I want to talk to you today about precision. I want to talk to you about definition, meaning. That seems a very odd subject for a lecture, doesn't it? But I'd better talk to you about it, for the good reason that man in his confusion today does not recognize this fact.

Now, let's give you a very graphic example. Supposing you had a lot of ribbons laid out here on the floor, and they were in the pattern of a wheel. Ribbons were laid out, and they were radiating from a center spot. They were all more or less of equal length, and they were graduated so as to approximate the spectrum, you know, in color. In other words, their colors were uniform. You could look at that and you could recognize form, couldn't you, with great ease? Hm?

All right. Now let's take one of these ribbons and disarrange it. What have we done? We have actually not made something less beautiful. Let's get off of that as a classification. We have made something less formful, haven't we?

Now let's disarrange the ribbons so that red is next to blue is next to yellow is next to green, and all of the other off-shades are mixed similarly. Well, that's not quite a form, is it? It's getting into a little confusion here. And now, instead of disarranging one, let's disarrange all of them. Let's have them all go out at odd angles from the hub. We're departing from what? We are departing from form and order.

All right. Now let's take these ribbons one after the other and let's give them a kink in different places, of different depths, making them different lengths. Well, we certainly are getting a lot further from form and order, aren't we? Form is degenerating.

All right. Now let's take all these ribbons and wind them all up in a ball, a tangled mass, and throw them down. We certainly have gone away from order, haven't we? This has become a clutter. It's become a confusion.

All right, let's do worse than this. Let's take what they were sitting on, which was a rug, which had a little dust and dirt in it, and let's pound them around on this rug until they're dirty, too. See, an integral part of the rug has entered into these ribbons now, and it's quite messy by this time.

Now let's take the rug and let's tear it up and wrap it around this ball of ribbons. Now let's cut a hole in the floor. And let's take the planks that we get there and pile them on top of the ribbons. And now let's cave in the roof on these ribbons. And just to add good measure, let's run three cars in a head-on collision into the spot where the ribbons are and then get the ribbons all tangled up in the oil and machinery of the crashed cars.

We have a picture, then, of the standard business organization; we have a picture of government — all kinds of things.

Confusion. Why don't you like confusion? Well, that thing is a confusion to a person which he cannot predict. Therefore, we would have Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith, where Mr. Jones has, let us say, a confusion threshold of one disarranged ribbon. This is confusion to him, see. And we have Mr. Smith whose confusion threshold was just before you crashed the cars head-in on the spot, see. He could have stood all this, you see. He could have figured all this was relatively predictable as far as he was concerned. But when you crashed those cars and got the motor oil all over everything, he knows then that the ribbons are stained beyond recognition. And no process known to him could possibly bring out in their original color the ribbons we started with, and so he's actually lost something.

When we talk about form, when we talk about confusion, when we talk about loss, we're talking markedly about the same thing.

People have a prediction threshold. As they drive down a highway, one person fully believes that the very next oncoming car is going to slew side-ways and strike him. See, his prediction of that particle is so nervous, you see, that he expects it to do the unpredictable.

And the other fellow goes on down the highway at a mad rate of speed and he doesn't care what those other particles do, because he just merely assumes that they're going to do the sensible or reasonable thing.

Now, it's not that there's anything right or wrong, bad or good, about anybody's attitude with regard to this, but this will tell you why Mr. Jones is upset when one ribbon is kinked in this first wheel we had, and why Mr. Smith is not upset until you crash the cars so as to get the motor oil all over everything. He says, "I quit. I quit." He says, "I can't predict that mess anymore." Well, this is nervousness in the preclear. You can watch a preclear. You can get his predictability. Preclears get down to a basis where they hate to see anything moving. They just despise to see anything moving. And when I said anything, I mean anything.

They hate to see the smoke of your cigarette moving. They hate to see anything in motion, much less a little kid. They hate to hear anything. That, again, is a symptom of motion, isn't it? Because everything to them is a warning. Everything has become a warning. Anything in motion is unpredictable, and that's very close to bottom. There . . . The axiom, you might say, the "truth" — it is not a truth — but the truth on which they run is "Anything which moves is therefore unpredictable," which has a corollary: "Anything moving is unpredictable." Now, that's how far they are into the future. A person who is three minutes ahead of present time in his ability to predict, of course, knows what practically everything is going to do.

I gave a group process one night to a bunch of people. The process run, by the way, was "Electing Cause." I ran this on a group — almost murdered half of the group — and gave an enormous case resurgence to the remaining half of the group. I ran it because there were many people in this group had continued to get Opening Procedure, Opening Procedure, and so on, long after they were ready for a tougher procedure. So I ran this Electing Cause. I just had them spot things which were cause and, of course, turned on a lot of automatic worry machines, and so forth.

Well, one of these persons had an automatic worry machine. Well, an automatic worry machine is something which elects cause, you see. It says, "That's the cause, that's the cause, that's the cause." Every time a person says, "That's cause," why, he says, "I'm effect," you know — unless he is totally detached, and then he can say, "That's cause, and that over there is effect." So I ran this type of process on this group, and this one person who heretofore had not been able to predict their dinner they ate three hours ago, found herself three or four minutes ahead of present time on prediction. She knew what all the cars were going to do and what all the traffic lights were going to do, and everything else, going home; knew who would be where and what would be which, and she was in a very, very calm state of affairs. She was predicting, not because she was looking from the present into the future, but because she was slightly in the future looking at the present. Now, that is a very healthy state for a thetan to be in. He's slightly in the future looking at the present.

All right. That certainly is an ability to predict moving particles. That person while in that state certainly would not have worried about any slightest moving particle, would they have?

But this other person, let us say, coasting behind it, watching only the fait accompli — the earlier state of this same person, watching only that which has happened as prediction (you'd hardly call it prediction at all) — that person was in a constant state of foment and worry. They were looking everywhere to find out "what did it." Their total fixation: "What has done this?" See? "What has done this?" Not what will do what, but what has done this?

Well, that's your psycho. He's slid back into the past. His confusion threshold is the disarrangement of one tiny ribbon in an otherwise perfect pattern. This person walks into a room and just becomes obsessed with the idea of straightening up everything, and putting everything in an exact, orderly pattern. This person is worshiping orderly form, because form itself can be preserved, form itself can be deteriorated and so forth, but the actual particles of form aren't. They stay there.

All right. Now, let's take up the anatomy of mystery, and let's look a little bit more at an axiom — what an axiom is. The anatomy of mystery enters in with an inability to predict. That's the first step into mystery. This goes into a confusion. See, unable to predict becomes, eventually — to the per-son viewing this — a confusion. What this person is looking at in that unpredictable field becomes a confusion. And that confusion becomes even unpredictable as a confusion. And so it becomes a complete mystery.

So let's look at this prediction, confusion, mystery — see, those three stages there. All right, this is the anatomy of mystery. If you start to take a mystery apart you will find confusion. Confusion is a step up. You start to take apart the most mysterious order that you know of and you will find a confusion. And you start to take apart the various tenets on which they live — the practices, the doingnesses — and you will discover a confusion, if this order is a mystery.

If it starts out as a mystery to you, you start to look at it and it becomes a confusion, and then as you continue to inspect it, it will become a predict-ability. Follow me?

How do we get these characters who have black fields upscale? This blackness is mystery. Night itself is mystery. Everything is black, there is no light, and yet you have this black, blacked space in which anything might be. And this, to the whole universe, is mystery. Anything might be in the night, you see, so it's a mystery. That's what they get. So as they go downscale they pick up this blackness, you know. And anything that becomes mysterious to them reacts on this stimulus-response pattern and they get … everything goes black.

When things become too confusing they start to dim out and go black. This is a person fainting. All you have to do is put eight more horns blowing and just a little bit more motion into the scene, and some person is liable to faint.

That's why in large crowds you have ambulances around and Red Cross tents, and so forth. Because sooner or later in all this motion and lights, and so forth, somebody is going to faint. They are going to pass out. They can call it sunstroke, heatstroke, exhaustion, anything they want to; but the ultimate deduction here would simply be that they became so confused, everything blacked out.

All right. Did you ever know a person … ? Now, this might take you a moment or two of thinking and it might not, but I'm going to ask you to do so. Did you ever know a person whose next words you could not even vaguely predict in the field of, let us say, emotion?

Did you ever run into anybody who made sudden comments which were unpredictable? They were not quite in sequence with the situation. They did this as a habit. You come in, you're feeling good, they say, "Look at your dirty feet" — anything. You could even get so you could predict that, you see.

But supposing you came in with dirty feet and knew you were going to get clobbered because you had dirty feet, and the person said, "Have a piece of pie." You never quite knew what this person was going to do next. You never knew what they were going to say next or what emotional scale you would run into next. Have you ever had anything to do with such a person? Hm?

Well, I'll give you a history which was the most astonishing thing I ever ran into in terms of this. A fellow had a wife who did this sort of thing to him consistently and continually, you know, and he'd say, "Well, I'm going to … I just got a job and my pay is going to be $125 a week, and I'm very happy about this job." And the person would say, "Well, what about your Mother?"

"What about my Mother? What's my Mother got to do with this job?" Mother doesn't live with them, no threat of Mother living with them — completely offbeat, see.

Well, blah! What about his mother? He's just bound up here in a moment of confusion, isn't he? He comes in and he says, "I've just got tickets to the show, and how about you … how about you and I going down and seeing the show?" And then the person says, "Well, we don't have any blankets." "What's blankets got to do with the show?"

"Well, we don't have …" And then large, tenuous reasoning, trying to get it over. Never the obvious thing, such as, "Well, if you've spent money on the show then we won't have money to buy blankets," you see. Nothing clear-cut like this, but round Robin Hood's barn.

One day, after he'd lived with this woman for a number of years — she was being very turbulent about other things — he took a look at her and there was a black frame. This person, out of all the people on earth, was getting a black frame around her. There was a ragged, black curtain was beginning to gather around this person. He didn't see this around any other person. And yet he saw this with his eyes wide open, and saw it as thoroughly and clearly as though it had been built out of physical-universe crepe. And day by day this curtain grew, until he could not see his wife with his own eyes.

What had happened? Unprediction, confusion and a blackness of mystery. How did I get him out of this? I asked him to remember something real about his wife. That's how I got him out of it. I asked him to remember a time when he was in communication with her, a time when he wasn't, and so forth. And we finally pulled him right on out of it.

We used a sort of a jackleg 8-D, we would have called it years afterwards (this was an early case). But we established or put into the situation enough ARC to just overcome the situation. Well, this is a curious manifestation, isn't it?

Does this vary one single bit from the guy who is walking around looking at total blackness as a thetan? Is there any difference? This universe has become so unpredictable to such a person that he as a thetan would rather look at blackness. This universe is totally wrapped in blackness as far as he's concerned, see. It's unpredictable. As he starts to take it apart it becomes a horrible confusion.

What is an excellent way to make him take it apart? Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of Opening Procedure 8-C is a very, very good way to do this.

Of course, you can't do 8-C, really, on somebody who is out of communication, so you'd use your two-way communication and your Elementary Straightwire steps to get him up to the point where you could. But remember where you are going. You're going up to 8-C, and therefore we have to give him something on the order of Elementary Straightwire.

Now, Elementary Straightwire — "Something you wouldn't mind remembering; something you wouldn't mind forgetting" — of course, is an excellent process to use on this person. But they have to be in two-way communication before you can use this process. And two-way communication may start way down at the bottom of the scale with Mimicry, and something like this process which we were running the other day where you hand things to the pre-clear and the preclear hands things to you. This is all fine as processing.

But where are we going? This person's blackness is intimately connected with this universe, and therefore we've got to get him up to a point where he's sufficiently in communication one way or the other. He's never going to get in communication with this universe via the past, believe me. You don't predict anything by being behind its moment of time. Do you? Ever? No, you sure don't. You can't be behind its moment of time and predict it. You get up even with it, at least!

So as a thetan, he can't see the universe around him. It's unpredictable to him. Blackness is mystery. Blackness came about through unpredictability of objects and things. Have we got this now? Mystery — confusion — unpredictability is the upward scale.

All right. We come around, we have him touch the walls and touch the walls. Now, one of the reasons why we run people best with 8-C with no significance, is because that wall isn't thinking. And it never has thought anything. So we get the best communication and the best duplication by an unthinking person. You're just going to have him put his attention on the wall.

Now, there's no thought in the wall, therefore there's no thought in the person. Get how obvious this is. This makes him do duplication of this universe.

If you do that process well, if you've gotten him up to the point where he's in communication (he isn't so frightened of the past that he can put some of his attention on the present), and we do 8-C, we will pull him up out of this horrible gulf of mystery and we will blow him on out — particularly if we do enough 8-C and then Opening Procedure by Duplication, which is some more pulling him out of the past and putting him into communication with the present.

What's blackness? Blackness is mystery. What happens when you bring a person out of a mystery? He goes into confusion, that's where he goes. And that's why he dives back in the mystery. And you will watch these boys time after time come up out of a blackness, get confused and dive back into blackness.

You see why these guys suddenly reverse their cases and turn off their visio and turn on blackness again? They don't like that confusion. That's what they don't like. The way to overcome this is simply run something like Opening Procedure of 8-C, Elementary Straightwire — "Something you wouldn't mind forgetting; something you wouldn't mind remembering." Now, there's something about your preclear that will always be some-thing about your preclear: He does not understand and he does not know the basic rules of the physical universe. These things he does not know — these basic rules.

In the course of processing, running all the steps of Intensive Procedure in the printed edition of The Auditor's Handbook, you will actually hand to him enough understanding, you see, of the physical universe to snap him out of it.

In each one of these steps there is a certain amount of knowingness. That's why there are so many steps. There are at least that many branches of knowingness. Actually, there are thousands more than the sixty or seventy there, but he'll probably cull knowingness out of these.

So if you were going to give a guy a complete, full audit — we won't even call it an intensive — if you were going to give him a complete, full audit, it might go on for 250 hours, you see.

But what would you do? You would simply be auditing him … And the funny part of Scientology and Dianetics today is the person undergoing auditing will recover the central laws which, later on, entered into a confusion, became forgotten by him.

Now, these Axioms and such are simply no more, no less, than guide-posts out of confusion. There is a knowingness strata there, isn't there? An axiom is a (quote) "self-evident truth." It's self-evident when it is exposed. It didn't expose itself, you see. A self-evident truth.

Now, these self-evident truths, because Scientology and Dianetics today are built in the direction of the common denominators of agreement of this universe, deliver into the hands of a preclear this understanding. He will come up with these same conclusions. This baffles many an auditor.

They're always coming up with a schoolbook solution — always. And you could say, "How long to run a process?" Until the fellow concludes the central agreement on his own hook.

Well, of course, we had to research this vast ocean of data in order to recover the single data that were terribly important in holding all the rest of it together. As soon as you recover that data, you have of course recovered all the held-down fives there are. And that's why a universe is here: held-down fives — if you remember the old analogy with the computer.

All right. The universe is here because of held-down fives. You start re-leasing these, one right after the other, and it all becomes very clear to him, whereas before it was a terrible confusion. Just because there's a lot of some-thing is no reason it's confusing. You got the idea? Just because there's a lot of something it's no reason there's a confusion there. You look at the Milky Way; there's no reason why you should be confused about the Milky Way just because there are so many stars in the Milky Way.

Well, people get quantity all mixed up with confusion. They get every kind of thing. They get velocity mixed up with confusion. They … Any way you could think of it, they get ideas mixed up with confusion, and so on. And bringing them up through confusion is one of the roughest things that you will do.

Well, as you're running Intensive Procedure you discover rather uniformly as you come up the line that the preclear recovers the central point from which all confusions priorly emanated. He recovers this datum. And that datum is an axiom.

Now, an axiom can be of first, second or third magnitude. A third-magnitude axiom would depend upon the second-magnitude axiom, which would depend, of course, upon the first-magnitude axiom. So there, really, you could say there are thousands of grades of axiom.

"This is a microphone," of course, is an eight-millionth-order axiom. See? An axiom, essentially, see, is just a statement. It's a self-evident statement which can be transmitted or understood.

Naturally, "This is a microphone" depends upon … Well, let's just take a tremendous jump and say it depends upon the fact that there is a field called electronics. You know, that's an axiom: "There's a field called electronics." And this depends upon the fact … And let's take another horrible jump and say, "There is a physical universe." And the axiom would be "The physical universe is here." You know?

Now let's take a terrific jump up the line and say "Life perceives the physical universe." We're just going up from this axiom, you see, "This is a microphone." "Life perceives the physical universe." Well, the funny part of it is, life often doesn't perceive the physical universe — as when you run into a Black Five. See, life doesn't perceive the physical universe. Well, it's become that much less alive. Life that is really alive can perceive the physical universe or any other universe it elects to perceive. But as it becomes less and less alive, it of course becomes less and less capable of viewing. Therefore, it becomes less and less capable of having space, and becomes less capable in all directions.

All right. Therefore, we've got life getting down to the plane of, and finally as inanimate as, the physical universe just on this single scale.

Now, let's take another Axiom: "The goal of life is survival." Well, that is an apparent goal. That's apparency. We look at life, we see that the common denominator of life is its surviving. And survival, of course, has its dichotomy, succumb. And life which isn't surviving is succumbing. Well, yet we've locked it all into survival because it's an absence of survival. See, succumbing is an absence of survival.

We find life can natively survive. It does not need space, it does not need time, it does not need energy and it does not need matter to survive. And that is a very, very high echelon truth.

So, we have a definition, in an axiom, of aberration itself: An aberration is the enforcement of a natural condition. Awful thing to pull on somebody. It's the enforcement of a natural condition.

All right. If we say this physical universe is a natural condition, it's been enforcing itself on the preclear, hasn't it? Well, naturally there could be a physical universe. It's a natural condition. But then it becomes aberrated, or aberrative.

Life, having to survive, finding it absolutely necessary to survive and going through certain formulas which are supposed to lead it toward survival, of course, is doing an aberrated thing. It's an enforced truth.

Now, if anything happens to a student — somebody's coming down toward the end of the run on a course, I like them to know this — if anything happens to a student simply because he's grasped some of these self-evident truths, you see, if he feels bad about this or something of the sort, if he's in an upset condition, it's simply because he feels these truths have been forced upon him. See, again you'd have an enforcement of truth.

Less liability could occur by teaching him a complete falsehood as far as this is concerned. And if we didn't have processing which worked, we wouldn't dare teach Scientology or Dianetics. Because somebody, sooner or later, is going to enforce these truths on somebody. That's going to be aberrative. But in view of the fact that they are processable truths, and in view of the fact that they lead to the central core of understanding which is what traps … of what traps an individual — the central core of these held-down fives — an education in the field of Scientology or Dianetics thereby becomes a freeing agency. You see? Because it's unenforcing these truths. A truth can only become enforced when it becomes unknown as a truth.

So we hide a truth. We lose it. We throw it away. And after that we get an aberrated condition, or an aberrative condition.

Well, we mask and enforce truths, and we get chaos. And as a result, everybody, as he goes down the line, he starts telling his mother and father, "I am a good boy." Yes, he is. And they say, "No, you're a bad boy." He finally forgets he's a good boy. He doesn't necessarily become a bad boy, but he has sure forgotten he's a good boy. And he'll start to enforce himself into good acts. And he'll walk down the street and give away his overcoat, and he'll do all sorts of weird and peculiar things. He's still trying to insist, convince and maintain the fact that he's a good boy. He has never stopped insisting on the truth.

A fellow comes along and goes to a medical doctor. And he says, "I'm alive."

"No, no, heavens." Thump, thump, tap, tap.

I don't know what they do with those thump-thumps and tap-taps. I asked a medical doctor, "Why do you do that — do you jump everything for like that?" And he couldn't tell me.

Anyhow, I taught another one that there are eighteen different kinds of pulse. He never knew this. This was old Chinese. There are eighteen different kinds of pulse. The speed of the pulse is not particularly important. It's the type of the pulse that is important. Anyway, he didn't know this.

Basic piece of Chinese medicine, there, left out. The Western doctor is now adopting acupuncture. He thinks it comes from Germany. It's three thou-sand years old, comes from China.

There are a lot of these truths around that have been around a long time, which have gotten buried and they're dug out again and scrambled up one way or the other. But the point I'm getting to is simply this: The individual insists and insists and insists and insists and insists on the truth, you see. And the more he insists, the more he tries to enforce this truth, the more energy he gets mixed up and the less space he can occupy. And that's the whole story, and there is no other story.

I'll go over this one again. We talk about axioms. Axioms are self-evident truths. They get scrambled, they get buried, they get confused, they get in juxtaposition, they get counteropposed, they get mixed up, they get unpredictable, and they get confused and confused; and all of a sudden they be-come a mystery, so that today you walk out and ask somebody on the street, you say, "What's the origin of life?" They'll say, "That's a mystery." A very few people will tell you, "God originated life." "That's a mystery," they'll say.

Well, you start to take it apart and they'll get confused on you. Let them get confused! They'll have to get confused before they can get up there and predict, won't they?

There is a bridge and we were looking for an actual bridge. Only, that bridge was built more like a labyrinth. Anybody who tried to cross it found himself back on the same side again or found himself down in the bottom of the gorge or found himself ten thousand feet up. It was not a good, straight bridge.

All we've been trying to do is tear out enough of these magic mirrors and walls, you see, to let a little straight passage get across there so that we could go from mystery to prediction. And the two-plateau which we described in the first book could be called mystery — bridge — prediction. And that bridge is confusion.

Now, you could get your preclear through confusion, and he'll get over here into the truth bin, which of course, is simply prediction. He can predict. Truth is prediction.

A bad man — you can predict his actions. He's bad or good with relation-ship to which survival viewpoint he's occupying. But this bad man comes to you, and you say, "Oh, no, he's a good man and I basically will believe in the good in him," and so forth. And then he picks up a gun and he shoots at you. And you have been guilty of unprediction, haven't you? Why? Because you assumed a falsehood. You assumed that there was an actuality in badness and goodness.

That's falsehood. There isn't any actuality. It's a matter of viewpoint of what you're drumming and beating the drum for. And so you assumed this, and then you assumed something else that you had no real license to assume at all: that you were in control of his future actions. And you aren't in control of his future actions, particularly when you are trying to make him self-determined. So you turn this fellow loose and he shoots at you, and you're surprised. Therefore you feel confused. You're wrong, then.

There is no reason for you to feel upset because a bad man or a bad woman acts up in life. There's no reason for you to feel upset or outraged for a minute. Because your upset and outrage as an auditor or as a human being or as a thetan is simply this outrage: "I failed to predict the action which took place." Therefore, running on a code of laws, even the Code of a Scientologist .. . Code of a Scientologist is an enforced code, but it's only there, hoping the guy will get up far enough so he'll see which way this wind blows. The moral codes are only for the ignorant. The Auditor's Code is only there until a fellow can perceive which way he's going. You see, he can get into a position where he could recognize all these factors existed. But it's a piece of experience born out of complexity. He wants to make people well, if that's what he's sitting there for, well, this is a nice little code of how to do it. It's actually .. . If it were considered just a moral code, it would have its frailties. Actually, it's not. It is a code of behavior which leads to a betterment of the preclear.

All right. Anytime, then, that you feel outrage, anytime that you feel disappointed and anytime that you feel disillusioned about life, you can say just this: "I have been going on an incorrect assumption with regard to the part of life about which I am now outraged." What do you get upset for because somebody in government is suddenly grabbed for graft? Well, what's remarkable is that so few are! Now, you don't have to be cynical, you don't have to assign this a particular derogatory value simply to be able to look things in the eye.

There are so many schoolchildren in the United States, and these school-children will get to high-school age, and a certain number of them are going to get venereal disease. That's quite a remarkable fact, isn't it? That sounded non sequitur, even. But it's true. It's true, they will.

There are so many of them are going to give birth to illegitimate children. That's the way it runs. You could predict that fact, couldn't you? Well then, why the devil should you feel outraged about it?

Now, you might want to correct it. And the first step of every correction is to as-is the existing condition. Nobody ever corrected anything who did not perceive the condition first. Am I right or wrong?

And there's where you get alter-isness being an enemy. You don't recognize the condition, and then you try to change it. Well, that's a certain way to go down a dwindling spiral.

What is derogatory or upsetting about alter-isness is when you take an unknownness and then start to alter it. Rrrrrr! The first way to perfect, change or better, or make more workable or put into further motion, any-thing, is to recognize the condition it's in before you start. And if you did that, then you can change things.

And if any talk I have given you demonstrates to you in any way that you shouldn't begin altering things — no, I never said that. You can just alter anything you want to alter. But for heaven's sakes, be able to predict what you're altering first.

Look at what you're trying to alter. So we are going to alter this Black Five into a thetan exterior. This Black Five is sitting there in mystery. The moment you start to pull the mystery apart — you'll see it for yourself, not because I told you — he'll get into a confusion. And he'll fight like mad to get back into that beautiful, comfortable, one-tenth-alive mystery.

See, that mysterious state — that's much more comfortable. He'll just black it all out and say, "Well, I don't have to predict any part of this," you know? "No responsibility." That's what your Black Five is saying: "No responsibility." You start to make him take responsibility and, boy, does he get confused. All the lines are going in all kinds of directions.

You have to run him so that he will come out of it. One of the ways to run him is to run Intensive Procedure. And its design is to make the individual come up with the Axioms of Scientology on his own hook.

And they'll do it. And that's why there are so many steps in Intensive Procedure. After you've run him, you see, just so long, and you've gotten him into a fairly good condition — you've hauled him up along the line — you can run him on another process until you've got your comm lag all flat on this process. And you run him on another one, and another one, till you've got that. He's coming up with the understanding of existence. Of course, that's the ARC of existence.

Actually, he's doing it because you're auditing him. But he overlooks this. He's self-asserted these truths.

Now, you yourself, in being audited, have a sort of a double echo because you've been trained — necessary to train somebody, you know. You'll come up against a sort of a double echo when you run across these things.

At first it won't appear so. You know, you'll say, "Well, I accept this be-cause Ron said so. And he's been fairly right — now and then, occasionally. And Ron said so, and therefore I accept this. And it's very intellectual, and probably restimulative, but very interesting, and so on." And then one day you're auditing a preclear, or something of the sort, and you suddenly trip across it in yourself, see. Pang! Boom! Hey, that's true.

Auditors come in and see me every once in a while, and it's always with a surprised expression on their face. They're beaming. They feel better. Their ARC is up. They've just suddenly discovered on their own hook something that has been around, you'd think, listening to them talk, since the dodo bird.

Well, maybe you only know it intellectually. You just know it analytically. You didn't know it was really stashed there in the body; you just assumed that it was.

Well, this boy rushes in and he says, "Hey, you know, there is something to this ARC!" You look at this guy, amazed. He's only been in Dianetics, you know, for three, four years. Just this morning one rushed in who was a very old hand, and he said to me, "You know, there's something to this duplication. I was running a group, and I made them duplicate me and I duplicated them, and all of a sudden I . . . Me! Imagine this! All of a sudden I understood what this duplication is all about, and this communication, and the whole works!" (He's only been studying this for about three years.) See, he all of a sudden discovered this for himself, brand-new, and it became his. All right. You'll have a similar experience. But you are less confused by knowing it intellectually.

Now there's this: Axioms are self-evident truths, but they are also the held-down fives. An ultimate truth has no mass, meaning, mobility; has no wavelength, no position in time or space — theta.

But it has the quality of doing something. See, it's not nothing. It's nothing in terms of mechanics. But it has a quality of doing something.

All right. It has this quality of doing something. Then, of course, it can get itself into all kinds of trouble, particularly by asserting that it can survive. What, in the name of God, else can it do? It can't do anything else. It could forget, and then pretend, by having forgotten, that it had stopped surviving. Because he doesn't remember his last life, of course he didn't live one.

People get very upset when you tell them about a past life. You can show it to them on an E-Meter. You can show them the facsimiles and they'll still be very upset.

Why? They have gone on a reverse. They're trying to insist that they can succumb by forgetting. Their method of succumbing is by forgetting. As close as a thetan ever gets to death is forgetfulness. That's as close as he ever comes to death. He never comes any closer, and he has to mock that up and keep it real suppressed to keep it in action. These self-evident truths come up and start hitting him in the face and stop being enforced; they cease to be hidden. And the next thing you know, he comes up through a terrific confusion — "What the devil am I doing here?" Did you ever see somebody wake up right after an automobile accident and say, "Where am I? What am I doing here?" Well, he was sure in the deep mystery of a coma, wasn't he? And he's sure in a confusion as to location now. And after he looks around, and the lamppost tells him where he is, and the doctor does, and a few other things do, why, he feels better. He knows where he is. We don't know where that is. Just because a lamppost says so or a doctor says so is no reason he's there. But he accepts this as a reason to be there.

The only death is forgetfulness. But what would be the greatest death of all? It would be the forgetfulness of a prime truth, wouldn't it? That would be the greatest death of all. That's for a thetan. You can take a body out here, a combination of lives and dependencies, and shoot it; and of course you can say with great truth, "It's dead." Of course, it flies off and makes another body someplace else. But that's with great truth you can say it's dead. But it's only the form which dies. Even in a body, even in a universe, it would be only the form which died.

The anatomy of confusion itself is simply the derangement of form. A form is a predictable thing. Your eye, as it goes around, predicts the spectrum of color. It predicts the orderliness. It sees an accustomed pattern. It says, "Ah! I know what that is." In other words, "I am predicting it. It's going to keep on lying there in that form. It has nice form. It's very smooth. It's well organized. It has shape." Disarrange one ribbon; you're not particularly worried. Disarrange six, and then finally get it up to the point where the cars zzz, boom, crash, and a fellow about that time says, "You know, I just better abandon that form entirely." In other words, "I will forget about it. I will pretend that I don't know about it." Why does he pretend he doesn't know about it? He pretends he doesn't know about it because it's too confusing for him to look at.

Well, get this. A fellow is a storekeeper. Has a nice wife. He has a lot of friends in the neighborhood. He plays the church organ. He has a lot of fun. Goes out with the boys Saturday night and gets saved every Sunday. He's in his environment there. Certain places he's very familiar with. He likes to go fishing. He's living okay. And all of a sudden he gets smallpox or something and pam! Boy, things are real confused, aren't they? He's sick. He dies. He leaves all this. He gets disinterested in it.

Why? It's too confusing. He might stay around for a little while and try to tap his wife on the shoulder and say, "Bertha. Hey! Johnny is about to fall in the well." But because he isn't on the ball and he doesn't know what he's doing, why, he can't even do anything about that so he gets into a complete confusion. I mean, the dickens with it. So the best thing to do is forget about it.

And the next thing you know, why, there he is, up the track someplace else. He's living maybe in another country. His name is Jacques. He's a dandy. He is a real devil with the ladies. He hates church, he's very antipathetic toward horse racing, but he sure does love poker. And he is well given to a life of smuggling. He's not a pillar of the community. And all of a sudden he gets shot by the revenuers or something of the sort, and pant! all that MEST gone, everything in a confusion, and so on. He didn't predict getting shot, is one of the main things. They never predict dying, the dopes.

And the next thing you know, why, he's a little girl in Kansas, saying, "Mama, can I have a cookie?" Naturally, it'd be very confusing. It would have been basically very con-fusing for the fellow who played the church organ or ran the corner store and had a lot of cronies and was kind of nice to people, and his real down-to-earth go-to-hellishness was a couple of glasses of corn liquor on Saturday night — and a little blasphemy, maybe, quietly behind his hand — all of a sudden to find himself a smuggler. Now he's a little girl in Kansas. That is so confusing for one identity that they just wipe it out, and they say, "I've forgotten all about this." Now, if — this confusion has mounted up and become very powerful — you come along (you dog), and you say, "You've lived before, brother," you've just told him what? "Be confused." You've said, "Go on, be good and confused. Just get all completely all mocked up. The little girl in Kansas is the smuggler, is the church organ player." Dzzzz! And yet he'd have to face that confusion before he would ever dare take whole memory on the track. And so would he have to face the confusion if he was going to predict his future, wouldn't he?

As you try to ask people to accept the Axioms of Dianetics and Scientology, you will find that they are staring straight into the teeth of confusion. Because you're telling them, "Look, Jacques is the organ player who asked for cookies in Kansas." Because it's too hidden. It's mystery. It's mystery because it became confusion. It became confusion because it wasn't predicted.

Nobody said out of this, "Out of these innocent little agreements which we are making, nobody is ever going to get hurt." They didn't predict a thing, did they? Hm? So naturally, you try to pull them up out of it — confusion.

Don't try to teach people Scientology. Process them. As far as the Axioms are concerned, you sure better recognize what they are! They're the held-down fives, which themselves compose the track which is Dianetics and Scientology.

Okay.