All right.
Want to talk about now, in the second lecture of this series, the elements of the problem, the problem itself and the number of things which were involved in the solution of the problem.
And this right at first glance might seem awfully dull material, but it nevertheless might give you some idea of what an individual was faced with in terms of no data.
The problem itself consisted of apparent discrepancies and continuous disappointments between the evident desire of life and the things which occurred to life in this universe. Wide discrepancy there: life says it is doing this and it’s trying to do that and always winds up with the reverse. This makes a puzzle. It is what is commonly known as a paradox or an enigma. And this has been upsetting to living beings now for quite a while. Ever since people started a little bit down Tone Scale, they began to be concerned about this: that they hear on every hand that there should be ethics, that people should be honest, that man should love one another, that the society itself should be just and fair; and on every hand apparently this is not what is happening. One sees betrayal, dishonesty — many, many things — war, idiocies in general.
You go down to a court of law, you find there will be a number of individuals there, particularly in night court, or one of these quick court sessions and parked away in some corner of the town — nearly every town has such a court. Men are brought in there, they walk through, the judge says, „Guilty? Or not guilty?“
The fellow says, „Well, not guilty, Your Honor,“ the usual.
„Well, look guilty to me.“ Pam. „Thirty dollars, thirty days. If you don’t have thirty dollars, thirty days.“
And the fellow says, „But I have a wife. And I couldn’t afford an attorney.“
„Well, haven’t any time for trial by jury here. I mean, that’s…“
You think this doesn’t happen because it says in all the history books and storybooks and things like that that this sort of thing doesn’t happen.
People are picked up by the police on the streets and they are arrested solely because they don’t have a dollar in their pocket or they’re not nicely dressed or they’re loitering or something of the sort And they go to court, and because they are dressed the way they are, and because they don’t act the way they do and so forth, the next thing you know, they find themselves in jail Just like that That’s not justice, that is adjudicating the Tightness and wrongness of a person in direct ratio to his buying power. Why, it doesn’t seem to have too much to do with it, but it’s the only rule that has been found workable, evidently, in courts of law. And you’ll see it there directly — if you cared to go down at this moment to the courts here, the night courts here, you would see this going on, and you would sit there horrified.
You would say, „This couldn’t possibly happen in a just society. Just because this fellow isn’t well dressed, he’s in jail.“ And yet that’s the only conclusion that you can draw.
He can’t hire an attorney, he can’t pay anybody anything; there’s no trial by jury for him.
The thing down there in Washington called the Bill of Rights — we all agree to that Bill of Rights; we think that’s wonderful. And the president of the United States a few years ago dared forward himself into great unpopularity by advocating that it be enforced fat a change. That’s a fact. Why, you had states of the Union saying they were going to secede — just oh, wonderful. We were going to enforce the Bill of Rights, and yet that Bill of Rights isn’t as complete, if you thought it over, as you would like to see it.
That Bill of Rights should have two other clauses in it one, a man has a right to his own sanity and, two, a man has a right to his own life. And that, in its narrowest sense, should be in the Bill of Rights. I don’t mean any of the philosophic meanderings which could go on from those two things, but just those two things: a man has a right to his own sanity; a man has a right to live and not be killed.
And yet a fellow walks down here to a hospital the other day — a young man, he’s in good health, but occasionally he has bad headaches. They took him and said, „Well, the thing for you, so-and-so and so-and-so. Oh, I guess, oh, go to Room 13,“ and so on. They turned him in and put him on an operating table and says, „We’re going to adjust something in your head.“ And he said he didn’t want this. And he says, „Well, the doctor says you’ve got to have this.“ And he said he didn’t want it. So they gave him a shot of morphine and wheeled him down to the operating room and killed him dead with a transorbital leukotomy, because he had a headache.
There’s no data on record anyplace — nowhere, nowhere is there any data on record that a transorbital leukotomy, a prefrontal lobotomy has cured a headache. It’s cured a man’s life, it’s cured him of living, it’s cured him of moving, but it hasn’t cured a headache the way we understand curing a headache, which is to say, making somebody feel good and not have a headache after they’ve had a headache.
Today I was informed of this — a very reliable authority — by a medical doctor that I asked to investigate this matter. I spent a great deal of money, by the way, in the last three years getting the records straight There’s a lot of things on record; we can hazard a lot of guesses.
I had a research chemist review — also had, by the way, a degree in English — review the records of electric shocks, transorbital lobotomies and other psychiatric treatments. Review the hospital records and the journal records and nothing else, and without an opinion — the hospital records and the journal records — and compile them to find out if medicine was saying what it knew. And it was saying it every time: that a person is at the complete mercy in this society of mental treatment for political reasons. Fascinating, isn’t it?
Reminds me of an officer — all due respect to the United States Navy. I like the United States Navy. I was a navy junior myself, been in the navy. A good organization, a good outfit, best navy in the world, but it’s a navy.
The United States Navy had a little — well, they had an accident, a small accident called Pearl Harbor a few years ago. And there was a commanding officer with a brilliant combat record in World War I; excellent condition this officer was in; beautiful fellow. He was out of port at the time Pearl Harbor happened, and for six months he’d been saying, „The increased signs of Japanese military activity in the Pacific demonstrate that we had better be extremely alert.“ Nobody was alert So he went out and got alert. And he was smart enough not to be in that harbor.
So he sailed back in, and he went up to headquarters and he said, „My God! What have you done?“ „Now,“ he said, „let’s patch this up right away and let’s get the squadron I have here alert We’ll get those aircraft carriers, and we’ll at least repair it to that degree, because you people have made a terrible mess of things.“
You know what they did to that officer? It wasn’t Monday morning after December the seventh when that man was in a hospital room, under detention as a dangerous psychotic, and was shipped to Saint Elizabeth and retained there until it wasn’t likely that he would give any story to the press.
I know that man. I’ve been down there several times around Saint Elizabeth’s, and it’s interesting the use which is occasionally made of insanity. All you have to say about a man in the society is, „He’s crazy!“ Everybody says, „Well, then, the guy isn’t talking right.“
Of course, an awful lot of — there’s enough truth in this, you see; there’s an awful lot of crazy people that do say very crazy things. But a man has a right to his own sanity.
A Korean veteran married a little high-school kid. She didn’t know anything; the psychiatrist says to her, „Now, your husband needs electric shocks, and you’ve got to okay it“
And she says, „Is that best? Will that cure him?“
„Oh, yes, yes, yes. Always cures them, cures them. Now you just sign on the dotted line. And if you don’t sign and if you don’t give us permission to give him electric shocks, we’ll kick him out of the hospital.“ She signed and he died.
He didn’t have the right to say whether or not he was going to get an electric shock or not.
Does this picture — and of course, I’m emphasizing the mind rather than wide, broad injustices — does this picture agree then with what you commonly suppose to be healing? Well, just in that little field it doesn’t agree. Well, in the broad field it doesn’t agree either.
A man is a good fellow; he works all his life, he tries to help people, he does this, he does that, and sure enough, why, at the last minute somebody picks up a club from behind and fixes his clock for him but good. The universe demonstrates a discrepancy: what it says it is doing is opposed to what it is evidently doing.
Now, what we consider a downscale operation is where these condemned activities on the whole, in a society, occupy greater number of incidents than the activities which we supposedly uphold. And when a society cracks across that 50 percent barrier it starts down very rapidly, and this we know as a dwindling spiral.
Yes, the first thing we face is that life is evidently not doing what it says it’s doing in this universe. It says it’s doing one thing, it’s evidently doing something else. It’s at least doing something else a lot of the time. When a doctor of medicine considers killing as good as curing, this is real weird, isn’t it?
Somebody goes to a place which advertisedly helps people and gets his spine broken or is disabled completely. And he doesn’t have anything to say about whether or not it’s going to happen to him. Big discrepancy.
In the matter of the state, people are continually, over and over, betrayed by governments. Over and over. This is the oldest story in Latin America which can be told. The government rides in on a great rosy mist of „Everything is going to be better,“ and as soon as it is there, immediately turns on the people and enslaves them to an even greater extent than the last government. That is the usual cycle.
Then there’s something wrong, if this happens over and over and over.
Yes, there’s something wrong all right, but one had to look pretty deep to find out what was wrong.
It sounds funny, possibly might not meet your eye instantly, but (this is a horrible thing to tell an audience), but a thing, a being or an entity which is immortal and which cannot do anything but survive is made to fight like mad because it is afraid it can’t.
It is utterly impossible for a thetan to do anything but survive. And so we have to add some duress to it As soon as you recognize that, the problem will fall apart in your hands.
Survive as the basic drive of existence answers up all necessary qualifications for Homo sapiens. It describes what he’s doing. What he’s doing can immediately be reduced understandably to survive. Yes, he’s trying to survive against the obstacles imposed upon him by the MEST universe. That’s what he’s trying to do, he thinks. But we look behind that scene, we get this discrepancy of he says he’s trying to survive and then is succumbing all over the place.
Do you know that it’s quite a trick for a person to walk across a street and not see the traffic light? That’s quite a trick! A person has to work awfully hard to get hurt in this society. The whole society is rigged so that he can’t get hurt. He can’t get hurt You see that? You see what a dreadful conflict and what a logical mess this would make out of everything; trying to force, whip, beat, nag something into surviving when it can’t do anything else. That is the terrible pity of it! That is the worst thing that could happen to anybody.
The Greeks had a play — I remember there’s a young fellow, he wanted eternal life. Oh, he lived a thousand years, and one by one — and here he is beautiful, young, and he watches all of his friends dying off and things change and he’s dropping out of it and dropping out of it, and he can’t die. Terrible. And of course, he finally winds up just begging the gods and sacrificing everything and anything just to die.
If that were written in this society at this time, the end of it would be that — the final solution was that he couldn’t die. And it would end on that solemn note of apathy.
But that’s what’s happening. Everyone is hiding this fact. But one can survive at different levels; one can live at different levels.
And when a society becomes entirely too intense on the business of surviving, it gets very, very, very unhappy. It gets worse and worse and worse, and its level of survival, the interest in living decreases markedly. And in order to reach up to a goal where people can be a bit happier and a bit freer is the desirable goal, not just the goal of nuking somebody survive because he can’t do anything else.
But you could evidently take somebody and with various duress make him insane. He wouldn’t die, you understand. And that’s the only non-survival thing that theta, life can do: go mad. It’s the final answer: „You’ve made me mad. I’m insane now, I’m done. Stop punishing me.“
And insanity itself comes about when a person can’t destroy himself in any other way; he has to become insane and unconscious and unknowing. And that, in a very small package, is insanity. That’s the one thing that can happen to life. It’s a dreadful thought, isn’t it? There isn’t any route up, but there’s a route down.
A being that has been over a certain curve can come in, evidently, into a new life, according to para-Scientology, and for a short time on the hope that things are going to be all right, will carry on and survive and then fall off even much more rapidly again because things aren’t He can’t survive as Homo sapiens.
So you have this discrepancy of the basic knowledge which is hidden from everyone, even from himself, that he can’t do anything but survive; he can’t do anything but survive — because it’s really too horrible to face. And he says he’s got to survive as the answer. And these two facts do not equate, and they drive one into the franticness of delivering cruel punishments, injustice, betrayal, destruction, misery as a revolt against an untruth that one has to work very hard to survive when one can’t really do anything else but survive. Do you see that clearly? It sounds like almost idiocy, and yet it explains so much.
By being a body, life can at least go through the motions of dying. Most societies will make this — when they really get downscale, they make this more and more beautiful. Lay out these corpses and so forth, and they burn candles and joss and they — the older the society gets, the more — till they finally even get noisy about it like the Chinese. Terrific ceremony.
I’m not asking you to buy immortality, but as you process a preclear, you cannot help but find out this terrible fact that this preclear is afraid of surviving, and he can’t do anything else. And he’s telling you the truth all the time in that his activities are motivated by survival. He’s telling you the truth. And so you get these terrific discrepancies of „The way to survive is to succumb,“ „The way to succumb is to survive.“
So, you get Schopenhauer saying, „The way to handle life is to die.“ And so, we get Zeno back in Roman times in his apatheia, saying, „Why do anything about it because you can’t do anything about it anyway. And that is why you shouldn’t strive or try, because striving and trying is what they try to get you to do so as to prove to you that you can’t do anything about it“ — apatbeia
Now, we have in all of the philosophies of the past the succumbers: „Let’s all die. Please, please, please, let’s die.“ And we have the survivors, who are saying, „Well, not only can we live, but we can live well and be happy about it“ And so these two philosophies immediately derive.
Unfortunately, the impossible philosophy is the succumb philosophy; that’s an impossible philosophy of „Let’s not live. Let’s try to live low scale enough so that we can pretend we’re dead even though we’re still alive.“ It’s really not workable although out through the society you will find it being attempted at every hand.
You go into a beer joint, and here in this beer joint you’ll find fellows who have a very happy solution: They’re just unconscious.
You go aboard a train… I don’t know why this is, but almost every time I go on board a train or a boat, at least one passenger will say to me, „You know, they ought to have a capsule or something, and you take it as you get on the train and it wears off as you get off the train.“ And the last one was quite inventive and he said, „You ought to have a series of capsules which are issued with the ticket and measured according to the destination.“ The answer is, of course, to be unconscious and to not know that you’re surviving.
Now, on the acceptance level on processing — is very interesting if you start on most preclears to feed them, in mock-up form in brackets, anesthetics, morphine, anything that will induce unconsciousness. It just seems that you just process and process and process and those quantities — you just can’t get enough of them mocked up to satiate this craving.
The fellow, first he has to waste it, you see, because he can’t have it, he knows he can’t have it And you finally get him so that he actually can have things that make him unconscious, and then you get the Pacific Ocean all full of beer, and you get all the space between here and Arcturus completely full of phenobarbital, and he takes that, and the bank is just insatiable on this. There is a terrific desire for unconsciousness. And if you didn’t know this about this preclear, you would go on trying to make him more alert.
Communication depends upon a greater awareness and the ability to put out further space. And you take somebody whose entire ambition is tied up in being unconscious so that he won’t survive and you say, „Come on now, fellow, let’s have some more space.“ Oh no. No, he doesn’t want any of that That will make him survive!
Now, maybe you don’t see completely how this problem is idiotic. It’s even turned away at the present time to the extent where, although most people will vaguely admit that there is such a thing as a human spirit, and this in most of the lands of the world, it’s a sort of a disgraceful thing.
„Well, yes, when I was younger I went to church,“ they will always say. I don’t know quite what church has to do with this. I’ve been puzzled about this lately. But they will say this: „Yes, when I was younger I used to believe in this. But of course then I realized that…“
Scientific world today is tremendously interested in teaching people, teaching them, see, „There’s no such thing as a human soul. You understand that Of course, you can make up your own mind about it, students, but there really isn’t any such thing as a human soul. You know that.“
And if you were to go into a physics classroom and try to convince the students there that something existed in this universe which could manufacture energy without using other fuel, he would say, „It’s against the law of conservation of nature.“ And you could ask him in vain which Senate or House resolution or bill this was.
He would ask you, by the way, probably to change the mass of something by creating its energy, because he’s demonstrated many times that he can take time, space, energy, matter one way or the other and show you that they’re still there.
They have very cute experiments. They take something and burn it and trap all of its gases and ashes, and they weigh it before they burn it and they weigh it after they burn it and it weighs the same, outside of the moisture which has been lost through heat. And they demonstrate this conclusively: that matter cannot be destroyed.
And when you buy that one as a preclear or when your preclear buys that one as a preclear, the next time he tries to rub out this facsimile — brrww. Shocking.
But you go around and you find other people that just go whoo-whoo, and they’re all gone! All this energy is gone. But the fellow who really buys conservation of energy, he’s in a bad way, because he’s bought the fact that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be converted. And that’s what this universe would love you to believe. It’s really survival conscious; it’s going to survive in spite of anything. Its space is going to survive. The great protagonists of this universe advocate the fact that space is space is space is space. That’s their definition of space: space.
And „Space is space,“ and ‘Two things couldn’t occupy the same space.“ Korzybski. He’s wrong, unfortunately wrong. Two things can occupy the same space or one thing can be in two different spaces. But not in this universe. He didn’t add that He was a man of lots of words.
Now, when it comes to understanding life by studying the behavior of the MEST universe, it’s somewhat like learning all about cows by studying cowbells or something, because it doesn’t work out.
You don’t understand life by understanding mud. And the test for this is entirely empirical. I believe, thirty-five hundred years of written history, men have been trying to solve life by saying it was mud. And some guy decided that the human spirit, as advertised and sold in certain packages by certain organizations in the world, was not quite what the human spirit was, and that life did not necessarily have to be the material universe, and he decided that things didn’t necessarily have to be, and so he looked at the problem. And then all of a sudden you could change the mental attitude and physical attitude, to a large degree, of a human being. And up to that time, the changes were very limited. You could put him on a chopping block and cut his head off, and that sure changed him, but that was not considered nice.
Now, we look at all this and we find out that we’re involved with studying something which is nothing in this universe. And so, of course, it’s very hard to study. But that doesn’t say it’s nothing in every universe and that we just needn’t get so arbitrary about it. Just because we look around and we see one universe is no reason why we suppose that there’s only one universe.
You can immediately — can experience three universes. Immediately. There’s your universe, and you know that doesn’t necessarily agree with this universe. And if you look around at all, you will find out there’s probably somebody else in the world, and his universe doesn’t necessarily agree with your universe, or haven’t you ever had an argument? So, there’s three universes you can experience and three different kinds of ideas.
A mathematician can draw up a great many symbols which will represent all sorts of situations that wouldn’t apply to this universe. So, it is fairly safe to assume that we aren’t dealing with one universe or three universes, we’re probably dealing with a lot of universes. Fairly safe to assume such a thing. Much safer than to assume there are only one, three or two universes. See, that’s not a safe assumption. Was considered a safe assumption once.
A fellow by the name of Piazzi, I think it was, walked out and discovered the eighth planet He was careless. He had a telescope and he pointed it at the sky. And the world was running a wonderful cycle of „don’t look.“
I’ve forgotten who it was, I think it was Hegel. Hegel had just written a book proving conclusively the number of planets available in this solar system consisted of eight — seven. And here was somebody with the eighth. And he had proven conclusively „because seven is a mystic number and is a whole number and doesn’t factor itself,“ or something — that there could only be seven planets. And he proved this without looking. And Piazzi pointed a telescope up there and saw the eighth planet and reported it Everybody said, „We know there can’t be one. Hegel said there wasn’t any more. That’s that“ Do you know, it just took years for somebody else to find that eighth planet again.
It’s not a safe thing to do to say there is only one of anything, or that it is conclusively ended. Something always comes along. That can also apply to me, by the way. All right.
Let’s take a few of these elements of this universe and find out how it is that life, from whatever universe it is or whatever thing it is, how can it exist in this universe. It isn’t that life is this universe necessarily and it isn’t that life is coincident with this universe completely, but there must be something in common at least between life and this universe, otherwise they would never get together.
So life then must have some sort of an idea about time. First thing, it must have some sort of an idea about time, otherwise nobody would ever get anyplace at the same time or a lot of things — not that they ever do. But you wouldn’t get a general agreement on being there. You know, you wouldn’t have any present time if life, you see, wasn’t in some sort of an agreement about time.
Well, you’d never have anything coordinating with anything in terms of matter. For instance, electrons flowing and other things flowing have a terrific coordination in terms of time. So that life has a concept of time, and this MEST universe has a concept of time, and these two universes then can come into confluence because of the mutual concept of time. And we look a little bit further, and we say, „What is time?“
"Time is change in space." Well, that’s fine, but time must be running someplace. You ask anybody where tomorrow is, and you ask anybody where the future is, and he’ll tell you in this society, by the way, that it’s over here on the right side; down low and on the right side normally — that’s the future. And if you ask the Chinese, it would probably be over on the left This is established entirely by your reading habit that time has a location. Because the future of any book is over to the right, and you’re always reading into the future from left to right Time has no location.
But if you could consider the MEST universe as coordinated in its motions and these motions merely continuing, and if you could conceive of life not as a flowing mass or energy, if you could conceive of life as a sort of a pointer which hung over this change of motion… A pointer like this hung over this change of motion. Here’s the flow of change of the MEST universe. And life has a coordinated viewpoint on the flow of change, and life stands still and observes this change, instead of looking at it in reverse. Life, you see, is obviously the one thing which can mobilize MEST, so that one rather thinks of life’s concept as something that moves all around.
If you could see life as a single viewpoint on this coordinated change, you would get the idea of what a flow of time is. It doesn’t go anyplace, time doesn’t, it doesn’t move in any direction; it changes in its atomic structure, its particle structure and so on, and it’s just this consistent interchange. And as it changes life observes these changes and then life measures this as change and doesn’t move in space, but these things move in space, and you have a fairly good idea of what time is.
You could go into that and think about it for a while and it becomes very plain; there’s nothing much to that. But much more important than that is what in the name of common sense is space?
The utter conceit of any Greek (much less anyone from MIT) of using the word „space“ without saying what he meant anywhere in his own work, and using symbols for space in his mathematics without saying what space was, is a conceit which should have a monument built to it, real big monument Gutzon Borglum or somebody should build it.
Because this is as bad as a streetcar conductor driving a streetcar without knowing what one looked like. Yet they’ve had this beautiful idea that „Everybody must know what space is because we all agree that we know the word.“ Well, believe me, that’s not good enough, not half, and not for anything, because we know this word space: „It’s a hollow spot with indefinite boundaries,“ evidently. You read physics and study it for a while and you find out that’s what it is: it’s sort of a hollow spot with indefinite boundaries, in something.
So, going back in this problem, one was faced with something very horrible: he didn’t have a basic definition; that was astonishing. And this definition was said by the physicist to belong in psychology, and was said by the psychologist to be a problem of physics, and that was as far as it went. What’s space? Well, you had to solve — get some idea what space was. All right.
There was a missing basic definition: What is space? Boy, nothing easier. Space is a viewpoint of dimension, and that isn’t just mixing words up, because the second you use that definition you can actually just crack cases with that definition. It’s a viewpoint of dimension. That’s all it has to be. The Doctorate lectures cover this at great length. But here, we’re just concerned here with that awful simplicity. That’s a very stupid sort of a simplicity to say something is a viewpoint of dimension and we immediately know more.
Well, you can, of course, have several coincident viewpoints of several different dimensions, because life can make space with great ease, only life can make static space. Ah, something new — static space.
Why, the physicist knew all the time that he was working entirely with a static space; the physicist knew all about statics. We’ll get that — a moment He knew that space was static; this was nothing strange that a being could make static space; space was static. Or was it?
I wouldn’t like to go on very broad record saying this, because somebody might pick this up and build a bigger atom bomb. And we wouldn’t want that.
The funny part of space in this universe is, it is not static space. We’re not living in static space. The rate of creation of new space in this universe is — MEST universe — is probably one over c. New space. And that gives you apparent motion on the part of anchor points in a consecutive and continuous line.
You go back and throw this into the Einstein theory and it’ll work I mean, it’s fascinating, but here’s space. Space is going „new space, new space, new space,“ see? „New space, new space“; all the time new space, brand-new space.
And of course, in every brand-new space it’s a brand-new space because you have a change of position of particles. That’s why it’s new space: particles of light, which are the most fluent particles which we observe in this universe are traveling at a certain speed — particles of light. All right. At each new position they are a new anchor point And they assume a new position at a very high rate of speed, measured by themselves, with life viewing it.
Here is something which, to some degree, we get to an upper limit of understanding, because we say, „The speed of light is.“ You see? We say it’s 186,000 zum-zum-zum miles per second. That’s the speed of light But we’re saying „miles per second“ and the second we say „miles“ we’re talking about space.
But if we considered each particle creating new space every time there was new relative position amongst the particles — new relative position amongst the particles, you have a new space, you see? We would then see that space was being created at the rate each particle was moving.
Don’t look so lost It’s not important.
The only thing that’s important about it — if you want to build an atom bomb. Energy is the flow of particles, and energy condenses into matter and we’re off into the material universe again. We can have a wonderful time with this. But these particles are anchor points, so we get lots of relative spaces rather than a pack of anchor points. You see how this is?
Instead of saying we have this space which is full of anchor points which are all smashed together making a solid object, we’ll say this solid object is a bunch of relative spaces; makes more sense because it works better in processing.
But let’s get down here to the very, very important omission: to leave a fellow without any definitions was the dirtiest trick that heritage could do, and I’m going to get even with heritage sometimes.
I had a Book of Knowledge when I was two years of age; my father bought me a Book of Knowledge. I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it; I couldn’t lift one of the volumes. And there was a very, very beautiful young girl, I remember, on the cover plate of one of the volumes, and this beautiful young girl was reading probably a Book of Knowledge. And it said as the caption under that, „The Heir to the Ages.“ It should have been „heiress,“ but it was „heir.“ „The Heir to the Ages.“ And they disinherited me, because here were terrific essentials which didn’t seem to be present And the one that wasn’t present was the one that said it was absent, which was zero; there was no zero.
You know, everybody came along and they said, „Well, zero. You know what zero is. You want to flunk arithmetic? You better know what zero is. It’s a goose egg. And you put it down on a piece of paper. That’s all. And if you don’t know that, you’d better quit“ And that’s about all a mathematician knows what — about zero.
But mathematics unfortunately came into the picture immediately, because mathematics turns out to be a servomechanism of the human mind. Or the human mind — if a mathematician won’t agree with that, because mathematics are godly, we know that. So we’ll just put it this way: „Let’s make the human being a slave.“ The human mind is a servomechanism to all mathematics, because mathematics is something which man uses to solve problems; the human mind is that servomechanism to all these mathematics. Therefore and thereby and therein, let’s observe something once and for all, right now, that there isn’t any problem with that microphone, that there isn’t any problem with that glass of water, there is no problem with this platform, there’s no problem with these lights; with the management of the hotel there’s a problem, but not with the hotel. There’s no problem until there’s a mind there to conceive a problem about it Now, that’s a hard one, sometimes, to get home.
You go down and drive down the street and you realize there’s no problem about any one of those cars, but somebody comes along and tells you, „Well yes, one of those cars might run up over the curb and might run into another car and might smash the other car.“
You say, „Who is that a problem to?“
„It’s a problem to the drivers.“ They start to say, „It’s a problem to the cars.“ It’s no problem to those cars. Whether or not they break down, improve, have less gas consumption, more gas consumption or run across stubble fields, it’s no problem to them at all They never think about it; they just do it And if they break down and that’s the end of them, well, they have broken down and that’s the end of them; there’s no problem, in other words.
And you see neon lights flashing, and these neon lights say — I won’t put a commercial plug on here — let’s see, these neon lights say, well, „Coca-Cola.“ (That isn’t commercial anymore, that’s just highway robbery.)
You see this big sign down here, neon sign and it’s flash-flash-flash, „Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,“ you know — flash-flash-flash. And you say, „There’s no problem about that sign.“
Somebody would say, „Well, yes there is, it might go off! It might stop shining!“
You say, „That’s a problem to the sign, huh?“
„No. No. It’s not a problem to the sign. But it would be a problem to the fellow who maintained the sign!“
And you say, „He presumably has a mind.“
All of a sudden, the fellow starts to get a new viewpoint on MEST. This stuff doesn’t think.
The engineer loves to build up tubes and plug in sockets and oh boy, cranks and wheels and shiny dials and call it an ENIVAC or a UNIVAC or something less publishable. But when it comes to that machine solving problems, remember, that machine never solves a problem that isn’t fed to it A mind thinks of a problem and feeds it to the machine.
Yes, you could set the machine running so that it would go on solving problems endlessly and you could go on setting it so that it would go on solving problems endlessly on the basis of the fact that it had been set to solve problems endlessly, and it would hand out answers, but there would — not a single one of them would be what we classify a problem, because they all would have been started in concatenation by a fellow who combined some MEST and who set the machine running in the first place. And the answers would not be answers till somebody came along and read them. And then they would be answers.
But somebody says, „Well, they go into books and they’re published and they’re sent all over the place, and it’s all automatic, it’s all automatic, it’s all auto — – and we got to have everything automatic.“ But the point is, MEST doesn’t think.
So, this tells you immediately that there’s something wrong here with mathematics in general if they say, „Mathematics exist as mathematics, have always been mathematics, will always be mathematics, and are entirely independent“ — we all get down on our right knee at this moment — “and are entirely independent of the human race.“
Oh no, they’re not I saw an arithmetic textbook in a ruined cabin one time; been lying mere for years, hadn’t solved a problem all the time it was there.
So life takes these things in symbols, combines them, does things with them, changes them and creates problems with them. And if life immediately says, then, „Well, there must be a why to the reason MEST is running this way, and there must be a reason. There must be a reason.“
I could tell you what has more reasons than anything else that you know about at the moment The thing which has the most reasons is the human body. It’s got a reason for everything. Boy, it’s really got reasons!
And is it daffy! Oh, but it’s got lots of reasons. And these reasons, all added together, add up (if you want to run it back far enough) to what? The survival of something which can’t die. Hideous, huh?
Well now, let’s look at this mathematics, and we’ll realize that there is something else about mathematics. Mathematics are very strange. In the field of algebra, an algebra professor will be the first one to demonstrate to you that one equals zero. He’ll be the first one to tell you this, because he could prove it to you very proudly. He’ll write up his algebra equation and then say, „Well, of course, you divide anything by zero, and of course that makes an error.“
Does it always make the same error?
„No, because by dividing by zero you can always make one equals two.“ He could make two equal twenty by dividing by zero. Any time he divides by zero he gets a different answer. The jerk. It’s a wild variable!
There’s a gradient scale of zero, and any mathematical equation which unqualifiedly contains zero as zero is going to solve in different ways, and then we get quantum mechanics. That’s the safe and stable mathematics with which they are building the atom bomb.
Zero is a gradient scale.
All right, do you mean zero right now? All right, we mean zero right now, and zero — don’t write it down on a piece of paper, then, because the second you write it down on a piece of paper you’re writing zero for the future.
Is there always going to be a zero of apples on that table? I’m afraid you can’t guarantee that So, zero then becomes nonabsolute.
Have there ever been apples on that table? You can’t guarantee that either. But the second you say „a past zero“ you have a nonabsolute. Well, that’s just there.
Now, you mean a „zero of what“?
Well, a zero of nothing.
What’s nothing?
Well, it’s nothing of course; it’s not anything.
Well, if you want to say what’s not anything, you will have to say not anything past, present and future. Whoo! We have an unobtainable goal. And we got a wonderful maybe, yes. All right.
We’ve got zero, then, something else. Zero where?
And therefore, if a mathematician wrote „nonlocated zero, geographically located zero,“ if he put it on a piece of paper which was going to be moved, it would become a variable, because a zero to be zero would not have any geographical location. None. That would be a real zero, so any time he says, „A zero of apples on the table,“ there’s still something there; there’s a point on the table.
And therefore, zero is a wild variable in all mathematics. That would be very disheartening for a mathematician to realize that, because he’s been pinning his faith for years — at least he had zero.
Now, what’s that got to do with us? Well, we find out that life to this universe represented zero but didn’t behave like zero should. He had no location, no wavelength, had no time element in itself; it didn’t have any mass, and we examined it and we found a theoretical, absolute zero, as far as this universe was concerned. But this didn’t mean that it didn’t have a somethingness elsewhere. It has a nothingness here, and in this universe it begins to identify itself with space.
The first thing with which a spirit identifies itself is space, so the space has nothing in it so the being thinks he is nothing. And that’s your first identification and he starts off from there, and of course, he isn’t there from there on after.
This, in short, was the heritage with which one started to solve the problem: life as a function and behavior in a society which did not know what time was, space was, energy, zero or mathematics. And this is a very poor heritage for a physicist to start out on.
Well, I don’t say I’ve solved these things. I’ve merely pointed out some of their idiosyncrasies and have succeeded in divorcing us from a great deal of superstition, because the one thing that happens, as far as we can find out, when a person can’t look, he has to think. And a person who does an awful lot of thinking isn’t looking. And the person who does the most thinking is crazy.
And if we want people to be happy, we’ve got to get them to a point where they can see, because this stuff doesn’t bite; doesn’t bite them. Might hurt their shins.
And we find out such astonishing things — that work is desirable; that’s fascinating. Nobody in America would believe that. Work is desirable, pain is desirable, impacts are desirable. Action of anything, any characteristic is intensely desirable. And so, some of these weird things about life begin to explain themselves.
And how do we find out about this?
Well, we just look.
We have processes which bring a person up from thinking about it to looking at it And the second he looks at it, why, it all blows away, all the clouds and worries and doubts, anxieties which he had.
But believe me, he can think of enough reasons about enough problems to avoid looking for an awful long time. And I think he’s avoided it very successfully that — for forty-five hundred years mat I know about, and I have been trying to figure out ways and means of breaking the habit of not looking.
And if all we did with these processes, if all we did with these processes was to make better drivers, we would still have reason to be here, because all the drivers on the highway are busy thinking. Ooh!
Knowledge is an instinctive truth, really, and one never figured himself in any direction but deeper into another problem.
If you want to know, Me, in its purest sense, knows pervasively and instinctively, and you don’t find out about knowing by thinking, you find out about knowing by being able to look.
And the first stage is you know how to look and then you become free enough so that you know. And it’s the most elementary problem in the world, idiotically elementary. And that was why nobody ever wanted to solve it Nobody wanted to solve the problem, because nobody wanted to look like an idiot As a matter of fact, it is as much as a man’s pride is worth to solve this problem. All right.
There are the various elements. We have a life which approximates zero in this universe, which is busy surviving, madly surviving and hoping nobody will recognize the thing that it can’t do is die.
But a thetan can do all sorts of things in going upscale and downscale and sometimes getting down to a low, low level, that it just can’t bring itself back up again. But it’s still surviving in spite of the fact that it’s at that very, very low level, it’s still surviving.