This is a talk on the elements handled in processing. It could also be called the elements of existence. Very little difference, these things. Let's just take a fast rundown on what these things are.

One is the person himself What are the component parts of the individual? The field of religion, the field of physics, the field of biology actually themselves are efforts of a sort of an „only one“ classification to study a fragment of the individual. Each one is a fragment, and therefore these things are each one a fragment of the truth.

Let's just look at this, then. Man has divided things into these categories. He's divided them into the field of the physical sciences as represented by physics and chemistry. The life sciences - which really aren't sciences by definition at all since they do not progress along orderly axioms - but those life sciences such as biology, anthropology and so forth.

And then let's look over at the other field and we find out there's religion, and religion is only one heading, and the rest of the group could be spiritualism, occultism, magic - the normal activities of barbaric and civilized peoples to understand the spirit or soul of man.

Now, if we see that man's knowledge is divided into these parts then it must follow that man must have some empathy with each one of these sciences. Is that right? There must be, then, a component part in man which would compare to each one of these fields. And we call these fields the fields of - just let's be very simple about it and call it religion, biology and physics.

All right. We have, then, three fields. These are each one representative of a whole family of sciences, and we see that man does have, then, something in relationship with each one of' these fields; otherwise he wouldn't be interested in these fields. Let's get as simple as that.

All right. What is it in man that corresponds, then, to the field of physics? It would be the material objects which he uses, handles or associates with. That would be one part of it, and another part of it would be those energies - raw physical universe energies - which an individual employs in order to transport himself in order to communicate, and so forth. These would essentially be a part of man because they are the things that man owns. In psychoanalysis this could have been called, and was never called or so classified, but could very well have been called the alter ego - those things which surround the centrality of man - his objects, his possessions, the physical energies he uses and the space in which he exists. All right. That's where physics comes in.

Now, where does biology come in? Well, this comes in with the cells, the cells themselves, the organisms which are built out of cells, the plants, fungus, bacteria, all these other things with which man is associated, and his body itself, which of course has in each case a representative part which is biological. And this part can be traced on an evolutionary chain - it's been something else; it's changed into what it is now. And you run out from this till you find a whole culture of organisms. And if you merely considered man an organism, you would have a whole culture which would be a society - like our modern society here. All right. So that would be another component part as far as biology is concerned. It would be those mobile or relatively immobile life forms which man associates with or is.

All right. What about religion over here though? You realize religion is the oldest subject that man has studied. It is very easily the oldest subject with which man has been associated. Well, if we're going to say, well, there is no truth in religion - if there isn't any basis to operate on there at all - we would be saying immediately there is no grounds for any sympathy in man. In other words, if we said man does not have a soul, we would then have to say man is not interested in religion. But of all the things that man is interested in, religion has been the most persistent on the whole track. We can trace back man's interest in religion for forty-five hundred years of written history. So obviously there's some component part there. Well, this is very much the case. A man has a spirit and he is his spirit, and his personality, his thinkingness, his aesthetic and so forth is a spirit.

Now, Dianetics would have gone quite a distance if we had merely been able to reduce engrams and straighten up life as a form. You should recognize Dianetics as a study of the biological level of man. This is biology and it's not much of an excursion into physics, and it's certainly hardly any excursion at all into man as a spirit. But there's a wider truth here to be observed, that man is a soul, he is a spirit. We don't care what words we use here particularly but it is something which is capable of creation and destruction, which is capable of the origin of space and is capable of the origin of energy and matter. Now, this is observable by test.

Well, what happened in Dianetics? Well, first we'd have to recognize what's happened to man. Let's take this field over here of the spirit - the beingness, the central beingness of a person - and let's take that as one extreme. And then over on the other side, here, let's take physics, chemistry - in other words, the material universe, space, energy and matter and its time, of course - as the physical side, and call it the extreme physical side. So now we have the extreme spiritual side, the extreme physical side, and those two things when combined make the biological group of knowingness.

Now, man has not looked at himself very well and so he recognizes in himself a life form, and he tries to composite out of this life form the idea that a cell is just a cell. The very, very uninformed physicist - not the nuclear physicist certainly, but the mere physicist - has constantly today sought to prove that life arises out of matter. And he gets no place with these experiments. He just keeps running up against it. He doesn't get anyplace at all. He tries to trace a piece of mud and out of this piece of mud rises a virus and out of that virus rises another form which we call the very small cell, and that develops, and eventually we have a life organism. This theory does not work. It observably doesn't work because until the advent of Dianetics, man did not have any human science. He had a lot of things he called human science, merely because he saw there was a need for them and he tried to fill in this gap.

But here, by the way, was psychology. That's what psychology is: it is the study which stems from the fully physical side of existence and seeks to trace the evolution of man from mud, really. Because the scientists who have originated - beginning with Wundt, a German - applying scientific methodology didn't just apply scientific methodology; they applied the scientific items of matter, energy and space and tried to get out of matter, energy and space the totality which we call beingness.

And as a matter of fact the last textbook - practically the most recent one issued in the field of psychology - registers itself as an entire and complete defeat. It says a definition of psychology is not possible without tracing its history. Now, that's a fine „Don't look,“ isn't it? You can always define something without tracing its history. Define the United States. Then we say, „Well, we can't define the United States until we've traced its history.“

Now, the second line in the opening book - first line says that it has no definition; the second line says, „The word psychology is derived from psyche and logos. And psyche means 'the spirit' and logos means 'discourse.' But this word no longer applies because psychology is“ - direct quote - „is not a study of the spirit nor even of the mind.“ They just wiped themselves out, in other words.

Psychology is not a study of the mind or spirit. And you who think that psychology is a study of the mind are trying to fill man's need for a study of the mind with this word psychology You see, psychology is not the study of the spirit or even the mind. It's not a study of the mind and spirit. It's an experimental application of bric-a-brac to collect data. Now, don't say, „Data about what?“ It just collects data.

Now, of course, it sought to come out of the field of philosophy, and it came out of that branch of philosophy which dedicates itself to the physical sciences. There isn't any reason to go on with this any further; I'm just trying to show you that here we had an extreme view. And the day you get any… well, any physicist who is… You know, he's just been to the university. He is a physicist. He has no broader background than that. You will find this individual pressing forward very hard trying to evolve every behavior in life out of Newton's laws or some such thing. And the biologist to some degree followed suit.

But the biologist was closer to it. He was actually studying the component parts of life which consist of cells and bodies. And he studied cells and bodies, but he tried to make this an end-all, and he tries to explain everything. He says that… Biology, by the way, does not agree with its parent science, cytology, which is the study of cells. The primary science is cytology; biology has had to be popularized so that it would agree with the people more than cytology does. But cytology lays down the principle that life is actually an accidental outgrowth of an unending stream of protoplasm which goes through time from its earliest moment until now, and that all possible forms and shapes, sizes and behaviors that life is going to produce are inherent in that unending line of protoplasm. They have reduced everything down, you should say, really, to the… When they mean [say] an unending line of protoplasm they mean the sperm-ovum trail that goes back into the dimmest past.

Now, that is cytology, and biology comes out of that and tries to study the form. Cytology actually studies this unending line of protoplasm and biology studies the form. So there is that field. And yet that field was far closer to anything man could use, certainly, than these offshoots that were originated out of the field of physics.

Because man does not come out of mud, because mud does not behave like man, nor does mud contain the potentials which will make man behave like man behaves. Mud is very, very easily controlled stuff, and man is not. And the physicist who goes out and tries to control man with mud - which is to say he tries to hold him in line with force, shot guns, shackles, jails and so forth - just produces fiasco after fiasco in terms of empire. He just gets no place by doing this and yet he's been demonstrating this for thousands of years. And by actual experiment in the business of living we find, then, that the physical picture is not workable. This total physical picture that says man came from mud - that's not workable.

We look over here at biology, and in spite of the fact that we have now had biology, and very good biology, since long before Pasteur, in spite of the fact that we've had biology for almost a century in the form which it's now being taught in high schools - I mean it's that old; it's an old, old science - we yet have very, very little advance on the subject of making cells do something predictably. There's very little advance in that. They just take the inherent components of what cells do and they can modify it slightly. They found out that the application of X-rays will mutate - that is, to change the growth ratio and growth form. They have found out that you can put certain molds in combination with certain bacteria and the bacteria will die. But then, man, that's nothing new; it just happens to be the fact that the antibiotics, these molds, do not kill off the whole organism. That's new.

But man has always been able to introduce a small amount of arsenic into a body and have it die. And actually arsenic itself is the earliest historical item on the antibiotic list.

Arsenic itself was utilized for many, many hundreds of years by witches in Europe. The only doctors they had in Europe were witches. And the witch came into disrepute when all of Europe turned over to religion. They abandoned herbs and so forth and went over for the spirit exclusively. But up to that time they'd been using arsenic in this way. They'd give an individual enormous numbers of doses, each dose very tiny. And every day this individual would take one of these tiny doses of arsenic, and he would eventually become proof against disease. And one of the things that made the European culture so suspicious of witches was a very simple one. They would dig them up, Lord knows how long later, and find the body of these witches perfectly preserved. Because these witches were arsenic eaters and the body would not decay in the grave.

You see what chance a mere bacteria had that floated into this body which was conditioned with arsenic. Well, they immediately had - enormous numbers of bacteria were inactive, then, against the witches. So they could live through plagues, syphilis - any type of disease of that character. None of these diseases were effective against these witches. And arsenic gives a person a rather pleasant color - gives them pink cheeks and so forth. And they dig up some witch twenty-five years after they were buried - if they dug up the rest of the graveyard they'd find everybody rotted and dust and a few ragged bones and rather messy - and here would be these witches perfectly preserved. So they says, „They must continue to use their bodies after they're dead. So the only way to kill a witch is to drive a stake through his chest.“ And all kinds of nonsense originated in this line. That was the end of witchcraft.

Anyway, here was the earliest stages, you might say, of practical biology. That's practical biology. And today this same tradition is followed through with such things as penicillin, Aureomycin, Chloromycetin - about a dozen specifics which the biochemists have been able to originate. The biochemist there, you see, is operating straight in the line of the cell, the organism. And he says it behaves by certain laws and has to feed in this way and that way and he traces his way through. But if this was true, if this was all there was, was this biological strata, then you would of course expect that every problem of the organism would have been solved by a biological approach. If it was a total truth you would have gotten a total solution. Well, you've got nothing even vaguely resembling a total solution.

Today penicillin is less and less effective. And they have to do other things today to make somebody well. And biology actually is just one jump ahead of the ability of the cell to proof itself and square itself around. Well, they can handle everything… everything, then, but the ability of the cell to defend itself. They can't handle that. Cell wins sooner or later.

All right. What about religion? Is this a total and an all where we are concerned?. After all we are a society, and we have individually and collectively various interests and so forth. Well, is religion an end answer? Well, certainly not as practiced. Religion itself has been responsible, probably, for more deaths - just as itself it's been responsible for more deaths and more unhappiness than any other single item. Dictators, plague - these things are actually very small compared to the amount of damage which has been done by religion in the name of peace. In the name of peace we have had nothing but endless war.

Religion broke its back, by the way, finally on that point. For, oh, a long, long while religion taught nothing but peace, peace, peace; turn the other cheek, turn the other cheek; peace; man is a spirit; save your soul; be good, go to heaven and get your reward; or if you don't, why, you'll go to hell and burn forever. They taught this philosophy that we must have peace, peace, peace. And World War I found troops of one side finding the dead bodies of troops of the other side on the battlefield with such legends as „Gott mit uns“ on their belt buckles. Well, God was on the other side, see. God was on their side. God was on the other fellow's side. God was on everybody's side because it was a Christian cataclysm. And it broke the back of Christianity because it almost entirely ruined the faith of troops in Christianity.

Up to that time the major wars had been fought against major faiths. It was sort of Catholic against Protestant. It was one faith against another faith. Christian against Mohammedan. The godlessness of the Mongol versus the Christian Europe. You know, their big cataclysmic wars that had this sort of a division.

But World War I was not of this character. It was Christian against Christian, just like that. And each side was trying to pep up its own troops with the idea that God was on their side. They wore it out.

Naturally, there followed a very godless area. There was no more godless area in the Christian world than that one which immediately succeeded World War I. And today Christianity hasn't gotten on its feet. But if you were to follow all the principles in government, and so forth, which are laid down in the name of the spirit, the soul, so on - if you were to follow these exactly you'd have an awful mess on your hands.

You see, we've actually had periods when these were followed exactly - very, very close to exactly. The first time they were ever followed brought upon the crash of the biggest and grandest and most plentiful society that we've had on Earth, the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon writes there - I don't know how many million words Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but his private purpose in writing that book was to demonstrate the actual action of Christianity in the society. That was his purpose in writing the book. Ostensibly he was very interested in the Roman Empire, and because it is a scholarly study of the Roman Empire it can still be bought in its entirety. Otherwise it long ago would have been put on an Index Expurgatorius. It's an interesting book. It tells you that whereas the Roman nation was responsible for about ten purges of Christians, and that there were probably less than a hundred thousand Christians in all the purges combined for the Roman Empire, there were probably less than a hundred thousand Christians who were arrested and imprisoned or condemned. And that was over a period of a long while; that was over a period of centuries. There were only about thirty Christians in that first purge that - the first Roman push against Christians -there were only about thirty Christians who were martyred in that time.

And yet the Christians themselves slaughtered one hundred thousand of their own people in one year of rioting in one city in the Roman Empire, Alexandria. In one year the Christians themselves murdered more Christians than were murdered in ten purges officially conducted by the Roman Empire.

Now, it tells you there must be some mad-dogness in this, isn't it? There's been more inhumanity conducted in the name of religion than under any other heading. I saw a wonderful book one time. It covered the life of Torquemada. It was oddly and symbolically bound in human skin. It's in a library down in Pacific Groves, California. It's in Spanish. It's a very, very old book; the life of Torquemada. The Spanish Inquisition.

The bloody chapters which have been written back through history in the name of Christianity and peace tell us that it doesn't apparently operate all by itself as a good operation point - you know, if we're going to consider the health of a society. If we just said, „All is now going to be operated from the standpoint of religion,“ we would be making a considerable error if we wish to bring about anything like a pleasant or peaceful or progressive culture. This is no condemnation of Christianity or a condemnation of man; we're just facing a few facts here. The world under the rule of religion has not been successful or peaceful. This we can see with a good clear glance at history.

Take the Crusades. I don't think there's any more disgraceful chapter, actually, in the history of Christianity than these battles fought for loot in the name of religion. The enormous numbers of people who died of disease and homelessness. You take the Child's Crusade. These are bitter chapters in our culture because America is essentially a portion of the European culture. You can call the American culture, European culture more or less the same cultures. And these succeed the Roman culture, which only indifferently succeeds the Greek culture.

But here's one line of culture. And we look at this, „Has it… - we can ask ourselves, „Has it been terrifically improved by the introduction of religion?“ And if we consider by improvement a calmness, happiness, the ability to get, beget and to live, why, we just (as people looking for data and so forth) could not put our vote in the direction of „Let's be exclusively religious. Let's favor nothing but this spirit. And then out of this spirit monitor all of our thoughts and activities.“ We certainly wouldn't have a culture. It would be chaos itself.

All right. Whether you agree with that or not agree with that - because it's not propaganda; I'm merely trying to tell you that here… over here we have this tremendous extremity. We have… everybody says, „Life is really caused by this mud“ as a terrible extreme. And over here, „Life must be totally monitored by this spirit, and that's all there is and it can't do anything else but face up to God, and do this and do that and conduct itself spiritually and religiously.“ And it says that over here, you see, and that's an extreme. And we find out neither one of these things have really succeeded, because at this moment the idea that man is actually mud gives adequate license to the government and its physicists to manufacture sufficient weapons to destroy all the civil populaces of Earth.

How can they bring their conscience to do this? Simply by saying, „Well, man is just mud anyhow. He has no right to happiness. He has no spirit. He has nothing. He's just, you know, animated rocks. Knock them off. Kill them. Kill everybody.“ It's insanity.

You have your rights in the face of such a proposed cataclysm. Actually, no government has the right to a single life - not even one life. We're not saying, now, we don't believe or should believe in capital punishment, but you see a government is not alive. It is an organism only so far as it is consented to by other organisms. And to say that a piece of paper up here has the right to a human being. Oh, no. It doesn't, not by a long way. And yet here's an extreme view - „All is mud.“ Doesn't work. An extreme view - „All is the spirit.“ Doesn't work. Truth must be someplace else.

Well, it's closer in the field of biology. Actually, biology is making life better for people. Physics isn't, religion isn't, because they're both too extreme. So there must be a closer truth in here.

Well, let's take a look at Dianetics and find out that Dianetics was actually a biological-mental study. A biological-mental study - that's „biological hyphen mental.“ That's what it was. And I call your attention to Issue 28-G of the Journal of Scientology which gives Scientology: A New Science, written in 1947. And there is actually the entering point. That's where we enter the picture. We say, „Look, we have cells and bodies, and the cells are trying to survive and the bodies are trying to survive. And they live in colonial aggregations, and we multiply this out and we see these cultures existing. And this is what we can see with our naked eye. Without much assistance we can see that we do have cells, and we do have bodies and we can see that these organisms are thinking. So what are they thinking about? Well, if the cell is trying to survive and the body is trying to survive, therefore, the thinkingness must be on the subject of survival.“ See? „And therefore, the… intelligence is the ability to resolve problems relating to survival.“ So we get a law there. Does it work? Believe me it worked.

Well, then by headlining right straight down the line of a biological-mental science, we did suddenly find ourselves capable of changing the intelligence quotient of an individual - something that's never been done before, observedly - and found ourselves capable of curing many psychosomatic illnesses in people, which had never been touched before. Miracles could happen, and that's the first time anybody had reported any miracles for an awful long time. By monitoring the mind we got changes in the body. Well, this was very curious. Well, but there was a biological-mental science.

Now, as we started to continue our studies, observations and so forth, what happened? We, of course, walked over in the direction of the spiritual side of man and walked over in the direction of the physical side of man. In other words, we merely broadened the biological concept in its two component parts. And we all of a sudden found ourselves looking at this thing called biological science as a combination of the spirit and the physical universe. You see that? We just broadened that, and the next thing you know we have two component parts which themselves combined form this third part. And so we got the theta-MEST theory.

And that was really the first big advance from that first approach of looking at the cells and looking at the bodies and saying, „Well look, they're trying to survive, and therefore this is what the mind is trying to do.“ So you see what happened there. We had theta. Theta was, in physical universe terms, a nothingness, a something that had no motion. It didn't have wavelength, it didn't have any place in space, it didn't have any space. It didn't have matter, mass - had none of these things - and yet seemed to be capable of the production of space and, actually, energy and matter; seemed to be capable of these. But it wasn't itself these things; it was truly a nothingness. And this nothingness with these potentials we called theta, merely because that is the Greek symbol for thought. And said, „Look, we have this thing called theta operating upon the physical universe which produces this biological substance.“

Ah-ha! Now, what are the three parts of man? That part of him which is nothing, that part of him which is totally physical combine together, as far as the body is concerned, to be that part of him which is biological. Now, is man composed of these three things? Well, he sure is. When he's dead, what remains there is totally physical.

Well, man has long observed this. Let's turn it around and look at it the other way. When you subtract his body what have you got? And this has really been a tremendous thing in terms of cases and results and everything else, because we started subtracting his body. Instead of subtracting him from his body, really what we started doing is taking a look at him as he existed independent of a body. We found out the body was totally physical, but as long as he was - or a life unit (there are two life units in a body) - as long as this life unit was connected to this totally physical thing, you had an animate biological thing.

And then we got, of course, the spiritual and the physical side of the individual. And we have gotten up along the line of our science until we can look at each one independently. We have taken biology so far apart now that we can look at the spirit as an entirety, and at the physical beingness as an entirety, and we can also look at the biological combination as an entirety.

So that's what we're studying. We're studying three things. We're studying the physical side of existence - matter, energy, space, time - we're sure studying it because we've got brand-new definitions for it.

A fellow came down here the other day… Talk about how new some of these definitions are. Chap came down here the other day, Wing Angell, and he said he was up at one of the big atomic plants talking to some of the engineers. And he talked to this nuclear physicist for a little while, and the fellow says, „Well,“ - very reservedly - „if you do have something you'd have a definition for space.“ And Wing said very promptly, „Yes. Yes, we do. We have a definition for space. Space is a viewpoint of dimension.“ And the nuclear physicist sat there for a moment. And all of a sudden a kind of a stunned look came in his eye, and he rushed out and he grabbed the phone and he said, „Shut down the experiment in number seven!“ They were about to blow the plant apart. All of a sudden one of his own experiments became meaningful. They'd been operating without a definition of nothing and without a definition of space.

All right. Over here in the field of religion did we clarify anything? Oh yes, we sure did. Everybody has been rushing around in their robes and so forth saying, „Save your soul. Save your soul. Now, look-a-here fellow, you've got to save your soul. Now, you've got to believe in something in order to save your soul, and you'd better save your soul.“ And nobody ever thought of asking him, „Well, where is my soul? Is it over there? Or do I carry it in my pocket? Or what is this thing you're talking about? You're talking about something certainly, because it has a name. Where is it? What is it?“

Well, this statement „Save your soul“ obfuscated the entire problem, because man is his own soul. How can you save your soul? You can't. You are your own soul. Weird, but you are. You can't save your own soul. You can yourself back out away from a body and take a look at it.

Now, what we call you, evidently, down through the years - we mean by that this biological combination of the physical and the spiritual, and that's „you.“ You have brown hair, and you wear shoes, and you are a man or you are a woman. Or you do certain things; you smile a certain way; you have eyes of a certain color. In other words, this youness, you see, has been pounded home as the combination of the physical and spiritual which is itself a visible biological manifestation.

Well, is it quite true? Well, when you tell a fellow „Be three feet back of your head,“ believe me he recognizes that he is himself. But he also recognizes first that he doesn't have his whole personality. Why doesn't he? Because he associates his whole personality with an alter ego which consists of matter. Also these cells have independent life in them. And here he's really - when you say „you“ - a total package of life. When he's three feet back of his head he is unable to muster up a personality because he's so dependent upon the physical part of the thing to muster up this personality. So he feels kind of personality-less. The personality is still parked there in his head.

Well, we've done a tremendous thing in just finding out that you could say to 50 percent of the people you meet „Be three feet back of your head,“ and the fellow says, „For heaven's sakes I am.“ This was awfully tough. It's only tough because it was very simple. Been talking about „Save your soul“ which, of course, put a red herring on the whole track. The whole track had a red herring on it. What was it? „Your soul is over there.“ You know, your soul is something you carry in your hip pocket; not you. Well, the second we recognize that a man's soul is himself - all the life which he will ever have really, as far as an intimate contact with life itself, is himself, and that is a unit which is capable of producing space, is capable of producing energy and is capable of producing matter. And that is the individual. We shouldn't say the body's life unit.

But when we first get him out he doesn't have any real recognition of himself, usually, as a personality. It's only after he looks around a little bit and recognizes that he can have a personality, and this whole thing called personality is built on a lot of postulates, that he can take his personality onto himself. In other words, while exteriorized - which is to say, a soul without a body while the body still lives - he yet can have a personality and he yet can experience joy and pain and so forth.

Now, here is the individual. This individual is immortal. But his immortality, of course, can be on a very gradient scale of comfort. He can be mortal very uncomfortably and rather blind, or he can be immortal, clear seeing and able to take care of himself. And we find out that this individual, you, evidently go all along the track of life, but that the shock of loss of one of these bodies - while you're attributing all your personality to the body - the shock of its loss is sufficient that it wipes out your memory concerning it. Because you say, „Well, the body remembers.“ Man believes this; he believes that the body does his remembering. It does his eating for him, doesn't it? And it does his talking for him. Well, therefore it does his remembering.

And an individual with a little drills begins to pick up memory on the whole track. But completely aside from these things - we're getting off into controversial things - we do have here these component parts, then, in a preclear. We have, first, this unit which is capable of the production of energy, which unit is alive and is aware. And we would call this an awareness unit. It's also a space-energy production unit, and this is the individual. And when you've subtracted that you actually do have the individual because with a little bit of drill he can have returned to him the personality which he ordinarily attributes to himself plus his body. But this is a matter of postulates. But we do have this and we can separate this individual from his body.

This is a fantastic thing and is actually a very major discovery. Here we had first this biological-mental approach. And the next thing we had right on top of that - we came along with this theta-MEST theory that there is a nothingness up against an all ness, and these two in combination make this biological phenomena. And the next thing above that is all of a sudden we've got the pure spiritual side of existence staring at us there. We actually can separate an individual from his body.

Well, these are quite some discoveries, by the way, to have a concatenation of that character, but look at the pattern. These are the inevitable discoveries aren't they? Once we take a rear view of the whole thing we find quite easily that, naturally, we'd discover more. Once we started looking at it you couldn't help but discover more about the physical universe. And that once you started looking at it, instead of just believing in it or protecting your soul or something, you'd certainly discover more about the spiritual side of things. And, of course, naturally then you'd discover an awful lot of things about the biological side of things. It's a combination of the two.

There are the parts with which you are working. The primary difference between the physical and the spiritual side… You see, it's not fair to say mental side. Where is mental parked? Biological. Biological-mental - that's the center pin. The only real phrase which fits it at all is what man considers spiritual. That phrase fits it much more aptly than any other, but, of course, he really hasn't had a phrase for it. We've had to put a new word in there - thetan. A symbol to represent a missing hole in the language. Because spiritual - he means many other things by spiritual. But we say over here the spiritual side of existence and the physical side of existence have a primary difference between them, an enormous difference between them. One thing which you will recognize instantly - instantly. The physical side of existence does not get ideas. You see that? I mean, there's an immediate difference there. Now, over here on the spiritual side of existence you got ideas. And over here on the physical side of existence you have no ideas at all.

Oh, some chap who just got his „magna cum louder“ or something at M.I.T. might try to say to you, „Well, look at these big electronic brains; they get ideas.“ Oh, nonsense. What he's defining as an idea is a datum. An idea is not a datum. But the funny part of it is that not one of those electronic machines ever had taken out of it a datum which was not put into it.

The physicist believes totally that you cannot originate anything new; you can't originate any ideas; there are no ideas to originate; everything has been originated in the past. And as you get the mental index of people and you draw their mental index you find out that the worse off they are the more thoroughly they believe that everything is already thought up and that cause is in the past and there is no cause or originality in the present.

And physics has subscribed to this almost 100 percent as a theory and a philosophy - you can't originate anything, conservation of energy, all these other things.

We have ideas, is the primary difference there. And so when we get into the subject of control at all we would get whether an individual was alive or not - it would be whether or not he could get ideas. I mean, there's really the sole test of whether he's alive or not: Can he get ideas?

We say somebody is dead. He's in a cataleptic trance; he's lying there; he's barely breathing; his heart is barely beating; and we say, „Well, is that individual alive or dead?“ Well, he's biologically still alive because his blood is still flowing, if sluggishly, through his body. But from a spiritual standpoint we would have to say, „Well, this person is very, very low on the biochemical band,“ but he certainly isn't getting any ideas, is he? You could just say a person is able… is alive as long as he gets ideas, and when he doesn't get ideas anymore he's not alive.

And as a matter of fact, when you were very young you had lots of hopes, dreams, aspirations, ambitions, and you wanted to go through life and do this and do that. Those were ideas, and you had lots of ideas. And people came along and said, „You shouldn't get this idea. And you shouldn't get that idea. You shouldn't be so wild about this. You should think more soberly about this whole thing, and you should dedicate yourself to just one line of attack. What you should become is maybe a good cook or something like that, you know. Hold yourself down to one thing and you won't get these wild notions, and so forth.“ And so you foolishly bought this philosophy. Wasn't any reason to buy it except that it just seemed like a philosophy that seemed to be fairly true. You wanted to get ahead in life. And, you know, you didn't feel as alive. And when you ran totally out of goals and ideas and ambitions and - all of this covered under the heading of ideas, concepts - when you totally ran out of them you didn't have any future at all. You actually would dwell more in the past than you would in the future. Why? There were ideas in the past. You had ideas once upon a time.

In short, an individual is as alive as he has ideas. He's as aware as he has ideas. Doesn't mean he has to hectically go on getting ideas, ideas, ideas. But it also doesn't mean that every idea has to be put into action. That's the way the MEST universe operates as a big trap. It says „Look-a-here, you better not get an idea without putting it into action.“ Who said so?

Now, when you walked out… when you were three or four years old, and you walked out and looked at the morning and you saw just a little bit of dew on the rose bushes and so forth, boy, that was a bright world. Whee! Just blindingly bright. Fresh, clear, startling, adventurous. Well, you saw the world because you could get ideas.

And later on, you walk out, you take a look at it - nah. Well, if you checked yourself up during those two periods you find out as a little kid, boy, could you get ideas. You wouldn't have to believe in your own ideas at all. It wasn't necessary to do. But you could know that they were there and put them there and (quote) „believe in them“ long enough to have a future and perception and so forth. You'd say, „Well, now the Billy Goat Gruff is just on the other side of the porch.“ It's okay. So there's a billy goat on the other side of the porch. „And the Black Knight is about to charge us, and here I stand in my white armor about to slaughter him.“

Ideas. World full of action - actually none of it put into practice. Little bit later on, why, you had to have a gun instead of your thumb and forefinger. You had to have an actual gun bought down at the drugstore for $1.98. It was no longer good enough to point your finger at somebody and twitch your thumb and say, „You're dead.“ He'd say, „I am not dead.“ But if you had a gun, why, maybe he'd say, „Well, I guess I'm not dead.“

You started to acquire objects in order to back up your ideas. Actually, no more fatal course exists. And when you find a person well along to where he isn't getting ideas anymore, he has to have things before he can do things. He'll think in terms of have, have, have, have, have. He's got to have. He's got to have this and he's got to have that. And when he gets them all laid out then he can do something.

That isn't the way it runs. It runs from the idea through doingness to havingness. And if an individual has to acquire in order to do, he finds himself almost incapable of going from havingness back to doingness, because doingness is a lighter, more airy thing. It has more ideas associated in it than havingness.

Now, get what havingness is. Havingness is a totally fixed idea. A desk is a codified, solidified idea. See, it is a desk. That's a fixed idea proven with matter and energy. And a person who hasn't any desk there at all doesn't even have to have a mock-up to get an idea.

And all you want a person to do in therapy is to be able to regain his ability to have ideas and to change the ideas which he's continuing with. He actually doesn't even have to change these ideas if he can get lots of ideas. He's run into a scarcity of ideas. He's fixed them down into too many things. So this scarcity of ideas is registered in the fact that everything is pretty solid. He gets ideas. As long as he gets ideas he's all right, but now his ideas are all fixed. He has begun to echo the physical universe. He has begun to take dictation from the physical universe.

An individual who is himself capable of the production of enormous numbers of ideas, capable of creating and destroying, is asked to survive by echoing only those things he perceives. He can only duplicate what he sees. He can only act like what he sees. Original idea? No, he can't have that.

So you get, actually, the happiness, the sanity, all these other things - we have a gradient scale which is an interesting and a simple gradient scale. It goes up here from the total spiritual all the way down the line to the total physical. And if we take points on this scale - in other words, if we pull biology apart and stretch it up here into the total spiritual side and the total material side down here, we find out that an individual at the top has enormous fluidity. He does not need any space. He can create space. He doesn't really need any energy or anything like that, but in order to produce some randomity, in order to produce some action, excitement in existence, he has this space - he produces some space, he produces some energy.

Now, he more and more holds onto and connects with space and energy, objects and so forth. And the more he has of these and the more he's dedicated to them, the more he is trying to make them survive as objects and forms, the further down this scale he goes. Well, the optimum point is about 20, you'd say, about halfway between. Well, that's true enough. But when he starts drifting away from this point which is in the middle, down towards 0 - assigning just the arbitrary of 40 over here at the spiritual side; 20 at the biological side - when he starts going over here he can no longer make this mental-biological object function. He has lost his control of it. And he begins to feel very sad indeed. He's lost his ability to control it, totally. He can't control it. He can't really keep it out of danger. He can't change it, he can't heal it or alter it. And he's on his way south. He's coasting right on down here toward the physical universe, and he finally winds up as a physicist. That's right. And he gets the philosophy of a physicist.

Actually, if we consider that the physical universe is God's universe and is built by God, the most religious person in it would be a nuclear physicist. He studies and examines God's postulates all day long. You might say, as far as the physical universe is concerned, the only really godly man would be a physicist, because he's the only one that is totally dedicated to following the rules, regulations of God. We look at these boys and we find out that they are in awfully bad shape. They have agreed thoroughly to the fact that they have to echo and mimic only physical things. That's very degraded. They get down to a degradation where they have no conscience, really, about making an atom bomb. No conscience about it or regulating it or anything of the sort. They've just neglected all their responsibilities.

Now, I'm just joking when I say they're the most godly people because those people today have, really, no concept of the idea of God or spirituality. They have had to drift away from this, they think, because of their own practical considerations. But these two points are very wide apart, and the sanest end of it happens to be the totally spiritual. And the maddest end of it, really, is the totally physical.

But after we've gone entirely through the totally physical, what do we come out upon? We come out where Sir James Jeans and other great physical philosophers of yesterday have finally emerged. True enough they were the most godly men in the world, because when they wound up all of their work, when they wrote their greatest book, they inevitably put in as a last line the fact that all of their studies had led to a complete conclusion that there must be something called God. They've gone all the way through the band of nuclear physics. When they've done that they wind up on the side that there must be a God. And they have assigned all ability to create space to another being.

Where do we find religion? Where, really, is this thing called religion, then? Is it up here on the spiritual side? It isn't, is it? It's down here on the physical side. Funny but that's the way it behaves, too.

Now, somebody comes along, exteriorizes you. You recognize that you are something which is separate from the body, something which can control a body, something which can use a body, heal a body, that you can have to do with other organisms, other bodies. You recognize this, you have recognized a great truth. Just recognizing that is a great truth, and you've suddenly moved well up from the biological-mental strata over here toward a real spiritual strata.

Now, in spite of the fact that we found religion way over here on the spiritual side of the ledger and we said „Man must have some sympathy with religion,“ we didn't find this spirit that we discovered to have much in common with religious teachings or practices. We didn't find, for instance, very much about this in religion, because religion talks about your soul and talks about the wrath of God. And the wrath of God and the wrath of God and the wrath of God and the wrath of God. And God will love if you don't make him mad at you, and so forth.

And we just don't find that when we move over here onto the spiritual side. We find out that you're you and you are capable of producing space and energy, and you are capable of a rather definite freedom, and that you evidently have an enormous potentiality for immortality. And we look around in vain for some God to shake the hand of And we find out that as far as, really, God is concerned, God then must be the spiritual agreement of all of us, and our search for that thetan in the people to whom we talk.

Everybody knows that there's a nothingness - he knows it really; instinctively he feels it - that there's a nothingness in this person to whom he's talking, you see. And he looks at their face but he senses their spirit. And so he knows that there is some sort of a nothingness in existence. After all, if he's talked to a thousand people, he's sort of sensed that there's a thousand… he's talked to kind of a thousand of these thetans. He just feels this instinctively. But sooner or later he's going to agree, very solidly, that there is some kind of a hidden influence around. Well, there sure is. There's the thetan. People often go around being certain there's something hidden in the actions of other people. Well, there sure is; there's a thetan - real hidden. It's not visible in terms of physical universe energy.

Well, if we were less able to reduce all this to experimental proof, we would have to walk very softly. But we don't have to walk very softly because we are today turning out the most definite therapeutic results which man has turned out using the very principles which I've just talked to you about. And these are the principles we are operating with. You have to know something about the physical universe. You have to know something about the biological-mental picture. But you certainly better know something about the spiritual side of the picture because it's the only causative element you're dealing with. The other two elements-the biological and the physical - are effects. The most total effect there is, is the physical universe. So you're actually studying cause in the thetan over to effect as the physical universe. And that is the band of the knowledge and the data which you are handling with Dianetics.