[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

Well, I want to give you a talk rounding up rest points and stable data. And I've been talking to you about rest points and stable data for some time. And one of these days, why, you'll know all about them. I say „one of these days“; that's a cynical remark, but good auditors cognite on this, after a very careful briefing with examples, in about three days. They say „Yes, yes, I understand that. There's nothing to that. I got it all straight.“ And „Yes, yes.“ And then about three days afterwards, they hysterically get on the telephone and they say „My God! I see what you're talking about!“

So I'm merely alerting you that people have had difficulty wrapping up this thing. And I'm not asking you to have any difficulty. All I'm doing is asking you to be sure that you do understand it. You just ask the — just look at it from all sides and see if you've got it taped, see? There might be something there you missed.

It's very simple. It's very simple. Confusion and the stable datum. A confusion of data is aligned by selecting one datum and then aligning other data with it. And if you do elect that datum which is the stable datum of that, or that class of confusions, then indeed you'll have an alignment. If you elect the wrong one, you will still have something of an alignment, and it is still better to most people than a confusion, but it itself is aberration.

The difference between aberration and sanity is simply that: One elects the right stable datum in any given confusion. If you fail to elect the right stable datum, you are apt to get misaligned or missing or random data left over.

Now, if you follow the modern scientific method, you would simply throw these unwanted data away. But if you were honestly and actually doing research, you would, of course, see if you had the right stable datum which did include these other data too. And you would do a good job then and get them all aligned.

Now, the confusion and a stable datum are exactly aligned with the Axioms you find under Dianetics — that portion of the Axioms of Dianetics which we called Logics — and the whole story is contained therein. That was fall, 1951.

However, the full impact of that did not hit until the fall of 1955, and no processes that handled it to amount to anything emerged until the spring of 1956, and no sweeping use of it was made until about October of 1956.

Now, this material, then, has been with us a long time, but like many simple things has gone overlooked, because the material itself was not entirely evaluated. In other words, it, being the evaluation of all material, did not itself get evaluated. Do you understand how then you would just completely miss looking that squarely at it? And yet we've had it in our possession all these years — five years, really.

And it has to be stated, however, in such a way as to express itself in mechanics.

Now, I talked to you yesterday about mechanics, because you have to understand that it isn't enough to consider confusion and a stable data in terms of postulates and data. So actually something brand-new has been discovered: Its application to mechanics have been discovered. I want to show you that mechanics are parallel with postulates but are a different class of action.

Therefore, if you take this matter of confusion and the stable data… Let's take a confusion of data; let's take the Department of the Interior. The Department of the Interior, let us say, is a confusion of dispatches, orders, departments, bureaus, sections, units, activities and so on, and every few years, they try to bring order to this by putting in a new secretary of the interior. But in view of the fact that the department itself is not too clear on what it does or why, and in view of the fact that people seldom bother — who are working on a clerk or a bureau level — seldom bother to inform the new secretary what's going on… Which is true enough; there's nobody as ignorant about the Treasury Department or the State Department as the secretary of the treasury or the secretary of state. As a matter of fact, every once in a while the departments will stage a mutiny against this new political appointee, and they just cut him off the comm lines and he's dead.

Now, the only man that ever held down the Department of Interior thoroughly was Ickes.

I remember Ickes pronunciamentos, and I knew some fellows who knew Ickes. I never knew about what Ickes did. I have no idea exactly what his modus operandi was, but he did attempt to act as some sort of a stable datum to his department.

All right, however that may be, a confusion is not really as-ised or aligned by adding any new stable datum to it. Do you see that clearly? I mean, just by appointing a man to the Department of Interior, or appointing a man to the Department of Commerce, or appointing a man to the Treasury or State Department does not necessarily make these departments into a smoothly running organization. Not necessarily at all, because he may or may not know the stable datum of that particular department, and he may or may not act to align its communication lines, bureaus, data and administration.

There was a fine Department of Agriculture, once, run by Wallace — not today's Wallace, his progenitor. As a matter of fact, today's Wallace depends, if I remember rightly, for his repute mainly upon the old man's organization of the Department of Agriculture. Now, before the older Wallace, if I remember rightly…

I'm very foggy on this sort of a thing because I'm from Washington, you see, and you just wouldn't know. You see things running around in Cadillacs, and four years from now you see more — different kind of things running around in Cadillacs, and it just doesn't make much impression on you.

But the departments themselves do make an impression on you. You go into them. You run into them all the time. Their activities are very much in control of the district, and before the older Wallace, if I remember rightly, Department of Agriculture didn't do much. It didn't have much. It was a confusion. Agricultural programs and so forth had not gone out, and I think the old man did a great deal to bring order into this. He actually created the thing. And by golly, the thing is still running on the older man as a stable datum, or was a few years ago.

This difficulty, of course, is that you have an orderly organization by a stable datum which has an exact definition for what it is doing, and that definition is held in common throughout the entirety of a department. That is the only point I'm trying to get across. Whether we have the right people or the wrong people in charge of these departments doesn't matter. But the point is that this man does represent and is part of every other bureau or organization in his department — would make him a stable datum to that department, don't you see?

Now, supposing we simply appoint somebody — oh, I don't know, oh, let's get real goofy. Appoint somebody from California; appoint somebody from California to the Supreme Court. Fellow saw a law book once; used one to sit up to the table so that he could get high enough to eat his cereal. And this man is simply appointed, and they say „Now, you're the chief inquisitor.“ And he never bothers to inquire what a chief inquisitor is. He doesn't do anything like that. Next thing you know, the place is in a sort of a confusion. Well, that's because it's running on a pretended stable datum.

Now listen: it's much worse to have an organization running on a pretended stable datum than it is on no stable datum at all. Remember that. Remember that real carefully, because aberration itself is simply that action of pretending something is a stable datum when it is not. This stable datum is there by force; it does not color or represent the activities of the remainder of the area, so that we have a great many discoordinated and disrelated data. Do you see that? Many data which do not mesh with data. You follow me?

We'll pass all sorts of laws, make all sorts of decisions, go completely overboard, dive in all directions, scramble everybody's eggs, you see? Things could become very random under such a circumstance. Procedures fall into disuse which are the main procedures of the administration of an organization. Procedures which are of no use whatsoever come into being, which tie up the wrong terminals with the wrong communication lines, and the next thing you know you have a preclear.

All you have to do, you see, is just elect the wrong stable datum and make sure it is a stable datum. And those actions are the actions of aberration.

Well, let's take Ickes and the Department of Interior. All right, this boy sat there, and he fought and spat and roared, and I don't even think old FDR even ever backed him up. He never stepped backwards for a split instant. He was mean. And you started to cross up the Department of the Interior, or mess up some of its functions or whatever department he had there… I've been in on some meetings where this person was present and I was very impressed, very impressed. He was terribly forthright and awfully clear-cut. Nobody could get him involved in a complication. That was one of the interesting things.

The law that was handed to him said so-and-so, and if it coordinated with his department or unit, why, that was fine; and if it didn't, Congress had better watch out. I mean, the man did stand as something his own division and people could count on. They counted on this man, you see?

The odd part of it is, there was another great secretary I knew better than Ickes by a long ways, and that was Knox. And although Knox got knocked around quite a bit, and although he dramatized his name occasionally by offering to take off his coat and fight you if you didn't instantly agree with him… He was a pugnacious little man — a man, by the way, who was a very fine secretary of the navy at a time when they needed one.

They had Knox and Forrestal. I don't know that anybody deserved these men, but they had them. But Knox was quite interesting in his earnestness and interest in every part of his department; he was all over the shop. And yet the man was simply an owner of a newspaper out in Chicago before he came in here. He actually brought in part of his own newspaper staff. You'd see them scattered around over the place. You'd see sergeants of Marines and newspaper reporters from his paper almost of equal rank.

And the difficulties that he got into were only the difficulties that the Navy Department got into. Now, get that clearly. If the Navy Department was in difficulties, why, he was in difficulty, see? He didn't get into difficulties disrelated from the Navy Department. You got it? He did operate as a stable datum, in other words. See, he was stable as a personnel.

Every once in a while, why, his chiefs of operation, something like that, would get real wild. And of course, all they had to do was take their umbrellas or their rubbers or whatever they wear when they get to be admirals and diddle across the street and see Franklin and say „Franklin, Knox is being mean to us. He won't let us have those new pretty gray uniforms we saw, here in the middle of the war. And he says it'd be a bad burden on the service and on the manufacturers, and so forth, to have to turn out a brand-new uniform, a brand-new type of uniform, right in the middle of a war.“

And Franklin, of course, he was an indulgent man. He'd say „Well, we'll just bypass him.“ Well, they bypassed him once too often and they killed him. But with him and Forrestal went the Navy.

The Navy is sitting over in the „Pantagon“ [sic] building now. The sailors are wearing corporals' and sergeants' stripes on their sleeves, and the officers are wearing army bars on their raincoat shoulders. And I think the last time any naval officer took a ship to sea, he ran it into the mud down here, didn't he?

Well, you see, the area got into a confusion as soon as you disturbed its stable data too well.

Now, I'm not asking you to side politically with this; I'm actually trying to show you some examples of how you'd work this out.

Now, supposing you had a company and the company sold insurance. And the head of the company was yourself, and you were interested in selling insurance. And you were interested in all parts of the company and its insurance business and the activities and actions of all of the personnel in that company, and also interested in its customers and the communication lines. And you were operating simply to run a good company. That was the postulate on which you were going. You were going to run a good insurance company.

Well, that company would be not confused; it would be an unconfused company. Do you see that? Why? Because you are operating as a stable datum in that company. You are working for that company, and you are serving that company, and the company is serving you. In other words, it's reciprocal. You see that?

Now, one fine day, you move aside. You get interested in something else; you go to Florida, or we suddenly open up the draft and you're only seventy-two, so you get drafted. And you've said a kind word about the wrong people, or something of the sort, so they draft you.

Anyway, you get ahold of somebody who tells you he's an insurance man, only he's really best trained in running food-canning plants. None of his data aligns with insurance. And somehow or another, by some fluke or pressure or exigency or something, he gets in charge of your company. You just know that the customers sooner or later are going to get their policies in tin cans.

Well now, if he simply worked at the job of running the company, it would be confused, but possibly it'd get by — possibly get by.

Now, let us say, you lost that man; you put another man in. He apparently was a good man too. But leadership being what it is in these United States today, this new person that you put in didn't work for the company, had no sympathy for any of the difficulties of its people or employees or anything of the sort, did not try to operate as a point of justice, adjudication, administration, origin, but instead worked only for himself.

Now, there's an interesting fact, because you have a camouflaged hole — what we call a camouflaged hole. Here's a post that is there, but it's not there. And a camouflaged hole is worse than no head of the company.

You realize that people have been around in employment this long, you walk off and you leave them for a while, and they still operate. To some degree they still operate. They'll mock up something; they'll keep functioning one way or another.

But you put in somebody who stops their operation or backs them up or directs them in some other direction for some other purpose than that for which they are working, and you have at once an insanity. Do you see that?

He's trying to make a few quick bucks to stick in the bank in Florida for himself, you see, and the company somehow or other continues to try to run an insurance business. But every time they run into a nice big policy sale that isn't going to net their present manager any money, or something like that, he cancels it, stops it and queers it one way or the other. Maybe he's trying to drive it downhill to a point of where he or some of his friends can buy the company for nothing and then sell its assets or do something like this, you see?

Now, you've seen that situation in a national transit strike. There was a fellow by the name of Wolfson. Why he's named such a thing, I don't know, because it's an undignified thing to do to a wolf. But this dud managed to get deep enough into politics so that everything went his way, so that he could take a great transit company, bleed it white of its amusement parks, its new equipment, its proper plans for improvement, everything else, and just sell these things in all directions, put some money in his pocket, and so on.

Now, that man was pretending to be the head of a transit company. Now, that transit company without any head whatsoever possibly would have gone on running quite smoothly. The streetcars would have gone back and forth. You'd have possibly found the motormen would have forgotten, maybe, to wear uniforms after a while. They would have become individual to some degree, without being driven. You'd probably find them driving along eating sandwiches and drinking Cokes or something of the sort. It'd have been a relaxed atmosphere, but you still would have had streetcars running and functioning. But with Wolfson at the helm — interested obviously in nothing but making money — there was nobody with whom anybody could negotiate. Because he was not negotiating on the subject of transit; he was negotiating on the subject of how much money he could get out of the federal government without taking a gun to people. And he did a very fine job of it. He did a very fine job, splendid job — for Wolfson and his brothers, but not for the transit company.

And here we find, a year later, the same situation, the same involvements, the employees all upset with their union, everything in chaos, and you have a transit company that doesn't transit. It talks about strikes and other things, you see? Now, that's insanity. Do you see that?

Now, what causes this insanity? It is a false stable datum who is simply pretending to be or who is pretended to be — somebody else pretends he is — the head or stable datum of this area or organization, and is not. There you have a camouflaged hole: There's no datum there, but everybody thinks there is. And that's insanity.

And that's what's wrong with your preclear! That's a very sweeping statement — „That's what's wrong with your preclear“ — but it's very, very true. That you could sum up aberration as rapidly as saying that it is a false stable datum holding in check an entire body of data, is quite a statement. Now, that's not stated to be exactly worded, but it is certainly there. Don't you see? That is.

Now, an idea can become fixed, and a person can then force other data to align with that idea, and you have individuation. An individuation is a fixed idea disassociated from other ideas with which it could associate if you pulled a couple of barriers or rearranged a few stable data. That is individuation. Something becomes individual by refusing to take part of its class. By the way, individuation is not necessarily a good thing, not necessarily a good thing at all. Not necessarily a bad thing; it certainly makes a game.

But too much individuation itself is an insanity, and we have the manifestation known as the „only one.“ An individual who should be part of certain classes of data does not consider himself to be part of those classes of data, but considers himself to be standing on a lonely plain all by himself, when as a matter of fact, he is in close communication with many other data and he is refusing that communication. The refusing of that much communication, of course, is a psychotic situation.

Now, we've applied it to something as big as a government department; we've applied it to a transit company and so forth. Well now, how about the totally mechanical aspect of a bunch of particles gyrating in space? In other words, a mechanical confusion. How about just a bunch of particles mixed up, confused, in motion, in a certain given area of space? Now, how do we apply it to something like that?

We apply it on this basis: We say none of those particles moving in this given area of space are still, therefore it is a total confusion.

You understand that when you think of particles running in an area of space, you are apt to also add the walls to contain the space, and the walls are motionless, and you can compare the movement of the particle to that wall. But let me assure you that if there are no walls there at all, then all particles are in motion with no particle to regulate any motion with. You cannot compare, then, the motion of any one particle with the motion of any other particle unless you try to operate on two particles in motion simultaneously.

Now, I understand they do this in the navy. They have what's called mooring-board exercises and so forth. You have two particles in motion and so on, and these guys pretend — they actually have the gall… This had me thrown one time. I just was thrown on this. I would go around in circles seeing mooring boards in front of my face.

You had a destroyer going in one direction, a battleship going in the other direction or some odd angle, each at a different rate of speed, and you wanted to know how far they would be apart at a certain period of time, and they were pretending that all particles were in motion. Now, it's not an understandable problem as long as all particles are in motion. It can't even be worked out. There is no answer.

They omitted (the idiots that dreamed up this mathematics) to mention that the mooring board which you're handed has a center point. That point is motionless and all other particles (the courses and ships) are moving in relationship to that center point. They are moving in relation to a motionless something.

But even if you considered the center point in motion too, remember there is another point with which their motion can be compared and that is Earth, the center of Earth.

If you were to lose some night the center of Earth, all people engaged in working with mooring boards would have to go get lost too. More importantly, all navigators would be out of a job. They are totally dependent on the center of Earth. They're not dependent on its surface but the center. Even if you didn't have stars, they could still work something out. They consider the center of Earth motionless. They neglect its movement. They consider all heavenly bodies as in motion compared to the center of Earth. That's the way they do it.

In other words, even [in] this complex problem of the mooring board and mathematics of this character which are really tremendous, you have these things compared to something. They are compared to something which is motionless.

Now, it may just be the person who is solving it who is motionless. But you'll always have something motionless with relationship to any problem, or it is a confusion and is unsolvable. Get that plainly. A total confusion is not solvable short of Scientology. It just is not solvable.

Scientology has something new here. Man is doing — but Scientology states that man is doing this thing: He arbitrarily appoints one spot in the confusion or one particle. in the confusion, regardless of its rate of speed, as motionless. He just arbitrarily says, „Okay, that's not in motion. All other bodies are moving in relationship to this body. We'll therefore neglect all other motions of this body. In comparison to them, we'll compare all particles as moving in relationship to this motionless bit of chaff.“ And at that moment, the confusion becomes not only that much less confused, but observable. This is the fabulous thing about this thing. For the first time you have become aware that there is a confusion to be ordered.

You nail down one point and say, „This point isn't in motion. All other things are moving in relationship to this point,“ and then look. You may find yourself completely out on the edge of the galaxy and you really shouldn't have elected that particular particle at all, but what difference does it make?

So the secret of the whole thing is simply that in a confusion we have to consider that all particles belong to more or less the same class if they are ever to be classified. They must belong more or less to the same class.

For instance, it'd be pretty hard to figure out the cosmic-ray bombardment through this room if you considered it in relationship to the air in this room. See, the air is already in motion or other things in the room are in motion, don't you see? And you've considered one set of motions versus another set of motions, and that in itself is a hell of a confusion. It just simply means that you have two classes of confusion which are making a new confusion, and you're getting very involved.

But you can consider cosmic rays in this room very easily by considering they're moving in relationship to the floor, or in relationship to the body's head or in relationship to anything else, even a photographic lens that you have parked someplace that you're going to take photographs of them with. It doesn't matter what you have there; you've got to have something motionless which has something to do in intention with cosmic rays, at least. It must have a similarity, even if only a similarity of intention.

Now, you could consider all the cosmic rays in the room, as they fly through the room, in relationship to one cosmic ray in that whole group that is flying through the room. And then you wouldn't be studying the cosmic rays in the room; you would be studying a class of cosmic rays, and you are apt then to get answers. See, you're apt then to discover something about their behavior. Otherwise you are considering them with relationship to a datum which is not necessarily related at all: the room. We've added an extraneous stable datum, a camouflaged hole. Cosmic rays have very little to do with rooms; they go through walls. Rooms don't stop them, therefore why should you study them in relationship to a room? You'd have to study them, really, in relationship to cosmic rays or something that would photograph cosmic rays or do something about cosmic rays which itself was motionless. Don't you see this? Well, supposing somebody has been going along fine and he's gotten into a traffic jam. Obviously it's a tremendous confusion. Remember that it is a class of moving particles; it is traffic. And remember that he is occupying one stable datum: his own car. He always considers the traffic moving in relationship to his own car. He usually does.

Very few people consider their own car, going at any rate of speed, as in very much motion. The passengers do but the driver doesn't. And therefore the traffic can be driven through in a car very easily. It's just usual, ordinary.

Well now, the moment you tried to go through the traffic with a pushcart, you would find more randomity. Why? The stable datum you have selected — a pushcart, which is not going to be in motion — is not of the same class of data as the remainder of the confusion. So trying to understand traffic by looking at a pushcart becomes difficult.

Now, let's go a little further than that and let's just look at traffic from some vantage point of which we are totally unaware. If we're totally unaware of a vantage point, then looking at the traffic only and not examining the highway or a signpost or anything of the sort, we would see an interestingly confused scene.

The traffic would be going in all directions without being in relation to anything until we did what? Until we selected out one car or even a still signpost or something to judge the motion of the confusion by. See that? So in that degree we would begin to understand the traffic.

Now, as we begin to add it up and find out it totally consists of automobiles, we would begin to separate it out. But as we observe it, we see that there are also trucks in that traffic, and being able to look better than they have been able to look in traffic (hah!) engineering departments, we would see that the trucks produced a randomity of flow which was quite interesting. They are not of the same class as the remainder of the traffic; they are wider, heavier, slower, they go at different rates of speed and so forth. So we find the traffic falling over these trucks.

Now, if we were to choose a truck and say, „That is the stable datum to all this traffic,“ as a trucking company would do, we would then try to resolve all traffic from the standpoint of a truck, and it wouldn't resolve. Trucks would keep getting run over by small cars.

Now, if we were to take all traffic from the standpoint of a passenger-vehicle operator, we would once more not solve the traffic problem, because we would have to handle passenger cars and trucks. And what do you know, we finally find out that it is really not possible to solve traffic by taking either of those two viewpoints. It's not possible. Traffic will not really ever be solved until they have classified the particles of the traffic.

Now, there are three particles in traffic. There's another particle which is growing up and which is rather treated levitiously, at this time but shouldn't be, because it's getting to be a very dominant part of traffic. There is the truck; there is the routine driver — routine passenger vehicle, simply on its mission of carrying something or somebody here or there — and then there is the sports car, or the fast automobile which is speeded up well above routine workhorse cars. Now we've added another class of traffic.

Now, there is transcontinental traffic, or transstate traffic, or large-distance traffic, and then there is short-haul traffic. So we've got two more classes of traffic which we had better separate out of this problem and look at very fairly, and find out that any traffic situation then must satisfy all these classes of traffic. We can't satisfy just one of them and satisfy all of them; we'll still have wrecks.

Now we've got to look at the whole problem of drivers, and we've got to examine drivers from a standpoint of „How do we classify drivers?“ Well, drivers are most easily classified as people who can drive and people who can't drive but are driving. And we find out all the real difficulties with traffic come down to the directive control of traffic — these people. These people cause a great deal of difficulty, because the people who can't drive but are driving are not stable data, and never could be stable data to any of this problem anywhere, because they're camouflaged holes. And traffic accidents happen and people get killed in traffic because traffic contains many of these false stable data. So we have finally reduced it all down to a class of person, a class of thing, which isn't. Everything else is traffic, but these people aren't traffic. These people are saying, „We are part of this traffic; we are drivers.“ They are not drivers. Don't you see? God knows what they are!

But just for this inability, and inability to understand this, and for lack of these Scientology theorems, as many people are killed every year as were lost in World War I on the U.S. side. That's a lot of people. Why doesn't somebody do something about it? Well, that's because they're too stupid to do anything about it because they don't have the mathematics necessary to work out the problem.

We actually have a little test we could give to people that would immediately slice out of this whole problem the pretended data, the data that are not of the class. We would at once see that this person is not a driver; this person is a murderer. This person is not a driver because this person cannot control an automobile; this person cannot control something so therefore this person is not that thing.

A driver by definition is somebody who drives a car, by which we understand he's in control of the automobile. Well, there's about 10 percent of those people out there on the roads are not in control of an automobile at all, and that's being very charitable, I assure you. But I'm only talking about the extreme case! The cars are rolling down the highways being started and stopped by traffic lights and intersection signs, when they are started and stopped. „The car stopped me that time“ sort of thing.

Now, you look this over and how had we taken this problem apart? We took it apart in all classes, but we found these classes were still related, until we found something that was pretending it was what it wasn't.

Now, as we take apart a preclear's bank we do the same operation. We find something that's pretending to be a stable datum and part of the preclear, which isn't.

Now, we did a great deal of work on this very early when we found and isolated the engram. Up to that time everybody thought this was part of the person, but it wasn't part of the person because you could delete it and you'd get more person.

Well, when you delete something and get more of something, you obviously aren't dealing with the same class of thing. You're dealing with some false thing that is reducing the remainder. See, you're not talking about the whole class, you see? You're talking about a false datum; it's a camouflaged hole really. We erased the engram and we found out the individual became more of a person. You see that?

So actually these engrams were pretending already to act as stable data to the confusion of the preclear, and they weren't, so they didn't ever take care of the confusion. They themselves contain the confusion.

But we can look at this as auditors, at this class of things called engrams. You see that? We're looking at these pretenders; they pretend they're in control of the situation and so on. And the whole task is how you delete, eradicate, these things, or get somebody up to a point where he can accept something else for a stable datum besides an engram. That summates auditing in the final analysis. The fellow doesn't obey things which have no right to command him.

People are so commonly obeying things which have no right to command them that they at length stop obeying anything. Now, you an auditor have a right to command a preclear; that's for sure. An engram, put in by some black operation of one kind or another, thrown into restimulation by this and that, has no right whatsoever to control a preclear, even if it's just because I said so! See, you could add it just by postulate like that. But the fact of the matter is it doesn't have a right to control a preclear because it's not capable of controlling him. It's only capable of confusing him.

Now, every one of these engrams, oddly enough, mirror this whole problem: confusion and the stable datum. An engram always consists of confusion and stable data, only we say it this way: It consists of random particles and rest points. There's a point in it which is considered to be motionless. The preclear occupies that point of the picture. See, the scene isn't there anymore. The engram is pretending something else: It's pretending the scenery is still present. It's not.

So we have all this confusion driving the preclear into working with the first and foremost series of postulates he made regarding mechanics and motion — that you select out one thing and call it motionless and thereby evaluate the remainder. So the preclear occupies a rest point or a motionless point in the engram and considers the rest of the thing in motion.

Now, I'll give you a little experiment. All you have to do is stand up in front of somebody and start waving your hands in front of his face and so forth, and the next thing you know he just goes dthuhhh. You didn't hurt him. You stand him up and start waving your hands in front of his face, just like this — just motion-motion-motion. Watch what he does.

He will immediately follow this basic law, that to take care of a confusion you occupy a rest point. You consider one point of the confusion as motionless and view the remainder of the confusion from that point. What's he do? He stands stiller and stiller and stiller and stiller. The more you flash your hands around in front of his face, the quieter he gets, up to a point where you bodily thrust him off of the rest point he has elected to occupy and force him to occupy no rest point, and then it all goes Boom!

See, power of choice let him at least say, „Well, I will stand here and fix myself so that I can look at this motion.“ But when you shoved him off of even doing that, now it is all confusion and he himself becomes confusion. You've overcome one thing. On a high positive basis, you've overcome his power of choice. You have not let him occupy the point which he said he wanted to occupy, therefore he can take the confusion.

It's quite interesting in a house, for instance: If you were to say, „Well, I'm going to take this little back room back here, and I'm going to put my clothes in here. I'm going to set this up.“ Even though the house was very, very noisy, you would be able to handle it to a marked degree. Why? You had elected to be in the little back room, and you figured you could get that up, and you could keep traffic from going completely and always through there; and you have decided on a rest point and that's that. Now, the confusion you would find would not bother you anywhere near as much. You always had a (quote) „hole to crawl off to“ (unquote). You got that?

Now somebody comes along with vast authority one way or the other and says, „We need this room to put together the icebox and so on. And we're going to put the icebox and so forth in this room. And we're moving you into the front guest room because that room is much more comfortable.“ It's even better insulated and isolated, but you notice the confusion more occupying that room - - your power of choice on what you elected.

Now, you take some little kid — finest thing in the world to do to a little kid is something I am guilty of doing to little kids, is move them around quite a bit, see? They object. You really have to give them a lot of affection, quite a lot of processing and so forth. They lose their toys, their favorite places and that sort of thing.

But the serious thing to do is a blunder I pulled once and I will never, never pull again: There's a regulation saying that all men of one rating should not be in one compartment. You see why that is; if the compartment is wiped out with shellfire you immediately lose all of your machinists, or all of your gunners or something of the sort, you see? Very wise regulation. But a crew went aboard ship, tumbled into the choice bunks, first-come first-served sort of a basis and there were only two or three that had to content themselves with no power of choice whatsoever over the bunks. And these fellows, because they had been trained in gangs — more or less, they had been trained by their ratings and were just out of schools — were all friends, and they grabbed off compartments, one after the other.

Somebody came aboard. I was very busy. I was trying to keep the fellow in charge of shipbuilding, the officers in charge of shipbuilding, from making too much commission out of the ship. I was trying to get some of the stuff aboard that they had billed. And somebody rushed up to me and he says, „You know, the crew is all nailed down one type of rating per compartment.“

And I said „Well, to hell with that. You know what you're supposed to do on that.“ I said, „Scatter them up.“

Now, I didn't bother to inquire. I didn't ask anything about it. I didn't even know they'd all gone aboard. Didn't know it at all. I just thought he was talking about some kind of a plan or something of the sort. So I said, „Shake it up,“ and he shook it up all right. He assigned every man his bunk throughout the ship. Boy, for about thirty or sixty days, boy, these guys were uncomfortable on that ship. I didn't understand it till recently.

They hadn't elected to be there, most of them, anyhow. They hadn't elected to have a war. Nobody'd come around — Eleanor had never come around and said, „Bill, you want to have a war?“ Nobody had done that. An oversight; she was probably busy.

We were finally driven down to the fact that it was terribly confusing, but they at least had grabbed their own bunk, don't you see? And even if it leaked overhead, why, you would have had a hard time disturbing this fellow. And I turned around and messed it all up again.

Well, by the time it could get rescrambled the other way and so forth and adjusted, why, everything was going well again, because we'd got so much shuffle the other way to, that I finally had to tell them „Go on and pick your own bunk“ all over again, you know? We'd been into a yard and gotten patched up so that everything got rearranged, and they got some power of choice again and their morale came up.

Now, why would their morale come up? Just power of choice over „what I am holding down as a stable datum.“ You got that?

Do you see at once why a learning process is one of your most important processes? Now, for instance, I sit here and I tell you that a stable datum and an area of confusion is damned important business. If you yourself can't see that, it is not important business at all. If you can't find that in your own experience, and if you cannot, by applying it, discover that it works in preclears, it is not then an important datum. Do you see that?

All I can do is demonstrate its possible existence to you. I'm unfortunately making you look at the very anatomy of any engram you've got in restimulation, and that's a rough thing, then, to teach. I tell you that the engram consists of pain, unconsciousness and compulsive exteriorization. All right, but its mechanics are composed totally of confusions and rest points! You don't have to believe that until you see it.

You might say a preclear, a thetan, is a living being occupying an unstable particle in the midst of an intolerable motion. Well, the unstable particle he's occupying is unstable or he wouldn't consider it difficult to occupy the motion area. He obviously is not occupying those points or particles or positions which are related to all other particles and positions. He must be occupying something which is disrelated, hence it's an engram. Do you see? He's occupying something that's not related to these other things; he's just standing back and watching the confusion. Otherwise he would have related this thing to all the other things, it would have ceased to be a confusion, he couldn't have cared less. See? He simply would have walked off. He would have moved up the track.

So there's a contradiction going on. He's sitting there on a rest point and the engram is waving its hands in front of his face. You get the idea?

Now, that inverts and he gets driven off of this point, and then he is in the motion watching a motion. Wow! That's pretty rough. But not as rough as this one: He's in the motion looking at a stable datum. He's in the motion looking at a stable datum. He doesn't have the stable datum! He can't have a motionless thing or body; he must stand there and look at a motionless thing or body of which he can have no part, and in which and with which he's not in good communication. Don't you see? There he is.

So you get these three conditions, or you simply get the condition of no preclear: He's not a preclear at all; he wouldn't be occupying anything mechanical at all.

Your preclear — you could classify this and say — could occupy a motionless particle that is not in any way related to or surrounded by any other particle. But he gets a question if he does this. He doesn't know whether the particle is in motion or not.

So you get the next condition: Your preclear is simply looking at a confusion. Or your next condition: He's occupying one point of the confusion, considering it motionless, and is therefore looking at all other particles as being in motion. Or he has been shoved off this point and is looking in a confused way at confusion, but that's not bad. Or he is in the confusion and knows it's a confusion because he can look at but not occupy or be or assume or assemble this stable datum. You got it? He's looking at a stable datum.

Let us say he was living in a family which had a person, quite a reproving person, that wouldn't permit anybody to be him, who was the most stable thing in the family. This would be pretty wild, see? This person is so obviously stable so obviously still, so obviously fixed and set…

Now, this person, by the way, actually attains this by telling other people they're in motion all the time. So you get a sort of an engramic situation here. „Why don't you be calm like I am?“ „Why don't you take this whole thing calmly?“ „Why don't you rest?“ „Why don't you do this?“ All of which infers that the other person is not. And eventually the other person will wind up out there in the confusion looking at the stillness.

Now, you run this process on them, it practically kills them: „Look around and find something in the room that is still. Now make your body confront it.“ Yeooow! This runs out more motion than you can shake a stick at; actually is a killer on the subject of obsessive motion.

Let us say somebody had a twitch in his hand; his hand twitched all the time. Well, tell you something fascinating. If you said, „All right, now look around and find something that is motionless. All right, now make your hand confront it. Now you make your hand confront it.“ If it could be made to come real at all, why, the next thing you know — if he even vaguely had the idea of making a hand do anything — you'd all of a sudden see the twitch turn on much more rapidly and then run out. See that use of it?

Now, Substitution and Confronting are two very fine uses of this. One of the processes of Substitution is to get him to substitute stable data for stable data. If you yank the stable datum out, he's in the confusion for sure. If you yanked it out completely enough and quickly enough, he would go all the way out of the confusion and wouldn't be bothered with it anymore. But it's a little bit difficult to do that. You don't yank it that cleanly.

So what you do is you substitute for the stable datum, or substitute for the confusion. So this becomes a laughably workable process if it is done only four or five times.

„Make up a stable datum for that difficulty.“ See, that must be very briefly done because he simply as-ises usually… He generally just picks up his old stable datum. If you only do it four or five times, he usually feels fine. Or you could say „Invent an individuality that could cope with that situation.“ That is the longest statement you could possibly make to add up stable datum. „Something that could withstand it“ — any of these things would summate into that. And you say, „A worse condition, a confusion, a difficulty, a problem“ and you're all saying a confusion. See?

So this is the way you handle these mechanics. You can substitute for the confusion, substitute for the stable datum, or you can simply bring up his level of tolerance in confronting motionless things and things in motion. These are essentially the basic, blunt methods of handling it, but there is the whole category of Creative Processes whereby you have him create confusions, create stable data, create things confronting the wall. Have him dream up or think of a stable datum that could withstand that confusion or something like that, and simply have him mock up then that stable datum, on and on and on and on and on. He says, „An iceberg.“ You say, „Okay, mock up an iceberg.“ And for the next two hours you have him mock up icebergs.

These are the types of process which are used in this. But Stop- C-S and other things also bring these things into view, and practically everything you're using will display this phenomena of the stable datum and the confusion.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]