Life is an "energy" of peculiar and particular properties.

And, believe me, they are peculiar. It took a long time to drag them out. The oddity is that right here at the beginning we have a static. This static is a true static. They don’t have any true statics in physics, but in Dianetics we have an actual true static. It doesn’t have wavelength, so it is not in motion. It doesn’t have weight, it doesn’t have mass, it doesn’t have length, breadth or any of these things. All it has is a symbol. It is motionlessness.

It is very difficult sometimes for a human being to conceive motionlessness, merely because he doesn’t want to look death in the eye. Death is motionlessness .

But here is, nevertheless, an emanation point, a motionlessness from which motion itself is attacked.

This is different from saying— and this was an old theory— that it is an emanation point of motion. That point we are not making. It is not an emanation point of motion. We don’t have this tiny point of whatever it is and then have all motion of the physical universe emanating from it. That is an old, old theory and it is cracked and weather- beaten. It dates from before the days of Sir James Jeans; l he had some interesting ideas on this. It is a very old theory. I know of its being about forty- five hundred years of age, anyway. You will find it in, I think, the second Medic hymn. They postulate a static and then have motion proceeding from the static.

Our thinking is different to this degree: We have a physical universe in chaotic motion which is, as far as we are concerned, interdependent with theta for its life organisms but independent utterly of theta as far as its motion is concerned. Perhaps theta and the physical universe both come from another dual source. Perhaps they are the same order of magnitude. Whatever they are doesn’t matter; it merely matters that the physical universe is in chaotic motion. But theta is a causative theta which impinges upon that physical universe. All the motion there is comes from the physical universe. But all the cause there is— so far as life is concerned— comes from theta.

At least a portion of the "energy" of life is impinged upon the physical universe.

You can envision theta as a small entity which is impinged or is trying to impinge itself on a larger one. If we have the physical universe— MEST— on one side and theta on the other, we can see a mergence of some sort. Theta seems to be making an encroachment upon the physical universe. The physical universe seems to be sort of non causative, random and chaotic, and theta oddly enough has the property of animating and mobilizing it and bringing order into it. And you can see the incursion of theta, a sort of mergence, at which time all theta becomes as thoroughly static and chaotic and so forth as the physical universe. But it is heading, via motion, into the static of complete order.

What else theta is doing, in what other direction, we know not what of, but we should not neglect to mention that it probably is doing something. There are probably infinities of universes. Theta is probably going in many directions.

As far as we are concerned, here on earth, theta has certain aspects. It is doing certain things and it is doing them in a certain way. It might be doing other things in other ways in other universes.

There is no point of impingement between theta and the physical universe for the excellent reason that they do not have their space and time in common. But this does not say that theta does not have matter, energy, space and time of its own, since it does in some peculiar fashion.

For instance, the matter of theta is a codified idea. We have theta matter lying out across this land in the form of a culture. It is quite solidified; it is definitely matter. Furthermore, an idea— which is really collected and aligned theta— has velocity and theta mass. An idea will spread in ratio to the amount of truth contained in it. It is very interesting stuff, theta. There are a lot of rules and laws that can be worked out concerning it.

Theta, as far as we are concerned then, is merely a causative static which depends for its motion upon the chaos in the physical universe.

That portion of life energy which is impinged upon the physical universe has, for its dynamic goal, survival.

Theta is moving in on the physical universe. I haven’t any idea at all why theta is trying to survive through MEST time; that is an imponderable. It is a strange thing that it should be trying to survive through MEST time. But theta evidently depends to some degree upon MEST itself for its survival. We look over all of the aspects of life organisms, we look over the phenomena, and we find those phenomena divided into the dichotomy of survive or succumb. Phenomena do not lie outside these fields, so far as we can tell at this time. And the inspection of all life behavior extrapolates up into higher orders of survive or down into lower orders of succumb.

Now, a fellow really has to be pretty blind to say "I think there are higher things in life than just survival— take ethics, for instance."

You could say, "Well, do you realize that the existence of a thing depends to a large degree upon its ability to approximate truth?"

"Oh, yes."

"Wouldn’t you say something would survive a lot better if it was closer to truth?"

"Well, sure, but this doesn’t have anything . . ."

He is hung right there, because the truth of the matter is that truth is somewhat approaching some optimum motion or optimum alignment or optimum codification. Bodies of men which operate on good, sensible codes survive longer and their individual members survive longer than those that don’t. This is interesting. It doesn’t at once postulate that for this reason all men on earth are good. They could only be potentially good.

The point is that theta does have this factor, this modus operandi, and survival as a postulate is embracive. Of course, it has to have its second datum of the same order of magnitude, which is succumb.

The physical universe is reducible to motion of energy operating in space through time.

Not even the physicists would argue a little bit about that one, because they don’t know. Poor old physics, it got to be such a beautiful static. It got to be such a wonderful static that all the physics professor had to do was say, "Now, you work out this problem according to page thirty- four, and it always works according to page thirty- four, and you never do anything else but page thirty- four, and it covers everything, and we’re all so content and happy about the whole thing." And then the Buck Rogers boys blew the whole thing up in his face, so that the basic mathematics now of physics is quantum mechanics.

This is wonderful stuff. You work out a formula in quantum mechanics and it runs clear across the blackboard several times over, and you keep throwing in figures like .0032, 15 billion squared, 85, and so on. You finally ask the physicist, "What are these figures here in the midst of these xs, ys and alphas and things?"

"Oh," he says cheerfully, "those are bugger factors." And you say, "What are those?"

"Well, the equations don’t work unless you throw those in."

"But what are they?"

"Well, we just found out that when the equations worked they had these figures in them, and so we just keep putting them in."

That is the way they figure the critical mass, by the way, of plutonium. You couldn’t hire me to go near Oak Ridge. They don’t know what its critical mass is except empirically, and one of these days they are going to build a pile that is much bigger than any other pile; they are going to figure it all out by quantum mechanics and somebody will forget to throw in a couple of "15 billions" in the right place, and the whole thing will blow up and New Mexico will disappear off the face of the map. Then somebody will say, "Darn those quantum mechanics anyway!"

The day of being able to be invariable in the field of physics has been over for some time. The general public, though, still has the idea that physics is invariable. They should just take a survey of the number of bottles of aspirin bought by atomic scientists. They would find out this is no longer true.

Sir James Jeans and some of the other boys, such as Dirac, postulate that the physical universe consists of motion. I don’t know how you reduce time into motion exactly. I tried it once and about five pages later I mopped the perspiration off my brow and said, "Whew," and threw the thing quickly away, because the further I went, the more I found that I wasn’t figuring time into motion, I was figuring the physical universe out of existence, and this isn’t done.

As far as I am concerned, according to the various theories that I can get hold of, there is no physical universe. But there is motion of nothing in the physical universe. And a motion of nothing is a wonderful thing to have.

You all have a motion of nothing. A chair, a table— these things are motions of nothing. There is no basic unit of motion. The Greeks carved it all down and they said there was such a thing probably as atoms. We came along and found out there were atoms, and everybody said, "Hurrah! We’re down to the big basic. Now, the basic building block of the universe is an atom." And then they started taking atoms apart, and now they can take the particles apart that go to make up the particles which go to make up atoms, and it has gotten very complicated. But all that is there is motion. That is wonderful.

As far as life is concerned, life takes advantage of this motion without static and injects a static into it to produce the motion known as a living organism. I hope you understand that. That is more of a postulate than it is an axiom; however, it is working out very beautifully and it merges in toward being an axiom, so let it stay that way for the moment.

That portion of life energy concerned with the life organisms of the physical universe is concerned wholly with motion.

That is all there is; it is the concern of the static called theta with the motion of the physical universe.

Life energy has as one of its properties the ability to mobilize and animate matter into living organisms.

This is very wonderful, because you don’t find anything else in the physical universe which can animate matter into anything. You will find chemicals trying to reach some sort of a balance amongst themselves. For instance, sodium doesn’t like itself; you get too much sodium together and it looks like a communist rally. And you get too much of this or that— the upper- weight metals like uranium and plutonium— and bad things happen like Hiroshima and so forth.

On the lower bands, however, you get things trying to form compounds. Iron is always trying to team up with oxygen.

The other day I became rather interested to see that somebody had gotten a good look at Mars through Mount Palomar’s big 200- inch telescope and that he had been observing the changes of seasons. The color of the surface of Mars changes according to the season: spring, summer, white in winter and so forth. It is just as though there were climate and living organisms and so forth. But the whole surface of the planet is red; evidently the soil is red and so on. What has happened there is that probably the bulk of the oxygen has been taken out of the air by all the iron, and so all this iron oxide is lying all over the place.

This action of course can occur in the physical universe. And it appears to have a plan, until you look it over and find out it doesn’t have a plan. Everything sort of merges with everything else and it all looks so orderly, but it is not very orderly; it is highly chaotic. Atoms are going in all directions; they are banging into each other in the most random fashion. The planets seem to go spinning around so regularly, but you look them over and you find out that they are out of orbit one way or the other way. For instance, earth has about eight motions instead of two. It is quite chaotic, all told. The pattern that is laid down is a very scattery one.

The closest thing to order I have seen brought into the physical universe, I think, is Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements— the old periodic chart. That is a wonderful thing. I don’t know how the old boy figured it out; it is just gorgeous. Nobody ever gives him any credit— you don’t hear his name; you know the name of Paul de Kruif but not that of Mendeleev. You have heard of all sorts of important and terrific people, but somehow or other this old boy’s name got lost.

But his work is the only piece of order I ever saw detected in the physical universe. The rest of it is pretty random motion going in all directions; it forms up in various ways and it blasts itself apart. It is very crude and there isn’t any element in it which actually mobilizes any other element to amount to anything. And certainly after it mobilizes it doesn’t animate.

In these patterns, as far as we have looked, you just don’t find anything animating anything else. That is why we have the postulate of theta. It is something that is not peculiar to the physical universe, which yet uses the motion of the physical universe. Also, because of the chaos of the physical universe and because of the action of theta, it is quite obvious that the physical universe is not planned by theta, because theta does another kind of planning— unless theta just took the physical universe and sort of threw it up in the air like confetti on the president’s head when he rides down Broadway and said, "Now, we’ll go gather it all up again and sweep it up to give the street cleaners work." It doesn’t look like that would be a good plan either.

Life energy conquers the material universe by learning and applying the physical laws of the physical universe.

It might seem rather odd to you that that is so close— right next door— to pain. Life goes into MEST. A static gets introduced into the motion of the physical universe; there is a collision, an enturbulence; then there is a separation, and what that static brings out to use is a law of the physical universe. Theta— the static— can make a facsimile of this collision and so learn a law of the physical universe, and then use that law and the force it accumulated from that impingement to go out and conquer more physical universe.

The static of theta itself has no force, so far as MEST is concerned, but it keeps borrowing MEST force and turning it back against MEST. It gets a few ergs of energy here and it shoots them out there, and it keeps doing that.

The engineer who dams a river uses other dammed rivers to dam this river. It took life quite a while to get a leg up to the point where it could utilize physical energy force through an organism like man. Man can now go out and convert and change things way beyond his own body, and he certainly does. He can change the physical face of earth at a great rate right now and he is doing so.

The way he has done it is not because theta has any force, but because theta has borrowed the force of the physical universe and converted it to a conquest of the physical universe. So there is a continual transmission of physical- universe force into the conquest of the physical universe.

Naturally the first thing theta would learn would be physics. It would work and work until it got physics and chemistry; that is all it would be interested in. Only after it got physics and chemistry well started would it say to itself, "What am I?"

Because theta’s attention is toward the physical universe, you will find that right now our orientation in Dianetics, from this region of the first static, is toward the physical universe. There is no reason, however, when that is licked, that theta can’t turn around and look the other way, because there are two directions of operation as far as a life force is concerned. That static proceeds from itself into the motion of the physical universe, and it possibly proceeds from itself into the motion of another universe on the other side, although why you have to postulate space and position and direction for a static, I don’t know.

A fundamental operation of theta in surviving is bringing order into the chaos of the physical universe.

Apparently an organism does not bring order— apparently. We are building atom bombs in order to bomb Russia and so on. But life has a very special way of bringing order: Life destroys those things which do not assist it to bring order and it enhances those things which assist it to bring order. It does both only within the limit of its own experience. So if it does this only within the limit of its own experience, some other viewpoint might find life doing some interestingly erroneous things. Life only does this according to its own viewpoint, but life will destroy what it itself considers contra survival to the goal it has in mind, and it will preserve what is prosurvival.

Out of that you get a very, very important formula in processing preclears. If you would just start picking up the times when people that he didn’t like have walked away from the preclear. and times when people that he did like have walked toward him, you could probably blow a case higher than a kite without ever running a grief charge on it. That is the physical side of the thing: The fellow is acquiring people he wants and he is losing people he doesn’t want.

You reverse that and you get entheta processing: He is acquiring people he doesn’t want and he is watching people he wants to stay with him go away. That is how you blow grief charges and so forth. But they have a tendency to resolve automatically if you run the validation side of processing.

The amount of order that theta brings in gives us evolution in MEST, evolution in theta, and an evolution in organisms— three evolution’s. These are covered in Science of Survival; there is no reason to go over them again.

A life organism is composed of matter and energy in space and time, animated by theta.

In short, there isn’t much reason for you at this stage of the game to go processing theta. What you are processing is motion— effort. Effort has motion in it.

The theta will take care of itself; we just sort of notice that. It inherently will go back to a causative static when it is relieved of the static motions which have been imposed upon it. Whether it lives or dies isn’t for us to ask; it at least goes back into a happier state. We extrapolate this from the fact that preclears get more and more well before they disappear! We assume that they are very well after they disappear. That is a reasonable assumption.

The MEST part of the organism follows the laws of the physical sciences. All life is concerned with motion.

Theta, operating through lambda (living organisms) converts the forces of the physical universe into forces to conquer the physical universe.

Theta, working upon physical- universe motion, must maintain a harmonious rate of motion.

The limits of lambda are narrow, both as to thermal and mechanical motion.

I described that a little bit earlier. What you are trying to do is get your preclear to an optimum motion. You will find, oddly enough, that this optimum motion is a lot higher and faster in terms of physical behavior than you supposed— even though it is fairly fixed in terms of heartbeat— and that people actually are built to move faster and think faster than "normals." They are built to move and think quite a bit faster.

But here you get the speed of use of the machine. This society has gotten down till it is almost static in the use of the body, with its use of automobiles and so on— static! And it is reflected in the degree of aberration in the society, because as the body begins to approach a static state it begins to think that it is in a static position.

Now, as long as an organism, a human being, can pick up motions and actions, turn them around and fire them right back, utilize them and bend them to his own wishes and will, he is healthy. A more severe motion has a second effect: The organism takes the motion, damps its action and kicks it out. He takes the motion, slows it down a little bit, and kicks it out. Or he holds it and dampens it. Or he receives it and then tries to equalize the body with it, somehow, but still stay in action with it. Or he blocks this motion off; he lets it in and then blocks it off interiorly. Or he just lies back and lets the motion raise the devil with him, which is succumbing.

I will go over that scale again. At the top of it we have the top of the tone scale: A person receives motions and throws them back. You try to hurt this person and he doesn’t even know he has been hurt. He doesn’t residually receive this stuff and throw it back again.

He is hurt a little bit at a level where action is damped. He just receives it and damps its action and throws it back. He is hurt a little bit. But when he holds it and dampens it, how does he stop it? What is the dampening factor? He is dampening motion and motion contains time, and the second he dampens down motion he has gotten a holder on the track because he is stopping time to that degree. You take this person over the track again and you will find an area where he caught some motion and held on to it and tried to dampen it, and you will find that he is sitting right there on the track. There was a holder, because he tried to stop something that contained time, and the second he tried to stop something that had time in it, he stopped.

Now, when he tries to equalize with it, that is just endurance. It is traveling at a certain rate of vibration, so he goes into the certain rate of vibration and tries to ride it out. That is what is known as endurance.

The next step down is that he gives the motion a portion of his body; this is physical medicine. When he gives it a portion of his body, that is a sacrifice to it. He really is whipped at about this point. He is really way down below 2.0 when he says "It keeps hurting my hand; therefore we’d better amputate my arm," or "It keeps hurting my appendix; therefore we’d better take out my appendix."

And when this motion comes along and forces the motion of the physical body to accord with the foreign incursive motion, the physical body succumbs on its self- determinism. It comes under the determinism of the foreign motion; the body itself becomes static as far as its own self determinism is concerned and it then obeys. That is a static. There is death. There are holders, groupers and all the rest of them.

A person can apparently get suddenly and wonderfully well overnight, peculiarly, without any processing. What happens to him? His concept of his own ability to move, his concept of his own motion, rises up high enough on optimum to make him believe (a static) that he can simply throw back incoming motions, and then all counter- efforts impinged against his person disappear. And there go psychosomatic illnesses. His static postulate with regard to them is "I don’t have to endure."

Now, all you have to do to a human being is just convince him he has got to slow down and take it easy— take one of these dynamic fellows with ulcers and say, "Now, you’d better slow down and take it awful easy and get some rest. Don’t work so hard at your job; I know you’re interested in your job, but don’t work so hard at it"— and you will bring him down the scale to where he will pick up incoming motions and hold them to damp them. You will finally get him down the scale to where he will just succumb to them. All you have to do is tell this fellow to slow down and he will get sick. Also, if you tell him to speed up beyond a point where he can speed up, he will get sick. But it is much harder to speed somebody up into getting sick than it is to slow him down into getting sick.

It is an odd thing, for instance, that a whole army can go out, fight a battle, endure enormous fatigue, have wounded all around and so forth, and they will think they are all right, until they all of a sudden find out they lost. The general made a report to Washington and Washington went and told somebody else, then the word finally came back to the troops, "You know, you lost the battle." The oddity is that recovery rate of casualties goes right out through the bottom. You bring news of a defeat into a field hospital and the incidence of mortality goes up.

In addition to that, if you take a soldier back from the front lines into the rear echelons and send him to a base hospital a thousand miles away from the front, he will probably die. He might have had a chance of living up within the sound of the guns, but you take him to a base hospital and he will kick the bucket. He was a part of an army; it was traveling at a certain speed. When he is wounded and stays in close association with action, he keeps going at a high enough rate to get well. But then you say, "Now, what this fellow needs is rest, "and ship him to a base hospital way back, tell him to be calm and quiet, give him nothing to do, nothing to occupy his mind, nothing but rest, and you have got a sick soldier on your hands. If he is going to die from this thing he will die.

We were doing that in this last war. We would kindheartedly pick up wounded soldiers and send them to Yosemite. We would send them almost anyplace— the fellows who had ulcers and skin diseases and bullet holes in them and so forth— and they just got so they weren’t worth a darn after a while. That is a fact. They would just lie around the hospital for about four months, and that was just as good as getting killed in action. I have watched them do that; I finally was ready to blow my top on this stuff, until I got four or five men very, very interested in moving very fast, you might say, along certain lines. And these fellows got impatient and they got well and they left the hospital.

That is where people make the mistake of saying "We should get him interested in something; let’s let him follow some hobbies. Nothing serious, let’s not let him get interested in anything serious, but if we can just give him a few hobbies or something so that he’ll walk down the corridor every day and walk back to his bed, he will undoubtedly get well because we’ll have picked up his interest in life."

Now, this is what motion goes into. Pain is merely a contradictory incoming motion to the motion of the body. It produces a randomity and the phenomenon is pain. What will happen, then, if you keep telling preclears to lie very still, to be quiet, to approximate these various forces, is that the forces will move right in on them, because the forces are not in them. The forces are in the theta facsimiles which they are still holding to them to compare with their own velocities.

So, you have this fellow and you want to exhaust this force and counter effort and so forth; if you exhaust his own self- determined effort, this force will disappear. You don’t have to build this force up to full magnitude.