BASIC REASON PART I

A lecture given on 30 July 1951

Basic Principles of Thought

There is a very funny thing about basic principles: Every time we start in on some basic principles they get more basic.

Mathematics and various fields of thought as they are generally advanced present a very curious aspect to an individual. Somebody comes along with a postulate, a very simple postulate of some sort or another. For example, Newton came along and said, "There are three laws of motion, and these are the laws of inertia, interaction and acceleration." This was very simple.

Then some scientists said, "That is very smart, but privately and between ourselves, if we try to teach that there are three laws of motion, it won’t give us any altitude standing on the lecture platform. We can stand up and teach this new aspect of natural philosophy all right, now that we have accepted it . . ."— of course, it took them twenty years!

Newton was announced as one of the greatest hoaxes of his day when he first came out with his new discoveries. So was Albert Einstein; he was announced at a lecture in Berlin by one of the foremost mathematicians of Germany as having perpetrated with his theory of relativity the greatest hoax of modern times. All the professors agreed, and felt he should be driven like a dog.

This happened because these things came in and they were relatively simple. The theory of relativity is not very complicated. But somebody standing up on the lecture platform and teaching this is not going to say "Now, this is all simple. I personally haven’t got anything to add to this because in my own lifetime I haven’t done any thinking. But it is very simple, and here are the basic laws." No, I am afraid the professors don’t work that way. They say, "Now, of course there possibly may be some of you who understand this— that is, understand part of it. And during the next four years that I will be instructing you here at the university, there may be some possibility that I can at least instill some pattern in your mind that will permit you to use this— but of course you won’t ever grasp it— because it is terribly important. " The fellow is saying, right along in the same line, "I am terribly important because I know this."

So here is this basic simplicity: three laws of motion. The urge of the people relaying this is exactly the same urge that navigators had, particularly before the war. If you ever went on a bridge and so much as glanced at a sextant, the ship’s navigator would draw up about eight feet tall and say, "What could you possibly know about that? You had better not touch that instrument! Don’t look at my chronometers. Leave it all alone now. Navigation is far too esoteric an art for anybody to understand it simply."

During the war they brought out texts on navigation, they had dead reckoning tracers and they were teaching navigation left and right, and it was really a fairly simple subject. This really was an old superstition about how difficult navigation was, but for several hundred years navigators maintained their altitude and dignity in the world solely by telling everybody that it was too difficult a subject for anybody to learn. They made a great cult out of navigation, but navigation was relatively simple.

I found out about this because one day I was trying to figure out navigation; I was reading the existing texts on the subject. I had studied surveying and so on, and I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t do good celestial navigation. I got into the books and I found them so complicated, so upside down, so topsy- turvy, so badly aligned and so pompous that I couldn’t do anything about it. So I went into basic surveying and tried to extrapolate what navigation was all about. I wanted to know what a person had to know.

I found out that the basic principle of celestial navigation is so simple that you could relay it to a ten- year- old boy. He wouldn’t have to know about logarithms or anything else. The proposition of measuring positions on a sphere is so easy that, naturally, they had to cover it up.

This is the same as physics today, which is based on three laws of motion; they are very simple laws of motion. The only way anybody can gain any importance personally in relaying this subject is to make these three laws of motion more complicated. They get more and more complicated.

I recently picked up a college text on physics. It is an elementary physics college text, and it starts out with the kinesthetic aspects and persistence of masses. I looked at this, feeling rather stunned, and I said, "What on earth are they talking about?" This is what is given to a freshman. I read on, and all of a sudden I realized that the author was talking about the law of inertia: the tendency of a body to remain in motion if it is in motion and the tendency of a body to remain still if it is still. But it sure took a chapter to make that one complicated! I imagine there are people out in society today who have had to study that college text on physics, who are properly humble when it comes to their instructor but who don’t know anything about physics.

The tendency, then, is to grow more complicated on this basis. It is very rarely that anybody tries to advance something by making it more simple. Any time a new postulate is advanced, the run- of- the- mill worker usually goes on and eventually the science, or whatever evolves from it, becomes some kind of a complicated hocus- pocus that would have staggered the original creator of the postulate, the original discoverer.

Bowditch is one of the prime examples of this, to get back on navigation again. I got a copy of the Navy Department’s Hydrographic Office publication of Nathaniel Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator. This, I understood, was the curse of all midshipmen and all who would study navigation. I read this thing through; it is written in highly complicated scholastic English, very academic, very pompous and extremely incomprehensible. But I was at the Hydrographic Office one day, and I discovered among their rare books an original Bowditch. It had been written— and this was the brag of Bowditch— for the cook of his ship. Even the cook had been able to navigate after Bowditch completed one cruise to Hong Kong and back. His tables and the book he wrote were slanted so that the common sailor could navigate, and the words are little tiny monosyllables. But in the course of something like 125 years this has been made enormously complex.

What I am leading up to is very definite; I may seem a bit far afield. We have in Dianetics been told many times that the human mind is too difficult to comprehend, that it is too complex, that Dianetics oversimplifies something that psychiatry has known for a very long time (and didn’t use somehow or other), and that in general the whole subject would be much better off if it were written solely with words which contained a minimum of five syllables.

I was told one day by a psychoanalyst in Washington, D. C., that he was unable to read the Handbook because it was written in a simplified style that was for general understanding and not for scholastic understanding. That was the first time I understood that scholars had a different level of understanding.

It is perhaps a little upsetting to people to go backwards instead of forwards on a subject. For instance, we have the three laws of motion in Newton. I am sure that sometime in this century or the next somebody is going to come along and resimplify motion. If you have a Sunday off sometime when you have nothing to do, break these things down into one pervasive law of motion. And if you have two Sundays in a row, answer this one: What is time? If you can answer that question simply, the sciences of physics, chemistry and Dianetics will have to be completely rewritten because you will have stepped back to an earlier simplicity. Apparently it is very destructive to say the science of physics would then sort of go to pieces. You would have reached back to an earlier simplicity; it would be something more fundamental than you had before.

That is the direction which any seeker after truth must take if he wishes to simplify and resolve problems which have not been resolved before: simplification of existing fundamentals. As soon as you get a new fundamental, the props come out from under literally thousands of complex, obscure and poorly explained facts which exist in that science. The destruction which takes place when you get onto a new basic is fantastic.

You move back into an earlier simplicity, something more fundamental, and the later data, which has been relatively complex, falls apart and becomes simple. Any practitioner of physics, chemistry or any other science then finds himself confused if he has been taught on a scholastic line like "I know more than you do, therefore you have to take what I say or I’m going to flunk you." Anyone who has been taught along that line has been taught a large mass of facts, and if somebody then comes along and achieves a new fundamental it is very tough, because this fellow has to reevaluate everything he knows about the subject.

That is what we are doing in Dianetics. Anybody who says Dianetics is oversimplified is simply complaining bitterly about the fact that a new simplicity has been reached which makes it necessary for them to jettison some thousands of facts which before would not cohese or adhese. Problems which did not resolve before do resolve with this new simplicity.

It took years for those individuals to accumulate, memorize and study a lot of these facts. Just as you cannot get an individual to easily give up a bit of his MEST, so it is very, very trying on an individual to ask him to give up some of his facts. He has a complex understanding which has made him important. Suddenly somebody comes along and says, "Here we have a new fundamental, a new basic principle, and it resolves all of this; it cuts all the corners and it resolves these problems that you have been worrying about." This fellow hasn’t been worrying about those problems. He was Gnostic about his field ordinarily— that is to say, he knew that he knew. And you have come along and told him that a lot of the facts he knew really aren’t so and that you have new simplicities.

You can therefore prepare. Just as you would prepare to be combated by any individual from whom you tried to take some money, so you can prepare to be combated by any individual from whom you try to take any of these long, arduous and complicated facts. The first thing he will tell you is that your business is oversimplified. And that is exactly true: you have oversimplified. You have simplified over his head!

This is probably why Dianetics does not get an immediate acclaim. This is why a new chemical formula which would be terrifically revolutionary would not get anything but suspicion. What is acceptable to men, then, is something within their frame of reference which fits a majority of their facts; that is quite acceptable. But something which puts new facts into the field and tries to take old and multitudinous facts away from them is going to be combated. It is considered simply on the same basis as theft; we are stealing importance, and we are stealing a very large number of data from individuals who, in all sincerity, were trying to work before in the field of the mind. And so there is upset.

However, you will find fields of the mind which are not as combative to upset as psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. There are many of these fields. For instance, the politician may know his ward- bossing, but he will sit there and agree with you perfectly when you say there is nothing known about politics. You can sit there and talk to a business manager who has his hands on a lot of MEST and a lot of employees every day, and you can tell him you have something new, you have something basically simple and a new technology on the subject of business. There won’t be one out of ten of those individuals who will suddenly rear back and say "It took me forty years, man and boy, to get down to a point where I understood how to run this business. You are not going to come in and tell me!" You won’t get that reaction; these men are hungry.

So, when you have the whole field of human thought out in front of you, why worry about whether Dianetics rises or falls on the opinion of only one small field of its activity?

Dianetics is basically epistemology; that is a nice big nutcracker word, but all it means is knowledge. It is that branch of philosophy which pertains to knowledge.

When you try to study anything about man’s behavior you find out it is based on knowledge or lack of it. And as a matter of fact, the mere act of trying to study without knowing what knowledge is, is nonsense. Up until a very few years ago, and right now, in general, people are asking people to study without having first defined knowledge. This is the grandest field of philosophy. Philosophy has many fields, and epistemology is probably the most basic of all those fields. What is knowledge? Dianetics is actually a study of knowledge.

We started to get sidetracked into the human mind simply because the human mind happens to be a vessel and a computer for and of knowledge. That is the only reason we are interested in the human mind, and the reason that we are upset about a human mind being aberrated is the fact that as long as we have an aberrated mind we can’t have a perfect computer. They are imperfect computers as long as they are very aberrated.

That is how we detoured into therapy. Therapy is a detour. I know it doesn’t seem so to most of you, but it has always been so to me. It is running around Robin Hood’s barn.

How can you teach men what knowledge consists of when men are violating the basic principles which have to do with data? A clarity of vision, an ability to absorb, recall and compute with data is absolutely necessary in individuals before they can adequately handle knowledge. And if you can’t handle knowledge in the world of men, then man is powerless against his environment, since knowledge is his greatest weapon against his environment. He is a thinking animal; his brain is his best weapon.

As a race, then, one comes down to the basic of having to treat individual minds.

You can get so easily and deeply interested in the mechanisms of aberration that you forget why you are studying aberration.

The study of aberration is a negative study. You are studying the mind as it ought not to be, and you are trying to bring it to a level where it should be. So long as individuals are walking around with imperfect computers which can’t even get back the data which was most arduously impressed into them, man cannot achieve his true potential. You can ask almost any instructor in universities and so forth how arduously they have to work, how hard they have to pound to get data into these skulls and get it regurgitated back out onto a piece of paper at examination time.

We had an "age of reason" l 170 years ago. The French, one fine day, rose up and said, "They have done it over in America; why can’t we do it here?" They had a lot of people there who had been over to America and had heard these crazy Americans talking about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A fellow by the name of Voltaire had been agitating around with his pen, getting thrown in jail and getting boosted out of it, getting arrested for debts and getting arrested for political reasons— in other words, living the standard life of a philosopher who is trying to make men better. And they declared one fine day an age of reason. So we have already had an age of reason.

The first act of the age of reason was to tear down the Bastille, the next act was to kill the Swiss guards and murder the king, and then the next act was to take people like Danton and Robespierre and so forth and say "Spare the guillotine and spoil the cause." In short, we had a fine "age of reason." I hope we don’t have another such age of reason. But I would not mind a reasonable age, particularly because of the novelty of the aspect. The idea rather titillates one. That would be amusing; nobody has ever seen anything like it before. The idea of nations conducting themselves rationally of course is laughable, but the idea of prison doors swinging in the wind, and no sanitariums and so forth is a very entertaining idea. Nobody would think that way in the society; it would be too much for their wits to bear, I guess.

But a reasonable age in which the test of an individual’s worth was how reasonably and how well he assisted his society would be a very interesting age. We could have a world where people got together and figured things out, figured out what was the best thing for all hands, instead of saying "You do this or you’re fired!" or "My father was a Republican; I’m a Democrat, and that is good enough reason for me to be a Democrat." Can you imagine picking up a newspaper that had information in it? That is more far- fetched than any of the science- fiction stories I have written. But there is some vague possibility that we could have a reasonable age.

You see on every hand individuals acting without any great attention to reason. They will even enter into the proposition the fact that "Because of engrams one is not reasonable, therefore one doesn’t have to be." One can dodge that far.

All this is leading up to one thing. What we are looking at is something simple; what we are trying to get across and work with is something very simple. What we are trying to achieve is a breadth and width and distance of knowledge through the societies of man, so that perchance man as a species might survive. He might even evolve into something better as a species. That is what we are after; at least that is what I am after.

We are treating aberration toward an end: we are trying to achieve reason in the individual. Therefore, by definition, any process which does not increase or even rehabilitate an individual’s ability to reason clearly with the data which is available to him is not a valid process. And any process which permits an individual to reason better, to work better and to live better is a valid process. I don’t care whether it is laying on of hands or pure education. That is a simplicity. It is too simple to be grasped sometimes.

It is not, for instance, whether the individual when he is told " p r " jumps up in his chair, turns2 around twice, comes down and lets out a pale scream. A therapy can do this; I imagine that we could figure out many therapies which would cause things like this and even worse things to happen to individuals. They would be very spectacular and they would do very well on a stage in the hands of a magician who was trying to impress an audience. But are they making people more reasonable?

There is something wrong, then, with any process which does not increase the person’s abilities, his reason or his ability to handle his environment. If a process fails on many people, it doesn’t fail for any other reason than it doesn’t make the individual better able to reason. It doesn’t make him so; therefore it is not a good process.

Any new discovery or any new simplification is valid and useful in direct ratio to how much it increases an individual’s ability to reason and resolve the problems relating to his environment. If a new process does not do that, if a new simplification does not do that, then it is not valid. You should evaluate for yourselves, then, what you are trying to accomplish with any preclear. and then evaluate all theory for yourself that explains why it happens. Think it over.

Dianetics is not so tender and fragile that it has to be approached with the awe and reverence which is demanded by a great many fields of learning. There are not very many fields of learning which would dare say "Come on in and get your feet wet. Come on in and tear it up and look it over and find out if it works." There aren’t many that can do that. Now, if we examine what is basically wrong with people, we find out that we are in a new level of simplicity. We find out what the individual is trying to do.

What is the society trying to do? Society is trying to survive. So we say the society is trying to survive; that is a simplicity. It is trying to live and persist in its living to the maximum possible time span under the most optimum conditions; that would possibly be another definition of what a society is trying to do. But we group that definition under survival, and if we get too far away from this postulate of survival, and if we stop evaluating by it what man is trying to do, we go very much astray again.

Many times in Dianetics I have had to go back and retrace steps clear back to the beginning of when I started to think about something, and then all of a sudden realize that it hadn’t been evaluated according to survive and therefore it hadn’t worked. Survival as a postulate and formula and as an explanation of why individuals do what they do is very good.

Somebody said to me the other day, "I like to think of something in higher levels. I guess maybe I am an idealist."

And I said, "Do moral individuals survive better than immoral individuals?"

"Oh, moral individuals would survive better, of course."

"Do honest individuals survive better than dishonest individuals?"

"Well, most of the time, I guess honest individuals do."

"Do people who have goals and ambitions fare better in life than people who don’t have?"

"Oh yes, they do."

"Do people who have ideals fare better than people who don’t have ideals?"

"Oh, sure. And I guess that’s why I’m an idealist. And I think your survival, having ideals, then, is surviving; one survives better, doesn’t he?"

He didn’t like this. Being an idealist was being somehow esoteric, and floating above the crowd, and he had that mixed up with the fact that he didn’t want to do what everybody else was trying to do or something.

But all of this works out to the basic simplicity that we are working with— survival, the survival of an individual. The survival of a man happens to depend upon his ability to reason. Therefore, man, with the great knowledge which is available to him, should be able to use that knowledge to the best possible advantage in order to survive best. Man’s principal weapon of survival, then, is knowledge. So we had better know something about epistemology, the basic of knowledge. What is knowledge? What is data?

There used to be a professor up at M. I. T. who was called "99 Percent Jackson." He had a maxim which said, "When you can ask the question of the physical universe, when you can ask the real question, then you have 99 percent of the answer." He said this so constantly they called him "99 Percent Jackson." That maxim is true enough.

Why does a person have to have knowledge and why does a person have to be able to reason? It certainly enhances his survival. Why does he have to have knowledge? So he can survive better.

Why does he have to be able to reason better? Reason is the ability to extrapolate new data and conclusions for any and all given situations from minimal data. That, perhaps, could be called reason.

People get awfully confused between what is data and what is reason. People will tell you, "I would build houses, too, if I just had an education." Bunk! He might have all the data in the world on the subject of building houses and not be able to reason well enough to build a single house. That is the difference between reason and data.

Knowledge would then have to include, perforce, both existing data— known data, observed data, relayed data, memorized data and so forth— and data which one reasons from his past conclusions and from his present data. The ability to reason out new conclusions to apply to his problems and the ability to recognize these problems are included under reason. So the ability to reason is different from the ability to memorize.

Memorizing is very simple. That is just the ability to recall what one has seen. That is just a stimulus- response mechanism. It is a silly mechanism. I look down and see a cigarette, and then look up and recall that I have seen a cigarette. That is, in brief, having memorized a cigarette.

Education, then, could be directed along two lines: (1) the line of giving somebody data, and (2) the line of making somebody reason with the data he has.

Modern education hardly takes into view the teaching of reasoning at all. Reasoning has sort of been left out. I guess "everybody knows" man is not a rational animal, because the ability to reason has been left out.

But look at the quality of reason, look at how good it is. For instance, take a fellow who has been educated exclusively in the field of chemistry: One day he moves over into the field of physics, and he observes some data in the field of physics and he observes that a problem exists. If he is running only on education he would have no data to solve that problem because it lies in the field of physics. But if he can reason, he has certainly run across enough natural phenomena in the field of chemistry to extrapolate, probably, a conclusion, a resolution of the problem he sees in physics.

As soon as a person is able to reason and use reason to his fullest capabilities, the amount of data which he has absorbed in his lifetime is expanded thousands and thousands of times.

When one looks at the relative worth of education by memorization versus that of education by the teaching of how to reason, all of a sudden he sees that in the field of epistemology there would be no comparison. It is much more important to be able to figure out something from what one observes than it is to be able to remember what somebody else has said he figured out from what he observed.

The moment you can get somebody to reason on some subject, his knowledge becomes greater on that subject. Knowledge is not just data, then; it is the ability to conclude. That is very important!

I have found that this bug has entered into Dianetics and that is why I am going into these subjects. This same misconception has worked into Dianetics. People have said, "If I could just recall everything I have ever read or been taught, then I would be more reasonable. Therefore I have to have sonic and visio in order to get these things. This is terribly important!" That is not true.

A lot of you, perhaps, have looked at a preclear who was wide open, who could go up and down the track, who could reread what he had done, had a terrific memory for everything he had been taught— and didn’t act reasonable! "Obviously" the person had to be reasonable because they could remember everything. You are working there with two different orders in the field of epistemology. You are working with a man’s ability to extrapolate and his ability to recall what he has memorized or seen.

The ability to extrapolate is hand in glove with self- determinism. As soon as you increase and enlarge a person’s right to extrapolate and reason on data observed, he will do so. If you inhibit his right to reason, you will inhibit his self- determinism. If you inhibit his self- determinism, not only does he feel he has no right to move here and there and do what he wishes, but he feels in the same way that he cannot use the data he has observed to reason with, that he has no right to reason with it, just as he has no right to move himself around in the society and do what he pleases according to his own judgments.

So the rehabilitation of a person’s self- determinism goes hand in glove with rehabilitating a person’s ability to reason. They are not quite the same thing, but his ability to move, work and act on his own command, under his own power and direction, is approximating his ability to reason on his own data.

In other words, if you restore a man’s right to handle his own data, you restore his right to reason and therefore his right to conclude, and that is how you are establishing a reasonable being. It doesn’t matter how much data you get out of this preclear’s bank. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have assembled his life for him into a complete and consecutive play that makes a nice story that you would read in some biography or something of the sort.

The one thing you are hitting for, then, is self- determinism, and right with it, reason— his ability to reason on data observed. The self- determinism has got to come up; his ability to reason won’t come up unless his self determinism comes up.

There is your target: epistemology. If you want this person to be happier, raise his self- determinism. A man whose self- determinism has been three- quarters rehabilitated can still go around with his arthritis of the neck, but you have done a good job! However, if the arthritis of the neck is gone and his self- determinism is diminished, you have done a bad job. And yet it is a strange thing that you could do this. You could wash an individual’s arthritis out of his life and at the same time reduce his self- determinism and his ability to reason. Therefore you would have actually reduced his ability to move and his scope in the society.

I want you to think about that. How was his self- determinism, his reason, inhibited in the first place? How was he made from a potentially reasonable being into a relatively unreasonable being such as a "normal"? It was done by somebody coming along and interrupting his self- determinism about his data— in other words, dominating him.

There are two ways that an individual can be dominated (and I know you will be interested in this): He can be made to handle himself and the environment around him or made to leave it alone on a physical level, or he can be left alone, ignored, and never trusted with anything. These things produce two different kinds of cases; one is the occluded case and the other is the wide- open case who is low on the tone scale.

The wide- open case who is low on the tone scale has been invalidated, has been made to feel a certain worthlessness, has been made to feel that he or she was not particularly worthy during youth; he has been ignored, he has been unable to get attention when he needed attention, and so on.

You will find this kind of case growing out of the sort of atmosphere that would leave a child with a chronic illness more or less abandoned for two or three years of its early youth.

One such case I know was the most beautiful wide- open case you ever saw; she was wide open at 0.2. I have seen several cases where this has happened, but this one particular case was very interesting to me. She had been left alone and more or less deserted for a year. The father went away and the child became ill. And because of upsets in the household, the child was put into a sickroom and was only attended to enough to shove some food into her mouth; that was all. Nobody played with this child, nobody did anything for this child for a solid year.

Every night the child lay on her back with a lamp going— a steam lamp that put eucalyptus oil into the atmosphere. This steam lamp had a rotating cover, and as it came around bits of steam would escape; it had a light in the bottom of it and it made a long, turning shadow pattern on the ceiling. The child begged and begged for some weeks to have this lamp taken away. Naturally this lamp was a hypnoscope, l nothing more than that. So the child was left in this dark, flickering, very choking, oil- soaked atmosphere of the room, utterly alone and abandoned. She couldn’t effect the removal of the lamp, couldn’t affect anybody, had no strength and had no power as far as any of this was concerned. That child really went bad, too, as life went on. That was evidently the primary invalidator. There were AAs back of this; they are bad enough as being invalidative. An AA says, "You are not worth anything." This abandonment said, "You are not worth anything."

The perceptics on the case, as far as sonic and visio were concerned, were quite acute— very, very good, excellent in fact.

But what had happened to ARC in general as a computation on this case? This person’s level of reality was so bad that an individual would walk into the room and she wouldn’t pay any attention to him at all, though the individual would be walking loudly. But sometimes she would be sitting alone and suddenly look behind her and scream piercingly because there was an individual standing behind her— only there was nobody there. In other words, she had a completely delusive reality.

But this child had never been much scolded about leaving things alone; she was not much inhibited or interfered with otherwise; she was just neglected. She was so thoroughly invalidated that the bottom dropped out of ARC.

That is the reason for these wide- open cases, evidently.

Now, the occluded case has evidently had his self- determinism very throughly interrupted by being manhandled with regard to material objects. You will find this type of material on the occluded case: "Willie, put that down! Forget about that now." "Move over here!" "Now, you’ve got to take this and go outside." "Now, go to bed; I told you to go to bed. No, you can’t have a drink of water. Go to bed! Now, you’ve got to go to bed." "Now, get up; it’s time for you to get up." "You’ll forget about that." "Now, you leave that dog alone; you can’t have that dog. Besides, I bought you a nice cat. You’ve got to have the cat." "Now, here are the new shoes that I bought you. Now, they’re your shoes, but you take care of them. Oh, you didn’t shine them today. You realize you’ve got to take good care of your clothes. You shine those shoes! Of course, they are your shoes, but I’m going to tell you how to take care of them every day in the week." "Now, these clothes that I bought you— I work and slave, I work my fingers to the bone in order to put you into good clean clothes, and look at you! Of course, they’re your clothes; you have to take care of them."

Here are physical objects— time, space, energy, matter— flying all around the place! This child, as MEST, is being moved all over the place. The MEST around this child is being moved all about. And that is exactly what happens, evidently, to this child’s mind. He starts to handle his thoughts just like he handles his MEST. This is evidently a truism: A person handles his thoughts the same way he handles MEST, because he has never had an example of how to think. That is just sort of native. But here is all this MEST around and he starts handling his thoughts the same way, so there go his thoughts off the time track. That is the occluded case.

But at the same time, this individual can have a long streak of being validated as an individual. He is at least important. So you have a combination there where his ARC isn’t too terribly bad; it is just the fact that all his data is gone.

This fellow, by the way, has a devil of a time in school— he nearly always does— because the educational system is based on that part of epistemology which says the memorisation of facts is the way you retain facts, and if you retain enough of these facts then you are well educated. This person, one way or the other, has actually been forced to reason. Any child handled as roughly as this is going to have to start reasoning. He is supposed to remember and forget so many things and so many things are enforced upon him and taken away from him that he is quite addled as to data.

But there is another sphere of activity. He has to be pretty shifty- footed. People are paying a lot of attention to him a lot of the time. Any time he is found, somebody is going to do something with him or his MEST. Any time he turns up, this child has got to have an explanation.

"Why was the wagon on the drive?"

"Well, you see, it was this way. I was standing out looking at the elephant."

"The what?"

He soon learns that this is not a reasonable explanation. He has a bad time, but he sure learns how to reason. However, he hasn’t got much data to reason with. He has taken the other side of the picture. He learns to reason on present time perceptics. It is all on an emergency basis— the heck with what happened yesterday! The kind of people he is surrounded with never pay any attention to that anyhow. If yesterday he was going to be severely punished for walking through a mud puddle, then today, sure as the devil, he is going to be punished because he didn’t! Life is too changeable; therefore he had better be Johnny- on- the- spot, spark long and blue! In other words, think!

Unfortunately he has been pushed around so much— he has been invalidated, really, one way or the other— that he has been made into MEST; now he is struggling to keep from being MEST. He probably has a lot of engrams too, and his data is all off the track and he gets pretty fogged up. But he can reason; he extrapolates— he extrapolates very well on no data.

This other person who has been invalidated does not extrapolate at all on all the data. You can therefore find this person very worried about whether you said something right or wrong. For instance, you sing a song about the cowboy who walked down the streets of Laredo; this person will right afterwards say, "But it isn’t Laredo, it’s Lor- ee- do. And in the last verse there, it says ‘as cold as the clay’ not ‘a clay." ’ They get extremely worried any time you vary their data. You just try and vary their data a tiny bit and it shakes them, because this is what they have; this is survival. This individual’s track is in good shape, but he has been invalidated, has been pushed down into nothing, and is just convinced he is MEST for lack of ARC. He has this data, and he gets very disturbed about data.

Those are the two extreme types of cases. You are processing people of one type or the other most of the time. Sometimes you get a mixed type, but that mixed type is not as frequent as it might be. It is generally six of one and half a dozen of the other— they are occluded or they are open. Sometimes you get an open case that is temporarily occluded but you never get an occluded case that is temporarily open.

Which one of those cases is the easiest to rehabilitate? As auditors working with just words and not paying any attention to all the other perceptics, you found the wide- open case very easy to process, because the wide- open case could hear all the words. It was an easy case. You couldn’t pick up very many somatics because the case didn’t have any reality. Matter wasn’t quite there and the person wasn’t quite there at all, but the data was there, and they would give you the data. But don’t ask one of those cases quickly whether or not this engram he has just run through was very real to him, because it wasn’t.

The occluded case will show up, actually, more benefit from processing in terms of reasoning, because every bit of processing that you do with this fellow, unless you just latch him up on the track and louse him up in general, is going to recover him data. The more data he gets and the more comfortable he feels about the thing, the hotter he will start reasoning. That is not true of the wide- open case.

The wide- open case is the one who will suffer acutely on ARC and the occluded case is the one who will suffer acutely on the material universe.

You will find that the wide- open case who is low on the tone scale is destructive of and careless of MEST; it doesn’t exist. You will find, ordinarily, the occluded case acquiring a lot of MEST; it exists.

There is no index, then, really, between perceptics and the ease with which a case can be restored to reason. I dare say you can work some wide- open cases from hell to Halifax and finish up and still not have someone who will reason— unless you are really working on what you are working on. You are trying to rehabilitate a person’s reality with a wide- open case. You are trying to get his ARC up. And with the occluded case you are trying to get data into view and perceptics into view. Those are the two different slants of working cases.

This did not appear in Science of Survival because I hadn’t thought it out as completely as I might have. It is not that I hadn’t thought it out to some degree, but it was not thought out to the degree that I could express it to you. There is a lot of difference between knowing something and being able to express what you know.

So there are two essentially different cases. Which one of those cases would you expect to come out into the clear fastest? You would of course expect the wide- open case to do so because it has sonic and visio and you can get all the data, and on the other case you have to turn it all on. That is essentially correct, if the level of your activity is sufficiently selective to recognize what you are doing. For instance, with the occluded case you are trying to get perceptics and data into view. But don’t go on and process a wide- open case for perceptics because the case doesn’t have any reality. According to my experience— which has been a bit wide in some spots, although it could have been a lot wider in other spots— it is just as hard to turn on ARC in this wide- open case as it is to turn on perceptics in the occluded case. Don’t forget that.

It is an unfortunate thing in this society that women have, as recently as fifty years ago, been considered chattels. That is MEST. You find more wide- open cases amongst women, evidently, than you do amongst men. The society and the family expect something of the man, by routine in the culture, and they don’t expect as much, as a routine on an average, of the girl. This is unfair, completely unfair.

A little girl is looked on as pretty; she is a cute baby. She is a cute little girl, her hair is cute and so on— MEST, in other words.

They talk about the boy as an active little fellow: he is clever, he is going to be president, he is going to be something or other. This is the average I am talking about now; it is a long way from being every case.

In other words, the culture tends to invalidate a woman.

Now, one day, the girl’s little brother pokes her in the snoot, and she says, "Waaah!" as most any child will. She hauls off to really poke him back, and Mama comes forward with this astonishing datum: "Little boys must not hit little girls." That is a great datum. This says that she is not able to fight. It gives her something to hide behind. It gives an invalidation of her physical strength at the outset.

I have known a lot of girls in my time in this land and that one, and some of them I would rather not tangle with again. Not only is the female of the species deadlier than the male, but quite often she is far stronger.

As a matter of fact, I know of one particular girl who beat up an officer of the German army who had been a prisoner of war and had been released while in the United States after the war. He made an improper advance to her and he went to the hospital. He was a great big hulking Nazi, and she ruined him! He didn’t have any qualms about beating up women but that didn’t do him a bit of good.

If you look through the society, then, you will find out that the little girl is kind of getting the dirty side of this thing, because she isn’t supposed to fight and she is not looked upon as athletic: "Did you ever see a girl throw a ball? You know that girls can’t play any sports anyway. Aw, you’re just a sissy! " A girl can throw a ball. The funny part of it is, she happens to have an entirely different shoulder joint than a man has, but with a little training she can really pitch. She looks clumsy, though, because it is actually a different joint.

For a few months out of the lifetime of a woman she is incapacitated because of children, so the society has gone off half- cocked for the last fifty thousand years and said, "This woman is inviolate. During the months of pregnancy she is not able to care for herself." That is a lie. It is not until the last two or three months that it is really that bad. But the culture has said, "She is not able to care for herself, she mustn’t be mauled around anywhere during this period, so therefore we are going to make her whole lifetime an invalidation. We are going to say she has no strength, that she is MEST, that she is a chattel, that she must be cared for, that she is not able, that she can’t do sports."

Along about 1911, women started to kick over the traces hard about this (around the time Carry Nation was cutting up saloons), and all of a sudden there was a women’s suffrage movement. The astonishing premise was advanced into the jaws of men that women were able to reason just as men reasoned. And no man would believe this, but women, "not being very strong and being very weak," won. Women got the vote. All this is in the right direction.

But this situation is an invalidation of half of the human race. That is not a healthy condition. It educationally slants women and condemns them in some small minority to 1.1. It gives them a 1. education. But you can’t just make a 1. by telling a person so. Fortunately, the majority of women are out of it. But the finger that is leveled at them says, "You don’t dare stand up to your environment or the physical universe around you, so therefore you had better be pretty covert about what you do about it." Educationally that is 1.1.

A little boy, who may be far more delicate than the daughter of the family, gets told, "So Johnny Jones beat you up. Hah! It looks to me like you are old enough to handle yourself." And actually, far more boys get this training from their fathers than one realizes—" You have got to stand in there and take care of yourself." All the hero tales he reads, every example— Hopalong Cassidy, King Arthur— everything says, "You’ve got to get in there and fight!" In other words, "You had better be 1.5." So we have the battle of the sexes— 1. versus 1.1. Educationally, they are postulated to go in this direction.

When you are processing individuals you can hit this on an average. When you start to process couples, if there is a lot of trouble in a family, the odds are that what is going on is 1. fighting 1.1.

But this doesn’t always mean that every girl in every family is raised invalidated. A lot of them are raised very nicely and they come way up the tone scale, but some of them are mauled around and used as MEST just as thoroughly as the boy I was talking about, and then you have an occluded case in a woman.

In other words, with a test of perceptics, and by that alone, you should be able to tell

  1. Is this person stronger on being able to remember or being able to reason?
  2. Should you start in on ARC or on MEST locks?
  3. What level of relative truth are you going to get off this preclear?

Now, we are extrapolating from one very definite small fundamental: knowledge. We are studying knowledge; therefore we are trying to make a more reasonable being. Knowledge has two portions— that the individual can reason and that he can learn and recall. A fully reasonable individual should be able to recall everything in his life and should be able to reason on it to the fullest extent.

With the person who can recall it all to the fullest extent, you had better rehabilitate their right to reason on that data, and then you will have a whole being. And with the individual who is completely occluded, you can pretty well assume that this individual already figures out more or less antagonistically that he has a right to reason anyhow, but he does not have any data to amount to anything to reason with.

I hope by showing you some of this that I have clarified with you these two types of cases. This is the first word that has been said on these cases; it doesn’t appear in Science of Survival. And I hope it advances your ability to handle preclears a little better. It might have advanced a few cases for you already.

We will go on in the second part of this by taking up the rudimentary parts of the mind again, to show you what you are rehabilitating.