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CONTENTS The Logics: Methods of Thinking

The Logics: Methods of Thinking

A Lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 4 December 1952

First hour of try night, December the 4th, we’re going to cover here the logics. The last evening lectures I covered these Qs.

All right, the logics are something which evidently apply quite broadly and uh… are not necessarily fixed for all universes but are quite general to universes and are certainly very specific for this universe. Logics would consist of methods of thinking. There could be many, many methods of thinking.

You take the decimal system. Uh… the decimal system is a method of thinking about object;, and particles, and so on. And it says if you take ten of them and then multiply them by ten all you have to do is add another zero. Uh… that’s a very fascinating system and this has a great deal of argument, however, from something I think is called the sept-signal system, which I think is by twelves or something like that. Sixes, twelves, and so forth; they claim this is a much, much better numerical system.

It goes along so and so and does such and such. And the odd part of it is, is it forms a different structure of logic. So you could change logic by changing the basic postulates on which the logic is based.

You could simply say, you could simply say, now it is logical to state the plus and the minus of a thing, and that is all you should state, the plus and minus of the thing. Plus you should never state the plus without stating the minus. And that is going to be logic.

Now we would say something like that, you get something interesting about — the logical statement will be: I think I would like to eat dinner, perhaps I will not. And that would be a reasonable statement, and that would be a universe called maybe. A universe… a universe in which homo sapiens is quite at home.

All social intercourse is apparently a long series of maybes. You know, you say, „How do you do? I don’t care how you do.“ „Would you have something to eat? I hope you won’t eat too much.“ Except the second maybe in social intercourse is never stated.

So it’s a long series of maybes and if you want to find somebody who’s been very very social for a long time you will find out his ARC relationships lie all in a ball. All wound up in one small tight ball, because everyone of them has got a plus on it and a minus on it, and the minus is never stated.

Now in view of the fact that Scientology is the science of knowing how to know, we have to have some definition of knowledge. Now these logics as they are written here have to be rewritten slightly for the echelon of Scientology in which we are operating, which is to say the make-break of universes.

This is very very true of homo sapiens, these logics, but they have to be refined just a little bit in order to fit them into a wider category.

Logic one is knowledge as a whole group. There are lists of these around, in these various books. Knowledge as a whole group or subdivision of a group of data or speculations or conclusions on data or methods of gaining data. That pins knowledge down as data. And that’s true for homo sapiens. And that is true for the type of logic homo sapiens uses.

That does not happen to be the highest level of knowledge. The highest level of knowledge is the potential of — it’s an action definition — the potential of knowing how to know. And that consists of simply the potential of knowing how to know. I’m sorry, but that’s all there is to it. And how do you know? Well, in order to know how to know you have to be free to postulate knowledge. And the freedom to postulate knowledge creates the data which then arranges itself as bodies of knowledge. So, you want to know what your highest echelon of knowledge possibly could be, it would probably be complete freedom to make the postulate to form any… any datum or group of data without even making the postulate to do so.

And that, that would be knowing how to know, so logic… logic one should be rewritten: Knowing how to know is the definition of the highest level of knowingness. And that the level of knowingness is the freedom to state a postulate which then can become knowledge. Now that’s very simple.

Logic two, a body of knowledge is a body of data aligned or unaligned or methods of gaining data. Well, that’s… that’s interesting too. That just simply says it’s a… a body of knowledge could consist of one postulate or two postulates. And that’s all. And that would be a body of knowledge and if they were stated from… for this universe, they have to be two. And they were stated… they have to be two to be a unit. I’ll explain that a little later. Uh… but, then… then a body of data could be any two data to make a com… a very complete workable body of knowledge.

Now, let… let’s have a whole body of knowledge. Now let’s think one up, let’s think real hard for earth here. Let’s postulate good and evil. Now let’s postulate from good and evil enough other data to make a full body of knowledge which would be very satisfying. Let’s think in a nice wide curve here. We say good and evil. That can lead in two directions.

That can lead to God and the devil, complete bodies of knowledge. But those are sub-bodies of knowledge to the body good and evil. Now on the other side of it — justice and injustice — and what do we get? We get the church and the state — that’s immediately descending from the postulate that two things can exist called good and evil. Now we say what is good? We could be Aristotelian and say: Good is something which isn’t evil, and what is evil? Evil is something which is not good.

Now we can have a universe in which all things good were purple and all things bad were magenta. So that people would get snarled up between the two when they were a little color-blind and that would cause randomity.

In this universe we have more or less conceived that good is white and black is evil. So we get the black and white and good and evil and we really get the opening of aesthetics. Now we’ve got church, state and the arts, proceeding from one set of postulates.

See, that becomes a body of knowledge. Now we’ll just… we’ll just put bric-a-brac on these things. And hang all sorts of bric-a-brac in various directions. We’ll put all the speculations of Martin Luther and uh… confront these with the speculations of Sigmund Freud. And uh… we’ll mess that up with Bismarck’s attitudes and throw in the writings of Machiavelli, sort them very nicely into one big bin of scrambled facts and you have the humanities.

Uh… first we have then this… that’s a body of knowledge. But don’t, in Scientology now at this time, confuse the potentiality to make a postulate with data. Because the two are not related. The two can be connected, but just because one has the potentiality of making a postulate which then can become a body of knowledge does not mean that one has to make a postulate.

He might never make the postulate but this doesn’t. take away from him the right to make a postulate. So a body of knowledge, we might have… this fellow might have a… a whole great big pile of whuf — a huge pile of whuf and there it is. And never do a single thing about it. He’s got it. Other people could come along and say, „Well, why don’t you whuficate that stuff.“ But it wouldn’t matter a darn whether he did or not. He’s… he’s got the whuf.

Now that is a much lower echelon than not having anything. Not having anything is about as high as you can get. You know the old Chinese legend that the uh… the uh… head of a Chinese state or the emperor or his chamberlain or somebody had a daughter and the daughter is very, very ill and the doctors all got around — they were members of the American medical Association. They all got around and they said, „Well, you’ll have to cover them with the shirt of a happy man, and wh… that is our equivalent of penicillin. We’ve made a postulate that that exists and uh… have to find the shirt of a perfectly happy man and put that upon her and your daughter will then be well.“

And so the chamberlain and the king called in all these couriers and messengers, sent them north, east, south and west, and they all rode and rode and rode and batches of them started coming back all footsore and weary and… and with their horses caved in and they hadn’t been able to find a happy man and she was just about to expire and… and the last… the last doctor was being hanged and in came the last messenger and he looked at the king or the chamberlain or whoever it was and he says, „I did find a happy man,“ and very eagerly because the last breaths were just coming out of the girl by that time.

The King says, „Well, give me…“ and the fellow said, „He didn’t have a shirt.“ So you see, there is… there’s a large difference though between… you see the reason man’s, by the way, never been able to resolve that little lesson, the reason he’s never been able to resolve it, is because he considered himself potentially what he was, was something that didn’t have to have, didn’t have to want, and so he knew very well that the way to be perfectly happy was to have nothing — no objects, which didn’t give you any time. And you could sit down on a pink cloud and there you were. And you could just be serene. You could be serene for just ages and ages and ages. So what do we have? We have a fellow down tone scale who is in the situation of having to want. He is running a body. He has responsibilities added up in his society which consist of families, and employers, and pieces of MEST in general, other pieces of MEST and he’s got to work, in other words, in order to keep a supply line going because he’s in a time track because he’s got objects already running.

And now we tell that fellow, now we try to tell him this philosophy: well, the happy man is the fellow who has nothing. Boy, he sure knows you’re wrong. He knows he’d only really be happy if he had this twenty-eight room house and nineteen hot and cold running servants and he… he’d only be really happy if he had these things.

And yet, yet, uh… if he gets those things he just reduces himself that much further to MEST. So he’s on a cycle which is very difficult to interrupt for him without knowing how to know. If he doesn’t know how to know, he cannot interrupt the cycle of having to want. Because having to want procures and procurement has to be selective between procuring what is desirable and not procuring what is not desirable.

And one begins to make this selection back and forth this way and that, and he gets to have more that he doesn’t want and want more that he doesn’t have and his confusion on this line gets to be such finally that he is MEST and that’s the bottom of the actual cycle, to be an object.

So the object of that sort of thing is to be an object. Well, you try to tell him about… about this thing — the way to have is to be happy is to not to Have and that sort of thing; he knows you’re nutty. Now a Hindu has a terrifically workable lot of data lurking in the midst of a terrific lot of very treacherous data.

And so you get a rustic, a fakir, or a yogi low level sitting on a bed of spikes to discipline the body and telling himself, „I am training myself not to have and by this I shall ascend to and rise to the highest of controls and nirvanas.“ And there he sits with a body.

Now you can talk about playing tricks on a fellow — he’s playing tricks on himself; he… he’s got something that has to want continually and here he sits with something that does and he says at the same time, „I will be only… I will only be happy if I do not have and therefore I must deny everything.“ And so he gets where? He gets on a maybe. And it’s from that datum it can be said that the very confusing quality of Indian practices arise.

He knows by instinct that he’d be happiest if he didn’t have, and he’s still holding on to something because he doesn’t know how to get rid of it completely. He’s holding on to something that has to want. And so he’s on a maybe. And he gets: „Is God there? Isn’t God there? Am I in communication with Him? Am I not in communication? What things are around me? Is it true or is it false or what is or what isn’t?“ and on this big maybe he rides himself right on in. It’s no joke; I’ve known a lot of those boys.

Logic three: any knowledge that can be sensed, measured, experienced by any entity is capable of influencing that entity. Too true. Just too true. This is, by the way, an interesting logic in that… in that it is aimed right straight at a fellow by the name of uh… I think it’s Kant. Uh… I guess it’s an impossible name like that… and with a name like that you’d sure expect that he wouldn’t be able to. And he sure couldn’t.

Now that’s our friend Kant and that’s… all knowledge that is worth having will be found to be beyond the bounds of human experience. So you better quit right here at this barricade, fellow, because us scholastics have got it all nailed down. We got a machine gun and barbed wire across here and anything that’s worth having is over here and this is the last outpost toward it, and if you try and pass it we’re going to fix your crock.

For a hundred and sixty-two years that philosophy pervaded Western philosophy and monitored it to such a degree that today you go out in Podunk and down on Ray Street and ask people offhand; you say, „Now what, what would you think of somebody who would dare to investigate the actual beingness and soul of man?“

„Oh, you mustn’t do that. No, that’d be very, very bad, because if you found out there’d be no more universes or something.“ Now, that’s the… that is the… I think that’s called transcendental logic or realism or something; it’s wonderful stuff.

Any datum worth having, then, is beyond man’s power to know. And that is sure enough sheer by the bucketful class A quality hogwash. It’s not true, it never has been true because it states that in this universe a one-way flow can exist. It says you can never backlash up a communication line and that’s sure wrong. There isn’t a piece of wire in any electronics laboratory nor a piece of MEST anywhere in any planet, not a piece of space manufactured anywhere in this universe which will not conduct both ways.

Now that engineers can figure them and figure them, and rig them and rig them and rig them but they still won’t get one that will put up one hundred percent butterfly valves along the whole length of it. If you pour juice in that way, there can juice go back that way again. That’s the wrong way to think about it, that there can be a one-way flow.

They’d have you think that this… and we are the puppets of some sort of a monitoring agency which could command us and affect us and influence us and yet we would never be able to contact nor experience the puppet master. Well, to hell with the puppet master.

That is the philosophy. I hope no man ever falls into that trap because it blocked human thought and human progress. Philosophy became completely abandoned as a subject. Would you believe it that even at this moment, this subject has been in existence for… more or less for two and a half years, and even at this moment they still give a Doctor of Philosophy degree in universities which demands only this of the student: that he know what philosophers have said. Now that’s incredible; if you had a Doctor of Philosophy you would expect a Doctor of Philosophy to be able to philosophize.

And a person… the professors of those courses would just be shocked beyond shock if you dared come in and infer that the end and goal of their students should be the production of philosophy. No sir, that’s how you keep a society static.

This society… this society actually was penalized to an enormous degree by that block on the philosophic line. It’s much more intimate to thee and me than you would suppose, because in the field of science they long since learned that in the natural study of use of natural law and the exactness of the agreements which had been made, that an enormous number of effects could be produced.

And since Immanuel Kant, assembly line rifles, automobiles, assembly line machine guns, rapid-firing naval cannon, steel ships, aeroplanes, atom bombs and H-bombs have been invented without what happening in philosophy? Just… just a dead blank. Now if somebody had been actually with some… some sensitivity that we shouldn’t really override the humanities just because we have a clear road here…

There ought to be some other road in the field of humanities there. There ought to be some parallel track. We haven’t got a society that knows anything about these things.

Well, what are we doing? We got atom bombs around here and there’s no danger with the control of an atom bomb. All you’ve got to do is push a button and there’s no danger about it. If you don’t push the button it won’t explode, and if you do push the button it will explode; the control of the atom bomb is an assured fact. It’s utterly certain that if you push a button of an atom bomb it’s going to blow. So you… there’s no danger or trouble with control of nuclear fission.

The boys have done a very good job, but how do you control the human being who pushes the button? And so we get Uncle Joe, uh… Uncle Joe and other characters around that may rush around, and they think the hottest way to do this to to make a… a secret society out of atomic science, as their first answer.

Now we’ve got to have a sort of an atomic police and none of this data can get out in any way, shape or form; and we’ve got to throw the barricades down, not just on trade but on the free knowledge of science which should circulate amongst all lands and which itself is the best guarantee of peace.

So not only do we produce the ultimate weapon but we produce at the same time a new barricade. Science is out of circulation with science today. And it’s going further and further out. Now that’s very interesting. An imbalance like that has been happening almost by the square. It is happening with a rush. We’re seeing the fruition of all of that misconcept at this time.

Actually, the only real danger an atom bomb is as far as thee and me are concerned is simply that somebody might bust loose with one of the doggone things and cost us some time, that’s all. We’ve got a spielplatz here called Earth and… and uh… uh… it’s… it’s… we need it for a short time and they keep trying to mess up the playing field.

I’m trying to do something about it, but not… not a bad sad hope either.

All right, that knowledge which cannot be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity or type of entity cannot influence that entity or type of entity.

If nobody to date has been able to actually spot with a meter the existence of commands from a Supreme Being… you see, he’s got no reason or right to keep insisting that people receive commands from a Supreme Being. He has no reality on it. He… he couldn’t… he couldn’t get a good agreement on this except on a stampede basis. It cannot be scientifically established the geographical location of a fellow by the no… name of the Supreme Being, MEST universe. That can’t be established.

A lot of fellows been trying that. This does not say that there aren’t such things as gods and makers of gods. But it does say that this cardboard thing-a-ma-bob that they sell by painting signs on the rocks probably isn’t sending out anything for us to experience at all.

Why? We can’t measure it. That’s a heck of an arbitrary scale, isn’t it? Well, the dickens it is. We’ve been able to measure everything else. In absence of that we’ve been driven to this incredible length. In absence of trying to find a Supreme being for this universe, why we’ve been driven to the incredible length of having to discover that uh… uh… probably the mostest god you’ll ever know is you in this universe and uh… for lack of a… lack of a nice big fellow who anthromorphically sits on a throne and uh… has a greed for adulation which would be found disgusting in any mortal (I’m quoting the Greeks now. The sources of Christianity, Plato, the great pagan, he’s their sole reason for authority). Anyway, didn’t you know that, that Christianity is based upon the writings of Plato, and the Catholic Church at all times when challenged about its doctrines has uniformly referred to the authority called Plato? You understand I’m not… not in any way, sense or form against the Church. I think the Church is a good organization. But we got a better one now.

Now there’s something else that goes with that which I ought to say to an auditor. He’s going to discover more half-known thing-a-ma-bobs and what-nots in preclears with this stuff than he cares to count up.

If he had one of these Chinese things that does addition in incredible numbers — I think it’s above an ENIAC in the number of figures it will carry or something — he would not be able to count off in a career of one year of auditing and Dianetics all the screwball things that he will run into and it’s a very, very good thing, a very good thing, to go along the line of what you actually know as a certainty and to lay off in receiving communication from your preclear and in trying to establish this, that and the other thing about the preclear, what you cannot discover as a certainty.

The E-Meter is a fair certainty of establishment. When your preclear starts to tell you that he is immediately in connection with the upper, higher key of the left-hand side of Betelgeuse, when he tells you this and says that he has positive information that you are about to be wiped out at thirteen-thirty o’clock, you say, „Okay, now let’s get a mock-up of…“

I told you when the class began about that thing about the Prince of Darkness. That’s routine. Sure, sure, there’s all types of odds and ends of communications that are coming through and being taped onto your preclear. But, you’re underestimating the power of thee, you’re just completely underestimating it. Nothing can tamper with you unless you agree to permit it to. And there is no stronger law in this universe really than that, as far as protection is concerned.

If you start saying this is destructive it can only then become so. Now, people can be hit with force because they have agreed that force is destructive and only then can force hit them. That person who has not agreed upon the destructivity of force would theoretically be untouchable by it.

We tell this story. I ran this out of a preclear one time. Didn’t run it out of a preclear, preclear told me about running it.

Way back on the first area of track… there are three areas to these tracks, you know, for each person. There is thetan plus thetan, there is thetan versus bodies. And then there’s bodies versus bodies. And you can divide the track roughly into those sections. The earliest portion of it is thetan versus thetan, the middle portion of it is thetan versus bodies and the latter portion of it is, of course, bodies versus bodies.

Now that means that if you’re looking for basic-basic on DEDs and DEDEXs and so on, you’re going to find them rather uniformly on thetan versus thetan, not thetan versus bodies.

Although, blanketing is a very easy place to go to. You have to know that on mock-ups by the way. It’s a lot more beneficial to take a couple of lighted electric light bulbs and turn them on and off and have the preclear smashing them together and breaking them and doing that sort of thing than it is to have the preclear doing the things with spots of lights on the body.

Well anyway, way back on the track… he is sitting there doing nothing and life was interesting to him and very pleasant and a bunch of thetans came around, about a hundred thetans, and said, „Do you know that you can’t fight a hundred thetans?“

„Aw go on, I’m not interested in fighting a hundred thetans, go on your way.“ And they tried to flip energy at him and of course he wouldn’t tune up to the energy; he didn’t think it was dangerous — it was just going right on by him and he wasn’t paying any attention to it. And they said, „Well, how do you know you can’t fight a hundred thetans? Why don’t you try to… you haven’t convinced us that you can’t fight a hundred thetans.“ Well, this got him kind of sore, which is the trick.

And uh… they got him to turn on so he would start blocking energy and then about a hundred thetans started dive bombing him with force beams and so forth, and started running around and around and he’s very successful at the first part of the battle; he’s knocking them left and right and then all of a sudden why of course he’s not. So he goes running around after that telling all the thetans he’d run into and so forth, „Do you know that you can’t fight a hundred thetans?“

Well, it’s an incredible thing now there that… that gives you an example. Let’s say you’re sitting there and your preclear says, „You know ah anama and I da da and I was da da and these Venusian psychiatrists and so on and it’s just going to happen to you any minute and uh… so on,“ or „We should get into contact with this,“ so on. Why, give me then the modern equivalent of „Go over it again“: „Let’s get another mock-up on this now,“ because uh… if you say, „They are? What? By golly, you know, maybe you can’t fight a hundred thetans; I’ll have to find out“ — because these characters don’t have a MEST entrance point immediately handy.

Just remember that, they don’t have a MEST entrance point. So deal in certainties. Deal in certainties. Know only that you know and go on from there. And when you know that you know, why operate. Work on that data. That also tells you that you should separate data out into various bins.

You take these bins and… and you… you can have, say you have several bins, and it’d be a gradient scale. You say, „All right, and we partially know about this and we know a little more about that and we don’t know anything about this over here on an evaluation of data; we haven’t got anything to measure this up to, but this we can correlate and coordinate and work with pretty well, now what part of it as we’re working is the most valuable to us?“

It is always that portion of it of which you were the most certain. Now that is a conservative way of looking at things in one way, at one… in one direction it’s a conservative method of looking at something but actually it isn’t. I consistently have done this trick in investigation. I’ve taken all the maybes and thrown them out the window and hung onto a few certainties.

And then with those few certainties looked for some more certainties and then evaluated again and thrown out any less certain thing that was there and I’ve gone straight on through in that wise. That meant that you couldn’t work with MEST universe what is laughingly called data — and so this work is not a product of MEST universe data, but it’s an investigation of the track of the MEST universe. All right, an investigation of its track alone would be the same in the investigations as it would be with the auditor.

The investigation is a parallel to an investigation that’s being carried on with an auditor, and every preclear is an adventure. They all have their differences, some of them are wilder than others, some of them more interesting than others. But in every one of them you are examining, first, a member of a universe in which you are also an inhabitant and, primarily, you are looking at a universe.

And that universe itself might be very strangely constructed. You’re not even vaguely interested in how that universe is really constructed, only insofar as how that structure has been knocked to pieces and its functions disrupted by an agreement level of which you have a very adequate track.

So deal with certainties, not with uncertainties. Be sure that you’re sure and operate. That doesn’t mean that you have to have 100% absolute certainty in order to operate, just take the one that comes closest to it in your estimation and work with it. If you knew eight techniques, let’s say, and you were darn certain of technique two, you would do much better to take this technique two and operate with it than you would be to try to operate with all eight.

You know, I ran into a fellow one time who was learning how to play the piccolo. And he was playing piccolo for the band. And he was just learning how to play this piccolo and I kept hearing this excruciating noise. It would go on all evening. So I found this fellow who was making this noise, and he was making this noise with his piccolo and what was he doing? All evening long he would hold one note until he was absolutely sure of that note. And he was sooner or later then going to be absolutely sure of every note on that piccolo. And he got to be a pretty good piccolo player. That’s kind of cautious!

A lot of the difference between speeds in people is that some people have more certainties than others. Two people can get to the same goal really at different times — one simply holds onto his certainties and examines them longer than another.

Now a person who’s trying to succumb will take the most uncertain data he has and use that. He’ll use that for all of his thinking processes and everything else. When he gets so far down the tone scale anything that has got an uncertainty principle to it, he’ll use. He won’t use any certainties.

You as an auditor just reverse the process and you’ll bring him up tone scale. That’s why these people float around with maybes all the time. They’d actually rather have a maybe than a certainty. And you start him going up the tone scale and you’re just finding more and more certainties.

This… this raving psychotic may be confronting you if you’re unfortunate enough to process psychotics and uh… uh… these techniques work on them. But uh… here… here he… he is… he’s raving around about this and raving around about that, and he appears to be quite certain.

Lord knows he may be apathetic about it or wild enough about it, but if you question him even vaguely about this thing, you… you shake up what little certainty he’s been able to accomplish on this terrific uncertainty in which he’s sitting. He’s not even certain of anything, truth is.

Well, the wrong way to treat him is to challenge what he’s got because he’s really got what’s to him a pretty good level of certainty. But he will go away from any big certainty because he’s headed down scale toward MEST and the mostest you can say about MEST is maybe.

MEST is plus-negative and in confusion and chaos. And so it’s the big… biggest maybe there is, is MEST. So let’s go up scale with this psycho and let’s find out the least thing of which he can be certain, with confidence and complete certainty, and it will break a maybe.

And you can just… if you follow that principle, not running engrams or anything else, but just follow that principle as a general operating principle with psychotics, you’ll watch cases breaking with psychotics — bong, bong, bong.

I haven’t any uh… qualms much about treating them. I hate to advise auditors to treat them for the good reason that psychotics are very hard to re… they’re quite restimulative when you approach them in a body. You can approach them without a body, just take your perceptic band off and just let it go through, don’t put up screens. That just builds up a stop and you get glee of insanity all over it. Horrible stuff.

Well, anyway, you take him up scale in certainties. If you have a raving psychotic you can at last say, you can at last say to him, he can recognize a MEST object, or he can recognize you, or he can recognize a window catch. You can just say to him sometime, „Is there anything in this room that is real to you?“

„No.“ Yeah, no.

What you’ve done is make him hold on to two new anchor points, and then post something in the room. And he’ll all of a sudden look around and he’ll say, „The light switch… the light switch, yeah, that’s really a light switch.“ Now he can go from there to „That’s a window. That’s a washstand. This is a bed. That’s a floor.“ Don’t think he’s just chattering. This guy is in momentary ecstasy of certainties.

You’ve managed to direct his attention just enough up level to let him find and locate — what? An object by anchor point coordinates. And you just let him locate himself. And he’ll locate himself; he’ll find his hands, and his legs, and stuff like that. He’ll locate himself. He’ll get himself right back into present time, if you don’t suddenly think you have to get fancy and if you don’t think you have to get more learned that that. Really there’s nothing more learned to know about psychotics.

Because you have to give them reality. What’s reality? You have to get them back into some sort of an agreement with something because they’re out of agreement with everything. You can even get a psychotic over, by the way, into his own universe, or you can get him into an agreement with you.

One of the oddest ways to get a psychotic over something is to get him into an agreement that something is what it isn’t. Don’t just keep agreeing with his… his… he says… he says, „That’s a hobbyhorse,“ and it’s obviously the windmill and so forth. Direct his attention someplace else; he’s got an identification on that windmill and he’s giving you the wrong name for it.

Get him over, mock him up an illusion, say „Do you see this little man, no, no, do you see this little man here?“ The guy will mock up a little man there for you, see? Maybe he’ll look at the one you’re mocking up and uh… he’s liable to say, „Yeah, yeah, I see that little man.“ Now you’d think you were leading him right straight off into hallucination and delusion; that wouldn’t be the case at all.

You say, „All right, do you see the little man jump?“

„Sure.“ Yeah, he’ll agree with you, yeah. You’ve got a point of agreement. Takes two to make some universe like this one.

Now, what is a datum? Logic four, a datum is a facsimile of states of being, states of not being, actions or inactions, conclusions or suppositions in the physical or any other universe. Too wide, a little bit too wide a definition. Let’s modify that definition by this: It’s a datum resulting from a postulate.

We’ve got a postulate, you know, up in the Q’s. Now let’s just say a datum is something that results from a postulate; can be an idea, a thought, or anything else. We don’t have to put that in terms of energy, because postulates are things that govern a large order of activity and any part of that order of thought or activity could be a datum, couldn’t it? And it does not have to be stated that it is engraved upon energy and that is the definition of a facsimile.

It’s not engraved upon energy. This is true for this universe but it is not true for all universes. What’s a datum? A datum is anything which proceeds from a postulate. You say this room is yellow throughout. You made a postulate. You’ve said a postulate — you’ve already said there is a room, space, coordinates, location and so forth — is yellow throughout and uh… now we get a datum, that wall is yellow. That’s a datum. Uh… those walls are so far apart, and so on. You see you’re… you’re making comments and classifications and gradient scale data proceeding out of basic data. Very… it’s a good way of looking at it. None of these terms are absolute.

All right, five, a definition of terms is necessary to the alignment, statement, resolution, of suppositions, observations, problems, and solutions and their communications. Here’s a whole matter of definition. Definition is taken up so beautifully and expertly by Count Alfred Korzybski that it is very difficult to improve in any way upon his classifications of definitions or his understanding of definitions.

Somebody said it a little shorter than Korzybski, uh… Voltaire — if you would argue with me, define your terms, and uh… Korzybski is speaking in the main about this universe, he’s using that reference point, and he is in the main working in an effort to gain a therapy which he never gains. The therapy intended in General Semantics, it would be the therapy resulting from any education, but an enforced discipline of forcing people to stop and think for a moment about this and that just to communicate better, puts a stop on the line. So it isn’t a therapy; it’s educational in its therapy level. It is not a process or a therapy which they tried to make of it and which it failed on.

But it was too bad that they did that because it is what it is… it’s uh… a dissertation and a very wonderful piece of work on the subject of definition. But we put down here… this is not particularly an agreement or disagreement with that. I don’t think Korzybski himself would disagree with these. He might even have a little fun with them.

Definition, a descriptive definition is one which classifies by characteristics by describing existing states of being. That would mean this is a table. Uh… this is a table. Uh… it has a flat top. And uh… it has uh… legs. And uh… it sits on things. Of course, that also… that also describes numerous things. That’s a descriptive definition, but that’s true of any descriptive definition that after you’ve described and described and described why, you still don’t have any great clarity on the thing. Even if you take a drawing of a rhinoceros you’re liable to get a unicorn.

Uh… the descriptive definition is very limited. A differentiative definition is one which compares unlikeness to existing states of being or not being. We say this is a table. Why is it a table? It is not a chair. Why is it a table? It is not a box. Why is it not a box? A box has no legs.

And we could say this has legs and a box doesn’t have legs, therefore it’s not a box. And we keep saying what this is not. The most wonderful fellow in the world on this is the German. The German can go on with this and on and on and on with this, of describing something by saying what it is not.

And actually there’s a system of Germanic logic which runs like this: it is not, it is not, it is not, and it can t, it can t, it can’t. They’ve proven those points and then they simply assume this about it. That’s a gorgeous piece of… piece of logic. They say it… it… it isn’t and it isn’t and it isn’t and it can’t and it can’t and it can’t and they’ve described what it isn’t like and what its disabilities are, and then they they say that’s all that’s left. And you say woooo.

They… they’ve just got through assuming with typical Teutonic conceit that they have just exhausted all possibilities here. They… they’ve insisted that they’ve exhausted all possibilities of unlikeness and inability and therefore conclude an ability. And Germanic philosophy is full of this sort of thing. My God, if you do that you can prove one equals zero and two equals ten and that one over the square root is the acceleration of gravity. You can prove anything if you do that.

So an associative definition is one which declares a likeness to existing states of being or not being. So you say that’s a table, it’s pretty well like a… it’s like a… well, it’s like a big table and uh… it’s like a chair except it’s not so high as a chair and a chair has a back, and so on, just go on like that. Now an action definition would be one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, inexistence, action, inaction, purpose or lack of purpose. And that’s very interesting. Although it sounds sort of garbled as you read it there.

Boil it down to this, boil it down to this. What that thing’s trying to say is simply this: here, here we have the classifications of insanity of Kraepelin. It’s actually Crap-lin but I… audiences snicker when I say that, for some reason or other. He worked an awful lot, long ago, and he made this terrific classification of psychotic states.

The Germans are morbidly interested in this sort of thing. And he goes on and on and on and on and on; he says there’s this state and that state and there’s this state and that state and this state and that state and woah rah, page after page after page. And then finally, having exhausted all states and having said so, he gets to the last classification and he says all other classifications are unclassified and so fall here.

This is the most gorgeous, by the way, piece of classification that has ever been done. And it hasn’t any use. Its level of use is demonstrated by the fact that there’s a place by the name of Walnut Lodge. I… I… They don’t see anything humorous in that, by the way; it’s Walnut Lodge. And that’s a spinbin down the line here. And uh… Walnut Lodge has… has… treats only… only uh… psychiat… oh uh… pardon me I… I said that accidentally, not as a gag, uh… uh… not as a gag.

They… they… they sent three people to see, to… to see me and every one of them was under treatment. And this was their staff. But anyway, very good people there, I’m sure, didn’t happen to meet any. Have some fine patients though. Anyway, they… they treat only schizophrenia. And so they take only schizophrenics. Now how do they get only schizophrenics? Well, anybody sent to Walnut Lodge is a classified schizophrenic. And they take somebody who is a dementia praecox unclassified or a more modern definition, a mania-depressive and they take him from Saint Elizabeth’s and they take him over to Walnut Lodge and he goes onto the books as a schizophrenic.

Why? Because Walnut Lodge takes only schizophrenics. Now you can look at them and you say, „Now wait a minute, let’s go over this awfully slow,“ you say, „What’s a schizophrenic?“

„A schizophrenic? We take schizophrenics here.“

You say, „No, no, no, what is a schizophrenic?“

„You know what a schizophrenic is,“ they say, „a schizophrenic is a general type of insanity and so when we take schizophrenics here that ends the whole thing.“

Actually, the modern definition of schizophrenia… actually the American psychiatrist does not define schizophrenia from its root word of shizoid or schizoid, meaning scissors-like, and it means a split personality. And you think that a schizophrenic today is a split personality person? That’s not true. It hasn’t anything to do with… it’s… I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. I go around and I get these guys and I hold them against the wall and I say, „Now look, what… what is this?“

And they say, „Well, uh… we had to go to school for twelve…“

„Well, wai… wai… wait a minute now. All I want is a common English definition or a Latin definition or even put it in Sanskrit. I can find a translator, but I want you to tell me what so and so is or why.“ And you get the most… it’s… it’s just A=A=A=A explanations.

Well, he rowed a horse because he rode a horse and that’s on down the line — no sense. You get that way by treating psychotics. Don’t ever treat psychotics.

Anyway, this action definition merely tries to state, then, that the definition of something should lead to putting it into action or remedying it. You say schizophrenia. Here’s an action definition of schizophrenia which you might apply. This isn’t the definition of schizophrenia, nobody can find that. It’s buried in the archives of the Library of Congress or something.

It’s… schizophrenia is an idea that one is two persons, which is remediable by the discovery of the life continuums being dramatized by the individual. And that would be an action definition and when you’re defining things, particularly in Scientology, I wish you’d remember that. Define it by what it does or its cure. Don’t define it by what it is like or what it’s unlike or anything. Somebody says to you, „What’s an engram?“ Well, we have a technical definition which is a moment of pain and unconsciousness. That’s all right but that is not an action definition. That is a descriptive definition and so far is limited in use.

So it’s the best… a clumsy way to define it but nevertheless a better way to define it, even if you say it this way, „An action definition of an engram is a moment of pain and unconsciousness which has content, perceptic content, which has command value on the individual and which when reduced brings a greater state of self-determinism to that individual.“

Or you could define it this way, „An engram is a moment of pain or unconsciousness which can be erased by continuous repetition of its phrases and perceptions as though at the moment it occurred.“

You see the reason I’m telling you this is a very interesting reason, that is the way you keep knowledge from being lost. The way to lose knowledge is to use descriptive definitions, associative definitions. It’s all very wonderful to say, that chair is like a hooblagobla. And it comes into a society which doesn’t have a hooblagobla. And then the information is then lost.

A chair is a four-legged object on which one sits and which is constructed by four legs, a seat, and a back, normally of wood. That tells them how to build it. Gives them some idea of how you build a chair.

And when you’re defining Scientology or you’re writing it down, please remember what I say on that. Give them as much of what you do to cause or cause an effect on this thing you’re defining in the definition as you can and still be brief… get an action definition. I do not know but what the concept of action definition is new — I don’t know this. It might not be, uh… but it… it certainly… it’s certainly something I’ve never before seen stressed in the field of philosophy.

Uh… what is an action definition? Action definition is something which gives the remedy or which gives the method of use or construction. All right, you have to learn how to think in those terms by the way. You ought to have this stuff so that you can deliver it, so that you can can remember it without any textbook or anything else, so you can put it all back together again.

This is essentially learning how to think with it. And it’s much more important to know how to think with it than it is to quote it. Very much more important, that’s why I seem to labor some points, and so forth. It’s… it’s just I want them punched up good and hard so that the evaluation line on the thing, if you… if you, all of a sudden one day, if you don’t know this… this subject well, all of a sudden one day you’ll be walking down the street and you, orienting, and all of a sudden whirr click, and the knowledge is yours and you’ve got it in mind and you can suddenly think with it and there’s no strain on it at all. And that’s… that’s just, after that, it’s very easy, very easy.

One of the best auditors over in England said, „Well, I finally uh… finally got it fixed in my mind one day that anything which didn’t consist of an optimum motion was an aberration and after that I understood the whole thing and it’s very easy.“ I don’t know if — that doesn’t get home to me, does it get home to you?

But he… he just told me this in his level of communication. Since that he’s been a wonderful auditor, everything going along fine. I don’t know what he got… what he got into the light, but something went click and after that the preclears are just coming off of an assembly line, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

Now, all of the early logics then really boil down to the fact that you have a non-wavelength thing called theta which is capable of creating space, time, and locating matter and energy in it, and that uh… there are various things you can do, and at this time the mostest we know you can do with great ease is to make postulates and postulates are a statement of states of being which then go into effect, or don’t go into effect, as the case may be. And proceeding from postulates are bodies of knowledge and data.

And knowing how to know is being free enough to be able to make postulates which will stick or not stick as the case may be, as you desire it.

Let’s take a break.

(TAPE ENDS)