I'm going to talk to you now about confusion and stable data. And these are extremely important things in the mind, in the world, in the pc and in the auditor.
To give you some idea right here at the beginning, what would you consider an auditor was? Why doesn't self-auditing produce the results it should produce? What is an auditor?
An auditor, basically, first and foremost to the preclear, is a stable datum. If in the entire world there was no one to give anyone assistance with the mind, then the confusion of the mind would be much greater, you see. Just the fact that somebody exists that can give you a hand is in itself a settling influence. Why? Because the world is confusion. The mind itself is confusion. One might even say unconsciousness takes place because of an effort to escape confusion. A person has problems in order to wake himself up and in order to make some sense out of the confusion.
The first thing a person does in a confusion is wonder what kind of a problem it is, if he wants to get out of the confusion. "What are they doing to me?" he will ask. "What is going on here?"
Person wakes up out of unconsciousness, his time-honored remark — and by the way, this is factual, I have attended many an ambulance entrance case and have many reports on them — they always ask, "Where am I?" See, their first statement is a problem. But by articulating the problem they to some degree as-is the confusion.
Now, the person coming out of unconsciousness says, "Where am I?" and then discovers by being told or observing it that he is in a hospital. Now, that is less confusing, then, to him and he'll want to know what hospital and then he will recognize what hospital, and he becomes much less confused. Now, how is this? How does this exactly work out?
Is it that the confusion itself disappears? No. No. A first and most basic mechanism of this is the matter of traffic. If you are in a large stream of traffic at Forty-second and Broadway or Piccadilly Circus and you want to cross the street, those flying particles, as they dash hither and thither, so on, can look pretty confusing to you.
Why don't they look that confusing when you're sitting at the wheel of a car? Because you have a nice, thick car around you? No. As a matter of fact, it's much harder to move a car through a confusion like that than it is to walk through one. But you are a stable datum. The car you are in is motionless and all the other traffic is moving. And if you're not in a car, then all cars are moving, you see. So just by the process of halting, anchoring, noticing, making immobile one car, the confusion tends to be less.
You can notice this in many fields. You see, most of the tests which you make here on Earth are made in rooms, therefore, they are not quite as forceful as tests as they might be. If we were to throw up a bunch of scrap paper in the middle of a room, we would really not get the same reaction that we would get if we were to throw up a bunch of scrap paper in the middle of some vast, unlimited space where nothing was motionless, because you see these walls are motionless. And as you conduct the test, the fellow feels perfectly safe because he has a floor, a ceiling and four walls all of which are motionless. And he then holds on to these as motionless and sees this bunch of scrap paper circulating around in the middle of the room as being of not any great importance.
Well, you would be amazed what would happen to an individual who has no walls and has no floor or ceiling and has nothing but space on every hand and has a great deal of scrap paper thrown up in his immediate vicinity. There is no stability anywhere. And does he confuse in a hurry. He really does. Would be most remarkable.
You get out amidst a heavy chop at sea and — where you're not motionless and neither is the sea — and you feel awfully confused. As a matter of fact, people don't live long, usually, just tossed into the ocean. Chop might only be two or three feet tall but it just swallows them up.
What they succumb to, really, is confusion. Now, if they get out in a fairly large boat, you see, they have stability. But why is that stability? It really isn't the mass, it's the motionlessness of the boat or ship in relationship to the waves.
Now, we take and put them out there in a little rowboat, well, this is a little bit better than simply being out there themselves, and those waves don't look quite so confused. But it's confusing enough, let me assure you, to be at sea in an open boat.
Now, if an individual — if an individual has no motionless particle, he himself confuses! Why? Because he Q-and-As, he duplicates what he is looking at. A thetan can be what he can see, he can see what he can be. He looks at this, there's nothing but confusion there, therefore he can be but — in nothing but motion. And a thetan can't be in motion, not very well. He doesn't like this.
Now, there's a way of defeating this. It's a trick and nothing but a trick, really. A trick, however, which goes a considerable distance: We look at one piece of paper and we say, "All pieces of paper are moving in relationship to that one piece of paper."
Have you any idea how many motions are taking place here on the planet Earth at this moment? There are eight separate motions. One of them is a thousand miles an hour — the commonest one which you know is of course the polar rotation. It rotates around its axis and is going at the rate of twenty-four hours there to the rather astonishing distance of twenty-five thousand miles. That means a thousand miles an hour. Now, that's the first action that would leap to mind the moment you were told that Earth was in motion. Right?
All right. There it goes. You're going a thousand miles an hour right this minute. And you start thinking about that and it gets rather dizzying. You just don't like that.
Now in addition to going a thousand miles an hour just in one direction, you are going in eight other directions simultaneously. There are eight separate motions taking place in all. (I should say seven more, in addition to the rotation.)All right, you see this now? That's very confusing. But why doesn't it seem confusing? Because you have a stable datum called Earth. And you are standing right on it, you're sitting on it and it is apparently motionless. Now get this apparency of motionlessness. It's just apparent, you see, that it's motionless. So that if you at any time can say to yourself, "Well, that piece is not moving," you say, "(sigh) What a relief."
You look up at the sky — if you were to expose a camera toward the North Pole and let it sit there all night, you would see nothing but a swirl of stars. There isn't a single star up there would remain in position the night through. They would turn in a complete circle, as well as go in other directions.
The North Pole, on which sailors rely so pathetically, every 12,500 years shifts so far as to be the star Vega, which is a considerable distance from Polaris. Polaris is not really even the North Pole — the polar star.
Quite amazing. I mean, here's all this action — you don't notice it. Why don't you notice it? Because you have Earth as a stable datum. You got that? That's all you really need to know.
Let's apply that. Let's apply that. Girl is an operator at a switchboard, and every now and then we notice she's in a terrible flap. She's very nervous. Calls come in, they hit that board, wham, wham, wham, wham. How would you, in just two seconds, straighten her out on her job?
One of the ways you could do it is simply call to her attention that she did have a stable datum in front of her, which was the actual mass of the switchboard. But this is not liable to do it. You have to give her a system. You have to say, "Whatever other calls do, you always answer trunk line 1 first. And whatever of the offices ring, always answer the boss's first. Now, those you pay attention to." She'll settle down on her job.
She'll say, "Well, that isn't important because the — trunk line 1 and the boss haven't rung. There are only twelve calls coming through here at once." So she'll just take the nearest one to the boss and plug it in. And after that you will notice that she works rather calmly. Don't you see?
Now, she might not be at once anxious to buy your idea of what a stable datum was, but you can find something there that she does always that she can hold as a stable datum and after that her job won't confuse her. See?
Now, if we were to take a government and set up at the head of this government one man, it would almost be a confession that there was a great deal of confusion around. A democracy cannot really thrive well in a tremendous confusion. Therefore in wartime we get all sorts of sudden appointments to be the absolute control of the Mediterranean theater and all this sort of thing, you know? Democracy does not function well in a tremendous confusion because its comm lines are not fast enough, but more important than that, because there isn't an immediately apparent stable datum.
One says, "The government," but then that's a sort of a floppy thing. It's not very precise. So we take a government that appoints or elects a dictator as its sole governing body. You know, only the dictator. You know, like way back when we had a fellow by the name of Mussolini. And it's quite amusing to note that somebody who is applying for a passport in Sicily would ask a Sicilian government employee whether or not he could have that renewed, he would have to wait till tomorrow. Why? A call actually had to go through to Rome, and come back as an authorization. Nothing could be put on a grooved line at all.
And when Mussolini was pulled out from under, the military government which went into Italy and tried to put it back together again had a dreadful time. The only people to hand who could occupy any position at all were Fascists. And these people were incapable of acting without consulting Rome, and Mussolini had gone long since. So we had a tremendous confusion. Therefore, it wasn't that Mussolini created the confusion, but there must have been a tremendous confusion in existence and he came in and occupied as a single stable datum. Don't you see how this would work? So everybody would be fairly calm under this, but if anything happened to that stable datum, then they'd be upset.
Now, quite normally your preclear's whole life has been disturbed by the disarrangement of one such stable datum. Let's say stable datum in this case, let us say, was Mother. Wherever Father went, whatever he did, Mother was always to hand, see. And we find then an effort to relieve Mother's valence on the case. Mother was nuts, see, and we're going to split this one off. Oh yes? There isn't any other stable datum on the whole case like Mother. So every time we try to separate Mother the case gets foggy and confused.
Now, a case getting foggy or boiling off or doing anything else is, in its finest, thinnest analysis, is simply getting into an area of confusion. And that is the source of all of these odd manifestations. The case feels stupid. The case feels that he's going to be overwhelmed at any moment and so forth you're just getting into confusing areas. There are various ways to relieve this. One of the ways of relieving it is to take the confusion itself under control. Well, we'll talk about that in a moment. You see what, then, one person could be to the case — stable datum for all the confusion.
Goes broke, he can always wire Mother and get a loan. Mother is the one answer. So you have a solution in this life, see, which is Mother. Now, you disturb Mother, you get the confusion for which Mother is a solution, see?
So if you want to shake confusion into existence on a case, it is only necessary to tap, discredit or knock out one stable datum. This is quite amusing. I mean, we, all of us, suffer from this from time to time. Preclear goes home, feels good, comes back to the next session in horrible shape.
Now, well, you say, "Well, how could anybody be invalidated that fast?" But we make a mistake. We say, "How could the preclear be invalidated that fast?" That is not the correct thing. The preclear isn't going to tell us; the person who was invalidated was the auditor. He went home to an invalidation of the auditor. The preclear has Scientology and an auditor as his stable data. The most prominent one, of course, is the mass one — the auditor. The auditor has mass.
Now the preclear comes back in a spin. What was said about the auditor? Not what was said to the preclear. You got that? In other words, the auditor has been shaken. Now, we'll see that time and time again. Always remember that that is what happened if the person was really shaken, although the preclear will not tell us.
Similarly, it has been utterly impossible for various fields which are bigheaded enough to believe they're competitive to Scientology to shake Scientology as a stable datum by, for instance, trying to shake me out of the picture as a stable datum, you see? They think up the most incredible things. As a matter of fact, I just received a bunch of affidavits from the States of statements made by a couple of rather discredited — the professions, medical and psychiatric and so forth — to people who would have investigated Scientology. And they didn't have anything to do with Scientology. They just had to do with me and all of my "horrible misconducts." Well, now, in view of the fact the hardest thing in the world to do is to as-is or knock out of existence your own horrible misconducts — particularly when they didn't exist.
You see, you can always — you can always prove yourself guilty — there's always evidence for that. But there's no evidence for not guilty. That's one of the most fascinating enigmas of law.
According to them, why, I eat small children and I'm at this moment somewhere in Alaska in an insane asylum in their own personal Siberia and they — you know, it just goes on and on and on. It's actually incredible what they will think up in order to make this invalidative.
Well, why don't they work on Scientology? I mean, there's something to be worked on there. They could be tested, it can be harangued at and so on, but they don't do it. They take the only mass object that they themselves can spot and then they start to shake that up. Of course this is a very dangerous thing for an organization to do.
Now, remember that it's very dangerous for your preclear's enemy at home to shake you up as an auditor. Remember that if a preclear was badly invalidated, really what happened was the auditor was knocked out as a stable datum. Now, that's a very dangerous thing to do the moment you know that.
You can start running something like, "An enemy of comparable magnitude to your sister." The next thing you know, the fellow realizes he's been had. He's now your friend. The other person has lost. Don't you see that?
For instance, for an organization to begin on this campaign — which is a pack of lies, you see — this campaign would be then eventually an invalidation of the organization who would deal in such things, don't you see? They have just nonchalantly put their throats out and even begged somebody to cut them, without us ever doing a thing about it.
Because this happens continually: Somebody comes in and sees me — I'm around — shakes me by the hand and looks at me. And I just notice them sometimes look at me rather peculiarly, if they're in the professions or something like that. And they look at me and he says, "It's quite interesting. This — you know — " (kind of nudge the fellow next to them), "you know, this guy isn't nuts. Somebody is wrong around here!"
Then the next thing you know, why, these chaps are all for us and if anybody would do anything this desperate on the other side, then they mustn't be any good at all, and we haven't even proven whether Scientology was any good or not, see?
It's never, then, been subjected to a contest of facts. It's a contest of stable data. Got that? Stable data, then I'm — only reason I'm talking about this is to give you a level of comparison: Stable data is much more valuable than a line of logic. Just get that, because that's quite a lot to say, see.
You could reason somebody into something, perhaps. But what if they were in a confusion? A confusion is stupidity — not-knowingness of where or when. That is stupidity, definition of. All right. Not knowing where it was, not knowing what it was, well, you could go ahead and explain to them at long length and show them evidences and do all sorts of things, when as a matter of fact, if you just repeated the same thing over and over, they would eventually have a feeling that you had impressed them logically. If you keep saying to them, for instance, "Well, there's cornflakes."
And they say, "Yappety-yappety-yappety-yappety-yap," and fly all around and confuse, confusion, confusion.
You say, "But that's one thing you can't get around — cornflakes." And they go, "Yappety-yappety-yap," and fly all around.
And you finally wind up and you say, "Well, you're absolutely right and that's totally correct. However, cornflakes."
They'll go off and they will tell people that you are the most hardheaded logical person they have ever talked to. Because there is something senior to logic and that is a stable datum. And that is always senior to logic.
If you begin on any type of campaign of any description, for heaven's sakes, remember, if you want to be successful in this campaign, is to make it, build it on the basis of a stable datum. Say one thing and say it often.
Of course, advertising has fallen into this a long time ago, but they don't quite know why. And they skid on it. They skid rather badly. They fool around, they change this and that. The reason they do it is they think that people remember one thing, people are only capable of remembering one thing. But by saying one thing over and over and over, they put a stable datum into the society and somebody coming down the street and just looking at their signboard has a little feeling of relief. (sigh) It says, "Bread loves Stork Margarine," you know? "Well, everything is right in the world," this person sort of thinks to himself, you know? That's why men wear the same types of clothes at any given period, and why women wear clothes always different from any other woman's clothes all the time.
Well, where you have — where you have a repetition, something of that sort, you get an idea of a stable datum. And where you have an irregularity one fact to another fact, as in logic — you know, logic is merely a parade, a gradient scale of facts, each one of which seems to march on to another fact which is almost itself, but not quite. And that is logic.
And as we look along the line of confusion and stable datum, we find then that a uniform body of men presented in battle order — very, very orderly, all alike, so on — brings out this odd manifestation: that one of them, all by himself, then, at close grips with the enemy and so forth, actually represents himself to be the whole company.
It's quite amazing. Now, a body of irregular troops might each one be terribly competent, and that body of irregulars might be fabulous in fighting a war or something of the sort, but they lose more often than they win merely because they do not overwhelm the enemy with a similarity or a stable datum, you might say. The enemy can always point to them as ragtag and bobtail and confused and not knowing what they're doing, you see. And therefore the battle does not get won before it is fought. And that's one of the things you must know about war: Never fight a war to win it. Win it, and then fight it if you want to. Always win it first.
And one of the ways you do this, one of the ways you would win this first is simply put up the most convincing stable datum, you see, and put it up the most regularly and never permit a confusion to exist on your side or in your mind.
Somebody starts overwhelming you with all manner of terminology that you don't understand and so forth, for heaven's sakes, pick up something out of your kit that sounds utterly, preposterously impressive, you see, and just go on with cornflakes, you see? And you'll make a bigger impression, actually.
Now this comes down to solve a great many of our interesting problems. Why is it almost impossible to take someone out of chiropracty and make a Scientologist out of him? It's an interesting question, since it's been with us for years. It's very simple: Chiropracty was a stable datum. Every time he has a stable datum, there was a confusion. So we discover that the individual, then, adopted chiropracty because of an existing confusion. And he, every time you ask him to let go of chiropracty, of course, gets the confusion back in his bank. In other words, his bank confuses all over again every time you say, "Give up chiropracty. Why don't you stop cracking spines and start auditing them?" — something on this order.
And he gets upset with you and tries to persuade you that cracking spines is much better. Well, cracking spines might be just fine, might be nothing wrong with this whatsoever, but measured one to the other, why, we do more fastestmostest fastest.
Why does he hang on to it? And what would you do? It's just a confusion. Chiropracty was a stable datum for a certain specified confusion which existed in his life. So what would you have him do?
There's one rule in auditing this, and this is the best rule to follow in any case of confusion. You can do this for any datum, even any datum or basic law or rule in Scientology: "Mock up the confusion for which chiropracty is a stable datum." Never pay any more attention to chiropracty, he'll just confuse if you do. "Now just mock up the confusion for which chiropracty is a stable datum." Just keep him doing this, you know, over and over. Move the thing around. Make it more confused. Do something with it to have him take under control that particular confusion and all of a sudden he'll say, "Well, I know Scientology works better than chiropracty." You've been trying to convince him of that for a long time. But every time you made him try to let go of it, he got the confusion back.
Now, similarly the idea, for instance, of location originally existed — stable location — of course, to as-is unstable locations. The whole idea of needing or being on a planet is brought about because it's better to be on a planet than drifting around in a lot of invisible particles that keep batting you one, you see.
And so you could say, "Mock up the confusion for which a planet is a stable datum," and you'll probably have the fellow rising quietly off the floor and sticking against the ceiling before much more time happens.
So any idea, no matter what kind of an idea, is of course as-isable or removable from a case as long as — and just always that wording — "Mock up the confusion for which (blank) is a stable datum."
We get Mother out of the case by saying, "Mock up a confusion, now, for which your mother is a stable datum."
And we just keep at it and keep at it and keep at it and all of a sudden, the person doesn't care whether Mother is there or not. Of course, in some cases he has to mock up his whole life and it takes some doing. Takes some doing. Running extroversion–introversion, why, twenty-five hours later you're still running "Mock up a confusion," along with Havingness and along with other processes, for which Mother is a stable datum.
But there is — there is one of the more visible processes of Scientology. It, of course, depends on the fact that a person's tolerance of the confusion must be low. And you have to raise his tolerance of confusion. And by having him mock up confusions, he of course, raises his tolerance of confusion and therefore it's a very, very simple thing to handle confusion in a case with just that one command: "Mock up a confusion for which Mother would be a stable datum" — chiropractor, or anything else you think up.
Thank you.