[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

There's a rumor going around that I'm supposed to talk to you about how to instruct people tonight.

Now, somebody tells me that that's what I said earlier today, but I have been run on not-knowingness, and the process was never flattened. We got back to five lives ago and I quit. I said, "That's that," I said, "That's that. If there's… If I've got all this to not-know all over again, to hell with it."

I want to talk to you about instruction. Instruction is an interesting subject. It's a very interesting subject, because we seem to be in the business of instruction. Now, you think of yourselves as auditors. Auditing techniques are a method of bringing people to know. Think it over.

A great oddity here is that the common denominator of living appears to be learning. In Dianetics we had survival as a common denominator. In Scientology we discover, much to our embarrassment, that that's inevitable. So we have to find another excuse, and the best excuse we can find without looking too far or weighing our brains down too much is learning.

Apparently learningness has great breadth, and we find learningness at almost any level of action, living or operation.

Now, learning would encompass this operation: Fellow looks at the wall and learns it's a wall. You got that? So recognizingness is the lowest level of learningness and is still learningness.

We meet Joe. If we're in good shape, we can learn that it's Joe by looking at him. Some of us who are not in very good shape meet Joe and talk to Father.

Now, do you see how this fits? See how this could be pushed over into a learning category?

Now, don't be fooled. The truth of the matter there is there's an awful lot more (this is between us Scientologists) to livingness than learningness. There's a lot more of it. There is creatingness. There is a number of other factors than learningness. We're not going to go into any of them. We're just going to talk about learningness, and we're going to show how everything could be pulled in and by some slight adjustment, and maybe going around a few fast curves, be common-denominatored into learning, which would make education our forte. Education.

The odd part of it is that a Scientologist can educate people that no one else has ever been able to educate. How do they do it? By auditing them. One of the main things that rises in auditing is IQ, which tells you of course, secondarily, that learning rate goes up. What is IQ but relative cognitionability?

Now, what then are we doing, what are we doing in actuality (below the level, of course, of Solids and Effort and so forth), but pushing thought around one way or the other? See, we're pushing thought around.

Now, people who think there is only thinking of course buy at once the totality of cognitionness. See, they buy that as the totality of any action. If you can learn about it, you got it. They do this so well that they invent so many things to learn about that nobody is ever then able to get Clear by processes of education alone. They booby-trap the line.

Some fellow has a body; he can't look at it so he looks at somebody else's. He can't look at that so he looks at a dead body on the dissection table. He finds an awful lot of spare parts as he begins to cut it up one way or the other. He looks over all these spare parts and he begins to realize that there is no way he can bring order into the chaos of blood and confusion from this cadaver except to apply new titles to everything that comes under his hand. So he writes a learned textbook on the subject. But actually he doesn't do anything. He doesn't even do a good job of cutting the corpse up, but he does do a splendid job of titling parts of the corpse. And he does a wonderful job of this, and he spends the rest of his life readjusting his titling.

This is about as close as anybody ever looked at a body — I mean directly — in the healing professions. They've even taken the titling and put it over into a dead language that nobody ever speaks anymore, you see?

A psychologist trying to occupy a brain that is to him only a series of titles will not get very much reality on the close proximity of brain cells. He has so many parts of the brain that he is living in the midst of a bunch of titles.

Now, learning can very easily, then, be subjugated to learning some complexity which has been invented about something that one never looks at. And so learningness itself can get to some degree into disgrace.

There's an obsession about learningness which is quite interesting to handle: the technique of craving to know — "Put craving to know into the walls," and so on; makes people sick at their stomachs, and all sorts of interesting things.

Now, here's learningness, then, at its worst: learning large, long categories of invented knowingnesses disordered into some kind of a chaotic catalog, with another curve of another language being applied, and so on.

Botany is one of these classification subjects. And I'll tell you the total thinkingness that went on concerning botany. It would interest you very much. It was done by Francis Bacon in a little essay, and he laid down a (quote) "science" called botany because he supposed that this would be a good way to lay down a science. So he just took something that hadn't been laid down and dashed it off in a paragraph or so, that this is the way you would put together a science about flowers, growing things. He dashed off this little paragraph, and that, since the sixteenth century, has been a science called botany.

Well, it's never moved in its actual technical activity from those few sentences. But, brother, has it got classification! Wow!

Now, you didn't know that a skunk cabbage was actually intimately related to a wallaby rose, did you?

Well I didn't either but the… some botanist would undoubtedly be able to accomplish this in some associative fashion.

All right. Now, let's take learning about the mind. I said some psychologist would be in the middle of a bunch of named parts, he wouldn't be in the middle of a brain. Well, then his ability to contact or look at his own brain has been so low that it has escaped him that the classification of the brain was the classification of an item in which most of the psychology world has been totally, embeddedly resident. So this whole fact has escaped them.

Now, let's look carefully why it has escaped them. They couldn't look at it, so they looked at a substitute for it. They couldn't look at the thing, so they looked at a substitute for the thing.

Now, let's go on into basic therapies, old-time therapies of one kind or another, and we find one of those was psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis is so interested in the significance of the experience that they have never looked at the experience.

So education has been in the past, or learning has been in the past, a system of avoiding observation. So a systematic avoidance of observation will sooner or later get something into trouble, and into trouble has come the whole of education itself.

We send a man to school for — I don't know, I think it's gotten up to an optimum now of sixty years till he gets out of college; and this individual actually has been put in a groove of avoiding knowing. You see that? He's on a system whereby he can avoid knowing something. How does he do that? By studying it!

Now, there are significances, and there are basic associations, and there are mock-ups, and there are floors and walls and machinery and cogwheels and botanical gardens. There are all these things. And anybody that you're trying to teach anything is normally into an interesting avoidance of the object by learning its invented knowingnesses.

Here's a great big machine, has chromium-plated cogwheels and gold-plated levers and — oh, it's a gorgeous piece of stuff, you know? I mean it's huge, so on. Two men walk up to it. One of them says, "What's that?"

And the other one says, "That's a Nash-Wheelsy."

"Oh? Oh, is that right? I didn't know that." And they walk away.

How easy it is to satiate somebody's appetite for learning by giving them a name for something. You ought to make a study of this. Somebody comes around to you and asks you, "What kind of a circumstance is this whereby somebody goes off the end of the pier because of a divorce? What's wrong with such a person, they had a divorce and they want to bump themselves off, and so on? What is that all about?"

And then you start to explain to them, "Look. What this person did to the other marital partner is kicking back as a motivator, you see? The person who is so upset about it must have done something."

Now, you explain this and you possibly would get it across very nicely. You see, possibly. You see, you would just take the actual straight-out anatomy of the marital difficulty. One person, after a divorce they want to kill themselves, and so forth. Well, they must have done something in order to inherit a motivator to this degree. Well, we explain this to somebody, we would give them some information. Why is it information? Because it can be used in the game of life.

But now let's just completely and utterly sidestep any responsibility we have as Scientologists, or just kick it over sideways and say, "Ahhhh!"

And they say, "Yes? What's the matter?"

"Well, that person has a-a-a-a-pseudomania. I mean it's a very serious circumstance. It's an illness — it's an illness which often comes after a divorce. Pseumania — pseudomania marititus." And you would be fascinated how often this deep, profound piece of nothingness would turn somebody else around and send them away perfectly satisfied, evidently. You know? They "know" now. Well, what do they know? They know something to remember, that's what they know. And that's all they know.

All right. Let's look at this, and let's take a little closer view of this, and we discover then that that person is willing to avoid the situation. The person is willing to avoid the situation and you gave him an excuse to. You gave him a fancy name. He didn't have to invade the thing any further. That was that, he could just avoid it from there on out and he's all set.

Or you have given him a little thread off your cloak of authority. An authority has told him this, so now he is an authority. And he goes down and tells his fellow mechanic "You know — you know Pete?"

"Yeah, what about Pete?"

"Well, you know Pete — Pete's in a bad way."

"What about Pete?"

"Well, Pete has uh… pseuda… um… has… uh — he's got a dreadful disease!" That's the end of that datum.

All right. We find, then, if this is dominant as a method of conveying understanding, that people must be avoiding to a very marked degree the actual objects, actions or beingnesses of life. Must be! They must be running on "avoid," somehow or another. They must be going off this way when they, as far as we could see, could go right on that way.

Some fellow wants to know how to build a small concrete dam. You teach him how to mix concrete, you teach him how to make a form, you teach him something about the pressures of water at certain depths and the need of side embankments. And it's quite a subject, but you could probably teach him all this in an evening. They don't do that in this society. They send them to college for four years. And when they come out, they don't even know what a dam is. And they don't give a damn either.

All right. So, education could be one of several things, one of which could be the science of avoidance — how to avoid. And we could do all that up, and we could do a wonderful science. It'd be terrifically acceptable. We would write it up in such a way that never could anybody find out anything, anyhow, anywhere. We would teach them a system whereby, if they looked at a wall, it was then necessary to look it up in a book. And having looked it up in a book, they would then have to address a small slide rule which operated in phonetics. Then they could look at the name on the slide rule, one way or the other, and it would give them a combination of syllables somehow or another, and this, we would say, was it.

You would be very amazed, but a book on this subject written with a very sober, pompous style would probably be enormously successful. "The Science of Knowing How to Study," or something, you could call it, you know. You'd be all set.

You would do this by catering to their avoidance mechanisms. You'd permit them to avoid, wouldn't you?

Well, our systems of education are less merciful, much less merciful, because we operate on the very sound principle that it won't kill anybody to know anything. And they operate with the associative datum — you see, the datum instead of the thing, and so forth — they operate on the theory that a little bit of learning will kill you deader than a field mouse; that learning is dangerous.

There's even an old proverb, "A little bit of learning is dangerous," you know? How they would love to include into that "A little bit of learning or a whole lot of learning or any kind of learning about anything will kill you dead." That is the theory of avoidance in education.

Now, we come through and we don't subscribe to this. We don't subscribe to it at all because we know for a fact — we know for a fact that a person (that is, the person, not his body) could actually connect with or associate with anything with impunity. And the only things that are giving him any trouble are those things with which he dare not associate. The things that he's unwilling to learn something about are the things that are giving him trouble.

And then, what does learning mean to us? It means, simply, communication. It doesn't mean a substitute datum. That's awfully, brutally, horribly simple. You want to learn about something, communicate with it, see?

Now, one of the ways of communicating with it is talking it over. Now, supposing it's just a datum. Supposing it isn't a solid object, supposing it's just some thetan's postulate. The only way it disappears is to talk it over, and in many cases, think it over.

Now, a person gets down to a point where he can't think it over anymore, then he has to talk it over. But most people do both: they think it over and talk it over, and it goes boom.

Data consists of the postulates, or assignment of value, of thetans.

That's data. That's all data is.

Now, when they have assigned a value on which they have rather uniformly agreed, they have a fact. You got that? Now, would anybody please tell me how the association only with these agreements, or the communication only with these agreements, would kill anybody? That's for sure.

Well, it so happens that the walls got there that way. That's packing a postulate that says "I am a case of thereness, agreed upon and ratified by the Treaty of Ugveldt, eighteen miles south of cloud nine." That's the wall.

So if there's a vast difficulty in associating with other people's agreements, of course then we'll have vast difficulty. Because the vast difficulty is just another postulate.

So we get down to the fundamental of Scientology education, and that is that it doesn't hurt a thetan to communicate with anything, anywhere, at anytime. And to educate him, all we have to do is teach him that. He has to know that. He gets to be a mighty smart boy if he subjectively knows, knows by experience — may require some processing, you see — that it won't kill him to know about something. If he learns that, then he learns learning.

It's a great curiosity that to go on then from that point and make any great tremendous complexity out of it is really rather difficult. A person can learn about what he can communicate with. And it won't hurt him to communicate with it.

Now, it does hurt — you understand, this is the cross-up that gets this all off. When you push a body into a buzz saw, parts come off, which by common agreement is painful. That's quite different though — it's quite different — than a thetan communicating with a buzz saw. You get somebody exteriorized and push him into a buzz saw and he says, "Whee!"

Now, the funny part of it is, if the body wasn't rigged by agreement to be destructible by its own experience — a body has agreed already to be destroyed by its own experience, you see — you could push it into a buzz saw, and when you pulled it off the parts would simply reassemble. If there was no experience factor added to the body, that wouldn't be painful either. But if you add an experience factor to the body, then you let people in for pain and destruction.

Old-time education could be defined in this wise — in this wise (it's horrible): placing data in the recalls of others. Therefore, old-time education accepts hypnotism, does not really allow for the usableness of the information, does not analyze doingness and completely avoids any havingness, which of course permits nobody to be anything. But putting data into the recalls of others causes others to rely on experience, not perception. These are two different things. Remembered experience is quite different than perception and estimation of the situation.

Now, I'm not running down old-time education completely; I'm just burying it.

Scientology has an entirely different category of action. Now, this has not at this time been laid out perfectly, all squared up at the edges and so forth. But it goes something like this: You offer data for the assimilation and use of others and facilitate their absorption of it to the end of permitting them a better control of a better life. That would be a much longer definition, but it actually is more factual.

If you're going to attempt education at all, then it has to be a game with a goal. There has to be some reason why. And unless you add that into your definition you're going to get nowhere.

So when we offer a person a datum, that datum must be under the self-determinism of the other person, not in his recalls. Get the difference. It must be at the disposal of his own determinism. And if it is not, then it cannot be used thoroughly in living.

So we give them data in such a wise as to give them control of the data, and then permit them to use that data, align and evaluate and apply that data to specific beingnesses and actions in life. And we never let a datum hang up in the air without anything with which to unite.

Now, what I just said originally about the avoidance system of education happens to be any preclear you ever processed. He's sitting there in his mother's valence. He has a very bad heart, terrible! You say, "Anybody you ever know have a bad heart?"

"Oh," he says, "yes. Mother."

And you say, "Well, all right. Do you ever remember a time when Mother's heart was bad?"

"Oh, yes, yes. Lots of times," and so on.

You say, "Well now, what about your own heart? Do you suppose that could have anything to do with it?"

"Yes, I dare say it has a great deal to do with it."

No data would fall out. It's all in there in complete black basalt.

I've had people sit and tell me exactly what was wrong with them. They'd studied it all out. It was still wrong with them, still wrong with them. They hadn't gotten rid of a scrap of it. Well, how come? It was probably all the wrongness they had left. It was probably the only lesson they had ever learned.

Now, anything that is wrong with anybody is simply a lesson they've learned. Well, people know this so they avoid lessons.

But the first thing that got wrong with them was to avoid a lesson, and then this permitted them thereafter to avoid more lessons, and every lesson they avoided could then victimize them. So here we go, here we go.

How many ways could you devise to simply teach somebody a great deal about education? How many ways could you possibly do so? Well, how many auditing techniques do you know? There's quite a few, quite a few. But in view of the fact that you're doing an educational activity, it of course depends in a large measure upon communication. So communication must be demonstrated to exist before any education can be undertaken that will become education in the Scientology sense, not another engram.

You can always beat somebody's head in and say, "That'll teach him." It will, the rest of his life. It'll teach him every day. To what? Lord knows! Completely random, completely random.

Supposing the phrase in that head-beating was "He is no earthly good." We actually got somebody from Northwest Airlines, I think it was, that had this phrase in the bank, and everything he had done on the ground had been a total failure. He'd taken to be a flyboy, and he hated being a flyboy; but he was no "earthly" good.

Some other fellow with the same, identical phrase becomes a parson. Man will insist on using his power of choice and he'll insist on doing something about anything. But unless his power of choice is in plain sight, and unless his somethingness is in very good view, unless the individual has a command over something and knows what he has a command over of, you know — that's very important.

I've heard it said that when you're training lions you really should know it's a lion you're training. See, I've heard of this. Some cautious souls have brought this up from time to time.

If you're handling a human being, why — huh! Lord knows what you're handling. You might be handling a lion, or you… Look at these little kids. They run up and down the street snapping cap pistols at each other, and so on. You can't tell from one minute to the next who they are. Who are they? Oh, I don't know. They're anybody: Davy Crockett or Buffalo Bill or Nathan Hale or — he got hanged — somebody. They're being somebody. They're being somebody they're not. It's only when somebody becomes somebody he is that he gets worried.

All right. Systems of education, then, must only take into account the unharmful aspects of communication, and the formulas of communication, and the facts of communication, and an alignment of the data to be transmitted so that it may be employed in living by the other person.

Terrific dependency, though, on communication, isn't it? Communication and its whole formula. Every time that was avoided when you were a little kid in school, you didn't learn something. There was something you didn't learn. That's for sure. They didn't bother to get your attention, they didn't bother to tell you where it applied; there you went. And to this day you probably think two and eight make twelve. Of course that's your postulate. If you were good enough they would, but that's beside the point.

Now, education oddly enough contains a nearly complete — outside of the definitions of it, itself — rendition in the old Logics of Dianetics. And those are the anatomy of education. They might be called the axioms of education. They were totally missing in the field of education.

Some of those were almost known back in the days when they used to teach a subject called logic and argumentation. Wonderful subject. I had a textbook on it once. Just gorgeous. Such simplicity! How you defeat an opponent in a debate. Wonderful list. I mean, they took up the subject, they really meant to defeat an opponent in a debate; they had a complete anatomy of how you defeated somebody in a debate, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the debate and they said so; how you distracted his attention. It ran down to the most mechanical things you ever heard of: Have him called from the wings occasionally. It did. I mean, it was a wonderful textbook. Practical! Wish I'd studied it.

Anyhow, one of the little data in there — one of the data in there was the most marvelous thing you ever heard of. "Never engage the actual data of your opponent in a debate. Always engage his sources." How fiendish!

The fellow says, "Two hundred and ninety-one tons of uranium were used last year." He's demonstrating the value of uranium, you see, and the expenditures on uranium, and so on.

You don't say "Ah," or "Well, what do you know." You never agree with him. A debate's an argument. It makes that very clear in this textbook — printed by the way, about 1866 or '67 — at no time do you agree with him. You find out "Who said that? Where did you get that datum?"

"Oh," he says, "that's Borks and Snorgelberg, their mining reports, published in the Miners Quarterly," and so forth.

And you say, "The Miners Quarterly of what organization?"

And he says, "Why, the United Mine Workers, of course."

And you say, "Ahhhh."

It wouldn't have mattered if it was the Republican National Committee, you'd have still said "Ahhhh."

I think they killed everybody off that knew the subject. I think they all got annihilated for it, so we don't have the subject anymore. It was a gorgeous textbook. I don't even have a copy of it anymore.

But anyway, if we want to relay a datum completely so that it fixes forever and it's not under anybody's control, we have to lose or lie about the source; we have to get the source out of sight completely. We have to give it some other source. Then we have to alter it a little bit. And then we have to deliver it with enormous authority; and if anybody says that isn't the authority, or the authority is nothing… has nothing to do with the datum, then let's back up the whole artillery on them. Let's flunk them, let's put them back half a term, let's send letters home to their parents. Sounds kind of wild, doesn't it? Just because they said that Snorgel and Fuggelbaum did so-and-so, why, all these penalties get lined up. If you don't believe it, you've had it.

Well now, that is old-time education. What good is the datum? It's no good at all. So Snorgel and Fuggelbaum said this — so what?

Einstein — here, I'll give you the reverse, now. Einstein had a lot to do, they say, with inventing the A-bomb. Well, it was invented on his authority or something. It was appropriated for on his authority. And we get down the line after a while, and Einstein at no time can say, "The A-bomb will not explode tonight." He can't say that and have it happen. What the hell is this about authority? What difference does it make?

Actually, it has nothing to do, really, with the behavior of the bomb at all. The bomb explodes or it doesn't explode, and that's all. It's an open-and-closed fact. Mostly because Einstein himself is outweighed by a tremendous number of people who all agreed on the backtrack that atom bombs exploded. He's outvoted! So you get pushed into the horrible position that I'm pushed into of simply categorizing the majority decisions.

But the whole alliance of authority and education is apt to bring people into a fixed state of mind. If what is being taught is true then they themselves will recognize its truth, since nobody can be taught, thoroughly, anything that he himself does not already have some knowledge of No matter how ghostily, no matter how thinly, there's some knowledge of it.

For instance, you can't be taught usefully — so that you can use it — any datum about the human mind that you have not already agreed to. You can be taught an invention concerning the human mind if you are taught that it is an invention. Otherwise, you would have to be taught hypnotically, merely given a new conviction which you could not use or alter. That would have to be done on an hypnotic level. What good would it be? Well, it'd add a new datum. And if enough people were hypnotized into believing this, that all brains had Ford coils in them or something, I imagine the genetic line would grow Ford coils. But it hasn't yet. Remember that; it hasn't yet.

In other words, we learn most easily that to which we have subscribed. This is why so many people flunk science. Science is the doggonedest mass of invention you ever cared to read, but it's a rather uniformly agreed-upon invention which is built on top of an already top-heavy series of inventions or postulates which are agreed upon. This already top-heavy mass of agreements, then, needs no further inventions, I assure you. And yet, just for the sake of teaching somebody something, these things get invented. You get the idea?

Now, it's a sure test of a teacher whether he knows his stuff or not, the number of data which he insists on everyone assimilating without question. If he insists that a great number of data be assimilated without further analysis or question in any way, shape or form, we know this boy doesn't know his business. He's scared. Somehow or another he feels that nobody must be permitted to examine these data. So he's doing something else. He's doing something else.

Now, educationally, it is absolutely necessary for the teacher to preserve the power of choice of the student over the data which he is taught. And if it is not in agreement with the experience of the student, and will not be found to be true in the environment of the student, he permits the student to examine this and say so, and operate accordingly. Only in this wise would you have anything used or useful.

Engineering fails mostly because all of the originators in the field of engineering have died off. They're way back on the track.

A chap came to me recently — he rather surprised me; I was a little bit overwhelmed by this experience. He came to me in London, and the appointment was made by cable two or three days before the fact. The first whisper of it was about two weeks before the fact, and then the exact appointment was made about three days before the meeting. And he wanted to come by and see me at my office in London. He said he wanted to talk to me. He didn't say it was urgent.

So I sat there wondering what this could be all about, as the chap has a rather famous name. He's probably the leading boy employed at this time by the U.S. Air Forces in the field of aerodynamic research.

And I thought, "What on earth does this fellow want to see me for?" I haven't done anything, honest. You know?

And he sailed into the office, he sat down, he took one of my Kools, he accepted a Coca-Cola, rejected an offer of some vodka — said it was not national with him — and chitter-chatted with me for exactly one-half an hour, talking about some recent developments.

I agreed with him, I thought these were fine, understood them a little bit, got some kind of an inkling of where he was going, fumbled with it a bit, said that's fine. He intimated that he was looking for some much younger man than himself, since he was about seventy-one and was right in there with the Wright brothers, to replace him someday, and intimated — oh, how cursorily — that someday he might want me to process somebody for him. But this was quite obviously not the object of his visit.

Well, he looked at his watch, went outside, got in the U.S. embassy car, went back to the airport, climbed aboard a U.S. Army Air Forces airplane, and was flown on to his destination, which was Brussels — a large conference in Brussels — and then flown home. That was all he wanted to do in London. And I sat there and I scratched my head, I couldn't figure out what in the hell was going on here. Didn't have any idea at all. No idea at all.

And finally — after a lot of time went by I finally figured out what was wrong. The guy was lonesome! That's all. Haven't heard from him since. Told him to drop by here, he said sure he would. He isn't home yet. But this is an interesting thing.

But in his conversation it was rather easy to detect the fact that in his field he alone, he felt, was running on choice of data and theory. Everybody else in his field, his own associates and assistants, particularly his assistants, were all running fixedly on data which had now become agreed-upon data in the field of aerodynamics, but which is not necessarily true at all. In fact, I never have been able to figure out — and neither could he — how anybody ever applied calculus to an airfoil, and managed to build the same airfoil off the same mathematical sheet. He said he always inquired whether or not they had sent the test model over for measurements in building the actual model, and never felt comfortable unless they did.

But this man was a realist, terrific realist. If you couldn't think about it and look about it, you couldn't know anything about it, so what use was it? And that was the way he operated. That was it.

I am afraid that in the field of knowledge, to me nothing, including Scientology, is sacred. In fact, I'd have to be argued with and shot at awfully long for anybody to convince me that a datum was an unalterable datum which must never again be reviewed. I'm afraid I would be very hard to convince this way. Of course there'd be ways to do this. You could kidnap all of you and hold you for ransom until I admitted that the moon was green cheese and — oh, I'd probably say the moon was made out of green cheese, because I'd go easy the other way too.

I am not trying to hold up an inviolable integrity at the expense of something or other, I know not what, don't you see?

The only fate I'd know which was worse than death would be "totally fixed on the entire track with all data which had ever been invented and agreed upon." That's the only fate I'd know that'd be worse than death. But there's another fate which is almost as bad, and that is to shy off every datum simply because it's been agreed upon, see? You have to remain fluid in both quarters. In other words, you don't have to accept every datum as a fixed, unalterable datum, and you don't have to shy off anything that looks like a fixed, unalterable datum. You don't have to do either one. Don't have to accept them, don't have to reject them. Yawn once in a while. It's not that important.

So here, here we have, worked out in Scientology, a great many data which are apparently the common denominators of agreements on the whole track, arrived at evidently by the bulk of the people who perceive them now. And people have become disabused or have disabused themselves of their participation in their creation, and many of these people are shying off of them and avoiding them, because if they thought again what they had thought once it'd evidently kill them. And so as we inspect this we arrive at certain definite methods and agreements by which we can reach these and turn them around one way, or fix them better the other way, or do something with them. In other words, we are actually capable of twisting and turning the various fixednesses and unfixednesses of existence.

Now, sometimes we do this well, sometimes we do this poorly; but we always unfix as easily as the thing was unfixed in the first place, and we always fix as easily as the thing was fixed in the first place. We always do those things, see? We can always unfix something that was awfully unfixed.

You know, a fellow's walking down the street and a thought flashes through his mind that maybe some of his behavior is not entirely masculine, maybe it is slightly effeminate. In other words, the datum is there "Maybe I'm a girl." Well, it's… You see, it's very nebulous. You know, maybe — he's just playing a game with himself of worry, something. We come along, we pat him on the shoulder, he tells us what he's worried about. We don't even have to tell him "You're not a girl," see? I mean, he just tells us what he was worried about, he — boom! See, it's gone that quick.

He's walking down the street now with another datum — another occurrence. He's walking down the street with a datum that he's a man. That's pretty fixed, isn't it? He's walking down the street and he's wearing men's clothes and a man's head and he's got a man's haircut, and he's really convinced he's a man. Now, we would unfix that one with a little more difficulty.

Of course, they do it easily in Hollywood, but we're not going that way.

Do you see, though, that the relative fixation of the data has a direct bearing upon our ability to unfix it. You got it?

Now, we can easily fix in his head that he's a man, can't we? He already thinks so. And we might have some success in fixing in his head this other earlier datum that he's effeminate. See, here's fixing and unfixing data, see? He's got the little ghosty notion that some of his actions are effeminate. We hear this, and we don't permit him to complete his communication, we shut it off in some fashion or another, we turn it around a little bit and we ask him very searchingly whether anybody has mentioned this lately to him or not. And then we look very learned and we say, "You're sure — you're sure you don't remember it? Oh," we say, "it's a bit occluded, eh?" He's wondering what's happening here, you know?

And we say, "Well now, I'll tell you how you cure this. I'll tell you how you cure this. One of the best ways I know to cure this would be to overcome any impulse whatsoever to wear feminine clothes or to use feminine things, you see, by simply buying some and putting them on the dresser. Therefore it'd be very easy for you, you see, to realize that they're not yours and that you have nothing whatsoever to do with them. And every time you look at them, get the idea that they are not associated with you in any way."

In other words, by this way and that way we might have some chance of fixing the idea in his head that he's a girl.

But by paralleling life we can take a lazy man's look at it, and a fellow walks down the street and he thinks he's a man, and we pat him on the back and you say, yes, he's a man. That's the easy look, you see? He says, "I'm worried about being a girl" — he's worried about it, that's good enough for us. Talk it over and he's no longer worried about being a girl. Don't you see? That's very easy. It's very simple.

Well, we do much better than that. We teach people how their minds get fixed and unfixed. We do better than that. Then we show them how they can fix and unfix these various agreements and things and postulates. That's the business we're in. We do this well.

Here's an organization, a business organization, that even we consider disorderly. Some inkling has come through to its boss — to its boss — some inkling has come through to the boss that this might possibly be a prevailing circumstance throughout the organization.

Well, we could straighten up his personnel and his comm lines. And we could look over this situation; we could do pretty well with this. Realize that if we didn't facilitate the communications in the organization that it would remain as confused as it was. We could do something about this. We could alter the situation more in the direction of a tolerable unit.

Now, what do we mean by a tolerable unit? Well, we could say "The unit works better." That's fine. "It better meets its goals" is a better statement. If a man is trying to be more a man, we can make him more a man, just achieving his goals; or we can get him to change his goals.

Now, a business that thinks it's confused, we could come along and educate it that it is totally confused. We could. We could simply go into nooks and crannies and pull old junk out, and keep calling management's attention to how this person and that person in the organization had been stowing stuff away, and forgetting stuff, and so on; and offer him no solution to this, you see, and carefully tell him every time to refrain from boiling over about it and not to get mad concerning it, because the entire tone of the organization depends utterly upon his own mood. We'd produce chaos! I mean, the place would look horrible before you got through. I mean, you'd really have chaos.

You could say, "Now, don't say I told you, because I don't want to get in trouble, and don't mention it to anybody, but actually your stock department, you see, is keeping all of the out-of-date stock and refuses to order any of the up-to-date stock. And then it won't release any stock to anybody else in the rest of the shop. And the fellow there has to be treated very carefully, because he's in a kind of a bad condition. Now, you treat him very carefully, and so forth, and don't go in suddenly and mess all this up, because your attention really is needed over here on much more important things." Get what you'd do here. It'd be pretty wild, wouldn't it?

So, you could intensify any given situation, or simplify any given situation; or, by the correct handling of data, return to any given situation its own self-determinism over what it's doing.

Just by the process of education alone, just by the process of educating the people immediately associated with living a marital life, on the subject of "These are some data about life. You pays your money and takes your chance. There they are. You want to look them over, okay. If you don't want to look them over, all right. Because this is kind of the way it seems to be. Let's look around and see if that's the way it seems to be." Orient them a little bit, give them some stable data, restimulate some stable data. All of a sudden, why, their environment is liable to straighten out and run much more smoothly. This you would call counseling. Or would you call it education?

Now, here then is a tremendous field in Scientology, and it does appear that all you're doing is not just increasing the learning rate of a person, but increasing his power of choice over what he has learned. And if you can do that, why, then he can lead a much better and more successful life.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]