A NEW SLANT ON LIFE (PART 3)

ON HUMAN CHARACTER


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

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

The basic impulse of Man is to produce an effect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PLAYING THE GAME

PLAYING THE GAME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FREEDOM vs. ENTRAPMENT

FREEDOM vs. ENTRAPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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JUSTICE


What is justice?

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

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

In Scientology the following definitions now exist:

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

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

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

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

INJUSTICE—Failure to administer existing law.

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

RIGHTS—The franchises of citizenship according to existing codes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is justice.

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THE VOCABULARIES OF SCIENCE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HOW TO STUDY A SCIENCE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluation of Data

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

What is the evaluation of data?

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

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

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

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

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

A Look at the Sciences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fundamentals

Fundamentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE HUMAN MIND


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The right foot. 7. The back of the neck.
2. The left foot. 8. The nose.
3. The right cheek. 9. The right hand.
4. The left cheek. 10. The tongue.
5. The toes. 11. The left hand.
6. The back of the head. 12. The stomach.
If you have gone over these members, investing carefully, aliveness only in each, you
probably will have received various aches and pains in areas where your concentration was not
fixed or at least, experienced grogginess. Try it several times.

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

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COMMUNICATION


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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