There are three things a man wants to know with regard to existence. Firstly, why does it come about at all? Secondly, what are we doing here? And thirdly, how are we doing it?

What, why, how. Why, how, what. It’s another series of triangles. Right now we have a what we are doing here, and that is a duality, not a singularity. We are surviving, and survive is related to a datum of comparable magnitude, succumb. One survives or succumbs. It’s one or the other. But it’s not an Aristotelian either/ or; it’s a long spectrum. One survives, in other words, in terms of magnitude and longevity. One might survive on a very starved- down, bare- necessity basis for a long time and still get away with it, and one might be able to survive with lots of room to spare in a great affluence. That gives the magnitude of survival, and then there is how much time. Space, time, energy and matter are one side of the equation, and thought is the other.

So now we have how we are doing. In other words we know what we are doing, and how we are doing it is better answered at this time.

Let’s take a look at a two- dimensional graph of Dianometry, the measurement of thought.

The center line is zero. Over to the left is wrong. Over to the right is right. On either side of the series of vertical lines is infinity.

The left side of the graph represents succumb and the right side represents survive. If you want to know how right an answer is, it is how many of these vertical lines the rightness could be measured on toward the right side of the graph, survive. In other words, as right as a person can get would be an infinity of survival. But as wrong as a person can get is dead.

The finite universe is called big theta. Then there is little theta; that is thought. It is not part of MEST. The operation and function of little theta is encroachment upon big theta. The effort of life is to try to break the law of the conservation of energy. It is always trying to upset the conservation of energy or get it as close to upset as possible.

In more dramatic terms it could be stated that little theta is engaged continually in an attack upon big theta in an effort to become big theta.

There happens to be in thought a little box representing each one of these parts of MEST— matter, energy, space and time. In other words, in thought there is a thought time. This is not the finite universe time scale. It is a comparable time scale over in little theta. Thought is an energy that compares in some parts with the electromagnetic and gravitic laws over in the physical universe field, but it isn’t the same thing. So, we have thought energy. Thought also has something representing space. When it comes to matter, thought can be put down as an idea— in other words a body of ideas, a body of thought. All of these things exist in a highly nebulous state over in little theta. There is only one trouble with little theta: it has to depend utterly upon all of these things in order to have motion in itself. So, these two thetas then are interacting. One is trying to pick up the other.

One day I imagine we will have overcome the stars and the planets. We will be able to take matter, tear it apart at will and put it back together again. We will probably be able to condense and expand space and stop time, and of course at that moment we will be big theta! We will be king of the mountain, and when we look around I am sure we will find there is a little theta. Furthermore, I am sure we will find a near infinity of big thetas.

That is a cycle of change, and evidently could be postulated as one of the basic laws of the universes— a new cycle of little theta overcoming big theta, and vice versa.

If you don’t believe that man is always trying to overcome energy and break that law of conservation of energy, look at the number of times inventors have worked upon perpetual motions in an effort to overcome the conservation of energy and get an output which far exceeds the input. In other words, you burn five pounds of coal and then it runs forever. The ideal would be that you put one dollar in the bank and you get five dollars out of the bank; that’s an effort to overcome conservation of energy. As you start along the line and pick up all of these big ambitions and goals and efforts, you find out that each one is trying to shake the pillars of this thing, conservation of energy.

For instance, without doing anything about it, the grasshopper wants to live a little. That is his big ambition. But he finds out that he has to put out a certain amount of energy anyhow, so he puts out the minimal to get the maximal. The instant life stops following this general law, it caves in. That’s death.

Now, there could be said to be a front adjudication board of the mind, and it could be said to be backed up by probably several hundred thousand similar boards. What this step does is evaluate information. What is the value of a datum? How valuable is data? What is the general proposition of relation and association of facts? The relation and association of facts commingling is the action of little theta. That is thinking.

Nearly all of the data concerns the finite universe. And little theta starts picking up all kinds of material about the finite universe and relating it, interrelating it, changing it and so forth. That’s the matter with which it deals, the idea of bodies of information.

Once there was such a thing as one- valued logic. That was what man had, and he got along very well on it— the will of God. Anything that happened was God’s fault. Man had no responsibility for his own actions; he was strictly a pawn in the hands of fate. Ancient superstitions ran on this basis: Man was not himself a causative agent. He had no great power of decision. He could not choose right or wrong for himself; he had to be told. Then we came up the line and we got two- valued Aristotelian logic. Aristotle made quite a contribution in a lot of fields and he made a very marked contribution in the field of logic.

One of the things which is understood in his work is, man has a right to think. You might not consider that was very much of a gain. But if it were possible, for instance, to knock out censorship so that there really could be free speech, then we would have that today.

Now, most censorship is based on two- valued logic. Here is right and wrong. Somebody says to the populace, "That is right and it’s all the right there is, and you can’t be any more right than that," or "That is wrong and that’s as wrong as you can get, and you can’t get any wronger."

Language today is even set up to agree with two- valued logic. You can’t be righter or wronger. Look over grammar texts and you will see shot through the grammar that was foisted off on us these very steep, definite accuracies. In grammar they have assumed that there is hairline accuracy. Actually things are more accurate and less accurate, more right and less right, more wrong and less wrong. There is no such thing as an absolute in the whole universe as far as man is able to obtain. (There may be one, but for practical purposes there isn’t.)

You get into Kant’s transcendentalism and it states that real knowledge transcends the bounds of all human experience. Because it transcends the bounds of all human experience, naturally he can say anything he wants to say and we have got to take it because we can’t experience it. That is authoritarianism super plus ultra.

So, there is two- valued logic. In other words, there is a precision right and a precision wrong. But that is a myth.

In Dianetics we are dealing with the principle of the spectrum as distinctly different from the principle of two values. You will find almost anything in Dianetics can be summed up in terms of a spectrum.

We can represent the spectrum of sanity as a series of vertical lines with degrees between those lines dealing with sections and classes of sanity. Complete insanity to complete sanity is a spectrum. Neither one is attainable. A person can get more and more and more sane. After you get off all the engrams, a person still has to be sure that he has absolutely nothing but correct data in his standard bank, and he must not have anywhere in his mind an incorrect datum. That is impossible. So he can’t be an absolute, or perfect in his computations. He has got a perfect computer, but what is modifying it is that some of his data may be incorrect, and one can never get a perfect answer as long as one has a datum here or there that is a bit off.

All advances of mankind take place by the discovery of new ways to think. We have, for instance, two values in the field of psychiatry: A person is sane or he is insane. Engineers were very dissatisfied with two- valued logic, so they substituted for it three- valued logic: right, wrong and maybe. In the zero area at the middle of the graph of right and wrong you get maybe. So engineers could get along fairly well. They have been working with the mind for a lot longer than anyone else. They have to deal with the mind continually. But they would never quite dare label the fact that they were dealing with the mind, because that had been moved off into sacrosanct precincts to do with thinking, aberration and the human soul, where engineers are not supposed to go. Yet here they are, having studied thought, building great big machines that think, and they have been doing this for quite a while now.

The earliest machine I know of that thinks is four thousand years old. It is interesting that the UNIVAC and the ENIAC have a four- thousand- year- old ancestor.

A further development of three- valued logic is Boolean algebra. Boolean algebra is very interesting, but it can get extremely complicated from a beginning that is extremely simple. It merely says that answers can be gained by any apparatus which can say yes is greater than no, or no is greater than yes. For instance, is this early? Well, you say that yes in this case is greater than no. But it isn’t very early. So, how much greater? In Boolean algebra they were tending toward leaving out the question of how much. The moment we run that in, Boolean algebra merges into the infinity- valued spectrum. So we have a spectrum of yes is greater than no and no is greater than yes.

The mind deals with these things all the time. How red is a red bicycle? How long is a piece of string? How far is it down to the corner? The mind does not want to know in feet; it doesn’t really want to know in time. It just gets the datum input and comes up with the answer. What we have been dealing with all down the ages in man, whether it is in mathematics or anything else, is a servomechanism known as the human mind. And the mathematician’s effort in the past was to put down on paper anything and everything that was necessary to the understanding of a problem so that no human mind had to look at it to find out what it was. In this he was saying that mathematics are imperishable, inevitable and will continue forever, and that they are a purity which has always been here, is here and will always be here. At this moment we knock our heads three times on the floor before the great altar of mathematics!

Actually, mathematics are a crutch which the human mind has thrown in in order to communicate. It can communicate with mathematics with great accuracy. How right these mathematics are, or how inevitable they are, or how long they have been here, or how long they will be here, or whether they will be here whether man is here or not, we don’t know. But we do know this: We use them. Any mathematical equation, no matter how simple or how complex, has hooked into it as one of its factors the human mind.

First the human mind went into it and wrote it down, and the next person who picks it up and uses it is hooking his human mind into that equation. It requires that mind for an understanding.

Now, let’s go a little bit further and say, "How red is a red bicycle?" Is there any reason why you should have to go out and study for some hours, perhaps, all of the things by which color is labeled? How is it graded? What mathematical assignation must be made to this or that shade of color? What is pigmentation? We could discuss this for a long time, and then finally we would come to the point of saying, "Well, it is .001 colorons1 red." That’s pretty fine, but we have had to do a long communication on that. There isn’t any reason why, if the limits of accuracy we require aren’t .001 colorons red, I couldn’t simply tell you it’s very red, and right away we would have a communication.

That is the field of communication. The mind deals with these factors all the time and actually arrives at the most fantastically useful answers just by using things of this character.

The Chinese are very good with the abacus. Actually, in this little gimmick they have hooked in the mind as a servomechanism to such a degree that a white man who hasn’t been brought up with an abacus has a hard time following it. They knock these little beads back and forth and add up these big sums, and you think maybe this person is just playing. I have seen a Chinese do an actuarial problem on the laws of probability on one of these things without thinking anything of it. The funny part of it is that a Chinese raised in that atmosphere has a very hard time thinking mathematically at all unless he has got one of these gimmicks up in front of him.

Perhaps some other race is going to suddenly decide, "There is no use having either mathematics, mathematical equations or UNIVACS and ENIACS. We will just use our heads." And somebody will come and say, "Gee, you know, that’s a good idea. Let’s work on it for a while." Then within about a generation somebody will be able to give you a mathematical statement of something or other mentally, with no trouble at all.

There is no difference between mathematics and thinking. Mathematics is merely another term for precise thinking.

For a long time the mathematician, unfortunately, has had to convince the world that he is necessary, so he has become a kind of priesthood. And he says, "Well now, boys, you can’t understand this stuff. That’s why you pay me so much money."

Now, we have this front board of the mind which is doing evaluation. How do we come to a solution about something like "Let’s eat breakfast now"? A datum comes in that says "Pretty hungry." The next datum for consideration that comes in is "Well, you don’t have very much money and you were going to eat a good lunch so you shouldn’t eat breakfast," and we get the evaluation that missing breakfast and eating a good lunch is a good thing.

The next piece of information that comes in is that there is going to be a visitor in forty- five minutes. That means we don’t have very much time to eat breakfast, so we are a bit more involved in it. Then all of a sudden somebody says, "But there’s a staff conference at 12: 00," meaning we probably won’t get lunch until about 1: 30! So our values come up right away and we go and eat breakfast.

You can figure any problem you want to using infinity- valued logic. You can even figure calculus on it. It consists simply of right/ wrong— a little bit right, a little bit wrong. A datum comes in that’s five lines right, and then one comes in that’s two lines wrong. Then one comes in that’s five lines wrong, followed by one that’s two lines right. At this point you get a point of no decision; but then one comes along that is two right. No more data comes along so we get action and execution.

It takes a little time for this to happen, so you get lags on the problem. And if a person is speeded up so that he has to make instantaneous decisions on someone else’s data, he doesn’t have time to add in or evaluate on this board all the factors, and the first thing you know, he starts making bad mistakes. Or perhaps he has some aberrations which don’t permit certain data to be evaluated. For instance, he may have an aberration that says "All men are good," so that no man, no matter how aberrated, could be considered to be bad in his actions. That datum can never be evaluated. Then when anything relating to that subject comes up to this board, immediately the person is going to get a wrong answer, and that is what aberration does and is why aberration is bad.

That is the trouble with engrams; they are unchangeable data which is not to be evaluated by any of the subevaluation computers. For instance, someone has the datum "All women are liars." Consequently, the person is doing a problem and it goes along perfectly fine until he all of a sudden discovers that one of the factors used in the problem came from a woman. Instantaneously the person thinks, "This is wrong."

An engram will attenuate the analyzer by restimulating unconsciousness. That is mechanical, but that is nothing compared to what happens to thought when it has some stet data which it is not permitted to evaluate. Any time a factor which a person is not permitted to evaluate, right or wrong, comes through on this board, the answer is wrong. It might happen that the society at large has enough of these stet values in it so that people’s answers are somewhat right and maybe not too wrong. That’s about the state of society in its answers today.

The held- down seven enters into this computation and as soon as it does, all sorts of things go wrong. That is aberration, and that is all aberration is. If a person looks around and doesn’t find any ramifications on something, it’s simply data. But when a man has foisted off on him a datum which he is not permitted to question, that is authoritarianism.

For instance, the government hands out a manifesto stating that the reich dollar is worth one loaf of bread today, but there are only twenty loaves of bread in the country and there are five billion reich dollars. The whole society tries to adjust to this thing, and if anyone questions it, he gets the firing squad. It’s a government edict; people can’t refuse to take this reich dollar.

People can’t think in such a country. It’s frozen.

Or, perhaps one is told by some sort of a command which is issued in a society that all males above the age of 21 must go to a military encampment and be trained for one year. That’s what the law says. Then the law has to be modified to let some of these people out because they are not in physical condition to be trained. Then it has to let out some more people because they haven’t sufficient mental capacity to be any good if they were trained. In other words you get modification, modification, modification, trying to make this thing sensible and rational, and it never gets sensible and rational because it has to be reevaluated continually. It is a stet datum.

But supposing the government said, "All men, and we mean all men, have to go out for military training when they are 21 years of age." There would be people being unloaded off trains in stretchers; the sergeant would be calling the roll and there would be somebody with an iron lung in the line- up; or there would be some fellow who was quite brilliant, who was one of the keys of the government itself, and all of a sudden he wouldn’t be there anymore. We would start to get into trouble with some law like that. That would be a stet datum.

A totalitarian government, then, could be said to be entering engrams into the social order continuously. That is what is wrong with it. But it’s not wrong because it’s morally wrong; it just happens to be unworkable, because every time one of these arbitraries is entered, to make the thing work then, the government has to send in another arbitrary. And when that arbitrary factor goes in, a new stet datum gets hung up on this evaluation board. It is a little plus right, but it’s not enough right, so the government puts in another arbitrary, all the time trying to make something a little more right by introducing a new stet datum.

For instance, we have decided the cotton industry isn’t going well, so we issue this law saying that all girls will wear cotton dresses on Tuesday, and this fixes up the cotton industry but it jams up all sorts of other things. With stet data, there is a little wrong with each one right. Finally, by the entrance of these stet data, you will get any equation walking over more and more to being wrong as far as the whole society is concerned because you get overloaded with wrongs, and when you get too wrong, the society succumbs.

It is an interesting thing that a government cycle goes along fine at zone 3 before a lot of arbitraries are entered, at which point it sinks down to zone 2. The people get angry, so more force is applied. When more force is applied, the people get very mad and they revolt, but it doesn’t come off. After that, they get more and more mad, and then finally they are an obedient people. They are down in the apathy of zone 0.

When we get down into zone 0, that government has put things over too far toward wrong. So the survival potential of a people is reduced to a point where the whole populace is likely to fail under a new onslaught from life. This isn’t a criticism of government; this is simply an explanation, because governments have declined in the past. I have been around and looked at a few of the ruins.

In other words, continual introduction of arbitrary not- to- be- questioned factors would interrupt completely the process of thought and make a person wrong. That is what an engram does, and that is what is wrong with an engram. It introduces these various factors and if they are not obeyed, then pain turns on to force the individual to obey it. You either obey the engram or the pain will turn on. That is the parallel law. So the thought level goes down.

It is the analytical mind’s job to be as right as it can be at all times, otherwise the organism will die. When it’s being as right as it can be and it keeps getting wrong data hammered at it, it will act upon them because it is forced to and it will make mistakes. Then it will figure out something in order to correct the mistakes, and something else to correct the mistakes which have been made because the mistakes have been corrected! The next thing you know, a person’s life is so complicated he can hardly stagger through this maze, and he actually thinks he is going through a forest of problems and bumping into trees everywhere. Then after he gets the engrams out which are causing these things, he takes a look and finds out that all this time he has been bumping into one tree, but it sure looked like a forest to him.

A person’s life, then, gets pretty simple, because one is removing these arbitrary factors. Take a person who worries all the time for fear his right foot will twitch. He has made terrific plans so that he sits down in the chair and almost always hooks this right foot under a rung in such a way that it won’t twitch. Then he must be careful to watch people’s eyes to make sure that they don’t look down to see if the right foot is twitching. Aberrations are just as silly as this, and just as jealously tended. After a while he neither has a compulsion to keep the right foot from twitching nor a right foot that will twitch.

When he was a little kid, let’s say, he had some sort of a somatic there and his right foot would twitch a lot. Finally they suppressed him down to a point where he couldn’t let that foot twitch anymore, and he had to break his own abreaction all the time, which was bad.

It is a magnificent tribute to the ability of the human mind to compute, that it is able to take care of all these arbitraries an aberree has and still go along and make a successful life out of it. But it is hard work. A person has to do a lot of thinking, because these arbitraries aren’t few. They run up ordinarily in terms of thousands in one person.

We say, "We’re going to pull up this person’s principal neurosis," and we find ourselves pulling up five hundred.

In view of the complexity of these things, how anybody could ever classify the various insanities, I don’t know. Basically the mind is very simple, but its manifestations are terrifically complex.

Man has been worrying about this for around five thousand years that I know of. What are his various connections with the infinite universe? with God? the human soul? with this and that? The problem gets extremely complicated. For instance, he might have a line such as telepathy, which might be shut off by engrams. Maybe the society, by not believing in telepathy, prevents any telepathy from operating. There are all sorts of possibilities. He might even be thinking he is getting telepathy when all he is consulting are demon circuits, and this enters a big doubt that he is getting a telepathic message. After a while he has so many either/ ors, with no solution, that this board just can’t be worked anymore and he drops the whole thing. And if there is no longer any telepathy, that is probably how it went out.

Being right is surviving and being wrong is succumbing. If a person is more right than wrong in his lifetime on an average, he goes on living. If he is just a little more right than he is wrong consistently, he will do all right, unless of course he hits one where he is suddenly very wrong, and then that’s too bad. The space of time in which these situations are permitted to be executed has a great deal of influence on this.

There is one of these right/ wrong evaluation boards for each dynamic. The optimum solution is when you have come as far right as possible for each dynamic.

If one knocks out any one of the dynamics in figuring out these problems and only operates on three of these dynamics, ignoring the fourth one, there is going to be something wrong about the equation and one is going to have to take the consequences. So, if one ignores self but pays attention to the next three, his problems are going to be just as wrong as if he ignored the fourth and took the first one.

This could be figured out in terms of force vectors, with a graph showing how the dynamics are suppressed and how they go forward. If a man were an infinity wrong on all four dynamics, the whole race would die and maybe even big theta would collapse too. That would be an impossible thing, but that is immediately what it postulates. If the person were absolutely wrong in everything he could do, there would go man, the universe, everything. If he were absolutely right, even for a moment, on all four dynamics, that would pose the fact that everything would survive for an infinity from then on, which is not only impossible but incredible.

How right can you get? How wrong can you get? Well, you could get so right that there would never be any death anymore for anything. Or you could get so wrong that everything would die, including the whole universe.

An individual’s death is very slightly wrong compared to the whole race, though people don’t like to see it. But in the very broad sense, if one man dies it is going to leave a hole. Don’t believe those signs that say "You think you’re such a smart guy and so necessary. Well, go down to the graveyard and take a look. A lot of them birds were indispensable too." It’s a lie.

The person was necessary and in his own line was indispensable, whatever he did. Start pulling people out of an organization left and right, saying "Well, this person has no function, " and things will start going wrong. Of course a man could be very consistently wrong as part of an organization. So all of these things require adjudication for right and wrong. There is no perfect solution, but we try very hard to attain one. It could be summed up on this basis: How wrong can you get? Dead. How right can you get? An infinity of survival.

As we go up the line, these zones are labeled, and they go up on a gradient. Complete apathy would be death. Right next to it is feigned death. Coming up the line are various degrees of apathy, and then you get into resentment and anger, and then into boredom, and finally to where the person is cheerful and easy to get along with.

Along about the middle of this scale there is a break line on affinity, a break line on communication and a break line on reality, below which point there is an increasingly reverse polarity, and above which there is an increasing attempt to reach the infinite in good affinity.

From about the middle down we get reverse affinity, the first level of which is just not to care particularly, then we start to get into faint and transient survival. You get a person who is just mildly perturbed. Below this he is slightly frightened, and then we get a point where he is afraid, then terrified. He finally reaches a point where he is being broken by onslaught and then a point where he dies.

Down that line we find that grief lies just above apathy. Just above grief lies fear and just above fear lies perturbation. But between grief and fear lies terror. It is simply a magnitude of fear. Afraid of what? Afraid of being wrong. How wrong can you get? Dead.

A person doesn’t have grief unless he loses an ally. The person lost has got to be an ally of some sort, no matter if he is a political figure, a motion picture star, Papa or Mama; there has got to be some affinity line in there. His death all of a sudden shows that some section of one of the dynamics has been wrong.

Maybe a person did not himself initiate the solution to be right. Maybe he is just part of a group, let’s say, but one of that group dies. For instance, in the newspaper recently there was a picture of a group of marines in Korea after their jeep had run over a land mine. The mine had exploded and killed a marine, and the picture showed the driver crying because he had just been responsible for the death of a marine. He felt he was infinitely wrong somehow, so there was a terrific shock reaction.

I mention marines because they are indoctrinated in these things. They have taken these survival points, which are there naturally, and have punched them up. One thing a marine must not do is be responsible for the death or injury of another marine. They take it very much to heart. So there was first fear or terror that it was going to happen, then there was a moment of terror that it was true, and then when he found out that it was true he immediately went into grief.

Have you ever noticed a person who is about to be told bad news? When he gets the introductory remark "I have something to tell you, sit down," that person for a moment is in a state of shock— terror. First there is a little fear, the person is perturbed, then more fear, then he is terrified, after which he gets the news and goes into grief and then apathy.

You can watch a person go down the affinity scale whenever you tell that person about a death on any dynamic.

The test of any philosophical level postulate is whether or not it can be observed in real life. Don’t check philosophy by going down to the library. Check philosophy by going out into the street, into your home, or into yourself, or by looking at the world. Any of these postulates become real to you only when you yourself have observed them, not because you have been told they are true.

Now, here is the reverse of a sudden break in affinity. A person is mildly perturbed about people around him, his job and so on. He doesn’t know he is getting along well. Then somebody comes along and tells him that he has just gotten voted as the most popular guy in the place. He wants to believe it but it has got to be confirmed a little bit more. Then he finds out this is true, and his affinity level and his survival potential will go way up.

If you run enough fear locks out of a person, the first thing you know, the person’s sense of reality will start to heighten, not only because you have communicated with the past by getting this fear, but also because any time you start to lift one corner of this triangle the others follow.

When you start running out locks of times this person was afraid, you are not down in the grief band, you are coming up above that, so of course his sense of reality will improve and naturally he is going to get better communication. Sometimes you can turn on sonic by doing this, and you will be able to predict that by looking at this series of triangles. You should learn to predict the rightness or wrongness of what you are doing, and by measuring up what you are doing in the line of processing you will find out why you are doing some of these things.

What happens when you break affinity with somebody after he has done something you don’t think is right? First there is boredom, then you start to get angry with him, then you break communication and say, "I don’t want to talk to this guy."

Have you ever talked to someone when he has been angry? Part of that tone band is he wants to talk to the person hey angry with, and he’s going to talk to him; he’s going to tell him what he thinks, and hardly anybody can restrain him from doing this. But after a short time it will really solidify.

Whereas if he did tell the other person, and this fellow had to sit down and take it, of course he would have abreacted it as far as just one dynamic was concemed. But it is not good to pick things up on one dynamic alone. A person can go along through life living on dynamic one just so long, neglecting the other three, and gradually the world will start kicking back at him. Dynamic one will get crushed from everybody else’s dynamic— from the whole group dynamic— and everything else will come down, winding him up in apathy. In other words a man couldn’t be angry forever. It’s a dwindling spiral.

After a person has this terrific anger where hey going to tell the other person off, we get apathy toward this problem and we get a break in communication. He doesn’t want to have anything more to do with this person. He feels bad about it and he just doesn’t want to have to be bothered. That is communication as it goes down toward apathy, pulling down affinity and reality with it. People can get angry at other people and not want to communicate with them anymore, and soon, when you say "Do you remember Joe?" the fellow will pause for a minute before saying vaguely "Oh, yes. Yes." Know that Joe isn’t real anymore. He doesn’t exist.

I have known people who even go so far as to say "You know, when I am mad at a person, I just pretend they don’t exist anymore." The word pretend is incorrect. He has gone down into the apathy band and that person doesn’t exist anymore as far as he is concerned. In such a way the whole society could go into an agreement on the nonexistence of a person and he probably wouldn’t exist. There would simply be a puff of smoke where he was standing.

Of course, reality could be postulated in other ways. It could be defined as agreement. We naturally select out of our midst those people who do not agree with our realities. If someone walked in at this moment and swore absolutely that an orange cat was standing here talking to you, and protested and affirmed his right to say so, you would be the first to say "Where is the local spinbin so we can put this boy in it?"

We have naturally selected this person out of the society because we know that an orange cat isn’t talking. And a person who gets that wrong often enough, and whose reality is that far out of agreement with everybody else’s reality, is crazy. On the other hand, it may be that an orange cat is talking! But we have agreed that this is not what is taking place. So we have a reality about the whole thing.

We can call reality agreement. As long as agreement exists, affinity exists and communication exists. When agreement doesn’t exist, affinity starts to break down, communication starts to break down into zone 1, and we have two different realities which clash. In other words, any one of these things that goes down finds the other two being lowered. So we get disagreement. That doesn’t mean that people working together have to agree with each other all the time. In a group of people working together, each one possesses his own set of data and can contribute his experience to the group. He doesn’t have to agree with the group, because his data may be entirely different. That group, therefore, which makes it possible for these various sets of data to be used by the whole group will stay in solid agreement, and it has great reality as a group. It will knit together and become possessed of a high level of affinity in the group, because it is communicating as a group.

You can use these things. You certainly can. By running out fear locks, you can turn on sonic and put your preclear in better communication with his past. And by getting all the grief off the case, you can definitely raise his tone level.

The toughest thing is when you get down on an apathy level. If everybody disagrees with one person long enough and hard enough, after a while this person is going to start down scale. He can’t help it. Then the group is going to start down with regard to him, and he will sink into an apathy after a while.

To start with he is perfectly cheerful. He’s agreeable. You come in and say, "Let’s go to the show tonight." He doesn’t much want to go to the show, but he’ll go. He drops down scale and you say, "Have a cigarette." He wants a cigarette but he says, "No." He is just disagreeing. Then he drops further and you say, "Here is your pay check." He replies angrily, "What do you mean bringing this pay check in here?" His agreement is way down. In other words, something has broken affinity and his communication goes down. After a while you can’t get this person to talk. He won’t agree with anything, neither will he disagree. His level of reality is way down in apathy. He is making no action to agree or disagree. He isn’t communicating, and as far as caring about anything is concerned, he doesn’t.

Now, we know there is an evaluation board for each one of the dynamics. What happens to the person with regard to himself? Robert Louis Stevenson once said that the greatest lesson a man should learn is how to be a friend to himself.

A man’s sense of reality about himself can be bad, too. Here you have the mind with regard to the matter which it is controlling. A mind can become separated in such wide disagreement with the matter it is controlling (because it has been smitten with so much pain from this matter, and is so much entangled with it) that you get a disassociation. That is what people do when they start going down the scale. When the mind gets disassociated from matter more and more and more, that man is crazy. He is no longer fully in control.

Various things can be done to put a man more fully in control of himself. You can get a person to a point where by exercise alone he learns how to balance himself. Mind and matter are usually in perfect accord in a little baby, unless he is very aberrated, and he will learn how to stand up. He will get bumps and so forth, but this is not serious. He will learn mentally to respect what is happening physically. He will gradually learn how to balance himself and he will take care of himself better and better as he learns more and more skills. Mind is still riding over matter.

You’ll notice that mind and matter are a spectrum. When you get down to a point where mind is unable to control matter, and on a reactive level they are too commingled— when they get too closely interlocked and beaten together— it’s pain. Reactive thinking would be thought tangled up so thoroughly with matter that it could no longer operate harmoniously over it, and about this time thought would detach its attention units and the person would be out of communication with himself.

One of the first things a person does when he starts to get very aberrated is to cease to enjoy life. He can have aberrations which hectically tell him to be a glutton, but he doesn’t enjoy the food. There is nobody sadder than a satyr or a nymphomaniac on the subject of sex. They are very frantic about the whole thing, but actually with no enjoyment. They have broken off communication, because affinity and agreement are broken. Psychosomatic illnesses follow in the wake of this.

On the first dynamic the mind can break off with thought. You find most people are only entered into themselves to a very slight degree. There are people who have tried to express that fact in the past by saying "Know yourself," or "Be yourself." All they are saying is that mind and matter had better get together and operate in agreement as to what they are going to do. In an aberrated society, we even have people practicing flagellation in an effort to destroy the matter so the thought can run free.

What is needed is a harmonious intermingling on every dynamic, and the goal of processing is to disentangle points of turbulence between little theta and big theta on each one of the dynamics so that a man can not only handle himself but be himself and enjoy himself on the first dynamic. On the second dynamic, children and sex, those people who beat their children are normally very aberrated sexually. They can also have the second dynamic selectively aberrated so that they are nice to children and don’t much enjoy sex, but usually the two are completely interactive.

Once we get the second dynamic straightened out, we can have affinity with future generations. It requires an agreement that future generations are something one must have. If we are in disagreement on that subject, the rest of it will start to fall down too.

Our end goal as far as the third dynamic is concerned is to get a person into good enough condition so that he will get along with his fellow man. Psychology has almost 100 percent concentrated upon that one fact— the "well adjusted" person— and that is really pauperized, because such a person is all tangled up as far as his group is concerned. A man has got to be able to get along with his group, and he has got to be able to feel that he has as much right to adjust the group as the group asks of him to adjust to it. In other words, it has got to work both ways. You don’t want a sheep, a person that will walk in and say, "Well, the walls are blue, so I turn blue." That is adjusting to one’s environment.

On the fourth dynamic, you want man in harmony with man.

You find all through an aberrated society turbulences on each one of these dynamics where little theta is trying to take over big theta. A large proportion of men, when they look it over, will agree that man ought to be in control of the universe. And if you ask them specifically what they would do about it, they may start to say, "Well, of course man, excluding the Russians, ought to be in control of the universe."

If we break this down, we find the condition today between Russia and the United States is that communication between the two is very low. Affinity is also low, and agreement is going to go one way or the other. Right now it depends on the flip of a coin. But if Russia and the United States come together as thought and MEST fighting thought and MEST, there will be a terrific turbulence on the fourth dynamic, and a sinking down into apathy. With an action of this character you are not going to get anything going up the line on agreement. No nation just because it was beaten ever agreed with what the conqueror was trying to do. It simply went down to apathy. And no conquering nation ever really won, because it could never win on the fourth dynamic. That was always missed. So the empires that conquered by the sword fell.

Those are the four dynamics and that is what you are trying to do on a philosophic plane in the administration of processing.

We have a Standard Procedure now that we know is safe. By this Standard Procedure, on the first, second, third and fourth dynamics, we can disentangle thought from MEST and let them balance each other gracefully.