You may occasionally find, as we go through these axioms, material that isn’t completely clear to you. If you go over it and start observing preclears and Effort Processing, if you are the kind of a fellow that does any thinking, you will run into the rest of it. I am not even going to essay to take you on a full grand tour, because it starts at zero and it ends at zero.

There is a mathematical proposition known as “backing up into zero.” We have a zero. Obviously it is nothing, but we keep taking things out of the nothing. So we find out that that zero is actually an infinity. This is a fairly well established principle. That is what we are doing with theta.

It is interesting that a fellow by the name of Dirac postulated once upon a time that there were holes in space. An atomic scientist came along not too long ago and started knocking a few alpha particles around, and he found that he was getting two electrons where he should only have been getting one — that is to say, he was manufacturing an extra electron every time he went through this process that he had embarked upon. So he studied it and studied it and studied it, and finally he had to conclude that there was a hole in space. This happened fairly recently. The law of conservation of energy seems thus to have been violated for the first time.

Theta might be likened to a hole in space. Theta is merely a mathematical symbol. We have backed up to this hole in space. We know what lies just on the other side of the hole; just a millionth of a millimeter on the other side of the hole we know what is there, looking back into this universe. But that is where we are.

As a matter of fact, I can take a preclear to that hole without much trouble; pushing him through is something else. I suppose one day some poor luckless devil will get pushed through and he will probably vanish. But it is all for the cause of science!

Oddly enough, theta has (1) no weight, (2) no wavelength, (3) no size. So it is zero, obviously! Only it is not zero, because as long as we have been playing with theta it has consistently produced answers. So obviously it isn’t zero.

Yet if you will go back on the time track to your boyhood or girlhood and break a toy — do that in theta: go back and break a toy — and then come up to present time and go find wherever that toy was hidden away as a keepsake and show me that it is now broken, I will abandon the postulate that theta has no wavelength.

Now, here was an experiment we conducted one night: You take a piece of chalk and look at it very carefully. Then break it. Now close your eyes and look at it very carefully and put the chalk back together again. When you open your eyes, there it is — still broken.

Theta is not traveling in physical-universe time as such. Memories are not stored as electrical charges with wavelength. They are not stored that way; they couldn’t be.

Here is a very funny thing: Take a fellow who has been going along fine — his body is not deformed at all — and all of a sudden one day he has a sad occasion. His mother-in-law iscross to him or something, and this keys in an engram. After that he goes around all twisted up. He goes to an auditor and the auditor audits out that charger and audits out that engram, and the fellow is then all right again. That is peculiar, isn’t it? He carried, you might say, the potential of that charge all those years without it being keyed in.

The amount of energy contained in one of those charges is tremendous. It is not stored in any cells. There isn’t a condenser or other electrical apparatus known for the storage of this much energy, nor could there be a catalyst which would take a facsimile which was lying on the time track and turn it into that much energy.

You can watch a fellow running through an incident where he is stuck in the arm with a needle, and you will see the flesh sink. He hasn’t got any muscles to make it sink, but it sinks.

I found out how to turn a theta facsimile — that is to say, a memory recording — on fully, a short time ago. I broke out a tooth. Somebody was asking if I would mind if I showed them the tooth. I am sorry I can’t do that, because the tooth was broken so badly I had to have it pulled. There wasn’t anything left of it. It was the second molar. It was very strange that it was cracked on the side — very peculiar. There were no cells around to make that tooth crack. It couldn’t crack internally, by a convulsion inside itself, in some peculiar fashion. It was done by a theta facsimile.

These and various other data bring us to understand that when we travel back in theta, we are not traveling back in MEST. You could figure it out that the body has a set of cells and these cells start out at conception and somehow or other carry these memories as a lasting trace, and all of this sort of rubbish. The funny part of it is that about every seven years there isn’t a single native cell left in the body; they are all changed by that time. Most cells are changed in the body in a matter of months.

So these memory recordings aren’t passed along from cell to cell. They could be, but they are not stored as electrical energy. You start examining this any way you want to and you will find that there isn’t an energy in the physical universe — at least which we know about — which has a small enough wavelength to store memory recordings.

Oddly enough, this was a discovery I made in 1932 when I was in atomic and molecular physics at George Washington University. I made an exhaustive study of the matter. There aren’t wavelengths small enough; physical scientists would know that. The boys fooling around in medicine would not know it because they don’t know the laws of energy, and as a consequence they have postulated, as the best postulates which they can offer, that memories are stored in punched protein molecules. That is cute! The theory says there are ten holes in a molecule — it doesn’t state what punches them — and something like a hundred memories to a hole. You figure that there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons in the body, figure out how many molecules there are and how many memories this is, and you find out that the human body, on this incredible theory, will not store three months’ worth of perceptions, even if you look at only the main observations. Wonderful!

The punched-protein-molecule theory is wonderful from this standpoint: You can’t see a molecule by any existing energy known today. An electron microscope will give you a vague impression of the whereabouts of a molecule, but that is about all. You can’t look at molecules. They draw beautiful pictures of them in chemistry, but they don’t look at them. They are small — tiny. Wavelengths of light, wavelengths of electricity, wavelengths of radio or any other energies on the spectrum — supersonics, the black band are much, much too gross to form a recording mechanism such as we know in the physical universe for memory.

This is all astonishing data. It is all known to a physicist.

You start to examine theta and you will find out immediately that theta is having a tough time sweeping along in present time continually. It is sweeping along in present time continually, and it is only in present time continually and can only be returned back to through present time. Your preclear doesn’t go anyplace; he lies right on the couch in front of you.

In addition to that, the number of people turning up with post-mortem experiences demonstrates utterly that you are not dealing with a genetic line. We don’t need that proof. All we need to look at is this phenomenon of return — the fact that a person is returning back through his memories.

Watching a preclear on the couch returning back through his memories, you can watch such manifestations as his back suddenly sinking in. You can watch him being twisted all out of shape in various ways, in manners for which he has no muscles. He hasn’t any muscles which can accomplish many of these actions which you can see.

You can take a preclear and by restimulation in full of some engram you can make him sit with his hands and his feet off the floor in an unbalanced position which he could not otherwise maintain, no matter how much you coaxed him to maintain it. It is wonderful.

There is a lot of this experimental data. You can research it all you want to, but it all boils down to this one fact: Theta has no physical-universe wavelength. It doesn’t have any time in it, therefore it can’t have any wavelength. Wavelength is a measure of motion through space against time. So something that has no wavelength doesn’t exist; this says it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have any mass; it doesn’t have any of these things. And it is very funny that the more we play with this stuff called theta, the more answers we get.

So we can postulate that we are looking up to a certain point in the physical universe; below that point all is motion and above that point all is question mark. And it is certainly not motion in the physical universe, but it may be motion in its own universe. This we don’t know about.

But this is a good, solid, practical, physicist’s method of looking at something. We cannot identify this; therefore, let’s see what we can rescue out of what we can’t identify, and then classify it against what we know, and with that work problems. One of the most practical approaches that physics has evolved is that principle — back up into the unknown, use what you have.

So here we have a lot of phenomena sitting around in the physical universe, evidently. However, it is not in the physical universe — but it is in the physical universe because there are living organisms here in the physical universe.

With what you are in contact, I can’t tell you; but that you are in contact with something, I can assure you. Your theta facsimiles are fascinating. They are facsimiles of the entire environ where everything occurred. They are recorded in the most bounteous fashion imaginable. Everything gets recorded with them. About eighty perceptics get recorded with these facsimiles. And when these facsimiles restimulate and reimpose themselves upon a human being, they evidently do so on an atomic and molecular level. They produce a misalignment of the molecules and atoms which go to make up the structure, or they produce an alignment in that.

They aren’t as gross, you might say, as joints, or as the whole body; they are particularized to every portion of the body, but are evidently residual neither within nor without the body. They just exist. Where and how, we are not questioning at this moment; that is the second echelon.

So I give you a definition of the departure we are taking when we examine Dianetics. We are examining physical organisms in the physical universe which are obeying a manifestation about which we know a very great deal, and we are watching that manifestation as it works with and influences motion. In doing this we have cracked the riddle of human behavior. We have the full circle now — the full circle. We can take anything out of this.

I am giving you that as a preface which really should be a preface on the Logic section of the Axioms. Dianetics, as anything new, started out with a way of thinking about things. It presents its way of thinking about things as postulates.

One doesn’t argue with a science’s postulates about logic. The fellow working in a science says, “We are thinking about it in this fashion. This seems to produce validity. By this method of thinking about it, we can isolate phenomena. And in this fashion we are able to examine the physical universe better.”

Thus these axioms. We are not worrying about whether these axioms are true or false.

The first thing we want to know in these axioms is about definitions. Perhaps before this there hasn’t been a definition of ‘definition’. What did one mean by definition?

As a consequence, somebody like Kraepelin in psychiatry could come along and catalogue all of an enormous array of what he called insanity’s and insane manifestations, and define each one. When he got all through he had a beautiful system of classification which was meaningless. The reason it was meaningless was that it did not spot cause or effect; it didn’t designate a cure. All it did was describe.

Therefore, how does one describe things? Certainly if we are examining phenomena we should know how to describe things, so there has to be a definition for definitions. What are definitions? “What are we going to accept as a valid definition?” is what this asks bluntly.

These are the principal ways of defining things, and this is logic postulate one.

The first is by descriptive definition: one which clarifies by describing existing state of being by characteristics. We say, “Table: It has a flat top; it sits on the floor; it has four legs.”

Next we have a differentiative definition: one which compares unlikeness to other entities. “Table: It has four legs and a high top, unlike a chair which has a low top and four legs. It is made out of wood, which means it is different from a microphone.” That is a differentiative definition.

Then we have an associative definition: one which declares similarities to the state or object being defined. “Table: a piece of furniture.” That is the associative definition for a table.

And then there is a dynamic definition: one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, action or purpose. “Table: You use this thing to put things on. It sits on the floor and it’s a piece of furniture. Sometimes people sit on it, but not always. And you build them by putting four legs together and putting a top on, and you take them apart with an ax if you have to.” That tells you what tables are for; it tells you what you do with tables.

Now, of those definitions, the last is the valuable one. No definition which does not give cause, use or solution, inherent in itself, is worth a darn.

Any science which pretends to be a science and uses these other three is a hoax. It doesn’t know. It says, “Measles: face gets covered with blotches, temperature goes up. Measles.” “Schizophrenia: runs around halls and screams.” From the full knowledge that these definitions are inadequate, there can be a highly authoritarian attempt to make these definitions designate a wisdom in the field which does not exist. You take Latin and Greek phrases, you put them together into inarticulacies and apply them to all sorts of things, and when you get all through you have something that sounds like a Latin chant — but it still will be nothing but a descriptive definition, a differentiative definition or an associative definition. No matter how much language or complexity goes into a definition, it cannot thereby become a dynamic definition.

A true science has within its embrace, then, dynamic definitions, if it is trying to define something which has use for people.

This is a system of logic not unlike other systems of logic which have been put forth into the world a few times. It is all by itself. It is relatively unimportant; it depends upon many other systems of logic which have gone before, but it is a clarification of them. It is distinct to itself in that it is a codification of how we are going to think about this subject.

So if you are going to describe something, know that your description will be inadequate unless you delineate, with that description, cause, purpose and solution. Then you can communicate and only then can you communicate. To try to communicate by perception alone is inadequate.

You know you have a dynamic definition, then, if it will answer this last one — cause, purpose, solution. If it has these things then you are saying something; otherwise, it is just words.

So Dianetics can be defined as a system of coordinated axioms which resolve problems concerning human behavior and psychosomatic illnesses. That says what it does; it says what it is. It is a system of axioms — a whole — which do a certain thing, which solve a certain thing. Therefore that is the definition of Dianetics.

Very often you may have tried to define Dianetics to somebody and given them a descriptive definition of it. Always give them an action definition. They say, “What is this thing Dianetics?”

You say, “Well, it’s a funny thing. Down at the Foundation they have a chart. And you can look on this chart — Dianetics includes such things as this — and find four or five things that a human being does, and from that you can always tell what he will do in the future.”

And he will say, “Yeah?” “You know whether he’ll leave his wife, beat the baby, or any of these things. You know all that in the future. And they have it all on a chart, and anybody can use it, and you just look at it.”

He will say, “Yeah? Gee, I wonder where I am on that chart.”

You get that kind of a reaction. You have invited a communication. By doing what? By saying what Dianetics is for and what it does, not by saying “It is a system like psychology.” Then they would have to understand what psychology is in order to understand what Dianetics is — and nobody understands what psychology is, so you would be sunk.

Now, all systems of thought would have a system of logic in them. Even if a system of thought doesn’t state what its system of logic is, it inherently has one.

Up to this time, an engineering textbook on physics should have included “This book is built on three-valued logic.” It should have said that in the beginning of the book in order to have been exactly precise. Yes, maybe and no — that is three-valued logic; that is more or less what engineering logic consists of. I say that, not because it is less or more workable, but because if you had asked engineers a relatively short time ago “What kind of logic do you use?” they would have said, “Three-valued logic.” You could have asked, “What kind is that?” and they would have said, “Well, you know, just like Boolean algebra. That’s the way the brain works — Boolean algebra.” They had it all figured out.

In Dianetics we introduce infinity-valued logic, and this is our second logical postulate. You have probably seen this before. It is in earlier notes and lectures. I will go over it very briefly in order to give you just a little review.

On one side we have right, on the other we have wrong. On each side we have infinity. On the side of wrong we have succumb, on the side of right we have surmise and in the center we have maybe.

It is not whether something is right or wrong, in Dianetics; it is whether it is righter or wronger than something else. All values of logic are relative to something. Every datum has to be evaluated by another datum. So the mind more or less thinks on this basis: It gets a question and then it compares it to the material universe and it says, “Well, that answer is two units wrong.” Then it gets another datum which is five units right and another datum which makes this solution six units wrong. The mind then adds it up and says, “That’s pretty wrong; we won’t do that.” All data is being evaluated as it comes up to the computer in this fashion.

This is thought. These evaluations are done by the introduction of theta facsimiles of data in the physical universe. Theta facsimiles of data in the physical universe compare, recombine and so forth, and give solutions which are righter or wronger.

Something was really pushed off on us with Hegelian grammars that had absolutes in it. The word correct, the word accurate, the word right, the word wrong — these are all back there and impinged upon our good old Aristotelian logic, to which our old friend Korzybski (God rest his bones) objected so violently but supplanted with so little.

Korzybski introduced the data behind axioms of logic of this type. Where general semantics applies to Dianetics is as a shadow background to these existing axioms on logic, not on thought; it doesn’t go further on thought. It is very valuable, though.

Don’t let anybody tell you that general semantics and Dianetics are similar; they are just vaguely similar. General semantics has to do with a word and a thing, and a lot of other things that we are not worried about in Dianetics. We even define words differently. We have a definition of words: Words are theta facsimiles of physical-universe actions or states of being.

There is a system of logic. Logic depends on viewpoint — on who is making this up. The United States says, “Communism? Well, let’s see, there aren’t enough bars on this graph here, but it’s wrong!”

Over in Russia they say, “Capitalism? Well, there aren’t enough bars here, but that’s wrong!”

You can’t then say rather thoughtlessly, “Well, they both think it’s wrong, somebody must be right.” Nobody is right and nobody is wrong; there isn’t any such absolute. But there are rightnesses and wrongnesses according to viewpoint.

Now, you take some preclear who has the viewpoint of succumb, who is outward bound to succumb: if you try to give him a process which will pick him up and make him survive, believe me, you are wrong. With somebody who is outward bound to survive — on that side of the ledger — if you give him a process which is going to make him succumb, you are wrong. It all depends on viewpoint.

This is a highly flexible system of logic; it is quite useful. It has a mathematics or two — or six or twelve — wrapped up in it. It is simple, though. You find out that if anybody were absolutely wrong — if you ever reached absolute wrongness — the whole universe would disappear, because everything in the physical universe is so interdependent on everything else in the physical universe that you can’t have an absolute which affects everything in the universe as wrong. If everything in the universe were wrong you wouldn’t have anything.

Over on the right side, if anybody were absolutely right — like Papa and Mama used to pretend they were — the whole universe would become immediately static and fixed forever in that shape.

Now, these axioms are ultimates along a certain compartmented area, and that is all. They are right within that area, and I will show you what that area is in a moment.

These axioms don’t have exceptions known to us at this time. When somebody — whenever it happens, in the near or far future — finds a new simplicity, a higher echelon from which to branch out, many of these axioms will go by the boards. But until a higher simplicity is reached, these axioms are rigidly fixed without exception.

It is an unfortunate thing that I am introducing to you a lack of randomity in the subject just now.

Next is the third logical postulate: A datum can be evaluated only by a datum of comparable magnitude.

It should be interesting to you that there is no sense in trying to compare the behavior of a nation with the behavior of an ant. There is no sense in trying to tell somebody how big a mountain is by showing him a grain of sand.

This single-datum postulate is something on which logic and the humanities have been splitting their keels ever since people tried to launch vessels in that direction — the single datum. Originally, every time they came up against a higher echelon which they couldn’t resolve they would say, “Well, above that is God.”

You march the evolutionist back to his amoebae and to his ammonia seas and so forth and then ask, “Now, what came before that?” and he will answer, “Well, God!” — just as, if you asked the ancients what caused everything, they had a good pat answer; they said “God.” They didn’t say the mechanism by which he caused it.

This is no invalidation or validation of God. It merely says that they had a single entity sitting up there. How could you evaluate something that only had one datum? With what do you evaluate God? God wasn’t very understandable till the Christians came along and gave us the devil. Then we had a datum of comparable magnitude and people could be happy. We knew what God was: God was an absence of evil. We knew what the devil was: the devil was an absence of good. The devil was positive evil, God was positive good.

Now we can interplay these two and we can extrapolate from there and we can get an entire system. It is a highly workable system. True, false or indifferent — that has nothing to do with it; I am just showing you how high you can get up along the level, and everybody happens to know this datum about God. Don’t ever make the mistake of suddenly postulating, on any echelon, one datum, because it won’t resolve. The basic unit of the universe is two.

There is a comparable mathematics to Dianetic logic in Dymaxion geometry which is a very amusing geometry of how you fill up space.

Logic 4: A datum is as Valuable as it has been evaluated. And God rest our weary bones — everybody seems to have missed this one.

A datum is no confounded, cockeyed good in the world unless it has been compared! Now, do you know where that comes from and why there should be any violence behind that statement? People keep coming around and saying, “You know that phenomenon you mentioned there? They knew about that in mysticism about three thousand years ago. Everybody has known that straight along.”

You just say quietly and gently, “Yes, but it wasn’t evaluated. Its relationship to other data had not been adequately established.” They don’t quite savvy this.

The point is that a datum which sits out all by itself in a resounding, heaving sea of data and which doesn’t have an evaluation tag on it is no good to anybody, unless that person gets himself some sort of a systematized effort that sorts out this data automatically and builds bridges to it — in other words, evaluates it. Then the data becomes very valuable.

So somebody says, “Well, Freud already said that there was prebirth memory — nothing new about that.”

You say, “What did he hang it to?”

“Well, he said so. It was right there in the book.”

Of course, he also said above and below that a thousand disrelated things which didn’t have any truth in them. He hadn’t evaluated this thing, so he hadn’t said to a student “What is true about this? Or what is false about it?” And a student, wading through all this material, could only then commit it to memory, and he could not use it in the physical universe. If you are going to teach anybody anything, you had better teach them how valuable their data is.

There is a book on navigation called “Dutton.” I imagine many a young officer has felt like blowing his brains out at the naval academy the moment he ran into “Dutton.”

The reason why is that “Dutton” is a complete monotone of data. It starts in with paragraph one, chapter one, and announces important or unimportant facts in the same tone of voice throughout about a 450-page volume. You commit it all to memory and then you get aboard ship and discover that all you had to find out was that you don’t wipe the lens of a sextant, or something. That was the important datum. That is a fact. And ensigns almost go crazy with “Dutton.” But an old-line navigator comes along and he picks up “Dutton” and looks it over, and he says, “My boy, this is one of the finest books on navigation you ever want to read.” Of course it makes sense to the old-line navigator — of course it does; he has all the evaluations. He knows enough not to wipe the lenses of a sextant eyepiece with a dirty handkerchief, and other important stuff. He knows that it is twice as important to take the sight right as it is to figure it right.

Yet you will find ensigns who go out and they worry and they work, and they get their tongue between their teeth and they figure out the position of the ship down to the last breadth of an inch — only their sextant sight is twenty miles wrong. You show them this — ”Hey, look, why don’t you take an accurate sextant sight and knock off those decimal places on that computation?”

“But that computation is accurate!” There is no evaluation of importance. This guy will run you aground if you don’t watch him. He will be out there taking a good, solid shot of a truck light, and then come in and report that he has now shot Arcturus and that your position is ten miles south of Cincinnati. Those are some of the liabilities of not evaluating data in a field.

Now, a lot of these axioms are necessary to a flow of thought; they flow through. But out of all of these axioms, there are only eight of them of excruciating importance. I will point those up when I get to them.

But if you are composing a system of logic or if you are trying to study a field of logic, you will mainly be trying to evaluate somebody else’s data. And if you are having trouble with that field, the only reason you are having any trouble with it is because the data in it has not been evaluated. Therefore, if the data hasn’t been evaluated, you know it hasn’t been compared to anything and the field isn’t oriented. So skip it.

Logic 5: The value of a datum is established by the amount of alignment (relationship) it imparts to other data.

The whole of life in the physical universe can be represented by a cone. The point of the cone is the high point from which we are viewing other data. So we have here, the value of a datum is established by the amount of alignment it imparts to other data.

Consider that this cone is filled with random data, all sorts of data. Nobody knows what sits at the top. The data becomes more complex as you go down the cone, becomes less complex as you go up the cone. So if somebody can find the datum that sits at the top, at the highest level of simplicity about the rest of this data — the datum that says “The reason ants build houses is . . .” “You build ships by . . .” and so on — then all of a sudden you have got this datum up here and it aligns two facts. That is a very important datum.

Mathematical and logical search is concentrated upon the search for high-echelon simplicities, not low-echelon complexities. When a mathematician makes a mistake and fails to contribute to the body of knowledge, it is because he cuts in at the level of complexity. You say, “How about getting a solution to this datum and this datum and this datum? That line that you’re figuring from there doesn’t align enough data.”

“All right,” he says, “I’ll figure it out. Let’s see, I’ll add twenty-five more equations on to this situation.”

“But look, that doesn’t explain all of this data down here. Now, what are we going to do about that?”

“Well, we’ll add about fifteen or twenty more equations.”

And this creates such a complexity that it itself has to be aligned. His direction of approach and your direction in the solution of a problem should be upward toward simplicities, not downward into complexities.

There is also a law of an economy of factors — ”law of parsimony” they call it: If you have two theories which seem equally valid, take the one which requires less data to support it. Just automatically take the one which has fewer factors in it.

If you want to resolve a case, for instance, you have to figure like this: A person always has to try not to survive; it is no effort to survive. What it is an effort to do is not to survive. That is what is rough, because that is an effort to overcome efforts which were not-to-survive efforts, and it gets very complicated under that basis.

So, you could ask the preclear for the effort of each word in the English language. You could actually ask him for the effort and he would resolve it for you, but it would take quite a while.

But if we know this law that says “It is the effort not to survive which is aberrative,” then we simply ask, “What is the effort not to survive? Let’s get the effort on that.” He will play you all sorts of efforts off on that one and he will shoot out the whole bank with it.

This is applicable in therapy. Always take the question which gives you the maximum amount of data, not the question which gives you the minimum amount. Get the broadest, widest explanation in the least words. Go toward simplicities of explanation, not toward complexities, in thinking, and you will find yourself solving a lot of problems that you perhaps wouldn’t otherwise crack. It is a good postulate.

Logic 6: Problems are resolved by compartmenting them in areas of similar magnitude and data, comparing them to data already known or partially known, and resolving each area. (For resolving what cannot be known immediately one can address what can be known and use its solution to resolve the remainder.)

That is awfully simple.

I was just telling you a short time ago about theta. We don’t know all there is to know about theta, but we can take what we feel is known about it. We know a lot about the physical universe right now because we have the whole science of physics. So let’s take it from where theta impinges on the physical universe and study it from that quarter, and resolve that. And then with what we learn there we can resolve the next step, and so forth.

In other words, you don’t have to know anything about the unknown item; just find out what it relates to and then solve what it relates to and that will solve the unknown. This is very simple — it is a method of thought. You can use it with considerable profit in thinking.

Now, Logic 7 is self-explanatory — the introduction of an arbitrary. Any time you have to throw an arbitrary into a situation to make it work, you are going to have to have other arbitraries introduced in order to keep it resolved, and it will just get more and more complex.

If there is something you don’t understand about a case and you decide to use force on that point, you are just going to have to introduce new force factors. You don’t know how to resolve a psychotic case, let’s say, and you have a psychotic who is screaming around and so forth, so you say, “Well, we can’t solve this right now, we can’t solve this right now — we’ll have to do something, do something, do something desperate, do something desperate,” so you introduce an arbitrary: you give him a sedative.

You have introduced an arbitrary and it will introduce further arbitraries of what is said in the preclear’s vicinity. Now you will have to give the preclear two sedatives in order to quiet him down next time, and then you will probably have to give him electric shock and some more sedatives and then a prefrontal lobotomy.... You get the idea of the arbitraries? It is a fan.

You introduce one arbitrary into a case and you will have to keep introducing arbitraries. So the devil with these “quick, simple methods.” They aren’t quick and they aren’t simple because they lead to the introduction of further arbitraries.

This is also applicable in any system of logic. Any system of mathematics works in this fashion.

For instance, a government passes a law saying all criminals must cease to exist, without understanding what criminals are or what criminology is. Then they have to pass a hundred thousand laws, year in and year out, in order to enforce the law that criminals mustn’t exist. They go into further and further complexities.

Now, this system of logic I went over — the cone going into simplicities — is driving toward natural laws. As soon as you start to introduce arbitraries into a problem you just keep going into further and further complexities and it gets tougher and tougher and tougher; there is less and less alignment of data. The first thing you know, you have a completely out-of-vector problem that doesn’t align anyplace and nobody understands it — and you are a psychiatrist!

Don’t ever let Dianetics start going in that direction.

Logic 8: An abstract postulate must be compared to the real universe and brought into the category of things which can be sensed, measured or experienced before it can be classified as workable.

That is actually just a definition of what we mean by workable. We mean workable in the physical universe, workable visibly, workable in terms that we can sense, measure or experience.

There is a lot of data behind that one, some interesting data. There is such a thing as three bins of data. Down in the third bin we have what man thinks he knows right now. He thinks he knows how to make good ice cream and shoes, he can make pretty good cars, he can make power dams and he can get women to whistle at him by driving a fancy car. These are things known — data. That is what he calls data. This data seems to work empirically or by derivation in the physical universe, so he says, “Fine. Fine, this data works. I’m all set.”

Only he isn’t, because there is always a randomity of data — some of these are going to cross. One datum will argue with another one. He will decide to go to the movies but his wife doesn’t want to go and he doesn’t want to go without his wife. But he wants to go to the movies. How do you solve that? So he takes up yoga!

Whether it is the science of physics or any other field, I don’t care — metaphysics, mysticism, algebra, democracy, anything — the second bin is composed solely of routes toward new data. It is by these routes that we discover new data from the great unknown.

This top bin may be unknown, but it is not unknowable. Every datum in it is true. Just because we don’t know it is no reason it isn’t true. There isn’t such a thing in these as a datum we will never know that will never have any effect upon us, because if it is never going to have any effect upon us then we will never be able to sense, measure and experience it. So as far as we are concerned it doesn’t exist — Kant to the contrary.

He was a “great” philosopher. Those boys — Hegel, Kant — I wonder that they didn’t get terrible headaches. Kant’s transcendentalism stated, “The only real data transcends the bounds of all human experience. Now that we have announced this, the rest of you dogs have to take our word for it.” What a wonderful way to get on top and stay on top.

Nobody ever thought to ask them, “Now, how is it that you know, if it transcends the bounds of all human experience? If you are never going to sense, measure or experience this, how do you know about it?” No, he twirled his monocle too well or something. Nobody ever asked him. I would love to know what his answer would have been.

The point is, in this first bin are all sorts of data. Here are better ways to make ice cream, better ways to make airplanes, rocket ships, women, everything. It is full of data and every datum is true. But by the time you get a datum from here and pull it down by one of these routes in the second bin and compare it to the real universe, it is liable to slightly change on you.

You ask, “How true are these axioms? They have been dragged out in that fashion; how true are they?” They are as true as they are workable — no truer. They work. If they work, then they are workable.

However, you should understand that the Hindu theory of how the universe was created was also considered very workable once upon a time. Somebody came up to the priests and said, “What is this universe all about? You boys are supposed to know.”

They said, “Well, it’s a hemisphere. There you are; go along now.”

People went along on this for a few generations and everybody was happy with this. Then one day some curious, rebellious, sour individual came up and said to the priests, “What is the hemisphere standing on?” The priests went into a big powwow and got together and figured, and they figured and they figured and they figured, and then they proudly released the answer: “It is standing on seven pillars.”

A few generations went by and the country changed. Somebody came in and said, “What are the pillars standing on?”

They said, “The backs of elephants.”

Then after a few generations someone asked another question: “What are the elephants standing on?”

By this time the priests were sick of the whole thing so they said, “The elephants are standing on a mud turtle and the mud turtle is sitting in mud, and it’s mud from there on down!”

That passed for true data once. These axioms, I am very sure, will some day be in that category. Right now they aren’t. Right now they are out so far in front that nobody is going to catch up with these things for a while. You will be arguing about these things in your old age, I am sure.

So, true data comes down by these routes, no matter whether they are mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, physics, chemistry, induction, woman’s intuition, anything. Any way you can get data, that is the way it comes down. But it always has to be compared to the real universe before you can say “This is a datum. This is a datum which we have found some workability for.” You can say “This is a guess,” so long as it remains in an abstract state.

One of the main things wrong with mathematics and mathematicians today is that they make this error of putting their other foot up here in bin one. They very happily had a foot down in bin three once upon a time and a foot in bin one; then they put the other foot up in bin one, via the route of mathematics, and they forget to keep a foot in each bin. They pick the foot up that is in the third bin and they put them both up in the first one, and you never hear of them again.

They actually do that. They get into the abstract, they forget to compare data to the real universe, and the second they do this they are done for, as far as their system is concerned. They just get more and more esoteric and so on, they don’t tie anything down and their theories start shooting out in all directions. Somebody comes along and says, “I wonder why that fellow isn’t getting anyplace with the problem?” He just took his foot out of the bin of known data.

This is a useful thing to know — that you can get slogging around in the abstract to such a degree that you don’t bother to nail down anything. And when you don’t nail something down every once in a while and compare it to the real universe, you can really go adrift.

Therefore, when I give you these axioms, you are going to go out and look at phenomena; you will see a lot of phenomena. If you don’t find phenomena to compare with them, the devil with these axioms: they are too abstract.

If you can find phenomena that proves them up, you say, “That’s fine.” But axioms, rules, data — these things are no good until you can find a comparison in the real universe! When you can find a comparison in the real universe you can say, “That’s workable,” and let it pass for the moment. Until you have done that, no abstract postulate under the sun is worth a tinker’s doggone.

Somebody out here can tell you, “But it’s a well-known fact that the human soul is purple with orange dots.”

And you say, “That’s fine. Where did you get that?”

“I got that in a dream. I have these dreams very often; they always work alit You say, “Show me one.”

“Don’t have to. Dreams always work out.”

You are just in a complete closed circle as far as this fellow is concerned. He isn’t keeping a foot back in the real universe.

If he could say, “Yes, I can show you one. Step over to this voltmeter. I get this phenomena and I explain it on the basis that souls are purple with orange dots, because — look — the dial turns a bright purple.”

You say, “So it does! I’ll be a son of a gun.” But it still has to be compared to another datum like it and it still has to be evaluated in terms of the rest of the physical universe before. it is any good to you.

Have you ever met these people who go around with little items that “nobody could do without,” data that we “must have,” like “Pike’s Peak is 14,110 feet high; Mount Rainier is 14,410 feet high”? You will be having a nice conversation with such a person and all of a sudden he will say, “Well, the new Chevrolet goes ninety-six miles an hour.”

You say, “I wasn’t talking about Chevrolets.” “But it will.”

Or you are having a nice discussion at dinner about things like that and he says, “Did you know that Persian cats originally came from Samarkand?”

You say, “Yes” — you expect him to go on and tell you some sort of a witty anecdote about Persian cats — and you sit there and you wait and you wait, and he says, “And silver costs

$9.02 a pound in the Transvaal.” This is wonderful. It is just as silly to get up there into the abstract and then not nail anything down. There is a famous book that only a few people have ever read. I wouldn’t break it out and give it to people, and the reason I wouldn’t break it out and give it to people was that it was all up in the top bin — every single bit of it. It has taken thirteen years of hard work and experience to get that book down to where you can put one foot in the bottom bin and put a foot in the top bin.

Now we can do that, and that is why we have these axioms. But thirteen years ago, in that book, these axioms almost existed in full — with no route built to them. There was nothing in the second bin — no route. We had no map and we had no phenomena observed in the physical universe to prove it up.

It is utterly fantastic to me that it happens to work out as it worked out thirteen years ago. This is just an accident — a complete accident. But that was a philosophic induction which all of a sudden turned out to have enough data in the known universe to fulfill it. It was an accident; it shouldn’t have existed. That philosophic echelon all by itself was good reading, but there was no bridge built to it.

Now you can go out and you can look in the field of mysticism, and by golly, you can find more data! And it is workable data that will point up more phenomena for you. Why? Because a bridge is built to it. You can study Dianetics and then go study psychology, and a lot of it will make sense. That is a fact — it will! In other words, almost anything can happen.

I have also covered Logic 9: A postulate is as valuable as it is workable. I mentioned this earlier in the talk this evening. We have not had to predict any phenomena which don’t exist in order to give you these axioms, nor at any time here have we had to neglect existing phenomena.

And we haven’t found anything in this physical universe at the moment which happens to fall outside these axioms. I hope somebody does sooner or later because this is almost a deadly picture, with no randomity in it, no mistakes. There must be some such phenomena, but what it is I am sure I don’t know.

In addition to that, these theories really test up like a true science in that they extrapolate. You can take these axioms and you can figure, “Well, he says these axioms are right; then such-and-such should exist as phenomena.” Go look and you will find it.

Logic 10: A large body of aligned data which has similarity in application, deducible or inducible from basic postulates, may be considered to be a science.

As much as the world uses the word science, it has hardly ever been defined. It could be defined as many things, but this is, to some degree, a dynamic definition of a science. How do you make a science? You get some basic postulates and you induce and induce, and compare it to the real universe, and if it is all lined up you have a science.

If that is a dynamic definition of a science, some sciences had better look to themselves. Even chemistry, the old grand pappy of everything, that started back in the field of alchemy, is so far out of alignment right now that the physicist, with his postulates about atoms and so forth, can go into the field of chemistry and say, “You know, I’ve figured out that in your field so-and-so....”

The chemists say, “That can’t be true. That doesn’t work according to our postulates.” “Well, it works according to my postulates.”

“Well, that’s fine. We’re getting all sorts of beautiful results according to the postulates of chemistry in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena. And they are entirely different than the field of physics.”

The chemist believes an atom is built in a certain way and the physicist believes it is built in a different way; they are both getting results and they are both merging closer and closer toward some kind of a goal. But they are still in violent disagreement. That is because they have not aligned their fields according to new known data; they haven’t realized the field had to be realigned. As a matter of fact, even basic physics ought to now be realigned. The law of conservation of energy seems to have been kicked overboard.

Now, Logic 11 is one which should interest you a great deal: The problem of human behavior, psychosomatic illness, mental aberration and the phenomena of life is susceptible to solution.

A fellow in the old Foundation wrote a letter to a scientist who was very interested — whose name I have guaranteed never to mention in the field of Dianetics. He had protested that somebody had mentioned his name in some publication and I promised him that we would never use his name in connection with it, so we won’t. But he said, “Any time I hear the word cure, universal, used, I always file whatever I hear about it in the circular file.” It is very interesting that people would work in a field which they consider unsolvable. And yet that has been true of all of these fields of the humanities. They didn’t have Logic 11. They didn’t believe the solution was there, and as a consequence they never made a steady, solid drive toward it. They just keep monkeying around the edges. If they had believed the solution was there, they would have laid down a logical pattern. I am not the only one in the world who can lay down a logical pattern. Nobody even tried, so they were in a field of complete defeat. It took the verve of physical science to push into that field in order to bring alignment to it.

Logic 12: It is possible to resolve the problem of how life is surviving, without resolving the problem of why life is surviving. That is what we mean by the first and second echelon of Dianetics.

Here we have — who knows? — a hole in space. But it is certainly a static line of some sort which contains a zero, which is an infinity — an interesting gimmick. It is theta, whatever it is.

Now, this top bin — I don’t know at what level — probably contains a “why.” It says, “Life is surviving, and this is why.”

You say, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that earlier?” But right now it looks terribly imponderable. Why is life surviving? Why all this effort? Why all these ramifications and so forth? This is a rough one.

Earlier we had an axiom, a postulate, about the compartmentation of problems. This is where the problem of Dianetics compartments. It is “how.” People in the past kept saying, “But why is there this and that, and why is it doing that, and why is it doing something else, and so forth, and why, why, why?” Occasionally they would ask a “how,” but they never differentiated how from why. As a consequence they never got an alignment of data, because the why is an imponderable. At the moment why is imponderable but we can answer how.

So let’s separate the sheep from the goats, the alphas from the betas, and get the field squared up and just look at how life is surviving. And that is what we are doing this very moment.

It is very interesting that only low-tone-scale people will ask you why.