I want to talk to you now some more about the Axioms.

It's a remarkable thing that life itself can be codified in terms of axioms. It has not been done before. The first time it was attempted is when I wrote up the Logics and Axioms way back there, couple of years ago.

Well, it's more than that; that's about three years ago. And I wrote these things up simply to give an alignment to thought itself. And as a matter of fact, copies of these Axioms were sent over to Europe and just a year ago I found them in Vienna, fully translated into German, which is quite remarkable. But over there they were terribly impressed, simply because it had not been done: nobody had codified life to this degree and nobody had codified psychotherapy. And they were not impressed as to whether they were right or wrong, it's just that nobody had done it before.

Well, we are not quite doing the same thing here. Those Axioms were quite complicated, and the Axioms which we have here in the summary of Scientology in the Auditor's Handbook are nowhere near as lengthy, but they pack a great deal more punch.

Now, let's take up something very, very interesting. Let's take up proof of ultimate truth.

If we have reached an ultimate truth, then we have reached an ultimate solution. And who would ever suspect, really, that an ultimate truth or an ultimate solution could be subjected to mechanical proof? Who would dream this?

Well, certainly I never would have dreamed it, and yet we have done just that. I discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate. Now, you'd better know what a perfect duplicate is. We get that in Axiom 20: Bringing the static to create a perfect duplicate causes the vanishment of any existence or part thereof.

You understand that — that if you can get a life form to make a perfect duplicate of anything, it will vanish. Now, that's quite remarkable. We have a perfect duplicate very, very clearly defined. It is an additional — now get that additional — it's an additional creation of the object, its energy and space in its own space, its own time, using its own energy. And we could append to that the considerations which go along with it because it couldn't be anything but considerations.

Now, this violates the condition that two objects must not occupy the same space, and causes the vanishment of the object. The second that you violate this rule which holds universes together, which is that two objects must not occupy the same space, and we make two objects occupy exactly the same space, why, we get a vanishment.

Now, this is quite remarkable. But if you will ask somebody to simply make a perfect duplicate of something, well understanding exactly what a perfect duplicate is, if you ask him to make a perfect duplicate for instance, of a vase, just exactly where it sits, it will start to fade out on him. And he can do that to almost anything.

Now, why doesn't it fade for somebody else? Why doesn't this perfect duplicate fade for somebody else? Well, it's quite remarkable. Do you know that everything in this universe is displaced or misplaced?

Now, when we say "a lie," when we talk about a lie, we really don't mean that simply changing the position of something is a lie. We have to alter the consideration regarding it to make a lie. Now, it isn't really a lie that everything is so scrambled in this universe, but believe me, it's scrambled. Just in the last moment or two, several cosmic rays went through your body.

Now, those were all particles. They emanated from someplace else and they came down where you are. Maybe they've been en route for a hundred million years — who knows. And there they are.

Now, to get one of those cosmic rays to vanish, it would be necessary to pick its point of creation. And we would have to find its point of creation, and we would have to make a duplicate of the ray at the moment of its creation. And then we would have to make a duplicate of having done so. And instantly that cosmic ray would vanish. There is no doubt about this whatsoever.

There is how you make a perfect duplicate.

Now, if you can make a perfect duplicate and make something disappear, why, you have of course achieved a vanishment. And this means, then, that you have achieved something which is quite interesting. It's very interesting to the physicist; it's very interesting to almost anybody. But it is demonstrable. You can do this.

Now, I asked one of our better auditors the other day: he was foolish enough to sit down and let me process him while I was doing something else. And I told him simply to look over to the wall over there, and pick a very small area and get the atoms and molecules in the wall there, and put an attention unit — you know, a little attention unit, a remote viewpoint — next to each one and follow it immediately back to where it had been created.

And he came off of the fender of that car as though he had been shot, because the object itself, this tiny portion of the object, started to disintegrate. And he rushed over to it to hold it into place. Well, it was an interesting experiment. Because he'd heard all this and he didn't quite believe it. But the second that he realized that, it was fine.

Well now, why doesn't the whole universe vanish? Well, let me point out to you that probably on the very site of this building there was another building once. Where's that other building? It's been broken up and the bricks have been moved, and part of it's out here in the street, and there's part of it still in the ground below you, part of it maybe has — oh, I don't know — some brick dust got on somebody's suitcase who went to World War II and part of it's in Germany and… In other words, it's spread all over the place.

And here are all these waves and rays going all over the universe. And to get each one of those at its moment of creation, in the time and space of moment of creation, using itself as its own energy, would be quite a job. And it's not an impossible job. It merely means that it's a job that requires an ability to span attention like mad.

You would get, then, a physical object to disappear so thoroughly that everybody else would know it was gone if you got all these various parts. You see, it isn't true that an object sitting before you at this moment — or your chair — has always been in that position; nor it isn't true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position; nor is it true that the atoms which made up the materials in their raw-material form were always in that particular ore bed or in that particular tree. So you see, it's quite complex. This universe is very mixed up. It doesn't mean you can't make it vanish, however.

Now, the second that we get this perfect duplicate and the second we can produce this phenomena, we know we have an ultimate solution. Now, we will go into that much more deeply here when we get to the last part of the Axioms. But I merely want to call that to your attention right here: that the perfect duplicate was the little latch string hanging out that opened the door to an ultimate truth.

Well, what would an ultimate truth be? Well, we'll take that up a little bit later. But an ultimate truth is a static and an ultimate solution is a static. In other words, an ultimate truth and an ultimate solution is nothing. You get the as-isness of any problem, you make a perfect duplicate of any problem, and the problem will disappear.

Now, you can subject that to truth, too. So if you can make a problem disappear by simply getting its as-isness, then you've got the solution to all problems, haven't you? Well, the mest universe itself is just a problem. And if you could make it all disappear just by getting its as-isness, it would disappear. It'd disappear for everybody.

All right. Let's study that and get that very good and get what a definition is, there, in the Auditor's Handbook. And let's get that definition of a perfect duplicate and let's understand it very, very well because contained right in that is the total solution, by the way, to a mental therapy, Dianetics, of which you may have heard something.

And the vanishment of engrams, the vanishment of ridges, of all energy forms and manifestations, can simply be accomplished by making perfect duplicates of them. That doesn't mean that you should go around trying to make nothing out of everything or get your preclear to try to make nothing out of everything. But it just can be done.

If you wanted to make a mest Clear, you could use the principle of the perfect duplicate to do it in a very short space of time. He'd not only be Clear, he wouldn't have a body, either.

All right. Let's take up number 21: Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication. The understanding that we have of an understanding is, of course, a broad collection of data — that's what we would consider understanding. "I understand this data."

Well, let's get understanding just a little bit better. Do we understand that understanding is simply the ability to get the as-isness of something? In other words, you go around and you say," I don't quite understand this car." And we walk around it — "Don't quite understand what's wrong with this car; it just won't start."

And we walk around it, and then we find out we haven't turned on the key. And we turn on the key; we have understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key.

Now, that actually is practicing alter-isness. If we walked around this car and said, "I don't understand what this object is, I don't understand what this object is… Ah! It's a car," we would feel immediately relieved; we'd feel a lot better about the thing.

But if we were to get its total as-isness, it would just be a hole sitting there. So understanding is as-isness. And understanding, in its entirety, would be a static. And so we have the fact that life knows basically everything there is to know before it gets complicated with lots of data, merely because it can postulate all the data it knows.

In other words, all knowingness is inherent in the static itself. A thetan who is in good shape knows everything there is to know. He knows past, present and future; he knows everything. This doesn't mean he knows data. This merely means that he can as-is anything. And if he can as-is anything, believe me, he can understand it.

Man's salvation, I have said several times, depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well, let's misinterpret that just a little bit and say," Well, man's salvation (if you wanted to mean save him from the universe) would depend upon his ability to make an as-isness of the physical universe, at which moment he wouldn't have a universe.

And this would be total understanding.

Well, this understanding has three parts, and this is affinity, reality and communication. Well, I've mentioned that to you before. And we know quite a bit about that. As a matter of fact, there's a total book on this subject. It's an old book and doesn't contain as many refinements as we have today, but affinity, reality and communication are very, very useful to the auditor. You should understand them very, very well. That's A, R, C.

Now, you can actually take ARC and you can compose, out of ARC, all the mathematics there are. You can combine ARC into mathematics. You can do anything with ARC that you want to do. Symbolic logic, even calculus could be extrapolated from ARC. It's quite interesting.

Affinity depends upon reality and communication; reality depends upon affinity and communication; communication depends upon affinity and reality. And as I used to say, if you don't believe this, try to communicate sometime with somebody and don't have any affinity at all. Just get real mad at somebody and try to communicate with him. You won't.

Try to get somebody to be reasonable when he is very angry, and you'll find out his reality is very bad. He cannot conceive of the isness of the situation. He will give you some of the weirdest things. There is no liar lying like an angry man.

Now, if you raise somebody's affinity, you will raise their reality and communication; if you raise somebody's reality, you will raise their affinity and communication; if you raise somebody's communication, you will raise their affinity and reality.

And the keynote of this triangle happens to be communication. Communication is more important than affinity and reality.

All right. Now, let's take up number 22, and find out that: the practice of not-isness reduces understanding. In other words, something is there and we say it's not there. That's a lie, isn't it? We're running down the road like mad and there's an enormous boulder lying in the middle of the road, and almost anybody, just before he has an accident, will say the boulder is not there. And by golly, it's there.

And this makes him feel that he's a bum thetan. He's failed. Well, the funny part of it is, if he were to say immediately, "As-is a boulder in the road," instead of denying the situation, and if he could do this — a perfect duplicate — well, the boulder would disappear.

But he doesn't do it that way. He sort of puts some energy up there and sort of pushes against the boulder and he says, "It's not there. It's not there. I deny it."

Well, he'll have a mighty thin understanding of the whole thing. He doesn't want to communicate with it, so he says it's not there. He doesn't want to have any affinity for it at all, so he said it isn't there. And believe me, his reality cuts down.

After somebody has lost something or been through an accident, you would be surprised how poor their perception is, how poor their reality is. Everything looks very dim to them. They don't like it. That means their communication is off, their affinity is off, they don't like the world, they feel sad and so forth.

Well, the practice of not-isness reduces understanding. And that is what man is doing all the time. He's trying to avow that something that isn't there is there, and he's trying to avow that something that is there isn't there, and between these two things — giving it no asisness at all or alter-isness or new postulates of any kind — he's having a lot of fun. Well, I don't know; some people claim it's fun anyway.

All right, number 23: The static has the capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC.

Well, we've just covered that. Here we have a condition of existence which is as-is. That'd be total knowingness. Well, if we had somebody who could say "As-is" to everything and trace all parts of everything back to the original time, spot, and so forth, and simply get them as they really were, we of course would have nothing left but a static. Naturally. We would not have anything else but a static. We would have zero. We wouldn't even have space.

Now, that's why we say the static has capability of total knowingness. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC. By the way, if you wanted to make this whole universe vanish, you would have to be able to span this whole universe. You would have to be as big as the universe. And that isn't, by the way, very hard to do. You can drill somebody up to a point where he can do that.

But if you go into that to get him to make an as-isness of it, would you please let me know first? I've got a couple of old hats and a motorcycle, and so forth, that I'd like to alter very quickly at the moment he does this, so I'd at least be left with those.

Now, number 24 is: Total ARC would bring about the vanishment of all mechanical conditions of existence. Now remember, all mechanical conditions of existence. It wouldn't bring about the sudden death of everything. It would bring about the exteriorization of everything. It would mean the vanishment of all space and all form. The mechanics.

Now, you want to differentiate between a consideration and a postulate and a mechanic. Now, you want to get the difference between a quality such as complete trust, a quality such as full responsibility, and the mechanics.

Now, you get somebody who is a Step V or Step VI or Step X… And you'll get one of these fellows, and he will be all out for mechanics and he won't have anything to do with considerations. And he will believe completely that considerations are — well, they're no good: "Mechanics are the thing. You know, you can put your hands on it. You can feel it, you can touch it."

Well, he has to be made thoroughly acquainted with the existence of these mechanics before he could as-is them enough so that he could get up to a point where he would have the ability to consider. That's why Opening Procedure of 8-C works. He has sunk below the level of mechanics.

Well, when we say mechanics we mean space, energy, objects and time. And when something has those things in it, we're talking about something mechanical.

All right. That's all that would vanish if you as-ised all of existence. It would just be the mechanics. And you could turn right around and postulate them all back again, too, with great ease.

Only, if you do this, why, don't postulate them back with any politicians. We've had too many of them. Generals, too — you can omit the generals. Don't give them any mechanical forms.

Number 25 of these Axioms and definitions: Affinity is the scale of attitude which falls away from the co-existence of static, through the interpositions of distance and energy, to create identity, down to close proximity but mystery.

My, isn't that complicated? That is very, very complicated. Well, let's get this fairly straight, and let's realize that we probably could simplify that particular Axiom. If it's complicated like that, we probably don't know all there is to know about it. I probably got a blank spot here someplace.

But affinity is simply a matter of distance, in terms of mechanics. Now, the second we get out of considerations and go into mechanics, what is affinity?

Well, affinity is basically a consideration, so it isn't a mechanic at all. But it does represent itself mechanically. There are mechanical representations of it. For instance, total knowingness goes down to lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well, that's different than simply knowing without looking.

Now we go down to looking.

And now we go just a little bit lower than that — this is, by the way, an affinity scale — we go into emotion. And look, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking, we have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it, do we dislike it — emotionally? There are particles in emotion. "I don't like it. In other words, I have some anger particles about it or I have some resentment particles." By the way, a preclear has his bank full of these emotional particles.

Now, if I have to feel it to know it's there, I've gone immediately into effort. My affinity for something would be good if I could feel it and it would be no good at all if I can't feel it. You get a Step V who is swearing by mechanics and swearing at all life forms (and who builds atom bombs and things like that), and we get this Step V telling you that he cannot contact life. He cannot contact life, so therefore — you know, we can't contact this thing called static, so therefore he can't believe in it.

Well, this is very interesting. You ask him why. And he says, "Well, I can't feel it." Well, he's twisting the snake around so it'll eat its tail or something. He's proving it all upside down and backwards.

He says he can't get the existence of something he can't feel. Well, the odd part of it is we can measure electronically the existence of life. There is a little meter which we have run some tests on, and we can actually demonstrate that one individual can turn on in another individual, at some great distance from him, a considerable electrical current — enough to make this little machine sit up and sing. And the other person can turn it on at will, and the person on whom it is being turned on can't stop it. Here's a manifestation which can be measured. We've done the impossible there, too. We've done the impossible in many places in Scientology.

You can't measure a static, but we've done so by making one person at a distance bring a mechanic into being.

Now, affinity is this scale. It goes down through effort. When a person gets down to effort, then he's into a level where he's got to work, everything has got to be work; he's got to touch everything and feel everything before he can know anything. A person in that band, by the way — as he gets to the lower part of that band — has facsimiles. He will even do weird things like this: he will get a picture to know what's happening to him. In other words, he will get a picture of an incident to get an idea. He gets the picture and then he gets the idea. He doesn't get the idea and then get a picture.

You want to watch that. Sometime or another you'll find a preclear who is doing this. You'll be saying, "All right, now get the idea of being perfect." And your preclear will sit there and say, "I got it."

You want to ask him "How did you do that?" — that's a wonderful question to ask a preclear at any time — "How did you do that?"

And he will say, "Why, of course, just like everybody else. I got this picture and this picture came up, and I looked at it, and the picture said, 'Be perfect' and so forth, and it showed me a circle. So a circle, that's perfect, so…"

That's the way your preclear was doing that. He wasn't making the postulate at all; he was waiting for a picture to come up and tell him what it was all about.

Well, now we go down from effort into thinking. And we get our figure-figure-figurefigure-figure case. Now, he's a hard boy to get along with because he can't work. His thought… Thought, by the way, is a colloquialism. Life is not composed of thought, particularly, it's composed of space and action and all sorts of things.

The static can do all these things. It's not necessarily pure thought. If you've got a hangover about pure thought from a field of Christianity, why, get rid of it. Because thinkingness comes in clear down below effort. And it comes in as figure-figure-figure-figure-figure.

Now, a person can postulate without thinking about it. If that's what we mean by thought, that's fine, but usually what people mean by thought is figure-figure-figure-figure. I'll just figure this out, and I'll get a computation, a calculation, and I'll add it up to "Now, let me see. Can you go to the movies? I don't know," they said when you were a little kid. "Now, let me see. I'll have to think it over. Give me a couple of days."

We don't know how all of this mechanic got into a postulate, but they've let it get in there. So that's our level of thinkingness.

Now, we go downstairs from thinkingness on this scale, and we get into symbolizingness. Symbolizingness is very interesting. A symbol contains mass, meaning and mobility. What is the definition of a symbol? A symbol is something that's being handled from an orientation point — a point which is motionless in relationship to the symbol (you know, it's motionless; the symbol is in motion) — and the symbol of that orientation point has mass, meaning and mobility.

"Where are you from?" "I am from New Jersey."

This fellow is telling you that he is from an orientation point called New Jersey, and it's motionless. And as he runs around the world he's always from New Jersey. He has mass, meaning and mobility; he has a name, he has mass, and so forth.

Well, when a person drops down the line below figure-figure, they're into a point of where they figure with symbols. Now, that's a condensation, isn't it? Now, each one of these was a condensation.

The next one down the line below symbols is eatingness. You know, animals eat animals. Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols. And they think they have to stay alive merely by eating other symbols.

This is real cute, and eating is quite important (of course, it can be a lot of fun). But here you have a real condensation. In other words, effort got so condensed that it turned into an inverted kind of thought. And that became so condensed that it packaged thinking, is what took place there; it became so condensed it became a symbol. A word, for instance, is a whole package of thought.

So packaged thinking is a symbol and packaged symbols are a plate of beans. Got that?

All right. Now, below that, when a person doesn't believe he can eat anymore, when he thinks he's not going to survive and so forth, he will go into the sex band. Now, as a witness of that, oh, if you starve cattle or something like that for a while, they'll start to breed. And if you feed them too well they'll stop breeding. It's quite irrational, but then who said any of this was rational?

Cattle who are starved or lacking certain food elements will decide, "Well, we'll live again in some other generation," and they'll breed up a lot of calves. Of course, there's nothing to feed the calves on, but they haven't paid much attention to that.

Now, here in Arizona we have an interesting fact. We have some very beautiful cattle who have stopped breeding. They've just been too well fed. The way you'd get those cattle breeding again, is you'd simply start starving them and you would get them breeding.

Down below sex, then — Freud, by the way, he was so condensed, he had to get clear down there to that condensation of sex — and down below sex we have a new level of knowingness. Only that, this time, is mystery and the level of mystery.

Now, mystery, of course, is a complete displacement of everything, which is in a terrific confusion. The anatomy of mystery, by the way, is unprediction, confusion and then total blankout.

You see, at first he couldn't predict some particles, and then this seemed awfully confusing to him, and so he just shut it all off and said," I won't look at it anymore." That's what mystery is, and your Step Level Vs, by the way, are very, very concerned about mystery. They are very concerned about thinkingness. They're trying to solve the mystery. Well, the mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. An ultimate solution, of course, is simply the as-isness of the problem. And the as-isness of mystery is simply mystery, and that's really all there is to it.

There really is nothing to know back of a mystery, except the mystery itself. It's just its as-isness, but it's always pretending there is something to know earlier than the mystery.

Okay.