SCIENTOLOGY

   A NEW SLANT
       ON LIFE

                by
       L. Ron Hubbard

                                                   1

          “The human mind
is capable of resolving the problem
  of the human mind.” -  L. R. H.

                   2

                                         TABLE OF CONTENTS

IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY?............................................................. 1
THE TRUE STORY OF SCIENTOLOGY .................................................... 3
TWO RULES FOR HAPPY LIVING.......................................................... 5
WHAT IS THE BASIC MYSTERY?........................................................... 7
MAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS SOUL............................................................ 8
THE REASON WHY............................................................................. 9
WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?...................................................................... 12
THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE......................................................... 14
MYTHS OF THE MIND......................................................................... 15
HOW TO LIVE WITH CHILDREN............................................................ 17
ON MARRIAGE.................................................................................. 19
THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS.................................................................. 20
ON THE DEATH OF CONSCIOUSNESS.................................................... 22
ACCENT ON ABILITY.......................................................................... 24
HONEST PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS, TOO ................................................... 26
ACCEPTANCE LEVEL.......................................................................... 28
CONFRONTING................................................................................. 29
ON BRINGING ORDER........................................................................ 31
ON HUMAN CHARACTER.................................................................... 32
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE............................................................. 34
PLAYING THE GAME.......................................................................... 35
FREEDOM vs. ENTRAPMENT................................................................ 36
JUSTICE........................................................................................... 39
THE VOCABULARIES OF SCIENCE........................................................ 41
HOW TO STUDY A SCIENCE................................................................. 43
THE HUMAN MIND ............................................................................ 47
RECORDS OF THE MIND ARE PERMANENT ............................................ 51
COMMUNICATION............................................................................. 54

                                                       3

                                   IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY?

Is it possible to be happy?

         A great many people wonder whether half of us even  exist  in this modern, rushing
world. Very often an individual can have a million dollars, he can have everything his heart
apparently desires, and is still unhappy. We take the case of somebody who has worked all his
life; he has worked hard and he has raised a big family. He has looked forward to that time in
his life when he, at last, can retire and be happy and be cheerful, and have lots of time to do all
the things he has wanted to do; and then we see him after he has retired— and is he happy? No.
He’s sitting there thinking about the good old days when he was working hard.

         Our main problem in life is happiness, but I’ll tell you more in a moment. The world
may or may not be designed to be a happy one. It may not be possible for you to be happy in
this world, and yet nearly all of us have a goal to be happy and cheerful about existence.

         You know, very often we look at the world around us and say that nobody could be
happy in this place. We look at the dirty dishes in the sink, and the car needing a coat of paint,
and at the fact that we need a new gas heater, we need a new coat, we need new shoes or we
would just like to have better shoes; and so, how could anyone possibly be happy when
actually he can’t have everything he wants. He is unable to do all the things he’d like to do, and
therefore, this environment doesn’t permit a person to be as happy as he could be. Well, I’ll tell
you a funny thing— a lot of philosophers have said this many, many times— but the truth of the
matter is that all the happiness you ever find lies in you.

         You remember when you were maybe five years old, and you went out in the morning
and you looked at the day, and it was a very, very beautiful day, and you looked at the flowers,
and they were  very  beautiful flowers; twenty- five years later you get up in the morning, you
take a look at the flowers— they are wilted. The day isn’t a happy day. Well, what has
changed? You know they are the same flowers, it’s the same world, something must have
changed. Probably it was you.

         Actually a little child derives all of his “how” of life from the grace he puts upon life.
He waves a magic hand and brings all manner of interesting things into being out in the society.
Here is this big, strong brute of a man riding his iron steed, up and down, and boy, he’d like to
be a cop. Yes sir! He would sure like to be a cop; and twenty- five years later he looks at that
cop riding up and down and checks his speedometer and says, “Doggone these cops! “

         Well, what is changed here? Has the cop changed? No. Just the attitude  toward  him.
One’s attitude toward life makes every possible difference in one’s living. You know you don’t
have to study a thousand ancient books to discover that fact. But sometimes it needs to be
pointed out again that fife  doesn’t change so much as you.

         Once upon a time, perhaps, you were thinking of being married and having a nice
home, and having a nice family; everything would be just fine. The husband would come home
and you would put the dinner on the table and everybody would be happy about the whole
thing; and then you got married and maybe it didn’t quite work out. Somehow or other, he
comes home late and he has had an argument with the boss, and he doesn’t feel well. He
doesn’t want to go to the movies, and he doesn’t see how you have any work to do anyhow—
after all, you sit home all day and do nothing— and you know he doesn’t do any work either.
He disappears out of the house.

         He’s gone. Then he comes back later in the evening, and quite an argument could ensue
over this. Actually, both of you work quite hard. Well, what do we do with a condition like
this? Do we just break up the marriage? Or touch a match to the whole house? Or throw the
kids in the garbage can? Or go home to mother? Or what do we do?

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         Well, there are many, many things we could do, and the least of them is to take a look
at the environment. You know, just look around and say, “Where am I? What am I doing
here?” And then, once you have found out where you are, why, try to find out how you can
make that a little more habitable. The day when you stop building your own environment,
when you stop building your own surroundings, when you stop waving a magic hand and
gracing everything around you with magic and beauty, things cease to be magical, things cease
to be beautiful.

         Other people seek happiness in various ways. They seek it hectically, as though it’s
some sort of mechanism that exists— maybe it’s a little machine, maybe it’s parked in the
cupboard, maybe happiness is down at the next corner, or maybe it’s someplace else. They’re
looking for something, but the odd part of it is, the only time they ever find something is when
they put it there first. Now, this doesn’t sound very plausible, but it’s quite true. Those people
who have become unhappy about life are unhappy about life solely and completely because life
has ceased to be made by them. Here we have the single difference in a human being. We have
here a human being who is unhappy, miserable, and isn’t getting along in life, who is sick,
who doesn’t see brightness. Life is handling, running, changing, making him.

         And here you have somebody who is happy, who is cheerful, who is strong, who finds
that most things are pleasurable; and what do we discover in this person? We find out that he is
making life, and there is actually a single difference: are you making life or is life making you ?

         Carefully go into this, and you will find out that a person has stopped making life
because he himself has decided that life cannot be made. Some failure, some small failure,
maybe not graduating with the same class, or maybe that failure that had to do with not
marrying quite the first man or woman that came along who seemed desirable, or maybe the
failure of having lost a car, or just some minor thing in life started this attitude. A person
looked around one day and said, “Well, I’ve lost,” and after that, life makes him; he doesn’t
make life any more.

         Now this would be a very critical situation if nothing could be done about it, but the fact
of the matter is that it is the easiest problem of all the problems man faces— changing himself
and changing the attitudes of those around him. It is very, very easy to change somebody else’s
attitude. Yet you are totally dependent upon other people’s attitudes— somebody’s attitude
toward you may make or break your life. Did it ever occur to you that your home holds
together because of the attitude the other person has toward you? So there are really two
problems here— you would have to change two attitudes. One: your attitude toward somebody
else, and two: their attitude toward you. Well, are there ways to do this? Yes, fortunately, there
are.

         For many, many centuries, Man has desired to know how to change the mind and
condition of himself and his fellows. Actually, Man had a cumulative inclination to do this up
to relatively few years ago. But, we are making it a very fast paced world; we are making it a
world where magic is liable to occur at any time, and has.

         Man now understands a great many things about the universe he lives in, which he
never understood before. Amongst the things he now understands is the human mind. The
human mind is not an unsolved problem. Nineteenth century psychology didn’t solve the
problem, but that doesn’t mean it has not been solved.

         In modern times the most interesting miracles are taking place all across this country
and across other continents of earth. What do these miracles consist of? They consist of people
becoming well when they were ill, incurably ill. They consist of people who were unhappy
becoming happy once more. They consist of abolishing the danger inherent in many of the
illnesses and many of the conditions of Man. Yet the answer has been with Man all the time;
Man has been able to reach out and find this answer, so perhaps Man himself had to change.
Perhaps he had to come up to modern times to find out that the physical universe was not
composed of demons and ghosts. To outlive his superstitions, to outlive the ignorance of his

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forbears. Perhaps he had to do everything, including inventing the atom bomb, before he could
finally find himself.

         Well, he has pretty well mastered the physical universe now. The physical universe is
to him no longer a problem, he can do many things with it; and having conquered that, he can
now conquer himself. The truth of the matter is he  has  conquered himself. The science of
Scientology came about because of a man’s increased knowledge of energy. Man became
possessed of more information about energy than he had had before in all of his history; and
amongst that, he came into possession of information about the energy which is his own mind.
The body is an energy mechanism. Naturally, a person who cannot handle energy could not
handle a body. He would be tired, he would be upset, he would be unhappy, and he looks all
around him to find nothing but energy. If he knew a great deal about energy, particularly the
energy of himself and the space which surrounds him, he, of course, would know himself; and
that, in the final essence, has been his goal for many thousands of years. To know himself.

         Scientology has made it possible for him to do so.

                                                       3

                               THE TRUE STORY OF SCIENTOLOGY

         The true story of Scientology is simple, concise and direct. It is quickly told:

         1.       A philosopher develops a philosophy about life and death;
         2.       People find it interesting;
         3.       People find it works;
         4.       People pass it along to others;
         5.       It grows.

         When we examine this extremely accurate and very brief account, we see that there
must be in our civilization some very disturbing elements for anything else to be believed about
Scientology.

         These disturbing elements are the Merchants of Chaos. They deal in confusion and
upset. Their daily bread is made by creating chaos. If chaos were to lessen, so would their
incomes.

         The politician, the reporter, the psychiatrist with his electric shock machine, the drug
manufacturer, the militarist and arms manufacturer, the police and the undertaker, to name the
leaders of the list, fatten only upon “the dangerous environment”. Even individuals and family
members can be Merchants of Chaos.

         It is to their interest to make the environment seem as threatening as possible, for only
then can they profit. Their incomes, force, and power rise in direct ratio to the amount of threat
they can inject into the surroundings of the people. With that threat they can extort revenue,
appropriations, heightened circulation’s and recompense without question. These are the
Merchants of Chaos. If they did not generate it and buy and sell it, they would, they suppose,
be poor.

         For instance, we speak loosely of “good press”. Is there any such thing today? Look
over a newspaper. Is there anything  good  on the front page? Rather, there is murder and
sudden death, disagreement and catastrophe. And even that, bad as it is, is sensationalized to
make it seem worse.

         This is the cold blooded manufacture of “a dangerous environment”. People do not
need this news; and if they did, they need the facts, not the upset. But if you hit a person hard
enough, he can be made to give up money. That’s the basic formula of extortion. That’s the
way papers are sold. The impact makes them stick.

         A paper has to have chaos and confusion. A “news story” has to have “conflict”, they
say. So there is no good press. There is only bad press about everything. To yearn for “good
press” is foolhardy in a society where the Merchants of Chaos reign.

         Look what has to be done to the true story of Scientology in order to “make it a news
story” by modern press standards. Conflict must be injected where there is none. Therefore,
the press has to dream up upset and conflict.

         Let us take the first line. How does one make conflict out of it? No. 1,  A philosopher
develops a philosophy about life and death.

         The Chaos Merchant has to inject one of several possible conflicts here: He is not a
doctor of philosophy, they have to assert. They are never quite bold enough to say it is not a
philosophy. But they can and do go on endlessly, as their purpose compels them, in an effort
to invalidate the identity of the person developing it.

         In actual fact, the developer of the philosophy was very well grounded in academic

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subjects and the humanities, probably better grounded in formal philosophy alone than teachers
of philosophy in universities.

         The one man effort is incredible in terms of study and research hours and is a record
never approached in living memory, but this would not be considered newsworthy. To write
the simple fact that a philosopher had developed a philosophy is not newspaper- type news and
it would not disturb the environment. Hence, the elaborate news fictions about No. 1 above.

         Then take the second part of the true story. People find it interesting.  It would be very
odd if they didn’t, as everyone asks these questions of himself and looks for the answers to his
own beingness; and the basic truth of the answers is observable in the conclusions of
Scientology.

         However, to make this “news” it has to be made disturbing. People are painted as
kidnapped or hypnotized and dragged as unwilling victims up to read the books or listen.

         The Chaos Merchant leaves No. 3 v cry thoroughly alone. It is dangerous ground for
him.  People find it works.  No hint of workability would ever be attached to Scientology by the
press, although there is no doubt in the press mind that it does work.

         That’s why it’s dangerous. It calms the environment. So any time spent trying to
convince press that Scientology works is time spent upsetting a reporter.

         On No. 4,  People pass it along to others,  the press feels betrayed. “Nobody should
believe anything they don’t read in the papers. How dare word of mouth exist?” So, to try to
stop people from listening, the Chaos Merchant has to use words like “cult”. That’s “a closed
group”, whereas Scientology is the most open group on Earth to anyone. And they have to
attack organizations and their people to try to keep people out of Scientology.

         Now, as for No. 5,  It grows,  we have the true objection.

         As truth goes forward, lies die. The slaughter of lies is an act that takes bread from the
mouth of a Chaos Merchant. Unless he can lie with wild abandon about “how bad it all is”, he
thinks he will starve.

         The world simply must  not  be a better place, according to the Chaos Merchant. If
people were less disturbed, less beaten down by their environment, there would be no new
appropriations for police and armies and big rockets, and there’d be not even pennies for a
screaming, sensational press.

         So long as politicians move upward on scandal, police get more pay for more crime,
medicos get fatter on more sickness, there will be Merchants of Chaos. They’re paid for it.

         And their threat is the simple story of Scientology. For that is the true story. And
behind its progress, there is a calmer environment in which a man can live and feel better. If
you don’t believe it, just stop reading newspapers for two weeks, and see if you feel better.
Suppose you had all such disturbances handled?

         The pity of it is, of course, that even the Merchant of Chaos needs us, not to get fatter,
but just to live himself as a being.

         So the true story of Scientology is a simple story.

         And too true to be turned aside.

                                                       5

                                  TWO RULES FOR HAPPY LIVING

         1. Be able to experience anything.

         2. Cause only those things which others can experience easily.

         Man has had many golden rules. The Buddhist rule of “Do unto others as you would
have these others do unto you” has been repeated often in other religions. But such golden
rules, while they served to advance man above the animal, resulted in no sure sanity, success,
or happiness. Such a golden rule gives only the cause point or at best, the reflexive effect point.
This is a self- done- to- self thing, and tends to put all on obsessive cause. It gives no thought to
what one does about the things done to one by others not so indoctrinated.

         How does one handle the evil things done to him?

         It is not told in the Buddhist rule. Many random answers resulted. Amongst them are
the answers of Christian Science (effects on self don’t exist), the answers of early Christians
(become a martyr), the answers of Christian ministers (condemn all sin). Such answers to
effects created on one bring about a somewhat less than sane state of mind— to say nothing of
unhappiness.

         After one’s house has burned down and the family cremated, it is no great consolation
to (1) pretend it didn’t happen, (2) liken oneself to Job, or (3) condemn all arsonists.

         So long as one fears or suffers from the effect of violence, one will have violence
against him. When one  can experience exactly what is being done to one, ah, magic— it does
not happen!

         How to be happy in this universe is a problem few prophets or sages have dared to
contemplate directly. We find them “handling” the problem of happiness by assuring us that
man is doomed to suffering. They seek not to tell us how to be happy, but how to endure being
unhappy. Such casual assumption of the impossibility of happiness has led us to ignore any
real examination of ways to be happy. Thus, we have floundered forward toward a negative
goal— get rid of all the unhappiness on Earth and one would have a livable Earth. If one seeks
to get rid of something continually, one admits continually that he cannot confront it— and thus
everyone went down hill. Life became a dwindling spiral of  more  things we could not
confront. And thus, we went toward blindness and unhappiness.

         To be happy, one must be  able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things
that are.

         Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is.

         Hence, ( 1 )  Be able to experience anything.

         The effect side of life deserves great consideration. The self- caused side also deserves
examination.

         To create only those effects which others could easily experience gives us a clean new
rule of living. For, if one does this, then what might he do that he must withhold from others?
There is no reason to withhold his own actions or regret them (same thing), if one’s own
actions are easily experienced by others.

         This is a sweeping test (and definition) of good conduct— to do only those things which
others can experience.

         If you examine your life, you will find you are bothered only by those actions a person

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did which others were not able to receive. Hence, a person’s life can become a hodge- podge of
violence withheld, which pulls in, then, the violence others caused.

         The more actions a person emanated which could not be experienced by others, the
worse a person’s life became. Recognizing that he was bad cause or that there were too many
bad causes already, a person ceased causing things— an unhappy state of being.

         Pain, misemotion, unconsciousness, insanity, all result from causing things others
could not experience easily. The reach- withhold phenomenon is the basis of all these things.
When one sought to reach in such a way as to make it impossible for another to experience, one
did not reach, then, did he? To “reach” with a gun against a person who is unwilling to be shot
is not to reach the person, but a protest. All  bad  reaches never reached. So there was no
communication, and the end result was a withhold by the person reaching. This reach- withhold
became at last an inability to reach— therefore, low communication, low reality, lover affinity.
Communication is time environment or situation.

         One means of reaching others. So, if one is unable to reach, one’s ability to
communicate will be low; and one’s reality will be low, because if one is unable to
communicate, he won’t really get to know about others; and with knowing little or nothing
about others, one doesn’t have any feeling about them either, thus one’s affinity will be low.
Affinity, reality and communication work together; and if one of these three is high, the other
two will be also; but if one is low, so will the others be low.

         All bad acts, then, are those acts which cannot be easily experienced at the target end.

         On this definition, let us review our own “bad acts”. Which ones were bad? Only those
that could not be easily experienced by another were bad. Thus, which of society’s favorite bad
acts are bad? Acts of real violence resulting in pain, unconsciousness, insanity and heavy loss
could, at this time, be considered bad. Well, what other acts of yours do you consider “bad”?
The things which you have done which you could not easily, yourself, experience, were bad.
But the things which you have done which you, yourself, could have experienced, had they
been done to you, were not bad. That certainly changes one’s view of things!

         There is no need to lead a violent life just to prove one can experience. The idea is not to
prove one can experience, but to regain the ability to experience.

         Thus, today, we have two golden rules for happiness:

         1.       Be able to experience anything;
                  and
         2.       Cause only those things which others are able to experience easily.

         Your reaction to these tells you how far you have yet to go.

         And if you achieve these two golden rules, you would be one of the happiest and most
successful people in this universe, for who could rule you with evil?

                                                       7

                                  WHAT IS THE BASIC MYSTERY?

         In the general study of the world and its affairs, we find out that the only way you can
make a slave— as if anybody would want one— would be to develop a tremendous amount of
mystery about what it’s all about and then develop an overwhelming charge on the mystery
line. Not only develop a mystery, but then sell it real good; sell some bogus answer to the
mystery.

         Man is so used to this that, when you come along and put a perfectly good answer in
his hands, why, he drops it like a hot potato, because he knows what all answers are: All
answers are carefully derived from mysteries with bogus answers, and all mysteries are going
to cost you something sooner or later.

         The development of the mystery itself stems from interpersonal relationships and Man’s
general conflict with his fellows and his environment, and so on. And the basic mystery is—
who is he? There’s no more basic mystery than that—” who is that fellow over there?” That is
the beginning of individuation, of, not individualism, but individuation, of pulling back from
everybody and saying, “I am me and they are ‘them’, and God knows what they’re up to!”
And then, after a while, the fellow takes it out of the realm of near blasphemy and puts it into
worship. And he says, “Well, God knows what they’re up to and he will protect me.”

         So what do we basically have? We basically have a mystery on who the other fellow is.
Now “science” originally meant truth, and now it means research revenue. Science has so far
abandoned the basic mystery, that they think there’s a mystery on what is a floor, what is a
ceiling, what is space. That is really a very cooked- up mystery— because that floor and that
ceiling and that space is what thee and me agreed to put there, and that’s about all it is.

         Wherever we have a mystery, we normally have had a disagreement or a
misunderstanding or an out- of- communication- ness. And that’s all there actually is to it,
basically. A fellow had to disagree with whom he was looking at. He knew about it originally
and he didn’t want to know who that fellow was over there. He didn’t want to know anything
about the situation, because he had learned a lesson: If he communicated with it, he would be
proved wrong!

         So we had some people in our midst— you amongst them— who would put up a “this”
and say it was a “that”. And then you would get these things twisted somehow or another, and
you’d say, “Why don’t you communicate with  this?” and then say, “You communicated with
that.” After a while a fellow says, “Aw, I don’t want to communicate with either one of them.
Dickens with it. Who cares what those things are— I don’t want to know.” And after that, he’d
had it. He said, “I don’t want to know,” and therefore he had a mystery sitting across from him
someplace. And he went so far along this line of not wanting to know that after a while he
conceived that he didn’t know. And then he went from there and said it’s impossible to know.

         Wherever Man finds himself deeply instilled, engrossed, surrounded with mystery, he
is actually in conflict with himself and himself alone. That is why processing works. THE
ONLY ABERRATION IS DENIAL OF SELF. Nobody else can do anything to you, but YOU.
That is a horrible state of affairs. You can do something to you, but it requires your postulate,
your agreement or your disagreement, before anything can happen to you. People have to agree
to be ill; they have to agree to be stupid; they have to agree to be in mystery.

         People are the victims of their own flinch. They are the victims of their own postulates,
the victims of their own belief that they are inadequate.

         An individual has to postulate into existence his own aberration, his own flinch, his
own stupidity, his own lack of confidence, and his own bad luck.

                                                       8

                                   MAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS SOUL

         For countless ages past, Man has been engaged upon a search.

         All thinkers in all ages have contributed their opinion and considerations to it. No
scientist, no philosopher, no leader has failed to comment upon it. Billions of men have died
for one opinion or another on the subject of this search and no civilization, mighty or poor, in
ancient or in modern times has endured without battle on its account.

         The human soul, to the civilized and barbaric alike, has been an endless source of
interest, attention, hate or adoration.

         To say that I have found the answer to all riddles of the soul would be inaccurate and
presumptuous. To discount what I have come to know and to fail to make that known after
observing its benefits would be a sin of omission against Man.

         After thirty- one years of inquiry and thought and after fifteen years of public activity
wherein I observed the material at work and its results, I can announce that, in the knowledge I
have developed, there must lie the answer to that riddle, to that enigma, to that problem— the
human soul— for under my hands and others, I have seen the best in Man rehabilitated.

         From the time since I first made a theta clear, I have been, with some reluctance, out
beyond any realm of the scientific known; and now that I have myself cleared half a hundred,
and auditors I have trained, many times that, I must face the fact that we have reached that
merger point where science and religion meet, and we must now cease to pretend to deal with
material goals alone.

         We cannot deal in the realm of the human soul and ignore the fact. Man has too long
pursued this search for its happy culmination here to be muffled by vague and scientific terms.

         Religion, not science, has carried this search, this war, through the millennia. Science
has all but swallowed Man with an ideology which denies the soul, a symptom of the failure of
science in that search.

         One cannot now play traitor to the Men of God who sought, these ages past, to bring
Man from the darkness.

         We, in Scientology, belong in the ranks of the seekers after truth, not in the rearguard
of the makers of the atom bomb.

         However, science, too, has had its role in these endeavors; and nuclear physics,
whatever crime it does against Man, may yet be redeemed by having been of aid in finding for
Man the soul of which science had all but deprived him.

         No Auditor can easily close his eyes to the results he achieves today or fail to see them
as superior to the materialistic technologies he earlier used. For we can know, with all else we
know, that the human soul, freed, is the only effective therapeutic agent we have. But our
goals, no matter our miracles with bodies today, exceed physical health and better men.

         Scientology is the science of knowing how to know. It has taught us that a man IS his
own immortal soul. And it gives us little choice, but to announce to a world, no matter how it
receives it, that nuclear physics and religion have joined hands and that we in Scientology
perform those miracles for which Man, through all his search, has hoped.

         The individual may hate God or despise priests. He cannot ignore, however, the
evidence that he is his own soul. Thus we have resolved our riddle and found the answer
simple.

                                                       9

                                           THE REASON WHY

         Life can best be understood by likening it to a game. Since we are exterior to a great
number of games, we can regard them with a detached eye. If we were exterior to Life instead
of being involved and immersed in the living of it, it would look to us much like games look to
us from our present vantage point.

         Despite the amount of suffering, pain, misery, sorrow and travail which can exist in
life, the reason for existence is the same reason as one has to play a game— interest, contest,
activity and possession. The truth of this assertion is established by an observation of the
elements of games and then applying these elements to life itself. When we do this we find
nothing left wanting in the panorama of life.

         By game we mean a contest of person against person or team against team. When we
say games we mean such games as baseball, polo, chess or any other such pastime. It may at
one time have struck you as peculiar that men would risk bodily injury in the field of play just
for the sake of “amusement”. So it might strike you as peculiar that people would go on living
or would enter into the “game of life” at the risk of all the sorrow, travail and pain just to have
something to do. Evidently there is no greater curse than total idleness. Of course there is that
condition where a person continues to play a game in which he is no longer interested.

         If you will but look about the room and check off items in which you are not interested,
you will discover something remarkable. In a short time you will find that there is nothing in
the room in which you are not interested. You are interested in everything. However,
disinterest itself is one of the mechanisms of play. In order to hide something it is only
necessary to make everyone disinterested in the place where the item is hidden. Disinterest is
not an immediate result of interest which has worn out. Disinterest is a commodity in itself. It is
palpable, it exists.

         By studying the elements (factors) of games (contests) we find ourselves in possession
of the elements of life.

         Life is a game. A game consists of freedom, barriers and  purposes.  This is a scientific
fact, not merely an observation.

         Freedom exists amongst barriers. A totality of barriers and a totality of freedom alike
are no- game conditions. Each is similarly cruel. Each is similarly purposeless.

         Great revolutionary movements fail. They promise unlimited freedom. That is the road
to failure. Only stupid visionaries chant of endless freedom. Only the afraid and the ignorant
speak of and insist upon unlimited barriers.

         When the relation between freedom and barriers becomes too unbalanced, an
unhappiness results.

         “Freedom from” is all right only so long as there is a place to be free  to.  An endless
desire for freedom from is  a perfect trap, a fear of all things.

         Barriers are composed of inhibiting (limiting) ideas, space, energy, masses and time.
Freedom in its entirety would be a total absence of these things— but it would also be a freedom
without thought or action, an unhappy condition of total nothingness.

         Fixed on too many barriers, man yearns to be free. But launched suddenly into total
freedom he is purposeless and miserable. He needs a gradient.

         There is  freedom amongst  barriers. If the barriers are known and the freedoms are
known there can be life, living, happiness a game.

                                                      10

         The restrictions of a government, or a job, give an employee his freedom. Without
known restrictions, an employee is a slave, doomed to the fears of uncertainty in all his actions.

         Executives in business and government can fail in three ways and, thus, bring about a
chaos in their department. They can:

         1.       seem to give endless freedom;
         2.       seem to give endless barriers;
         3.       make neither freedom nor barriers certain.

         Executive competence, therefore, consists of imposing and enforcing an adequate
balance between their people’s freedom and the unit’s barriers and in being precise and
consistent about those freedoms and barriers. Such an executive, adding only in himself
initiative and purpose, can have a department with initiative and purpose.

         An employee, buying and/ or insisting upon freedom only, will become a slave.
Knowing the above facts, he must insist upon a workable balance between freedom and
barriers.

         There are various states of mind which bring about happiness. That state of mind which
insists only upon freedom can bring about nothing but unhappiness. It would be better to
develop a thought pattern which looked for new ways to be entrapped and things to be trapped
in, than to suffer the eventual total entrapment of dwelling upon freedom only. A man who is
willing to accept restrictions and barriers and is not afraid of them is free. A man who does
nothing but fight restrictions and barriers will usually be trapped.

         As it can be seen in any game, purposes become counterpoised. There is a matter of
purpose- counter purpose in almost any game played in a field with two teams. One team has
the idea of reaching the goal of the other, and the other has the idea of reaching the goal of the
first. Their purposes are at war, and this warring of purposes makes a game.

         The war of purposes gives us what we call problems. A problem consists of two or
more purposes opposed. It does not matter what problem you face or have faced, the basic
anatomy of that problem is purpose- counter- purpose.

         In actual testing in Scientology, it has been discovered that a person begins to suffer
from problems when he does not have enough of them. There is the old saw (maxim) that, if
you want a thing done, give it to a busy man to do. Similarly, if you want a happy associate,
make sure that he is a man who can have lots of problems.

         We have the oddity of a high incidence of neurosis in the families of the rich. These
people have very little to do and have very few problems. The basic problems of food, clothing
and shelter are already solved for them. We would suppose then, if it were true that an
individual’s happiness depended only upon his freedom, these people would be happy.
However, they are not happy. What brings about their unhappiness? It is the lack of problems.

         An unhappy man is one who is considering continually how to become free. One sees
this in the clerk who is continually trying to avoid work. Although he has a great deal of leisure
time, he is not enjoying any part of it. He is trying to avoid contact with people, objects,
energies and spaces. He eventually becomes trapped in a sort of lethargy. If this man could
merely change his mind and start “worrying” about how he could get more work to do, his
happiness level would increase markedly. One who is plotting continually how to get out of
things will be miserable. One who is plotting how to get into things has a much better chance of
becoming happy.

         There is, of course, the matter of being forced to play games in which one has no
interest— a war into which one is drafted is an excellent example of this. One is not interested in
the purposes of the war and yet one finds himself fighting it. Thus there must be an additional

                                                      11

element and this element is “the power of choice”.

         One could say then that life is a game and that the ability to play a game consists of
tolerance for freedom and barriers and an insight into purposes with the power of choice over
participation.

         These four elements, freedom, barriers, purposes and power of choice, are the guiding
elements of life. There are only two factors above these and both of them are related to these.
The first is the ability to create, with of course its negative, the ability to uncreate, and the
second is the ability to make a postulate (to consider, to say a thing and have it be true). This,
then, is the broad picture of life, and these elements are used in its understanding, in bringing
life into focus and in making it less confusing.

                                                      12

                                       WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

         Knowledge is certainty; knowledge is not  data. Knowingness itself is certainty. Sanity
is certainty, providing only that that certainty does not fall beyond the conviction of another
when he views it.

         To obtain a certainty one must be able to observe. But what is the level of certainty
required? And what is the level of observation required for a certainty or a knowledge to exist?

         If a man can stand before a tree and by sight, touch or other perception know that he is
confronting a tree and be able to perceive its form and be quite sure he is confronting a tree, we
have the level of certainty required. If the man will not look at the tree or, although it is
observably a tree to others, if he discovers it to be a blade of grass or a sun, then he is below
the level of certainty required. Some other person helpfully inclined would have to direct his
perception to the tree until the man perceived without duress that it was indeed a tree he
confronted. That is the only level of certainty required in order to qualify as knowledge, for
knowledge is observation and is given to those who would look.

         In order to obtain knowledge and certainty, it is necessary to be able to observe, in fact,
three universes in which there could be trees. The first of these is one’s own universe; one
should be able to create for his own observation in its total form for total perception, a tree. The
second universe would be the material universe, which is the universe of matter, energy, space
and time and is the common meeting ground of all of us. The third universe is actually a class
of universes, which could be called “the other fellow’s universe”, for he and all the class of
“other fellows” have universes of their own.

         A doctor, for instance, may seem entirely certain of the cause of some disease, yet it
depends upon the doctor’s certainty for the layman to accept that cause of the disease. That
penicillin cures certain things is a certainty to the doctor even when penicillin suddenly and
inexplicably fails to cure something. Any inexplicable failure introduces an uncertainty, which
thereafter removes the subject from the realm of an easily obtained certainty.

         We have here, then, a parallel between certainty and sanity.

         The less certain the individual on any subject, the less sane he could be said to be upon
that subject; the less certain he is of what he views in the material universe, what he views in
his own or the other fellow’s universe, the less sane he could be said to be.

         The road to sanity is demonstrably the road to increasing certainty. Starting at any level,
it is only necessary to obtain a fair degree of certainty on the material universe to improve
considerably one’s beingness. Above that, one obtains some certainty of his own universe and
some certainty of the other fellow’s universe.

         Certainty, then, is clarity of observation. Of course, above this, vitally so, is certainty
in creation. Here is the artist, here is the master, here is the very great spirit.

         As one advances he discovers that what he first perceived as a certainty can be
considerably improved. Thus we have certainty as a gradient scale. It is not an absolute, but it
is defined as the certainty that one perceives or the certainty that one creates what one perceives
or the certainty that there is perception. Sanity and perception, certainty and perception,
knowledge and observation, are then all of a kind, and amongst them we have sanity.

         The road into uncertainty is the road toward psychosomatic illness, doubts, anxieties,
fears, worries and vanishing awareness. As awareness is decreased, so does certainty
decrease.

         It is very puzzling to people at higher levels of awareness why people behave toward

                                                      13

them as they do; such higher level people have not realized that they are not seen, much less
understood. People at low levels of awareness do not observe, but substitute for observation
preconceptions, evaluation and suppositions, and even physical pain by which to attain their
certainties.

         The mistaken use of shock by the ancient Greek upon the insane, the use of whips in
old Bedlam, all sought to deliver sufficient certainty to the insane to cause them to be less
insane.

         Certainty delivered by blow and punishment is a non- self- determined certainty. It is
productive of stimulus- response behavior. At a given stimulus a dog who has been beaten, for
instance, will react invariably, providing he has been sufficiently beaten, but if he has been
beaten too much, the stimulus will result only in confused bewilderment. Thus certainty
delivered by blows, by applied force, eventually brings about a certainty as absolute as one
could desire— total unawareness. Unconsciousness itself is a certainty which is sought by
many individuals who have failed repeatedly to reach any high level of awareness certainty.
These people then desire an unawareness certainty. So it seems that the thirst for certainty can
lead one into oblivion if one seeks it as an effect.

         An uncertainty is the product of two certainties. One of these is a conviction, whether
arrived at by observation (causative) or by a blow (effected). The other is a negative certainty.
One can be sure that something is and one can be sure that something is not. He can be sure
that there is something, no matter what it is, present and that there is nothing present. These
two certainties commingling create a condition of uncertainty known as “maybe”. A “maybe”
continues to be held in suspense in an individual’s mind simply because he cannot decide
whether it is nothing or something. He grasps and holds the certainties each time he has been
given evidence or has made the decision that it is a somethingness and each time he has come to
suppose that it is a nothingness. Where these two certainties of something and nothing are
concerned with and can vitally influence one’s continuance in a state of beingness, or where
one merely supposes they can influence such a state of beingness, a condition of anxiety arises.
Thus anxiety, indecision, uncertainty, a state of “maybe” can exist only in the presence of poor
observation or the inability to observe.

         Such a state can be remedied. One merely causes the individual to observe in terms of
the three universes.

                                                      14

                                 THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE

         There are three conditions of existence.

         These three conditions comprise life.

         They are BE, DO and HAVE.

         The condition of BEING is defined as the assumption of a category of identity. It could
be said to be the role in a game, and an example of beingness could be one’s own name.
Another example would be one’s profession. Another example would be one’s physical
characteristics. Each or all of these things could be called one’s  beingness.  Beingness is
assumed by oneself or given to one’s self or is attained, for example, in the playing of a game,
each player having his own beingness.

         The second condition of existence is DOING. By doing we mean action, function,
accomplishment, the attainment of goals, the fulfilling of purpose, or any change of position in
space.

         The third condition is HAVINGNESS. By havingness, we mean owning, possessing,
being capable of commanding, positioning, taking charge of objects, energies or spaces.

         The essential definition of  having is  to be able to touch or permeate or to direct the
disposition of.

         The game of life demands that one assume a beingness in order to accomplish a
doingness in the direction of havingness.

         These three conditions are given in an order of seniority where life is concerned. The
ability to be is more important than the ability to do.  The ability to do is more important than the
ability to have.  In most people all three conditions are sufficiently confused that they are best
understood in reverse order. When one has clarified the idea of possession or havingness, one
can then proceed to clarify doingness for general activity, and when this is done one
understands beingness or identity.

         It is an essential to a successful existence that each of these three conditions be clarified
and understood. The ability to assume or to grant beingness is probably the highest of human
virtues. It is even more important to be able to permit other people to have beingness than to be
able oneself to assume it.

                                                      15

                                         MYTHS OF THE MIND

         The curse of the past has been a pretense of knowledge. We’ve had a worship of the
fable. We have had prayers being sent up to a myth. And man hasn’t been looking at all.

         We in this modern age of science have not developed out of the field of humanities
anything comparable to a scientific observation of the mind. The humanities— psychology,
sociology, criminology and the various branching studies of the social sciences in general— can
be said at this time and place to have failed.

         Imagining that one can see is a condition worse than being unable to see. The
humanities imagined too many things to see. They never cared to look. And so they have
failed.

         Scientology tells you quite adequately that there is an enormous Valhalla mixed up with
Pluto’s realm, mixed up with fairy tales, mixed up with Menninger’s work, lying all over
below the level of truth. The truth is a simple thing that anybody could see. Why don’t they see
it? Because they live in this gorgeous wonderland which isn’t and never will be.

         Let’s go into wonderland. The wonderland of syllables, the wonderland beneath the
earth of never never. We know it as dispersal. An individual looks at something and it flashes
back and he can no longer look in that direction. It kicks him in the teeth. So he mustn’t look
that way. He must look somewhere else. And he eventually learns very well not to observe
anything.

         That is the exact mechanics of how a wonderland of pretended information, which
became the social sciences, was created. The individual couldn’t confront man, so he turned
around and developed a theory about man.

         There are a lot of imaginary and legendary beings and beasts just like there were in the
dark ages. Take the way the ancient mariners kept people from trading with the American
Coast. Every mariner of Columbus’ day believed that you just sailed so far then fell off the
edge and there were terrific monsters and beasts who would drown you if you sailed beyond
the sight of land.

         A great many beasts had been invented to debar careless voyaging into somebody else’s
hunting preserves.

         Now I’m not going to tell you that the field of the mind has been  only  inhabited by
imaginary beings, but something of this order is done by the fellow who invents tremendous
nomenclature of the brain or bone structure and then says “you have to know all these names
before you can know anything about the mind” and then says “each one of these parts of the
brain has a specific function.” And adds “nobody should tamper with the mind because it
bites.”

         I don’t say that that is the same thing the Spanish sailor did with the sea in order to keep
guys like Columbus from discovering things. I don’t say that for a moment. I merely insist
upon it.

         All a person has to do is look— right where he is— and he will see something about the
mind. But if he’s been told it’s very dangerous to fool with the mind and he doesn’t know that
those raging sea beasts are really dummies to keep fishing preserves, why, he says, “Well, I’d
better not look. I’d better go blind. “

         Through the years I learned that they were supposed to do things with the mind across
this basic premise— that IQ. cannot change and personality characteristics are unalterable. This
is a defeatism.

                                                      16

         Now, Scientology is defined as knowing how to know. But it could be better defined
as “summated and organized information about you”. It’s everything that has been known
about you for 2500 years at least. But it is summated so it is communicable, so that it is
applicable and so that it gets some definite results. And way over and above all these other
things it is capable of changes. It can create changes for the better, and it can make things look
and act better.

         Most of our data is on the firm foundation of having looked. And your ability to know
the subject is your ability to look.

         Man, before he gets up and looks to find where he is, before he starts to look in the
proper direction, discovers he’s blind. Then he says, “Hey, wait a minute,” and takes the veil
off his eyes, takes a look— and has the tendency to keep diving into complexities.

         So there is only one continuing stress in Scientology and that is greater simplicity, and
that means greater communication. By involvement in a complexity we create a mystery. We
sink man into a priesthood, a cult.

         The simplicity of observation, the simplicity of communication itself and only itself is
functional and will take man from the bottom to the top. And the only thing I am trying to teach
you is to look.

                                                      17

                                  HOW TO LIVE WITH CHILDREN

         An adult has certain rights around children which the children and modern adults rather
tend to ignore. A good, stable adult with love and tolerance in his heart is about the best therapy
a child can have.

         The main consideration in raising children is the problem of training them without
breaking them. You want to raise your child in such a way that you don’t have to control him,
so that he will be in full possession of himself at all times. Upon that depends his good
behavior, his health, his sanity.

         Children are not dogs. They can’t be trained as dogs are trained. They are not
controllable items. They are, and let’s not overlook the point, men and women. A child is not a
special species of animal distinct from Man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained
full growth.

         Any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children.

         How would you like to be pulled and hauled and ordered about and restrained from
doing whatever you wanted to do? You’d resent it. The only reason a child “doesn’t” resent it
is because he’s small. You’d half murder somebody who treated you, an adult, with the orders,
contradiction and disrespect given to the average child. The child doesn’t strike back because he
isn’t big enough. He gets your floor muddy, interrupts your nap, destroys the peace of the
home instead. If he had equality with you in the matter of rights, he’d not ask this “revenge”.
This “revenge” is standard child behavior.

         A child has a right to his self- determinism. You say that if he is not restrained from
pulling things down on himself, running into the road, etc., etc., he’ll be hurt. What are you,
as an adult, doing to make that child live in rooms or an environment where he can be hurt? The
fault is yours, not his, if he breaks things.

         The sweetness and love of a child is preserved only so long as he can exert his own
self- determinism. You interrupt that and, to a degree, you interrupt his life.

         There are only two reasons why a child’s right to decide for himself has to be
interrupted— the fragility and danger of his environment and you, for you work out on him the
things that were done to you, regardless of what you think.

         When you give a child something, it’s his.  It’s not still yours. Clothes, toys, quarters,
what he has been given,  must remain under his exclusive control. So  he tears up his shirt,
wrecks his bed, breaks his fire engine. It’s  none of your business.  How would you like to
have somebody give you a Christmas present and then tell you, day after day thereafter, what
you are to do with it, and even punish you if you failed to care for it the way the donor wishes?
You’d wreck that donor and ruin that present. You know you would. The child wrecks your
nerves when you do it to him. That’s revenge. He cries. He pesters you. He breaks your
things. He “accidentally” spills his milk. And he wrecks, on purpose, the possession about
which he is so often cautioned. Why? Because he is fighting for his own self- determinism, his
own right to own and make his weight felt on his environment. This “possession” is another
channel by which he can be controlled. So he has to fight the possession and the controller.

         In raising your child, you must avoid “training” him into a social animal. Your child
begins by being more sociable, more dignified than you are. In a relatively short time, the
treatment he gets so checks him that he revolts. This revolt can be intensified until he is a terror
to have around. He will be noisy, thoughtless, careless of possessions, unclean— anything, in
short, which will annoy you. Train him, control him and you’ll lose his love. You’ve lost the
child forever that you seek to control and own.

                                                      18

         Another thing is the matter of contribution. You have no right to deny your child the
right to contribute. A human being feels able and competent only so long as he is permitted to
contribute as much as, or more than he has contributed to him.

         A baby contributes by trying to make you smile. The baby will show off. A little later
he will dance for you, bring you sticks, try to repeat your work motions to help you. If you do
not accept those smiles, those dances, those sticks, or those work motions in the spirit they are
given, you have begun to interrupt the child’s contribution. Now he will start to get anxious.
He will do unthinking and strange things to your possessions in an effort to make them “better”
for you. You scold him . . . that finishes him.

         Permit a child to sit on your lap. He’ll sit there, contented. Now put your arms around
him and constrain him to sit there. Do this, even though he wasn’t even trying to leave.
Instantly he’ll squirm. He’ll fight to get away from you. He’ll get angry. He’ll cry. Recall
now, he was happy before you started to hold him. (You should actually make this
experiment.)

         Your efforts to mold, train, control this child in general react on him exactly like trying
to hold him on your lap.

         Of course, you will have difficulty if this child of yours has already been trained,
controlled, ordered about, denied his own possessions. In mid- flight, you change your tactics.
You try to give him his freedom. He’s so suspicious of you he will have a terrible time trying
to adjust. The transition period will be difficult. But, at the end of it, you’ll have a
well- ordered, sociable child, thoughtful of you and, very important to you, a child who loves
you.

         The child who is under constraint, shepherded, handled, controlled, has a very bad
anxiety postulated. His parents are survival entities. They mean food, clothing, shelter,
affection. This means he wants to be near them. He wants to love them, naturally, being their
child.

         But on the other hand, his parents are non- survival entities. His whole being and life
depend upon his rights to use his own decision about his movements and his possessions and
his body. Parents seek to interrupt this out of the mistaken idea that a child is an idiot who
won’t learn unless “controlled”. So he has to fight shy, to fight against, to annoy and to harass
an enemy.

         Here is anxiety. “I love them dearly. I also need them. But they mean an interruption of
my ability, my mind, my potential life. What am I going to do about my parents? I can’t live
with them. I can’t live without them. Oh, dear, oh, dear!” There he sits in his rompers running
this problem through his head. That problem, that anxiety, will be with him for eighteen years,
more or less. And it will half wreck his life.

         Freedom for the child means freedom for you.

         Abandoning the possessions of the child to their fate means eventual safety for the
child’s possessions.

         What terrible will power is demanded of a parent not to give constant streams of
directions to a child. But it has to be done, if you want a well, a happy, a careful, a beautiful,
an intelligent child!

         The child has a duty toward you. He has to be able to take care of you, not an illusion
that he is, but actually. And you have to have the patience to allow yourself to be cared for
sloppily until, by sheer experience, itself— not by your directions— he learns how to do it well.
Care for the child?— nonsense! He has probably got a better grasp of immediate situations than
you have.

                                                      19

                                              ON MARRIAGE

         Communication is the root of marital success from which a strong union can grow, and
non- communication is the rock on which the ship will bash out her keel.

         In the first place, men and women aren’t too careful “on whom they up and marry”. In
the absence of any basic training about neurosis, psychosis, or how to judge a good cook or a
good wage- earner, that tricky, treacherous and not always easy- to- identify thing called “love”
is the sole guiding factor in the selection of mates. It is too much to expect of a society above
the level of ants to be entirely practical about an institution as basically impractical as marriage.
Thus, it is not amazing that the mis- selection of partners goes on with such abandon.

         There are ways, however, not only to select a marriage partner, but also to guarantee
the continuation of that marriage, and these ways are simple. They depend uniformly upon
communication.

         There should be some parity of intellect and sanity between a husband and wife for
them to have a successful marriage. In Western culture, it is expected that the women shall have
some command of the humanities and sciences. It is easy to establish the educational
background of a potential marriage partner; it is not so easy to gauge their capability regarding
sex, family or children, or their sanity.

         In the past, efforts were made to establish sanity with ink- blots, square blocks and tests
with marbles to find out if anybody had lost any. The resulting figures had to be personally
interpreted with a crystal ball and then re- interpreted for application.

         In Scientology, there is a test for sanity and comparative sanity which is so simple that
anyone can apply it. What is the “communication lag” of the individual?— When asked a
question, how long does it take him to answer? When a remark is addressed to him, how long
does it take for him to register and return? The fast answer tells of the fast mind and the sane
mind, providing the answer is a sequitur; the slow answer tells of down- scale. Marital partners
who have the same communication lag will get along; where one partner is fast and one is
slow, the situation will become unbearable to the fast partner and miserable to the slow one.

         The repair of a marriage which is going on the rocks does not always require the
auditing of the marriage partners. It may be that another family factor is in the scene. This may
be in the person of a relative, such as the mother- in- law. How does one solve this factor
without using a shotgun? This, again, is simple. The mother- in- law, if there is trouble in the
family, is responsible for cutting communication or inverting communication. One or the other
of the partners, then, is cut off the communication channel on which he belongs. He senses this
and objects strenuously to it.

         Jealousy is the largest factor in breaking up marriages. Jealousy comes about because
of the insecurity of the jealous person, and the jealousy may or may not have foundation. This
person is afraid of hidden communication lines and will do anything to try to uncover them.
This acts upon the other partner to make him feel that his communication lines are being cut; for
he thinks himself entitled to have open communication lines, whereas his marital partner insists
that he shut many of them. The resultant rows are violent, as represented by the fact that, where
jealousy exists in a profession such as acting, insurance companies will not issue policies —the
suicide rate is too high.

         The subject of marriage could not be covered in many chapters, but here is given the
basic clue to a successful marriage— Communicate !

                                                      20

                                     THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS

         The conditions of success are few and easily stated.

         Jobs are not held consistently and in actuality by flukes of fate or fortune. Those who
depend upon luck generally experience bad luck. The ability to hold a job depends in the main
upon ability. One must be able to control his work and must be able to be controlled in doing
his work. One must be able, as well, to leave certain areas uncontrolled. One’s intelligence is
directly related to his ability. There is no such thing as being too smart. But there is such a
thing as being too stupid.

         But one may be both able and intelligent without succeeding. A vital part of success is
the ability to handle and control, not only one’s tools of the trade, but the people with whom
one is surrounded. In order to do this, one must be capable of a very high level of affinity, he
must be able to tolerate massive realities and he must, as well, be able to give and receive
communication.

         The ingredients of success are then: first, an ability to confront work with joy and not
horror; a wish to do work for its own sake, not because one “has to have a paycheck”. One
must be able to work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of exhaustion. If one
experiences these things, there is something wrong with him. There is some element in his
environment that he should be controlling that he isn’t controlling, or his accumulated injuries
are such as to make him shy away from all people and masses with whom he should be in
intimate contact.

         The ingredients of successful work are: training and experience in the subject being
addressed, good general intelligence and ability, a capability of high affinity, a tolerance of
reality, and the ability to communicate and receive ideas. Given these things there is left only a
slim chance of failure. Given these things a man can ignore all of the accidents of birth,
marriage or fortune, for birth, marriage and fortune are not capable of placing these necessary
ingredients in one’s hands. One could have all the money in the world and yet be unable to
perform an hour’s honest labor. Such a man would be a miserably unhappy one.

         The person who studiously avoids work usually works far longer and far harder than
the man who pleasantly confronts it and does it. Men who cannot work are not happy men.

         Work is the stable datum of this society. Without something to do there is nothing for
which to live. A man who cannot work is as good as dead and usually prefers death and works
to achieve it.

         The mysteries of life are not today, with Scientology, very mysterious. Mystery is not a
needful ingredient. Only the very aberrated man desires to have vast secrets held away from
him. Scientology has slashed through many of the complexities which have been erected for
men and has bared the core of these problems. Scientology for the first time in man’s history
can predictably raise intelligence, increase ability, bring about a return of the ability to play a
game, and permit man to escape from the dwindling spiral of his own disabilities. Therefore
work itself can become a game, a pleasant and happy thing.

         There is one thing which has been learned in Scientology which is very important to the
state of mind of the workman. One often feels in this society that he is working for the
immediate paycheck and that he does not gain for the whole society anything of any
importance. He does not know several things. One of these is how few good workmen are. On
the level of executives, it is interesting to note how precious any large company finds a man
who can handle and control jobs and men. Such people are rare. All the empty space in the
structure of this workaday world is at the top.

         And there is another thing which is quite important, and that is the fact that the world

                                                      21

today has been led to believe, by mental philosophies calculated to betray them, that when one
is dead it is all over and done with and that one has no further responsibility for anything. It is
highly doubtful if this is true. One inherits tomorrow what he died out of yesterday.

         Another thing we know is that men are not dispensable. It is a mechanism of old
philosophies to tell men that if they think they are indispensable they should go down to the
graveyard and take a look— those men were indispensable too. This is the surest foolishness. If
you really looked carefully in the graveyard you would find the machinist who set the models
going in yesteryear and without whom there would be no industry today. It is doubtful if such
a feat is being performed just now. A workman is not just a workman. A laborer is not just a
laborer. An office worker is not just an office worker. They are living, breathing, important
pillars on which the entire structure of our civilization is erected. They are not cogs in a mighty
machine. They are the machine itself.

                                                      22

                              ON THE DEATH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

         Where does one cease to Survive and begin to Succumb? The point of demarcation is
not death as we know it. It is marked by what one might call the death of the consciousness of
the individual.

         Man’s greatest weapon is his reason. Lacking the teeth, the armor- plated hide, the
claws of so many other life forms, Man has relied upon his ability to reason in order to further
himself in his survival.

         The selection of the ability to think as a chief weapon is a fortunate one. It has awarded
Man the kingdom of Earth. Reason is an excellent weapon. The animal with his teeth, with his
armor- plated hide, with his long claws, is fixed with weapons he cannot alter. He cannot adjust
to a changing environment. And it is terribly important to survival to change when the
environment changes. Every extinct species became extinct because it could not change to
control a new environment. Reason remedies this failure to a marked extent. For Man can
invent new tools and new weapons and a whole new environment. Reason permits him to
change to fit new situations. Reason keeps him in control of new environments.

         Any animal that simply adjusts itself to match its environment is doomed. Environments
change rapidly. Animals that can control and change the environment have the best chance of
survival.

         The only way you can organize a collective state is to convince men that they must
adjust and adapt themselves, like animals, to a constant environment. The people must be
deprived of the right to control, as individuals, their environment. Then they can be regimented
and herded into groups. They become owned, not owners. Reason and the right to reason must
be taken from them, for the very center of reason is the right to make up one’s own mind about
one’s environment.

         The elements fight Man and man fights man. The primary target of the enemies of Man
or a man is his right and ability to reason. The crude and blundering forces of the elements,
storms, cold and night bear down against, challenge and then, mayhap, crush the Reason as
well as the body.

         But just as unconsciousness always precedes death, even by instants, so does the death
of Reason precede the death of the organism. And this action may happen in a long span of
time, even half a lifetime, even more.

         Have you watched the high alertness of a young man breasting the forces which oppose
life? And watched another in old age? You will find that what has suffered has been his ability
to Reason. He has gained hard- won experience and on this experience he seeks, from middle
age on, to travel. It is a truism that youth thinks fast on little experience. And that age thinks
slowly on much. The Reason of youth is very far from always right, for youth is attempting to
reason without adequate data.

         Suppose we had a man who had retained all his ability to reason and yet had a great deal
of experience. Suppose our gray- beards could think with all the enthusiasm and vitality of
youth and yet had all their experience as well. Age says to youth, “You have no experience!”
Youth says to age, “You have no vision; you will not accept or even examine new ideas!”
Obviously, an ideal arrangement would be for one to have the experience of age and the vitality
and vision of youth.

         You may have said to yourself, “With all my experience now, what wouldn’t I give for
some of the enthusiasm I had once.” Or perhaps, you have excused it all by saying you have
“lost your illusions”. But you are not sure that they were illusions. Are brightness in life, quick
enthusiasm, a desire and will to live, a belief in destiny, are these things illusions? Or are they

                                                      23

symptoms of the very stuff of which vital life is made? And isn’t their decline a symptom of
death?

         Knowledge does not destroy a will to live. Pain and loss of self- determinism destroy
that will. Life can be painful. The gaining of experience is often painful. The retaining of that
experience is essential. But isn’t it still experience if it doesn’t yet have the pain?

         Suppose you could wipe out of your life all the pain, physical and otherwise, which
you have accumulated. Would it be so terrible to have to part with a broken heart or a
psychosomatic illness, with fears and anxieties and dreads?

         Suppose a man had a chance again, with all he knows, to look life and the Universe in
the eye again and say it could be whipped. Do you recall a day, when you were younger, and
you woke to find bright dew sparkling on the grass, the leaves, to find the golden sun bright
upon a happy world? Do you recall how beautiful and fine it once was? The first sweet kiss?
The warmth of true friendship? The intimacy of a moonlight ride? What made it become
otherwise than a brilliant world?

         The consciousness of the world around one is not an absolute thing. One can be more
conscious of color and brightness and joy at one time of life than at another. One can more
easily feel the brilliant reality of things in youth than in age. And isn’t this something like a
decline of consciousness, of awareness?

         What is it that makes us less aware of the brilliance of the world around us? Has the
world changed? No, for each new generation sees the glamour and the glory, the vitality of
life— the same life that age may see as dull, at best. The individual changes. And what makes
him change? Is it a decay of his glands and sinews? Hardly, for all the work that has been done
on glands and sinews— the structure of the body— has restored little, if any, of the brilliance of
living.

         “Ah, youth,” sighs the adult, “if I but had your zest again!” What reduced that zest?

         As one’s consciousness of the brilliance of life declines, so has declined one’s own
consciousness. Awareness decreases exactly as consciousness decreases. The ability to
perceive the world around one and the ability to draw accurate conclusions about it are, to all
intents, the same thing.

         Glasses are a symptom of the decline of consciousness. One needs one’s sight
bolstered to make the world look brighter. The inability to move swiftly, as one ran when one
was a child, is a decline of consciousness and ability.

         Complete unconsciousness is death. Half unconsciousness is half- death. A
quarter- unconsciousness is a quarter of death. And as one accumulates the pain attendant upon
life and fails to accumulate the pleasures, one gradually loses one’s race with the gentleman
with the scythe. And there ensues, at last, the physical incapacity for seeing, for thinking and
for being, as in death.

         How does one accumulate this pain? And if one were to get rid of it would full
consciousness and a full bright concept of life return? And is there a way to get rid of it? With
Scientology, the answer is YES.

                                                      24

                                         ACCENT ON ABILITY

         When we say “Life”, all of us know, more or less, what we are talking about; but when
we use this word “Life” practically, we must examine the purposes and behavior, and in
particular, the formulas evolved by Life in order to have the game called “Life”.

         When we say “Life”, we mean Understanding; and when we say “Understanding”, we
mean Affinity, Reality, and Communication. To understand all would be to live at the highest
level of potential action and ability. The quality of Life exists in the presence of
Understanding— in the presence then, of Affinity, Reality and Communication.

         Life would exist to a far less active degree in the levels of misunderstanding,
incomprehensibility, psychosomatic illness, and physical and mental incapability’s. Because
Life is Understanding, it attempts to understand. When it turns and faces the incomprehensible,
it feels balked and baffled.

         If one is obsessively, and without understanding, being determined into
incomprehensibility, then of course he is lost. Thus we discover that the only trap into which
Life could fall is to do things without knowing it is doing them.

         One can always understand that his ability can increase, because in the direction of an
increase in ability is further understanding. Ability is dependent entirely upon a greater and
better understanding of that field or area in which one cares to be more able. When one attempts
to understand inability he is of course looking at less comprehensibility, less understanding,
and so does not then understand lessening ability anywhere near as well as he understands
increasing ability. In the absence of understanding of ability we get a fear of loss of ability,
which is simply the fear of an unknown or a thought- to- beunknowable thing, for there is less
knownness and less understanding in less ability.

         Part of understanding and ability is control. Of course, it is not necessary to control
everything everywhere if one totally understands them. However, in a lesser understanding of
things, and of course in the spirit of having a game, control becomes a necessary factor. The
anatomy of control is Start, Stop and Change, and this is fully as important to know as
Understanding itself, and as the triangle which composes Understanding:

         Affinity, Reality and Communication.

         The doctors and nurses in a contagious ward have some degree of control over the
illnesses which they see before them. It is only when they begin to recognize their inability to
handle these ills or these patients that they, themselves, succumb to these. In view of the fact
that of recent centuries we have been very successful in handling contagious diseases, doctors
and nurses, then, can walk with impunity through contagious wards.

         The fighters of disease, having some measure of control over the disease, are then no
longer afraid of the disease and so it cannot affect them. Of course, there would be a level of
body understanding on this which might yet still mirror fear, but we would have the same
statement obtaining. People who are able to control something do not need to be afraid of it and
do not suffer ill effects from it. People who cannot control things can receive bad effects from
those things.

         The common denominator of all neurosis, psychosis, aberration and psychosomatic ills
is “can’t work”. Any nation which has a high incidence of these is reduced in production and is
reduced in longevity.

         Amongst the unable is the criminal, who is unable to think of the other fellow, unable to
determine his own actions,  unable to follow orders,  unable  to make things grow, unable to
determine the difference between good and evil, unable to think at all on the future. Anybody

                                                      25

has some of these; the criminal has all of them.

         And what does one do about “how bad it is”? Well, if one depends for a long time upon
others to do something about it, or depends upon force, he will fail. From his viewpoint the
only one who can put more Life, more Understanding, more Tolerance and more Capability
into the environment is himself. Just by existing in a state of higher Understanding, just by
being more capable, an individual could resolve for those around him many of their problems
and difficulties.

         The accent is on ability.

                                                      26

                              HONEST PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS, TOO

         After you have achieved a high level of ability, you will be the first to insist upon your
rights to live with honest people.

         When you know the technology of the mind, you know that it is a mistake to use
“individual rights” and “freedom” as arguments to protect those who would only destroy.

         Individual rights were not originated to protect criminals, but to bring freedom to honest
men. Into this area of protection then dived those who needed “freedom” and “individual
liberty” to cover their own questionable activities.

         Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free— he is in
his own trap. When his own deeds cannot be disclosed, then he is a prisoner; he must withhold
himself from his fellows and is a slave to his own conscience. Freedom must be deserved
before any freedom is possible.

         To protect dishonest people is to condemn them to their own hells. By making
“individual rights” a synonym for “protect the criminal” one helps bring about a slave state for
all, for where “individual liberty” is abused, an impatience with it arises which at length sweeps
us all away. The targets of all disciplinary laws are the few who err. Such laws, unfortunately,
also injure and restrict those who do not err. If all were honest, there would be no disciplinary
threats.

         There is only one way out for a dishonest person— facing up to his own responsibilities
in the society and putting himself back into communication with his fellow man, his family, the
world at large. By seeking to invoke his “individual rights” to protect himself from an
examination of his deeds, he reduces, just that much, the future of individual liberty— for he
himself is not free. Yet he infects others who are honest by using  their  right to freedom to
protect himself.

         Uneasy lies the head that wears a guilty conscience.

         And it will lie no more easily by seeking to protect misdeeds by pleas of “freedom
means that you must never look at me”. The right of a person to survive is directly related to his
honesty.

         Freedom for man does not mean freedom to injure man. Freedom of speech does not
mean freedom to harm by lies.

         Man cannot be free while there are those amongst him who are slaves to their own
terrors.

         The mission of a techno- space society is to subordinate the individual and control him
by economic and political duress. The only casualty in a machine age is the individual and his
freedom.

         To preserve that freedom one must not permit men to hide their evil intentions under the
protection of that freedom. To be free, a man must be honest with himself and with his fellows.

         If a man uses his own honesty to protest the unmasking of dishonesty, then that man is
an enemy of his own freedom.

         We can stand in the sun only so long as we don’t let the deeds of others bring the
darkness.

         Freedom is for the honest men. Individual liberty exists only for those who have the

                                                      27

ability to be free.

         Who would punish when he could salvage?

         Only a madman would break a wanted object he could repair.

         The individual must not die in this machine age— rights or no rights. The criminal and
madman must not triumph with their new- found tools of destruction.

         The least free person is the person who cannot reveal his own acts and who protests the
revelation of the improper acts of others. On such people will be built a future political slavery
where we all have numbers— and our guilt— unless we act.

         It is fascinating that blackmail and punishment are the keynotes of all dark operations.
What would happen if these two commodities no longer existed? What would happen if all men
were free enough to speak? Then and only then, would you have freedom.

         On the day when we can fully trust each other, there will be peace on Earth.

                                                      28

                                         ACCEPTANCE LEVEL

         One thing that a person will discover is that he has been carefully taught that certain
things are bad and, therefore, not enjoyable and that he has set up resistance’s to these things
and that they, at length— these resistance’s— have become a sponge for the things they were
set up to counteract and the resistance, caving in, has created a hunger for that which was, at
first, resisted.

         This is the physical universe at work in its very best operation: Make one fight
something, then so arrange it that one winds up craving for what one was fighting.

         You can, if you look about you, see Acceptance Level dramatized in every activity of
life. You can understand, then, why some woman will not clean up a living room; a living
room is not acceptable, except in a cluttered fashion to this person. You can understand, also,
why some man leaves a beautiful and helpful girl and runs off with a maid or a prostitute; his
acceptance level was too far below the beautiful girl. You can understand, too, some of you,
why you were not acceptable in your own homes when you were young; you were too bright
and too cheerful and this was too high above those around you. You can understand, as well,
why the newspapers print the stories they do.

                                                      29

                                             CONFRONTING

         That which a person can confront, he can handle.

         The first step of handling anything is gaining an ability to face it.

         It could be said that war continues as a threat to man because man cannot confront war.
The idea of making war so terrible that no one will be able to fight it is the exact reverse of
fact— if one wishes to end war. The invention of the long bow, gun powder, heavy naval
cannon, machine guns, liquid fire, and the hydrogen bomb add only more and more certainty
that war will  continue. As each new element which man cannot confront is added to elements
he has not been able to confront so far, man engages himself upon a decreasing ability to
handle war.

         We are looking here at the basic anatomy of all problems. Problems start with an
inability to confront anything. Whether we apply this to domestic quarrels or to insects, to
garbage dumps or Picasso, one can always trace the beginning of any existing problem to an
unwillingness to confront.

         Let us take a domestic scene. The husband or the wife cannot confront the other, cannot
confront second dynamic consequences, cannot confront the economic burdens, and so we
have domestic strife. The less any of these actually are confronted, the more problem they will
become.

         It is a truism that one never solves anything by running away from it. Of course, one
might also say that one never solves cannon balls by baring his breast to them. But I assure you
that if nobody cared whether cannon balls were fired or not, control of people by threat of
cannon balls would cease.

         Down on Skid Row where flotsam and jetsam exist to keep the police busy, we could
not find one man whose basic difficulties, whose downfall could not be traced at once to an
inability to confront. A criminal once came to me whose entire right side was paralyzed. Yet,
this man made his living by walking up to people in alleys, striking them and robbing

         them. Why he struck people he could not connect with his paralyzed side and arm.
From his infancy he had been educated not to confront men. The nearest he could come to
confronting men was to strike them, and so his criminal career.

         The more the horribleness of crime is deified by television and public press, the less the
society will be able to handle crime. The more formidable is made the juvenile delinquent, the
less the society will be able to handle the juvenile delinquent.

         In education, the more esoteric and difficult a subject is made, the less the student will
be able to handle the subject. When a subject is made too formidable by an instructor, the more
the student retreats from it. There were, for instance, some early European mental studies
which were so complicated and so incomprehensible and which were sewn with such lack of
understanding of man that no student could possibly confront them.

         Man, at large today, is in this state with regard to the human spirit. For centuries man
was educated to believe in demons, ghouls, and things that went boomp in the night. There
was an organization in southern Europe which capitalized upon this terror and made demons
and devils so formidable that at length man could not even face the fact that any of his fellows
had souls. And thus we entered an entirely materialistic age. With the background teaching that
no one can confront the “invisible”, vengeful religions sought to move forward into a foremost
place of control. Naturally, they failed to achieve their goal and irreligion became the order of
the day, thus opening the door for Communism and other idiocies. Although it might seem true
that one cannot confront the invisible, who said that a spirit was always  invisible? Rather, let’s

                                                      30

say that it is impossible for man or anything else to confront the nonexistent; and thus when
nonexistent gods are invented and are given more roles in the society, we discover man
becomes so degraded that he cannot even confront the spirit in his fellows, much less become
moral.

         Confronting, as a subject in itself, is intensely interesting. Indeed, there is some
evidence that mental image pictures occur only when the individual is unable to confront the
circumstances of the picture. When this compounds and man is unable to confront anything
anywhere, he might be considered to have pictures of everything, everywhere. This is proven
by a rather interesting test made in 1947 by myself. I discovered, although I did not entirely
interpret it at the time, that an individual has no further pictures when he can confront all
pictures; thus being able to confront everything he has done, he is no longer troubled with the
things he has done. Supporting this, it will be discovered that individuals who progress in an
ability to handle pictures eventually have no pictures at all. This we call a “Clear”.

         A “Clear”, in an absolute sense, would be someone who could confront anything and
everything in the past, present and future.

         The handling of a problem seems to be simply the increase of ability to confront the
problem, and when the problem can be totally confronted, it no longer exists. This is strange
and miraculous.

         Man’s difficulties are a compound of his cowardice’s. To have difficulties in life, all it
is necessary to do is to start running away from the business of livingness. After that, problems
of unsolvable magnitude are assured. When individuals are restrained from confronting life,
they accrue a vast ability to have difficulties with it.

         Various nervous traits can be traced at once by trying to confront with something which
insists on running away. A nervous hand, for instance, would be a hand with which the
individual is trying to confront something. The forward motion of the nervousness would be
the effort to make it confront; the backward motion of it would be its refusal to confront. Of
course, the basic error is confronting with  the hand.

         The world is never bright to those who cannot confront it. Everything is a dull gray to a
defeated army. The whole trick of somebody telling you “it’s all bad over there” is contained in
the fact that he is trying to keep you from confronting something and thus make you retreat
from life. Eyeglasses, nervous twitches, tensions, all of these things stem from an
unwillingness to confront. When that willingness is repaired, these disabilities tend to
disappear.

                                                      31

                                         ON BRINGING ORDER

         When you start to introduce order into anything, disorder shows up and blows off.
Therefore, efforts to bring order in the society or any part of it will be productive of disorder
for a while every time.

         The trick is to keep on bringing order; and soon the disorder is gone, and you have
orderly activity remaining. But if you  hate disorder and fight disorder only, don’t ever try to
bring order to anything, for the resulting disorder will drive you half mad.

         Only if you can ignore disorder and can understand this principle, can you have a
working world.

                                                      32

                                       ON HUMAN CHARACTER

         In the past, a knowledge of his own character was an unpalatable fact to Man, since
people sought to force him to achieve that knowledge solely through condemnation. He resisted
what he was, and he became what he resisted; and ever with a dwindling spiral, he reached
lower dregs. If ever once a man were to realize with accuracy what he was, if he were to realize
what other people sought to make him, if he could attain this knowledge with great certainty,
there are no chains strong enough to prevent his escaping; for such would be his astonishment
that he would brave beasts, gods and Lucifer himself to become something better than what he
had beheld in his own heart.

         The only tragedy of all this is that Man has lacked any method of estimating himself
with certainty so as to know what it was he was trying to improve.

         The basic impulse of Man is to produce an effect.

         In relatively high- toned beings, the very upper range of Man and above, the impulse is
to produce something out of nothing. One can only cause a creative effect by causing
nothingnesses to become something.

         Lower on the tone scale, the effect most desired is to make nothing out of something.
The general range of Man occupies this area of the scale.

         Man on the lower ranges is entirely dedicated to the goals of the body itself. The body,
to exist, must make nothing out of something. This, as the simplest illustration, is the goal of
eating. It may or may not be necessary to life to eat; it may not even be necessary for the body
to eat. In Para- Scientology, there is some evidence that the stomach once produced sufficient
life energy to motivate the body without any further “food”, but the body of man and beasts in
general is not equipped so today, and of that we are very certain.

         The body’s single effort to make something out of nothing is resident in sex, and in this
culture at our time, sex is a degraded and nasty thing which must be hidden at best and babies
are something not to have, but to be prevented. Thus, even sex has been made to parallel the
something- into- nothing impulse.

         Exactly as the body, by eating, seeks to make nothing out of something, so does the
general run of Man, in his conversation and interpersonal relationship, seek to make a
nothingness out of friendship, acquaintances, himself, art and all other things. He much more
readily accepts a statement or a news story which reduces something further toward nothing
than he accepts a story which raises from a relative nothing to a higher something. Thus, we
find out that scientific achievements for the good of man occupy a very late place in the
newspapers and stories of murders and love nests, wars and plagues gain first place.

         Man, in his present form, is held on the road to survival by his culture alone. This
culture has been policed into action by brute force. The bulk of men are surviving against their
own will. They are working against their own desires, and they seek, wherever possible and
ever so covertly, to succumb.

         The physical universe could be called a Love- Hate universe, for these two are the most
prominently displayed features, and neither one has any great altitude, although many claim that
love is all and that love is high on the tone scale, which it is not.

         To live, Man must eat. Every time a man eats, no matter the kindness of his heart or
disposition, something must have died or must die, even though it is only cells. To eat, then,
one must be able to bring about death. If eating is motivated by death, then digestion would be
as good as one is permitted to kill. Digestion’s are bad in this society. Killing is shunned in a
degraded and covert fashion, and man eats only those things which not only have been killed

                                                      33

elsewhere and out of his sight, but have as well been certified as dead through scalding
cookery. Killing even food is today far above the ability of the majority of our culture.

         The characteristics of love could be said to be No- Kill, stomach trouble, hunger but
can’t eat, work, flows, heavy emphasis on affinity, reality and communication, and inhibited
sex. Hate as a personality could be said to characterize, at least on a thought level, kill, bowel
trouble, hungry but eats covertly, no work, hold, pretended affinity, reality and
communication, and enforced sex. These are two personality classes. Many people are com-
pounded of both.

         Thought in Man is largely born out of impact and is not free. It is an effort to know
before he knows, which is to say, to prevent a future. The phenomenon of going into the past
is simply the phenomenon of trying to take the knowledge which one acquired through force
and impact and held after the event, and place it before the event so as to prevent that thing
which has already happened. “If I had only known” is a common phrase. This gets bad enough
to cause man to want to know before he looks at anything, for in his debased state it is
dangerous not only to use force, not only to use emotion, not only to think, but also to perceive
things which do. Thus the prevalence of glasses in this society.

         The body— and that means, of course, Man in this culture— must have a reason for
everything. That which has the most reason is the body. A reason is an explanation, the way
Man interprets it, and he feels he has to explain himself away and to explain every action which
he makes. Man believes he must have force but receives force, that he must not perceive or be
perceived, that he must kill but must not be killed, that he must not have emotion, that he must
be able to wreak destruction without receiving it. He can have no pain; he must shun work and
pretend that all work he does has a definite goal. Everything he sees he feels must have been
created by something else and he himself must not create. Everything has a prior creation to his
own. All things must be based on earlier things. Thus, he shuns responsibility for whatever he
makes and whatever destruction he may create.

         This animal has equipped himself with weapons of destruction far superior to his
weapons for healing and in this low- toned mockery whines and pleads that he is duplicating
saintliness and godliness, yet he knows no meaning of ethics and can follow only morals. He
is a meat animal, a thing in the straitjacket of a police force, made to survive, made to stay in
check, made to do his duty and performing most of it without joy and without, poor thing,
even actual suffering. He is a meat animal; he is something to be eaten. If he is to be helped, he
must learn where he is and find better.

         In our current age, cowardice is an accepted social pose; self- abnegation, a proper mode
of address; hidden indecency, a proper method of survival.

         It may be that my statement of this does not carry through with an entire conviction.
Fortunately, although these data are based on a wide experience with Man, particularly in the
last few years, as well as during a terrible and cataclysmic war, my statement of the case does
not have to stand, for in Scientology we have processes which, by their workability, signify
the accuracy of this observation on human character.

                                                      34

                                   PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

         There is a basic rule that a psychotic person is concerned with the past, a neurotic
person is barely able to keep up with the present, and a sane person is concerned with the
future.

         This division could be more specifically made by realizing that the neurotic is barely
able to confront the present, but that the very, very sane confront the present entirely and have
very little concern for the future, being competent enough in handling the present to let the
future take care of itself. Looking into the past and looking into the extreme future, alike, are
efforts to avoid present time and efforts to look elsewhere than at something.

         You have known people who would reply on an entirely different subject when asked
about anything; when consulted concerning the weather, they would reply about a
meteorologist. The inability to look  at  something becomes first manifest by thinking before
looking, and then the actual target at which one should be looking is more and more avoided
until it is hidden entirely in a mix- up of complications.

         The avoidance of reality is merely an avoidance of present time.

         An individual who will not look at the physical universe must look either ahead of it
into the future, or behind it into the past. One of the reasons he does this is because there is
insufficient action in the present to begin with; and then this thirst for action develops into an
inability to have action, and he decides that all must be maintained in a constant state, and he
seeks to prevent action. This also applies to pain. People who are somewhat out of present time
have a horrible dread of pain; and people who are truly out of present time— as in a psychotic
state— have a revulsion towards pain which could not be described. A person entirely within
present time is not much concerned with pain.

         The avoidance of work is one of the best indicators of a decayed state on the part of a
personality. There are two common denominators to all aberrated personalities; one of these is a
horror of work and the other is a horror of pain. People only mildly out of present time, which
is to say people who are categorized as “sane”, have already started to apologize about work, in
that they work toward an end reward and no longer consider that the output of effort itself and
the accomplishment of things is sufficient reward in itself. Thus, the whole network of
gratitude or admiration becomes necessary pay for energy put forth. The parental demand for
gratitude is often reflected in a severely aberrated person who is given to feel he can never
repay the enormous favors conferred on him by being worked for by his parents. Actually,
they need not to be paid, for, flatly, if it was not sufficient reward to do the work of raising
him, they are beyond being paid; in other words, they could not accept pay.

         Taking the very, very sane person in present time, one would mark a decline of his
sanity by a shift from an interest in present time to an overwhelming interest in the future which
would decline into considerable planning for the future in order to avoid bad things happening
in it, to, then, a shunning of the future because of painful incidents, to a shuddering and
tenuous hold on present time, and, finally, to an avoidance of both the future and present time
and a shift into the past. This last would be a psychotic state.

         One holds on to things in the past on the postulate that they must not happen in the
future. This sticks the person in the past.

         Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future.
In Scientology this condition in an individual can be remedied so that he can more comfortably
face present time.

                                                      35

                                          PLAYING THE GAME

         The highest activity is playing a game. When one is high- toned, he knows that it is a
game. As he falls away down the tone scale, he becomes less and less aware of the game.

         The greatest ability of thought is DIFFERENTIATION. So long as one can
differentiate, one is sane. Its opposite is IDENTIFICATION.

         The legal definition of sanity is the “ability to tell right from wrong”.

         Therefore, the highest ability in playing a game would be the ability to know the
rightness and wrongness rules of that particular game. As all rightness and wrongness are
considerations and as the game itself is a consideration, the playing of the game requires a high
ability to differentiate, particularly it requires an ability to know the rules and the right- rules and
the wrong- rules.

         When an individual is prone to identify, he is no longer able to differentiate the
right- rules and the wrong- rules, and the right- rules become wrong and the wrong- rules become
right, and we have a criminal.

         A criminal cannot play the game of society. He plays, then, the “game” called “cops and
robbers”.

         A person who strongly identifies is not necessarily a criminal, but he certainly is having
trouble playing the game of society. Instead of playing that game, he “gets tired”, “gets sick”.
He has these things happen because he doesn’t want to play the social game. He has a “game”
of sorts in “hypochondria”.

         Now, if you had a culture which was running a no- game game for anybody, a culture
which itself had no game for everybody to play, a culture which had in its government a
fixation on keeping anyone from playing the game THEY wanted to play, we would have, as
its manifestation, all manner of curious ills, such as those described in various ideologies like
Capitalism or Communism. The entire government game would be “Stop playing YOUR
game”. The degree of sanity in government would be the degree it permitted strong and active
participation in the game of government, in the game of playing your game.

         But if people who can’t play the game can’t differentiate, similarly, a sane person could
find himself very confused to be part of a game which wasn’t differentiating and where the
rightness and wrongness rules were unclearly defined. Thus, a government without exact and
accurate codes and jurisprudence would discover in its citizens an inability to play the game no
matter how sane they were.

         Thus, the game can be crazy and its players sane, or the players can be crazy and the
game sane. Either condition would affect the other. When we get crazy players and a crazy
game, the end product of either of the two imbalances above, we would get anything except a
game. We would get chaos.

         As a useful example of an inability to differentiate, let us take people who cannot see
anything wrong with slanderous materials. We have here people who see no difference. They
don’t differentiate. They don’t differentiate, because they see no game. They see no game
because they can’t play a game. Or, habituated to a social structure which had no rules of
rightness or wrongness, they have lost their criteria.

                                                      36

                                     FREEDOM vs. ENTRAPMENT

         In Greece, Rome, England, Colonial America, France and Washington, a great deal of
conversation is made on the subject of Freedom. Freedom, apparently, is something that is
very desirable. Indeed, Freedom is seen to be the goal of a nation or a people. Similarly, if we
are restoring ability to a person, we must restore Freedom. If we do not restore Freedom, we
cannot restore ability. The muscle- bound wrestler, the tense driver, the rocket jockey with
frozen reaction time alike are not able. Their ability lies in an increase of Freedom, a release of
tension, and a better communication to their environment.

         The main trouble with Freedom is that it does not have an anatomy. Something that is
free is free. It is not free with wires, vias, by- passes, or dams; it is simply free. There- is
something else about Freedom which is intensely interesting— it cannot be erased.

         You may be able to concentrate somebody’s attention on something that is not free and
thus bring him into a state of belief that Freedom does

         not exist, but this does not mean that you have erased the individual’s freedom. You
have not. All the freedom he ever had is still there.

         Furthermore, Freedom has no quantity, and by definition, it has no location in space or
time. Thus we see the individual (spirit, soul) as potentially the freest thing there could be.
Thus man concentrates upon Freedom.

         But if Freedom has no anatomy, then please explain how one is going to attain to
something which cannot be fully explained. If anyone talks about a “road to Freedom”, he is
talking about a linear line. This, then, must have boundaries. If there are boundaries, there is
no Freedom.

         Talk to a person who works from eight o’clock until five with no goals, and no future,
and no belief in the organization and its goals, who is being required by time payments, rent,
and other barriers of an economic variety to invest all of his salary as soon as it is paid, and we
have an individual who has lost the notion of Freedom. His concentration is so thoroughly
fixed upon barriers that Freedom has to be in terms of less barriers.

         Life is prone to a stupidity in many cases in which it is not cognizant of a disaster until
the disaster has occurred. The midwestern farmer had a phrase for it: “Lock the door after the
horse is stolen.” It takes a disaster in order to educate people into the existence of such a
disaster. This is education by pain, by impact, by punishment. Therefore, a population which
is faced with a one- shot disaster which will obliterate the sphere would not have a chance to
learn very much about the sphere before it was obliterated. Thus, if they insisted upon learning
by experience in order to prevent such a disaster, they would never have the opportunity. If no
atomic bomb of any kind had been dropped in World War II, it is probable there would be no
slightest concern about atomic fission, although atomic fission might have been developed right
on up to the planet buster without ever being used against Man, and then the planet- buster been
used on Earth, and so destroyed it.

         If a person did not know what a tiger was, and we desired to demonstrate to him that no
tigers were present, we would have a difficult time of it. Here we have a freedom from tigers
without knowing anything about tigers. Before he could understand an absence of tigers, he
would have to understand the presence of tigers. This is the process of learning we know as
“by experience”.

         In order to know anything, if we are going to use educational methods, it is necessary
then, to know, as well, its opposite. The opposite of tigers probably exists in Malayan jungles
where tigers are so frequent that the absence of tigers would be a novelty, indeed. A country
which was totally burdened by tigers might not understand at all the idea that there were no

                                                      37

tigers. In some parts of the world, a great deal of argument would have to be entered into with
the populace of a tiger- burdened area to get them to get any inkling of what an absence of tigers
would be.

         The understanding of Freedom, then, is slightly complex if, then, individuals who do
not have it are not likely to understand it.

         But the opposite of Freedom is slavery and everybody knows this— or is it? I do not
think these two things are a dichotomy. Freedom is not the plus of a condition where slavery is
the minus, unless we are dealing entirely with the political organism. Where we are dealing
with the individual, better terminology is necessary and more understanding of the anatomy of
minus- Freedom is required.

         Minus- Freedom is entrapment. Freedom is the absence of barriers. Less Freedom is the
presence of barriers. Entirely minus- Freedom would be the omnipresence of barriers. A barrier
is matter or energy or time or space. The more matter, energy, time or space assumes command
over the individual, the less Freedom that individual has. This is best understood as
entrapment, since slavery connotes an intention and entrapment might be considered almost
without intention. A person who falls into a bear pit might not have intended to fall into it at all,
and a bear pit might not have intended a person to fall upon its stake. Nevertheless, an
entrapment has occurred. The person is in the bear pit.

         If one wants to understand existence and his unhappiness with it, he must understand
entrapment and its mechanisms.

         In what can a person become entrapped? Basically and foremost, he can become
entrapped in ideas. In view of the fact that freedom and ability can be seen to be somewhat
synonymous, then ideas of disability are, first and foremost, an entrapment. I daresay that,
amongst men, the incident has occurred that a person has been sitting upon a bare plain in the
total belief that he is entirely entrapped by a fence.

         There is that incident mentioned in Self Analysis  of fishing in Lake Tanganyika where
the sun’s rays, being equatorial, pierce burningly to the lake’s bottom. The natives there fish by
tying a number of slats of wood on a long piece of line. They take either end of this line and put
it in canoes, and then paddle the two canoes to shore, the slatted line stretching between. The
sun shining downward presses the shadows of these bars down to the bottom of the lake, and
thus a cage of shadows moves inward toward the shallows. The fish, seeing this cage contract
upon them, which is composed of nothing but the absence of light, flounder frantically into the
shallows where they cannot swim and are thus caught, picked up in baskets and cooked. There
is nothing to be afraid of but shadows.

         When we move out of mechanics, man finds himself on unsure ground. The idea that
ideas could be so strong and pervasive is foreign to most men.

         So, first and foremost, we have the idea. Then, themselves the product of ideas, we
have the more obvious mechanics of entrapment in matter, energy, space and time.

         The anatomy of entrapment is an interesting one, and the reason why people get
entrapped, and indeed, the total mechanics of entrapment, are now understood. In Scientology
a great deal of experimentation was undertaken to determine the factors which resulted in
entrapment, and it was discovered that the answer to the entire problem was two- way
communication.

         Roughly, the laws back of this are: Fixation occurs in the presence of one- way
communication. Entrapment occurs only when one has not given or received answers to the
things entrapping him.

         It could be said that all the entrapment there is is the waiting one does for an answer.

                                                      38

         Entrapment is the opposite of Freedom. A person who is not free is trapped. He may be
trapped by an idea, he may be trapped by matter, he may be trapped by energy, he may be
trapped by space, he may be trapped by time, he may be trapped by all of them. The more
thoroughly a person is trapped the less free he is. He cannot change, he cannot move, he
cannot communicate, he cannot feel affinity and reality. Death itself could be said to be Man’s
ultimate in entrapment, for when a man is totally entrapped he is dead.

         The component parts of Freedom, as we first gaze upon it, are then: Affinity, Reality
and Communication, which summate into Understanding. Once Understanding is attained,
Freedom is obtained. For the individual who is thoroughly snarled in the mechanics of
entrapment, it is necessary to restore to him sufficient communication to permit his ascendance
into a higher state of understanding. Once this has been accomplished his entrapment is ended.

         A greater freedom can be attained by the individual. The individual does desire a greater
freedom, once he has some inkling of it. And Scientology steers the individual out of the first
areas of entrapment to a point where he can gain higher levels of Freedom.

                                                      39

                                                  JUSTICE

         What is justice?

         “The quality of mercy is not strained— it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .”
may be poetic, but it is not definitive. It does, however, demonstrate that even in Shakespeare’s
time men were adrift on the subject of justice, injustice, severity and mercy.

         People speak of an action as unjust or an action as just. What do they mean? Yet, unless
we can understand exactly what is meant by these terms, we certainly cannot undertake to
evaluate the actions of individuals, communities and nations. For the lack of an ability to so
evaluate, misunderstandings come about which have, in the past, led to combative personal
relationships and, on the international scene, to war. An individual or a nation fails or refuses
to understand the measures taken by another or fails to fall within the agreement of the pattern
to which others are accustomed and chaos results.

         In Scientology the following definitions now exist:

         JUSTICE— The impartial administration of the laws of the land in accordance with the
extant level of the severity- mercy ratio of the people.

         LAWS— The codified agreements of the people crystallizing their customs and
representing their believed- in necessities of conduct.

         MERCY— A lessening away from the public’s acceptance of discipline necessary to
guarantee their mutual security.

         SEVERITY— An increase in that discipline believed necessary by the people to
guarantee their security.

         INJUSTICE— Failure to administer existing law.

         EQUITY— Any civil procedure holding citizens responsible to citizens which delivers
decision to persons in accordance with the general expectancy in such cases.

         RIGHTS— The franchises of citizenship according to existing codes.

         When laws are not derived from custom or when a new law contravenes an uncancelled
old law, exact law becomes confused and injustice is then inevitable.

         Basic justice can occur only when codified law or a majority- held custom exists.

         Observing these definitions, jurisprudence only then becomes possible. Law Courts,
legislatures and legislation become confused, as nothing is possible in the absence of an
understanding of such principles.

         Laws which do not derive from agreement amongst the society which we call custom,
are unenforceable unless there is then a widespread agreement that this is customary in the
society. No matter how many police are hired, no matter the purity of prose with which the
legislation is written, no matter the signatures occurring on the enforcing document, the public
will not obey that law. Similarly, when a government acts to ignore certain basic customs
amongst the people and refuses to enforce them, that government then finds itself in a state of
civil turmoil with its people on that subject. We can look at any public- government battle and
discover that it stems exactly from a violation of these principles.

         An understanding on the part of a nation of the difficulties of another is necessary to a
continued peace. When one nation begins to misunderstand the motives and justices conceived

                                                      40

necessary by another nation, stress sets up which eventually leads to war, all too often.

         Whenever there is an excessive commotion amongst a people against its government,
the government is then invited to act as an opponent to the people. If a government is acting
toward its people as though it were an opponent of the people and not a member of the team, it
becomes obvious that many of these points must exist in the law codes of the country and must
violate the customs of the people. Wherever such a point exists, turbulence results.

         And that is justice.

                                                      41

                                 THE VOCABULARIES OF SCIENCE

         In all scientific systems you have a number of code words which operate as
communication carriers, and when a person does not know these words well, he is having
difficulty with the science itself. I have seen a senior in science falling down in his
comprehension of a later part of the science because he had never gotten the nomenclature of
the science straight to begin with. He did not know exactly what a British Thermal Unit was, or
something like that— therefore, later on, when he’s solving some vast and involved problem,
there’s a datum rambling around in his head and it’s not stable at all— it’s getting confused
—it’s mixed up with all other data. And that is only because he didn’t understand what the term
was in the first place.

         So just as you learn semaphore signals, just as you learn Morse Code, just as you learn
baby talk, so, when you become conversant with any particular specialized subject, you must
become conversant with its terminology. Your understanding of it then increases. Otherwise,
understanding is impeded by these words rattling around and not joining themselves to
anything. If you know vaguely that such and such a word exists and yet have no definite
understanding of what it means, it does not align. Thus, a misunderstanding of a word can
cause a misalignment of a subject, and this really is the basis of the primary confusion in Man’s
understanding of the mind.

         There have been so many words assigned to various parts of the mind that one would
be staggered if he merely catalogued all of these things. Take, for instance, the tremendous
background and technology of psychoanalysis. Overpoweringly complicated material, most of
it is merely descriptive; some of it, action terminology, such as the censor, the id, the ego, the
alter- ego, and what not. Most of these things lined up, each one meaning a specific thing. But
the practitioners who began to study this science did not have a good founding in the exact
sciences— in other words, they didn’t have a model of the exact sciences. And in the
humanities, they could be as careless as they liked with their words, because the humanities
were not expected to be precise or exact— not a criticism of them— it just means that you could
have a lesser command of the language.

         When they got into the study of Freud, they got into this interesting thing— to one
person an id was one thing and to another person it was something else. And alter- ego was this
and it was that. The confusion of terms there, practically all by itself, became the totality of
confusion of psychoanalysis.

         Actually, psychoanalysis is as easy to understand, certainly, as Japanese. Japanese is a
baby talk— very, very hard to read, very, very easy to talk. If you can imagine a language
which tells you which is the subject, which is the verb, which is the object, every time it
speaks, you can imagine this baby- talk kind of a language. One that doesn’t have various
classes or conjugations of verbs. A very faint kind of a language. Nevertheless, it merely
consists, in order to communicate with a Japanese, of knowing the meanings of certain words;
and if you know the meanings of those words precisely, then when a Japanese comes up to
you and says, “Do you want a cup of tea?”, you don’t immediately get up because you thought
he said, “Wet Paint”. You have a communication possibility.

         Well, similarly, with the language of psychoanalysis, the great difficulties inherent in
understanding such a thing as psychoanalysis became much less difficult when one viewed
psychoanalysis as a code system to relay certain meanings. It did not, then, become a problem
of whether or not these phenomena existed or didn’t exist. It simply became a problem of
words meaning a certain precise thing. And if they meant that thing to everybody, then
everybody was talking psychoanalysis, and if it didn’t mean this thing to everybody, then
people weren’t talking psychoanalysis. Who knows  what  they were talking? The next thing
you know, they were talking Jungianism— the next thing you know, they were talking
Adlerianism— and the amount of difference between these various items is minute, to say the
least. But the language difficulties, then, made many practitioners in that field at odds with the

                                                      42

theory, which they did not, at any rate, understand.

         I remember one time learning Igoroti, an Eastern primitive language, in a single night. I
sat up by kerosene lantern and took a list of words that had been made by an old missionary in
the hills in Luzon— the Igorot had a very simple language. This missionary had phoneticized
their language and he had made a list of their main words and their usage and grammar. And I
remember sitting up under a mosquito net with the mosquitoes hungrily chomping their beaks
just outside the net, and learning this language— three hundred words— just memorizing these
words and what they meant. And the next day I started to get them in line and align them with
people, and was speaking Igoroti in a very short time.

         The point here is that it is not difficult to learn a language, if you understand that you
are learning a language.

                                                      43

                                     HOW TO STUDY A SCIENCE

         The whole subject of a science, as far as the student is concerned, is good or bad in
direct ratio to his knowledge of it. It is up to a student to find out how precise the tools are. He
should, before he starts to discuss, criticize or attempt to improve on the data presented to him,
find out for himself whether or not the mechanics of a science are as stated and whether or not
it does what has been proposed for it.

         He should make up his mind about each thing that is taught in the school. The
procedure, techniques, mechanics and theory. He should ask himself these questions: Does this
piece of data exist? Is it true? Does it work? Will it produce the best possible results in the
shortest time?

         There are two ways man ordinarily accepts things, neither of them very good. One is to
accept a statement because Authority says it is true and must be accepted, and the other is by
preponderance of agreement amongst other people.

         Preponderance of agreement is all too often the general public test for sanity or insanity.
Suppose someone were to walk into a crowded room and suddenly point to a ceiling saying,
“Oh, look! There’s a huge, twelve- foot spider on the ceiling!” Everyone would look up, but no
one else would see the spider. Finally someone would tell him so. “Oh, yes, there is” he would
declare, and become very angry when he found that no one would agree with him. If he
continued to declare his belief in the existence of the spider, he would very soon find himself
institutionalized.

         The basic definition of sanity, in this somewhat nebulously learned society, is whether
or not a person agrees with everyone else. It is a very sloppy manner of accepting evidence, but
all too often it is the primary measuring stick.

         And then the Rule of Authority: “Does Dr. J. Doe agree with your proposition? No?
Then, of course, it cannot be true. Dr. Doe is an eminent authority in the field.”

         A man by the name of Galen at one time dominated the field of medicine. Another man
by the name of Harvey upset Galen’s cozy position with a new theory of blood circulation.
Galen had been agreeing with the people of his day concerning the “tides” of the blood. They
knew nothing about heart action. They accepted everything they had been taught and did little
observing of their own. Harvey worked at the Royal Medical Academy and found by animal
vivisection the actual function of the heart.

         He had the good sense to keep his findings absolutely quiet for a while. Leonardo da
Vinci had somehow discovered or postulated the same thing, but he was a “crazy artist” and no
one would believe an artist. Harvey was a member of the audience of a play by Shakespeare in
which the playwright made the same observation, but again the feeling that artists never
contribute anything to society blocked anyone but Harvey from considering the statement as
anything more than fiction.

         Finally, Harvey made his announcement. Immediately dead cats, rotten fruit and pieces
of wine jugs were hurled in his direction. He raised quite a commotion in medical and social
circles until finally, in desperation, one doctor made the historical statement, “I would rather err
with Galen than be right with Harvey!”

         Man would have made an advance of exactly zero if this had always been the only
method of testing evidence. But every so often during Man’s progress, there have been rebels
who were not satisfied with preponderance of opinion, and who tested a fact for themselves,
observing and accepting the data of their observation, and then testing again.

         Possibly the first man who made a flint ax looked over a piece of flint and decided that

                                                      44

the irregular stone could be chipped a certain way. When he found that flint would chip easily,
he must have rushed to his tribe and enthusiastically tried to teach his fellow tribesmen how to
make axes in the shape they desired, instead of spending months searching for accidental pieces
of stone of just the right shape. The chances are he was stoned out of camp.

         Indulging in a further flight of fancy, it is not difficult to imagine that he finally
managed to convince another fellow that his technique worked and that the two of them tied
down a third with a piece of vine and forced him to watch them chip a flint ax from a rough
stone. Finally, after convincing fifteen or twenty tribesmen by forceful demonstration, the
followers of the new technique declared war on the rest of the tribe and, winning, forced the
tribe to agree by decree.

Evaluation of Data

         Man has never known very much about that with which his mind is chiefly filled: Data.
What is data?

         What is the evaluation of data?

         All these years, in which psychoanalysis has taught its tenets to each generation of
doctors, the authoritarian method was used, as can be verified by reading a few of the books on
the subject. Within them is found, interminably, “Freud said ....” The truly important thing is
not that “Freud said” a thing, but “Is the data valuable? If it is valuable, how valuable is it?”
You might say that a datum is as valuable as it has been evaluated. A datum can be proved in
ratio to whether it can be evaluated by other data, and its magnitude is established by how many
other data it clarifies. Thus, the biggest datum possible would be one which would clarify and
identify all knowledge known to man in the material universe.

         Unfortunately, however, there is no such thing as a Prime Datum. There must be, not
one datum, but two data, since a datum is of no use unless it can be evaluated. Furthermore,
there must be a datum of similar magnitude with which to evaluate any given datum.

         Data is your data only so long as you have evaluated it. It is your data by authority or it
is your data. If it is your data by authority somebody has forced it upon you, and at best it is
little more than a light aberration. Of course, if you asked a question of a man whom you
thought knew his business and he gave you his answer, that datum was not forced upon you.
But if you went away from him believing from then on that such a datum existed without taking
the trouble to investigate the answer for yourself— without comparing it to the known uni-
verse— you were falling short of completing the cycle of learning.

         Mechanically, the major thing wrong with the mind is, of course, the turbulence in it;
but the overburden of information in this society is enforced education that the individual has
never been permitted to test. Literally, when you are told not to take anyone’s word as an
absolute datum, you are being asked to break a habit pattern forced upon you when you were a
child.

         Test it for yourself and convince yourself whether or not it exists as truth. And if you
find that it does exist, you will be comfortable thereafter; otherwise, unrecognized even by
yourself, you are likely to find, down at the bottom of your information and education, an
unresolved question which will itself undermine your ability to assimilate or practice anything
in the line of a technique. Your mind will not be as facile on the subject as it should be.

A Look at the Sciences

         The reason engineering and physics have reached out so far in advance of other
sciences is the fact that they pose problems which punish man so violently if he doesn’t look
carefully into the physical universe.

                                                      45

         An engineer is faced with the problem of drilling a tunnel through a mountain for a
railroad. Tracks are laid up to the mountain on either side. If he judged space wrongly, the two
tunnel entrances would fail to meet on the same level in the center. It would be so evident to
one and all concerned that the engineer had made a mistake, that he takes great care not to make
such a mistake. He observes the physical universe, not only to the extent that the tunnel must
meet to a fraction of an inch, but to the extent that, if he were to judge wrongly the character of
the rock through which he drills, the tunnel would cave in— an incident which would be
considered a very unlucky and unfortunate occurrence to railroading.

         Biology comes closer to being a science than some others because, in the field of
biology, if someone makes too big a mistake about a bug, the immediate result can be dramatic
and terrifying. Suppose a biologist is charged with the responsibility of injecting plankton into
a water reservoir. Plankton are microscopic “germs” that are very useful to man.

         But, if through some mistake, the biologist injects typhoid germs into the water
supply— there would be an immediate and dramatic result.

         Suppose a biologist is presented with the task of producing a culture of yeast which
would, when placed in white bread dough, stain the bread brown. This man is up against the
necessity of creating a yeast which not only behaves as yeast, but makes a dye as well. He has
to deal with the practical aspect of the problem, because after he announces his success, there is
the “yeast test”: Is the bread edible? And the brown- bread test: Is the bread brown? Anyone
could easily make the test, and everyone would know very quickly whether or not the biologist
had succeeded or failed.

         Politics is called a science. There are natural laws about politics. They could be worked
out if someone were to actually apply a scientific basis to political research.

         For instance, it is a foregone conclusion that if all communication lines are cut between
the United States and Russia, Russia and the United States are going to understand each other
less and less. Then, by demonstrating to everyone how the American way of life and the
Russian way of life are different and by demonstrating it day after day, year after year, there is
no alternative but a break of affinity. By stating flatly that Russia and the United States are not
in agreement on any slightest political theory or conduct of man or nations, the job is practically
complete. Both nations will go into anger tone and suddenly, there is war.

         The United States is a nation possessed of the greatest communications networks on the
face of the earth, with an undreamed- of manufacturing potential. It has within its borders the
best advertising men in the world. But instead of selling Europe an idea, it gives machine guns,
planes and tanks for use in case Russia breaks out. The more threats imposed against a country
in Russia’s tone level, the more dangerous that country will become. When people are asked
what they would do about this grave question, they shrug and say something to the effect that
“the politicians know best.” They hedge and rationalize by saying that, after all, there is the
American way of life, and it must be protected.

         What is the American way of life? This is a question that will stop almost any
American. What is the American way of life that is different from the human way of life? It has
tried to gather together economic freedom for the individual, freedom of the press, and
individual freedom, and define them as a strictly American way of life— why hasn’t it been
called the Human Way of Life?

         In the field of humanities, Science has been thoroughly adrift. Unquestioned
authoritarian principles have been followed. Any person who accepts knowledge without
questioning it and evaluating it for himself is demonstrating himself to be in apathy toward that
sphere of knowledge. It demonstrates that the people in the United States today must be in a
low state of apathy with regard to politics, in order to accept, without question, everything that
happens.

                                                      46

Fundamentals

         When a man tries to erect the plans of a lifetime or a profession on data which he,
himself, has never evaluated, he cannot possibly succeed.

         Fundamentals are very, very important, but first of all one must learn how to think in
order to be absolutely sure of a fundamental. Thinking is not particularly hard to learn. It
consists merely of comparing a particular datum with the physical universe as it is known and
observed.

         Authoritarianism is little more than a form of hypnotism. Learning is forced under threat
of some form of punishment. A student is stuffed with data which has not been individually
evaluated, just as a taxidermist would stuff a snake. Such a student will be well informed and
well educated according to present- day standards, but, unfortunately, he will not be very
successful in his chosen profession.

         Do not make the mistake of criticizing something on the basis of whether or not it
concurs with the opinions of someone else. The point which is pertinent is whether or not it
concurs with your opinion. Does it agree with what you think?

         Nearly everyone has done some manner of observing of the material universe. No one
has seen all there is to see about an organism, for example, but there is certainly no dearth of
organisms available for further study. There is no valid reason for accepting the opinion of
Professor Blotz of the Blitz University, who said in 1933 that schizophrenics were
schizophrenics, and that made them schizophrenics for all time.

         If you are interested in the manifestation of insanity, there is any and every form of
insanity that you could hope to see in a lifetime in almost any part of the world. Study the
peculiarities of the people around you and wonder what they would be like if their little
peculiarities were magnified a hundred fold. You may find that by listing all the observable
peculiarities you would have a complete list of all the insanity’s in the world. This list might
well be far more accurate than that which was advanced by Kraepelin and used in the United
States today.

         If sanity is rationality and insanity is irrationality, and you postulated how irrational
people would be if certain of their obsessions were magnified a hundred fold, you might well
have in your possession a far more accurate and complete list of insanity’s and their
manifestations than is currently in existence.

         So, the only advice I can give to the student is to study a subject for itself and use it
exactly as stated, then form his own opinions. Study it with the purpose in mind of arriving at
his own conclusions as to whether or not the tenets he has assimilated are correct and
workable. Compare what you have learned with the known universe. Seek for the reasons
behind a manifestation, and postulate the manner and in which direction the manifestation will
likely proceed. Do not allow the Authority of any one person or school of thought to create a
foregone conclusion within your sphere of knowledge. Only with these principles of education
in mind can you become a truly educated individual.

                                                      47

                                           THE HUMAN MIND

         It is common to think of the human mind as something which just happened in the last
generation or so. The mind itself is actually as old as the organism. And according to earlier
guesses and proofs established by this new science, the organism, the body, is rather old. It
goes back to the first moment of Life’s appearance on Earth.

         First, there was a physical universe which happened, we know not how. And then,
with the cooling planets, there appeared in the seas a speck of living matter. That speck became
eventually the complicated but still microscopic monocell. And then, as the eons passed, it
became vegetable matter. And then it became jellyfish. And then it became a mollusk and made
its transition into crustacea. Life evolved into more and more complex forms, the Tarsius, the
sloth, the anthropoid, and finally Man. There were many intermediate steps.

         A very materialistic Man, seeing only the material universe, becomes confused and
vague about all this. He tries to say that living organisms are simply so much clay, wholly a
part of the material universe. He tries to say that after all it is only the “unending stream of
protoplasm”, generation to generation by sex that is important. The very unthinking Man is
likely to make many mistakes, not only about the human mind, but the human body.

         We discover now that the science of life, like physics, is a study of static’s and motion.
We find that Life itself, the living part of Life, has no comparable entity in the physical
universe. It isn’t just another energy or just an accident. Life is a static which yet has the power
of controlling, animating, mobilizing, organizing and destroying matter, energy and space and
possibly even time.

         Life is a CAUSE which acts upon the physical universe as an EFFECT. There is
overwhelming evidence to support this now. In the physical universe there is no true static.
Every apparent static has been discovered to contain motion. But the static of Life is evidently a
true static.

         Life began with pure CAUSE evidently. With the first photon it engaged in handling
motion. And by handling motion ever afterwards, accumulated the experience and effort
contained in a body. Life is a static, the physical universe is motion. The effect upon motion of
CAUSE produced the combination which we see as the unity of a live organism. Thought is
not motion in space and time. Thought is a static containing an image of motion.

         Thus, one can say, with its first impingement upon motion, the first thought about the
physical universe began. This static, without volume, wave length, space or time, yet records
motion and its effects in space and time.

         This is, of course, analogy. But it is a peculiar analogy, in that it sweepingly resolves
the problems of mind and physical structure.

         A mind, then, is not a brain. A brain and the nervous system are simply conduits for
physical universe vibrations. The brain and nerve trunks are much like a switchboard system.
And there is a point in the system where the vibrations change into records.

         An organism is motivated by continuing, timeless, spaceless, motionless CAUSE. This
cause mirrors or takes impressions of motion. These impressions we call “memories” or more
accurately, facsimiles.

         A  facsimile is  a simple word meaning a picture of a thing, a copy of a thing, not the
thing itself. Thus, to save confusion and keep this point before us, we say that the perceptions
of the body are “stored” as facsimiles.

         Sights, sounds, tastes, and all the other perceptions of the body store as facsimiles of

                                                      48

the moment the impression was received. The actual energy of the impression is not stored. It
is not stored, if only because there is insufficient molecular structure in the body to store these
energies as such. Physical universe energy is evidently too gross for such storage. Further,
although the cells perish, the memories go on, existing, evidently, forever.

         A facsimile of yesterday’s hurt toe can be brought back today with the full force of the
impact. Everything which occurs around the body, whether it is asleep or awake, is recorded as
a facsimile and is stored.

         There are facsimiles of anything and everything the body has ever perceived— seen,
heard, felt, smelled, tasted, experienced— from the first moment of existence. There are
pleasure facsimiles and bored facsimiles, facsimiles of sudden death and quick success,
facsimiles of quiet decay and gradual struggle.

         Memory usually means recalling data of recent times; thus we use the word “facsimile”,
for while it is the whole of which memory is a part, the word “memory” does not embrace all
that has been discovered.

         One should have a very good idea of what a facsimile is. It is a recording of the motions
and situations of the physical universe plus the conclusions of the mind based on earlier
facsimiles.

         One sees a dog chase a cat. Long after dog and cat are gone one can recall that a dog
chased a cat. While the action was taking place one saw the scene, one heard the sounds, one
might even smell the dog or cat. As one watched, his own heart was beating, the saline content
of his blood was at such and such a point, the weight of one’s body and the position of one’s
joints, the feel of one’s clothing, the touch of the air upon the skin, all these things were
recorded in full as well. The total of all this would be a unit facsimile.

         Now one could simply recall the fact that one had seen a dog chase a cat. That would be
remembering. Or one could concentrate on the matter and, if he was in good mental condition,
could again see the dog and the cat, could hear them, could feel the air on his skin, the position
of his joints, the weight of his clothing. He could partially or wholly regain the experience.
That is to say, he could partially or wholly bring to his consciousness the “memory”, the unit
facsimile of a dog chasing a cat.

         One does not have to be drugged or hypnotized or have faith in order to do this. People
do variations of this recall and suppose that “everybody does it”. The person with a good
memory is only a person who can regain his facsimiles easily. A little child in school learns,
today, by repetition. It isn’t necessary. If he gets good grades it is usually because he simply
brings back “to mind”, which is to say, to his awareness, the facsimile of the page of text on
which he is being examined.

         As one goes through life, he records twenty- four hours a day, asleep and awake, in
pain, under anesthetic, happy or sad. These facsimiles are usually recorded with all perceptics,
which is to say, with every sense channel. In the person who has a missing sense channel,
such as deafness, that portion of the facsimile is missing.

         A full facsimile is a sort of three- dimensional color picture with sound and smell and all
other perceptions plus the conclusions or speculations of the individual.

         It was once, many years ago, noticed by a student of the mind that children had this
faculty of seeing and hearing in memory what they had actually seen and heard. And it was
noted that the ability did not last. No further study was made of the matter and indeed, so
obscure were these studies that I did not know about them during the early stages of my own
work.

         We know a great deal about these facsimiles now— why they are not easily recovered

                                                      49

by most people when they grow up, how they change, how the imagination can begin to
remanufacture them, as in hallucination or dreaming.

         Briefly, a person is as aberrated as he is unable to handle his facsimiles. He is as sane
as he can handle his facsimiles. He is as ill as he is unable to handle his facsimiles. He is as
well as he can handle them.

         That portion of the science of Scientology which is devoted to the rehabilitation of the
mind and body deals with the phenomena of handling these facsimiles.

         A person ought to be able to pick up and inspect and lay aside at will any facsimile he
has. It is not a goal of this new science to restore full recall perception; it is the goal to
rehabilitate the ability of a person to handle his facsimiles.

         When a person CANNOT handle his facsimiles, he can pull them into present time and
discover himself unable to get rid of them again.

         What is psychosomatic illness? Demonstrably, it is the pain contained in a past
experience or the physical malfunction of a past experience. The facsimile of that experience
gets into present time and stays with the person until a shock drops it out of sight again or until
it is processed out by this new science. A shock or necessity, however, permits it to come
back.

         Grief, sorrow, worry, anxiety and any other emotional condition is simply one or more
of these facsimiles. A circumstance of death, let us say, causes one to grieve. Then one has a
facsimile containing grief. Something causes the individual to bring that facsimile into present
time. He is unaware of it, is not inspecting it, but it acts against him nevertheless. Thus he is
grieving in present time and does not know why. The reason is the old facsimile. The proof
that it is the reason lies in Scientology processing. The instant the facsimile is discharged of its
painful emotion, the individual recovers. This is processing in one of its phases.

         The human mind is only a phase of the continuing mind. The first spark of life which
began animating matter upon Earth began recording facsimiles. And it recorded from there on
out. It is interesting that the entire file is available to any mind. In previous investigations I
occasionally found facsimiles, which were not hallucination or imagination, which seemed to
go back much earlier than the present life of the individual. Having by then the tool of effort
processing, it was possible to “turn on” a facsimile with all perceptics at will and so it was
possible to examine the earliest periods possible. The genetic blueprint was thus discovered and
I was startled to have laid bare, accessible to any future investigator, the facsimiles of the
evolutionary line. Many Auditors have since accomplished the same results and thus the
biologist and anthropologist come into possession of a mine of fascinating data.

         There are those who know nothing of the mind and yet who get amply paid for it who
will talk wisely about illusion and delusion. There happen to be exact and precise laws to
delusion. An imaginary incident follows certain patterns. An actual incident is entirely
unmistakable. There is a standard behavior in a facsimile of an actual experience: It behaves in a
certain way; the individual gets the efforts and perceptions with clarity and the content of the
incident expands and remains fairly constant on several recountings. An imaginary incident
contracts in content ordinarily and the individual seeks to keep up his interest then by
embroidering it. Further, it has no constant efforts in it. Those who cannot take time to
establish the actuality of facsimiles before becoming wise about “delusion” are themselves
possibly quite delusory people.

         The human mind, as the present mind of Man, differs not at all from the most
elementary of minds, that of the monocell, except in the complexity of brain appendage. The
human being is using facsimiles to evaluate experience and form conclusions and future plans
on how to survive in the best possible manner or how to die and start over again.

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         The human mind is capable of very complex combinations of facsimiles. Further, it can
originate facsimiles on the basis of old facsimiles. Nothing goes wrong with the mind except its
abilities to handle facsimiles. Occasionally a mind becomes incapable of using a facsimile as
past experience and begins to use it in present time continually as an apology for failure. Then
we have aberration and psychosomatic illness. A memory of pain contains pain and can become
present time pain. A memory of emotion contains emotion and can become present time
emotion.

                                                      51

                           RECORDS OF THE MIND ARE PERMANENT

         Man for all his years took the observation for the fact that, when a human being was no
longer able to control its own operations and functions and, so long as it, again in control,
could not recall what had occurred, the material was not recorded. This was wholly
unwarranted as an assumption.

         Let us examine, first, pain. Pain, technically, is caused by an effort counter to the effort
of the individual as a whole.

         The individual is a colonial aggregation of cells. Each cell is seeking to live. Each cell
and the whole organism is basically motivated by a desire to survive.

         The entire physical structure is composed of atoms and molecules, organic and
inorganic. While the individual is alive and conscious, these atoms and molecules are in a state
of optimum or near optimum tension and alignment.

         On the receipt of a counter effort, such as that of a blow, or, internally, as in the case of
drugs, shock or bacteria, the optimum or near- optimum tension and alignment of these atoms
and molecules, as contained in the nerves, muscles, bones and tissues of the body, are
disarranged. The result is a slackening or speeding of the motions of the physical body in such
a way as to cause misalignment and maltension of the atoms and molecules.

         This is pain. Counter- efforts to survival cause this effect to take place. The technical
name of this effect is randomity. The directions of motion of the various portions of the body
are disarranged into random vectors or patterns. Pain results in loss, invariably, the loss of
cells or the loss of general alignment.

         When pain departs, it is still on record. The record of that pain can be called again into
existence.

         If you wish to make a very simple test, simply go back to the last time you hurt
yourself. Get as full perceptions as you can of the object which hurt you and the surrounding
environment. Seek to contact the painful object again. Unless you are badly occluded, you
should be able to feel that pain once more. If you, yourself, cannot make this test because you
are occluded, ask your friends to try it. Sooner or later you will find someone who can recall
pain.

         Another test: Pinch yourself and then go back to the moment you did it and feel the
pinch again. Even if you are occluded, you should be able to do this.

         In short, pain is stored on record. But that is not all that is stored. The whole area of
any randomity is stored in full. The atoms and molecules rearrange themselves, when pain is
recontacted, into the pattern they had when that pain was received. Hence, the pain can come
back. But also the effort and all of its perceptions can come back when either the pain or the
general randomity come back.

         The misalignment caused by a blow, shock, drugs, or bacteria causes an inability of the
control center of the mind to function. Thus, the control center of the mind can go unconscious,
can be overwhelmed by this misalignment.

         After consciousness is regained, whenever the control center of the mind tries to recall
what happened, it can recall only the randomity. It is trying to recall a time when it could not
recall and, thus, draws a blank.

         Man thought that if he could not recall a thing, then it didn’t record. This is like the little
child who hides his eyes and then thinks you can’t see him just because he can’t see you.

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         With every area of randomity thus created by injury or illness or shock or drugs, there
is stored, as well, the counter effort to the body. The effort impinged upon the body by the
blow or the other misaligning factor also was stored. This is physical force. When it comes
back upon the body, it comes back as physical force. It can distort features or the body by
being in constant “restimulation”.

         Restimulation is occasioned by some part of the early recording being approximated in
the environment in the present. This calls up the old area of randomity. The body, confused,
registers the old counter- effort.

         Nearly everyone has these counter- efforts of the past being, some of them, exerted
against him in the present. His sub- level awareness is tied up in resisting old counter- efforts—
blows, sicknesses, drugs— which once affected him and drove him into unconsciousness.

         The moment an individual wholly concentrates his attention elsewhere, these old areas
may exert their force again.

         Feel the aliveness or full sense of being of each one of the following. Feel wholly alive
only in the member of your body named:

         1.       The right foot.                   7.       The back of the neck.
         2.       The left foot.                     8.       The nose.
         3.       The right cheek.                 9.       The right hand.
         4.       The left cheek.                   10.      The tongue.
         5.       The toes.                          11.      The left hand.
         6.       The back of the head.           12.      The stomach.

         If you have gone over these members, investing carefully, aliveness only in each, you
probably will have received various aches and pains in areas where your concentration was not
fixed or at least, experienced grogginess. Try it several times.

         Processing cleans up these old areas with resultant rise in health and sanity.

                                                      53

                                           COMMUNICATION

         It could be said that if you would get a person into communication you would get him
well. This factor is not new in psychotherapy, but concentration upon it is new, and
interpretation of ability as communication is entirely new.

         If you were to be in thorough and complete communication with a car on a road, you
would certainly have no difficulty driving that car. But if you were in only partial
communication with the car and in no communication with the road, it is fairly certain that an
accident would occur. Most accidents do occur when the driver is distracted by an argument he
has had, or by an arrest, or by a cross alongside of the road that says where some motorist got
killed, or by his own fears of accidents.

         When we say that somebody should be in present time we mean he should be in
communication with his environment. We mean, further, that he should be in communication
with his environment as it exists, not as it existed. And when we speak of prediction, we mean
that he should be in communication with his environment as it will exist, as well as it exists.

         If communication is so important, what is communication? It is best expressed as its
formula, which has been isolated, and by use of which a great many interesting results can be
brought about in ability changes. The formula of Communication is: Cause, Distance, Effect,
with Intention, Attention and Duplication.

         There are two kinds of communication, both depending upon the viewpoint assumed.
There is outflowing communication and inflowing communication. A person who is talking to
somebody else is communicating to that person (we trust), and the person being talked to is
receiving communication from that person. Now, as the conversation changes, we find that the
person who has been talked to is now doing the talking and is talking to the first person, who is
now receiving communication from him.

         A conversation is the process of alternating outflowing and inflowing communication,
and right here exists the oddity which makes aberration and entrapment. There is a basic rule
here: He who would outflow must also inflow— he who would inflow must also outflow.
When we find this rule overbalanced in either direction, we discover difficulty. A person who
is only outflowing communication is actually not communicating at all in the fullest sense of the
word, for in order to communicate entirely he would have to inflow as well as outflow. A
person who is inflowing communication entirely is again out of order, for if he would inflow
he must then outflow.

         Any and all objections anyone has to social and human relationships is to be found
basically in this rule of communication, where it is disobeyed. Anyone who is talking, if he is
not in a compulsive or obsessive state of beingness, is dismayed when he does not get
answers. Similarly, anyone who is being talked to is dismayed when he is not given an
opportunity to give his reply.

         Even hypnotism can be understood by this rule of communication. Hypnotism is a
continuing inflow without an opportunity on the part of the subject to outflow. This is carried
on to such a degree in hypnotism that the individual is actually trapped in the spot where he is
being hypnotized and will remain trapped in that spot to some degree from there on.

         Thus, one might go so far as to say that a bullet’s arrival is a heavy sort of hypnotism.
The individual receiving a bullet does not outflow a bullet, and thus he is injured. If he could
outflow a bullet immediately after receiving a bullet, we could introduce the interesting
question, “Would he be wounded?” According to our rule, he would not be. Indeed, if he were
in perfect communication with his environment, he could not even receive a bullet injuriously.

         An unfinished cycle of communication generates what might be called “answer

                                                      54

hunger”. An individual who is waiting for a signal that his communication has been received is
prone to accept any inflow. When an individual has, for a very long time, consistently waited
for answers which did not arrive, any sort of answer from anywhere will be pulled in to him,
by him, as an effort to remedy his scarcity of answers.

         We have seen an entire race of philosophers go out of existence since 1790. We have
seen philosophy become a very unimportant subject, where once it was a very common coin
amongst the people. The philosophers, themselves, put themselves out of communication with
the people by insisting upon using words of special definitions which could not be assimilated
with readiness by persons in general. The currency of philosophy could not be duplicated
readily by those with relatively limited vocabularies. Take such jaw cracking words as
“telekinesis”. While it probably means something very interesting and very vital, if you will
think back carefully, no taxi driver mentioned this word to you while you were paying your
fare or even during the more verbose moments of the ride. Probably the basic trouble with
philosophy was that it became Germanic in its grammar, an example set by Immanuel Kant.
And if you will recall that wonderful story by Saki, a man was once trampled to death while
trying to teach an elephant German irregular verbs. Philosophy shed some of its responsibility
for a cycle of communication by rendering itself unduplicatable by its readers. It is the
responsibility of anyone who would communicate that he speak with such vocabulary as can be
understood.

         Now, let us take up the individual who has become very “experienced” in life. This
individual has a time track, it isn’t anyone else’s time track. The basic individualities amongst
men are based upon the fact that they have different things happen to them and that they view
these different things from different points of view. Thus, we have individualization and we
have individual opinion, consideration and experience.

         Two men walking down the street witness an accident. Each one of them sees the
accident from at least a slightly different point of view. Consulting twelve different witnesses to
the same accident, we are likely to find twelve different accidents. Completely aside from the
fact that witnesses like to tell you what they think they saw instead of what they saw, there
were actually twelve different points from which the accident was viewed and so twelve
different aspects of the occurrences. If these twelve were brought together and if they were to
communicate amongst themselves about this accident, they would then reach a point of
agreement on what actually happened. This might not have been the accident, but it certainly is
the agreed- upon accident, which then becomes the real accident. This is the way juries conduct
themselves. They might or might not be passing upon the real crime, but they are certainly
passing upon the agreed- upon crime.

         In any war, it takes two or three days for enough agreement to occur to know what took
place in a battle. Whereas there might have been a real battle, a real sequence of incidents and
occurrences, the fact that every man in the battle saw the battle from his own particular point of
view, by which we mean severely “point from which he was looking”, rather than his
opinions— no one saw the battle in its entirety. Thus, time must intervene for enough
communication on the subject of the battle to take place so that all have some semblance of
agreement on what occurred.

         Of course, when the historians get to this battle and start writing different accounts of it,
out of the memoirs of generals who were trying to explain away their defeats, we get a highly
distorted account, indeed. And yet this becomes the agreed upon battle, as far as history is
concerned. Reading the historians one realizes that one will never really know what took place
at Waterloo, at Bennington, at Marathon. In that we can consider as a communication one
soldier shooting at another soldier, we see that we are studying communications about
communication.

         Now we come to the problem of what a life unit must be willing to experience in order
to communicate. In the first place the primary cause point must be willing to be duplicable. It
must be able to give at least some attention to the receipt point. The primary receipt point must

                                                      55

be willing to duplicate, must be willing to receive, and must be willing to change into a source
point in order to send the communication, or an answer to it, back. And the primary source
point in its turn must be willing to be a receipt point.

         As we are dealing basically with ideas and not mechanics, we see then that a state of
mind must exist between a cause and effect point whereby each one is willing to be Cause or
Effect at will and is willing to duplicate at will, is willing to be duplicable at will, is willing to
change at will, is willing to experience the distance between, and, in short, willing to
communicate.

         Where we get these conditions in an individual or a group, we have sane people. Where
an unwillingness to send or receive communications occurs, where people obsessively or
compulsively send communications without direction and without trying to be duplicable,
where individuals in receipt of communications stand silent and do not acknowledge or reply,
we have aberrative factors.

         A man is as dead as he cannot communicate. He is as alive as he can communicate.
With countless tests I have discovered, to a degree which could be called conclusive, that the
only remedy for livingness is further communicatingness. One must add to his ability to
communicate.

         For a great many years I asked this question, “To communicate or not to
communicate?” If one got himself into such thorough trouble by communicating, then, of
course, one should stop communicating. But this is not the case. If one gets himself into
trouble by communicating, he should further communicate. More communication, not less, is
the answer, and I consider this riddle solved after a quarter- century of investigation and pon-
dering.

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