You are not spectators of, as are so many, but you are students of the human mind, not students of a process regarding the human mind. You aren't studying opinions about the mind. You are studying the mind. You are studying above that echelon really, but you are studying the mind.

Now, when we study the human mind, we're studying essentially a vessel of knowledge, a formulator of knowledge.

But when we study the mind and its ills and upsets and so forth, we can with accuracy call this Dianetics. Dianetics is a Greek word meaning "through mind." But why are we studying the mind? The mind is being studied simply because it is a vessel of knowledge and for no other reason. We wouldn't care if our best subject was the mind of a mouse, a rat — we would be studying that if it was the best example of knowledge, of a vessel containing knowledge or a computer of knowledge. We'd be studying that.

We wouldn't care what we'd study. If it were a teapot — if it were the best available vessel which could contain and compute knowledge, we'd be studying that.

But Dianetics is the application of what we know to healing or curing or straightening up, de-aberrating the mind. Now, the word aberration means "crooked lines." And no word was ever more aptly chosen, since we find that the human mind becomes aberrated because the flow — the electronic flow lines from the thetan, as they cover the body itself and regulate the body itself — operate well only when they travel in straight lines, unimpeded by ridges. And so we're studying aberration, which means the crookedness or bends or enturbulent spots or confusions or crosses of the flow lines emanating from the thetan in monitoring the body or his environment.

Now we want those lines to be straight and unimpeded, and when we de-aberrate somebody, it's just exactly as though we did take all those flow lines and make sure that all the flow lines were flowing straight. And any time they flow crookedly or hit something and bounce off consistently, they are aberrated. That is to say, they are changed in direction. And that's the basic meaning of that word aberrated.

Now, our process in Dianetics is to make the flow straight, to de-aberrate, to straighten the flow. That's exactly what it means and there isn't anything more complicated to it than that. It's not esoteric, it isn't mumbo jumbo, it isn't anything at all; it means just that. It means that your thetan must have an unimpeded flow — flow in straight lines, not lines with spirals on them, not lines with rolly coaster loop-the-loops on them. They've just got to be straight, that's all.

And wherever one of these lines is crooked, you will find several things. You'll find a ridge, you'll find a somatic, you will find a cross of other lines. You will find a person, by decision alone, bending or impeding a line. And the process is simply taking out impedances. Your process is really not an improvement of a thetan. It is taking out all the ways he got improved — (quote) "improved" — all the way down the track. Now that is what we're doing, and that's Dianetics.

Now in the field of Scientology we are studying knowledge — pure knowledge. We're trying to get to the highest possible level of knowledge itself and we don't care whether that knowledge is contained in teacups or tin cans. We don't care whether it's contained in thetans. We don't care whether it's ever contained in anything or not. We're just studying knowledge.

What's knowledge? There have been a lot of opinions on what knowledge is.

Now, actually Scientology is an easy way of saying "epistemology." Nobody would ever face up to that word epistemology, and yet it's a very wonderful word which has been cracking the brains of scholars since time immemorial. Epistemology. It's spelled e-p-i-s-t-e-m-o-l-o-g-y and it is a proper and definite part of the whole field of philosophy.

But philosophy also says it has another field; it has several other fields. It has ontology, it has ethics, just as though these had some difference. All of a sudden we found out that it should have only had one part in the first place and that's epistemology because ethics comes under the field of knowledge. If a person has a high enough level of knowledge, he has ethics. If he doesn't have a high enough level of knowledge, he doesn't have ethics, he has to have morals. Morals are opposed to ethics. In the dictionary, you find it says, "morals: ethics." Then you go over and look at ethics and it says, "ethics: morals."

We have gotten down the Tone Scale on the subject of conduct, if you please, until nobody is differentiating between morals and ethics. Oh, this is fabulous. George Bernard Shaw in all of his life never really made a more scathing, vitriolic comment upon man than that contained in the dictionary that says ethics are morals and morals are ethics. That tells you you are dealing with an essentially — a debased being. He has drifted way south from the time when he was a Greek, because the Greek knew there was a difference. And whenever you get an identification of A=A=A=A, watch out because you have insanity.

Differentiation is the essence of sanity. Identification is the essence of insanity. He "rowed" a horse, r-o-w-e-d, would mean propelling a horse with a pair of oars. And he "rode" a horse, r-o-d-e, would mean getting up on top of a horse and going off someplace.

To an insane person there is no difference. Somebody says he rode a horse and this person will sit there for a moment and he'll get this foggy notion of a fellow sitting in the saddle with a pair of oars. Everything equals everything. It's like a complete short circuit all the way through the thetan. No straight lines are traveling in any direction, it's just a mass of interchangeable energy which interchanges without any differentiation.

Sanity depends on the ability to differentiate. So when we see, once upon a time, that philosophy was divided into ethics, into ontology (which is essentially a study of matter) and it was a study of epistemology (it was essentially those parts — there are some more parts to it), we see that once upon a time somebody knew there was a difference between morals and ethics.

But we see there's evidently an essential error. None of this material was ever subject to proof. And in Scientology you are actually knocking against a door that broke in the knuckles of Kant, Hume, Locke, Nietzsche, old Zeno with his apatheia, Lucretius, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. Their bowed and bloody heads at life's end was their contest with the problem which you are facing with such an easy, cheerful mien.

The study of knowledge. Look how wild these fellows were once. Socrates, Aristotle — particularly Aristotle with his syllogism: A equals B and C equals D, therefore A equals D. Get that "equals." He said this was logic. But that's insanity. And by the way, you can prove anything with it. Anything. The syllogism is a most wonderful mechanism.

Now they take geometry in school and they teach the little kids — they say, "Now, we're going to teach you how to think." Hah! In the latest geometry textbooks, do you know it says that? "This is essentially what logic is: logic is geometry." And you get two or three of the brighter boys who are in that class, and the kids don't dare tell the professor but they'll tell you, they say, "I don't think that way. I can't make myself think that way. I must be in terrible shape." No, they're sane.

A equals B, C equals D. Now, if A equaled D, then B would equal C. Oh, no. No, no, no. You could say — in the first place, what are you dealing with? You're dealing with A and B and C and D. Therefore you're dealing with abstract symbols. And you can say anytime you want to, "Symbol A equals symbol B" and look very bright and happy about it, and say, "That's it, symbol A equals symbol B and they're equal." Nobody can contest that. That's true. It's only true by definition. You said so — that's the only reason it's true. You've just declared your terms.

You say, "Hereinafter from this point on, I am going to consider that A equals B." They wouldn't dare challenge that, because by definition that's what you're proceeding from. But they could say this — they could say, "Well, A what? What's A?" and then challenge you. But they have to go before the fact. Definition. That is thinking by definition and that is the root and basis of all mathematics today and it is wrong. And isn't it wonderful that man has gotten as far as he has gotten? Isn't it just wonderful he's gotten as far as he's gotten in the field of mathematics going on a basic error?

A mathematician, when he first hears about this, will practically blow — try to blow your brains out and then wind up blowing his own out. He gets in dreadful shape because you tell him, "Look, we are dealing in the field — when you say that, that's theoretical. You're dealing in the field of the abstract. You mean that there's a theoretical A which is equal to a theoretical B."

He'll say, "That's true."

"Well, then why in the name of common sense don't you also add the other evident truth, that A will continue to be theoretical from now on to the end of time and is only a vague approximation of the real universe?"

He'll say, "Well, that isn't true. Mathematics is always true, it's always been true."

And you'll say, "Man invented it."

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

… but be that as it may, when you say, "What's A?"

And the fellow says, "Well," happily, he says, "it's an apple."

And you say, "Okay. What's B? A equals B. Therefore B must be another apple."

And he says, "That's right," proudly, "apple equals apple, doesn't it?"

You say, "Just a min, you mean the word apple equals the word apple?"

"Well, if you want to put it that way."

You say, "Wait a minute. The word apple is just a symbol again, and is a theoretical abstract and has nothing to do with apples, except it's a symbol." And he'll say, "Yes, that's true. That's true."

Now, you say, "Then apple equals apple. Now, give me two apples which are equal to each other."

"Why, it's easy. Here's two . . ." Now you've got him on infirm ground.

Do you know that as long as the universe is old there has never been one apple equal to another apple. No two apples have ever been equal. Equal means exactly the same, and there'll be some difference in the billions and billions of cells which go to make up an apple. There'll be some difference between those two apples, just in number of cells.

But there's another much more definite difference between the two, and that is: one occupies one space and time, and the other occupies another space and time. And even if you said this apple is equal to itself, you'd have to say when, so it would require another definition.

A equals B if A and B are the same object and if they both occur in "now." And on this crazy thing we're going to erect a mathematics? Oh, no.

You do all you want with mathematics. But you will find out that it's a vague similarity — is considered to be, for practical purposes and application and never because it's true — similar to a vague similarity. And these two vague similarities are similar to each other for working and practical purposes in solving some of the simpler — only the simpler problems in the material universe. Now, isn't that a — that's a — really a qualified definition, isn't it?

And that definition appears and applies to arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, analytics, calculus, differential calculus. It applies to differentials. It applies to the theory of equations and it applies to quantum mechanics. And there isn't any more mathematics, really. There's symbolic logic. That's a great one, that is. They try to make up a mathematics which will approximate in terms of symbols what goes on in the human mind. That's great. One fellow says, "I think I will open the door." Now, to put this down in symbolic logic — well, there's about 9 pages and about 150 symbols. Oh, it's just wonderful. You try to approximate in terms of symbol what's going on in the real universe, it only has one value and that is one of the ways the mind thinks, but only one of the ways the mind thinks, and that's by approximation.

A mind thinks by pervasion — that is going into things and getting their beingness — or by approximation; it just mocks them up. There's another way the mind thinks. We won't worry about that right now.

It can actually pervade everything and see how it squares around, or it can simply just do a mock-up over here and say, "this mock-up is similar to the real thing and it's close enough in its similarity. Therefore I'll find out what's true in the mock-up and then just say, for the devil of it, that it's true in the — what we're drawing it similar to."

And when you're doing that, by the way, you're more accurate. There's a greater accuracy.

Now, absolutes are unobtainable, so I can say, "more accurate." I can say, "righter, wronger." This immediately proceeds, you see. If you can't say A equals B with truth, then you can't say, "It is right" and "It is wrong." You've got Aristotelian logic — and boy, the world has fallen on its face and man is in horrible shape today because really the only logic he had for a long time was Aristotelian logic.

And Aristotelian logic goes this way: A equals B, C equals D. Now, if B equals C, then A equals D. And that's told you this: The morals of the case are right and wrong. There's no gradient scale of rightness. There's no gradient scale of wrongness. And that immediately told you that there couldn't be any ethics. So the day that Aristotle introduced his beautiful syllogism, he kissed goodbye to the world of ethics, which are rightness adjusted by judgment and reason. Rightnesses adjusted by judgment and reason. Now, that happens to be ethics. And that rightness is always relative and it is never arbitrary. In order to have a man ethical, you have to have a man capable of reason and judgment. He has to be able to evaluate data and draw conclusions from the data in order to have society.

But if you have a society which is a moral society, it only needs this: it's right or it's wrong. Things can't be wronger than wrong or less wrong than wrong or righter than right or less right than right. No, no. No. You have right and wrong and therefore people have to run, then, on a code of morals.

So you can't get any decent conduct and you can't have anything but a force society as long as A equals B, C equals D and if B equals C, A equals D. That's all you could have is a force society: a society that needed a police force to enforce its morals. That was the function of the church. That has been 99 percent of the function of the state — enforcing a moral code, whether they call that moral code the code of common law, the Code Napoleon, the Ten Commandments. I don't care what they call this code, it was an arbitrary. It said, "Thou shalt not, thou shalt not and thou shalt and thou shalt and thou shalt and thou shalt."

There's nothing wrong with having a code like this. We're not talking about rightness and wrongness. All we're talking about is the relative workability of it. Whenever you introduce an arbitrary into a society, into anything — when you introduce a solid arbitrary into an equation, you're going to have failure.

There's the field of Scientology.

Once upon a time the Great Chinaman of Konigsberg said: "Man will never know truth since truth is beyond the realm of human understanding and anything worth knowing is beyond the realm of human understanding and therefore this great truth which I seem mysteriously to know enough about to tell you about is actually beyond the realm of human understanding so therefore I am understanding beyond the realm of understanding and I am not human but you are and you'd better listen to me and therefore we have an arbitrary which we're introducing in the year 1792 called Kantian reason. And this is now going to dog the whole field of philosophy until 1950, when somebody is going to machine-gun it."

And sure enough, when he introduced that arbitrary and when society actually paid some attention to the introduction of that arbitrary, we got static philosophy. We got no thought. Today you wouldn't run up to anybody who had studied philosophy in a university and ask him to do some philosophizing. No, you would go to him to find out what philosophers had said.

So the whole field of philosophy became, in training, not making philosophers, but making people who knew what philosophers had philosophized about, which immediately was saying, "All that has been thought of is all that can be thought of." It's saying, "The only thing left in the field of philosophy is just to study what the philosophers have philosophized about. That's all that's left and therefore we'll make a Doctor of Philosophy by the simple expedient of making him know what all the philo."

You'd think, offhand, that a good society would train people to philosophize, to figure things out. You'd think that a society couldn't get along without that. Well, they can't. What do you know? They can't. They have wars and famines and disasters and rebellions and everything else because there's nobody around thinking anything out. Everything's just kind of growing in a — or decaying, and nobody can change it because A equals B and thou shalt not and thou shalt. We have a society of statics which are pretending to be kinetics, and so the society doesn't go very far — doesn't go anyplace.

Now, on this level you could get enormous advances in the physical science and you couldn't get a single advance in the field of the humanities. So all of a sudden in 1945, we woke up to the fact that we had an atom bomb, kaboom! and we didn't have anything in the humanities.

Now, this is a very interesting point. This means that we had no trouble controlling an atom bomb. Do you know there is no trouble at all controlling atomic energy? No trouble at all! When you push a button it goes off. When you don't push the button it doesn't go off. That's all there is to controlling atomic … And you lead shield the places the stuff is stored and you do this and you do that and it's all under control. Nobody's worried about these atomic stockpiles anywhere in the world — because it's under control.

The problem is not the control of atomic energy. The problem is quite something else. It's the control of the person who is controlling the atomic energy. And that problem isn't even vaguely solved. So if you were going to have atomic energy, somebody should have gotten up right away and said, "Hey, wait a minute. How we going to control the control of atomic energy?" Not how are we going to control atoms, but how are we going to control the beings who have these atoms in their grasp?

Because without ethics they can't be controlled. Without ethics they can't be controlled. You cannot control that broadly in the field of morals.

A moral will not work that well, because a fellow can always say, "Let's see. There's a moral that says thou shalt not kill. Hah-hah. There are people in the world who are liable to kill. Therefore it is up to me to enforce this fact, 'Thou shalt not kill.' Now, the best way to do this is for me to have some atomic bombs . . ." You see, the whole thing's defeated itself instantly.

The fact that the moral code is there means it has to be enforced. And when anything has to be enforced it requires weapons. The only thing which can control the atomic bomb is an ethic. Is it reasonable to bump off the better part of the human race? No. That's that! I mean, we have controlled the atomic bomb the second we've driven that through.

But how do we bring man up to a recognition of this reason after his many, many centuries of having been bogged down utterly — entirely different thing. Morals — A equals B. He's been taught, "Thou shalt not reason." It's right and it's wrong. It's white, it's black. These are absolutes, and so they will.

So you see, you're actually studying the field of human knowledge, but way up above that you're studying knowledge. What's knowledge? What is knowledge? And we have answers. What is knowledge? See, good workable answers. They can do the strangest things. They can make people . . . You know that strata, you can make people well — if the truth be told, you could make them quite ill. You can make them happy. You can make them very sad. You can do most anything you wanted to with a human being, really. But because people come up the line in ethics when they study this, it's quite safe to release this information, particularly if there's a central core of people who know the whole subject well. That's your safeguard.

If this were merely published and published and published and published and no one was ever trained in it, it would be a very dangerous thing — nobody was ever trained.

It is upon the handful, actually — the very, very few who are being trained in this — that the burden of the application rests. They become, willy-nilly, "authorities."

Now, knowledge is knowledge. And if you will look at this knowledge in two sections, you'll get along better with it. One is this knowledge plus my own beingness and slant on existence. There's that one. You see, that's one subject, really: My own beingness and slant on existence interpreting this knowledge. And then there's the knowledge itself. And don't let the first one I mentioned blind you to the fact that there may be a lot more in the second one.

There's the knowledge itself. And if anything was clean and pure and applicable in its raw state, Scientology is, just as Dianetics is.

I can only caution you against applying this badly. I can only let my imagination show you some of the things which might occur if some of the basic elements were not watched carefully. But I can't blind you to the fact, and have no intentions to do so, that it exists as a body of knowledge. It's sort of like — I dug it up and there it is; and your own conscience, your own beingness, is really your only guide to your use and application of it. It exists as it is. And then it exists also as I interpret it.

Now when I slant it, you will find my slants form up just like this — just these slants to it. One, play it on the good side. Use it reasonably to get man over the humps. Use it to straighten out the dynamics. Try not to aggrandize yourself because you know it. Try not to profit widely by it and be very humble about giving it to people.

Now, I can say all those things. Actually not one of them is necessary to the good application of this information. Not one of them. A man could probably ride through to the finest and highest degrees and office and state and so forth by being as rough, as crude, as mean, as selfish in the application of this knowledge as anybody could imagine and he possibly might get away with it. You might take this information and enslave all of mankind and bring him up to a higher state of existence simply by enslaving him. You might do an awful lot of things with this knowledge, but that's your opinion.

So I'm telling you where opinion stops and truth starts. The knowledge itself is truth. As I talk to you about it and as I try to teach you about it, you will find that it is slanted in the direction which I have mentioned it to you.

This, by the way, is incomprehensible to a great many people out in the public. And they figure that if I slant this information in this direction I must have personally some terribly overt motive and there must be something awfully wrong with me — because they know what they'd do with it. Heh-heh. So there must be something wrong with me and I probably have a great many secret vices or something. I mean, there must be something awfully wrong. It's obvious that there is, because "If you knew how a man's mind worked," such a person would say, "if you could make him do exactly what you wanted him to do, if you could control him to that degree, you would, of course." A equals A. "If you could do this, you would. And that would be the best thing to do because you could."

However, if you tried to control mankind this way, you would wind up owning mankind, you poor, poor proprietor. You would wind up owning mankind, and I can think of no more dreadful fate or any redder or hotter hell than that one. You would wind up with the management of man in your lap if you started to apply this in the direction of acquisition and control. And you would seal the door against any happiness you would ever know, just as solidly and with the biggest spikes that you could imagine.

Of course, this is only my opinion. But I know, to this degree. If I were talking to you as some fellow who had never commanded anything, who had never owned anything, that would be different. If I were just a little fellow — a little philosopher that kind of thought along and had stayed in an ivory tower and done it all theoretically — no, no. I'm not. I'm an engineer. I've commanded a great many things, a great many men have been under my command. I know the ins and outs of commands and the first in and out I know of command is, if you crave it, leave it alone. It's like a horrible drug.

Well, continuing this matter of the application and division of this knowledge. In applying any information, it depends a great deal on your own self-determinism. And your knowledge of the subject itself is best oriented by your demand of the subject. What are you going to use it for? For what is this subject going to be used by you?

Now, I talk to you about command. I've commanded corvettes, I've commanded expeditions. And anybody who is foolish enough to want an exalted position above his fellow man is perfectly welcome to it. There is nothing wrong with it. As a matter of fact, it's a big kick. In this lifetime, I've practically occupied nothing else but posts of command. They require a strength of beingness the like of which you don't find in most people. They break you. They demand of you things that you ordinarily would never dream of having anything to do with at all. Fantastic. And when a person gets into a post of command because he craves it, there is nothing there but disaster for the command and disaster for himself.

Nothing ever must be approached with more humbleness than a post of command. And command is essentially control. Therefore, the desire to control one's fellow beings means the desire to command one's fellow beings. And raw experience itself will teach you the lessons with regard to this. Experience itself. I can sit here and play wise old graybeard to you, which I am not, and say, "Well, having done all these things and so forth, I can say that it isn't worthwhile." Maybe to you it is worthwhile. Maybe to you it is.

So, get your orientation points. You want to help your fellow man. I can tell you on that side of the ledger, there is nothing more thankless. You can actually, actually prepare yourself; if you're going to do nothing but help people, to do it for your own sake, because of your own desire for a feeling of well-being and job well done inside yourself — because Homo sapiens is never going to say to you, "Well done." He's never even going to say thank you.

You can take the person who has the most hideous affliction and cure him most miraculously and utterly and he'll be very, very grateful to you for a very short space of time until it suddenly occurs to him, "Good heavens, if this person cured me, that makes him senior to me." And he will try in every way he can to remedy this situation. You will have preclears that you have done your best for and you have failed on. And you will spend many a racked hour thinking about what you might have done because you know you could have done better. And you will have preclears that you would rather not work with, who will go all around your neighborhood or all around your area telling people what a dog you are, what a dog you are, what a dog you are.

Why? What will stop him from doing this? He'll say, "Dianetics is no good and this thing Scientology, that's just a chimera," and so on. "And that auditor particularly . . . I've heard it said that there are little boys, actually — that this auditor, you know, has connection — and horrible, and I understand that the real reason why that one went crazy and so forth is because this …" And you'll say, "How in the name of God can you stop this person?" This person only wants one thing: processing from you. Now, isn't that wonderful, that he would go to this degree to get processing from you? He will damn you in every character. You're really dealing with a loop when you're dealing with Homo sapiens.

Now, actually you can use this information to bail yourself out of the MEST universe. You could become the best Homo sapiens anybody ever heard of. Or you could become Homo novis with it. Or you could even go further than that and bail yourself out and make a universe of your own. So you see, you- have a variety of choices. I don't think anybody's ever offered this many choices before. You have a variety.

So you want to make up your mind what you're trying to do here. Now, you could even study this on — "Well, I'll do anything that turns up. And anything that seems logical to me after I have this information, I'll reserve judgment because after I've been processed for a while I will know more." Oh boy, is that true. That's true. That's true. But that shouldn't keep you or halt you at any time; any thought like that should never halt you or halt a preclear from making a decision. Never, never give way to this one: "Well, I'll be saner tomorrow or I'll be better able to judge tomorrow and therefore I'll judge tomorrow."

Nu-huh. Judge today. Figure it out today, right now. Always go on the basis, "Well, I'm always sane, my judgment is never wrong, I can't be wrong anyhow, I am always right." Because who knows — who knows, you might be righter than you know.

Now, just because you figure it out differently tomorrow is no reason you can't change it, you know. And just because you said today, "This is final to the end of time," is no reason why something else can't be final to the end of time tomorrow that's totally contradictory to it. Because unless you are capable of changing widely, varying widely, shifting your goals, shifting your targets and so forth, you aren't pliable. And you'll continue to be aberrated.

So don't worry about this. And furthermore, the pressure of life and death to you will shortly be a pressure no more. Therefore, the penalty for guessing wrong drops to practically nothing. You're in the horrible position of walking outside the field of penalty. Because you die as Homo sapiens, it works out, is no reason why you are going to die. If you died as Homo sapiens and never knowing that you were anything but Homo sapiens — yes, there is a chance that you would fly off to wherever the dead and departed go and come back fifteen minutes later. You'd be somebody else.

But you could walk off from your body and be yourself and rehabilitate yourself. And actually, in the first fifteen minutes of play when you step out of your body, you know you're outside, you .know you're you and you know you're detached from it. And you know you're not it. That piece of knowledge takes place awfully fast when it takes place. Oh, does it take place fast. And you all of a sudden say, "Well, for heaven's sakes." The moment you say that, you're immortal.

And get the big joke: You're more immortal than any Greek god because those poor guys fooled around with MEST bodies and idols in temples in the form of human beings — they liked those idols — until they did a dive. They did a transfer, and you will find Athena and Loki somewhere in the line today. You will also find some other actual beings — they were actual once, they were thetans and so forth — and one of them is Lucifer. You'll find Lucifer somewhere in the line. The joke is that there were several Lucifers.

I would hate to tell you who else you'll find in the line. I would just hate to tell you who else you'll find in the line. But one of these days you're going to put somebody on an E-Meter — you're going to put a lot of somebodies on the E-Meter, and because they've done so many overt acts against some of these characters, they're going to be these characters.

You're going to put somebody on the meter and find out that they were a very high and exalted personage right here on Earth once upon a time. There are two sides to that picture — they were either part and parcel of the people who killed that exalted personage and then did a life continuum, or they were the person. And the first one is the more likely. You'll find lots of Cleopatras, for instance. Boy, did she have enemies.

They say there were three hundred reincarnations to Buddha — the bodhisatta. You read the Jataka. The Jataka is very revealing — a book not very well known in the United States, if known at all. And I don't know whether it's well known here but it should be much better known here. The Jataka, J-a-t-a-k-a, the three hundred reincarnations of the bodhisatta. And they claim he (to be British colloquial) did a bunk and left this area afterwards. Or did they claim it? Or did he? Or someday on an E-Meter as you process somebody, are you going to find Buddha who fooled around one time too many and did a transfer? And my guess is that that is going to be the case.

My guess is that for this reason, the guy was unwilling to use force of any kind and got into the line that he got into by being unwilling to use force. And if he was that unwilling to use force he wound up on the wrong side of the ledger somewhere. Because every one of your great teachers along the line, early in his life was a dog! Oh, boy! Were they terrible! When Christ was about ten they had an awful time with him, according to the legends that kick around in that area today. That's the truth. His parents sort of had to move out of the neighborhood every once in a while because he was too rough. Here he was, a super-high-powered thetan that didn't quite know the limits of his strength, and all of a sudden woke up one day and found out that he came from what we call the northwest. All right . . . that's colloquial — that's just a part of the universe.

And he became a great teacher. And he did miraculous and wonderful things. And when he died, he detached, and knew it, and went around and saw some of his disciples and said, "Well, goodbye boys."

Now, I'd hate to tramp on anybody's religious toes. You understand that I'm not doing so. There is no reason why we shouldn't say, "Boy, that was really something, and he was a great man, and he gave man a guiding light for an awful long time. Yes sir, he did a job. He did a good job." No doubt about it.

Buddha did a good job. Buddha brought civilization to areas of this Earth that never would have been civilized otherwise, just never. So did the Greek gods do a good job. All these people did a good job. But just look at the first chapters of the New Testament, the way it has been — was either originally taught or the way it has been rewritten. And you know the Bible gets rewritten about every sixty or seventy years. That's the truth of the matter. You can go down here and find some original translations. They do not agree with the later translations. It's very interesting that the Bible shifts around the way it does, particularly the New Testament.

Now, it's very peculiar that they should have the Old Testament and the New Testament in the same covers, because Christ was, if anything, a revolutionary. He was telling people, "Was man made for the sabbath or was the sabbath made for man?" and so forth. The poor guy's revolution is sitting there in a continuation of the Old Testament in the Bibles which you buy down here at the bookstall.

It's something like printing Karl Marx right up next door, or something like that, to the great proponent of all conservatism. Let's print Confucius and Karl Marx in the same volume and then say, "Well, this is a book." You can't imagine that, can you? Well, look at the New and Old Testaments together there. "I am a god of wrath." The second part of it says, "Our Father is a god of love." Oh great. I mean, there's not much difference.

Actually, the Yahweh — you see, that's Jehovah, Yahweh. You can pronounce it any way you want to because the mystery of the case left out all the vowels — it's just a collection of consonants and then only the high priest would know how to pronounce the consonant, therefore his name could never be used in vain.

Now, unless you go widely out into the realm of study in this, unless you study it from all of its different sides, unless you take it from some of its original source which is India here on Earth, and see where these lines lead in, it becomes a very puzzling picture.

But let's look at that old book itself, and look at that very interesting book. It's a fascinating book. Do you know that the Book of Job is probably the oldest written manuscript known to man and comes straight from India. It's an old, old book and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Yahweh. It just happens to be included in there. You see, nobody quite got organized on this whole thing. They just kept throwing these things together and you'll find Yahweh as a specialized case and then you find Christ following right after, teaching a god of love. Fascinating. That book is very confused.

Now, I'm going to ask you bluntly to reexamine some of your possible conclusions along this line: not because God is good, bad, not because one should be an atheist, not because one should be holy, not because one should be anything. But let's take a look at it because the truth of the matter is that what you know of God, you know very intimately. Because that's you. The life that beats in you and thinks in you and is in you connects up directly and is a part and parcel of an infinity which we could classify as the Supreme Being.

Yeah, you've got a direct inside line on this. And you will find that when you say, "God is different than . . ." and "I have no connection than …" and "I depend on the approval of a mysterious thing of which there might or might not be affinity, might or might not be a communication and might or might not be a reality," you have a wonderful confusion there. That's gorgeous, because that's aberration itself. Does he love you or doesn't he? Can you communicate with him or can't you? Does he exist or doesn't he?

Well, there's something to it if many billion men in the past two thousand years — there's something to what I say about confusion, if you examine the fact that billions of men in the past two thousand years have been killed in his name, murdered, raped, burned. Wonderful. There is no more savageness has ever existed on the face of the earth than has existed in the name of the Prince of Peace. So something is wrong.

In World War I our troops kept walking across to the German lines after battles and there lay the German corpses and what did they have on their belt buckles? "Gott mit uns." And the German troops would look at our slain and they would see the crosses around the neck, the amulets and so forth. There was something wrong. And World War I broke the grip of religion upon the world because it took millions of men and it showed them that they were fighting millions of men of God. Wonderful. They couldn't have planned it better if they desired to break the back of organized religion on Earth.

And do you know that the calmness which had existed before in societies — there were things that could be done. One of the primary powers of the state, one of the ways of getting civilization on the road was religion. And it lost its grip in 1914-1918. And the world lost one of its primary civilization controls.

And what had to happen? Something had to happen. This one was pretty well gone. The church was no longer attended. It had ceased to be the tremendous power that it once was. It was in disorderly state as never before. People still went to church. They still dropped this. But back on the battlefields were belt buckles with "Gott mit uns" on them. The most savage denunciations were written, the most puzzled pleas appeared in papers to get some way out of this strange misunderstanding. Christ is on our side. Christ is on our side. No, it's on our side. No, we're fighting for Christ. Somebody, after the war, began to realize nobody was fighting for Christ, but somebody had sold a bill of goods and with an educated world — now the world was getting educated.

One of the primary factors of civilization which had given it its aesthetic, disappeared out of our civilized life almost wholly compared to where it had been. It's pretty hard for anyone here to remember back before 1914 directly in this life. But a man could be comfortable about religion in 1900, a man could be. And he could be comfortable about religion in 1850. And the world was kind of divided up two ways — there were good women and there were bad women. And there were holy people and there were unholy people. And there were pagans and infidels and Christians. And it was all — oh, it was beautifully — I mean everything was all categorized and understood and people had agreed upon this and one of the primary parts of the agreement structure of civilization disappeared. Something, some new understanding had to take place.

And so we found Hindu philosophies coming into the Western world. It was wonderful that anybody would buy Hindu philosophy. Nobody in the Western world certainly, please not that.

I was a young, vital kid up against Hindu philosophy once. Mysticism, Krishna, nirvana, so forth. And I used to look at this sort of thing and I would say, "You know, there's just got to be something there. There just must be something there. But when I look at what it's done to this people, I don't want it."

And I found out in the temples of the Western Hills of China, in the foothills leading up to Tibet and in :India, a condemnation of mysticism that existed in the form of want, unhappiness, disease, lack of initiative, lack of aesthetic, which itself condemned the whole philosophy. And I developed a little maxim that said, "The more a society is addicted to superstition, the worse it will prosper. The better a society has knowingness about the factors of its operation, the more orderly and prosperous and happy that society will be."

Therefore, to rise high, a society must go toward knowingness, not toward superstition. And I've been going in that direction ever since.

Now, we can talk about this being science. Well, it's not like any science anybody's thought of before. In the first place, it is in one chunk, it is well ordered and it's graded, and it's evaluated and it didn't keep dropping into place from here and there and here and there and changing. Now, that's an interesting thing about it because .science essentially stems from deductive reasoning. You take a mass of data and then you take some of the data and evaluate it and you get a fact or a law.

Almost the entire strata of what we're studying here is inductive reasoning. You say, "This must be fairly high as a common denominator, now let's see if we can find something in the material universe to support it. Now, let's examine thoroughly to find out if there are any exceptions in the material universe. Oh, there are not? Fine. We'll leave it at that." In other words, this thing is going exactly the opposite direction. It's actually and essentially the evolution of a philosophy. But it's a philosophy of what? It's a philosophy of knowledge which would make it automatically closer to a science than science.

So when you try to classify this for somebody, you look it over very carefully, you're not going to be able to classify it for them. You just tell them, "Well, Scientology really means epistemology, you know." And when they look blank, leave them looking blank. The dickens with trying to go out along the line and explain to somebody, "Well, now, it's a science."

And they say, "Well, deductive, you've got this mass of data and you selected this and that from it and these had to be inevitable conclusions. No, that hasn't been done that way."

He's right. It hasn't been done that way. No science was ever done that way, only he doesn't know it. The big joke is on him.

Couple of chaps sat over here one day, at one time or another here in England. One of them, Bacon — Bacon writing with his quill pen one-day, was dashing off examples of what should be — "And this you'd call a science." So he says, "All right. We'll take . . ." I think it was botany; it was either botany or biology, I've forgotten which it was. Anyway, one page of this manuscript he said, "If you take, for instance — a science should be organized this way, and this would be the organization of it" — and we will say it was botany — "you'd do these steps and these would be the classifications of the science and you'd gather the facts and data about this in this order and that would be the s ." And what do you know? Today it is. Isn't that interesting? I mean, this fellow dished up a science in ten minutes one afternoon.

There, complete. And I think it's the science of botany. It's all there. It's sitting there on a page of manuscript.

And you take Newton. Newton laid down the primary principles of physics and he laid down the primary principles of calculus, mathematics — that type of mathematics — just bang, bang. Sitting with his feet on a mantelpiece one day and said, "Well, I guess we'll have a philosophy and we'll turn it in and we'll call it a science and it'll be a science of motion. That's fine." Zing-zing, zing-zing. "Now, what'll really give me trouble is gravity and it'll take me several days to solve that." And he did.

And now we want people coming around saying, "Well, they accumulated a large mass of evidence and they worked for years and they did this." Well, it would be very nice and it would be very charming and inevitable if they sort of did but they didn't. You got botany in this fashion. You got — actually, natural history was almost completely organized by "Mister Aristotle." You got physics. And then there was some old fellow I — Mendeliev or Mendeleev, or something of this sort, drew a periodic chart and we had chemistry.

Just fascinating. I mean, these sciences which are supposed to have taken place with billions of workers slaving like mad and gathering up data the same way you would use a bulldozer, you know, and then somebody going over the garbage pile and trying to find some important data in it. That's supposed to be the way science is originated and that's a myth. That's sort of one of the ways that you keep sciences from originating.

Now, the actual fact of the matter is that everything you have today that is called a science was dished up by one or two guys on a Sunday afternoon, sort of offhand, and he said it ought to be this way and it has been ever since.

Now, if you doubt me on that, go back and really look for the elements in these basic — what we call the basic sciences. And should strike you as peculiar that they keep rising in this fashion. And now all of a sudden we have a science of knowledge, if you want to call it a science of knowledge. But what does it stem from? It stemmed from many, many, many years, hard-working years of trying to find out what is the common denominator of knowledge? What's the common denominator?

I had to look through twelve races, look through all of the present-day physical sciences, look through what we laughingly used to call the humanities (and then studied rats under that name) and so on, and finally found out that there was one word which didn't seem to be violated anyplace and that word was survival.

Now, what could we do with survival? They were obviously all trying to survive. And then I tried for five years to disprove the word survival, and say there's something lies outside of it. Nothing lies outside of it in the MEST universe. In the MEST universe nothing lies outside of it, not even the immortality you reach as a thetan while still in the MEST universe lies outside the word, survival. And for the first time with this class we are stepping, really, beyond the scope of the word survival. We are going into the essentials of beingness as superior to the essentials of survival because we are examining the creation of time, and when we examine the creation of time we immediately step outside the basic definition of survival which is continuous existence along a span of time.

We suddenly step outside of a continuous existence along a span of time. We have something else, something new and that would be beingness which wouldn't have any relationship to the span of time called the MEST universe but would have something to do with spans of time, but not necessarily. Beingness could exist independent of a span of time. So that's where we're studying this subject and that's why it's gotten awfully simple all of a sudden. We're on a much higher common denominator.

Now you have to know about this common denominator of survival. And that's talked about in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Science of Survival, Self Analysis, Handbook for Preclears and Scientology 8-80. And that's survival, essentially. But we're creeping more and more out of that, and now we have a study of being. Survival is dependent upon having, and being is not dependent on having.

Now you get the general idea and the scope of your subject.

Now, the technique which you are going to know about here is "Scientology 8-8008." And that's what we're talking about. And you're going to be taught Standard Procedure Issue 2, not Standard Procedure Issue 1. There's a modification so we'll call it SOP 2 to make it a little bit different than SOP 1. You've got to know SOP 1 too.