& (…) You bet 'cha.

This is October the 29th, afternoon lecture.

We have been covering, here, all kinds of highly factual, basic, fundamental material. I'd like to point out to you, every few lectures or every few times in a lecture, that we are dealing with a simplicity which stems from, as far as we've been talking here, a definition of space.

The next thing that you might puzzle on is a definition of life, a definition which would include all life, not just the MEST universe.

Now, the second we do this - second we do this, we have to evaluate an absolute zero and realize that zero has a gradient scale. It's very simple.

We have a - there's a little doll lying here on the table and there's no doll there now. I just moved this doll and now the place I moved the doll from is a zero of dolls. But get the limitation of the zero. It has to - you have to say, "There's no doll there now," implying that a doll has been there.

Mathematical zero, as a symbol, is entirely inarticulate and inadequate. It's like saying we'll consider this whole society an egg. There's just that much a variation in zero. Let's just call this whole society and sum up this whole society as "egg." That's the same way of saying, "Something is nothing, there's nothing there."

Now, man has a tendency to avoid motionlessness. In fact, it's the one thing which he can't assimilate unless you simply just shove it at him and cram it down his throat or wring it around his neck - nothingness!

& Do you know this is to such a degree that there is -

Nothingness, you see, has actually just now, with this work in Scientology, come up for inspection. Do you know that I don't think you'll find anywhere in the history of man anything which is a good, solid dissertation on the subject of zero or nothingness. I just don't know of one. I'm not terribly well read, I mean, I don't read Greek and I don't read Latin, I don't read German which immediately throws out the three most important source languages we have. At the same time, just knowing what people have brought out of those languages and what papers they seem to have paid some attention to, so on, I just don't know of one. I've had - never had a hint of one.

This was puzzling to me when I was studying mathematics. One "studies" mathematics in this society, by the way. It's quite amusing. There's no definition out in the universities today for mathematics. That one is sitting in the Logics that you have in the book

Handbook for Preclears, just so someplace there'll be a definition for mathematics. It's a - it's a word which is defined in the dictionary. It is not science or a system in definition.

One says, "There are lots of mathematics;" very grandly. You don't run into any mathematics until you get to theory of equations. What is mathematics? Well, if you study theory of equations - that esoteric thing which is supposed to follow after the fellow's imagination has been completely deleted by studying differential calculus and integral calculus and a few other things. You can get up to theory of equations but you still aren't looking at definitions of mathematics. You're looking at - I never could quite get the professor to say what you were looking at, but it was interesting. It must have been, lots of hours were spent in the room. And you had to get the idea that this was a theory of what you equated and that sort of thing.

Well, the fellows that have been to work in this field would have done much better if they'd simply applied themselves to epistemology and stopped removing themselves one step over into a thing called mathematics because - never doubt this - any work with symbols which symbols can change and alter in form is doomed to an enormous amount of inaccuracy.

It's like trying to build a small house - building with symbols - like trying to build a small house out of rubber sponges. See, they just keep bouncing around. It's a very bad analogy; there can't be as bad an analogy. I've almost plumbed the depths when I say "building something out of symbols." You can get the idea of nothingnesses that are not quite nothingnesses but that are somethingnesses.

Now, we've had - we've had some illustrations here of somebody fighting nothing, nothing. Terrible concept! If you want to just keep running a preclear on this, you'll have him berserk; he'll be practically out of his mind before you get him through, not out of his head! (That being some slight difference.)

The methodology of symbolism itself… Imagine the conceit! What gets me every once in a while in this society is you find such terrible conceit sitting here and there, and it's usually the conceit of "This set of symbols which we have sitting before us and which we have arranged, so forth, are terribly important, although they explain nothing! Terribly important, these symbols are." And somebody is supposed to sit down and memorize symbols which lead to no end. There's no end product on these symbols at all except some more symbols. And here's a - here's a fantastic thing because a symbol can always shift. For any given moment it has a precise definition, but you add time to a symbol and it's licked, because it has no form.

Take this thing called "freedom." Take this thing called "democracy." Today they - you - everybody practices democracy. It isn't democracy, it's some kind of socialism. I don't know what kind of a socialism, it's invented all the time. But we're fondly believing that our forefathers fought for democracy. They didn't, they fought for rugged individualism. Well, democracy is different than rugged individualism; democracy is considerably different. Democracy is establishment by the major amount of force in the community, which is to say the most votes.

So, we - they have this muddy picture every time we go into symbols.

This sort of thing led Korzybski to write an enormous tome trying to tell people why no two people could ever converse because everything they said was impurely understood by the other one, so he was - that book called Science and Sanity is undoubtedly a very great work and I'll read it someday. I got past the first page of it one time, but… Have you ever read the first page of Science and Sanity?

Male Voice: Yes.

Tell you what - now, have - you're sure you read the first page? It's a very interesting Page - you can't find on it what the book's all about. And the book ends the same way because I read the last page.

By the way, I had an editor friend one time and he used to buy stories and he used to find out what stories he was going to buy simply by taking up stacks of manuscripts as they came in and he'd read the first paragraph and he'd open them up to the middle and he'd read a paragraph and then he'd read the last paragraph, and they integrated into a story, he bought the manuscript without any further questions asked, because practically none of them did.

And if you apply that test to a story in a magazine you'll - and then read the story itself you'll be amazed to discover that it's a quite accurate test. It's a test of the consistency of the story - quite accurate. The story which doesn't do that isn't worth reading to a large degree because it just starts - kind of starts nowhere and goes nowhere and gets noplace in the middle.

Well, when you start out to define how nobody can talk to each other and you're using words to do it, you wind up by not talking to anybody - Q and A.

Now, Korzybski has an enormous number of very, very clever ideas. They've been explained to me by my friends and I appreciate it very much. I know quite a bit about Korzybski's works.

Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever. This was a number of years ago and was very, very clever. Of course, I found out later that Bob Heinlein had - that was his viewpoint on what Korzybski should have written and was mostly taken from Hayakawa, but that was explained to me by another friend who talked three whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski. But this other fellow was quite accurate and he was very convincing - the number of times he pounded the table with his fist convinced me utterly, and so I know that there is something in there; I'm just sure of it. I haven't read that book but I'm sure there is.

But I am also sure that every time I processed a preclear who was a general semanticist, I practically had to shoot him to get him off the couch. Now, is there some connection between these two data?

I had one little girl who had taken in the university something that was called semantics. I don't know whether they follow Korzybski or who, but this girl had a communication lag that you couldn't have reached in a jet plane in hours. And finally, I tried to figure out what this was all about because I wasn't in communication with this girl. I'd say one thing and she would sort of dazedly look around and wonder if I'd said something else.

So I just took up the whole subject of words, immediately, and just started sorting through words and all of a sudden she looked rather sad about it all. Seemed like the professor had been very good looking and it was his foregone conclusion that no two people could ever find out what each other was saying simply because the words were all completely inexact and carried no exact meaning, one to the other. And she had thought this over carefully and had decided it was true and hadn't talked since. She couldn't communicate. She knew that everybody she talked to got some different meaning out of what she was saying.

So I sat down, I looked at her for a little while and all of a sudden picked up a book and threw it violently against the wall. She looked in that direction. "What do you think just happened?"

She says, "You threw a book at the wall!"

I said, "Did that carry an exact meaning to you?"

"Well, I don't know why you threw the book at the wall."

"No! No! Just the fact that I threw the book at the wall, did that carry an exact meaning?"

"Well, you threw a book at the wall."

“Yeah, you know I did that? Well, could you consider that a communication?"

"Well, I'd hate to receive it. Yes, it - I see, it - what do you - say, there's something here," see.

Of course, we could communicate, and I did it with MEST actions because words are symbols which represent, in every case, the action of the MEST universe. And all language is MEST universe derivation. And it is carried on air particles which vibrate against eardrums. And if people have lived a similar time track - they have lived in one society - or if they have studied the language extremely well against the background of living in a similar society, they know exactly what they're saying; there's no doubt about it at all.

Completely aside from that, here again, is the scientist trying to materialize everything by dematerializing entirely. What he's trying to do is dematerialize - and doesn't realize - is that the only - the only complete spiritualist - the only complete spiritualist in the country is really the leading atomic physicist. See, he doesn't know that he's a spiritualist.

Now, you see here that this similarity of experience brings about an ability to interpret and extrapolate the thought processes of somebody else. You see that that could occur, don't you? What do you know! The fellow that tries to do it that way will go mad. He gets into the same boat of this poor little girl who had been taught general semantics in college. Because people think they're talking with language!

The amount of conversation in which you engage is mostly pleasant and idle and needn't carry any direct meaning; it's a rather pleasant interchange or a somewhat disagreeable interchange that one has to go through or some such gradient as that.

And it would certainly surprise the living daylights out of you, if you found out that you were making motions with various forms such as larynx, mouth and so on, and the other person's eardrums were violating [vibrating] violently, and that one had interposed this tremendously complex communication system between two beings, so I guess they could be surprised. It's about the only explanation because they don't pick up their meanings that way; practically useless. It's a communication system.

Therefore, this MEST universe gives you various forms on which you can agree and words can be defined from this and it's all very beautiful and all that sort of thing. Well, when it comes down to meaning, thetans, one to the other, depend for their certainty upon action. The interaction of anchor points is about all that carries any meaning.

The more attention one pays to noise as noise, the more attention one pays to words as very meaningful things which have to be studied hard, the harder it is to do anything.

It is absolutely extraordinary, utterly fantastic, that the communication system of the MEST universe can carry on it any message. It is the most - the greatest tribute to a thetan I know of, that he can actually make it work. But as far as communication is concerned, the ability to know what the other fellow was saying or know what the other fellow was thinking, it's only the thetan who can't look that is ever fouled up about it.

If a thetan is too deeply mired into significance, and if he's practically plowed under with the wonderful reason why the significance which underlies something or other - he, no matter how grand the words, no matter how they're strung together, never seems to be able to convey any message or receive one. and that's what we. know as "out of communication." This person has accepted symbols as his mode of communication. And having accepted the symbol, the symbol now does all the work and he is entirely dependent upon a set communication system before he can do anything. He has stopped looking and started talking. It's perfectly all right to talk; it is an accepted mode of communication I sit to you here - sit here and talk to you and it's perfectly acceptable. You know what I'm talking about. I don't think there's many questions in anybody's mind as to what I'm talking about or what I'm saying.

There isn't any question in my mind when you say things. And there isn't anything mystic about this. It's just the fact that although it's fun, don't let it whip you.

If you wanted to have a real good time with a preclear, just start out with the subject "communication system" or "systems;" and start applying to it any kind of process you know - any of these processes we've gone over in Dianetics or Scientology. Just start working with this whole subject "communication systems," and you'll find out that you have this enormously complex thing where you have lines and relay points and interruption points and waiting sidetracks and it's the most fabulous thing you ever heard of! It's set methods of communication, and when all dependency for the communication is put into the method of communication in a government you get bureaucracy which never does anything. The paper chain is carrying the entire responsibility, and so it is in polite conversation; they expect the word and the form to carry the entire meaning.

Have you ever talked to anybody who was a letter-perfect person in politeness and manners, and who, at the same time, had no oomph? You have to look kind of close, because sometimes you don't see that they're there. Here are these forms flowing. Communication - there's air waves and vibration; there's nothing giving them a shove, there's nothing backing them up.

You know when somebody is being polite, unless you're too mired in significance. If you're too mired in significance, you're always wondering what was behind what he was saying. "What's behind what he's saying?" This immediately says, "I am uncertain if there is a terminal communicating to me!" That's all that is. And that's one of the worst things that can happen to a thetan: is he gets communicated to and he can't see where he's being communicated from! He'll go daffy but rapidly.

We had an experience here yesterday, had to do with a - with an "episcopatory" or whatever they call these - a "rectorium," and we have one across the street. And one of our boys, unfortunately - unfortunately for probably the sanity of this poor boy, gave him a message from God in a ball of light. Ah, yes. It's fortunate he gave him a ball of light. Why didn't he just give him the message and make it obvious that the message was on some sort of a system.

The thetan will believe then that he thought of it as a self-defense. If he can't find any system to attribute it to, he will then consider that he thought of it. It's his only defense. "I'll take the responsibility for it, I thought of it." Then he'd go along for a little while and then he'll get a hidden communication; something will say, "Kill yourself."

"What was that talking to me?" as the actual system really slowed down, see. "What was that talking to me? What direction did it come from? How did I perceive that? Where is it? What's taking place there? Uh…" And then, "Well, I don't know, I might - I talk to myself sometimes; it's probably something that I thought of and I probably am just feeling low today and it's because it's a gloomy day and it's just a idle thought that occurred to me." Now, that is stretched out. That sequence is very stretched out. Here is the way it would look in its normal time span: "Kill yourself."

"Oh, well, hell. It's just gloomy today1 of course, I'd think of such a thing."

What's he trying to do? He's trying to substitute significance for the lack of a line. If he can't find the position, he has to assume he must have done it and if he can get any kind of an idea at all that it has an exterior position to himself and it's talking to him - uuuuuuuu!

The fellow who has voices talking to him inside of his head is much better off than the fellow who has voices talking to him from way outside his head. Odd that psychiatry classifies people quite in reverse. People who have voices talking to them from the outside are sane and those who have voices talking to them from inside of their head are very often classified as insane. As a matter of fact, I read a paragraph in one of their innumerable, contradictory books which had to do with just that. It said that one could always tell whether or not a person was psychotic, because the spoken voices - the speaking voices and so forth - were invariably inside the person's head if the person were psychotic. Couldn't they face the idea that these voices very often come from outside?

Now, you can set up the great god Throgmagog - article one, "Dianetics: Evolution of a Science" - anytime you want to on a pc who is slightly hypnotic. You get something that looks like E-therapy, and that was, by the way, the source of E-therapy, much to my disgrace; even said so by the boys doing it. You set up the great god Throgmagog and he processes the preclear.

How can you do this? You just set up, not a viewpoint, but a communication source-point. And you can set up a communication source-point anyplace you please.

Now, the fellow sets up a communication source-point and then forgets about it. What's a circuit? He set up a communication source-point and then he's forgotten about it. Then he overlooks this in his modus operandi. He will look at this: that he has had to set up a communication receipt-point because his communications aren't going anyplace satisfactorily. Now, that's where you get that funny little technique of the person sitting in one chair, and then turning around and facing himself saying, "Why don't you answer me?" That sort of thing. You blow ridges and you'll blow all sorts of odds and ends in the case, just because people just don't answer fast enough and communication lag and so on. Well, there's - he's mocking up a communication receipt-point. Well, he does that all the time; they don't bother him. It's communication source-points that he mocks up, because he becomes the effect of them. And when he mocks up a communication source-point and forgets about it, you have a circuit, and that's what a - what a circuit is.

Now, people who have - are having trouble with position are having immediate trouble with communication source-points and communications receipt-points, so they don't know who's talking to them. "Kill yourself;" the voice says and the guy stops, "Well, I guess I'd better" All right.

When we - when we look at the communication source-point and the communication receipt-point, and we have a preclear who doesn't know where he is or where his source- or receipt-points are, he has gone down into a level of uncertainty which demands any kind of a certainty, so he'll pick tip anything. He'll let some kind of an old, moldy, decayed body nailed to a cross or something like that talk to him - he'll get visions from. And of course, some adventurous thetan going around can always mock up a ball of fire for one of them.

But you notice that all creditable visions - those visions which are credited by the Catholic church, which is an expert on visions, they get them all the time, people writing in all the time they've had visions - they call for of necessity, the existence of a source-point for the communication in the form of some sort of mock-up, and they've laid this down as their - part of their rules. Now, I haven't stated it the way they state it. "Did he appear to you?" which means "You didn't just hear him, did you? I mean, you saw him too? Oh, you saw him too! Oh, oh, well, well, come on in, we'll canonize you. Got fifty bucks or…?" What is it they charge now for a canonizntion? Anyway or can you buy them? Oh, that's right, they have to be "posthumorous."

The point I'm making here is that the communication source-point must be identified, and the thetan's utter passion for knowing where he is comes about when he's confused about communication source-points and communication receipt-points, He wants-he wants to know where he is. Well, if he knows where he is, then he figures out - he'll be able to figure out where the source- and receipt-points are, second. Well, when he starts getting bad off, he doesn't know about this. Now, you'd say when a thetan starts getting bad off. And when he starts getting to be human, my God, even any old, moldy engram that comes along can start talking to him suddenly, see? See, anything can happen from there on. He just - he's there - he doesn't even know he's there; he thinks he's a body and so on, being run by God, he - or something - he's in horrible condition.

Well, position in this universe is more than a defense; it's an utter necessity. If a person doesn't know exactly where he is, then anything can happen to him. So geographical position - it works out immediately that if you're going to operate in this universe, then geographical position becomes, immediately, the most important thing which a person can have because this we call "certainty." Certainty of what? He knows where he is. Why does he want to know where he is? Because he's surrounded by source- and receipt-points. The second he finds out who he is, then he can identify the rest of it.

Well now, his gradient scale of processing is ordinarily to do - to get rid of or do something about the source-points. It wouldn't occur to somebody who was doubtful about where he was that anybody could be so far gone as to not know where he was. This was Dianetics to some degree. I couldn't quite get it through my thick skull that the people themselves got lost. This didn't sound reasonable or natural to me, that the people themselves were lost.

It worked, then, that anytime anybody could have a - he could then - all you let him do was identity the source-points in the facsimiles which were talking to him and those were talking to him continually. A thetan now and then passing by saying, "Hiya, Bub," we could take care of, see, because it wasn't repetitive. But these consistent, continual, hammer-pound dramatizations and so forth that were coming through from the engram bank - well, we could get rid of those. But in order to run one, a fellow had to know what? He had to know where he was so he could find the source- or receipt-point.

Well, now, with Theta Clearing we find the same condition occurring; we find those people can be theta cleared with the greatest of ease who know where they are in the first place; that's a Step I.

Now, what's this gradient scale of Steps right on down through VII? Just a gradient scale of being lost. See, they don't know where they are. And the less they know where they are, the more they can confuse communication source- and receipt-points.

Now, you know this graph that we use just continually of the eight anchor points - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight - and with a little diagonal line in the middle of it. One end of it's A and the other end of it's B, and this little diagonal line in the center of that space. Well, boy, he's having an awful time; he's having an awful time with A and B, because he might be at A, and B might be talking to him or he might be at B with A talking to him or he might be somewhere in between. Or he might be beyond either one or off the communication channel entirely and still getting backflashes or talked to.

The only way he can resolve this, as far as he's concerned, is to consider something himself, and then find out where he is in relationship to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and then he will know whether or not he's at A or B, you see? Simple.

Well, if he knows where one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight are with relationship to himself, then he can spot A and spot B. Is he them? Well, up to that point he doesn't know that. "Am I they?" That's what his continual question is: "Am I they? A? B?"

Well, of course, he can't be A and B if A and B are a communication system set up whereby something starts at A and goes to B and come backs to A again. See, he can't be - he doesn't get dumbfounded or confounded or - he's just - we just consider this a line with source. And he can't be at A, because he's got to go; if A is the start, why, then he knows he can't start and he can't be at B because he'd have to arrive to be at B; and he doesn't dare arrive, so he can't be at A or he can't be at B. So A and B must be other points. That's what - the guy thinks he's a line; he thinks he's on the line or he's a particle on the line or he is the line. See? He is the line sending himself someplace. Well, he's the communication that's being sent. Do you see how that is? Very simple.

Well, I know that this produces an awful chaotic state in a case if you start processing the lines. See, what do you do? You start processing the lines. And these things will swell up and smack him every time. If you start processing communication lines just as such on a case, without rehabilitating the individual's position, not even as a terminal - just if you don't rehabilitate his position (his geographical location), with regard to the points in which he - which is deter - which are determining the space he's in, he gets into trouble every time. We just… Why? Is because that line is full of particles which are going someplace and he merely identifies himself now with these particles, and so he gets smaller and smaller and smaller as a person. See?