View source for Logics 1 through 7 (LA 521110)

'''Series:''' L&A

'''Date:''' 10 November 1952

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

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← [[Lecture_Index_LA|Back to Series]]

The Logics are as follows: The Logics are a method of thinking. They apply to any universe or any thinking process. They do not have to apply. You can get the doggonedest combinations simply by disobeying a Logic.

Some data which you should have in advance of the actual Logic, and one is the definitions of logic.

So let's take three levels here. Let's take differentiation and let's take similarities.

Now, in the general course of human events, these data have many times been covered in various ways. You will find a terrific rundown on this in Count Alfred Korzybski's work Science and Sanity, in a field that is called general semantics. The late Count Korzybski did a very splendid piece of work on this. And he analyzes identities of space and identities of time and identities of this and that. And his basic analysis of all this material is unparalleled. I give that to you without reservation; I have never read his work.

That's not said to be clever. The work was described to me in about 1945, I think. His basic tenets must have some degree of truth, because one day I was working out what general semantics should consist of and someone says, "Well, now, I see you've been taking notes out of Science and Sanity." I didn't have a copy of it, I've never had a copy of it. And here you have one of the tests of data: Can two people take the same basic data and by working with it, extrapolating, so to speak...

That word simply means getting some more and some more and some more and some more application out of the same datum; you say extrapolating, that's just theoretical adding up of data, if you want to use that word. It's a good word. I don't happen to know of one that means, really, more precisely what we're doing, in the English language. But you get two people and they're extrapolating from more or less the same data and they get the same answers, you have a little better guarantee of the validity of the data. And if you get several people who do the same thing and arrive at the same point, it's starting to look pretty good. It's starting to look pretty good. Or if you get just one fellow who is extrapolating from data and he's just putting data together and he's going on and on and on putting data together and just keeps working, keeps working, keeps working, you know he's on a right track. But then go over this and take a look and see how you can apply it and whether or not you agree that it's on the right track. And if you see that it is on the right track, why, then you go ahead and use it. Or if you just use some of the processes that have come out of this, and you find they work, then you accept the body of data as a whole. I used to do quite a bit of this.

Now, just working out, how do you think? Differentiation. The ultimate in sanity is differentiation; this is rivaled in insanity by disassociation. But disassociation is actually complete identification, and that's quite different from differentiation. A person can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. He can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. There are two cigarettes, and the person who tells you that they're the same is being sloppy.

Now, Alfred Korzybski, in working with this data, gave you some extras that you really don't need, and that is a process. Because his process is based on trying to train people to differentiate instead of identify, and the reason they identify instead of differentiating is electronic. And the person who is thus trained becomes slower in thinking, not faster. His IQ drops; it does not rise. That is on test. So it's a mechanical proposition. It's very mechanical. Differentiation.

Now, you've heard some people talk non sequitur. They say, "The submarines have the chrysanthemums because of the beer, no Empire State Building, after all," and look at you expectantly.

And you say, "What are you talking about?"

And you say, "Oh, again. Never didn't, did it?"

And they say...

Now, if you do that to a little kid and the little kid is a very bright little kid, he will look at you very brightly and he'll say, "Well, there's no spokes on the wheels!" Or he'll throw in something like "Well, Rolls Royce... Umhm." And you can go back and forth that way. And you have somebody come along the street with you, listening to this conversation going on, and you keep going on and you say, "Well, the ruddy rods are all on the left-hand side and that makes it far back of there."

And he says, "But it's below that point."

And you say, "Well, it's not really. It's liquid." And you go on and... If you find some adult who is listening to this...

He has to have his material in this form, otherwise he can't credit it.

People have what's known as a bullpen. Years and years and years after somebody has heard a joke, he may suddenly figure it out. He's got data waiting. He's trying to make the data add up to the data. And if he can't make the data add up to the data, he gets unhappier and unhappier and unhappier. Well, actually, there's no reason why he should get unhappy just because somebody walked up to him – schoolteacher walked up to him one day and said so-and-so and so-and-so, and he didn't add it up, he didn't add it up, he didn't add it up. And he goes along years later and all of a sudden gets this point – ptock! He's got that out of the bullpen.

But in an awful lot of people, particularly a person with no sense of humor, you have a larger, larger, larger bullpen, until the bullpen exceeds the size of the standard memory bank.

And then this person does this trick on you: "Are you sure you really know that word? Now, does that word really mean that? Or would you say it..." Here you're getting a line of ideas – zzzzzzz – like this. And all of a sudden they'll stop you, and they want to, not get the definition that you have of a word, but they want to go over this word very carefully. You've stuck something in their bullpen when they do this. Now, that is upsetting.

A person who is completely unworried about existence won't worry about you being sequitur or not. He won't care if you identify, actually. You can do anything you want to do.

And unless something he's trying to work out impinges on what you're saying, he goes ahead and he won't pay any attention to it. He just lets it ride – let it slide, dickens with it. He can figure it out because he can evaluate suddenly whether or not the situation is getting important. And if it gets important he will ask you for an identification of code. What symbols are you using? He'll want to know precisely what symbols they are, what they mean to you, exactly how this adds up, what the square root of all this is, and he puts it into this other problem – bing! – and he says, "Then that's what you mean?"

And you say, "Yes." And then you look at it for a second and you say, "Sss! Gee, that's what I've been meaning on that for years."

Now, he has made you do something that Voltaire often wrote that he demanded people do in arguing with him: "If you argue with me, you must first define your terms."

Now, in school they very often teach you that there is no such thing as a definition of terms, that every word means everything else to everybody else, and therefore there's no meeting ground of any communication, and so on. They teach general semantics in universities in the States, sometimes, and this is the general moral, is that "nobody can understand anybody and you're all out of communication anyhow, you little boob, and boy, are we fixing you up!" No other intention, really.

The funny part of it is that the terms are terribly precise, and the oddity is, is that when we have lived through a certain similar strata of existence, our terminology becomes very exactly other people's terminology. You have no real trouble understanding it. But people in the teaching profession often wish to excuse their own lack of communication by saying nobody can understand anybody and they mean different things by all these different terms. No, they don't.

The English language is the English language. If you met up with Shakespeare, you'd have to say, "Hm-hm."

And he'd say, "And I mean that by that."

And you'd say, "Oh, is that what you're talking about?"

Well, just straighten out the code book. Because all you're doing is flying signals. Look at a naval code. Naval code says "This flag, which is yellow and blue, means turn. If it flies below the numeral, it means turn left; if it flies above the numeral, it means turn right." You see that naval signal – you know whether it says turn right or turn left. Bing-bing, there isn't any question about it. Because words are symbols of action in the MEST universe. And it's only when we get sloppy, sloppy signals .

Supposing we had a signal: the TURN pennant over NINE meant "turn right ninety degrees." But the TURN pennant over NINE also meant "eat chow." But the TURN pennant over NINE also meant "retreat." Gee, it would start to get important all of a sudden, wouldn't it?

So the enemy is over there and you have to TURN NINE to get over there – or NINE TURN to get over there – and somebody flies NINE TURN and half the ships retreat. It's just that it isn't a good code book, it isn't a good signal book. And so does language fall down in this classification. And language will very often interfere.

Homonyms: "through." There's "he threw" and "through." It can become very foggy, by the way – language can – only where it has homonyms. And a nation is found to be as aberrated as it is homonym silly.

There is no more madder nation than Japan. And you walk down the street in Japan and you say to some Japanese, "Blah-d-blah, blither-blither," something of the sort. And he says, "I withhold my foul breath from your face," and "Yes," and so on. And he goes on down the street. And you told him that you were on your way home and you wanted him to go on to the office. And he took it that you were on your way to the office and you wanted to go home.

It's supposed to be a terribly hard language. It's not a hard language. It's as simple as baby talk, really. It's an awfully easy language in terms of languages. Some of the Malay languages are a little bit rough.

But in katakana you have this great big character, which is a Chinese character, and then you have the little katakana stuff up at the corner of it (if I'm using the proper terms on this; it's been years since I ran into this stuff).

Anyway, they've got the character and then they say how it's pronounced in Japanese. But do you know that two Japanese can stand together and converse with each other for a little while and then all of a sudden find out they're talking about two entirely different things, and with a great surprise find this out, and they promptly break out their pencils and pieces of paper, and they draw the Chinese character for the proper words they're using. "Oh. Oh, I understand; that's very good. Yeah, very good, yeah. I so solly. Yeah." Whee! That's a rough one.

They identify. And you will find that they're perfectly happy to do that. It makes bad communication. And they're perfectly happy to have bad communication. They don't want anything better than that. If you went in there and tried to straighten their language out and give them new words to support these, why, they'd be upset with you as all could be.

Now, you take katakana is, I think, if I remember rightly, some forty-seven characters – just sort of fishing this out of the hat. It's been ages since I ran into this. Anyway, some forty-seven characters, something like that. And when they write them all down they don't space anything – when they're just a stream of characters. There's no spaces that separate any of the words they represent. And boy, that sentence can read any way. It can read "The boy milked the cow" or it can read "Dogs are forbidden here" or it can read "The steamer will sail at nine." They don't care. Well, you just sort of infer from the surroundings what it's all about.

And that nation has the highest rate of suicide, has the highest rate of thick-lens glasses and did the most suicidal trick a few years ago. It's the doggonedest country.

I can talk that way about Japan because actually I'm very, very fond of the Japanese. It almost broke my heart in the last war to be fighting the Japanese, because I consider them a very interesting and a very, very nice people, as a people. And all of a sudden I was – kaboom.

That's a silly thing about war: You find yourself shooting up your friends and trying to explain to people that... They say, "Well, why should you feel bad about some of these bucktooth Nips?" and "They did this and they did that."

And you say, "Didn't we? Didn't we too?"

But they're crazy, those people.

It's fascinating; it should tell you a great deal. It should tell you that the sanity of an individual is dependent upon his ability to differentiate clearly and cleanly, particularly in the field of communication.

And what do you know? It has nothing to do with logic. In order to differentiate, you don't have to be logical. And what does this mean? It means that an individual who can differentiate to a tremendous degree can also create to a tremendous degree, and really is living in such instantaneous time (which will be covered later) that he doesn't have any real need to be logical.

Why does he ever have to figure anything out? He can create so much action that action always solves action: boom-boom-bing! Action, action. Or he finds out the whole universe is run wrong – boom! another universe. It does not make any difference to him. But here we have logic.

Communication in essence depends upon logic.

What's logic? It's a shade of similarities. It is never a shade of identities. Identities are theoretical things which exist in mathematics only and do not exist in the real universe. And mathematics is not directly applicable to the real universe but is only an abstract of the real universe, which makes it easier and handier to get some sort of approximation of what's going on in the real universe. Anybody can cast up any kind of theoretical mathematics he wants to cast up and he can get wonderful results, and he can also figure out all kinds of things that aren't there.

It doesn't mean anything's wrong with mathematics; it means that mathematics has a greater virtuosity than even a mathematician suspected. It's wonderful. But if you start identification with a mathematical formula, you can follow almost anything out.

If you start identifying with zero, for instance – whoo! You get the Einstein time formula. Oh, I've forgotten what it is, but there's t0 in there. And then people come around and they say, "Einstein's time formula. You know, it's the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equation as used and modified by Einstein, and that demonstrates that nothing can go faster than the speed of light."

And you say, "Well, wait a minute, it's got the square root of zero in it."

And they say, "Well, that's t0 and that's different. That means 'no time'."

And you say, "Yeah," you say, "that's a zero."

"Well, no, that's just zero time; that's the nonexistence of time. That's..."

And you say, "There's a zero in the formula!"

"Well," they say, "oh, I guess you could call it a zero. But this is mathematics and that's different."

No sir. No sir, it's not different. Algebra – all you've got to do is throw a zero into the equation and what do you get in algebra? You can get 1=2, 2=12; you get any answer you want out of an algebraic formula if you just throw a zero in it – if you throw a slippy zero in it – that says 1-1=2.. And what do you know? It can be worked out so it will: 1-1=2, because 1-1 is zero. And any time you throw a zero in...

So, an identification is usable in the theoretical abstract. But if applied to the world of reality or universes, it's insanity. And what's the matter with the insane patient? Why is he in that sanatorium? Well, I'll tell you why he's there. He's there because he doesn't know the bed from the bureau from the chair from the attendant from present time from 1760. That's why he's there. He really doesn't.

Now, some of the time he will know and he'll apparently differentiate beautifully. He'll know that you eat the food on the plate, not the plate. And he'll get along that way and he'll get along on some automatic responses alright. And he'll go into a dramatization. And this thing will run off like a phonograph record – it has no application to present surroundings. And what has he done? He's said that "this dramatization, this phonograph record which I am running off this way, that runs just this way, is applicable in this surrounding and solves the present problems." That's identification.

You could say a sane person has thoughts like this that he can connect or relate if he wishes. A logical person has thoughts, each one of which bears a resemblance to the last one, and that's kind of aberrated because it's stimulus-response thinking.

Have you ever had anybody tell you that you really couldn't think of an original thought because it depended upon the last thought? Well, that is an operation – that is an insidious, black operation. They're trying to convince you that you have no ability to think an original thought, and if you can't think an original thought, you can't have an original universe, and that every thought you thought depended on some thought you had just thought before. Ooh. They're showing you, you have no illusion, that you have nothing of your own, really – it's just sort of all running off in an uncontrolled, horrible stream that just goes on and on, that you think all the time, that all your thoughts are connected to all your thoughts and there's some shadow of this... Nuh-uh, that's not true. Fortunately for our sanities that is not true. But gee, it sure is good.

A ridge behaves this way. A ridge with facsimiles on it behaves this way, but not a thinking being. He can cut his thought line anyplace he wants to and start thinking about something else at will. It does not depend on earlier thoughts.

Now, you could also draw logic like this. You could say all these data are more or less related, you see? These are data, each one of these square boxes. And therefore, this thought is vaguely connected to that thought, see? And therefore, we have an association between those two thoughts.

I'll give you a better example of that. We start talking about apples and that leads us into talking about apple boxes. And we say, "Well, let's box up these apples and sell them at the market." It's perfectly logical.

Or we get this (this would be completely illogical): Man on a subway train, subway train's making an awful lot of noise, and he turns over to the other fellow and he says, "I'm trying to get off at Wembley. Where is it?"

The next fellow to him says, "This isn't Wednesday, it's Thursday."

And the next one says above the roar of the train, "Well, I'm thirsty too. Let's all get off and have a beer." Now, you see, that's non sequitur.

To make that logical we'd have to tell it this way: The fellow leans over and he says, "I'm trying to go up to Wembley."

And the fellow says, "Well, I'm not going there till tomorrow and it'll be Thursday. If you want to go there tomorrow, I will show you the way."

And the other fellow says, "That reminds me, I haven't had a drink for hours. Let's all get off the train and have a beer."

It isn't funny, is it? But it's logical. And that's the funny part of logic: it's not funny. And that's the funny part of humor. Humor is either complete identification or complete differentiation.

Now, you take the fellow on identification: We say he rode a horse, and he "rowed" a horse – r-o-w-e-d, he rowed a horse. That, by the way, is perfectly all right. I mean, to an insane person that would be logical – rowed a horse up the road.

All right, get those three categories.

Now, that's identification.

Now let's take a look at these three compartments in terms of electronics. We could sort of say we have condensers. These cells, electronic cells, could be handled at will and any time; they are nicely insulated. One is insulated from another perfectly, they don't discharge one across the other, and therefore they can be controlled and regulated with great ease. Right?

On this one you don't have as thorough an insulation, but you do have an ability to link these things together to make a flow possible: the flow will go along here, you'll get some action on the flow. That's all right.

But what about this one? That means a complete short circuit. Although this is in no wise connected with structure, it is peculiar to note that the protein molecules of the brain in an insane person are short circuited. A current entering any part of the head will evidently restimulate any part of the thinking apparatus. I mean, he starts thinking on anything, then he thinks of everything. But he thinks it all in the same time and without anything at all. So you get what is known as confusion, and that actually is the MEST universe – all force vectors going in all directions simultaneously: short circuit. Everything equals everything. Great.

Now, you've got to have a differentiation, and you've got to pull this identification at least up to similarities to make an insane person well.

The only thing you have to do to make an insane person well is to show him or have him recognize the difference between the attendant and the bureau. And I'm not talking just in nonsense; that is actually the best process. Get him to locate the attendant in time and space, get him to locate the bureau in time and space. Now get him to locate the bed in time and space, get him to locate his pyjamas in time and space. Now get him to locate his hand in time and space and his body in time and space. And all of a sudden he says, "I'm here and this is 1952." And that is the best technique I know of with which to treat the insane.

Now, identification, similarity and difference; then these are the three levels. All right.

And by the way, you don't have to keep too close a record of this. You'd better keep notes on some of them, but we will have these in AP&A, which will be issued to all of you as soon as it's manufactured, and that will be in ten days or two weeks.

Male voice: It is in AP&A already, isn't it?

We have this edition of it coming out here.

Logic 1: Knowledge is a whole group or subdivision of a group of data or speculations or conclusions on data or methods of gaining data.

We have said, in that, knowledge is data – knowledge is data. It's facts or data. And we don't, notice, say about what. We don't say it's data about anything, we just say it's data. A datum is a fact. It would have some identification, then, with space, time, energy or matter, or some combination thereof. And that would be a datum; it would be a descriptive thing. It could be the thing itself or it could be a symbol representing the thing itself See how wide our definition is here.

Now, Logic 2: A body of knowledge is a body of data, aligned or unaligned, or methods of gaining data. There it is.

Now, Logic 3 is: Any knowledge which can be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity is capable of influencing that entity.

And that is a rifle shot straight into Kantian reason. That is a good, solid, big, heavy-caliber rifle shot. That is a declaration of independence over the types of nonsensical, mystical balderdash they were passing out 160 years ago, and which killed the ability to think in man more than anything else I know.

The philosophy was one of the beautiful control mechanisms. It said "All knowledge that is any knowledge at all transcends the realm of human experience and therefore a human being can never contact it and never know it, so knowledge is beyond knowing for you. Back into the pit, you slave, back into the salt mines; you will never know."

And that was the byword: German transcendentalism. And that ruled the world of knowledge and philosophy and laid poor old Philosophy in her grave for about 162 years. Interesting, isn't it?

They said all knowledge is above the realm of human experience. Well, just look at that for a moment, and you'll find out: How can knowledge be above the realm of human experience if the human being is even using the word knowledge to describe it?

It says anything can be sensed by an entity which can influence the entity. Anything can be sensed by the being in some fashion or other, otherwise there isn't any such thing as a one-way flow.

That's what it says in electronics. It says a flow that can run this way on a wire could be rigged to run the other way on the wire. And it says if you get a flow coming this way on the wire, you can measure it as coming this way on the wire. That's all. And it says that we are not then governed as dirty little puppets of some sort or another, all busted up and kicked into the gutter and used any way anybody cares to use us. No, it says we are beings capable of knowing. And that's all that Logic says. We are beings capable of knowing. And that is actually something that will probably always go unremarked, but that is what broke the back of the human mind – just that.

And the first statement I ever made on that was: They keep telling me in the psychology department, they keep telling me in India, they keep telling me here and telling me there that it's all too complex for anybody to know about. Well, I am affected by the activities of the human mind and the activities of other minds. And if I am affected by them, I know I can know about it.

And everybody said, "Oh, no, no, no! Nnnnnn! Nasty, nasty, you must not touch." And boy, a lot of them are sorry I did. But don't let me catch anybody here falling in that same pit of saying it's all too complex, or agreeing with somebody saying we can't know about it, or we don't have the right to know about it, because experience has told us adequately, by this time, that we have every right to know about the human mind.

And it's told us something else: That there are two additional rights that man has to have before he can achieve political freedom. And one is the right to his own life and the other is the right to his own sanity. And those had better be added to the rights of man. And if you today are fighting a revolution or find yourself fighting a revolution, it will add up eventually to fighting for those two rights: one's right to his own life and his right to his own sanity.

Now, right here on Earth, right to one's own life would be quite revolutionary. But it applies to the whole MEST universe – the right to one's own sanity. Because throughout this universe, that is the line that has been denied. Nobody had any right to his own sanity. So the declaration is very simple. It says "You have a right to know. And if you have a right to know, you really should have a right to continue knowing." That, of course, is just an interpolation by me and an opinion by me. That's not necessarily data.

Now, a corollary: That knowledge which cannot be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity or type of entity cannot influence that entity or type of entity.

If it can't be sensed, measured or experienced by him it can't influence him. So let's have done with voodoo, mumbo jumbo and the great god WallaWalla. Just skip them. Because any time you feel yourself creepily wondering whether or not you aren't being influenced from some direction, go find your auditor. For two reasons: (1) You'd have to be in awfully bad shape to be so influenced, and (2) because 99 and 9999999 percent of the time... And 100 percent of the time you could identify it. So what you're protesting against would be your inability to identify. And if you can't identify something immediately, what do you know, it's not important.

So, just on the subject of knowledge, we are dealing with the level of knowledge. We're dealing with epistemology, actually, that branch of philosophy which has to do with identifying the identity of knowledge. And that, by the way, is Scientology; the therapy is Dianetics.

Now, Logic 4: A datum is a facsimile of states of being, states of not being, action or inactions, conclusions or suppositions in the physical or any other universe.

I'm going to make a change on this. I have just a moment ago defined a datum for you. I said a datum was a symbol of, or the actual thing, of space, time, matter or energy in any universe. It was a symbol of space, time, matter, energy or any combination thereof. Or it was the matter, space, time, energy itself, symbol of. That's a datum. In other words, it is any scrap of or any combination of or a symbol of any scrap of or any combination of any universe: datum – no matter how great, no matter how small. And that's a datum.

So that change should be noted by you.

A datum is not a facsimile. I am very relieved and pleased to tell you that a facsimile is not necessary to the process of thinking, but is a record of the process of thinking which is used by people in thinking. In other words, there was another method of thinking. And in better knowing that new method of thinking, we have much wider powers of thinking. But this was in the realm of discovering something new, whereas the facsimile system is actually – as all these datums were slanted – wholly Homo sapiens. That's how Homo sapiens thinks. And we're having to use this whole list of Axioms, and this is the changes you'll find in it: the whole list of Axioms now are applicable to the thetan. So we have a list of Axioms which apply to Homo sapiens, and the ones I'm giving you now apply to a thetan. They're up-strata each time, a little bit – a little higher knowingness.

Now, Logic 5: A definition of terms is necessary to the alignment, statement and resolution of suppositions, observations, problems and solutions and their communication.

"If you'd argue with me, define your terms." That's just taken straight out of Voltaire's mouth and made more complicated. And we can change that Logic 5 a little bit this way: A definition of terms is necessary – a definition of terms. We can go worse than that and we can say a definition of data. You've got to describe what data you're talking about before you can talk about the data.

Definition (and by the way, this is a very, very slippy thing) – this is the definitions of definitions. A Descriptive definition: one which classifies by characteristics, by describing existing states of being.

Example: People are insane and there are five classes of insanity. One is schizophrenia, another is manic-depressive, another is dementia praecox, another one is oh, I don't know, over the barrel and another one is the polka. These manifest themselves by having that... the patient itches, and so on. What is schizophrenia? Schizophrenia applies to a patient who itches. Difference: some schizophrenics don't itch. Now get that, that sounds awfully wicked of me and vicious, but you know I had to wade through all that stuff. You don't have to and I had to.

I waded through it under the supposition that I could find something out. You know, I'd get bashed in and mowed down by these words, words, words. Well, that's definition by classification: describing different states of being. That's a very bad way to define.

Now, we get definition, Differentiative definition: one which compares unlikeness to existing states of being or not being.

"Smallpox: Smallpox is different from other illnesses because it leaves poxes." "Diphtheria is diphtheria because it is not like smallpox."

Well now, those are ridiculous examples of this type of classification. But it's circular reasoning. And you be careful of this when you start studying something. Read it over, and if it's just saying that it is classified by being classified, or by things that are like it, that's a pretty kind of a poor definition. And it's classified by things which are unlike it, that's a poor definition for the observable reason...

Now, the Associative definition is: one which declares likeness to existing states of being or not being.

Now we get an Action definition: one which delineates cause and potential change of state of being by cause of existence, inexistence, action, inaction, purpose or lack of purpose. That sounds complicated, but that's not.

A definition should contain within it both the cause and remedy – the cause, effect and remedy: "Measles is that illness which causes children to break out in rashes and is cured by serum so- and-so, so-and-so." You could then go on and say it's similar to some other things. But get that: it's a good definition; it tells you at least what cures it – kind of a little bit of what it looks like and then what cures it. That's a good definition.

Now, if you could also say – you could say this with certainty – "measles is an illness which is caused by the virus measleus..." Nobody knows what causes it, by the way; they pretend to have taken some pictures with an electronic microscope of the measles virus recently and-hm-hm. Then they found a bunch more that were just like it and they didn't cause measles, and that was very upsetting. And then the ones they did find didn't cause measles invariably. But they released a big news story about it when they found it. Anyway, they never release the third and fourth news stories; that makes it tough for us. We come along, we have something new that will make you well and everybody says, "We know these things that are new and make you well that appear on the front pages of the papers never make anybody well the third week. So we know that they're not there."

Well, anyway, descriptive definitions are just fine, but an action definition is what you want to demand. And learn to demand one of the physical universe. What's the cause of it? What's the effect? And what remedies it? Or what changes it? And demand that of your definition. And if you can demand that of your definition, there isn't a problem under the sun, in this or any other universe, that'll defy your understanding or resolution. Just demand those things: What it is, what causes it, what its effect is and how to alter it. And you can solve it. Any mystery of anything under the sun, by the way, resolves under the same conditions, just by definitions only.

Now Logic 6 – and please know Logic 6! Please, please, I ask you this. If you don't know anything else in this subject, know Logic 6.

Logic 6 is: Absolutes are unobtainable. There's no absolute universe. There's no absolute Clear. There's no absolute right, there's no absolute infinity, there's no absolute zero, there's no absolute wrong, there isn't an absolute black, an absolute white – nothing. And so don't let anybody say to you, "A Clear and yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yap."

And you say, "Well, where do you get that?" And they say, "Well, it's yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yap, and it follows, therefore, they would be perfect. And this last person you processed – Theta Clear – came down and my wife was minding her own business and... Well, that's what happened. And therefore, he couldn't have been Clear because he wasn't perfect and good."

Doesn't follow. It's completely a non sequitur identification of perfection with a term which you have. All Clear means in the first place is taking enough numbers off so you can add something else up on the machine. It's an adding-machine term; it's an electronic-computer term, is where it came from. It means to clear the computer so it'll think.

And it doesn't say how well it's got to think now; you just clear it up so it can think better. You clear a human being up so he can think better and you have a Clear. You've done a clear. You can do a clear of this lifetime, you can do a clear of the whole track, you can do a clear of this person to such a degree that he can create his own universe, or you can clear this person in such a way that he's cleared of the MEST universe and can go then and create his own universe. In other words, you have terrific selection here.

Absolutes are unobtainable!

This is the primary error that Aristotle made. It doesn't seem to be a very important datum. But it can gum up the whole field of thought. They kept saying there's right, there's wrong. The world is laid out for most men in terms of black and white. And I'm sorry to say, for an awful lot of engineers, they let the thing categorize itself into yes and no and maybe. The yeses and the noes they use they think are absolutes.

I took an engineer one night who was working on logical machines – he was working on strategy machines, rather. And he was working on these machines, and I explained to him, "You are working on three-dimensional logic just because you have such a thing as Boolean algebra which you apply to a telephone switchboard. The person's 'in,' 'not in,' 'maybe he's in.' 'Yes-no,' 'Yes-no,' 'Yes-no.'"

I said, "Just because you're doing that is no reason it applies to logic. I can demonstrate to you that there's at least twelve values in logic."

"Oh," he says, "no, no. There are only three values in logic," he says. "There's yes, no and maybe."

"No, no. There are twelve." And I proved to him utterly and conclusively – he finally agreed to me – that, well, if you wanted to be sticky about the whole thing, there were twelve values in logic.

There was "not-so-maybe maybe," and there was "a-lot-more-maybe maybe," and so forth, and I could show him how you could work this out and make Boolean algebra come out a little bit better. And so he bought it; he bought it. And I did the meanest thing a guy can do when he does that: I sold him this thing lock, stock and barrel, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building and the president of the United States thrown in. He was all set to go out and build strategy machines which had twelve knobs on them instead of three, when I proved to him just as easily that there was eighteen-valued logic. That was very mean.

Because the truth of the matter is that logic is infinity-valued; there's an infinity of values in logic because logic is a gradient scale. And you'll take that up in just a moment. And I've just been talking about it – Logic 7: Gradient scales are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data.

And that's the one you're going to use in processing. And you're going to use that and use that and use that and use it and use it and use it in processing. So get it, get it well; know what we mean when we say a gradient scale. A gradient scale means a progressive scale from "none of," to a "slightly little bit more than none of," to "a lot more than none of," to "a lot more than none of" till "you almost got some" – just little tiny grades. Mmmmmm! And boy, you can connect any datum of the physical universe to any other datum in the whole physical universe with a gradient scale.

You can make, by logic, anything happen to anything. By logic, you could actually be circuitous and laborious enough to go around Robin Hood's barn far enough and to show that it was a gradient scale enough, of all the gradient scales that there were enough of, and you would come up in the end with a connection between, and prove to somebody completely and utterly, that Camembert cheese was the sole diet of rabbits – and if it weren't, it sure should be.

Now, that is an idiocy, really, and would show up in the logic as an idiocy. That's because it isn't a true gradient scale.

The true gradient scale with which you are working is the gradient scale between the static zero and the all-motion infinity of theta and MEST.

Theta is a theory – it's just a theoretical thing; it's a theoretical zero, an actual zero with no motion, no wavelength. And an all-motion thing would be something in the vicinity of MEST. That all-motion thing would be – let's see, something that would be terribly all-motion (I mean, would be way up the scale on it) – would be something like the stuff of which the companion star of Sirius is composed: one teaspoonful of the companion star of Sirius brought to Earth would weigh one ton.

Now, boy, that's getting up there to an all-motion. And I imagine that that would make plutonium look like a cap in a cap pistol. That stuff really must be unstable. But just exactly what element this would be or where it is on the periodic chart I wouldn't be prepared to say. But it's evidently there, by the behavior of that companion star.

But the point I'm making is, you're getting up toward an all- motion. Matter is almost an all-motion thing; it's getting heavier and heavier and there are more and more vectors, more and more vectors to less and less time, less and less space, time and space decreasing, decreasing, decreasing. So you've got a gradient scale from zero to all-motion, theta to MEST – meaning, by MEST, the MEST universe, this universe, this MEST universe. So you see what that is and how that works out? You've got a gradient scale running from zero to MEST. See where man stands on it?

You look at the tone scale. The tone scale is a gradient scale which runs from theoretical behavior of theta down to the complete MEST, which is much below where you generally pick up the tone scale – complete MEST: wavelength, motion, and so forth, of this character. All right.

What's the gradient-scale principle? It is more of it and more of it and more of it, or less of it and less of it and less of it on the same subject.

Now, how red is a red bicycle? The mind answers that. You can see that there's a pretty red, red bicycle, isn't it? I mean, there's a red, red bicycle there. How red is a red bicycle? All right. Let's take a look at a red bicycle and find out how red it is. Well, there's a gradient scale of redness, isn't there? So we'd have to know where we were on this pale pink up here to this deep, deep infra of some sort. It's a gradient scale of redness. It'd pass through Chinese red and it'd go through salmon down below it. Up above it, it'd go through scarlet, carmine. How red is red? It's a gradient scale of redness.

How sick is your preclear? He has no absolute illness. He's on a gradient scale. And every preclear is on the same gradient scale. He's somewhere on the scale and the behavior at that point of the scale is that behavior for that point of the scale. You know how bad off he is. And at the same time, you know how "enMESTified" he is. He's as bad off as he's bogged down in MEST. So you see what you have: a gradient scale between theta and MEST, which is also the gradient scale of sanity.

And how many things does this gradient scale represent? Well, it represents an awful lot of things. It represents the activity of energy; it represents a lot of other things. You should know about a gradient scale, you should be able to think in gradient scales and you should always know this about gradient scales: That when your preclear is bogged down, you didn't apply a gradient scale. You gave him too much. He can do whatever you want him to do if you give him little enough of it to do at first.

You can use a gradient scale in this fashion. If I never taught you anything tonight but this, it'd have been all right as a night well spent. And it's just this fact, just this datum: Your preclear can do anything you want him to do, providing you define what you want him to do – especially to yourself – and then give him a small enough bit of the gradient scale to do of it. And the process works like a dream if you do that. And if the process breaks down on you, it's because you don't understand the gradient scale or because you haven't given him little enough. There's [a] much-less point on the gradient scale.

You want him to imagine a body. You say, "Go ahead and imagine a body." And he doesn't imagine a body, he can't imagine a body. And you say, "All right. Imagine a head." He can't imagine a head. You say, "All right, can you imagine one hair?"

No, he can't imagine one hair. Don't throw in the sponge, because there's a lot more gradient scale left.

"Can you imagine a fingernail paring?"

"No."

"Well, can you imagine one cell in a fingernail paring?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes, I guess I could imagine that. Yeah."

"All right. Now let's see if you can get two cells."

"No, can't do that. I can just get one cell."

"All right. Well, get that cell and now put it over on the mantelpiece."

"Oh, I'm having an awful hard time moving it out of the center of the room."

You say, "Well, how about putting it over by the door?"

"Mmmm, I couldn't do that."

"Well, how about moving it over to the other chair right near you there."

"Doesn't seem to want to go."

"Well, how about making it roll over and go one millimeter?"

"Yep, I reckon I can do that."

"Now can you make it go two millimeters?"

"Well, I can make it go one and a half millimeters."

We eventually get this cell moved, and we get it moved to the door, we get it moved to the mantel. And then we find that we can get two cells and we can move them to the door and put them on the mantel. And then we get this other thing, and the first thing you know, you say, "How much cells you got on the mantel now?"

And he says, "Ulp! I've got several."

You say, "You got enough for a fingernail paring?"

"You know, I think I have."

"All right, put them together as a fingernail paring."

"Well, what do you know! I got a fingernail paring." Gee, it'll be so prized, he'll be so proud!

When you get up the line in tone, you won't really be in good communication with how tough this is for some preclears. You'll say, "Oh... ah, let's see. Let's mock up London and all the inhabitants and yeah, get it down to the last hair, and so on, and get the smell of the whole place, now."

Guy says, "Ha, I'm sorry, you must be talking to somebody else. I can't do that." And we finally get him down to where he has one electron going around the ring.

Boy, that's good. He's now got one electron going around the ring. By golly, once he gets something like that, too, it's hell to make him get rid of it.

Now you have to make him get two of it, three of it, six of it, eighty of it, millions of them. Gradient scales. If you can't create much, create a little. If he can't envision much time, have him envision little time. If he can't get out of present time very far with recollection, gradient scale.

"You say you can't remember people?"

"No.

"Can you remember your wife?"

"Mmm... well, not really."

"What's the last thing she said to you when you left home?"

"Mm-mm. No."

"Well, did she ever say anything to you?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure she did."

"Well, remember one of those times."

"No, I couldn't do that."

And you say, "Well, now, you say you don't remember people. Now, how about me? How about me? When you first walked into my office, you remember me sitting there?"

"I thought you were standing up. I... no, I can't remember that."

"Well, now, where were you when you walked into the door?" (You know, like these quiz programs? They give you all the answers?) "Where were you when you walked into the door?" You see?

"I don't remember that."

Believe me, his sanity depends on your getting him to remember some tiny gradient of time. And you finally work it down to this: You say, "See my hand there on the chair?"

"Yep!"

"Now note where it is."

"Yep!"

"All right. Now I'm going to move my hand back on the chair here. Where was it?"

The guy will say, "Right there. What do you know! Right there." And the guy's liable to brighten up and look like he's about to cry or something of this sort. You would be utterly amazed at the change that can come over a preclear like this sometimes.

You look at him and you say, "This isn't possible."

One fellow walked in one day; everybody had been processing him. He was from some God-forsaken place – New York or someplace. And he was... Everybody had been processing him and so on, and they never thought to ask him the magic question, "Can you remember something real?" This is the one question you must always ask a preclear if he appears even the least bit vague to you. "Can you remember something real? Can you remember a time when you were really in communication with somebody? Something like this – just a little scrap memory that you know is true, that is of the MEST universe?" Because that's the way you get him back on the MEST time track and then into his own universe. All right.

And this fellow had never been asked these questions. He'd been processed by auditor after auditor after auditor after auditor, and this fellow is sitting there with lenses to his glasses that you couldn't have measured with an ax handle! He's sitting there with his... with just... oh! Boy, he was in bad shape.

And I looked at him and I said, "Well, now, let me see. Can you tell me something that's absolutely real to you? Really real to you?" He thought and he thought and he thought.

"Well, can you remember a time when you were really in communication with somebody?"

He said, "Just now with you. Yeah!" He said, "Just now with you." Kaboom! Beautiful shape.

I said, "Now can you remember something real?"

"Yes!"

Something else, something else, something else – brrrrrrr, boom! Just like a big-toothed saw going through that reactive mind, or through those ridges – picking them up, picking them up, identification, identification. Saw him around the next few days, happy as a clam.

That is the break point of a case. Cases break in little, sudden jumps. You will see them happen. Sometimes you'll process this case and you will process it and you will process it and you will say, "Oh, no!" And you'll process it some more and you'll process . "Something must be happening," you say, "by the gradient scales alone. He must be coming up a little more slowly than I can notice it. I hope. And it probably isn't happening, probably isn't happening."

But one day he walks in and you say, "All right," rather wearily to yourself, "let's get a time when you were... Well, no, let's mock up...

Preclear will say, "What's the matter? You feel confused or something?"

And you'll say, "Well, no, not... not... not really. Of course, I've been processing you for a long..."

"Well," he said, "I didn't know." He said, "Am I making you upset?" He said, "Well, maybe I better run out all these sessions on you. Yeah!" And the guy will brighten right up and feel wonderful and go home and just be in beautiful shape and be at work the next day. And you'll ask him next time, you say, "How's your lumbago?"

"Oh, my lumbago is – oh, been ages since I felt any lumbago. I mean, wonderful st..."

You say "What broke this case?" Well, very amusing. What broke this case is you broke him on help. You see, a man gets bad off in various ways. But you could take any psychotic and you could put him on an E-Meter and you could find out something in the universe which he was still capable of helping. He's still capable of helping something somewhere. Maybe all eight dynamics are wiped out to 7.99999, but there's this one-millionth of a dynamic that he can still assist. And maybe that was you.

Or maybe it was the cat as he came in the door. And you didn't know how low this preclear really was. Maybe you didn't test him adequately or something. And all of a sudden you found something he could help. Now, it's just a tiny little thing, but if he can help that he could help something else, he could help something else, he could help something else. He could feel he could help a lot more than that. And all of a sudden he can help himself. And that's where you're trying to get him. He's just sunk on the whole subject of trying to aid anybody.

Why? Because all the people that have been around him since time immemorial have been convincing him that he was of no use to them. He was on an "I've got to be needed," and everybody kept saying to him, "We don't need you. You are of no use to us." And then suddenly one day he finds out he can help something.

Now, your process is definitely indicated there on a gradient scale. Help this, help that, help something else. And you can actually drill him on this and make him mock up things to help. And the first thing you know, by golly, he'll be a cock of the walk. He'll be in beautiful shape. Gradient scales.

If you can get him... his attention in any way, any preclear can find a little bit of what he has to do to get well. And boy, that's an important one, because it also permits you to figure out what's right, what is wrong. There's a gradient scale of rightness, a gradient scale of wrongness; there is no absolute right, there is no absolute wrong. Right above that, "Absolutes are unobtainable," and below that, "Gradient scales are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data."

Now, it's very possible that auditors, here and there, in the last class, might somehow have missed this datum, because I didn't stress it very hard. And I've been observing their work and I've been observing that their work fell down only on one thing, really: the gradient scale and a knowledge of how to use it. The gradient scale. They'll have the preclear mock up this, that, something else, something else, and then do things to them.

"I can't." He says, "I can't do it." And the auditor throws in the sponge! Hmm.

Next time I catch an auditor doing that I'll make a gradient scale out of him. Because if you ever made up your mind that you're going to have the preclear do something, don't leave the ground! Don't leave the subject! Don't leave the preclear until you make him do enough of it to keep him from invalidating himself! Because if you set up something for him to do and he doesn't do it, he goes eight feet below ground. But if he can do a little tiny bit of it, he's happy. He's real happy. Then he feels good.

And I won't mention any names – we just had the case of that this afternoon, the preclear in this case having a little bit of difficulty (not very much) getting out of a corpse somewhere on the track and out of his body in present time.

The auditor says, "All right." He says, "You say you'd let down all of your teammates – you'd let down all of these teammates if you did any of these things, and so on? Well, mock up your teammates and shoot them all down." Now, maybe he said only mock up a dozen teammates or maybe only mock up one teammate and shoot this teammate down. And maybe he might even have said, "Take this teammate and make him lie on his back." Maybe he got to that gradient scale. But it didn't work and the preclear couldn't do it. And the preclear was lower than a snake when I saw him; he was quite low. And he didn't attribute it to just that fact.

What was the proper thing to do? Well, this is a problem of teammates. You don't have to know its details, it has no real bearing on the subject or the case even. But here it is, the auditor has already, for some reason best known to himself, given the preclear something to do. And now he doesn't work down the gradient scale. He's asking the preclear to do the most extreme thing on the gradient scale: destroy. Destroy. That's tougher to do than create, any day – in processing. So he's asked him to destroy something that he has been given to believe is deterring the preclear from getting well. Now, aren't we getting interesting.

What he should have done is bring the fellow down to a point where he could handle the teammate, just handle him. Just move him in time and space a little bit or change his uniform buttons. Just change something about this teammate. And if he couldn't do something to the teammate, let him get a ring that belonged to a teammate. Or if he couldn't do something about a ring that belonged to a teammate, have him do something like cover up a footprint a teammate has made. And if he couldn't do that, have him go over and pick up a piece of bread that a teammate has just thrown aside. Or have him pick up an empty cartridge that the teammate has just fired and has thrown away – anything that has to do with spacing [placing] in time and space, and a little bit of it.

And that was what the solution to that problem was. And it comes under the heading of knowing what a gradient scale is and how to use it. If you can get him to do a little bit of it, you can always get him to do a lot of it – by gradient scales. And gradient scales solve right-wrong. They solve valuations for the preclears. He's on two-valued logic, and you're all of a sudden moving him over. He wants to know if something's right or wrong. How do you answer the question? Just tell him about gradient scales.

All right.

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