Well, how's it going today?

Audience: Good. Fine. All right.

Good, huh?

Well, I seriously doubt that you will all make it, because a lot of people have died doing this. Quite the reverse is true, a lot of people have died because they didn't do it.

Our main problem, as a matter of fact, in the handling of cases is trying to handle cases. Cases kick back. Why? Let me answer that elementary question: Why do people blow sessions?

Well, they've got a bank that's had them out of control for years, decades, eons. See? They got a bank, they think it belongs to somebody else. It's had them out of control. See, it's kicked them out of control. They're being mauled all over the place. The bank says, "Under no circumstances may anybody be permitted to control anything. Confusion! Rrrah, that's what we want! Hah, hah! Uuulhh, sluup."

And you, the auditor, go in there and you say, "Control." And the bank says, "I am going to blow!" Preclear never does. Interesting. The preclear never does say, "I am going to blow." But the bank says, "I got to go! I got to go! I got to go!" Got it?

Now, a great deal of experimentation has demonstrated two interesting things: Running confusion does not resolve confusion because it Q-and-As with the bank; running stability, control does win because it complements the thetan.

Now, this has been sorted out at great cost, with much ardure and with considerable question on my part that it would sort out this way. But very exhaustive tests have been made in this wise: To get rid of confusion, did one erase the confusion or did one simply establish a stability? That was the question, the research question.

And the answer to that is very, very powerfully true. And after a great many tests and much doubt it turned out to be, unassailably, you handle the stability — you bring about the stability and you ignore the confusion.

It's quite remarkable — a thetan responds to and is closer to these things: motionlessness, keep it from going away and solids. Odd, but he's closer to a solid than a moving, ephemeral mass. It's because a solid is an exact opposite. An ephemeral mass is an in-between maybe. It's halfway between. All right.

It turns out that if we handle a confusion we upset the stability of the thetan. We apparently make it better because we damp out the confusion, but we still have done nothing for the thetan. We've given him less bank to control and exert himself over, perhaps, but we haven't done anything for him. We've just made the job a little easier, maybe. And in the final run, we weaken him.

Keep It from Going Away we always run. We never run the reverse: Throw it away. Now, that was very hard to establish — very, very hard to establish. Would anybody get anyplace throwing anything away? And the answer is "No."

Yes, but what does this do to Christian generosity, Christmas, communication? Well, it says you can take it or you can't. Then if you're having a rough time, you can't take it, because you can't take it anyhow. If you're in remarkably good shape, you can give away your shirt with no liability. But brother, you better be able to have a shirt before you give it away. If you give away a shirt because you can't have one anyway, you just sink yourself one rung lower on the ladder.

So, it's pull it into your chest. Keep it. Don't let it go. This is the activity at which the thetan believes himself to be very good. In this wise he traps himself, true. But this is the motion he is good at, and this is the action which complements a thetan. And if you let somebody blow in session, you have let his bank dramatize the reverse. You've let the bank throw him away. You mustn't let him leave — both for your benefit and for his.

An awful lot of thetans run around and say, "Well, I'm going to leave, I'm going to go there, I'm going to do that, I'm not going to hold this point." Why do you think confrontingness is so good? This is just another keep-it-from-going-away. This is just "Keep me from going away." And if an individual can't keep "me" from going away, then we get this random chase-it-all-over-the-universe.

Now, we have, in essence, the activity of psychiatry as being an epitome of something nobody should ever do. Psychiatry is just a name for a mechanism that we have inherited down through the long years. It has always been with us. Some religionists play it on this side of the fence, too. All they've got to do is violate these three principles — give a man more confusion; tell him to get out and go away; make it less solid. All they got to . do is violate those principles.

They keep it from going away for the thetan. "Put him in an insane asylum. Huh-huh. See, that's helping him out, isn't it?" Like hell it is! Push in masses on him. Those are the very things that got him where he's going. And chase him all over the universe. Well, he's got to go to Earth now. You know, blow him out of his head, blow him into some other environment, kick him out, kick him out, kick him out.

When a fellow starts to blow he decides that your duress — something in him decides that your duress must now mean that he must obey a basic psychiatric implant that he must leave. You see? You start hitting him, he believes the response is that he must leave. And you get, also, the mechanism of exteriorization. You hit a guy hard enough with a .44 Magnum or something like that — some mild tap, and he says, "Well, I've got to leave now."

You know, it's highly doubtful if anybody ever dies. See, it's very doubtful if anybody ever dies — that's doubtful. But it is a sure thing that thetans leave, and when they leave, things die. See, that's true. The other is not establishable at this time. I don't know that somebody cut in half with chain shot and bisected and quartered and paired with hand grenades and everything else, I don't know that this fellow . . . One, I don't know why he couldn't heal himself at once and, two, I don't know why the body has to die. The mechanical answer, as held by the medicos back in sixteen-hundred-and-something, when they were arguing about the circulation of blood and other things, the mechanical answer of the heart stops pumping, you see, the mechanical answer of the body cells start to break down — these are only signs, you see? These are only symptoms. And they have mistaken the symptom for the cause.

Evidently the cause is the thetan leaves — evidently. And when he does, all these other things can ensue. Now, you have reality on that. You know that communication broken off from a body part will let it deteriorate. Right? Hm? Well, how about a fast leave? How about a fast break-off of communication from this body part?

And we get something that's very, very interesting about all this, very fascinating. I've been investigating the field of telepathy. Fascinating field. I don't know that there's anything but telepathy, you see? I don't know but what all communication isn't basically telepathic communication.

Because we say, "Well, communication depends on space." I don't know that it does. What does the space depend on, then? Well, it depends on space. Well, this is cute. Well, space is a viewpoint of dimension; we've got a pretty good reality on that. If it's a viewpoint of dimension, then who thinks that who's thinking? See, somebody must think he is looking at a dimension. But if he's looking at a dimension, how do they get agreed-upon space, since there's no space to talk about or cross, you see? Communication, then, doesn't ensue to somebody who has yet no space. See, thetan two comes along and he wants to see the same space as thetan one. Well, thetan two doesn't have any space to talk across, yet, does he? So, the easy way out of this trap is very simple: He gets it by telepathy, which is communication without space — good explanation for what telepathy is. Communication without space. A relay of ideas without a via through the mechanical physical universe. It's a communication without vias. And what is telepathy? Well, evidently telepathy is a very easy thing, evidently it's so easy that you can all see to some extent.

I've been fascinated by several phenomena that turned up as a result of this. Explanations. How does a person know there is any place to exit to? — speaking about a blow. Well, the funny part of it is, if he doesn't know he is there, then he couldn't know very well that he had a place to exit to, don't you see? But the place he exits to must seem, for some reason or other, more real and secure than the place he is. And so we get the phenomena of exteriorization based on a belief — not a telepathy, now — that there's an elsewhere. But no confidence in the there. See, no confidence in here, but a lot of belief in an elsewhere. Get the idea?

Well, a thetan has to have a confidence in here. He'd have to have a confidence in a motionlessness. He has to have a confidence in solids, for some reason or other. And he has to have a confidence in being able to telepathize, in order to do any of it.

Every once in a while somebody says you're goofy because you think you can read thoughts. I don't know that you ever do anything else. I think the one single action which we can undertake with aplomb is the reading of thoughts. Think that's the common denominator of all actions, where they are a community of actions. Telepathy.

I've got a whole series of experiments laid out to perform on this. It's much more important now to get a Mutnik up to Sputnik and do all sorts of things with this mechanical world. But I think it'd be much smarter to find out what we were trying to get up. These are very practical experiments, and they're based on this: The improvement of eyesight is the criteria. The improvement of eyesight. And we take a few cases who have normally bad eyesight, and we process them merely in the direction of mechanics — flows of light, space, this sort of thing. We process them in that direction only. We take an equal number of cases in more or less the same state of normal dishabille and we do nothing but attempt to raise their ability to telepathize. And then we see whose eyesight gets improved. See, do the people get improved who were doing exercises in telepathy or do the people's eyesight get improved who were doing mechanical exercises? It's an interesting experiment.

I've already performed some tiny little section of it, and not a conclusive answer but an answer which just says that the experiment ought to be performed, and it was in favor of telepathy.

You know, eyesight has been the most resistive thing, the most resistive thing to improve. You can turn somebody's eyesight way up and then it turns way off. And processing occasionally varies the ability to see, but the whole case has to be improved before eyesight starts to get better. It's quite interesting. It's almost the last thing to respond. You would expect this, because the space of this universe is one of the most set things we have anything to do with. See, the space is, so therefore, eyesight depends basically upon space, you see, so that you'd have to alter ideas concerning space; and the person would have to be in pretty good shape to alter ideas concerning space in order to get any real permanent change in eyesight, don't you see? So eyesight is quite resistive to improvement. It's one of the last things that improves. And could we just sail forward and simply improve the fellow's idea to give and receive ideas? And if he could give and receive ideas easily, why, then would his eyesight improve? I believe that it would.

Oddly enough, a scholar taking all of his ideas off of a printed page and so forth quite normally gets very bad eyesight. This is traditional. Well, that doesn't add into the experiment very well. He is evidently improving his idea — his idea reception ability — because he's doing it all the time and he must become very familiar with it. But I think that would be on a basis explained — he gets stuck in mechanics on the basis of a stuck flow. And I did my first experiment on this the other day and found out that he had violated solids very thoroughly. The page was always invisible. He never reads the page. He reads the print. And therefore, the print sits there on an invisible sheet, you see, and he never looks at the sheet. So you ask one of these boys that's done a lot of this to mock up a sheet of paper and keep it from going away, and you have the most gorgeous slabs of invisibility you ever saw.

One of the most disturbing activities you can engage upon is to take some fellow who's very well studied and has read a great deal, and have him mock up pieces of paper and keep them from going away on six sides of the body — oh, for an hour or two. You will discover that the paper is totally invisible, and you have to merely persuade him to mock up the idea of the paper anyway, and though it's totally invisible, and get the idea that it is there.

This invisibility possibly is one of the basic invisibilities in the so-called blank field. The person has a blank field, he's probably just stuck on an invisible page, don't you see? That's probably the commonest source in this society of this invisible field.

Now, to go right at it and remedy havingness on paper, however, is not indicated — that's merely an experimental audit. It can be done, however, and it's quite interesting that after a while he is able to see a page. He's able to see a sheet of paper, able to mock one up and have a sheet of paper. Enormous automaticities and that sort of thing sets in. Basically, he has looked at something which has been controlling him, not something he has been controlling. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised but what some of the ideas of God didn't come from the fact of somebody having read too much: an invisibility telling them what to do — isn't that a description of one of the later gods that have been invented? Invisibility that tells you what to do and how to be immoral and other things.

Well, now we get into this same basis of confusion versus the stability, and a thetan goes in the direction of stability and motionlessness and improves his ability toward motionlessness, why, he gets better and better and better and the confusion sags away and disappears. And we go toward confusion and we get a limited process, and the confusion gets worse and worse and worse and then it gets better a little bit and so on.

You can argue with it and say, "Well, a thetan should be able to mock up a confusion, too," but evidently it's something he shouldn't have done in the first place. It's quite amusing. It's quite amusing that there are two activities of which a thetan tolerates only one. Since all things are a consideration, this must be part of that consideration, but at the same time we do have some facts in addition to considerations.

We do have some facts. It must be that there are some facts. The first two or three Axioms of Scientology are facts. They are above the level of consideration, don't you see? Since they describe the ability of the thetan to consider, you see? And he has to have a consideration in order to conceive himself solid. So therefore, his state — his existing state without mass, without wavelength, without actual location and so forth — this must be a fact, see. So that's a fact above a consideration, which is what makes Scientology able to handle the thetan. See, otherwise, we would still be dealing in the realm of considerations.

Well, now, apparently there are some facts mixed up with this one, not just considerations. There's some more facts right there with the first Axioms. And the fact of motionlessness is a better fact than confusion, see. Probably confusion is a consideration, and the motionlessness or stability is a fact. Do you see that?

Now, similarly, hereness, newness is evidently a fact, and thereness and elsewhereness is evidently a consideration. Do you see that? So hereness and newness is a fact. Now we get up to a less reliable point, and it isn't anywhere near as important in processing, either. It's quite interesting. You'll find that the most important things in processing are in this order: Keep It from Going Away, Hold It Still, and Make It More Solid. It's in that order. Keep It from Going Away is the most important in terms of mechanical processing. Hold It Still seems to be a mechanism that keeps things from going away, but is in itself a valuable mechanism. And you'll find out that Make It More Solid could almost be omitted. It can't be, but it could almost be, and we're evidently going away from the basic state of a thetan. Hereness and newness and keep-it-from-going-awayness are almost the same thing, don't you see?

We must assume, then, that a thetan is here and now always. He's always here and now, and he's never there. But he begins to dream of there and exteriorizes. And then you can say all of his trouble stems from exteriorizing. (pounding) Every difficulty he has ever been engaged in has stemmed immediately and directly from exteriorization and abandonment of his concept of hereness and nowness. Because hereness and nowness is evidently me-ness. And thereness and wentness and over-elsewhereness and so forth is evidently somebody-elseness, see? So the second he exteriorizes, he becomes somebody else. The search for self is, "Hold that line!" Get the idea?

Everybody's been going around, and for generations, for ages, particularly here on Earth they say, "Be yourself" — I suppose they've been doing this for trillions of years — "Be yourself. Be yourself." Well, funny part of it is — probably used as one of the biggest operations there is, but there's no more therapeutic thing a fellow could be than himself. But what would himself be? Would himself be anything? No. Being himself would be here and now. And when we tell people to come up to present time, when we tell people to occupy one space — one point in space, something like that, we're telling him, "Be yourself." See?

This is the mechanical statement of "Be yourself": occupy a point in space and be now. Well, that's the way it sums up — that's the way it sums up. Therefore, you mustn't ever let anybody blow, because the fellow is trying to tell you that he isn't. He's making the postulate "I am not," when he makes the postulate "elsewhere." You see?

Now, you make a fellow blow when you're too mean to him, too cruel to him. All you've got to say to him is, "You aren't. You aren't. You aren't. You aren't," and he'll get the idea that he's elsewhere, see? Then he makes it a fact mechanically. But basically it was nothing but an idea in the first place, see? We examine this from the viewpoint of telepathy, and we get into the more interesting strata of philosophy. I think if Kant had ever gotten into those realms, he would have needed a Boy Scout compass. It gets pretty confusing.

If space is a telepathic consideration, then there's no hereness. But there must be hereness for a thereness to occur. So there must be a basic hereness which is an integral part of a living thing. There must be a basic hereness for him to feel so strongly about hereness. But if there's no thereness and no dimension except by telepathic idea — and every evidence points in that direction — then there is no orientation of here, no orientation of this point called hereness. There aren't three other points to get a fix. You see this? So this tells you that man's search is for reassuringness that hereness is hereness. And space must have developed totally on the idea of thereness, with no hereness connected with it. This is one of these gorgeous philosophic rat races.

If you can — if you can wrap your — well, you might as well say "brains," everybody else does. If you can wrap your brains around that data, you are actually battling a philosophic edifice at a level that Spinoza and Kant boggled at, which makes you smarter than Spinoza and Kant. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Well, now, as we go on here, we now enter in and we've been entering into our ideas concerning the way we ought to run these particular lectures, and I am asking you to bear with me. Wouldn't you rather have some of these questions answered here as we go on through the rest of this series of lectures? Hm? Now, actually, I have just answered a question; I have just answered a question concerning somebody who asked me — more or less asked me, "What is a blow?" You know, "How does a person blow a session? What is the mechanism of it?" I've tried to answer that question for you. Did I, to any degree?

Audience: Mm-hm. Yes.

Now, we have a question here: "Is there a gradient between a thetan and a thought?" And I've just been covering this. Which is to say, there is such a thing as a fact. See, there must be a fact before we get a consideration. See, so the first Axioms are facts. They are. They would not be modified by consideration, don't you see? And the fact is still there. You might get a semblance of change, you might get a distortion, you might get this and you might get that, but in the final analysis you could only modify considerations, couldn't you? These facts are still facts. So a thought — a thought is simply a consideration or product or conception of a thetan, and a thetan is a fact. Now, therefore you couldn't very carelessly say "a thought" in comparison to a thetan, and you couldn't say that just for this reason: There is no bottom or top to a series of things, and here the person has conceived a thought, you see, to be a thing, and then something goes on into a mass, don't you see, and something goes on into something else, you see, and he's conceived that it would be part of it. There is no gradient scale at all. There are thetans and there are thoughts. Ugh. I have spoken.

Well, here's another question here: Somebody says, "Since theta can't be wrong, basically, how did he get invalidated in the first place, since if he knowingly not-knows for randomity, it's done by him anyway so it can't be wrong or invalidatory. Thus, what is a motivator, a ded, a dedex and so forth?" A thetan makes up his mind, you know, makes up a consideration that he is right or he stands for this or he stands for that. And then somebody else tells him and goes through some hocus-pocus, like, oh, science — science is a wonderful hocus-pocus to prove something — and proves to him that that consideration is incorrect and, therefore, we get down to denial of self. And there is such a thing as an invalidation. There is such a thing as a bad idea concerning things — there is. And that is merely the denial of self. The denial of self. Here is a total rationale, 100 percent rationale: denial of self. That's all that's wrong with a person. He has denied himself.

For years he went along and he said, "I stand for the Black Shirts." Somebody comes along and says the Black Shirts are very bad. And he says, "Yeah, they're very bad. They're no good."

Don't get confused between his saying the badness of Black Shirts and the goodness of Black Shirts means that Black Shirts are good or bad, don't you see? That has nothing to do with it. It's the fact that he denied himself. He was something, he had mocked up himself as something that stood for Black Shirts and now he says they're no good. So now he has said, "I am no good." And the only way he can say, "I am no good" forcefully is to be incapable. Denial of self is almost the total action, if not the total action. It works the other way too, you know. For years he said Black Shirts are bad, and somebody comes along and tells him they're good and makes him believe it and promises to take away his house and kiddies or something of the sort if he doesn't say they're good, and he finally says, "Well, Black Shirts are good."

He set up a piece of randomity whereby he basically believes something. He now says he basically believes something else. Now he has made it difficult to find out where he is. See? So he denies himself in this wise. For instance, if I went into a country and there'd been a whole bunch of Nazis or something of the sort, and these Nazis are — been running around running things — or Fascists or something or Communists or Democrats, something. And they were all — had been very dedicated to this subject. They'd been very dedicated, and just been hot. We don't care what it was, some ideological buffoonery. And they'd just been having a good time, dramatizing this thing and saying how wonderful it was and fighting a war about it, and all of a sudden, why, they lost their army or something. And you walk in and — whole bunch of people there and one group says to you, "We were — we were Nazis," or Fascists or Democrats or whatever it is, "we were — we were under force and we were persuaded against our will." And worm, worm, squirm, squirm, belly-to-the-ground, you know?

And the other group says, "We were Nazis." A very sick conqueror would kill all the fellows who said they were Nazis and pat on the heads all the guys who had their bellies on the ground. And then try to run the country.

The butchery of a man capable of a forthright thought, of course, brings about a dwindling spiral in the whole race. If everybody who stood for anything or everybody who wished to persevere in any way or anybody who had constancy or consistency and so forth was killed off as fast as he rose, you would eventually get a selection of only the very weak and the very incapable.

It's very amusing that when we took over Sicily and Italy, we put into power anybody we could get our hands on. And people came bellying up, you know, "We were Fascists against our wishes," and you know, that sort of thing, and "We were really against the Fascists," and all this sort of thing. The devil they were. They were right in there running execution squads along with everybody else; but they're denying themselves, don't you see? And our military patted them all on the heads, you know, and they said, "Well, good, boys," and the gang that had just declared, "We're still Fascists, or we're Fascists, we were the mayor," and so forth, why, our military just threw all those fellows out, and they put all these self-denyers in, see?

Wow! They have a picnic! Do you know who they put into force and office in Sicily? They put in the Mafia, the Black Hand, 100 percent. All the offices of government in Sicily were filled for a short time by the Mafia. Isn't this wonderful? Well, of course, they're noted for their vendetta, and so they merely used their official position just to grab people out of the bed in the middle of the night and shoot them and stab them and knife them and send the cops around and terror them — oh, it was a gorgeous mess.

And somebody on the staff, some reserve officer probably, looked this over and he decided that we hadn't done right. You know, somebody who was not part of the actual establishment must have had to have done this. Maybe a regular — they were in scarcity in the war. He says, "We've put the wrong people in here, somehow," and he looked them over real quick, and he found this datum that they'd put the Mafia in office. So he did a very sensible thing. He grabbed every competent Fascist he could lay his hands on and slammed him back into office. The hue and cry down here in Washington, you would have thought that they had assassinated the Vice President. You never heard such mourning and weeping as went on at the fact that we'd actually put Fascists and Nazis in office; after we conquered the area, we put the enemy in charge again. Military government had enough brains by this time, having experienced a wave of terror under the Mafia, they stood up to all of this barrage and said that — the only men that can fill the job in any way.

These fellows actually, really only had one liability; they went back to the business of running the country, but they had only one real big liability. They'd been used to calling Rome for the hot dope, see. And they always had been very used to calling Mussolini up and getting the right answer, you know? "What do I do now?" see? And Rome always had a policy for them of one kind or another. They never — they had lost the power to act on their own initiative. Nobody ever encouraged them to. So that was their only liability. Isn't that interesting? They didn't have a liability of revolt, inconstancy, treachery, bribery or any of these other darn things that they might have had a liability in. These fellows were still saying, "We're Fascists."

So you can add up to this that if there is any real actual thing called aberration, not dependent on somebody else's idea of what's crazy — in other words, aberration independent of agreement — if there is such a thing, why, then it is denial of self. It's an interesting principle.

I've tried, by the way, just for your information, to work out a large number of processes that handled willingness, which is a very high button and probably allied to this denial of self or denial of things button, you see, and tried to work out processes that would directly process willingness and directly process denial of self. And I haven't made the grade. And I haven't made the grade. Evidently it's too senior an idea, it's too high above too many other ideas, or evidently, maybe like trying to process a preclear with a tremendous present time problem. And evidently his present time problem is mechanics, and you have to handle mechanics on the case such as we're handling with our Intensive Procedure right now, before you can attack such things as an idea of denial of self or willingness or something like that.

But I tried to short-cut that thing and slash right back through it, and I've been at it for about five or six months, trying to cut the Gordian knot there of getting right straight to denial of self, getting right straight to willingness, without any of the other material being used, you see? And I found out that there was no — that I couldn't — I couldn't get there directly; it was like a present time problem getting in the road of it. And although I haven't abandoned the idea that it can be, you see — I haven't abandoned experimentation — we do have something horribly workable in the Intensive Procedure which we're now using right here. This is very workable and even in terms of the Western world is not too slow. It's not a slow haul. As a result, why, we've rather sabotaged this project of discovering a direct route through to increase of willingness, a direct route through into knocking out self-denial. Do you recognize when I say self-denial, that it's been made into a virtue?

Keep It from Going Away and withholdingness and self-denial are all related. And probably Keep It from Going Away has its greatest power resident in this one fact alone, and that is self-denial expresses itself mechanically as withholdingness. See, self-denial is withholdingness, but it's not withholdingness from self, you see? It's just withholdingness. And if you rehabilitate a person's ability to withhold you take over for some reason or other his invalidations, you see, the inflows. The automaticity of inflow — you take it over and take it off automatic and you evidently run out all this denial of self. It's very involved, and you'll understand it much better when you've been processed on it about five hours; don't look so puzzled.

Somebody asks what's a motivator, a ded, a dedex. Well, if you get the idea that you're just everybody else, if you — you are everybody else, which you might be, and then you kick somebody else in the teeth, why, you kicked yourself, didn't you?

Truth of the matter is I worked this out to a very fine point and I found out that you proceeded further on the basis that everybody was an individual. See, you proceeded further if you worked on individuation, you got further than if you proceeded on "We're all one."

It's not proven either way. But if you're sold on the idea we're all one, why, motivators, deds, DEDEXes, overt acts … I notice this person omits overt acts, here — that's very interesting. If we have this overt act thing all knocked out — I mean if we have to establish it, it's a consideration. You know, you can make somebody guilty of overt acts for the last thousand years by simply describing to him why he shouldn't? You actually key in withholdingness on him, is what you do. And overt acts are so much the product of consideration in actual play that it takes a great deal of yak to establish them. They otherwise don't exist. The guilty conscience of the tiger who has just et the lamb ain't, until you've explained it carefully to the tiger.

There are some amusing processes that have been worked up on this interestingly complex basis. Let's see, one of the processes on the basis that just being told you had committed overt acts was about all you needed to do — let's see, "Mock up your mother and have her say something that would have no effect upon that wall." I think that was one of them, on the basis that the mother was the one who had described the motivatorishness and the overt-actishness of Newton's law. And mother had described this law, time after time after time, and said, "Well, now, if you keep hitting little Johnny, sometime you will get hit. You wouldn't like that." And the plain reason that would occur to the child — that nobody was hitting him. He was hitting little Johnny, which was a totally satisfactory state of affairs. He was permitted to get confused on this point that he was hitting little Johnny — he was hitting him.

Great artists have devoted a great deal of time driving home this message. The fellow who wrote the poem concerning "Do not send to find for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Well, it's perfectly true. But how did it get so blasted true? See, that's an interesting thing. How did it get so true? Well, it isn't native. It isn't a fact, don't you see? It's a consideration. And if you divide up facts and considerations, you'll know that facts can't be altered, and considerations can be. Then you have to say, "Well, how many facts are there?" Well, there are probably a few more facts than we know exist — it would be highly presumptuous of us and very limitative and extremely dangerous for us to say we have established all the facts there are.

We're not the same sort of scientists, I hope, that were bred in the European universities in the Middle Ages under the Scholastics, which the American university is totally patterned on. Do you realize that the American university follows a pattern that's been abandoned in Europe for many centuries? It's interesting — interesting, but true. Look up the Scholastics sometime. And then look up the way an American university is made to function. And you'll find out the American university follows in the tradition of the Scholastic. European university doesn't; it follows in the tradition of the Academy — the Grecian tradition.

Well, the European university once followed in the tracks of the Scholastics — once upon a time followed in the tracks of the Scholastics. And they found it didn't work. They found, after a while — I don't know, there was some kind of a race between France and Italy, I think, and Italy had a better catapult than France, and France immediately got a big scare; and they got all the lords and nobles together and they decided they would have to have more appropriations to build catapults, you know. They got pretty frantic — pretty frantic, and so they said, "Well, we're going to give a hundred billion livres to the schools around here and have them take all the peasants and educate them into building catapults." You remember this whole thing that happened. Anyway . . .

They did it, and then they lost. They lost. They'd given their money to a set of universities which were run on the principles of Scholasticism, which is, "We know all there is to know, and there isn't anything else anywhere to know, and we have the finite total limit of it, and it's all perfect, and you don't have to look at it anyway." Scholasticism. And you get this marvelous thing. I've forgotten who it was, that — two scientists involved in, one was a scientist and the other was a theoretician. And some fellow had just glimpsed the eighth planet and rather excitedly reported it to one and all. He was a fairly reputable fellow, and he had his paper thrown out because another paper had recently been issued to this effect: "Seven is a perfect number." This was Scholasticism.

We don't see clearly or cleverly really how specialized and peculiar the American educational systems are because we've all been subjected to them to some degree. But if you started — if you wanted some good mental gymnastics sometime, just start looking over and trying to find something peculiar about the American educational system. And for a while it'll escape your notice because you've been put to it for so long, but then you'll find out it is the damnedest, funniest educational system that you ever had anything to do with. It's the weirdest educational system; it's very arbitrary, and it's way out and beyond. Well, we've had them before. Scholasticism was one of these weird educational systems and so forth.

I'm sure the American Indian, the Mexican Indian had schools and methods of education which were also as wildly outlandish and peculiar, but he thought they were ordinary because he had been educated by them, see? Hence, it's quite remarkable — to establish a status quo in education it's only necessary to have a few generations that have been educated by that system. And then that system itself becomes this thing of "There are no further facts," see? "There is no other way to educate," don't you see? "We are educating in all the ways there are to educate. And those consist of: All the children in unison must count from one to a hundred every morning, see? And books must always be read at the back of the classroom, you see? And in order to teach somebody his alphabet it's necessary to give him a blow on the heels for every letter he learns, as it goes through his mind, you see? That's how you teach a person the alphabet." You know, you could dream up a whole bunch of things like this, but you wouldn't get as outlandish as educational systems are, and as peculiar.

Well, the American university has developed a peculiarity of its own. For instance, it no longer believes that an ability to do something has any relationship to a study of it. Now, that's a wild one. But it's nevertheless true. They would blink if you told them it was true, because you would have rooted a datum right out of the middle of their guts. Now, for somebody to tell you blandly that he's studied the subject for twelve years and is therefore an expert at doing something is totally non sequitur. The remarks have nothing to do with each other at all. Well, admittedly you have to study something or look at it or be familiar with it. Admittedly if you're familiar with it for a long time and continue to be familiar with it, you'd be quite familiar with it. But your ability to do something with that particular subject or in that particular field is your ability to do something, it is not dependent on length of time at all. It might have taken you fifty years of study to get up to a point where you could do something in that field. Well, therefore, it'd be nonsense to say that anybody could do it in four years, don't you see?

I'd say that the length of time that some of the scientists put in to learn what they learn could not be crammed into the throats of anybody in university in twenty-four seconds, see — twenty-four semester weeks, or anything like it.

And yet they pretend to do this, so it's outrageous. But on the other hand there's no reason why the fellow couldn't have gone to school for a year, you see, and learned all about this. The point is, did he learn about it? That's the only point. Can he do anything with it? Does he understand the subject?

For instance, they give a PhD in American universities, which is quite remarkable. A PhD is a remarkable grade. It's a remarkable degree because it says, "Doctor of Philosophy." Go down here and rake out a few of last year's PhDs and say, "Okay, son, philosophize."

And the guy will say, "What are you talking about?"

You say, "Philosophize. Write me some philosophy. I have a business up here, and I don't have any philosophy to run it. Write me some philosophy to run the business."

He'll say, "What?"

He doesn't understand that philosophy, actually, at one time had a very, very basic use in the society. It does have a use. As a matter of fact, the whole country out here is going nuts for the lack of some good philosophy, see? Nobody can orient this thing; there's no policy for why things run. You get the idea? Nobody's dreamed up a put-together in the field of the mind to match up the mechanics, don't you see? And none of these guys have the idea of philosophizing, regardless of about what.

But they will give you the philosophy of somebody else. They'll quote Kant and Nietzsche and Skip-skop Schopenhauer and the rest of these fellows, and they'll quote all this, and it doesn't strike them as odd at all that knowing about philosophers is different from being able to philosophize. A Doctor of Philosophy, you see, would be, then, somebody who had a lot of philosophers by rote, do you understand that? Well, that would hardly be the case.

Now, a philosopher could fill many niches, and there could be a tremendous amount of philosophy. But a speculative philosophy which leads to a doingness, which puts people in a position to do speculative philosophy would be as about as close as you could get to philosophy, see? You got that? So try to compare what we're doing here, which is basically highly philosophical, compare what we're doing here or have done in Dianetics and Scientology to sitting in a classroom, passing an examination on what Skip-skop Schopenhauer said, see? No utilitarian application, no doingness connected with it, wasn't required that you understood it at all, you see? It's a wealth of difference.

Now, that doesn't say that philosophy has to be practical. Doesn't say they have to do anything about it. But slavish committing to memory of a series of facts does not constitute philosophy or education. And we get the whole world falling in to the areas of facts and invented facts, or supposed facts or invented facts. And you could also have the — just the invented fact, of course, would be a consideration. And there evidently are some facts, which I think is something that we have not stressed enough. There are some facts. We do know some things that are. And we do not know all the things that are. We know they are apparently relatively few. That is to say they're not — they don't form three-quarters of your knowledge. They probably at this moment form about a billionth or a trillionth of your knowledge. You see, I mean, it's some very — it's evidently a very minute ratio. And the remainder is apparently and only this, apparently, consideration. That is to say that stems from that, and by the process of agreement becomes a fact. And you're into the whole field of mechanics.

Well, people's consideration as what is right and wrong is more important than what is right and wrong. If you run out their consideration, you get an alteration of what is right and wrong, and that's very fortunate, because most people who are right think they are wrong today.

Okay, we'll take up some more of this later.

Thank you.