GOALS OF THETA AND MEST

A lecture given on 25 June 1951

Survival on the Sixth and Seventh Dynamics

I want to tell you something about the goals and purposes of Theta and MEST.

I am not so sure about MEST on goals and purposes as I am about Theta, because MEST is in the losing valence so far.

It seems that MEST has a primary law it operates on that the physicists are very fond of, called the conservation of energy. This thing has worn so thin and the nap is off it so beautifully that it certainly doesn’t need much explanation, unless somebody wants to come out and explain it. But just running everything down and saying "Energy conserves itself, and that is the end of that" is nonsense. You can extend the conservation of energy and have a lot of fun with this concept; it is such a "holy of holies" of concepts that hardly anybody does much about it. As a matter of fact, Einstein, about a year and a half ago, put together some very new and very revolutionary theories in a mathematical form, and when he got clear down to the bottom of the line, his method of saying "This is true" was to say, "And so you see, this is the conservation of energy." He didn’t further advance, particularly, conservation of energy, but all these theories were true because they compared with the conservation of energy. This is all right; they can do a lot of things like this in the field of MEST. But conservation of energy is about the furthest frontier they have gotten to; when they want to add to theory they say "conservation of energy."

This would be a limited concept. There is actually conservation of matter; matter tends to conserve itself one way or the other. Compounds tend to go into the most stable forms and all this sort of thing. In other words, elements tend to go into the most stable compounds and try to conserve themselves.

There seems to be a conservation of space. Space is space somewhat on the order of Gertrude Stein’s "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose": space is space is space. Until somebody finds out what space is, that is really about all you can say about it. It is an empty hole in which there isn’t anything until something is!

You can derive that space is a vibration. You can also figure out that space can exist only in the presence of time, that time cannot exist without space, that space cannot exist without time, that the two are interlocked so they are both the same thing. I don’t know how this hangs on the fact that space and time cannot exist without energy, but it possibly does.

We have matter, energy, space and time, the first letters of these making up MEST. We understand enough about this to make ourselves a very fine automobile that can split the breeze at eighty miles an hour and never give it a thought. We are certainly conquering space and time with energy— moving ourselves, removing ourselves from one point in space. You start thinking it over and it becomes very mysterious, but very few people think it over; they merely go out and get in the car and drive off. That is the safest thing to do.

Now, you can start thinking over these questions of "Who is God? Why is man here? Where is man going?" As a matter of fact, the number of ARC breaks that you can pick up on religion is enormous. ARC and religion raise a lot of questions: "Does God love you or doesn’t he?" "Can God actually talk to me or can I actually talk to God?" or "Is he listening?" And as far as reality is concerned, people say, "You had better believe in God or we’ll bust your head in and send you to hell! We don’t mean to enforce any realities on you, but . . . ! " Then the atheist comes around and he says, "You know very well God doesn’t exist; it is just mud." Of course, he wouldn’t be inhibiting any reality on it!

There is a multitude of ARC breaks, in other words, which you can find in a preclear on the eighth dynamic— a postulated Supreme Being, or Creator: "It comes from someplace, and it is a Prime Mover Unmoved and that is that." Let’s kind of leave it at that, because when people start fooling around with it without knowing many of its natural laws they spin people.

I have been asked what the difference is between the seventh and the eighth dynamics. The seventh is the Theta universe; that is Theta energy. We could go all out and postulate a Supreme Being who made the seventh and the sixth dynamics, but that would be just throwing in a curve. It is not necessarily true that the Supreme Being has anything to do beyond being the entity.

But it just seems to work out fairly well that man has been very happy for a long time to postulate the existence of a Supreme Being. He is known as the Creator. What did he create? We can say he created the physical universe. Then is he the Theta universe, or has this got anything to do with it? We would be unjustified in saying that the Supreme Being is the Theta universe. We could say that the Theta universe could be another universe; maybe there are dozens of universes. You can get balled up on this subject in a hurry.

But we are aware of the fact that the seventh dynamic of Theta and the sixth dynamic of the physical universe exist, if only for this reason: an engram is a collision between the seventh and the sixth dynamics; a secondary is a parting of the seventh and the sixth dynamics. Loss is a secondary; too close a collision is an engram. And we know that that is the basic source of all this unreason and everything; so we know they exist. But we are not justified in saying the Supreme Being is right in there with the seventh any more than we are justified in saying he is in with the sixth. But man has assumed for a long time that he was, so we will go along with that until we know something about it.

Now, we go right over into MEST and we find out that things are just as hazy about MEST, except we are used to handling it. We have agreed on an awful lot of things about MEST, but it is hazy in the areas of space and time.

For instance, you send your preclear back down the time track; obviously he is moving. He is going someplace. But he is not going into the past; he is going into a record of time, not time. Therefore all the Theta that is in existence must be the Theta in present time.

Now we try to tie up time— Theta time and space time— and we find out that that is possibly the bridge between the two. You can go into all kinds of cockeyed postulates, just as the physical scientist has been going into them for a long time in trying to explain energy, space, matter and so forth. Every few years the physical scientist comes out with a brand- new postulate. Every few years he changes his viewpoint.

It is pretty hard to change the laws of motion. The physical scientist has pretty well agreed and we have pretty well agreed on the laws of motion and the laws of the transmission of energy; we know that conservation of energy exists and so on. It is pretty hard to change that. But how is matter put together? What is the structure of space?

Einstein blew into view following the line of Maxwell, Lorentz and FitzGerald, who were the forerunners on this, and we got a brand- new theory. But he got busy a year and a half ago, and now we have another brand- new theory. In other words, basic structure on this thing is getting mauled around all the time.

What happened to Theta was that somebody made an arbitrary and said, "That’s it! And if you don’t believe that’s it, you are going to hell!" It got to be an arbitrary and men were prohibited from thinking on the subject. So we have dammed up the humanities badly.

Now, when we talk about goals, there is an old phrase that comes to mind: "All angels have two faces." This is, as far as I know, about three thousand years old. All angels have two faces; there is a black face and a white face, the face of creation and the face of destruction. So it is with a Supreme Being: Somebody comes along and tells you "God is love, and if you don’t believe it he will knock you to pieces." They don’t see that they are postulating immediately that God has two faces— destruction and creation. They cannot exist independently.

You really have to fool around with this for a while to figure it out, but destruction theoretically couldn’t exist very well without some construction. You would have to construct something in order to bring about the destruction of any great wide mass of something. It is more hidden that destruction comes up as a creation.

For instance, you destroy a life organism; it at least has learned what destroys it as the Theta withdraws. There is a little tiny bit on the evolutionary chain, something like that. But these two things are not separable. You can’t construct without destruction; that is obvious to us.

So there are two drives, two sides to each dynamic. There are two sides, then, of purpose to MEST. It would not be true if you were to say that conservation of energy is the basic law, because it is not. MEST, existing in chaos, is trying to persist, but it builds up into something or it knocks something apart and breaks down; it goes in these two different directions. MEST is not as well understood as Theta is, as far as the purpose and goal is concerned.

Over in Theta, obviously, there is survive and succumb. In the Handbook it says, "The dynamic principle of existence is survival." That is fine; it is half the statement. The dynamic principles of existence are survive or succumb— one or the other. It is a dynamic principle to succumb. There is actually a pressure, a thrust and a persistence toward succumbing. So we have two purposes in Theta, two purposes in an organism: survive or succumb.

Now, the tone scale has arbitrary numbers on it, but that does not make it any less workable or practical. Below 2.0 that organism is trying to succumb and draw apart to create another organism. The organization below 2.0 is actually trying to destroy itself. The drive is toward death.

The higher up it is toward 2.0, the more it seems to wish to persist as itself and merely bring destruction elsewhere. But there is a withdrawing periphery of succumbing below 2.0, and above 2.0 you have an expanding periphery of survival.

You could draw this as a V; at the top where it expands would be 4.0, and at the bottom point would be tone 0. Right at the bottom of the V we have the point where the organism ceases to exist as an individual. From the halfway point— 2.0— on down, you could say the organism was bringing destruction to a contracting periphery. At 1.5 the person tries to bring destruction to MEST, organisms, life forms, organizations and so forth around it. That is anger, destruction, and so forth. When we get down to 1.1 the periphery has narrowed; the destruction which can be accomplished at 1.1 can be accomplished, at best, covertly. It is usually concentrated on a few individuals or something like that; it is directed. And the amount of destruction is beginning, more and more, to feed back to include a destruction of the individual.

At 1.5 the organism doesn’t intend to die itself. At 1.1 it thinks it might. Down at 0.5 it is claiming that it will, but it is trying to bring destruction to a little bit of the environ. This is neglect. It tries to bring destruction to one or two individuals, as opposed to a 1.5’s effort to bring destruction to an organization or something like that. The 0.5, down there in the grief band, is trying to kill one person, or maybe two, three or four people, or some thing or an idea or something like that. But his periphery of destruction is much smaller and the recognizability of the effort is much less. Down below that we get the organism just above death pretending that it is dead, and then we get death itself.

At 2.0 the effort is to get survival just for the organism. This organism is trying to survive more or less for itself. As it gets up to 2.5 it will survive for itself and maybe a couple of pals or maybe the family or something.

Then, up at 3.0, it will survive for itself and for some friends and for the organization. Up here we are getting more and more dynamics cutting in, more and more manifestations of dynamics, a wider and wider periphery.

Now, I don’t think this thing can be drawn as a straight V; it is more like a couple of curves. But it is even more complex than that, because there is an analytical series of curves and there is a reactive series of curves.

The reactive mind is trying to destroy. It is set together on the basis of organism survival through destruction; this is the law of tooth and claw in the jungle. But up above that level the analytical mind starts to feed in; analytical computations come in more and more and you get wider and wider peripheries of survival.

You could graph an individual’s influence on his environ as a series of concentric circles. At the center we have the individual at 0.1. He is going down to the vanishing point there; that is right toward death. But a little bit further out he can influence his environ; out at 0.5, this individual is merely trying to influence three or four individuals. He rarely tries to influence an organization.

Farther out, we are getting an influence on an organization and so on, and as we go out we get a wider periphery of influence.

But you notice that this series of concentric circles can be drawn for survival or it can be drawn for succumb. Drawn for succumb, it means, as you go further toward the center, "I want to bring death to mankind," "I want to bring death to the organization," "I want to bring death to friends," and clear into the center, "I want to bring death to self."

When you draw it for survival, you get, way out above 2.0, "I want to bring life for all of mankind and life and the universe in general." As you move in toward the center this becomes "I would like to bring about the persistence, survival and heightened state of the Elks Club," "I think I can make Mamie happy," and way in at the center, "I’m just barely able to live. Go away and leave me alone."

So this could be the person’s sphere of influence; it could also be a graph of Theta endowment.

Now, Jeffersonian democracy has as its postulate that "all men are created with equal rights under law." This gets Hobson- Jobsoned into "all men are created equal," and is picked up ideologically here and there in the world and political buffoonery is done with it. Men are not equal; that is horrible but factual.

If you had a whole series of clears, you would not have two of them equal— not even by straining the definition of equal with Korzybski. You can look at two people and realize they are not equal. One is superior to another on one point, and the other one is possibly superior to the first one on another point. It is not the difference of whether one person is senior to the other person or not; it is just that one has a heavier concentration on this or less on that.

There are differences among people. It comes about from many things, but one of the things it comes about from is Theta endowment. Evidently, one person is more alive than another. A person out on the perimeter of the survival diagram has an endowment which is liable to flood through the whole galaxy; he feels that way.

A person can be aberrated to the point where he feels that way and is not, but that is a manic. However, his actual endowment is enough to cover quite a bit. A little further in, his endowment can cover a group; further still, his endowment can cover the family; and in at the center his endowment can cover himself. There is the expanding periphery of endowment.

So you can be quite prepared to patch somebody up as well as you possibly can and find out then that they are able to be able to be nice to themselves. Believe me, that is a tremendous advance for any individual.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s monument in San Francisco says that one of the first things a man has to learn is how to be a friend to himself. How many of you are friends of yourselves?

Here we have these various differences between people. It is very easy to grade up these differences and look them over very analytically and be very dispassionate about it. You will find out when you start to get involved with preclears, particularly preclears who are your friends, that you are going to get in deep enough to become emotionally involved; you become affected, in other words, by the endowment. Your endowment is affected, the dynamics are affected, all of these things are affected.

The tone scale and Chart of Human Evaluation have been drawn for your protection. For instance, a woman following and using these will find that no matter how much she would love to believe that the man that she met at the bar one night is a shining knight in white armor, she will notice that he is slightly given to not answering her. Watch it. That is one column on the chart. Let’s discuss children with him; he says he likes them all right but they kind of get in his road and they are noisy. She should watch out for this person because, just as sure as the devil, a love affair with this individual will result in a broken heart! That is a nasty thing to postulate as something that will come true, but as a matter of fact, you could go back into that persons life and find out how many things collapsed in his periphery. Go back and find out how many failures there were; you will find his life is strewn with failures.

Then there is the fellow who comes up and says, "I am going to make an honest human being out of this person by setting an example." I shudder when I think of the cemeteries filled with individuals who have had this sentiment.

Endowment has a lot to do with the magnitude the aberration will achieve. A fellow who is a 1.5 with a terrific endowment is really dynamite. This can be horrible; you look at this person, and he has gotten in as the head of the Ku Klux Klan or he is ruling Germany or some darn fool thing like this. The damage that will accrue in that person’s vicinity is enormous.

But you can take some fellow who is a 1.5 who just gets a little bit angry about the whole thing and once in a while will bust a teacup, and he is a different story.

Now, between the two of them, who is more potentially worthwhile to the society? Which one would you as an auditor be proudest to put back into the society? The guy who just breaks teacups? No. If you can take this heavily endowed 1.5 and bring him up the tone scale so that he will function, you have a person who will really influence his environment and influence it in a survival direction; he is very worthwhile.

This has been recognized by psychiatry; they realize that a heavy endowment makes a person more harmful. So what they do is cut up enough switchboards so that the endowment cannot be expressed. That is "efficient"; it brings the fellow down to a point where he will occasionally break a teacup. Someone told me about one fellow who used to stand and hit his fist against the wall, and before they gave him the prefrontal lobotomy, he would really crash into that wall. Then, after they gave him the prefrontal lobotomy, he would just walk up to the wall and give it a little push with his fist. That was a real "advance" for psychiatry.

Now, you can either enturbulate a fellow down the tone scale or cut off his endowment a little bit one way or the other, but the endowment is normally cut off physiologically or is affected physiologically. For instance, you could burn him up with an electric shock machine or do something "intelligent" like this, and it would cut down his endowment, but it wouldn’t change him much on the tone scale. However, he would not be as harmful to other people; that is considered important.

There was an advertising executive who used to go into terrible rages and throw ink pots and jump up and down and scream, but that fellow put out a lot of advertising. He was an acute 1.5; he would occasionally go into 1.5. He did it often enough so that people got alarmed. Most of the time the fellow was operating above 2.0 and he was operating constructively. But if somebody enturbulated him he would smash down at 1.5. So they gave him electric shock. Now he has a job sweeping the place out, but he sure gets mad at that broom.

You don’t want to do this as auditors. What you want to do is preserve the endowment, and not only preserve it but disenturbulate it and lift it up the tone scale.

A person can be made more obedient by depressing him down to apathy; authoritarian auditing can depress him down to apathy. It is very simple to suppress people on the tone scale; it is only necessary to just enturbulate them further, enturbulate them more, confuse them more.

I will tell you how that is done. There was an argument here the other evening and I had to run it out of a preclear I told him how to enforce and restrain ARC and gave him an example of how to argue with somebody who was trying to push his buttons, using Black Dianetics on them. All you do is give them enforced and inhibited ARC: "I really would like to tell you about people. You know, you should like people more. You really ought to like people more. You shouldn’t hate them, you should like them; I’ve been listening to people lately and they don’t like you very much, you know, and you ought to increase your affinity for them."

Of course, the big gunshot on this sort of thing is "You ought to pay more attention; you understand so poorly." That is the big one- two: enforced ARC and inhibited ARC, and preferably in the same sentence. Listen to two people arguing sometime, and listen to them doing that— enforced, inhibited, enforced, inhibited ARC. And then they will hit the big one: "You’re dumb!" This hits like an atom bomb.

Enturbulation, disorganization, incomplete thinking and disorderly action are all enturbulative. You should remember this as an auditor. I will give you an example; this is the way not to audit: "I want you— is there a chain available— no, excuse me, do you have an incident? (snap!) . . . Now, what is the basic on this chain? ... All right. Go to that.... Are you sure you are there? Well, go to an earlier one.... All right. Let’s scan forward all the way to present time." Then the auditor gets tired of sitting there; the preclear gets halfway to present time and the auditor says, "Let’s go back to the beginning and scan it again," and the preclear starts to spin.

Actually it is only necessary to be that careless with patter to enturbulate the devil out of people; they start to do something and then you tell them to do something else, and so on.

So what you want to do is codify all of your patter, and this is very constructive. You notice that it is very hard to build a cathedral without drawing some plans, and if the plans don’t lay out exactly what kind of a cathedral you are building, then the cathedral is going to fall down or do something else. It works just that way in auditing. You work with your preclear on a highly organized basis. You build an agreement with him; for instance, "When I tell you to go to the earliest incident on the chain, I mean the earliest incident available to you without straining or anything— the earliest available incident. When I ask you if you are there, you tell me whether you are or not, and when you tell me you are there I will say to you, ‘From there forward to present time, begin scanning, ’ and you start at the moment I snap my fingers."

That is good organization. You then never vary the patter with him; keep the patter the same. You will find that the auditing comes off much more smoothly.

I am pointing up the difference between survival and non survival: planning, prediction, understanding and organization are survival things, and succumbing things are disorderly things.

A smooth, sine- wave voice is a survival thing, but a jagged, noise wave voice is a succumb thing. There is the difference between the two levels. From 2.0 down, you have disorganization, carelessness, nonthinking, impulsiveness, use of force, use of punishment drive and push on a MEST level. Above that level you have constructive leading, reasoning, organization and good planning.

This business about survive and succumb is very important to you as an auditor because in about 90 percent of the people you work you are trying to pick somebody up out of the succumb band and bring him up to where he will live. Fortunately, the techniques we have now will sneak him up over the break point; he doesn’t find out about it until it is too late. That is actually what you are doing.

This does not preclude the possibility that occasionally a preclear might smile at you very happily and walk out of the office and go blow his brains out. As a matter of fact, we have just been lucky; we have been shot in the pants with luck, because something like 10 to 15 percent of the patients ought to go blow their brains out. But they don’t, and that is remarkable because when you start handling people who are chronically below 2.0, you are handling people who would rather go toward succumb than survive.

The Theta on the case wants to survive. That is the analytical level; that is above 2.0. There is a very little bit of this. You enturbulate that and all you have left on the case is the entheta, which wants to succumb.

Did you ever have a case suddenly go down into apathy on you? The fellow will just lie there, and he doesn’t care anymore whether he runs anything or not. Trace it back to the moment before when you gave him something disorganized or changed his mind about something.

You can make a blunder (it does not take a blunder of an Auditors Code magnitude) with some of these people which merely gives them a sense that you are not organized with them, and this means to them that there isn’t an ARC line between you. At that moment ARC snaps, and they go into apathy right there.

You are professional auditors. You have to handle cases in this level. A book auditor should never have, and as a matter of fact would not have, very much to do with the cases which we handle routinely; they would throw up their hands in horror over most of these cases.

It is a real test trying to work somebody at 1.1 who has some free Theta which gets up to 2.1. He is in super antagonism on the one level but is operating in covert hostility on the lower level. How the auditor can sit there and take some of the abuse that he gets from this preclear without knocking the preclear over the head with the couch surpasses one’s understanding. It is a real temptation to grab him and say "Listen, bud!"

That is all you have to do— Just say "Listen, bud, you’re going to do this or else!"— and he will crash and drop into apathy. So he goes home that night and takes some psychoanalysis or strychnine or something else, and you haven’t got a preclear anymore. And you have followed the "time- honored" line of obliterating the person rather than the aberration.

So, if you divide the tone scale off into those two levels, survive or succumb, you will understand processing in general a lot better.