REVIEW OF THE THETA- MEST THEORY

A lecture given on 25 June 1951

Evolution and the Tone Scale

If you are not familiar with the basic postulates of the Theta- MEST theory, they are well covered in Science of Survival. But I would like to give you just a little bit more on that, a quick review.

The reason we consider Theta as independent of the physical universe is not so much because vast amounts of evidence say that the physical universe cannot contain Theta as it is that, by compartmenting Theta out, we can regard it without getting cluttered up on the subject of electromagneticgravitic impulses.

If we just say it is outside the physical universe and it has its own laws, we open the door wide for speculation and understanding regarding it. But the second we say that this is physical energy of some sort which is different than other physical energies we have so far encountered, we have a tendency to assign to it certain physical- energy properties.

As far as I can tell at this time, Theta as an energy has very little relationship to the physical energies which we know about. Where it begins to partake of physical- energy manifestations is in the organism— which is, after all, partly a physical- energy organism. And additionally, after it has become enturbulated with the physical universe, it begins to take on certain magnetic properties; it behaves in certain ways.

But we regard this energy above that point and we End that it does something very weird and very strange. Right away when we look at it, we see affinity, reality and communication. We define reality as an agreement on what exists. We define affinity as something which is cohesive, but it seems to be a little bit more than cohesive. And communication is a transfer of something.

But electricity doesn’t do this. Nothing in atomic and molecular phenomena compares across the boards with Theta and ARC. We are immediately out of the standard laws of energy, and as long as we stay out of them and regard Theta as Theta we are on good, safe, solid ground— although, apparently, we are on no ground at all!

Let us just get rid of the concept that man is mud and say that there is this energy which is motivating him, and that this energy, coming into collision with physical- universe energy in space and time, produces this strange thing that people have been trying to understand for a long time, the life organism.

By so regarding it we are achieving results, and that is a scientific test above all other scientific tests. We are predicting answers, and when we look to find out if those are applicable we find that they are. In other words, we are now equipped, with the Theta- MEST theory, to do a larger and better piece of extrapolation and derivation than man has been able to do before in the field of the humanities.

The Theta- MEST theory came into being very shockingly with the realization, one fine day, that I was standing on a stage and didn’t know what I was talking about. Everything was going along fine in Individual Dianetics; I had everything nailed down. The first and second dynamics were in good shape and we were getting along fine. Then one day I stood up on a stage in California to give a lecture on the subject of Political Dianetics. I thought it was all licked; we knew how to put states together and everything else. I stood up and started to talk, and then I said to myself, "Wait a minute. Do I know anything about this? Sure, that’s easy. Societies arrange themselves on the tone scale. But that is just descriptive! It doesn’t give you the dynamics of the society. What is the third dynamic?"

That was last September. And by October I realized that I had become so engrossed in the first and second dynamics in Dianetics that I hadn’t followed the curve all the way back to 1930, and my original reason to enter the field in 1930 was simply that thought had not been isolated as an energy.

What is the energy of thought? My whole concentration in studying atomic and molecular phenomena was "Where in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena does thought lie?" And I very successfully discovered that it didn’t lie there and couldn’t lie there as far as I was concerned, because memory could not be stored by any known means. It was all right for somebody in Keokuk or Vienna to sit there and say memory is stored in punched protein molecules, and then go on with this tremendous extrapolation of how these energy waves are stored in punched protein molecules or something of the sort. As a matter of fact, that theory didn’t come out until later; that is a refinement.

The existing theories of 1930 were perfectly workable to anyone who did not know atomic and molecular phenomena. But the second that you looked over this specialized field of energy, you found out quickly that there was no form of energy small enough to act as memory storage and that the human body did not contain minute enough divisions to contain these things we knew as physical energy. Even when we tried to extrapolate on up the spectrum and postulate unheard- of shortnesses of wavelength and infinitesimal bits of energy— microergs and things like that— we still found out that the human mind could not do it by existing theory.

So instead of saying "We must now cancel out that the human being is an organism"— which has been the scientific method so far— we said, "There must be something else here that we don’t know about. There must be something operative other than standard atomic and molecular phenomena as it is related to the physical universe."

I went all the way back to 1930 and came on forward again. It didn’t take very long, because an enormous amount of data had been accumulated along the line which merely needed to be coordinated. As a matter of fact, it only took four days of very intensive discussion and thought on the thing to get back to where it had started originally and then bring it on forward and find the third dynamic.

The moment the third dynamic was located, it was understood that an organism— a social organism, a group— had its own energy. As soon as it was realized that a group had its own energy this could be demonstrated.

Then it was necessary to find out how this applied to the first and second dynamics. We went back to the first and second dynamics and they picked up remarkably through the application of the Theta- MEST theory. Suddenly types of processing that had been very difficult to communicate became easy to communicate. Furthermore, it was possible to figure out new ways of doing it by the application of the Theta- MEST theory. Most importantly, it resolved many of the problems on the third dynamic so that we knew something about organizations of man, even down to as finite a number as two— the auditor and the preclear

They form a group. Why is it they can process each other at all? Why is it that processing requires an auditor? It does. By the Theta- MEST theory, you merely postulate that here you have a group and where you have a group you have a quantity of Theta which is interior or exterior to the group (we don’t care which). It nevertheless exists there as a group; it is demonstrably so.

Here we have phenomena which is not embraceable by the atomic fission boys. They can certainly raise hell with Hiroshima but they can’t take a single person out of a spin bin except in a coffin. This is the difference.

The primary difference that we are running into, then, is that we are working with a basic postulate which refines the humanities quite markedly and puts them into a predictable state of affairs instead of such an unpredictable state. Theta, of course, can be said to be an energy of its own universe which, when impinged upon the matter and energy in space and time of the physical universe, will create an organism known as life. That would be pretty basic as a definition; it is very simple. You can say the component parts of Theta which we now know are affinity, reality and communication. It seems to break down into these three manifestations.

When these three factors of Theta impinge themselves on MEST, we have computation, and until that happens we don’t have computation. It takes a uniting of Theta with MEST to bring about computation— which is to say, understanding.

Now, you can take affinity, reality and communication, impinge them on matter and energy existing in space and time, and you will get any and all methods of computation (i. e., mathematics) that exist today. You can actually derive that. You can sit down and scratch your head over it and figure out all the forms of mathematics there are; they are all there: calculus and theory of equational and arithmetic and all the rest of it. This immediately points up that the three points of affinity, reality and communication, when united into MEST, demonstrate comprehension, understanding, computation.

You would make a mistake if you said that reality and agreement were also understanding and computation. It takes all three of these things to make understanding. Shorten one of them and the understanding becomes unbalanced; shorten two of them and it becomes very unbalanced; shorten all three and there is no computation.

As these three elements go into MEST heavily— too heavily, on an enturbulative level— comprehension and understanding disappear, and you merely get the magnetic super association and so forth of MEST itself, and you get the organism applying the only law that MEST really follows— the law of force.

Force is the weapon used by that organism which is very enturbulated with MEST. From 2.0 down, you have the organism using force rather than reason. Here is the punishment- drive theory; here is the theory of "So they won’t work? Whip them! And if they won’t work then, kill them. That will show them! " There is MEST really backing up against Theta.

On the other side, we have Theta coming on into MEST. Theta can exist as reason fairly well down to 2.0, but then breaks up into force. However, Theta has a trick, and you should know about this trick: Theta itself does not have force. If Theta were a physical- universe energy, naturally it would have a force component. But it doesn’t have a force component.

It is all very well to say that, with the Theta- MEST theory, it is all solved now. But we really don’t know all there is to know about Theta. When you get down there and take a look at this theory, it says that until Theta comes into MEST, we are not at all sure of what it is doing. But when Theta first runs into MEST it starts running a cycle: It goes very heavily into MEST, gets thoroughly enturbulated, kicks the free Theta back out again, comes back and charges into MEST again, gets enturbulated and gets kicked out again.

But what is Theta doing every time? It goes in there and it gets a computation and then comes out with the computation. It keeps learning the laws of MEST, and it learns them so that it can turn MEST against MEST and that is how we progress. We turn the laws of MEST against MEST. We learn something that is the reason, the natural law, behind a certain behavior of the physical universe, and then we use it against the physical universe. Theta itself has no force; it merely has comprehension and computation, reason and retention of reason.

This extrapolates all the way on out. You can postulate that no organization— no organism— ever went together without being suddenly crushed into MEST too hard. Then it withdraws itself, and it has learned something about the natural laws of this MEST it was trying to conquer, and it goes back into the MEST again with those natural laws.

The cycle of death and life is an organism cycle, from organism to organism. Evidently, Theta goes into an organism, creates an organism, enturbulates, and death ensues. But something happens there; there is a sort of a physical line. There is a sort of a physical- organism line which goes through the unending stream of protoplasm. We don’t even have to step out into Theta bodies. We can make this digestible even to a biologist, because we can say that the Theta- MEST line is carrying along the unending stream of protoplasm which comes down through the ages, and is the cycles of life.

Here we have the obvious fact that no organism exists here today which doesn’t have direct ancestors. Way back some time or other something happened and we got a steady stream forward of organisms through time and space, and it will keep on going. That is the unending stream of protoplasm, and we can say that the Theta and MEST are doing this impingement and withdrawal and are carrying along the line of protoplasm. Theta makes another organism, backs out of that organism through death, and it has then learned a little bit more.

You could explain this on the basis of the cat’s habit patterns. The cat has learned it has to do certain things, from generation to generation. We don’t even have an exterior understanding there; it is a sort of built- in mechanism. You take a kitten, separate it from its mother at birth and raise it separately, and the first thing you know, there sits the kitten washing its face. These are built- in habit patterns— genetic patterns.

Additionally there happens to be, evidently, a Theta line— a Theta- body line— which sort of travels along the side of the protoplasm line. There is more evidence saying it is there than there is evidence saying it isn’t there. So by favoring this theory on that side, you will find that here you have another cycle which is even more easily explained: the Theta body.

Theta has gone into an organism and it has been kicked out by death, and it goes into the next organism. Each time it learns a little bit more, until finally Theta has gotten very well educated on the subject. One of two things then happens: either Theta gets so thoroughly enturbulated that it just disappears and isn’t anymore, or it learns enough so that it can withdraw itself and disenturbulate itself in the organism in one lifetime.

That is Dianetics; it is actually a mechanism for licking death.

The reason for death is that, organism by organism, the Theta has to learn more and more and more about MEST. The reason for death is that an organism has now learned all that it can but it is so thoroughly enturbulated that the Theta can’t do anything more; it hasn’t any more force. It has to withdraw one way or the other from that organism, and so we get death; there is the death cycle. Then we would get the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death; birth, growth, decay and death. People have been talking about that cycle since the early days of India.

We are doing it, in Dianetics, in one generation. That is one of the reasons an effort to stop Dianetics would be darn near impossible. It just so happens that the evolution of knowledge and the evolution of life sort of comes up to a point with an organism where it will graduate across that one evolutionary jump; there is an evolutionary span. Somewhere along the line enough facts and enough data are going to get accumulated for Theta to learn how to disenturbulate itself in one lifetime. That is Dianetics, and that is really all we are doing.

Now, it so happens that organizations behave so clearly like organisms that you get cycles of organizations. For instance, you have twenty people and they form a group; they are in agreement as to certain similar goals and purposes; there is an ARC in that group. The thought would be that if we cleared all those individuals we would have a cleared group. That is not true! We could clear the group and not clear the individuals and we would have a cleared group.

This is fortunate, not unfortunate, because if we had to wait upon the eradication of engrams out of everybody on the face of the earth before we could have a world without war, I am afraid we would be working for a long time. Fortunately we don’t have to; we can take the organism of an organization and set it up in such a way that it is no longer a psychotic organism. That is what we have discovered on the third dynamic. Group Dianetics won’t be out for a long time yet, but the actual truth of the matter is that organizations and groups today are psychotics. They are psychotic sponges; I can’t think of anything lower on the psychotic level than sponges. They don’t even have nerve lines; they don’t have memories. They are so terrifically introverted that their chances of doing anything against the environment as an organism are very slight.

Therefore, the most "efficient" groups we have are down in the death band: armies and navies. All they have to worry about is what they are going to blow up next, so they can be rather efficient organizations.

What does a psychotic do? "What do we blow up next?" You can take a bunch of civilians— take a few lawyers and a couple of engineers and make officers out of them, and a bunch of boys out of high school, good kids who are having a lot of fun around the hamburger stands and so forth— and all of a sudden have an organism capable of destroying cities! And yet if you ask any member of that organism "What do you feel about killing human beings?" he will say, "Who wants to kill human beings?" But put a gun in his hands as part of that organism and he goes out and kills human beings. That is a psychotic organism!

The sanity of the group is only faintly related to the sanity of the individuals who go to make up the group. That is how rough this Theta- MEST theory gets. The group is so thoroughly an organism that it can be insane regardless of the people who belong to it. It has its own Theta and that Theta is either enturbulated with engrams or it is all messed up and disorderly because it doesn’t have a purpose. There is something wrong with the group and it will function in the most blundering and horrible fashion imaginable.

What we are doing in Wichita, by the way, is building the second organism of Dianetics. The Theta had departed out of the other organizations.

Theta will pull MEST in under it. There is a natural attraction between Theta and MEST. YOU put out enough Theta and MEST Wild move under it rather automatically; it is very strange but it will do that. And you put out enough entheta and the MEST Will move away from it or collapse in its vicinity.

Did you ever see a fellow complaining "I never get anything out of life, and I never have any lucky breaks; everybody else got a lot of lucky breaks but I never do"? He goes down to a gambling table and throws his buck on the gambling table and loses that too. The MEST moves away from him at great rapidity.

The MEST had begun to move away from the Foundations at such a fast rate that they just died. There wasn’t anything much you could have done to them.

Here we are carefully building an organism. This organism has got to consist of certain elements, and we are going to put in each element at the time it is ready to go in. For instance, it will probably be six weeks or two months before a modified nerve line goes into this organization so that you have a nervous system— in other words, communication lines. They are your nervous system. A modified communication system will be put in in Wichita in about six weeks or two months, but that is about the earliest it could be put in, and then that probably will not be refined for another two or three months into a full communication system.

This organism is growing, and it had better grow according to plan because if it stops growing according to plan, if it suddenly gets darted out in some weird direction or other, we will start to get another psychotic organization. We can’t afford one. Lets be smart this time and make a two- generation species whereby in the first generation it is a very dumb organism, and in the second one it gets awfully bright and efficient. That would be quite a trick if we could do that.

There will probably be a third Foundation before we get through. Ten years from now this will probably collapse, but right now it is going ahead very smoothly because we are paying attention to laws that we know exist concerning Theta in its conquest of MEST.

Now, what is the purpose of Theta? The purpose of Theta could be said to be the changing of MEST. YOU could say it was the changing of MEST rather than the conquest of MEST, and that way you embrace everything Theta really does do to MEST. Because, believe me, there is a lot of Theta at work behind the atom bomb. All they are trying to do with that bomb is change MEST. YOU see a big article in the papers: "Our government is very proud. They have accumulated more explosive power than all the bombs and bullets fired by all sides in World War II and in all the seven hundred years preceding!" In other words, the United States Government today has this much explosive power at its disposal— are they proud! Here is Theta quite illogically and irrationally saying, "Boy, can I change MEST!"

It is like a little cartoon they had down on the stage at the California Institute of Technology. Over to the side of the stage, pinned up against a curtain, was this cartoon of a man standing there: He has a little tiny capsule and he is addressing a roomful of scientists, saying, "Gentlemen, I have the end product here of all scientific research down through all the generations. In this small capsule I contain enough explosive to blow up the whole universe!"

Fortunately, Theta does not deal exclusively in those lines, because if Theta wants to survive there still has to be MEST.

So there is a definite cycle here of creation and construction. There is a death cycle by which Theta will bring certain things to death and it will bring certain things to life.

Just pure reason tells you that there can’t be any creation without destruction. Supposing trees had kept growing from the earliest age till now, and supposing we were unable to destroy anything: this would be a funny looking world. It would be so deep in piled- up timber we wouldn’t have any place to walk. We couldn’t destroy it.

Fortunately, little bugs and woodsmen have not spared those trees, and forest fires and things like that keep this debris cleared away. We say, "Oh, that’s too bad; that forest fire swept over all that land." It is too bad, but at the same time you can’t get too sentimental about it. If nothing were ever able to destroy that forest— God help us.

We could never build a nice new modern building if we didn’t tear down the tenement first.

So there is destruction as part of the computation of Theta. It is changing MEST. But the best way it could possibly use to change MEST would be to build up and manufacture an organism large enough and powerful enough that the organism itself, through its motivations, could command sufficient knowledge of MEST to really change MEST. That would be something like man.

Man has the science of physics now and he is going along pretty well on the science of physics. When man progresses in physics, it is natural that, for instance, we drive better automobiles. The big level of production is right there along the line of bigger automobiles and bigger buildings and bigger movies and bigger this and more of that and so on. That is all MEST activity. We are accumulating MEST; we are taking more and more of it in cognizance.

But the more we learn about that, the more we will fall away from what you might call the Theta universe, if that consists of spiritual considerations. The more we understand of the MEST universe, the less likely we are to go researching into the Theta universe. That is not smart, though, because an organism had certainly better know what it is composed of; it had certainly better know how to back up into that Theta. That is what we are doing right now and it is really paying dividends; we are backing up into the stuff we are made of.

The organism itself stands at a sort of a crossroads between Theta and MEST and it has properties— composite properties— which give it some command over Theta as well as over MEST.

There may be such things as Theta perception for instance. There may be a lot of things. It is fascinating. Buck Rogers with his conquest of MEST is a pantywaist compared to what we are doing in a conquest of Theta, because this has frontiers and ramifications that man has just never looked at before. We are out in the wide, wide world of Theta.

You start looking at Theta and you pick up one little pink piece of this big jigsaw puzzle and say, "Now, this little pink piece is— look at it, it’s turning white and it belongs right here in the puzzle." That is a fatal gesture. You had this big jigsaw puzzle and there were pieces scattered around, and there were blue- striped and pink and brown pieces, and you kept trying to find white pieces to fit in. Every once in a while when you picked up a piece and looked at it closely you found it was white and you could add it into the puzzle, and you were getting all these white pieces into it. For a while you didn’t realize something was happening, but a horrible thing was happening every time you picked up one of those pieces; every time you picked up one and fitted it into the puzzle about a thousand more showed up out there. So you picked up another one and a thousand more showed up.

We are definitely in the field of "you can win," and it is fun. It is going to take a long time probably for man to realize fully, as he goes in the direction of Theta, that he can win.

Every once in a while you will read some learned scientific treatise where some stupid fool is saying, "Now that man has conquered his environment and that we understand all there is to know about this subject . . ." That fellow is just asking for it, because in the next issue of the same journal somebody will have found a basic postulate which completely blows open the field of biology or something of the sort, and it extends the knowledge of MEST down in a brand- new direction. So, when they pick up this piece and find out it is white over here in MEST and fit it into the puzzle, they get a bunch more showing up. A good scientist knows today that as he goes into the world of MEST, the more he finds out, the more he has in front of him to find out, and that he can’t win. We haven’t yet gone far enough into Theta to have this horrible fact smite us this heavily.

There are more imponderables about Theta today than there were five months ago; a little bit more is known about Theta today, but there are more imponderables and we are getting more and more. It goes on out to the far horizon.

So, you have the fact that an organism can be a group or it can be just a life organism, and it is composed of Theta and MEST. MEST itself has an evolutionary chain; MEST evolves. For instance, take all these tricky little biochemical products; those are MEST. Only Theta organisms could make those products. MEST is being changed.

Once upon a time there was a nice, clean prairie here, and prairie grasses and prairie flowers and a few buffalo wandering around and a few Indians, and it was all quiet and pastoral; now look at it. The change which is taking place is a MEST change, and this is a MEST evolution that we are going through here, really. Here is space and time and a prairie. Those grasses are organisms and those buffalo were organisms. Man’s viewpoint, half the time, is he considers life organisms as his MEST. They are just physical universe; if he needs them, he takes them.

Here you have MEST going forward. The bricks in that building across the street not too long ago were lying out as part of the MEST plain in a clay pit; then an organism came along and made bricks and built the building. That is evolving MEST. But MEST evolves, as I said, even into chemical compounds and this sort of thing. We know about the evolution of life organisms.

And there is another evolution. There is a present time "staff of life," you might say, whereby the chemicals and sunlight are being put together in such a way that you have life. A basic unit exists which takes chemicals and sunlight and makes form from it. That is algae and plankton and various things.

Other organisms do not have the power to take chemicals and sunlight and put them together into an organism, so they eat the basic converter. And then other organisms come along and eat the lesser organisms, and so on ad infinitum. We have, then, a cycle whereby man is being supported and is allied to and is dependent upon practically every form of life on earth, which is our universe at the moment. I hope it won’t continue so forever; it is a very small planet. I met someone not long ago who had flown around it twenty times. You can see how small it is getting.

Here, then, is the staff of life operating in present time. You go out and eat fish. That fish is unable to feast on plankton: he has to eat a smaller fish which eats a smaller fish, which eats a smaller fish, which eats a smaller fish, which eats plankton.

The only reason I am bringing this up and mentioning it is that formerly the physical scientist who was trying to make sense out of the humanities looked at the tooth- and- claw law of the jungle; he looked at the life- eat- life, dog- eat- dog world and he based his conclusions upon that observation. He thought that this was it, and this was all there was to it. So, of course, he missed the boat on ARC, because ARC doesn’t compute very well when you look at the tooth- and- claw world.

But there is this tooth- and- claw world of all of these various species interlocking, fighting, interacting and, way up here at the top, supporting something. But we will be supporting something.

Man has ceased to be a comestible. He is not looked upon by any species, except a toothless tiger or a blind shark or something of the sort that doesn’t have any more sense, as a comestible, though he is mistaken for one very often. Most animals and even fish shy away from man. We are not popular with the animal kingdoms.

Now, the lower life forms of course are unreasoning. But as we come up along the line we get into higher and higher levels of organisms. We probably are evolving into a new gradient species, and it will probably evolve into a higher one. And each time the test of the organism will be how much more MEST it can change in order to, in the long run, support more Theta. That is really the test of a Theta- MEST organism.

We will move upward to some time when we are building a new planet to go around a sun that was manufactured yesterday, and we will then have about the level of evolution which evidently Theta is tending toward. That is a pretty high goal.

We should realize then, just with this little sketch of the subject, that we are dealing with something which is not merely speculation. As a matter of fact, you can explain it to your preclears if you want to, like this: "For thousands of years man believed he had a human soul. And then for about a hundred years he figured out he didn’t have a human soul, and look what happened to the world during those hundred years: we had all these wars and everything got torn up and so forth. Theta is really the realization and computation on the basis that man does have a soul, and this is part of the operating mechanism." But that is a long way from the whole story.

Actually, man has been trying to find this thing called a human soul for about as many years as he is old. As soon as man started to reason, he figured out there was something there that he didn’t quite know about. Now, I want to show you the tone scale as it relates to the Theta- MEST. theory.

Way up at the top of the scale is pure Theta. At 4.0 is Theta as it comes into an organism. As Theta comes more into MEST it moves down the tone scale, until, at tone 0, Theta is really crushed into MEST and the organism is dead. That is all there is to the tone scale.

As the Theta gets more and more into MEST, it gets more and more irregular in its vibrations until at last the vibrations are such that Theta nulls itself out. It damps itself out and that is the end of it. It isn’t vibrating anymore; it is dead. You could say it comes down to tone 0 and it won’t vibrate in MEST anymore. It kicks itself out, and evidently then, and only then, can cohese back up at tone 4 again.

Tone 1.5 is the band of recognition that something is threatening loss. At 1.1 something is threatening loss but the person will not quite dare do anything as a frontal attack to it. In fear, we get a recognition that loss is liable to take place, and down at grief loss has taken place. Apathy is the level of "Loss has taken place and I recognize it."

Up above 2.0 are the gradient scales of sanity.

This is the background derivation of the tone scale.

At tone 0, then, you have Theta— affinity, reality and communication— vibrating at such a level of dissonance in MEST that it has damped itself out; it can no longer exist in MEST. Higher on the scale it still is of a vibration which permits it to coexist with MEST; it can exist with MEST. But up above tone 4 it is at such a pure vibration that it can’t exist with MEST, and there you have the human soul, the spirit and so forth.

People have tried to account for this— exactly what it does— in a thousand different ways. I am certainly not going to go overboard on it when not even the boys in Rome know what it is up there.

Now, you can figure this out on the basis of three musical notes. Three musical notes are being struck as a nearly perfect chord is what you have as tone 4. As you move down the scale, these three notes are being struck with a little discord; at 3.0 they are just a little bit off but not too unpleasant. Then at 2.5 they are being struck a little further off. At tone 1.5 they are being struck in such a discord that you have actually got noise when you hit them; that is anger. Then at 1.1 they are struck with a discord which would be not unpleasant to hear unless you thought about it, but if struck for a very long time it would be pretty darned unpleasant. ARC is damped out.

Down at grief this chord is so far out that it doesn’t make sense; it is just flat. And down at the bottom of the scale it is gone completely; it is not a chord.

That is what you would consider pitch— the "inter- pitch" of three notes. And then you have volume. The volume is the difference between, for instance, fear and terror. Fear and terror don’t occupy two different positions on the tone scale; terror is just more volume of fear. Grief is more volume of being sad or of being a little hopeless. Deep apathy doesn’t mean deep pitch, it means more volume of being apathetic.

Now, just as you have those three conditions in music— pitch, volume and quality— so do you have pitch, volume and quality on the tone scale. If you keep that in mind, you can practically derive a tone scale. You will know roughly what a person is going to do.

For instance, take volume on anger: You take three musical notes and start building them up in disharmony with each other, and if you build them up to a high enough volume, it will start breaking things; it would start destroying eardrums and so forth. Whereas you could build a real musical note up to that volume and it wouldn’t have the same effect.

There is an interesting experiment that they love to do in a physics laboratory to demonstrate sympathetic vibration. They take a tuning fork, usually a wooden one which puts out a very low note, and put it in a resonator, and they have another tuning fork somewhere nearby. You strike the first tuning fork and it rings; then damp it and you will find that the second tuning fork, which you haven’t touched, is ringing too— if they are both the same note.

But if the second one is a different note, when you hit the first and then damp it out the second one will not be vibrating. However, if you hit the first one with enough volume, you could theoretically force the second one into doing some kind of an action. You could actually force it with wave volume into doing something, but it would not be the corresponding note and it wouldn’t have any great volume to it. That is sympathetic vibration.

Now let’s set up a person and pretend he is a tuning fork, and we will have him vibrating at 1.5 (let’s make it obvious). Then somebody needles him a bit more and he starts vibrating at 1.5 a bit harder. Then he starts going 1.5 a little bit harder, and the next thing you know, he sets up a sympathetic vibration in another person of 1.5.

But what is it that is 1.5 in this second person? It is his reactive- mind level engram which says anger. And that is the key of restimulation; that is how one person keys in another person. Sympathetic vibration— this is just an example of how it occurs.

We set up a person near somebody else, and this person has grief and a lot of volume on the grief. Eventually the engrams in the bank on the subject of grief in the second person will key in. You put up enough grief on one person, and another person in his area will eventually key in on grief. It is the same way with apathy or anywhere up the line.

This is corresponding moods. What you are getting here is an ARC covibration and, actually, a MEST covibration. You can take a whole mass of people who are perfectly calm, and all of a sudden from some other source something hits the Theta of the group, and you get mass hysteria— bong! The group Theta revibrates into everybody and they all go down in a mass hysteria, and you have these strange mob reactions and so on.

Mobs can exist, by the way, at any level of the tone scale. Somebody being cheered with tremendous acclaim is being cheered with a vibration high on the tone scale.

Now, Theta fits easily into MEST UP in the top half of the tone scale. They go together very well; they are interoperative above 2.0. They have an attraction for each other; they go along just fine. There is something in Theta and there is something in MEST which makes them go together and makes them work together above 2.0.

And there is something about being below 2.0 which makes them want to work apart. Furthermore, there is something below 2.0 about vibration: the vibration below 2.0 is so different that it is antipathetic toward the vibration above 2.0. Entheta in great volume will attack Theta and try to drive it out; Theta and entheta will smash against each other and try to repel each other, if you can imagine that reaction.

You get entheta vibrating very heavily, get it up in volume, and it will suddenly knock Theta out. If you show any group enough Theta to disenturbulate the entheta which is that group, the group will come up on the tone scale. But if you show a heavily entheta group— a very enturbulated group— a little bit of Theta, watch what happens to that Theta: it enturbulates, fast!

Theta has to pretty well safeguard itself to keep this from happening. It will get enturbulated every time because of this. A big volume of entheta will knock out Theta. In other words, there is a counterattack going on. Actually it isn’t a counterattack, it is a sympathetic vibration; it is a natural consequence of what happens on this vibrational scale. But it is easier to see if you say it in terms of "entheta attacks Theta"; the two will attack each other.

There is the mechanism of death. After the organism has gone too far down the line, Theta and MEST separate and what little Theta remains in the organism will go on out. We have here, then, in vignette, the modus operandi of human behavior.

Now, communication, reality and affinity start to reverse polarity as they get down the tone scale. When you get reversed polarity on affinity and reality, what happens to communication? When you get a reversed polarity on communication and reality, what happens to affinity? They are all going to go in the same bundle. It is actually a triangle that we are working with, and this triangle becomes more and more antipathetic.

You cannot, in other words, take Theta and suddenly remove communication from the bundle and work on only the other two. They will not work; without communication they are not interoperative. They will enturbulate as a result. They are not separable.

You should know, then, these basic facts, because you as an auditor will find yourself really up against it if you don’t realize that what you are doing, in the majority of the cases that you will process, is taking a very, very small amount of Theta and attacking a very large quantity of entheta with it. And if you don’t realize that, if you don’t know this basic operation, you are liable to overlook some of these prime principles and suddenly invest all of the Theta present. That is just inviting the enturbulation of the remaining Theta on the case.

If you try to take some person who has so much in the bank that he couldn’t possibly listen to it, or maybe it is so jammed up in some fashion or other that he can’t listen to it, and you work with phrases to turn on his sonic, you will watch him get more and more enturbulated and more nervous. That is computational. He doesn’t dare listen to this stuff, so it doesn’t turn on.

But it happens mechanically. You try to drive a case, which is instinctively resisting the investment of what little Theta it has, into a large body of entheta where it will hang up, and this case will fight back. It will resist you mechanically without any slightest attention to the commands in the engram; it will just automatically and mechanically do so.

So what we are dealing with, at last, is the mechanical aspects of processing as different from the semantic aspects of processing. All of you know the semantic aspects of processing well enough; you don’t have to go over that ground. But on the mechanical aspects there is a lot to be learned.

It just works out that a case which has a certain amount of entheta and a certain amount of Theta on it will behave in a particular fashion regardless of the semantic content— the words and phrases— of the engrams. The case will have a certain behavior; it will behave in a certain direction mechanically regardless of the content of the engrams.

That is apparently a very different shift on Dianetics. It is not a shift but an extension, because the semantic content is quite important, definitely. But standing behind it and having greater importance is the mechanical aspect, the Theta/ entheta ratio of a case. That is more important to understand and to know, because that is uniform in every case and that determines, really, the position on the tone scale.

The reason you did not have this before is because it could not be codified for delivery. It was not sufficiently codified and so you didn’t have it. That does not make it any the less valid.

Here is your big jump. This is accessibility. How can you get into communication with somebody who is low on the tone scale with his communication vector, or factor of his Theta, in a completely disturbed condition? How are you going to get in communication with this person? It is pretty hard to do.

Are you going to fish around and look for "I’m not going to pay any attention to you"? I am afraid that you could look for a long time for phrases like that and you would just seriously enturbulate this case. That is all that would happen; you would just get the fellow more and more enturbulated. Whereas if you suddenly realized that this manifestation that you were getting from this case merely derives from his position on the tone scale and is mechanical, you would also realize a lot of ways to resolve the case. It turns your attention, then, from fishing around for phrases to fishing up Theta wherever you may find it.

It turns your attention around to giving the guy enough Theta in present time. It turns your attention around to the real reasons there has to be an auditor. It turns your attention to various other factors which, perhaps, it has not been sufficiently concentrated on before; because all of you have met cases here and there that you couldn’t do much for or you had a hard time working with, and after you had worked with them a while, no real result was achieved. I can assure you that if you pay attention to the mechanical aspects of processing, you will meet those cases again but you will resolve them.

No matter how much a person kicks and says "I’m not going to believe in Dianetics until I run a prenatal engram. You people believe in prenatals, don’t you? I’ve got to run a prenatal engram. I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that," you will process him where he is supposed to be processed, even though it depresses him to find out that you think he is at 0.2l on the tone scale. If he is at 0. on the tone scale, he can profit by a rise up the tone scale.

Now, the other aspect of this is that, derivationally, you will be able to discover what you can do with a case without even really looking at the chart. As you begin to use the chart, if you keep looking at the fundamentals behind the chart— the fundamental postulates— and you understand those thoroughly, you aren’t going to need a chart. You can figure out what this person would do about this and about that and about something or other— you will know!

You can just look at certain aspects of his behavior and you will know what the rest of them are, and you will know what his intentions are.