as many motivators as you have overts, as many overts as you have motivators. And if it doesn't balance, the preclear will try to balance it out, one way or the other, by considering himself licensed to fight. What is an unbalanced overt-act--motivator sequence? It's a license to fight.
All right. Now, many people have talked about this very learnedly. This is nothing brand-new. It's out of an observation of "We guess, but it's awfully complex," you know, sort of a frame of mind. And it is over into the field of: We get a preclear, and this preclear tells us, "And my papa beat me and my mama beat me, and they were very mean to me, and they did this to me and they did that to me. And they did this to me and they did that to me." And you say, "Brother, you poor guy. You mean you could never get these parents of yours to do a thing to you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" That's actually what that preclear is trying to tell his auditor — if his auditor knows Dianetics.
If he knows psychology, I don't know what would be the conclusion. But I'll tell you what it means in Freudian analysis. They let that patient sit there. Understand this: They let him sit there for two to ten years, four hours a week, blathering this stuff.
Now, the basic law which underlies all this guilt and recrimination is the overt-act-motivator sequence, and it is found in the Axioms of Dianetics.
When somebody is talking to you about being terribly wronged — if he seems to be able to pull in on himself all kinds of engrams of punishment; if this is all he can talk to you about — you can be dead sure that this person has delivered far more overts than he has motivators for. They have never been motivated — his overt acts. He has been a mean boy.
He has just mocked up all kinds of defenseless people. His parents were probably good to him. The ones he complains about are the ones that he did the overt acts to. Just bing-bing! Just like that.
These people were good to him. They did what they could for him in their circumstances of life. They were extremely pleasant to him; they made sure that he got a lot of things in life.
And one day, in a mistaken fit of zeal or reaction or accident, or some-thing of this sort, why, he did something to one of his parents. He did some-thing mean — real mean. If he's talking about both his father and his mother, he's done something real mean to both of them — probably several times.
And he could stand doing it once. He didn't feel too good about it, see. But the next time … It isn't that they get hardened and calloused, actually. The chips start balancing; they very precisely balance. The number of acts is a finite quantity. And it's the more acts, the more situation it develops in the preclear.
So he's then repeatedly — it wasn't because he got used to doing it, you know — he then started to say, "Well, I have a perfect right to hurt my parents. People are no good. This thing about society and social life, and so forth, is just a lot of bunk. And I had a perfect right to do this." And he did something else to his parents, and he did something else, and he did some-thing else. And then one fine day, he all of a sudden felt like he was caving in. He didn't know what was wrong with him. He's just unbalanced the combination to such a point that he is left with a complete overbalance.
And you know what happens to him then? He's got to pick up hallucinatory or imaginary overt acts. He's got to make up mock-ups and claim that he didn't make them up, and pull them in on himself, or reach back on the whole track and pull in mock-ups of people being mean to him.
And the next thing you know, this preclear is all beaten up by engrams and facsimiles. He's got birth in restimulation, and Fac One. And he's got electronics and all the times he was under arrest. He's got these things in restimulation.
What's the mechanism behind all this? It's simply: He's been ornerier than people have been ornery to him — to be very technical in our use of words. Nevertheless, that's a very, very precise thing.
That's noumena to us — can be classed as noumena, not phenomena. It's not speculative. It's only speculative while you are examining it, and it's speculative to yourself, you see? You're speculating, "I wonder whether or not this is a law" — the same way you would study physics.
You go out and you get an inclined plane and apply the formula of inclined planes to the rolling little wooden ball, or something of the sort, you know. And you speculate, "I wonder whether or not that's true or false." You do it a few times and you say all of a sudden, "Hey! What do you know? That's true!" Well, so therefore, speculation would be admissible in the field of physics as long as we were examining it. And anybody teaching you physics would try very hard to get you to make sufficient experiments, you see, to give yourself an insight into whether or not these laws were true. If he didn't, he would never teach you physics.
But after you found out that something drops at 32.2 feet per second here on earth, acceleration of gravity — if it accelerates at 32.2 — you don't, every time you put that in an equation, speculate some more, do you? If you did you'd be crazy. You can go out, and if you've dropped so many weights of such and such sizes in vacuums, and you've discovered that's always 32.2, you could assume that it would continue to be 32.2. And you could relax about the whole thing, couldn't you?
And after that you'd say, "Thirty-two point two. That's just what it is." All right. Overt-act — motivator sequence. That's all right, nobody is saying, "Now, look. You have to take this on belief," or you haven't got to swallow this, you know. It's all perfectly all right. You can question it all you want to, as long as you look and examine and see whether or not this is true; and look, and decide if you find this out to be true, you're dealing with a law. It seems to hold true person to person to person to person — so true, that you as an auditor can actually, from the two-way communication of your preclear, know very quickly who he's been mean to. Because he's giving you all the sad tale of how mean this person is to him. This person isn't mean to him. You can just set that down as a law. You've got this overbalanced overtact — motivator sequence.
All right. And there's this fellow who's going around saying, "Boy, I'd just like to cut their throats and slit their gullets, and torture 'em. And if I just had a chance . . ." or he's actually doing it! You can just count on the fact that this boy has received enough motivators. He's heavy on motivators.
He was kicked around for a long time with no provocation, and now he has a license to do what he pleases.
Will he really be able to put these into action though? The trick in it is he can never completely duplicate the action that was done to him. See, it can't be the perfect duplicate. He's trying to make a perfect duplicate, and that would wipe it all out. And instead of making a perfect duplicate, he keeps on making these imperfect duplicates, and so keeps unbalancing it from life to life, over and over, one way and then the other way, back and forth. You see how life goes, then?
So we're dealing with a law. Nobody wants you to believe this law. All anyone wants you to do is look and find out whether or not the law is true. If you find out it's true, then we're out of the field of a speculative science, aren't we? Right away.
So there are two different kinds of sciences. One is speculative, and the other is what you might call an exact science. Now, I'm not telling you Dianetics is an exact science simply because I invented it. I'm telling you it's an exact science because it is. There's a difference there, isn't there?
You see, I've been agreed with, now, by practically anybody who has re-ally studied Dianetics. Even the chair of physics of Columbia University came close to a left-handed sort of praise one day when he said to a bunch of his students, "The diabolical accuracy of the predicted behavior by Hubbard is going to undo, someday, the entire field of psychology. And then where will you be?" He was mad. He didn't even know he wasn't making sense. Nobody is trying to undo psychology. We're not playing in the same league.
Therefore, you get somebody oriented in the field of psychology and try to treat him with Dianetics, why, you'd . . . About the only way you'll exteriorize him, by the way, is by R2-45.
All right. He's speculating all the time. The main problem he's trying to solve is "Am I alive or am I not alive?" Well, so much for that. Let's look at the most elementary Axioms of Dianetics — the most elementary. We discover these Axioms are put together on a level of simplicity, not just to make people happier, you know, with it; not just to get people to agree, and so forth; not to pat them on the back, or something of the sort. These Axioms we put together as the most elementary Axioms of Dianetics are actually quite immutable. Horrible.
Dianetics, you see, is the study of man, more than anything else. It is the study of man. It's a study of his behavior and the motivations of behavior of man — not just life, but of man; a very specialized kind of life. And, as far as man is concerned, he is obeying very, very definite laws and rules — and which can be set forward in axioms.
And the first and most fundamental of these, which we mustn't lose sight of (and it's even in the R2 list; way advanced in the R2 list): The dynamic principle of existence is survive. That's the basic Axiom of Dianetics.
You can talk about ideals if you want to, and you can talk about a lot of other things. You can say nobility, and you can say this and you can say that, and say these are motivating causes of existence, and all that sort of thing; but none of that is substantiative. You can't substantiate that. You can substantiate the fact that man is trying to survive or — as later on in Science of Survival you will discover — he inverts, and he's trying to succumb.
But then he is not man very long, is he? I mean, after he decides to succumb, you see, he's walked out of the human race. So again, when we're talking about man, the dynamic principle of existence is survive — that which we know as man.
Now, a person gets down below 2.0 on the Tone Scale and he sort of leaves the human race. He leaves it in more ways than one. He tries to part company with all of his fellows. He tries to push his fellows off. He becomes antisocial.
He considers it a crime to survive, by the way. It is evil to survive. He really believes it's evil to survive. He believes something that is surviving over a long period of time would be evil. It's like a beautiful statue that was … I think the thing was built to Arsinoe, one of Cleopatra's relatives. Anyhow, this thing was on the coast of North Africa, and it was just a gorgeous piece of stuff. And it has excited the ire of successive lines of kings in that particular area, hardly without exception, since the day it was first left unprotected by Cleopatra's immediate family.
Now, ages ago this thing was built and it's still there — it's still there. It's almost indestructible. And it has driven some of the lower orders, dynasties, and so forth, of the North African coast, into complete frenzies.
In the last war, they were busy shooting machine-gun bullets at it, and so forth, trying to knock it to pieces, and they couldn't even make a dent in it.
Monarchs have had teams of oxen hitched to it to try to pull it over and destroy it, and so on. And it just goes on standing there.
This is an interesting thing. Practically every man, however, who has tried to destroy it is trying to destroy a great many other things, you see. He's off on a destruction bent. He is what we call insane, and the human race elects out those who are insane, or uses them for their political and military leaders. One or the other.
The human race will also use them for their witch doctors — such a case as the shaman's call. They wait for somebody to go mad in the tribe, and froth at the mouth. And after that, why, he has visions, dreams, hallucinations. They believe what he says. He is then their witch doctor. We've carried that forward into the field of psychiatry.
Anyway, our whole basis here, where we're talking about the human race — what is the human race, and so forth — we're talking about survival. Because when we talk about succumb we're merely talking about an objection to surviving, aren't we?
So it's still survival. The guy is objecting to survival. So we could say more clearly, if we wanted to clarify this further, the dynamic principle of existence is survive. And this is countered by the second principle, succumb, but we're getting too involved.
Actually, on the Tone Scale below 2.0, succumb is the goal. And above 2.0 on the Tone Scale, survive is the goal of man. And this is an adequate statement. Perfectly adequate. Nothing else falls outside of that. You see, mankind is very thoroughly in agreement with conservation of energy, and survival is actually simply persistence. He creates to persist. He destroys to persist.
All of his actions are monitored by persistence, you see. He creates to persist, he destroys to persist, he acts to persist, he teaches bank tellers to be honest, so they can persist — so the banks can persist — and this is the central goal. I inspected this goal for five years and found it to be uniformly workable — so workable, that today, when we have a process which simply, intimately addresses this (survival, you know), it's a very workable process.
And where we have a process which doesn't take survival into its conclusions, we don't have a workable process. It's not workable. As soon as we let go of that one as the primary motive in existence, why, we just shotgun all over the place.
Now, processes, then, which enhance survival, are considered to be good processes. Even processing, you see, is monitored by this dynamic principle of existence. And processes which reduce survival are considered to be bad processes.
What is a bad process? One which reduces survival. What is a good process? One which enhances survival. Life becomes very simple if you know this.
If you isolate this as an immutable law, it is then very easy to under-stand what man is doing and what various classes of men are doing.
Okay. In order to understand survival, as you will learn in Science of Survival, and as you have probably already read in Science of Survival, you discover that the factor, survive, as a drive or a thrust, is itself subdivisible. If you were to put a magnifying glass on its vector arrow, you would find that there were eight major subdivisions, eight thrusts toward survival, eight thrusts for survival.
And in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, we only treat four of these, because Dianetics is the science of man. And the first of those is the thrust for the survival of self as self, for self. That's first. What man considers self is himself. Well, it's actually thetan plus machines plus body plus reactive bank, and that is what we call the first dynamic, where man is concerned. Actually, that isn't the first dynamic. The awareness of awareness unit is the real first dynamic. But man, when he thinks of himself, is himself. So we can take even the first vector to pieces, can't we?
See, we put a fairly good magnifying glass on this survival-vector arrow, and we got out eight lines, really. But if we were to put just a mediumly good, you know, rather poor magnifying glass on the survival arrow, we'd only see four dynamics, if we were a man. And self would simply mean a conglomerate. See, it's awareness of awareness unit, plus the machinery which serves the awareness of awareness unit (the computers and so forth), plus the body, plus the reactive bank. But we'd have to have a much better magnifying glass trained on that one little vector to see all this.
All right. So, we look over this and we say, well, dynamic one, then, covers self. In Scientology it means the awareness of awareness unit. In Dianetics it means something else. It means the body plus the thetan plus the reactive bank plus the machinery. It means four things. And that is self. The actual first dynamic — pardon me, in Scientology it simply means the awareness of awareness unit, see; in Dianetics it means all these other things — the real, actual first dynamic is the awareness of awareness unit all by itself. And for that reason, nobody's ever really processed, until Scientology, the actual first dynamic. They were always processing a third dynamic. Well, that's one thing they can learn out of this immediately.
Now, let's look at the second dynamic. And we say, what's this second dynamic? In Dianetics, Scientology, it's the same thing. The dynamic two is the urge of the individual toward survival through procreation. It includes both the sex acts and the raising of progeny — the care of children and their symbiotes. What symbiote means: it means dependencies. It means their dogs and their cats and their dolls — their tokens.
In Freudian work we discover this was the end-all of existence. Freud discovered that people had gone down what we now know in Scientology as the Know down to Mystery Scale — first known as the Know to Sex Scale, now known as the Know to Mystery Scale.
Most people that he would discover having trouble, were stuck at the condensation we call sex. This is because they had decided that they could not survive in the body in which they found themselves, but would have to pro-create in order to have another body up the time track, and maybe that could survive.
This is so much the case that a biologist writing — with indifferent knowledge of humanity and life, and certainly with no knowledge of Dianetics and Scientology — would uniformly attribute the totality, the total purpose of existence, was simply to procreate and keep the unending line of protoplasm going, on a racial line. They think that's the total of life.
Well, they didn't solve the problem either, any more than somebody who would come along and say, "You all live for self. You live for yourself. Every man lives for himself, and that is all he lives for." Actually, any man living for himself is not going to live.
All right. The second dynamic is quite startling, in that it connects two things which were hitherto really not connected, even in Freudian analysis, and which are very definitely connected — and that is the sexual act on the one hand, and the care and raising of children on the other hand. If you say sex, you're talking about the sexual act and children, aren't you?
So we discover all sorts of weirdities in this society whereby people are engaging in the sexual act, but making sure that they do not have any children. Well, we'd say that these people then are below 2.0 on the Tone Scale, and must be going in the direction of succumb. Hm? The act is okay, but the children aren't okay. Well, you say this doesn't equate? That's right. It doesn't equate. Those people are nuts. They're daffy.
Of course, we get up on the third dynamic, we can find out that there can be an overpopulation problem for such people as the Polynesians. They have only so many fish around the island. They have only so much ground on the island to live on. There are no other islands in the world. So they cut back their population by inhibiting sex. And this is the way they do it. They practice birth control to keep the population … They now practically don't exist as races, either. So you see, it's perfectly all right to sit down on the second dynamic. You'll survive always — for a while.
Well, as a case of nonsurvival, take the attitude toward sex of a New Yorker. I don't think I need to go on describing it any further, in level of survival. New York depends exclusively for its forward driving population on kids from the farms, kids from the small towns, other cities — exclusively. It can't continue on its home product.
You go through the ranks of New Yorkers, and you discover that the executive of this and the hot brains behind that, and so forth — well, this guy is from Peoria and that guy is from Keokuk and so forth. Where is the native New Yorker? He is working for them — janitor.
Anyway, this all has to do with the fact that New York, being so terrifically compressed and suppressed, of course has a pretty bad foul-up on the second dynamic.
Well, that's just one dynamic that they've cut out. And you see, they could cut out just half of this. They could believe in the sexual act and omit children from the computation of sex, and you would have only 50 percent of the second dynamic operative.
And if these fellows started to live for self and for the sexual act, you would have only one and one-half dynamics out of eight dynamics functioning. Uuuh! This fellow would not be very alive, believe me. He's not, either. He has a horrible time in life.
I'm not necessarily being hard on New Yorkers. I like New Yorkers. Actually, if I had followed my natural bent — I'm being more covert today than usual — I would have discussed, in these same terms, and put in the name Hollywood. But I don't like dirty words, to utter them in class. So I don't say the words like that. We are talking about something clean and noble like sex. We don't want to introduce Hollywood into it.
Anyway, the second dynamic is only, really, from a Scientologist's view-point, only one-eighth of the picture. You don't have to equate that mathematically, but it's really about only one-eighth of the picture.
You could theoretically have somebody who would believe in the sexual act, and be very fine in the sexual act, and who could be good to and raise children as a totality of function in existence. There are such people. They don't think of themselves, and they don't really think of the third dynamic at all. They certainly don't think of the fourth dynamic. There are some women like this. There were some in the Middle West. But actually they're only one-eighth alive. You see, theoretically you could get somebody "manic'd," you might say, on one of these dynamics at a time. You could get any kind of a combination.
Now, the only reason I'm mentioning that is it's combinations of these emphases on these various dynamics which make these combinations of personalities which appear so complex. One person is only partly there on the first dynamic, and he's very much there on the second dynamic, and boy, he's certainly all out on the fifth dynamic — the rest of them, zero.
Well, boy, he'd be quite a man. He would really be quite a man — I mean, if he had even that much combination. You're probably talking about some headliner like Clyde Beatty, or something, when you're talking about that. He probably is very fine on the second dynamic. He is very darned good on the first dynamic. People like him. He evidently can associate very well, and he's sure hell on wheels on the fifth dynamic, animals, and any kind of life form.
But I can tell you from my own conversations with him, he's a complete dead loss on the remaining dynamics. But here's an awful lot of dynamics to be in force. Give you an idea of the normal Homo sap. That's a lot of dynamics to be in force.
All right. The next dynamic that we talk about in Dianetics is of course the third dynamic, and by that we mean groups. We mean any group of selves — whatever we call the first dynamic, you see — any group composed of first dynamics.
And the family is a specialized group. And it belongs partly between the third and the second dynamic, because it has a purpose and a mission as a group to raise families. But then all third dynamic functions actually impinge slightly into the second dynamic. You can always go down here to the Kiwanis Club and get a big cheer about all these poor kids, see. They always go slightly over there on the third dynamic a little bit. But by a third dynamic we mean a group of selves.
All right. This group of selves, accumulating together, actually develops a personality of its own. You'll get a sort of a colonial aggregation. And you'll just get an aggregation. Somebody asked me one time, "Why do you say, 'colonial aggregation?' "
"I don't know, myself. I read it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica." And they say, "A colony, you see, that means a group. And then an aggregation, that means a group. So that's actually redundant." That's all they know about groups. They go down here to the Kiwanis Club, they will find clique A and clique B and the voters. And clique A is a colony sitting in the middle of the entire aggregation called the Kiwanis Club. Right? And clique B is another colony, a bunch of pals that kind of run things when they get their hands on the reins, and they're sitting there in the aggregation known as the Kiwanis Club.
But what do you know? The Phoenix Kiwanis Club and probably the London Kiwanis Club are probably quite divergent, one to the other, but they probably have something or other in common, if the London Kiwanis Club exists at all — may very well, because they say Kiwanis International. They probably have something in London.
And we would have, then, a colony, you might say, called Phoenix, a colony called London, which are part of the aggregation known as Kiwanis Clubs. You see how this thing builds up?
It's like a German schema. If you have ever studied the horrible ponderousness of German mathematics, you will realize they can make lines and precisions and plans and charts for things that nobody ever dreamed of before, not even themselves.
Well, here you have, you see, small groups, bigger groups, integrating bigger groups. It doesn't mean that this is its progress. You could get a huge group and it breaks down into an individuation, or you could get a terrific number of individuals and they integrate into a group. You see, it can go both ways. Well, that's what we mean by a third dynamic.
Now, when we say mankind — which is the fourth dynamic — we say then, the total of a species known as mankind. We say the total, the whole thing.
Now, if there are men as such that are recognizable to us as men on some other planet, they would probably also be part of the fourth dynamic. But if they had three hands or two heads they would certainly fall into an-other category.
What we mean by mankind ordinarily, with the short-circuited, introverted view of earth, is the denizen who has one head, two arms, two legs, walks upright, wears shirts, pants, coats, belongs to clubs, votes, eats, gets married, buried, and rolls along.
This fellow has a certain cohesion to himself as a species. For instance, you would have far more feeling for a Russian than you would have for a gorilla. You see that? I mean, you'd recognize a Russian had some vague connection with the human race. And a gorilla, you would recognize, wouldn't have. And if it came to shooting the two of them, you would probably have much less compunction at shooting the gorilla than shooting the Russian. Do you follow me? Because the Russian — you have a kinship with the Russian.
Now, actually, only when some violent politician can break down this knowledge that we all have amongst ourselves that we are all human beings — only when somebody can break down and segment out of the human race, a whole race, such as the Russians try to do to the U.S. with their propaganda, and so forth — can you get anybody to fire a gun.
All wars have to start with the assumption that is given to the basic populace that they are not fighting the human race. And all wars stop when they realize at length that they're fighting the human race.
It's curious, isn't it? Their fourth dynamics come to life. Do you know that they had the awfullest time trying to keep World War I going? One particular Christmas they started singing the same hymns on both sides of no man's land, you know. And the next thing you know, why, people were walking around in no man's land. The next thing you know there wasn't a ma-chine gun going for hundreds of miles. And the war almost stopped.
And this was the most regrettable thing. Well, look at all the generals that would have been reduced to businessmen again. Look at that. Would have been the most horrible crime ever happened.
World War I educated soldiers pretty thoroughly. It educated them pretty thoroughly. You can't get anybody stampeded today — any civilized nation, European or American — you can't get them stampeded on the subject of fighting for the good of mankind. They saw too many dead Germans with "Gott mit uns" on their buckles. They said, "Gee! These guys are men. HmpfP'
Too many prisoners were taken into German prison camps and given decent medical care, see. And we took too many of them. Now, there was a little bit of a breakdown in World War II. But that was because we were fighting the Oriental nations. And we had never fought them before, particularly, and we were not used to their ideas of warfare.
And the Japanese had never really been sufficiently civilized to recognize their likeness. But here you had a difference of skin, so you could say immediately, "Well, it's a different race." You know? So you had this break-down come.
The Korean War also had some of this in it. You say, "Well, it's a different race, and therefore they're not human." Truth of the matter is, this is awfully hard to swallow for anybody who has had to associate with them for long.
Now, you take occupation troops — make very, very, very bad soldiers. Oh, they make terrible soldiers. You can't convince these people that they're fighting something else than the human race. They've lived with them. They know these people eat, breathe, procreate, like food, like entertainment, they can tell the same jokes, see? And you can't get a war going.
It's only a cut communication line which permits man — segments of man, colonies of man — to believe that they are entirely different than the aggregation called man, that permits an international incident.
It's only by thoroughly cutting the communication line that you can bring about a decay of the fourth dynamic. It's a horribly hard thing to do. They have staffs that work on it day and night — McCarthy, and so forth. They just have a terrible time.
I was quite curious about the iron curtain because I thought, "Gee, you know, they must be a great industrial nation to have that much iron." I was very curious about this iron curtain. And the only thing I found was that the Russian soldier had been held so far out of communication — been held so thoroughly out of communication with Europe and with America — and he'd been told so many lies on an organized basis, that he had ceased to consider the European or the American as a member of the same race as himself.
And having been educated in this direction, he of course could get into quite a state of affairs. Now, we get back to something I mentioned earlier, the overt-act — motivator sequence. This is how we break down and individuate in one of these dynamics.
The Russian soldier has been thoroughly educated to believe that Russia has suffered the most terrible indignities at the hands of the democratic nations of earth. He's been so educated to believe this, that he then feels entirely free, in the name of Russia, to lash out and do weird things.
But the things he does are not very weird. After he's been occupying Austria for awhile or Germany for a while or something, oh, do his officers start to have trouble with him.
He starts to settle down, and the Frauleins, they look very appetizing, and they look very pleasant, and he thinks more and more of these people as human beings. He begins to get into communication with them. He begins to pick up some oddities and interest in some of the customs. And the next thing you know, why, Slobovich — or whoever happens to be in charge of the local political bureau — issues an order to the occupation troops of Austria saying, "You will at this moment immediately attack and utterly disintegrate such and such towns." And the officers issue these orders, and the Russian troops would .. . Well, they'd have to go around, you know, and get their friends out first, you know. And then they'd have to see that everything was transported properly, and so on. They'd go right on conducting themselves like civilized human beings. Because they are themselves basically civilized human beings — a little less well educated than the Western world, but they've been thoroughly educated into believing that they have received so many motivators that they are now capable of God-knows-what overt act. The second that they begin to realize that they are members of the human race, you can't get them to fight the human race.
The only way we could ever have a war with Russia is to have an iron curtain. The only way we could ever have an iron curtain is, ourselves, keep talking about it. The Russians know they haven't got one. Any populace which they have tried to take over and control and pen in borders, and so forth, leaves them like water going through a handkerchief. I mean, it's not made out of iron. I found out there was not that much iron in the world.
I myself, by the way, have been stopped by Russian soldiers when I was in the wrong area. And our own country would not have done a thing about it, because it said right in my passport I wasn't supposed to be there. And, you know, "He's not supposed to go in that country." I've been stopped, and my passport examined. And I told them I had lost my way, you know, and so forth (and I was only fifty or sixty kilometers over the border, you know; of course, I was merely momentarily lost; I'm not too horrible at communication with strange peoples and places, and so forth) — and get into one rousing big argument about whether or not I was in favor of lynching Negroes, just get into a terrible argument, and sit around and soak up vodka, you might say, the local vintage, and so forth, on this subject.
I did this, and everybody got drunk, and we never settled it — whether I was in favor of this or not. We did settle the fact that they weren't. They weren't in favor of lynching them, because they don't have any Negroes in their country. They finally told me this, you see.
And I remember distinctly, out of a sort of a vodkaesque fog, of explaining to them that I was dead against lynching of any kind whatsoever — even lynching dogs. And I remember getting off onto a long dissertation on how you would lynch a dog.
But this was a common meeting ground. This was the propaganda which had been thrown at them continually. Any white American was somebody who went around and as an afternoon sport would lynch Negroes. In other words, an American is not part of the human race. Isn't that curious?
This is the way they say it. They say he is not part of the human race. Well, this is what these boys have been told. And we all wound up good friends, and so on.
But this is true in any nation. I have been in, to date now, well, rather thoroughly, twelve very barbaric cultures. And I found that these people were all part of the human race too.
But they didn't believe, to the degree that they could communicate with it, that the next tribe was human. They were willing, after they talked to me for a short time, to admit I was. I liked poi too, you know. They could see that with the avidity with which I ate lizard's tail that I was quite human. But the tribe that just lived over the hill, hmm. They obviously weren't human. So they'd go to war with them; kill them.
All right. Those are the principal dynamics. But if you're looking at all of life you've got to go into the remaining dynamics. And we go immediately into animals, and we find that animal's and man's are not too far apart as far as functional bodies is concerned, but there's an essential difference between them.
An animal is essentially, evidently, a body running around in a self-determined fashion. And a man is a captured body. See, he is somebody who is … who's captured a body, who's got more IQ than the body and who is running the body.
But once in a while we find a horse or a dog or something like that, that's been taken over by some thetan on the downskid on the same basis. And so we have some peculiarly intelligent beast — horses that can typewrite, and all this kind of stuff.
All right. We go up along the line — of course, that includes all there are in terms of dynamics — and we get to the sixth dynamic and we consider the material universe, or the woof and warp and laws of a universe, actually, as a dynamic. It's no more important than one-eighth of the entire picture, you see. And it's a dynamic, and it consists of matter, energy, space and time. And therefore the sixth dynamic is called the MEST dynamic. It's matter, energy, space and time. And whatever thrust we have for survival of these items, why, that would be the sixth dynamic.
Seventh dynamic, of course, is as a spirit. And the eighth dynamic is really infinity stood upright. And it simply means infinity. Now, you can come along and say, "Well, you also mean the Supreme Being?" No, we don't particularly mean the Supreme Being. How do we know that you aren't, collectively, the Supreme Being. See? That's probably much more closer to truth.
There are gods around of various kinds. There are some wind gods over in India; there are various savage gods of one kind or another. But if you give them a good quizzing you find out that they're just a thetan and they behave most remarkably like you would if you hadn't thought that you ought to lay aside all the power you had, too.
I think very possibly there's some thetan in charge of these hurricanes down here. I wouldn't be a bit surprised, you know. I've never run into him. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised at all.
In any words, the sky is the limit when you get into spirits, because you can't see them and weigh them — that is, they couldn't before Scientology. We can come awfully close to doing so now, though. Naturally, to weigh anything and to see anything and to observe anything, the thing has to have mass and location, doesn't it? And a spirit does not have. And so, of course, we are apparently then escaping from an exact science if an exact science is weighing and measuring. But we don't know that an exact science is weighing and measuring, do we? We could have an exact science of things that aren't weighable or measurable.
Well, Scientology's treatment of the thetan, the awareness of awareness unit of the body, is an exact science, but it's not measurable. It's not mensurate. And here we have our break, you see, with former spiritual, occult, mystic levels of study and action. Some of the old Hindus and Tibetans and so forth — these boys were quite sharp on this subject.
We would also have to include in the seventh dynamic any known spirit. You know, there are people who are known. By the way, there are some spirits in existence which predate the Bible, which are admitted to exist before the Bible begins. And are admitted to exist in every religious work on earth before the beginning of that particular religious cycle. Whether Brahmin, Hindu, Hebrew, Christian, Mohammedan, or any of these other things, we discover that prior to the creation of the Creation, these boys were present. And they are called by very many names, but the ones that we would be most familiar with would be the seven archangels. And those are the boys that continue to hang around and are known far and wide.
And it's a curious thing, but they exist. They are real, they are alive and they're still going strong today. You don't have to take my word for that. That is not an exact scientific statement until you go and look, and shake them by the hand, and say, "What do you know!" Then it's an exact-science statement to you.
Well now, when we talk of the most elementary of the Axioms, we're talking about simply the survival of existence itself in this universe or in any universe. And we're talking about it in terms of a subdivision of the word survive, and whether or not people are surviving or succumbing, and how many routes they are taking to do this, which are the four dynamics as far as man is concerned. He really doesn't reach any further than four dynamics. His worship of God is usually the worship of a man. Somebody has to be in human form before he can work himself up a good job of worship, you know? Even Christ had to be in human form.
Now, where you have, then, these basic elements, you have the basics and the basic assumption from which we have started — and why I have been talking to you about this today. I want you to get it very, very clear-our basic assumptions. And these are demonstrable assumptions, which are bet-ter than the assumptions of physics because they just assume them. These are very demonstrable. You can discover these things to be true.
Now, these are the basic assumptions, and we depart from that fact and we go along precisely along this track until we reach further workable truths. But I've talked to you today, this long, about something that elementary to make sure you understood that we have not departed from this.
This is the point from which we take off to study an exact science called Dianetics, and an even broader and more exact science called Scientology. Okay.