View source for ARC and the Tone Scale (501104)

'''Date:''' 4 November 1950

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

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Now, I don’t want to have to cover with you the whole theory back of communication, affinity and reality. But I do want to be able to give you enough material here that you’ll be able to use it very adequately.

Now, if we look at this triangle here, here is a triangle lying out flat, here’s a second triangle lying out flat and a third and a fourth. In other words, here’s a stack of triangles. It’s not a very good example of draftsmanship, but you see this stack of triangles here. We’ve got the left-hand corner labeled “communication,” the back corner of these triangles all joined, labeled “affinity.” The right-hand one labeled “reality.” We have these four triangles then in parallel, stacked one above the other and this we have as a Tone Scale.

A Tone Scale is a series of triangles, not a series of lines. Communication, affinity and reality stack up this way. And we find out that we are moving from one plane to the next. These planes happen to be triangles.

There are several triangles in Dianetics, outside of the fact, oddly enough, that Dianetics in Greek has a delta, “D,” which is a triangle.

It is an oddity that this thing happened to fit in. Now, there are three things a man wants to know with regard to existence. Is why does it come about at all? And what are we doing here? And how are we doing it?

What, why, how. Why, how, what. It’s another series of triangles. Now, right now we have a what we are doing here. Now that’s a duality, not a singularity—survive, which is related to a datum of comparable magnitude—succumb. Now, one survives or succumbs. It’s one or the other. But its not an either/or, an Aristotelian either/or, it’s a long spectrum. One survives, in other words, in terms of magnitude and longevity. One might survive on a very starved out, starved down bare necessity basis for a long time and still get away with it. And one might be able to survive with lots of room to spare. Great affluence. See how that’s the magnitude of how much survival. And then there is how much time.

Here we have space, time, energy and matter, you might say, as one side of the equation and thought as the other. I’m not going to go into that too deeply but what we have here is how we are doing. In other words, we have answered now how. We know what we are doing, and how we are doing it is better answered in this triangle.

Now, the actuality is that it’s impossible to reach a complete wrong. Draw you something else here.

Now, this little gadget here is another— I’m not going to draw all of this, this one can really get complicated here when you start to put it into mathematical equations, but as long as you keep it here in a two-dimensional graph, it is a very easy one.

This is the graph of Dianometry, measurement of thought. Right here is a center line at zero. Over here is wrong. Over here to the right is right. This is infinity. This is infinity. In other words either side of those series of vertical lines here goes out to infinity. In other words I’m merely representing an infinity series of vertical lines in parallel.

All right. Now, this is succumb and this is survive. You want to know how right an answer is—how right is it that way? You measure these—you could say the value of a right answer could be graphed here as how many of these vertical lines would the rightness be measured on toward right, survive.

In other words, as right as a person can get would be an infinity of survival. Now, as wrong as a person can get is dead. How wrong can you get? Dead.

Mass, matter, energy, space, time and energy. I’m giving you these equations through here and here you have matter, M; energy, E; space, S and time, T. We get out of this MEST.

Just use it as something instead of having to say all the time that it happens to go together and make it MEST or . . .

Now, we call this big one here, this is big theta. Big theta. That’s finite, the finite universe. Don’t think you’re going in over your head because this is awful simple. And over here on this side of the picture is little theta. That’s thought. Not part of MEST. Thought, little theta. The operation and function of little theta is encroachment upon big theta. The effort of life is to try to break the law of the conservation of energy. Life is always trying to upset the conservation of energy or get it as close to upset as possible. It could be measured actually, if you want a more dramatic term, that a little theta is engaged continually as an attack upon big theta in an effort to become big theta.

There happens to be, in thought, a little box, to represent each one of these. In other words, in thought there is a thought time. This is not the finite universe time scale. It’s another one. In other words, you have a comparable time over here in little theta. Now, energy—thought is an energy that compares in some parts with the electromagnetic, gravitic laws over here in this field. It isn’t the same thing. It is comparable but not identical. So we have thought energy. Thought also has something representing space. And when it comes to matter, thought, it can be put down as an idea. In other words, a body of ideas, it’s a body of thought matter.

You have all of these things in this highly nebulous state over here at little theta. There’s only one trouble with little theta: it has to depend utterly upon all of these things in order to have motion in itself, and for these things to be meaningful and significant they have to be modified over here. You’ve got two thetas then, interacting. This theta’s trying to become this theta.

One of these fine days I imagine we will have overcome the stars, the planets, we will be able to take matter and tear it apart at will, put it back together again. We will probably be able to condense and expand space and stop time and everything else, and of course at that moment what are we? We’re big theta. And what happens then? We’re king of the mountain. When we look around and I am sure we will find there is a little theta. And furthermore I am sure we will find a near infinity as we look around at that point of big thetas.

That is a cycle of change. And evidently could be postulated as one of the basic laws of the universes. Something there, a new cycle of little theta overcoming big theta and vice versa.

Just pointing this out to you. If you don’t believe that man is always trying to overcome energy and break that law of conservation of energy, you look at the number of times engineers have worked, inventors have worked upon perpetual motion. Perpetual motion is an effort to overcome the conservation of energy. What perpetual motion wants to do is to get an output which far exceeds the input. In other words, you burn five pounds of coal and then it runs forever. In other words, you get five pounds of coal just on and on and on.

The ideal would be that you put one dollar in the bank and you get five dollars out of the bank. You put one dollar in the bank, you get five dollars out of the bank. That’s an effort to overcome conservation of energy. And as you start along the line and you start to pick up all of these big ambitions and goals and efforts and so forth, we find out that each one is trying to shake the pillars of this thing, conservation of energy. Each one.

Now, for instance, without doing anything about it, the grasshopper wants to live a little. That’s his big ambition. But he finds out that he has to put out so much energy anyhow, so he puts out the minimal to get the maximal. All the time. The second life stops following this general law, it just caves in. That’s death when the law is no longer applied.

Now, here is this equation. Now, this little graph here, it makes up in some very fancy equations, just gorgeous, because actually this graph is three-dimensional.

I won’t go into its further ramifications. This is enough. This could be called over here the front board, adjudication board of the mind, this could be called it. And it could be said to be backed up by probably several hundred thousand similar boards. What this step does is evaluate information. What is the value of a datum? How valuable is data? What is the general proposition of relation and association of facts so that we can think? Now, the relation and association of facts, commingling, that’s the action of little theta over there. That’s the thinking one.

Nearly all of the data there concerns the finite universe. And little theta starts picking up all kinds of stuff about the finite universe and relating it, interrelating it, shaking it and so forth. That’s the matter with which it deals, the idea of bodies of information. When we get this, we consider this thing as the front evaluation board of the mind, and it won’t look like blanks. I’m going to show you how this thing works.

Here’s zero. That’s neither right nor wrong. Here’s an infinity of being wrong and over here is an infinity of being right. So once upon a time there was such a thing—now you have heard of two-valued logic, haven’t you? All right, once upon a time there was such a thing as one-valued logic—one-valued logic, that was what man had, he got along very well on it—the will of God. Anything that happened was God’s fault. He had no responsibility, you might say, for his own actions. One-valued logic. He was strictly a pawn in the hands of fate.

Your very ancient superstitions and so forth ran on this basis: man was not himself a causative agent. He had no great power of decision. He could not choose right or wrong for himself, he had to be told what was right and wrong.

One-valued logic. Then we came up along the line, we got two-valued logic—Aristotelian. Aristotle made quite a contribution in a lot of fields and he made a very marked contribution in the field of logic.

One of the things which is understood in his work is: man has a right to think. You wouldn’t think that was very much of a gain would you? Well, when we, for instance, knock out censorship and get free speech operating so that there’s really free speech, why, well have that. As a matter of fact, in this country you can say anything you want to so long as you don’t say anything against—and now I could lay out a list in front of you, and you would agree with me.

Here is right and wrong. Two valued. Now, most of your censorships and so forth grew up on this basis: two-valued logic.

Somebody says to the populace, “It’s right and it’s all right and that’s all the right there is and you can’t be any more right than that” or “That is wrong and that’s as wrong as you can get and you can’t get any wronger.” And the language today is even set up to agree with two-valued logic. You can’t be “righter” or “wronger.” Just look over your grammar and you will see all shot through the grammar that’s foisted off upon us, have been these very steep, definite accuracies. In grammar they have assumed that there is hairline accuracy. Actually things are more accurate and less accurate, more right and less right, more wrong and less wrong. There is no such thing in the whole universe as far as man is able to obtain. (There may be one, but for practical purposes there isn’t.) You get into Kant’s transcendentalism and of course we get that real knowledge transcends the bounds of all human experience. Now, that it transcends the bounds of all human experience, naturally, he can say anything he wants to say and we’ve got to take it because we can’t experience it. That’s authoritarianism super plus ultra.

So, two-valued logic. In other words there’s a precision right and there’s a precision wrong. That’s a myth. Let’s put up this little postulate here and say that absolutes are unattainable.

We know we’ll never reach the end of infinity. In Dianetics we are dealing with spectrums—the principle of the spectrum as distinctly different from the principle of two values.

You will find almost anything in Dianetics can be summed up in the terms of a spectrum. As a matter of fact, that’s its basic graph—a spectrum. Now, here’s a series of vertical lines and Dianetics always assumes that we go on to infinity in either direction on any subject. And the degree between those lines can be very tiny. We’re dealing with sections and classes.

Let’s take sanity. Complete insanity to complete sanity is a spectrum. Neither one is attainable. And the guy gets more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more sane. After you get off all the engrams, a person still has to be sure that he has absolutely nothing but correct data in his bank. That he must not have anywhere in his mind an incorrect datum. That’s impossible. So he can’t be an absolute—perfect in his computations. He has got a perfect computer but now what is modifying it is some of his data may be a little bit off. But you can never get a perfect answer as long as you have a datum here or there that is a little bit off. You understand what I mean? Here’s a difference in thought. All advances of mankind by the way, take place by the discovery of new ways to think. And we have, for instance, in the field of psychiatry, two values: a person is sane or he’s insane.

Now the engineers were very dissatisfied with two-valued logic so they came in and they substituted for it three-valued logic. Right, wrong and maybe.

All right, right here in the zero area you get maybe. Right, wrong and maybe. So they could get along fairly well. What led them into this more than anything else was the discovery of people working with the mind that Boolean algebra—engineers have been working with the mind for a lot longer than any other particular breed of cat3 I know. They have had to deal with the mind consistently and continually, but they never quite dare label the fact that they were dealing with the mind because that has been moved off into sacrosanct precincts known as “this area has to do with thinking and this area has to do with aberration and this area has to do with the human soul and engineers aren’t supposed to go in there.” But here they are building these great big machines, having studied thought and so forth. They’ve been doing this for quite a while now Machines that think.

The earliest machine that thinks, of which I know, is four thousand years old.

Its interesting isn’t it that the UNIVAC and the ENIAC had an ancestor four thousand years ago. Yeah, that’s right. Engineers have been worried about this for a long time, because they have to think—not too long ago they figured out this Boolean algebra. Boolean algebra is very interesting stuff, but it can get awfully complicated from the beginning and awfully simple. It merely says that answers can be gained by any apparatus which can say “yes is greater than no” or “no is greater than yes.” See, yes greater than no. For instance, “Is this early?” Well, you say that yes in this case is greater than no. But it isn’t terribly early. You see, how much greater? Now, in Boolean algebra they were just a little tiny bit degree leaving out that “how much?” The second we run that in, Boolean algebra flattens out into this spectrum right here. The two merge. So we have a spectrum of “yes is greater than no” and “no is greater than yes.” You follow this very easily.

On this we can graph how red is a red bicycle. How long is a piece of string, so forth. These nebulous answers. The mind deals with these things all the time, consistently. How red is a red bicycle? How long is a piece of string? How far is it down to the corner? The mind does not want to know in feet, really doesn’t want to know in time, it just gets the datum and so on. There you are.

In other words, what we have been dealing with all down the ages of man in mathematics or anything else, is with a servomechanism known as the human mind. The mathematician’s effort in the past was some effort to put down on paper anything and everything that was necessary to the understanding of a problem all by itself so no human mind had to look at it to find out what it was. In this he was saying mathematics are imperishable, inevitable and continue on forever and are a purity which have always been here, are here and will always be here. At this moment we knock our heads three times on the floor before the great altar of mathematics. Actually mathematics are a crutch which the human mind has thrown in in order to communicate. Now, it can communicate with mathematics with great accuracy. How right these mathematics are or how inevitable they are or how long they’ve been here or how long they will be here or whether they’ll ever be here whether mans here or not, these things we don’t know. We do know this, that we do use them. Any mathematical equation, no matter how simple or how complex, has hooked into it as one of its factors, the human mind.

First went into it—the human mind—and wrote it down. And the next fellow that picks it up and uses it is hooking his human mind into that equation. It requires that mind for an understanding.

Now let’s go just a little bit further step than that and we say, “How red is a red bicycle?” Is there any reason I have to write you down a number of figures that demonstrate red? Is there any reason why you have to go out and study for some hours, perhaps, all of the things by which color is labeled? How is it graded? What mathematical assignation must be made to this or that shade of color? What is pigmentation? We could discuss this for a long time, and then finally we would come to the point of saying, “Well, it is .001 colorons red.” That’s very fine. But we have had to do a long communication on that. But we’re still doing a communication. There isn’t any reason why we can’t say in view of the fact that the limits of accuracy we require aren’t .001 colorons red. We’re not going to manufacture this paint, I just want to tell you how red this red bicycle is. And I tell you it’s very red.

I could say, “Well, it’s very red,” or “It’s very red.” And right away we have a communication there and we’ve come up here and when I said, “It’s red,” it sure is red, it’s very red. And, “Oh, my God!” All right, that’s the field of communication. The mind deals with these factors all the time and actually arrives at the most fantastically useful answers just by using things of this character.

Now, this front board on the mind could be said to be the thing that takes all the other boards in the mind. You know what the Chinese abacus, the thing that you throw these things back and forth—the Chinese are very good at these things. Actually, in this little gimmick they have hooked in the mind as a servomechanism to such a degree that a white man who hasn’t been brought up with this thing has an awful time following it. It’s very hard to follow. And so they knock these little beads back and forth and they add up these big sums and they say so-and-so. And you think maybe this guy is just playing, but when you get through . . . I have seen a Chinese do an actuarial problem on one of these things, something of the laws of probability. So I didn’t think anything about it at all. The funny part of it is, the Chinese has an awful time who was raised in that atmosphere, thinking mathematically at all unless he’s got one of these gimmicks up in front of him. Yeah, he has an awful time. He wouldn’t be able to add up all of the things sometimes that some other race is going to suddenly decide—“You know, there is no use having either mathematics or mathematical equations or UNIVACs or ENIACs. Let’s just—we’ll use our heads.” And somebody’s going to say, “Gee, you know that’s a good idea, let’s work on it for a while,” and within about a generation, why, somebody comes around and he can give you a statement of something or other and you add up the statement of something or other and they say, “Well, yeah, that’s 2.987 percent.” And that’s that. So here you’ve got the front board of the mind which is doing evaluation: mathematics and thinking. No difference between the two. Mathematics is just a nice, big, beautiful term for precise thinking, if you really want to go in for definitions. You start treating the definition like that and you stop being afraid of this stuff, and you really go on from there.

The mathematician unfortunately has had to convince the world that he is necessary for a long time and so he’s sort of become a priesthood. And he says, “Well now, boys,” he says, “you can’t understand this stuff, that’s why you pay me so much money.” Now, here we have this front board, you might say, and how do we come to a solution about something of “Let’s eat breakfast now.” Well, a datum comes in and it says, “Pretty hungry.” And the next datum for consideration comes in—this is all being evaluated someplace else but there are a lot of other factors. But if you just set up a series of these right and wrong boards, all of them solve. So the next factor is “Well, we don’t have very much money and we were going to eat a good lunch.” All right. He shouldn’t eat breakfast. But we’re here now, with this little arrow, and we get the evaluation through, that by missing breakfast and eating a good lunch this is a good thing, and the second board (that evaluates this) is feeding this board, is one back.

Now, we don’t jump back to here and go back to one. We jump back just one line here. So far in this problem we’re just two lines right, see. And the next thing that comes in is there’s going to be a visitor in forty-five minutes. That doesn’t mean we have very much time to eat breakfast, so we’re a little bit more wrong—half a line wrong there. And then all of a sudden somebody says,  “But there’s a staff conference at 12 o’clock, meaning we probably won’t get lunch until about 1:30. Well, to hell with that!” But his values come up here. So right away now we’ve got an equation that overweight’s at this point. Nothing is dragging it back, so we go eat breakfast. That’s how a decision is reached on this board. You can figure any problem you want to, that’s a very simple one. You can figure calculus on it. That’s just right-wrong. A little bit right, a little bit wrong, see, and a datum comes in that’s five lines right and then one comes in that’s two lines wrong and then one comes in that’s five lines wrong and then one comes in that’s two lines right. At this point you get a point of no decision. But then one comes along that is two right. No more data comes along so we get action and execution.

This, in terms of time—it takes a little time for this to happen. And so you get lags. A little lag there on a problem and if one is speeded up so that he has to make instantaneous decisions, you know—nearly instantaneous, he has to figure out and get yes or no here and for this problem somebody else feeds him some data there and somebody else some data there, yes, no, he’s saying. And you do this, you do that and time is all jammed up. And he isn’t adding in, he doesn’t have time to add in or evaluate on this board all the factors. And first thing you know he starts making mistakes, bad mistakes or he has some aberrations which don’t permit certain data to be evaluated. For instance, he has an aberration that says, “All men are good.” I mean he has this as an aberration. So that no man, no matter how aberrated, could be considered to be bad in his actions. So that datum could never be evaluated and when anything relating to that comes up to this board, why, immediately somebody is going to get a wrong answer. Now, that’s what aberration does. That’s why aberration is bad.

We have a datum there that says, “All women are liars.” Just like that. Boom. That’s the trouble with engrams, by the way, is they’re stet data. They’re unchangeable data which is not to be evaluated by any of the subevaluation computers. Consequently—doing a problem here and it’s going along perfectly fine and we get up to here and all of a sudden discover that a woman has added something in to this aberration. A woman has added something in. One of the factors used in the problem came from a woman, instantaneously, of course, “This is wrong.” (descending whistle) Bang! And we get action.

That’s wholly irrational. Just because a woman was one of the people who said anything.

You know, an engram will attenuate the analyzer by restimulating unconsciousness. That’s mechanical. Well, that’s nothing compared to what happens to thought when it has some of this stet data. Data which you’re not permitted to evaluate.

Any time a factor which you’re not permitted to evaluate, right or wrong, comes through on this board, the answer is wrong. It might happen that the society at large has enough of these stet values in it so that people’s answers are just kind of right and maybe not too wrong. That’s about the state of society in its answers today.

The held-down seven—not to go too fast here—the held-down seven, in other words, enters into this computation and as soon as it does, you get all sorts of things wrong. That is aberration. That’s all aberration is.

Look around on it and you don’t find any ramifications on this thing, it’s just data. A man has foisted off on him a datum which he is not permitted to question. That’s authoritarian government, for instance. The government hands out a manifesto and it says the reich dollar is worth one loaf of bread today but there are only twenty loaves of bread in the country (as we exaggerate this problem) and there are five billion reich dollars. And now the whole society is trying to think, tries to adjust this thing. But you question this thing—firing squad. It’s a government edict. People can’t refuse to take this reich dollar and so on. People can’t think with this thing— it’s frozen.

Let’s put another little problem. One is told that in a society, by some sort of a command which is issued, that all males above the age of twenty-one must go to a military encampment and be trained for one year. That’s the end of that. That’s what the law says. The law says this. Then the law has to be modified to let some of these fellows out because obviously they’re not in physical condition to be trained. Then it has to let out some more people because they haven’t sufficient mental capacity to be any good if they were trained. Now it has to let out some more of these people. In other words you get modification, modification, modification, trying to make this thing sensible and rational. It never gets sensible and rational.

It can’t get sensible and rational because it has to be reevaluated continually. A stet datum in other words. But supposing the government said, “All men, and we mean all men, have to go out for military training when they are twenty-one years of age.” Boy, what that would do. There would be people being unloaded off trains in stretchers, the sergeant would be calling the roll and there’d be somebody with an iron lung in the lineup. Here would be some fellow who was quite brilliant who was one of the keys of the government itself, a young guy but he was getting along all right and all of a sudden he isn’t there anymore. Gee, we would start to get into trouble with some law like that.

Now, that’s a stet datum, A totalitarian government then could be said to be entering into the social order continuously, engrams. That’s what’s wrong with it. But it’s not wrong because it’s morally wrong or something like that, it just happens to be unworkable because every time you get in one of these arbitraries to make the thing work then the government has to send in another arbitrary. And when that arbitrary factor goes in, a new stet datum, it gets hung up here on this evaluation board. A little plus right but it’s not enough right, so the government puts in another arbitrary that’s supposed to make it come over here but every time they try to make something a little more right by introducing a new stet datum.

We get a law for instance saying all girls will wear cotton dresses on Tuesday. We’ve decided the cotton industry isn’t going well, so we issue this law. And this fixes up a little bit of the cotton industry, sure, but it jams up all sorts of things, because every Tuesday, that’s very strange . . . You know, stet data all the way along the line and there’s a little wrong with each one right. And finally by the entrance of these stet data, you will finally get any equation walking over here more and more to being wrong as far as the whole society is concerned, because you get overloaded with wrongs, and when you get too wrong the society succumbs.

It’s an interesting thing that a government cycle begins—let us say the government’s coming along here, here is the third zone; the government starts out here in the third zone, it’s going along fine before a lot of arbitraries come along and it comes down here and the people get sort of mad so there’s more force applied and so on. Then more force applied and people get awfully mad and they want revolution but it doesn’t take place. And the next thing you know, why, they’re more and more mad and then finally they’re an obedient people. They’re down here in the first zone. I mean the zone zero, actually. And when we get down here below into zone zero, the first thing you know, this government has put things over too far towards wrong. So the survival potential of a people is reduced to a point where the whole people is likely to fail under a new onslaught from life.

This isn’t a criticism of government, this is just an explanation. Because governments have declined in the past. I’ve been around and looked at a few of the ruins.

In other words, continual introduction of arbitrary not-to-be-questioned factors would interrupt completely the process of thought and make a person wrong. That’s what an engram does and that’s what’s wrong with an engram. So that it introduces these various factors and if they’re not obeyed, if such an introduced factor is not obeyed, then pain turns on to force the individual to obey it. So we have the introduction of an arbitrary and pain unless that arbitrary is obeyed.

You either obey the engram or the pain will come. Now that’s the parallel law. So the thought level goes down because the analytical mind is—its job is to be right, as right as it can be all the time. It has to be as right as it can be, otherwise the organism will die. So when it’s being as right as it can be right and it keeps getting these things hammered at it—wrong data, it’ll act upon them every once in a while because it is forced to. And it’ll make mistakes. And then it’ll figure out something else in order to correct the mistakes. And then it’ll figure out something else to correct the mistakes which have been made because the mistakes have been corrected. And the next thing you know, a guy’s life is so complicated he can hardly stagger through this maze. And he actually thinks he is going through a forest of problems and bumping into trees everywhere. And after he gets the engrams out, causing this sort of thing, he takes a look and he finds out that all this time he’s been bumping into one tree and it sure looked like a forest to him.

A person’s life then gets pretty simple because you get to taking out these arbitrary factors all the time. And actually life does get to be awfully simple. There aren’t these things, these things that have to be paid attention to and these things over here—that doesn’t have to be paid attention to anymore. And take a person who used to worry all the time for fear he might have his right foot twitch and he’s made terrific plans so that he sits down in a chair and he almost always hooks this right foot under a rung in such a way that it won’t twitch. And then he must be careful to watch people’s eyes to make sure that they don’t go down to see if the right foot is twitching.

You think I’m kidding you. Aberrations are just as silly as this, and just as jealously tended. After a while he neither has a compulsion to keep the right foot from twitching or a right foot that will twitch.

When he was a little kid, let’s say, he had some sort of a somatic there and his right foot would twitch a lot and finally suppressed him down to a point where he couldn’t let that foot twitch anymore. He had to break his own abreaction all the time, which isn’t bad.

You see how complicated life gets. Now, that’s a ridiculous one. It is a magnificent tribute to the ability of the human mind to compute, that it’s able to take care of all of these arbitraries an aberree has and still go along and make a successful life out of it.

It’s an awful lot of work. A person has to do an awful lot of thinking but the human mind . . . Because these arbitraries aren’t few They run up ordinarily in terms of thousands in one person.

You say, “We’re going to pull up this person’s principal neurosis,” and we find ourselves pulling up five hundred.

How anybody could ever classify an individual in view of the complexity of these things, classifying as a number or a rating or something as to insanity, I don’t know To many of us the mind is awfully complex. Basically it’s terribly simple, but its manifestations are terrifically complex. We speak of the file clerk. Well, naturally there’s some mechanism in the mind that hands forth data. How many other things are there? That’s an interesting problem.

Man’s been worrying about that. It’s not just one of these problems you throw away and don’t look at again. Man’s been worrying about this for about five thousand years I know about.

What are his various connections with the infinite universe, with God, the human soul, with this and that. He’s tried and figured and tried and tried. And the problem gets terribly complicated again because into his head has been impressed, as well as any other communication line that he might have—such as he might have for instance, a line such as telepathy—we don’t know this for sure, but telepathy, by the way, may be shut off by engrams.

Maybe the society by not believing in telepathy is . . . So we don’t have any telepathy operating. That’s a broken communication line, we might say. Well, that’s fine but here’s this telepathic line and when a fellow who is trying to communicate—he’s trying to communicate on the short-circuit basis. Nothing goes through. But something ought to. Something might be muted there. There are all sorts of possibilities.

In addition to that he might be thinking he was getting telepathy and only consulting a demon circuit. So then it’s entered in that there’s a big doubt that he is getting a telepathic message. Is he listening to a demon circuit or to a telepathic message?

Well, after a while he has so many either/or’s with no solutions that this board just can’t be worked anymore and he drops the whole thing.

That’s to some degree what’s happened, I suppose. If there isn’t any telepathy, that’s probably how it went out.

I haven’t, I hope, gone too far ahead of you on this. I’m trying to show you that being right is surviving and being wrong is succumbing. If a person is more right on an average than wrong in his lifetime, he goes on living. It says so right there. It’s true.

If he’s just a little more right than he’s wrong, consistently, he’ll do all right. Unless of course he hits one where he is terribly, very wrong. That’s too bad. The sudden one where he passes in his checks all in a moment, in other words, the space of time in which these situations are permitted to be executed has a great deal of influence upon this thing.

Now, there’s one of these for each dynamic. The optimum solution is when you have come as far as possible over on right for each dynamic.

If you knock out any one of the dynamics in figuring out these problems, if you only operate on three of these dynamics and you forget about the fourth one, there’s going to be something wrong about the equation. And one is going to have to take the consequences. So if one ignores self but pays attention to the next three, his problems are going to be just as wrong as if he ignored four and took the first one.

In other words, any one of the dynamics, because we’re dealing with the rock-bottom stuff of the dynamics now, when we’re dealing with this—this could be figured out now in terms of force vectors, with the same sort of a graph here. Showing how the dynamics are suppressed and how they’d go forward. That would be the way you compute them then. I hope I’m not going too far there. So now let’s mention something here that I was leading up to. If a man were an infinity wrong, in other words an absolute wrong, the wrongest he could get would be of course wrong on each one of his dynamics. He would have to be wrong on all four dynamics, an infinity wrong on all four dynamics. What would happen then? The whole race would die and God knows maybe big theta would collapse too.

In other words, that would be an absolute wrong. That would be an impossible thing. That’s immediately what it postulates. If the person was absolutely wrong in everything he could do, there’d go the universe— man, universe, everything.

If he were absolutely right, even for a moment, on all four dynamics, that would pose the fact that everything would survive for an infinity from then on, so forth. You see these are incredibles. Not only impossible, but incredible.

How right can you get? How wrong can you get? Well, you could get so right that there would never be any death anymore for anything. Or you could get so wrong that everything would die, including the whole universe. But an individual’s death is not very wrong. As a matter of fact, it is very slightly wrong compared to the whole race. It’s actually not terribly important. People don’t like to see it, but I’m talking now in a very broad sense, not sentimentally, but practically. One man dies, it is going to leave a hole.

Don’t believe those signs, by the way, they put up there saying, “You think you’re such a smart guy and so necessary, well, go down to the graveyard and take a look. A lot of them birds were indispensable too.” I’ve seen this sign around. It’s a goddamn lie. It is. You just can’t spare people, that’s all. I mean, the fellow was necessary. He is in his own line indispensable, I don’t care what he says.

You start into an organization, you start pulling people out of it left and right and say, “Well, this person had no function” and then you look around and, oh! things start going wrong. Of course a man could be, as part of an organization, wrong, very consistently wrong and if he were causing tumult and furor, remove him and things might go righter. But it might be a little smarter to try to remove his engrams which made him go wrong. So dealing with a group we still have to deal with mankind. It isn’t enough just to put a man out of a group and foist him off on mankind. Because something’s going to go wrong out there, too.

All of these things require adjudication for right and wrong, wrong and right. There’s no perfect solution. But we try awfully hard to attain one. And effort is continually directed toward building this line. What I wanted to get to then as far as the individual is concerned—you get down here to zero and you’re dealing then with individual death— actually there would be an infinity of triangles going below this level and an infinity of triangles above this level. This is not something that is hard to understand. It could be summed up about this basis: How wrong can you get? Dead. How right can you get? Infinity of survival.

Now, as we go up this line, these zones are labeled—you can observe they’re the gradients. Now, here’s complete apathy, which would be death. Here is feigned death. Come on up here, get the various degrees of apathy and then you get into resentment and then you get anger and then you get fighting and then you get boredom and then you get finally where a person is cheerful—they even get along fine —a highly rational level.

Now, along about this point there’s a break line on affinity, there is a break line at communication, a break line on reality, below which point you’re getting an increasingly reverse polarity. Above which point you’re getting an increasing agreement. In other words, you’re going up along this line, you’re trying to get up to the infinite in good affinity, right affinity, good affinity, you’re trying to reach the infinite, and we get about the middle of this thing and we start down and we’re getting reverse affinity. And what’s the first level of reversed affinity is just not to care about. Not to care either way. It’s a null point. That’s already halfway down the scale. That’s a null point. Below that, not to care about particularly, we start to get into faint threats to survival. You get a person who’s just mildly perturbed.

Now we get him and he’s slightly frightened. Now we get a point where he is afraid. Now we get a point where he’s terrified. Now we get a point where he is being broken by this onslaught against him. And then we get a point where he dies. Like that last one there, just well up above it he goes into an apathy.

You go down that line and we find that grief lies just above apathy and that just above apathy lies fear and just above fear lies perturbation. But between grief and fear lies terror. It’s just magnitude and more afraid after that.

Afraid of what? Afraid of being wrong. How wrong can you get? Dead. A person doesn’t have grief unless he has an ally. I mean, a person has got to be an ally of some sort, no matter if he’s a political figure, a motion picture star, there’s got to be something there—Papa, Mama, whatever it is, there’s got to be some affinity line in there, and so we get the point on an emotional level. I’m just talking about emotion now—affinity. That’s the single band. His death all of a sudden shockingly brings forward that some section of one of the dynamics has been wrong.

Maybe a person himself, as himself, did not initiate the solution to be right. Maybe he’s just part of the group, let’s say, but one of that group dies. If you saw in the paper the other day a picture of a group of marines in Korea a few weeks ago, and the driver of a jeep had run over a land mine. The mine had exploded and a marine in his jeep had been killed. And the picture is of the driver crying because he’s been responsible for the death of a marine. Now, that is, the point of it there— there’s one of the group, now he was infinitely wrong somehow or he felt he was wrong. And it’s one of the things he mustn’t do, see, is to let another member of that group get killed. So you’ve got a terrific shock reaction.

I mention the marines because they are indoctrinated in these things. And the marines have taken these points of indoctrination and they’re there naturally and they just punch them up, high. One thing a marine must not do is be responsible for the death of another marine or his injury. They take it very much to heart. So there’s grief. Fear or terror that it was going to happen would be down below a rational level. There was a moment of terror that it was true and then he found out that it was true and immediately went into grief. Have you ever noticed a person who is about to be told bad news? Or he gets the introductory remark, “I have something to tell you, sit down.” That person for a moment is in a state of shock, terror. There’s just an instant there. First a little fear, perturbed, fear, terrified, got the news, grief. Right down the scale. The grief will fasten in on it and then apathy.

Now, you can watch a person go down this affinity level whenever you tell that person about a death which would be on any dynamic an ally The test of any philosophical level postulate is whether or not it can be observed in real life. Don’t go check philosophy by going down to the library. Go check philosophy by going out into the street, into your home or into yourself, looking at the world. On any of these postulates they become real to you when you yourself have observed them, not because you have been told they are true. So think for a moment of that shock line that comes in on grief. On anything coming down to grief you can see that affinity follows this.

Now, think of this one: a person is mildly perturbed about his people around him, his job and so on. He doesn’t know he’s getting along well and somebody comes along and tells him that he’s just gotten the vote as the most popular guy in the place. The guy, first C, he goes in here, he wants to believe this thing. Now, it’s got to be confirmed a little bit more. And he finds out this is true, his affinity level and his survival potential will go way up. You’ve seen people do this. So we’re dealing with this one strata here, this one line, one corner of this triangle. There’s where grief lies. Terror here and so on. Lee Barr was telling me yesterday that a chap over at New York had mentioned— here’s how you make your auditing predictable—he had had pretty good results in getting people into communication with reality—heightening up their sense of reality by running out little fear locks out of them.

They’d run enough fear locks out of whoever it was—got some fear locks, the first thing you know, the fellow’s sense of reality would start to heighten. Why not? You’ve not only communicated with the past by getting this fear, getting it up—of course his sense of reality is going to go up because he kept running the triangle. Any time you start to lift this one, this will lag for a bit but follow. And any time you lift this one again, this one will lag a bit but follow. And so it goes around the three. So naturally if you start running out a few little locks of whenever this fellow was afraid, frightened, so on, you’re not down in the grief band. You’re coming up here and of course his sense of reality is going to improve. Naturally he’s going to get better communication. Even sometimes you can turn on sonic, just by doing this. But you would be able to predict that. You look at this series of triangles here and you’d say, “Well this—we can predict this.” This is what I’m trying to teach you to do this morning is to predict the Tightness and wrongness of what you’re doing and find out whether or not what you’re doing is right or wrong. And be able to measure up what you’re doing in the line of processing and you will be able to find out why you’re doing some of these things. All this might not digest right now, but it will come to you later.

You get in communication, what is the first thing that happens when you break affinity with somebody? He does something very wrong to you. The first thing you do is—you don’t think it’s right but he thinks it’s right. Well, it’s not right. Anger—starting down, first boredom, you start to get angry with him, then you break communication, “I don’t want to talk to this guy.” You have noticed people rather loath to talk to people when they’ve been angry with them? You will have a tone band, be a part of this tone band, it’s they want to talk, they want to tell them what they think. And hardly anybody could restrain them from doing this. But after a short time it’ll really solidify. Well, if they told him and this fellow had to sit down and take it, why, of course they’ve abreacted the thing as far as just one dynamic, they have been able to pick it up a little bit. But it’s not good to pick things up on one dynamic alone. The guy can go along through life living on dynamic one just so long, he’s neglecting three of them. And gradually the world will start kicking back at him gradually. Dynamic one gets crushed from everybody else’s dynamic, from the whole group dynamic, everything else will come down. They’ll break him down and he’ll only wind up in apathy. Sometime in the future he will. A man couldn’t be angry forever, in other words. It’s a dwindling spiral.

So, after this person has this terrific anger, he’s going to tell him off, he’s going to do this and that and so forth, we get apathy towards this one problem and we get here a break in communications. No communication to this fellow. We don’t want to have anything more to do with him. We feel bad about this thing and we just don’t want to have to be bothered. That is communication as it goes down through this tone band.

Now, when this goes down its going to pull this down and it’s also going to pull this down. After a while, there’s one thought that’s very common in society—people can get angry at other people and not want to communicate to them anymore and first thing you know, you will say, “You remember so-and-so?” And the fellow will say, “Oh, oh, yes, yes. Yes.” That guy isn’t real anymore. He doesn’t exist. And I have known people who even go so far as to say, “You know when I am mad at a person, I just pretend they don’t exist anymore.” Pretend, hell, I mean he’s gone down into this band, that person doesn’t exist anymore as far as he’s concerned. In such a way the whole society could go into an agreement on the nonexistence of a person, he probably wouldn’t exist, there’d probably be a puff of smoke where he’d been standing.

All right. Of course reality could be postulated in other ways. Let’s define reality in another way now. Let’s call it agreement. Let’s call reality agreement. We naturally select out of our midst those people who do not agree with our realities.

The man who would walk in at this moment and swear absolutely that an orange cat was standing here talking to you and would affirm this and protest and affirm his right to say so, so on, you would be the first to say, “Where is the local spinbin8 so we can put this boy in it?” We have naturally selected him out of the society. Man has been in the business actually of naturally selecting people out who were on a complete point of no agreement, because you know that an orange cat isn’t talking. You all know that but he—see? And a person gets that wrong, often enough, his reality is that far out of agreement with everybody else’s reality, he’s crazy.

Of course, it may be that an orange cat is talking! But we’ve agreed that this is not what’s taking place. So we have a reality about the whole thing.

All right, we can call reality agreement. So long as agreement exists, affinity exists and communication exists. When agreement doesn’t exist—“What we should do is elect a Republican president.” “No, we should elect a Democratic president.” “Who?” Affinity starts to break down here a little bit. Yow, yow, yow, yow, yow, yow, yow! See? Communication starts to break down here into zone one, because this is breaking down. So, here we have two different realities. They clash, boom! boom! In other words, any one of these things that goes down finds the other two being lowered. So we get disagreements.

Doesn’t mean that people working together have to agree with each other all the time. This would be a hell of a thing because their data is different. And a group working together, each one of whom possesses his own set of data, can contribute his experience into the group. He doesn’t have to agree with the group, because his data may be entirely different. That group therefore which makes it possible for these various sets of data to be used by the whole group will stay in solid agreement and it has great reality as a group. It will knit together and become possessed of a high level of affinity in the group, as it is communicating as a group. [gap] You can use these things. You certainly can. We get the little datum right now—somebody comes along and he says, “You know, by running out locks of fear, communication is established.” A persons sonic turns on, is what he says. The central fact would be he gets into better communication with his past. You run out these fear locks and you get sonic. And you say, “Yeah, yeah, that’d work out.” You could also then say that by getting all the grief off of the case you’d certainly raise the Tone Scale wouldn’t you?

Well, the toughest thing is when you get it down here on an apathy level—you get one of these on an apathy level. If everybody disagreed with one guy and they disagreed with him long enough and constantly enough, hard enough, after a while this fellow is going to start down. He couldn’t help it. And the group is going to start down with regard to this one. Because here he is down the line. He goes down here and he’ll sink into an apathy after a while. Here he’s perfectly cheerful. He’s agreeable. You come in, you say, “Let’s go to the show tonight.” He doesn’t much want to go to the show but he’ll go to the show. And even gets down about this far—you come in and you say, “Have a cigarette” and he wants a cigarette and he says, “No.” He’s just disagreeing. And you come down this far and you say, “Here’s your paycheck.” “What the hell do you mean bringing this paycheck in here!” Hm? See? I mean, his agreement is way down. In other words, something has broken affinity and he’s off communication a little bit. He’s down into this band right here. And then after a while you can’t get this guy to talk. He won’t agree with anything. But he won’t disagree with anything. His level of reality is way down here in apathy. He is making no action to agree or to disagree. So that his communication line over here is in an apathy. He isn’t communicating. And as far as caring about anything is concerned, no. He doesn’t. Now, we know there’s a board, one of these evaluation boards, for each one of the dynamics.

What happens to the person with regard to himself? Robert Louis Stevenson9 once said that the greatest lesson a man should learn is that he must learn how to be a friend to himself. That’s in San Francisco on his monument there. Not a direct quote, but here a man’s sense of reality about himself can be bad too.

Here you have the mind with regard to the matter which it is controlling—the mind with regard to the matter which is controlling it can become separated. It is in such wide disagreement with the matter it is controlling because it has been smitten with so much pain from this matter, there’s so much entanglement of matter—big theta and little theta—at this point, has been too much and you’ll get a disassociation. That’s what people do when they start going a little bit off, you know. They start disassociating.

Well, you get the mind disassociated from the matter more and more and more and more. That’s a man being crazy. He wouldn’t have known himself that he isn’t fully in control of himself.

Various things can be done to put a man more fully in control of himself. You can actually fix it up so that he could learn to do it without running on a demon circuit.

Now, you can get a person into a point where by exercise and by exercise alone, learning how to balance himself and so forth—a little baby is in perfect accord, mind and matter usually, unless he’s a very aberrated little baby, and he’ll go around and he’ll learn how to stand up and he’ll get bumps and so forth, but this is not serious. And he’ll learn mentally to respect what is happening physically and he’ll gradually learn how to balance himself and he’ll take care of himself better and better and he learns more and more skills and mind is still riding over matter. But when we get down to a point where mind is unable to control matter and on a reactive level they are too commingled—now you’ll notice mind and matter are a spectrum and that when they get too closely interlocked and beaten together, it’s pain. You’re getting a separation, so you’re getting less control. In other words, reactive thinking would be thought tangled up so thoroughly with matter that it can no longer operate harmoniously over it. That would be reactive thinking.

In other words, here you are doing very well, thought controlling MEST very nicely, going along fine. But then MEST has kicked back against thought a little bit here, a little bit here and they’re still able to function all right, a little bit off, but not too much. And then finally he gets a great enturbulence but neither one have any sort of a harmonic, and about this time you get a sort of a detachment, where thought will detach enough of its attention units to come up here. He’s out of communication with himself What’s one of the first things a fellow does when he starts to get very aberrated? He ceases to enjoy life. He can have aberrations which hectically tell him to be a glutton or something of the sort; he isn’t enjoying it. There is nobody sadder than a satyr or a nymphomaniac on the subject of sex. I mean, very hectic about the whole thing but actually no enjoyment.

He’s broken off communication because affinity is broken. And as far as agreement, that’s broken. You’ll get psychosomatic illnesses and everything else following in along the wake of this. So on the first dynamic, the mind can break off with the body. You find most people are only entered into themselves to a very, very slight degree. Very slight.

People have tried to express that fact in the past by saying, “Know yourself” or “Be yourself” or something like this. All they’re saying is that mind and matter better get together and operate in agreement as to what they are going to do.

Now we get an aberrated society, we have people start practicing f lagel-lance. The thing to do is just to beat hell out of the body all the time. That’s great. That’s a real breakdown. That’s an effort to destroy the matter so the thought can ride free. This doesn’t work, you know.

What you need is a harmonious intermingling. So what you’re trying to do on every dynamic—this is really the end on the highest echelon that can be stated at this time—the end of your processing is to disentangle points of turbulence between little theta and big theta, where you’ve got these points of turbulence, where it’s disharmonic, confused on each one of the dynamics—so that a man not only can handle himself and be himself and enjoy himself— you get those points of turbulence so we’ve got dynamic one this way.

Now, on the second dynamic, children and sex—and remember that the second dynamic includes those two things. People happen to overlook that. It’s the future race also.

You find incidentally that those people who are mean to children are normally very aberrated sexually. Also they can have the second dynamic selectively aberrated so that they are nice to children but don’t much enjoy sex. They can be selectively aberrated, but usually they’re completely interactive. So we’ve gotten the second dynamic in this shape and we straighten that out and so we have an affinity for the future generations. It requires an agreement that future generations, you see, are something one must have. If you get a disagreement on that subject, the rest of it will start to fall down, too. So we get the second dynamic.

Our end of therapy as far as the third dynamic is concerned is to get a fellow into shape so that he will get along with his fellow man. Psychology has almost 100 percent concentrated upon that one fact, to give you the limited sector of operation. “He was a well-adjusted person.” And that is really pauperized.

Because here’s your third dynamic. This fellows all tangled up as far as his group is concerned. He’s got to be able to get along with that group. And he’s got to be able to feel that he has as much right to adjust this group as the group asks of him to adjust to it.

See, in other words, it’s going to work both ways. You don’t want a sheep, a guy that’ll walk in and say, “Well, the walls are blue, so I turn blue.” That’s adjusting to one’s environment. Anyway  .  .  .

So, on the fourth dynamic also, you want man in harmony with man. You find all through an aberrated society you have turbulences on each one of these where — the little theta is trying to take over big theta. Right now you’ll find basically a large proportion of men when it’s presented to them and they look it over, they will agree, yes, man ought to go on in control of the universe. And you ask them specifically what they would do about it, and they may start to say, “Well, of course I mean man ought to be in control of the universe, but not the Russians.” Yeah, now we’re starting to break down this. And what’s the condition today between Russia and the United States? Communication? That’s really here. Communication between the two. (descending whistle) Agreement is in the second band, is going to go one way or the other. It’s right now on the flip of a coin. Because if Russia and the United States come together as thought and matter and MEST fighting thought and MEST, you’re going to get a terrific turbulence on the fourth dynamic. Terrific. And you’re going to get them sinking down into an apathy. With an action of this character, you’re not going to get anything going up the line on agreement. No nation, just because it was licked, ever agreed with what the conqueror was trying to do. It simply went down to an apathy. And no conqueror, no conquering nation really ever won, because he could never win on the fourth dynamic. That was always missed. So the empires that conquered by the sword fell down.

All right, those are your four dynamics and that’s what you’re trying to do on a philosophic plane—what you’re trying to do in the administration of processing. Mind you, the processing that you are learning at this time is something which can be improved and certainly will be improved, but along this echelon there will be much less improvement.

What I have told you here in the last hour and a half is much less perishable than all the rest you will learn about processing. Because out of this that I have told you here, all of this was developed. And ten thousand more could be developed the same way. There is not just one thing. There are many.

We have a Standard Procedure now that we know is safe. By this Standard Procedure, on the first, second, third and fourth dynamics, we can disentangle thought from MEST and let them balance each other gracefully.

By the way, we’re doing it now. The efforts are toward making it easier, faster, simpler to do, to accomplish the same goal. But there is processing—here’s your therapy and there is your effort to balance.

All right. Let’s take a break.

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