Enormous numbers of postulates have been made down through the ages concerning the mind and the behavior of the soul which are suddenly found to be valid. This is what you are going to run into out in the society the second you start to do something about these subjects. Somebody is going to say, “Well, so-and-so knew that, and the ancient Gogwogs and psychotherapy knew that, and . . .” yak, yak, yak.

Let me give you an instance: In Dianetics, at the beginning of last year, we possessed more phenomena, more horsepower and more effectiveness than had ever been aligned before on the subject of human behavior and mental phenomena. This was demonstrable in the fact that auditors, working in the Foundation, could turn people who had been extremely sick back out into the society.

We went on accumulating data — datum after datum after datum — until a year and a half later we had an array of mental phenomena which would have made somebody at the beginning of 1950 stagger at the magnitude of what had occurred in between in terms of collection of phenomena, although he knew a lot in 1950. We had, then, right in the field of Dianetics, an ocean of data.

A whole ocean of data had been collected. The continual effort to codify it and communicate it, the continual effort to find out what people were doing right or wrong, the continual advance research to get new coordination’s — all these kept aligning data and evaluating data, till we started the sudden upward climb, a very few months ago, of knocking out relatively unimportant data. Here began evaluation. But let me point out that a few weeks ago, although we had all of the data, we did not have Self-determined Effort Processing. We didn’t have the button. We had all the data, but we didn’t have the button. We had an ocean and we were looking for a drop of water in that ocean, and until all the phenomena which we had discovered had been completely aligned and evaluated with regard to itself, there was no slightest chance of picking that darn drop of water up, because it looked like every other drop of water in the ocean.

Then all of a sudden, by alignment and evaluation, careful extrapolation, going back over all of the Axioms, going back over everything that was known, a collection of all the Axioms and a reorganization of the whole field, Effort Processing dropped into our laps. This came about by extrapolation, not by experience or accident (which science believes is the real investigating role; they think if you just pick up a lot of data and sort of throw it in the air like a juggler does apples, and if you just get enough data, you have the answer). Then, by re extrapolation again, we got Self determined Effort Processing.

One of the research auditors and I tried this out on some preclears, working separately. The next time I saw him I had a little bit more data. But then I did another extrapolation and he turned up again and I said, “It’s self-determinism.” From that moment he was getting more results than I had been getting, till I turned around and used it on the preclears I was working with. But he was working in advance of me, and I didn’t dare tell him because it would have scared him to death.For the first time in the history of Dianetics I wanted to see what somebody else could do, cold, with an axiom that was just extrapolated in that fashion.

So more than a year and a half, and actually the sum total of some twenty years of evaluation and reevaluation, have suddenly culminated in a push button.

How did it do it other than by fortuitous accident? Fifteen years ago I knew perfectly well the basic mystical tenets of India concerning “that which you validate will come true.” Here is a datum. What is the evaluation tag on it? We didn’t have any proof there was any value there at all until we got Validation Processing. We tried Validation Processing and it had workability. So it was true — what you validated would come true. There was a reason for that, and it had to be reevaluated and reassigned, but it was put in its proper place.

You could go out now and get yourself a handful of textbooks on mysticism, spiritualism, magic, druidism, Jungism, psychotherapy — any wild, madcap field that you wanted to get into — and every few pages of any book you picked up on these subjects you would find that somebody had hit upon and more or less stated an axiom of Dianetics. But these data didn’t have any bridges built to them; they were not compared with the real universe. So they didn’t have an alignment as data, because between two things in these subjects that you will find inherent in Dianetics and find true in Dianetics, you will find 865,000 things that are untrue and unevaluated but which are given just as much importance as those data which are now found to be inherent in Dianetics.

People don’t realize this because it is almost a new axiom in the field of thinking that a datum is as important as it has been evaluated. It is very obvious when you think about it but it is actually a new step in logic. So you have to teach people that step in logic before you can get any agreement on the other side of it, and that has been about 90 percent of what has been wrong with science — or 110 percent.

In the physical sciences, a man is up against a highly uncompromising thing: the physical universe. The engineer who builds a bridge across a river has got to have a bridge that is going to hold the tonnage which he says it should hold. Otherwise a train is going to go across the thing and if there is no bridge there somebody is going to be mad.

An engineer can’t, as they were doing in the field of psychoanalysis, say, “Why, there’s no hole in that mountain there, there’s no shaft or anything of the sort, and nobody could possibly have fallen in there — we’ve proved it.” But they never went and looked! The physical engineer couldn’t possibly get away with this. The physical engineer could not say “Now, gentlemen, on the expert authority of Dr. Hogwart, writing in Vienna in 1887 in a paper called ‘An Examination of the Mysticism and Its Impact on the Regeda,’ a tunnel was driven at Milepost 82 that went through Bald Eagle Mountain.” (Nobody was catching up on these boys in the field of spiritualism; there was nobody running a train.) The engineer would get in the train, open up the throttle, go down the tracks, get to Bald Eagle Mountain, get to the milepost and — whatever Dr. Hogwart said — crash! No hole in the mountain, no tunnel.

Somebody had to come along and let the real universe catch up with this data before we knew what was true data and what was false data. What was true and what was false — that is what is important. What do you validate? What is valid? What is workable? What is invariable in its workability? We have to have the precision of the physical sciences and the only way we can get it is to put these things to the test of actuality. Somebody has got to drive the train. If we say there is a bridge across the river, by golly, somebody has to put a train across that bridge to find out why.

This is something like working with a white jigsaw puzzle; we would pick up a piece and put it in, pick up another piece and it would turn white, pick up another one and more would turn white. Every time we did so there were a lot of pieces that had been pink and yellow with purple polka dots that turned white on us, and a lot more strange-looking pieces showed up on the perimeter.

We are really at an explorer’s dream point. You take some of my pals at the Explorers Club and just tell them, “You know, the maps and charts of the area are such that they don’t even fill in the seacoast. They just sort of merge from the color of land into the color of sea,” and they say, “Well, let’s see, how can I get there?”

We are looking at an unknown because we have just done the horrible action of turning all the pieces white. Practically all the pieces that are known have turned white — mysticism, spiritualism and so forth.

We are into the second echelon with a clean slate, and that second echelon is simply “What is theta, and how do you conduit it nicely, handle it and isolate it very nicely so that you can do tricks with it? What is its exact composition?” In other words, we have to know theta well enough so we can say “There’s an island universe that’s going to appear out in that direction,” and one does, or something like that. That is the kind of thing we are working with now. We are that much on the fringe, because we have cleaned up the available pieces.

It may seem to you as though I am sort of over stressing what has happened; it may be that I am. But if the amount of advance that we have seen can be made on the few cases which have been processed, I can assure you that, if we haven’t got the push button, the push buttons are available and we will have the push button. We have suddenly narrowed everything down to such an enormous concentration point.

The reason for the few remarks I have been making here is somebody is going to try to argue with you about this, you are going to try to tell somebody about this, you are going to try to teach a class about it or something of the sort, and the first thing you know, somebody will say, “Well, Professor Hogwart said that back in 1887 in his papers, and that’s so-and-so and so-and-so.”

Your answer is “And what else did he say?” sweetly and innocently. “Well, I’ve forgotten just at the moment.”

“Let’s get the paper” — if you really want to be mean about the whole thing — ”Let’s get the paper.”

Now you find out that “it is obvious that if you leave babies in stumps in the white of the moon, they will always and invariably set fire to a house if they become kleptomaniacs.” You say, “Well, that datum isn’t true, is it?” And then you go down the rest of the thousand data that comprise this paper, and you will find that that datum that was remarked earlier was true. The reason this fellow remembered it is that it had a sympathy correspondence with his mind, and it sort of stood out. He had an instinct for its truth and this instinctiveness of its truth sort of let him carry the data along.

That is the way to handle it. You are going to try to tell somebody about these things and you are going to find people telling you immediately that all these things are known and all these things have been done. There is only one slight difference: If these cases continue to hold as they have held, you are going to have people walking in off the street with glasses, walking around the corridor and walking back on to the street without glasses; you are going to have people coming in with arthritis and all kinds of other chronic somatics and walking back on the street without them. There is a slight difference there.

What is the essence of that difference? It is the fact that this material is applicable to the real universe with an invariability. That is its chief difference. So we have a tremendous scope opening before us and we have buttoned up a lot of data.