View source for ARC, As-Isness (7ACC 540728)

'''Series:''' 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)

'''Date:''' 28 July 1954

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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Want to talk to you now about ARC – affinity, reality and communication.

The concept of ARC is very old. It was developed in Elizabeth, New Jersey about in July of 1950. The first scent that there was something there came under the basis of an explanation of agreement and it was discovered that what we call reality is an agreement.

Let's give the example today which was given then: An individual comes in to a crowd of people and says, "Look at the black cat." And the crowd of people do not see the black cat. So the reality is, is there's no black cat there, and the unreality is there's a black cat there. And so they take this fellow who saw the black cat and they lock him up and by natural selection select out of the line everybody who might be imaginative, [laughs] And this is reality at work, agreement, what we call reality in general. But there could be two kinds of realities. An individual could postulate a reality, just as simple as that. He could simply say, "There is a woman standing in front of me" – you know, mock-up – and there would be a woman there. And he could do it so well that she would be completely and entirely real to him. And without obtaining any agreement for anybody else, that could still be a reality – see, that could still be a reality.

But what we commonly understand to be reality is agreed upon. The more people that agree upon a reality, the more real it is. That is why you have board meetings, why somebody doesn't lay down a complete set of something or other without any agreement from anybody. He has a board meeting, the people discuss this, the various members of the board take it up, they give their opinions about it. There might or might not be a rearrangement of the original data. The original data might be the data which went right straight on through, but to the end of this time we would discover that we had a reality, we had a set of laws.

Governments and peoples recognize this very clearly so that the minutes of a board of directors meeting of a corporation become the law of that corporation.

Now, there is a thing called a monarchy, or a fascism, or any other type of line whereby you have a dictator who, without any agreement in any direction, lays down a law. Now, what do you think eventually happens to him? Do you think he has much persistence? Do you think much Isness takes place in this individual's vicinity? No, certainly doesn't because he never discovers what the realities are of those around him or tries to adapt what he is trying to do to those realities and so – let's get to our next point here – so doesn't communicate.

And what happens to a dictator or a monarch is his communication lines break down, that's the only reason such governments don't work, why democracies persist and thrive and why monarchies die and are forgotten.

The communication line is composed of at least some degree of duplication. And now let's look at this thing called duplication and let's discover that it is part and parcel to communication.

Now we take up the Formula of Communication. The Formula of Communication is Cause, Distance, Effect. But actually, there is a much longer way of stating this, and that's communication in this universe or any universe would be Cause, Distance, Effect. We're talking about a universal-type communication which has space, a communication which takes place in space. It goes under that law: Cause, Distance, Effect. Otherwise, you have no beingnesses or individualities.

And we discover here the definition of communication: "Communication is the consideration and action of impelling an impulse or particle from source-point across a distance to receipt-point, with the intention of bringing into being at the receipt-point a duplication of that which emanated from the source-point. "

Well, you see, you couldn't have a source-point or a receipt-point acting unless there was some attention involved – there would have to be an intention and attention involved. So we get the Formula of Communication is Cause, Distance, Effect. We're still talking about a universe-type communication, you understand. "The Formula of Communication is: Cause, Distance, Effect, with Attention and Duplication. " So attention has entered in here.

"The component parts of Communication are Consideration, Intention, Attention, Cause, Source-point, Distance, Effect, Receipt-point, Duplication, the Velocity of the impulse or particle, Nothingness or Somethingness. " And we get into nothingness or somethingness, we're into affinity. We're in over there to affinity, we've gotten over there. But as long as we're at this reality, we're talking about degree of duplication.

And let's discover something about the Communication Formula. Let's find out that if you put in a wire in New York City to San Francisco and this wire said, "Dear, I love you" and the wire arrived in San Francisco as "Dear, dear I loathe you," something would have happened there. You'd hardly call that a good communication line.

A perfect communication requires a perfect duplication at the receipt-point of that which emanated from the cause-point.

Cause, as we understand it, is simply defined as source-point. And effect, as we understand it, is simply defined as receipt-point. This is all the definition we have of cause and effect. And if you want to add some more significance to it, you're perfectly welcome; but remember, in processing, that there are no further significances to cause and effect than source-point and receipt-point.

This duplication is quite interesting. What would happen to the person in San Francisco on this imperfect duplication? He wouldn't be seeing eye to eye with you particularly, would he? So we have entered affinity.

Affinity would be the consideration resulting from the degree of duplication. The reality is simply the degree of duplication – agreement, agreement. And when you get two objects duplicating each other – you get a copper pole and a copper pole, you will get a flow between the two of them. If they're complete opposites, you get the flow in one direction in terms of polarity, but they have to be similar poles. And there you get an agreement.

Well, you get a solidity if you get a perfect – pardon me, a perfect duplication becomes a nothingness. See, now, a perfect duplication becomes a nothingness.

Let's define a perfect duplication. A perfect duplication of something would be another of it which occurs in the same space as, and which uses the same energy and mass as, and which has the same form as – and which, incidentally, contains the same considerations as – the original. In other words, it would be same place, same place; same mass, same mass. And when you do that, you get nothing. But that's in the same place, isn't it?

Now let's put these two things which are just alike across a slight distance. We can test this out in electricity. We put two poles that are exactly alike a slight distance apart. They just sit there. They do not deteriorate. You have to this degree then – you have to this degree, if they will simply sit there with no other consideration in them that they just sit there, you will have an agreement, which is a reality and it has solidity. But now if you have a perfect duplicate, you have fallen into the definition of affinity. All right.

Affinity is a very complex thing. That's the most complex thing we've got, is affinity and duplication – that is to say, consideration and duplication and communication enter in together one way or the other – we get every emotional state and everything else.

Over there at the affinity corner, then, we list scales, all scales. The old Chart of Human Evaluation is an affinity scale. We just call all scales – even though they contain sex and even though they contain effort and so forth, not only just emotion, we'll call those affinity scales.

And we'll find then over at the affinity corner – this is, by the way, a triangle. And one corner is A, and one corner is R, and one corner is C. And over there at the A corner we discover that we have every scale we have and it is just the amount of somethingness which is involved in the communication, modified by the degree of agreement or duplication. Agreement, duplication – same thing. All right.

We discover, then, that affinity, perfect affinity, would occupy – the cause-point and the effect-point would occupy the same space with the consideration that it was not compulsive. See, we get both points occupied, no compulsion involved in the thing, and we would get affinity. But a perfect affinity results in a nothingness. It occurs only in the state of nothingness. It is itself a singular high-level truth.

We discover this in various religions. We find out that everybody is trying to love everybody. Well, that's fine. If they really had a complete affinity one for another, they would simply occupy the same space and there wouldn't be any space and there wouldn't be any somebody or anything else.

They have to get a slight distance apart, there has to be some space involved here, and there has to be some slight variation in their agreement. It has to continue to vary in order to continue to have a reality. Now, that's not too plainly stated, don't feel confused about it. We would have to have a slight distance, in other words, to get some action. And the second we had some action, we'd have some space and some energy, wouldn't we? So the moment we've got a source-point and a receipt-point apart to any degree whatsoever, we have the potentiality of a universe with all of its considerations.

So affinity which is entirely coexistent will disappear, make anything disappear. The reality disappears when good affinity, that is, occurs. We've got a perfect duplication with – of course, perfect duplication says source-point, receipt-point on the same point. And we get no mass, just like that – boom, no mass.

This is subjected very easily to proof. You make a perfect duplication of any object simply by mocking it up, so to speak, in its same place, with its same energy, in its same time, and with its same form, all of its characteristics equal, same considerations – you just mock it up there. And if you're real good, you do it just once and you won't see the object again. It has at least disappeared for you.

Now, if you were to unmock at the same time every atom in its own time, every atom and molecule in it in its own time and space, and so forth, the object would disappear for one and all. Now, there's a nice example there.

Now, we have the four conditions of existence and these are the conditions which result from the problems of trying to have something or have nothing. Existence is a something-nothingness variation which includes a continuance or a non-continuance. In other words, if we could have a non-existence, we'd have a non-continuance. A perfect duplication, then, results in a non-existence.

Religion, aspiring toward love for one and all, is trying to unmock the works. It's just an effort just to unmock the whole thing. The effort, the yearning toward God, is actually an effort to just unmock the whole works. That's an effort toward infinity.

Of course, if you occupied everything 100 percent, or if anyone did, or if God did, there would be nothing there. That's certain. So we get most religions with the goal of love – has to then modify the definition of love by saying, "You mustn't kill your own kind." We'll at least leave that reality, you see.

We also have various customs and practices amongst species such as sexual intercourse between opposite members – see, two sexes. We mustn't have anything on the Second Dynamic which would have the same body trying to reproduce itself by having anything to do with the same body. So we get a disappearance. We couldn't create a thing. That would be total affinity. So we must modify love by saying, "You must not kill your own kind. You mustn't occupy the same space as your own kind on the Second Dynamic. You've got to follow a custom which takes another kind of body which is different than your own," and in this wise we modify it out so that we do continue to have a universe. Just as simple as that. If it weren't so modified, there would be no universe.

Now, let's look at this effort to fall away from a perfect duplication, the desire to have something, and we discover that as soon as one has a desire to have something, then he has to alter it. And we take the four conditions of existence, he has to alter. In other words, it can't be a perfect duplication every time. And as a matter of fact, two terminals of opposite polarity will continue to flow one from the other, and you change their polarity, they'll flow back again. And you will have a flow and you will still have mass.

But again, if they're too much opposites, why, they will eventually dissipate themselves and cease to have mass. So we'd sort of have to change it some other way. We'd have to mock them up and get some new terminals once in a while. We'd have to do various things to go on and have an existence, an Isness. You see that?

Now, ARC – ARC is a study in mechanics more than anything else. When this triangle comes up the line to a point where affinity occupies exactly the same point as reality, the same point as communication – in other words, when source-point and receipt-point are the same, when they're the same mass and so forth, we then get a vanishment. And that vanishment is replaced by a knowingness. And we get a nothingness replaced, which is a knowingness, when the triangle completely drops down to that.

But up to that point it expands and expands and expands and becomes more and more infinite and more and more infinite. And then it really becomes infinite – which is to say, it ceases to have any space at all. And that's infinity, no space at all. Now, let's see that as the top level. We approach that, however, by simply making everything occupy the same space and the result we get from that is no space at all.

Now, the bottom scale of ARC – and these points have drawn together and drawn together and become more and more packed, and more and more massive, and more and more energy has occurred in them, until we get it way down to the bottom scale, they are not occupying the same point. They are almost, but they've just been drawn down and compelled down by force and pressed in upon one another till source-point and receipt-point are right close together and very massive and quite unalike but completely commingled, and practically unapproximatable. The person has pulled them together.

That's the use of Not-isness. He's pulled these two terminals together and pushed them together in order to compel an affinity in the hope that it would all disappear. It won't disappear. It's something like walking to Chicago halfway and then walking to Chicago halfway again and then walking to Chicago halfway again and theoretically you'd never get to Chicago.

In this wise, using energy to compel the non-existence of energy is silly. Energy will not unmock energy, but a thetan can unmock simply by perfect duplication. All right.

What are these other emotions and how are they caused? They are simply the degree of duplication and the amount of distance involved.

Hate comes about very peculiarly. You have a combination here of each side of this hate having an intention not to be an effect-point, but insistent on being a cause-point. So we have two cause-points, in conjunction, trying to push in against each other. No, no. See, they won't go in, even though the duplicate is almost perfect.

We have two brothers hating each other and when they turn in – both of them decide to be cause-points on a particular problem, there is no meeting of the eye. They have no idea of occupying the same space and the effort not to occupy that same space makes them both want to be cause. And the result is, is they are insisting upon their dissimilarity while being exactly alike and you've got hate.

Now, they have to be loud about their dissimilarity while they're being exactly alike, too, to really have hate. There is nothing more deadly than two churches with exactly the same creed fighting one another, each of them trying to be source-point.

Now, this gets off into orientation-points, which you know about. When we've got two points which insist that they're the cause-points, they – hrrrip. See. Not all parts of this triangle are approximated.

In other words, we don't have each one willing to be cause and willing to be effect of the other one, so we don't even have a two-way communication. And the effort to keep some kind of a communication from occurring, the amount of repression, restriction and so forth involved, just force them right straight together and they stand there opposed. It's an interesting thing.

Now, what thousands of manifestations we could draw out of these formulas – what thousands of them we could draw out. Actually, existence is more clearly understood by a description of these conditions of existence, which consist of As-isness, Isness (which is itself reality), Not-isness (which is the effort to uncreate by using space and energy against space and energy), and of course, Alter-isness (which – bring about a change, bring about a change, bring about a change – you'll get persistence). As long as you change, you get a persistence. When you hit As-isness, no persistence.

You get two As-isnesses which are holding apart and saying they're not alike, where their consideration is different and their mass exactly the same, you get a very unstable situation. The considerations are going one way and the masses are going another way and it ends up in a confusion.

Now, it's easy to understand this from conditions of beingness. However, all by itself and independently, one of the easiest things to comprehend in the world – if you don't try to add it up to existence and all these other complexities because these are quite complex – is simply ARC taken all by themselves. And let's just take a fast explanation of ARC, taken all by themselves, and we simply find out that reality is the amount of agreement, that affinity happens to be the emotional reaction or the energy reaction on a subject, and communication, or simply the mechanics of relaying an impulse or particle from cause to effect across a distance, with a duplication and with attention. All right.

We discover immediately that a break in communications if not complete, an incomplete break of communication will – or just the effort, the effort to break the communication apart, will bring about a deterioration of A. And this brings about a deterioration of R. And this, in turn, brings about a deterioration of C.

C deterioration started it. That brought about a deterioration of A. That brought about a deterioration of R, reality, which brought about a deterioration of communication, which brought about a deterioration of affinity, which brought about a deterioration of reality, which brought about a deterioration of communication, which brought about a deterioration of – you've got the dwindling spiral. You're looking right straight at the dwindling spiral and that's exactly how it goes.

And let's discover that if we want to communicate with somebody, we have to have something – an agreement. We have to have something we're agreed upon before we can communicate. We also discover that we have to communicate with a certain amount of affinity. We can't put up a bunch of barriers. We can't communicate defensively, because we won't communicate.

Peace talks between two countries are the more ridiculous of these manifestations. They're conducted with barbed wire and barriers and close to the battlefield and all that sort of thing. And you don't want it close to the battlefield when you're conducting a peace talk. What you do is pick up the peace delegates and take them into Paris and get a large spacious hotel and have everybody walking in and out, quite free. And they'll, all of a sudden, they'll come to an agreement and they'll settle the whole thing. You could never do it on the battlefield.

Now, the reason why they stopped doing it on the battlefield, really – that we've forgotten that – is because that no peace was ever recognized on a battlefield but the complete slaughter of the enemy. And that's why in olden times the mortality rate in a battle was something – nine out of ten, back in Roman times. Very high. That was because they wiped out the enemy to a man. They could come to no agreement. They were still in the heat of passion and so they could not communicate. So how could they come to an agreement? There would be only one agreement they could come to and that was simply that somebody isn't here. All right.

And having made this Not-isness out of the enemy, they would find the enemy out surviving themselves or something very peculiar would happen. I mean, the peace talks brought about never would result in anything. But let's talk about this in more common parlance on a more understandable dynamic and we discover as we walk down the street that somebody is watering their lawn, they've got the side of the car all wet. You want to change what they are doing, and so forth, and you say, "What the devil's the matter with you, getting water all over my car! Yiya-yiya."

This fellow will have no idea of what you are saying. He probably won't even recognize that he's gotten some water on your car. He simply recognizes somebody is mad at him and he will fight you. That's because we took the A out of it and put it way downscale, you see. And so we used a barrier – hate is a barrier. And we took a barrier and put it on the line and then we were going to communicate and then we're going to get some agreement?

You want him to agree to turn the hose off the side of your car. Well, there would be many ways to accomplish this, but one of the better ways to do it would simply – to coincide with him, slightly. And as he's holding the hose nozzle, you would walk up and take hold of the hose nozzle very, very gently, you see, and not threateningly at all, very quietly and gently and just steer it away from the side of your car.

And he would turn around to you and say, "Oh, I'm awfully sorry. I… I didn't notice I was doing this."

If you want to know anything about handling people, you'd better know about ARC. And all you really have to know is that when any corner of this triangle deteriorates, the other two corners deteriorate. That's really all you have to know. And to raise any two corners of this triangle, you only have to raise one.

So that if you enter a problem, you could take the affinity contained in it and raise it upscale; you could take the agreement in it (the reality) and raise it upscale; or you could take the communication and raise it upscale and you would get an upscale manifestation for the other two parts.

Note: In this section of the lecture there is sound distortion in the original recording.

If we raise communication, we'll immediately raise the level of affinity and raise the level of agreement. If we raise the level of agreement, we will immediately raise communication and affinity. But beware, there is a point where we raised too high and it all goes boom – only it doesn't go boom. It doesn't even disappear with a whimper. It just suddenly disappears. We would just get it gone.

You see, we've raised affinity so high that all points could coincide with all points and then we would have nothing left in terms of a distance. And, therefore, we would have no agreement because we'd all be on the same consideration and so we wouldn't have anything even vaguely resembling – well, we'd have some serenity, maybe, with no space or location or anything else. That's the top-top of the ARC Triangle.

But in finite living this is quite useful as a triangle and we see individuals depressing on this triangle. We see an individual who is cutting his communication line. You walk in, you say, "Hello. How are you?"

Silence.

Where is his A? It's right there with that silence. Where is his agreement? Where's that reality? Boy, he doesn't have much reality. He's liable to think the strangest things about you. He's just got through looking at you and now he's sure that you are wearing a gray flannel suit with long pants. You're a girl, you were wearing an evening gown.

And there's where hallucination comes in. He doesn't communicate, so he can't duplicate, so there's no agreement. See? If we got a total blank every time we tried to greet somebody, we could size him up immediately: that is his As-isness about life. We should never make a mistake about that.

If a person is very, very mean to you, the chances are they don't know you. That's the best chance in the world that they don't know you. They're very mean to you. How could you guarantee they don't know you? Well, that's very, very obvious, for the excellent reason that A-R-C added up together comprise knowingness. And out of affinity, reality and communication, you can actually derive – I won't bother to do this for you, but you could actually derive every mathematics there is.

And this is understanding which expands and expands and expands and becomes more knowing and more knowing and more knowing. You can be further and further from things and know what they're all about, in other words. More knowing and more knowing and what not and total affinity and brotherhood with the universe – what universe? See, right there. All right.

Of course they wouldn't understand you if they were mean to you. It demonstrates that these three things, when depressed very low, certainly down to the level of resentment or antagonism and so forth, contain very little understanding. And the least understanding there is, is when all three points – really, just the two points of source-point and receipt-point – have dwindled and deteriorated down to this minute distance which can't close to zero. And that's stupidity to end all stupidity. It takes place right there. This fellow will know nothing.

Don't worry about people who are mean to you or who get mad at you. There's no reason to worry about them at all. They're not even getting mad at you. They don't know where you are, who you are, or anything else. That is people going around trying to be understood. Why try to be understood? Why not try to fix up people so they can understand.

That's why Man can be basically good and be considered to be the foulest beast on the face of the Earth. Simply, as his affinities go down, his communication and agreements go to pieces, too. The use of ARC is best exemplified in the Chart of Human Evaluation and copies of that are available from the HASI. There are many books on this subject also. The whole book Science of Survival is written on the subject of ARC. However, it hasn't this many codifications. I mean, we have more data here than is contained in earlier days. We know more about it. We know that it produces these four considerations of existence and that these things are above and senior to ARC.

Okay?

ARC, AS-ISNESS PAGE 9 7ACC-34 - 28.07.54

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