All right. This is the afternoon lecture of November the 3rd and this afternoon we are going to take up "Of what can we be certain?"

Very certain, then, that we are dealing with the component parts of human beingness and MEST universesness.

It's very obvious then, isn't it? Of what can we be certain?

Now, let me tell you a little story very briefly. There's a young man around who has never had any auditing to amount to anything and yet he's an auditor. He's a very good auditor. He's been through several schools. Nobody's ever audited him.

He was in a hospital. He was lying there, not expected to go on with life. And he said one fine day - he was about ready to pass in his chips, and about everything was wrong with him that could be wrong - and a copy of the first article "Dianetics: Evolution of a Science" was lying on the table, next bed. He picked it up, read it - he picked it up, read it and he said, "Gee, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Gee-whiz, what do you know. Gosh, that's good. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense." All of a sudden, was well. He's never had a recurrence.

Of what can we be certain? The very first thing which interested you about Dianetics and Scientology, the very things that interested you about it are things of which you can establish some kind of certainty. They tell you that there are further certainties to be reached.

Of what can you be certain? You can be certain of the component parts of existence if you're certain of them. Now, understand that.

Now, you read something like "survive," "eight dynamics," all these things make sense. So you - there's a degree of certainty there. You've got a compartmentation of existence. This is very good. And then you take it out and you say to Joe Blow or Dick Suds or Mr.... You take it out to Miss Schmo and she says, "Nyowh-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyo! And all because nyuf-nyaw-nyeah-nyeha-nyeha-nyeha." And right away you feel you have to be invalidated.

So once you start on this track it would be perfectly fine if nobody kept saying that to you, but they - what they do is pushing around your anchor points. What's your anchor point? Your anchor point is a certainty.

Out of the horrible seething mass of co-unindated [co-inundated] material, out of tremendous quantities of complete balderdash and control mechanisms, libraries full of pure and unadulterated bunk, out of the writhings of skip-skop Schopenhauer and the moanings of Schnietzke, the apathy of Zeno, man has taken a little bit of the incomprehensibles here and incomprehensibles here and said, "God, I wish I could be certain of this."

People look all the way through books of philosophers, the Bible, life to find something that will agree with them. At first glance, they're trying to look for something to agree with. Nah, they're not looking for something to agree with; they're looking for something on which they have sufficient experience to establish a certainty.

And you go down and you get a book - old Will Durant's book The Story of Philosophy - whenever you get it out of the library you'll find page after page - underscore, underscore and an underscore here and an underscore there and exclamation points over in the borders and it's all marked up, old copies of it. Libraries have to replace it every time they turn around. Because people in their great enthusiasm will underscore "God is good." Here these rather clever statements one way or the other which are quite profound and quite interesting of which somebody could be certain and then they pick all the way through - the thing they find "God is good." Fine.

Well, philosophy in its final analysis, would be - it's about time some body would define it - it would be a collection of routes by which, perchance, mayhap, somebody might find a way to discover a method of locating a sign-post which would indicate a route toward some tiny piece of certainty. That's philosophy.

Now, the mathematician is one of the most aberrated boys you ever ran into. He's done this, see. He's - this is - this is the way not to go about it; he's a good example of that. These guys are hanging on the walls and swinging from the chandelier. If you've ever run into one of these boys, they're sick - they're good and sick. They're handling this mass of what? Symbols so they can be certain. Great mass of symbols they've got in front of them there.

And they will tell you something on the order of a dog snarling across an old decayed bone he's about to bury and which you're trying to take away from him? "That's all there is is mathematics. And this whole universe is built out of mathematics and it's built out of mathematics. And if you don't think it is then I'm going to rrrah! zuh! Try to take this bone away from me, no sir," and yet all they're dealing with is one plus one equals two.

And then they just get fine, that's swell. If they'd just stick with arithmetic they'd stay good and sane. They go one plus one equals two. Well, you can stand this level of symbol but immediately an apparent untruth has entered. Immediately an untruth has entered. No one plus ever - any other one ever equaled a thing with a - with a curve in it. No matter how many straight lines you add to how many straight lines, you will never get anything with a curve in it. Unless, of course, the things are so infinitely small as straight lines that nobody would notice whether they were curved or not and this would be an interesting piece of oversight, wouldn't it?

So we have the apparent truth of arithmetic - if they stayed with arithmetic they'd be all right - one plus one equals two. That is, a straight line and a straight line, so on.

But they explain to you, "You dumb sap. That's a symbol for one quantity of something, you see? Ha-ha! Now, that's what we mean when we say the symbol, which means a quantity of one plus a symbol which means a quantity of one equals this curved thing over there and that means two quantities of one." You're supposed to be satisfied.

Don't ever say, "One what?"

"Oh!" he says, "One apple, one orange, one dollar. That's the way it's done."

You say, "One dollar plus one dollar equals two dollars. Okay, let's get some dollar bills. All right."

God help a teacher that ever does this in school because she'll - even she will see where she bogs.

Lay out a dollar bill. Now you say, "You lay out another dollar bill, and that equals…"

Then she'll say, "Wait a minute, Just a minute. Let's go over this again. You lay out a dollar bill and then you lay out another dollar bill and that equals - well - well, I'll tell you, honey, all it is, is, you see, you pick up these two dollar bills and put them over there and that equals these two dollar bills."

Something wrong about that, you see, because - because those two one-dollar bills never equaled anything but the two one-dollar bills right where they were and the second you've moved them elsewhere (as Korzybski has laid down), they're not the same two one-dollar bills, because they're occupying different space.

In other words, the only way we can do arithmetic is to wildly confuse space. And if we sufficiently confuse space and get wild enough about our confusions of space, we can do arithmetic. But if we happen to notice that we are confusing space in order to do arithmetic, all the preponderables and unponderables and expoundables of arithmetic vanish.

The only thing wrong with arithmetic is that you can make all sorts of things equal to all sorts of things that they obviously are not equal to. So gradually as the fellow goes on up the line through calculus and theory of equations, he finds out that it takes him all the way through theory of equations to get there, and he should have learned it in the second grade, first grade, kindergarten, Mother should have taught him before she [he] went to school. You - if he - if she couldn't teach him this, he was too dumb to be in school. It's when you confuse two spaces you can get any answer you want. Any time you confuse two spaces you can get anything you want.

If you're permitted, in any game, to confuse spaces, then you can get any answer. Let's follow that for a minute. You lay down this dollar bill and you lay down this dollar bill and the second that you say, "Those two spaces are on the other side of the equal sign," your arithmetic formula is right - the second you do that - but then the arithmetic formula can't be right the second that we know that those two dollar bills occupied space. We haven't moved those two spaces over unless we're a thetan.

The whole process of existence from the beginning of time until now has been the confusion of spaces and only when you could confuse spaces could you ever fool anybody.

"Now you've seen it. Now you see it there, there it is, there it is. Now we turn over the hand and nothing there." See? Everybody says, "Gee, he's good with card tricks. How the hell did he do that?" Well, the way he did that was - slipped it up his sleeve, of course. There's where the space went. But he showed you his sleeve and it wasn't in it. So therefore, people are left in a confused state of mind.

Do you know what card tricks are for? Basically card tricks and suchlike magic was simply used to confuse people sufficiently - people who were ignorant - confuse them sufficiently, bing-bing-bing, see, to plant a suggestion, and you could then tell them that they had seen anything. And the only thing that you ever used the palming, the card trick, the sleight of hand, any of these things, was simply so that the crowd would become open-mouthed enough to suddenly believe that you had a small boy at the end of a rope which had leaped in the air and which was not held from above. And you only had to tell them this was true. Or you had to spread a mock-up that this was true from their viewpoint - bang! You didn't have to say a word, you just went into a regular communication system, but you got them confused by looking at MEST by confusing spaces.

Fellow says, "You see this quarter? It's gone. Where is it?"

Well, up his sleeve, of course, but he isn't wearing a coat.

"Let me see," they said, "now, what is that? What is that?" In other words, how do we disentangle these two, three, four spaces there. We - all of us saw it as one space.

"Now, let's see, there was a space there, and now there's not a space there. The quarter is gone; it was an anchor point. So it was making up - if it was an anchor point that with a set of other things made more space. But now that space has evidently been destroyed and that space must be created someplace else but it obviously isn't any… Well, how do we figure this out? Let's see, how do we figure-figure-figure-figure-figure."

Well, how did they start figuring? They recoiled from looking. You have to recoil from looking. And why do you recoil from looking? Because it gets too confused.

Now, who's the most pestiferous person you know? The most pestiferous person you know.

Get a mock-up of this person from in front - talking to you from in front - just the idea the person is there, talking to you from in front.

Now, get the idea that while he's talking to you in front, he comes up from the right side talking to you about something else.

Now he comes up from the left side while he's still talking to you from in front and on the right side.

Now he comes in from above and starts talking to you.

Now he comes in from below and starts talking to you.

Now two more of him walk up in front while all of these others are talking.

And you fix your attention on the - what those two new ones are saying and just get your attention fixed on them and he starts talking to you from the rear.

Now get your attention thoroughly on his talking to you in the rear and then have all the others start talking to you while he walks in from the other side of the room and talks to you while all of him is talking to you there.

And then he appears exactly where you are, talking to you.

What's happening here? There's obviously - there's one person we have postulated and then all of a sudden we get him in lots of locations. Do you get the idea of your attention being racked from one place to the other? Do you see how this could be?

All right, now much more graphically - blow all those up.

Now much more graphically get an explosion on the right side and just as you're looking at it, get an explosion on the left side.

Now while you're looking at this second explosion, get one in front of you and just as you fix your attention on it, get an explosion behind you.

Just as you fix your attention on the one behind you, have an explosion under your feet.

As an explosion happens under your feet, get one happening above you.

As one happens above you, get another one happening above you when you expect to look away.

What's happening there? You're just being asked to make space, make space or agree with space, agree with space, agree with space, agree with space. And every time you drag your attention off one space, then you try to hang that up and leave it there while you go to another space.

All right, let's find the four upper anchor points of the room.

Now get the idea there's no room there.

Now let's find the four upper anchor points of the room while there's no room there.

Let's get the four lower anchor points of the room while there's no room there.

Now have the room appear eighteen feet to the right of you.

Do you get this immediate impulse to yank the room back? Hm? Why do people get messed up on a time track? Why do they get stuck on a time track? It's just that they haven't had time to sort out the space that's been given them before they have to sort out some new space. You see?

So arithmetic is the end-all swindle.

The dollar bill plus the dollar bill is simply the dollar bill plus the dollar bill. It's exactly the same place that the two dollar bills … But anytime we grant the fact that there can be a symbol for anything we're in trouble. We have said immediately that the thing is not the thing, that something else can represent the thing.

Any time an executive wants to get in trouble, he hires a manager who then writes letters in the executive's name. We're in trouble. If we want to keep out of trouble, the way we do is not try to be an executive and have a manager, just have a manager. That's simple, then, see.

But deputizing while still holding on to is the favored method of doing business in this community and culture today. And that happens to be an impossible method of doing business because it is intensely restimulating. While you're still holding on to this space, you've got to hold on, now, to another space. Now, while you've got to hold on to another space, we hold on to the next space. And before you can let go of it, you'll hold on to the next space and the next space and the next space.

So finally, you say, “Well, just these words will stand for these spaces and that'll be that. And we won't try to hold on to any spaces anymore; we'll get some symbol that'll stand up and hold on to all these spaces for us."

This is an immediate admission that one can't hold on to spaces; it's also an immediate admission that one cannot look. When one can't look, he's in trouble! That's the only place it goes, is into symbolism. And any time you get symbols, any symbol plus any other symbol can be two other symbols because you just simply said it was true. Then guys, after they've noticed that this is wrong, that is to say, it's contrary to regular postulates or contrary to existing spaces the second they've noticed that this is haywire, they will lay off arithmetic.

Try and teach some bright little kid arithmetic; you're in trouble. Just try and do it and you're in trouble. He'll ask you and ask you and ask you. And, of course, you say, “Well, of course, you always want to get the proper change" - some such thing. "And that's why you want to learn arithmetic, you little dummy!" It isn't a good answer at all. Learning arithmetic is just a method of looking at symbols while you should be looking at the real thing.

Do you mean to tell me you can't see at a glance a hundred objects and know whether or not there are ninety-nine or a hundred and one? You mean you have to go through a system of counting them? This is a superlimitation. The only reason you have arithmetic is because somebody else has agreed upon a system of symbols, not because you need them.

Now, computationally anybody can figure out where he is navigationally; he knows where he is, he doesn't have to figure it out with a sextant and all that sort of thing.

Driving through fog the other day, terrible fog, very thick fog and I was traveling at about sixty-five, seventy miles an hour - a real thick fog - and slowed down and braked down to about thirty and braked down to about twenty and then went around the truck which was crossparked on the highway. I never saw the truck even when I passed it. Why?

Well, it's a simple matter of knowing that there's a truck up there. How do you know there's a truck up there? Well, you know there's an iron object in the fog. Why? Well, you can taste the iron, of course. How far ahead of you can you taste it? Well, you can taste it about five hundred yards.

People - this is real silly, you see. I mean, what do you need there? Well, you make the postulate you can't see in fog - you sure can.

Now, the other way to do it is simply shift your sight to infrared. The second you shift your sight to infrared fog can't stop it. If you're depending on MEST vision and MEST objects, you can certainly count, look, see, sort. This is not difficult. It is hard to explain because the language does not admit it. This is the superlimitation.

Fellow who goes out has to - in a circus and balances himself with one finger in a bottle on top of a pole fifteen feet high while balancing the pole, has a certain state of mind. You could label this state of mind certainty. But actually, it's a sort of an elan - an elan. He's doing it, he knows he can do it - swing-pang! One day he goes swing-pang and the bottle collapses and so forth, and after that he isn't so hot at it. After that he'll start to set up circuits in training so he can do it.

I think that probably two or three-year little - old kids could walk high tight wires three hundred feet in the air with no trouble whatsoever, except that this is shown off as an exhibition, which means they can't do it. Nobody pays any attention to them, but people would pay attention to things doing it, so if nobody pays attention to them, then they can't do it either.

You find every little kid will have the sneaking hunch that if he had all the adulation that circus performers get, he could do all the things they do. The cross-circuit is, is nobody pays him attention and people pay attention to high-wire walkers. So it must follow, immediately, that there's a difference of space. See, he must be in a different space, so this must be a different thing. They're given the idea "they can't" before they get the idea "they can."

Now, I taught a little kid one time to steer a racing yacht which was one of the fightiest yachts anybody ever tried to… Lot of square footage was up there, some twenty-five hundred square feet of canvas was up there in a thirty-five mile breeze and she didn't have a single reef point in her. And she was going with her whole rail under.

And I just told this little kid, "Come over and steer it."

"Oh," he says, "I can't reach it."

"Well, why don't you stand up on the rail and put your foot on the tiller."

"Okay." He did, he steered it. Never occurred to him, you see, he couldn't, because it never occurred to me he couldn't. Well, that was rough beef, because actually a fellow had to grab ahold of that tiller real hard and push real hard and do all sorts of things. But he was just doing a beautiful job of steering that vessel. I didn't even tell him how to do it. She'd start to fall off and he'd bring her up into the wind a little bit more. Why? That's just the way he was supposed to do it; nobody had ever trained him how.

You see, a person then gets half-trained and they think they have to be trained And that's the only reason we're talking about Dianetics and Scientology, in we're talking on a cultural level where people are half-trained, then they have to be fully trained because they have to be out-trained out of being trained. The only excuse we have for going to school here is to get untrained so that we can recognize that we're trained. See that? It sounds silly but it's absolutely the thing, what we're doing.

All right. As we look down the line we find out what's certainty. People think that they can get trained into a certainty. They can't get trained into a certainty. But they can be guided to feel, be guided to think, be guided to work and be guided to look on certainties. Not the symbols of the thing, hut the thing. They can look, they can feel, they can feel the effort and they can think, in just that order, on the subject of certainties.

So the component parts of livingness happen to be think, effort, emote, look and the objects and spaces about which one thinks, toward which one applies effort, which apply effort against one which one feels, which feels of one, at which one looks and which look (if they're mirrors) at one. Those are the component parts of existence.

If you become certain that these component parts of existence exist, then you have a certainty.

You see anything?

Well, right now, close your eyes, close your eyes. Did you get an impression of anything around you? An impression of anything?

Male voice: Visually? No.

In the room?

Male voice: Not visually.

Well, now, just a minute. Close your eyes again. Do you get an impression of anything visually?

Male voice: Sure. Everything's in the room. Everything that belongs here.

Well, do you get an impression of anything visually? Do you see anything visually?

Male voice: Well, blackness.

There.

Male voice: It's not in the room, though.

There we finally made some… It's not in the room?

Male voice: Well, you know…

Where is it?

Male voice: It's right - it's right here but it's…

All right. Where is here?

Male voice: All right, right here in the room.

Okay. And so you can take any preclear and kick his teeth in on the subject of observation. That's the first place you kick his teeth in when he tells you're occluded - he's occluded.

He says, "I'm occluded."

And you say, "Okay, close your eyes and take a look. What do you see?" "Nothing," he'll say.

Sometimes he will keep up this damn-fool story about he sees nothing for minutes! And you just have to keep talking to him and arguing with him and saying, "Now, come on. Do you see anything at all? Is there anything at all to see?"

"Oh," he'll say after a while, "some blackness."

"All right. Is that something or isn't it?"

"Well, I don't know what it is."

That isn't what you've asked him, you've asked him if he saw anything. Get the essential difference there.

"All right, now where is it?" That is the next question.

Well, I made him say where it was. He said it is - it's in the room. Of course, but he isn't sure of that, are you? Male voice: Yeah, I'm sure it's in the room but it doesn't have anything to do with the room, though.

Oh, it's not connected with the room in any way, shape or form Doesn't have anything to do with it.

Male voice: Yeah, I got it when I'm outside, too.

Your - I see, I see, it carries - portable?

Male voice: Oh, yeah, I can take it anywhere I go.

Mmm!

Male voice: It's not heavy.

Now, that's the only confounding thing about a body, an automobile, a bird or anything else. They're mobile, damn them. That's the only thing about a planet or a star that is even vaguely confusing. They're mobile.

When a person recognizes something of this mobility it upsets him. And there is his excuse for using symbols; he tries to handle mobile objects.

The only mathematics I know that does me any good at all is rate of change - mathematics which handle rate of change in ratios. And I try to look at rates of change in ratios and mock-ups and any other way I think for them, I just get more and more confused. So does anybody else, because that is the sticker beyond stickers.

You have a barrel, it is leaking at the rate of one drop every three minutes. What is the - at the rate of one drop - now, it is a conical structure rather than cylindrical, and you want to know the area of the water - the difference of the area of the water every three minutes.

Now, the rate of change of the area of the water at the top of the water supply because it was leaking or because it was running seems to be an important problem to some people. Never found any use for it, but whenever I run up against that one, it has to be done mathematically. I have to add and subtract and cast it up and integrate and differentiate and so forth, and when I get all through I look up in the back of the book to find the answer and I take what I found in the back of the book.

The difference of area because of difference of escapement. It's hard to look at because it's very hypothetical - extremely. And people claim they want to know answers to this sort of thing, so they do.

That introduces in this universe, then, an uncertainty. And actually, from that uncertainty of mobility of space - that is to say, mobility of anchor points - a mobility of anchor points introduces a possibility of confusion. We answer this question - well, we've answered it.

We've got eight anchor points. These anchor points are unchangeable anchor points as far as their own character and beingness is concerned - individually unchangeable. Now, we move these to a new location so that you have them in eight new places. Do you have a different space? Well, do you or don't you? Do you have a different space?

Female voice: Yes.

Do you?

Male voice: It's determined by the location.

That's correct! If you don't know that, though, about this universe, you don't know anything, do you?