

ORGANIZATION SERIES - PART 03 OF 20

[New name: How To Present Scientology To The World]


EDUCATION

A lecture given on 25 October 1956

[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

There's a rumor going around that I'm supposed to talk to you
about how to instruct people tonight.

Now, somebody tells me that that's what I said earlier today, but
I have been run on not-knowingness, and the process was never
flattened. We got back to five lives ago and I quit. I said,
"That's that," I said, "That's that. If there's... If I've got
all this to not-know all over again, to hell with it."

I want to talk to you about instruction. Instruction is an
interesting subject. It's a very interesting subject, because we
seem to be in the business of instruction. Now, you think of
yourselves as auditors. Auditing techniques are a method of
bringing people to know. Think it over.

A great oddity here is that the common denominator of living
appears to be learning. In Dianetics we had survival as a common
denominator. In Scientology we discover, much to our
embarrassment, that that's inevitable. So we have to find another
excuse, and the best excuse we can find without looking too far
or weighing our brains down too much is learning.

Apparently learningness has great breadth, and we find
learningness at almost any level of action, living or operation.

Now, learning would encompass this operation: Fellow looks at the
wall and learns it's a wall. You got that? So recognizingness is
the lowest level of learningness and is still learningness.

We meet Joe. If we're in good shape, we can learn that it's Joe
by looking at him. Some of us who are not in very good shape meet
Joe and talk to Father.

Now, do you see how this fits? See how this could be pushed over
into a learning category?

Now, don't be fooled. The truth of the matter there is there's an
awful lot more (this is between us Scientologists) to livingness
than learningness. There's a lot more of it. There is
creatingness. There is a number of other factors than
learningness. We're not going to go into any of them. We're just
going to talk about learningness, and we're going to show how
everything could be pulled in and by some slight adjustment, and
maybe going around a few fast curves, be common-denominatored
into learning, which would make education our forte. Education.

The odd part of it is that a Scientologist can educate people
that no one else has ever been able to educate. How do they do
it? By auditing them. One of the main things that rises in
auditing is IQ, which tells you of course, secondarily, that
learning rate goes up. What is IQ but relative cognitionability?

Now, what then are we doing, what are we doing in actuality
(below the level, of course, of Solids and Effort and so forth),
but pushing thought around one way or the other? See, we're
pushing thought around.

Now, people who think there is only thinking of course buy at
once the totality of cognitionness. See, they buy that as the
totality of any action. If you can learn about it, you got it.
They do this so well that they invent so many things to learn
about that nobody is ever then able to get Clear by processes of
education alone. They booby-trap the line.

Some fellow has a body; he can't look at it so he looks at
somebody else's. He can't look at that so he looks at a dead body
on the dissection table. He finds an awful lot of spare parts as
he begins to cut it up one way or the other. He looks over all
these spare parts and he begins to realize that there is no way
he can bring order into the chaos of blood and confusion from
this cadaver except to apply new titles to everything that comes
under his hand. So he writes a learned textbook on the subject.
But actually he doesn't do anything. He doesn't even do a good
job of cutting the corpse up, but he does do a splendid job of
titling parts of the corpse. And he does a wonderful job of this,
and he spends the rest of his life readjusting his titling.

This is about as close as anybody ever looked at a body -- I mean
directly -- in the healing professions. They've even taken the
titling and put it over into a dead language that nobody ever
speaks anymore, you see?

A psychologist trying to occupy a brain that is to him only a
series of titles will not get very much reality on the close
proximity of brain cells. He has so many parts of the brain that
he is living in the midst of a bunch of titles.

Now, learning can very easily, then, be subjugated to learning
some complexity which has been invented about something that one
never looks at. And so learningness itself can get to some degree
into disgrace.

There's an obsession about learningness which is quite
interesting to handle: the technique of craving to know -- "Put
craving to know into the walls," and so on; makes people sick at
their stomachs, and all sorts of interesting things.

Now, here's learningness, then, at its worst: learning large,
long categories of invented knowingnesses disordered into some
kind of a chaotic catalog, with another curve of another language
being applied, and so on.

Botany is one of these classification subjects. And I'll tell you
the total thinkingness that went on concerning botany. It would
interest you very much. It was done by Francis Bacon in a little
essay, and he laid down a (quote) "science" called botany because
he supposed that this would be a good way to lay down a science.
So he just took something that hadn't been laid down and dashed
it off in a paragraph or so, that this is the way you would put
together a science about flowers, growing things. He dashed off
this little paragraph, and that, since the sixteenth century, has
been a science called botany.

Well, it's never moved in its actual technical activity from
those few sentences. But, brother, has it got classification!
Wow!

Now, you didn't know that a skunk cabbage was actually intimately
related to a wallaby rose, did you?

Well I didn't either but the... some botanist would undoubtedly
be able to accomplish this in some associative fashion.

All right. Now, let's take learning about the mind. I said some
psychologist would be in the middle of a bunch of named parts, he
wouldn't be in the middle of a brain. Well, then his ability to
contact or look at his own brain has been so low that it has
escaped him that the classification of the brain was the
classification of an item in which most of the psychology world
has been totally, embeddedly resident. So this whole fact has
escaped them.

Now, let's look carefully why it has escaped them. They couldn't
look at it, so they looked at a substitute for it. They couldn't
look at the thing, so they looked at a substitute for the thing.

Now, let's go on into basic therapies, old-time therapies of one
kind or another, and we find one of those was psychoanalysis. And
psychoanalysis is so interested in the significance of the
experience that they have never looked at the experience.

So education has been in the past, or learning has been in the
past, a system of avoiding observation. So a systematic avoidance
of observation will sooner or later get something into trouble,
and into trouble has come the whole of education itself.

We send a man to school for -- I don't know, I think it's gotten
up to an optimum now of sixty years till he gets out of college;
and this individual actually has been put in a groove of avoiding
knowing. You see that? He's on a system whereby he can avoid
knowing something. How does he do that? By studying it!

Now, there are significances, and there are basic associations,
and there are mock-ups, and there are floors and walls and
machinery and cogwheels and botanical gardens. There are all
these things. And anybody that you're trying to teach anything is
normally into an interesting avoidance of the object by learning
its invented knowingnesses.

Here's a great big machine, has chromium-plated cogwheels and
gold-plated levers and -- oh, it's a gorgeous piece of stuff, you
know? I mean it's huge, so on. Two men walk up to it. One of them
says, "What's that?"

And the other one says, "That's a Nash-Wheelsy."

"Oh? Oh, is that right? I didn't know that." And they walk away.

How easy it is to satiate somebody's appetite for learning by
giving them a name for something. You ought to make a study of
this. Somebody comes around to you and asks you, "What kind of a
circumstance is this whereby somebody goes off the end of the
pier because of a divorce? What's wrong with such a person, they
had a divorce and they want to bump themselves off, and so on?
What is that all about?"

And then you start to explain to them, "Look. What this person
did to the other marital partner is kicking back as a motivator,
you see? The person who is so upset about it must have done
something."

Now, you explain this and you possibly would get it across very
nicely. You see, possibly. You see, you would just take the
actual straight-out anatomy of the marital difficulty. One
person, after a divorce they want to kill themselves, and so
forth. Well, they must have done something in order to inherit a
motivator to this degree. Well, we explain this to somebody, we
would give them some information. Why is it information? Because
it can be used in the game of life.

But now let's just completely and utterly sidestep any
responsibility we have as Scientologists, or just kick it over
sideways and say, "Ahhhh!"

And they say, "Yes? What's the matter?"

"Well, that person has a-a-a-a-pseudomania. I mean it's a very
serious circumstance. It's an illness -- it's an illness which
often comes after a divorce. Pseumania -- pseudomania marititus."
And you would be fascinated how often this deep, profound piece
of nothingness would turn somebody else around and send them away
perfectly satisfied, evidently. You know? They "know" now. Well,
what do they know? They know something to remember, that's what
they know. And that's all they know.

All right. Let's look at this, and let's take a little closer
view of this, and we discover then that that person is willing to
avoid the situation. The person is willing to avoid the situation
and you gave him an excuse to. You gave him a fancy name. He
didn't have to invade the thing any further. That was that, he
could just avoid it from there on out and he's all set.

Or you have given him a little thread off your cloak of
authority. An authority has told him this, so now he is an
authority. And he goes down and tells his fellow mechanic "You
know -- you know Pete?"

"Yeah, what about Pete?"

"Well, you know Pete -- Pete's in a bad way."

"What about Pete?"

"Well, Pete has uh... pseuda... um... has... uh -- he's got a
dreadful disease!" That's the end of that datum.

All right. We find, then, if this is dominant as a method of
conveying understanding, that people must be avoiding to a very
marked degree the actual objects, actions or beingnesses of life.
Must be! They must be running on "avoid," somehow or another.
They must be going off this way when they, as far as we could
see, could go right on that way.

Some fellow wants to know how to build a small concrete dam. You
teach him how to mix concrete, you teach him how to make a form,
you teach him something about the pressures of water at certain
depths and the need of side embankments. And it's quite a
subject, but you could probably teach him all this in an evening.
They don't do that in this society. They send them to college for
four years. And when they come out, they don't even know what a
dam is. And they don't give a damn either.

All right. So, education could be one of several things, one of
which could be the science of avoidance -- how to avoid. And we
could do all that up, and we could do a wonderful science. It'd
be terrifically acceptable. We would write it up in such a way
that never could anybody find out anything, anyhow, anywhere. We
would teach them a system whereby, if they looked at a wall, it
was then necessary to look it up in a book. And having looked it
up in a book, they would then have to address a small slide rule
which operated in phonetics. Then they could look at the name on
the slide rule, one way or the other, and it would give them a
combination of syllables somehow or another, and this, we would
say, was it.

You would be very amazed, but a book on this subject written with
a very sober, pompous style would probably be enormously
successful. "The Science of Knowing How to Study," or something,
you could call it, you know. You'd be all set.

You would do this by catering to their avoidance mechanisms.
You'd permit them to avoid, wouldn't you?

Well, our systems of education are less merciful, much less
merciful, because we operate on the very sound principle that it
won't kill anybody to know anything. And they operate with the
associative datum -- you see, the datum instead of the thing, and
so forth -- they operate on the theory that a little bit of
learning will kill you deader than a field mouse; that learning
is dangerous.

There's even an old proverb, "A little bit of learning is
dangerous," you know? How they would love to include into that "A
little bit of learning or a whole lot of learning or any kind of
learning about anything will kill you dead." That is the theory
of avoidance in education.

Now, we come through and we don't subscribe to this. We don't
subscribe to it at all because we know for a fact -- we know for
a fact that a person (that is, the person, not his body) could
actually connect with or associate with anything with impunity.
And the only things that are giving him any trouble are those
things with which he dare not associate. The things that he's
unwilling to learn something about are the things that are giving
him trouble.

And then, what does learning mean to us? It means, simply,
communication. It doesn't mean a substitute datum. That's
awfully, brutally, horribly simple. You want to learn about
something, communicate with it, see?

Now, one of the ways of communicating with it is talking it over.
Now, supposing it's just a datum. Supposing it isn't a solid
object, supposing it's just some thetan's postulate. The only way
it disappears is to talk it over, and in many cases, think it
over.

Now, a person gets down to a point where he can't think it over
anymore, then he has to talk it over. But most people do both:
they think it over and talk it over, and it goes boom.

Data consists of the postulates, or assignment of value, of
thetans.

That's data. That's all data is.

Now, when they have assigned a value on which they have rather
uniformly agreed, they have a fact. You got that? Now, would
anybody please tell me how the association only with these
agreements, or the communication only with these agreements,
would kill anybody? That's for sure.

Well, it so happens that the walls got there that way. That's
packing a postulate that says "I am a case of thereness, agreed
upon and ratified by the Treaty of Ugveldt, eighteen miles south
of cloud nine." That's the wall.

So if there's a vast difficulty in associating with other
people's agreements, of course then we'll have vast difficulty.
Because the vast difficulty is just another postulate.

So we get down to the fundamental of Scientology education, and
that is that it doesn't hurt a thetan to communicate with
anything, anywhere, at anytime. And to educate him, all we have
to do is teach him that. He has to know that. He gets to be a
mighty smart boy if he subjectively knows, knows by experience --
may require some processing, you see -- that it won't kill him to
know about something. If he learns that, then he learns learning.

It's a great curiosity that to go on then from that point and
make any great tremendous complexity out of it is really rather
difficult. A person can learn about what he can communicate with.
And it won't hurt him to communicate with it.

Now, it does hurt -- you understand, this is the cross-up that
gets this all off. When you push a body into a buzz saw, parts
come off, which by common agreement is painful. That's quite
different though -- it's quite different -- than a thetan
communicating with a buzz saw. You get somebody exteriorized and
push him into a buzz saw and he says, "Whee!"

Now, the funny part of it is, if the body wasn't rigged by
agreement to be destructible by its own experience -- a body has
agreed already to be destroyed by its own experience, you see --
you could push it into a buzz saw, and when you pulled it off the
parts would simply reassemble. If there was no experience factor
added to the body, that wouldn't be painful either. But if you
add an experience factor to the body, then you let people in for
pain and destruction.

Old-time education could be defined in this wise -- in this wise
(it's horrible): placing data in the recalls of others.
Therefore, old-time education accepts hypnotism, does not really
allow for the usableness of the information, does not analyze
doingness and completely avoids any havingness, which of course
permits nobody to be anything. But putting data into the recalls
of others causes others to rely on experience, not perception.
These are two different things. Remembered experience is quite
different than perception and estimation of the situation.

Now, I'm not running down old-time education completely; I'm just
burying it.

Scientology has an entirely different category of action. Now,
this has not at this time been laid out perfectly, all squared up
at the edges and so forth. But it goes something like this: You
offer data for the assimilation and use of others and facilitate
their absorption of it to the end of permitting them a better
control of a better life. That would be a much longer definition,
but it actually is more factual.

If you're going to attempt education at all, then it has to be a
game with a goal. There has to be some reason why. And unless you
add that into your definition you're going to get nowhere.

So when we offer a person a datum, that datum must be under the
self-determinism of the other person, not in his recalls. Get the
difference. It must be at the disposal of his own determinism.
And if it is not, then it cannot be used thoroughly in living.

So we give them data in such a wise as to give them control of
the data, and then permit them to use that data, align and
evaluate and apply that data to specific beingnesses and actions
in life. And we never let a datum hang up in the air without
anything with which to unite.

Now, what I just said originally about the avoidance system of
education happens to be any preclear you ever processed. He's
sitting there in his mother's valence. He has a very bad heart,
terrible! You say, "Anybody you ever know have a bad heart?"

"Oh," he says, "yes. Mother."

And you say, "Well, all right. Do you ever remember a time when
Mother's heart was bad?"

"Oh, yes, yes. Lots of times," and so on.

You say, "Well now, what about your own heart? Do you suppose
that could have anything to do with it?"

"Yes, I dare say it has a great deal to do with it."

No data would fall out. It's all in there in complete black
basalt.

I've had people sit and tell me exactly what was wrong with them.
They'd studied it all out. It was still wrong with them, still
wrong with them. They hadn't gotten rid of a scrap of it. Well,
how come? It was probably all the wrongness they had left. It was
probably the only lesson they had ever learned.

Now, anything that is wrong with anybody is simply a lesson
they've learned. Well, people know this so they avoid lessons.

But the first thing that got wrong with them was to avoid a
lesson, and then this permitted them thereafter to avoid more
lessons, and every lesson they avoided could then victimize them.
So here we go, here we go.

How many ways could you devise to simply teach somebody a great
deal about education? How many ways could you possibly do so?
Well, how many auditing techniques do you know? There's quite a
few, quite a few. But in view of the fact that you're doing an
educational activity, it of course depends in a large measure
upon communication. So communication must be demonstrated to
exist before any education can be undertaken that will become
education in the Scientology sense, not another engram.

You can always beat somebody's head in and say, "That'll teach
him." It will, the rest of his life. It'll teach him every day.
To what? Lord knows! Completely random, completely random.

Supposing the phrase in that head-beating was "He is no earthly
good." We actually got somebody from Northwest Airlines, I think
it was, that had this phrase in the bank, and everything he had
done on the ground had been a total failure. He'd taken to be a
flyboy, and he hated being a flyboy; but he was no "earthly"
good.

Some other fellow with the same, identical phrase becomes a
parson. Man will insist on using his power of choice and he'll
insist on doing something about anything. But unless his power of
choice is in plain sight, and unless his somethingness is in very
good view, unless the individual has a command over something and
knows what he has a command over of, you know -- that's very
important.

I've heard it said that when you're training lions you really
should know it's a lion you're training. See, I've heard of this.
Some cautious souls have brought this up from time to time.

If you're handling a human being, why -- huh! Lord knows what
you're handling. You might be handling a lion, or you... Look at
these little kids. They run up and down the street snapping cap
pistols at each other, and so on. You can't tell from one minute
to the next who they are. Who are they? Oh, I don't know. They're
anybody: Davy Crockett or Buffalo Bill or Nathan Hale or -- he
got hanged -- somebody. They're being somebody. They're being
somebody they're not. It's only when somebody becomes somebody he
is that he gets worried.

All right. Systems of education, then, must only take into
account the unharmful aspects of communication, and the formulas
of communication, and the facts of communication, and an
alignment of the data to be transmitted so that it may be
employed in living by the other person.

Terrific dependency, though, on communication, isn't it?
Communication and its whole formula. Every time that was avoided
when you were a little kid in school, you didn't learn something.
There was something you didn't learn. That's for sure. They
didn't bother to get your attention, they didn't bother to tell
you where it applied; there you went. And to this day you
probably think two and eight make twelve. Of course that's your
postulate. If you were good enough they would, but that's beside
the point.

Now, education oddly enough contains a nearly complete -- outside
of the definitions of it, itself -- rendition in the old Logics
of Dianetics. And those are the anatomy of education. They might
be called the axioms of education. They were totally missing in
the field of education.

Some of those were almost known back in the days when they used
to teach a subject called logic and argumentation. Wonderful
subject. I had a textbook on it once. Just gorgeous. Such
simplicity! How you defeat an opponent in a debate. Wonderful
list. I mean, they took up the subject, they really meant to
defeat an opponent in a debate; they had a complete anatomy of
how you defeated somebody in a debate, which had nothing
whatsoever to do with the debate and they said so; how you
distracted his attention. It ran down to the most mechanical
things you ever heard of: Have him called from the wings
occasionally. It did. I mean, it was a wonderful textbook.
Practical! Wish I'd studied it.

Anyhow, one of the little data in there -- one of the data in
there was the most marvelous thing you ever heard of. "Never
engage the actual data of your opponent in a debate. Always
engage his sources." How fiendish!

The fellow says, "Two hundred and ninety-one tons of uranium were
used last year." He's demonstrating the value of uranium, you
see, and the expenditures on uranium, and so on.

You don't say "Ah," or "Well, what do you know." You never agree
with him. A debate's an argument. It makes that very clear in
this textbook -- printed by the way, about 1866 or '67 -- at no
time do you agree with him. You find out "Who said that? Where
did you get that datum?"

"Oh," he says, "that's Borks and Snorgelberg, their mining
reports, published in the Miners Quarterly," and so forth.

And you say, "The Miners Quarterly of what organization?"

And he says, "Why, the United Mine Workers, of course."

And you say, "Ahhhh."

It wouldn't have mattered if it was the Republican National
Committee, you'd have still said "Ahhhh."

I think they killed everybody off that knew the subject. I think
they all got annihilated for it, so we don't have the subject
anymore. It was a gorgeous textbook. I don't even have a copy of
it anymore.

But anyway, if we want to relay a datum completely so that it
fixes forever and it's not under anybody's control, we have to
lose or lie about the source; we have to get the source out of
sight completely. We have to give it some other source. Then we
have to alter it a little bit. And then we have to deliver it
with enormous authority; and if anybody says that isn't the
authority, or the authority is nothing... has nothing to do with
the datum, then let's back up the whole artillery on them. Let's
flunk them, let's put them back half a term, let's send letters
home to their parents. Sounds kind of wild, doesn't it? Just
because they said that Snorgel and Fuggelbaum did so-and-so, why,
all these penalties get lined up. If you don't believe it, you've
had it.

Well now, that is old-time education. What good is the datum?
It's no good at all. So Snorgel and Fuggelbaum said this -- so
what?

Einstein -- here, I'll give you the reverse, now. Einstein had a
lot to do, they say, with inventing the A-bomb. Well, it was
invented on his authority or something. It was appropriated for
on his authority. And we get down the line after a while, and
Einstein at no time can say, "The A-bomb will not explode
tonight." He can't say that and have it happen. What the hell is
this about authority? What difference does it make?

Actually, it has nothing to do, really, with the behavior of the
bomb at all. The bomb explodes or it doesn't explode, and that's
all. It's an open-and-closed fact. Mostly because Einstein
himself is outweighed by a tremendous number of people who all
agreed on the backtrack that atom bombs exploded. He's outvoted!
So you get pushed into the horrible position that I'm pushed into
of simply categorizing the majority decisions.

But the whole alliance of authority and education is apt to bring
people into a fixed state of mind. If what is being taught is
true then they themselves will recognize its truth, since nobody
can be taught, thoroughly, anything that he himself does not
already have some knowledge of No matter how ghostily, no matter
how thinly, there's some knowledge of it.

For instance, you can't be taught usefully -- so that you can use
it -- any datum about the human mind that you have not already
agreed to. You can be taught an invention concerning the human
mind if you are taught that it is an invention. Otherwise, you
would have to be taught hypnotically, merely given a new
conviction which you could not use or alter. That would have to
be done on an hypnotic level. What good would it be? Well, it'd
add a new datum. And if enough people were hypnotized into
believing this, that all brains had Ford coils in them or
something, I imagine the genetic line would grow Ford coils. But
it hasn't yet. Remember that; it hasn't yet.

In other words, we learn most easily that to which we have
subscribed. This is why so many people flunk science. Science is
the doggonedest mass of invention you ever cared to read, but
it's a rather uniformly agreed-upon invention which is built on
top of an already top-heavy series of inventions or postulates
which are agreed upon. This already top-heavy mass of agreements,
then, needs no further inventions, I assure you. And yet, just
for the sake of teaching somebody something, these things get
invented. You get the idea?

Now, it's a sure test of a teacher whether he knows his stuff or
not, the number of data which he insists on everyone assimilating
without question. If he insists that a great number of data be
assimilated without further analysis or question in any way,
shape or form, we know this boy doesn't know his business. He's
scared. Somehow or another he feels that nobody must be permitted
to examine these data. So he's doing something else. He's doing
something else.

Now, educationally, it is absolutely necessary for the teacher to
preserve the power of choice of the student over the data which
he is taught. And if it is not in agreement with the experience
of the student, and will not be found to be true in the
environment of the student, he permits the student to examine
this and say so, and operate accordingly. Only in this wise would
you have anything used or useful.

Engineering fails mostly because all of the originators in the
field of engineering have died off. They're way back on the
track.

A chap came to me recently -- he rather surprised me; I was a
little bit overwhelmed by this experience. He came to me in
London, and the appointment was made by cable two or three days
before the fact. The first whisper of it was about two weeks
before the fact, and then the exact appointment was made about
three days before the meeting. And he wanted to come by and see
me at my office in London. He said he wanted to talk to me. He
didn't say it was urgent.

So I sat there wondering what this could be all about, as the
chap has a rather famous name. He's probably the leading boy
employed at this time by the U.S. Air Forces in the field of
aerodynamic research.

And I thought, "What on earth does this fellow want to see me
for?" I haven't done anything, honest. You know?

And he sailed into the office, he sat down, he took one of my
Kools, he accepted a Coca-Cola, rejected an offer of some vodka
-- said it was not national with him -- and chitter-chatted with
me for exactly one-half an hour, talking about some recent
developments.

I agreed with him, I thought these were fine, understood them a
little bit, got some kind of an inkling of where he was going,
fumbled with it a bit, said that's fine. He intimated that he was
looking for some much younger man than himself, since he was
about seventy-one and was right in there with the Wright
brothers, to replace him someday, and intimated -- oh, how
cursorily -- that someday he might want me to process somebody
for him. But this was quite obviously not the object of his
visit.

Well, he looked at his watch, went outside, got in the U.S.
embassy car, went back to the airport, climbed aboard a U.S. Army
Air Forces airplane, and was flown on to his destination, which
was Brussels -- a large conference in Brussels -- and then flown
home. That was all he wanted to do in London. And I sat there and
I scratched my head, I couldn't figure out what in the hell was
going on here. Didn't have any idea at all. No idea at all.

And finally -- after a lot of time went by I finally figured out
what was wrong. The guy was lonesome! That's all. Haven't heard
from him since. Told him to drop by here, he said sure he would.
He isn't home yet. But this is an interesting thing.

But in his conversation it was rather easy to detect the fact
that in his field he alone, he felt, was running on choice of
data and theory. Everybody else in his field, his own associates
and assistants, particularly his assistants, were all running
fixedly on data which had now become agreed-upon data in the
field of aerodynamics, but which is not necessarily true at all.
In fact, I never have been able to figure out -- and neither
could he -- how anybody ever applied calculus to an airfoil, and
managed to build the same airfoil off the same mathematical
sheet. He said he always inquired whether or not they had sent
the test model over for measurements in building the actual
model, and never felt comfortable unless they did.

But this man was a realist, terrific realist. If you couldn't
think about it and look about it, you couldn't know anything
about it, so what use was it? And that was the way he operated.
That was it.

I am afraid that in the field of knowledge, to me nothing,
including Scientology, is sacred. In fact, I'd have to be argued
with and shot at awfully long for anybody to convince me that a
datum was an unalterable datum which must never again be
reviewed. I'm afraid I would be very hard to convince this way.
Of course there'd be ways to do this. You could kidnap all of you
and hold you for ransom until I admitted that the moon was green
cheese and -- oh, I'd probably say the moon was made out of green
cheese, because I'd go easy the other way too.

I am not trying to hold up an inviolable integrity at the expense
of something or other, I know not what, don't you see?

The only fate I'd know which was worse than death would be
"totally fixed on the entire track with all data which had ever
been invented and agreed upon." That's the only fate I'd know
that'd be worse than death. But there's another fate which is
almost as bad, and that is to shy off every datum simply because
it's been agreed upon, see? You have to remain fluid in both
quarters. In other words, you don't have to accept every datum as
a fixed, unalterable datum, and you don't have to shy off
anything that looks like a fixed, unalterable datum. You don't
have to do either one. Don't have to accept them, don't have to
reject them. Yawn once in a while. It's not that important.

So here, here we have, worked out in Scientology, a great many
data which are apparently the common denominators of agreements
on the whole track, arrived at evidently by the bulk of the
people who perceive them now. And people have become disabused or
have disabused themselves of their participation in their
creation, and many of these people are shying off of them and
avoiding them, because if they thought again what they had
thought once it'd evidently kill them. And so as we inspect this
we arrive at certain definite methods and agreements by which we
can reach these and turn them around one way, or fix them better
the other way, or do something with them. In other words, we are
actually capable of twisting and turning the various fixednesses
and unfixednesses of existence.

Now, sometimes we do this well, sometimes we do this poorly; but
we always unfix as easily as the thing was unfixed in the first
place, and we always fix as easily as the thing was fixed in the
first place. We always do those things, see? We can always unfix
something that was awfully unfixed.

You know, a fellow's walking down the street and a thought
flashes through his mind that maybe some of his behavior is not
entirely masculine, maybe it is slightly effeminate. In other
words, the datum is there "Maybe I'm a girl." Well, it's... You
see, it's very nebulous. You know, maybe -- he's just playing a
game with himself of worry, something. We come along, we pat him
on the shoulder, he tells us what he's worried about. We don't
even have to tell him "You're not a girl," see? I mean, he just
tells us what he was worried about, he -- boom! See, it's gone
that quick.

He's walking down the street now with another datum -- another
occurrence. He's walking down the street with a datum that he's a
man. That's pretty fixed, isn't it? He's walking down the street
and he's wearing men's clothes and a man's head and he's got a
man's haircut, and he's really convinced he's a man. Now, we
would unfix that one with a little more difficulty.

Of course, they do it easily in Hollywood, but we're not going
that way.

Do you see, though, that the relative fixation of the data has a
direct bearing upon our ability to unfix it. You got it?

Now, we can easily fix in his head that he's a man, can't we? He
already thinks so. And we might have some success in fixing in
his head this other earlier datum that he's effeminate. See,
here's fixing and unfixing data, see? He's got the little ghosty
notion that some of his actions are effeminate. We hear this, and
we don't permit him to complete his communication, we shut it off
in some fashion or another, we turn it around a little bit and we
ask him very searchingly whether anybody has mentioned this
lately to him or not. And then we look very learned and we say,
"You're sure -- you're sure you don't remember it? Oh," we say,
"it's a bit occluded, eh?" He's wondering what's happening here,
you know?

And we say, "Well now, I'll tell you how you cure this. I'll tell
you how you cure this. One of the best ways I know to cure this
would be to overcome any impulse whatsoever to wear feminine
clothes or to use feminine things, you see, by simply buying some
and putting them on the dresser. Therefore it'd be very easy for
you, you see, to realize that they're not yours and that you have
nothing whatsoever to do with them. And every time you look at
them, get the idea that they are not associated with you in any
way."

In other words, by this way and that way we might have some
chance of fixing the idea in his head that he's a girl.

But by paralleling life we can take a lazy man's look at it, and
a fellow walks down the street and he thinks he's a man, and we
pat him on the back and you say, yes, he's a man. That's the easy
look, you see? He says, "I'm worried about being a girl" -- he's
worried about it, that's good enough for us. Talk it over and
he's no longer worried about being a girl. Don't you see? That's
very easy. It's very simple.

Well, we do much better than that. We teach people how their
minds get fixed and unfixed. We do better than that. Then we show
them how they can fix and unfix these various agreements and
things and postulates. That's the business we're in. We do this
well.

Here's an organization, a business organization, that even we
consider disorderly. Some inkling has come through to its boss --
to its boss -- some inkling has come through to the boss that
this might possibly be a prevailing circumstance throughout the
organization.

Well, we could straighten up his personnel and his comm lines.
And we could look over this situation; we could do pretty well
with this. Realize that if we didn't facilitate the
communications in the organization that it would remain as
confused as it was. We could do something about this. We could
alter the situation more in the direction of a tolerable unit.

Now, what do we mean by a tolerable unit? Well, we could say "The
unit works better." That's fine. "It better meets its goals" is a
better statement. If a man is trying to be more a man, we can
make him more a man, just achieving his goals; or we can get him
to change his goals.

Now, a business that thinks it's confused, we could come along
and educate it that it is totally confused. We could. We could
simply go into nooks and crannies and pull old junk out, and keep
calling management's attention to how this person and that person
in the organization had been stowing stuff away, and forgetting
stuff, and so on; and offer him no solution to this, you see, and
carefully tell him every time to refrain from boiling over about
it and not to get mad concerning it, because the entire tone of
the organization depends utterly upon his own mood. We'd produce
chaos! I mean, the place would look horrible before you got
through. I mean, you'd really have chaos.

You could say, "Now, don't say I told you, because I don't want
to get in trouble, and don't mention it to anybody, but actually
your stock department, you see, is keeping all of the out-of-date
stock and refuses to order any of the up-to-date stock. And then
it won't release any stock to anybody else in the rest of the
shop. And the fellow there has to be treated very carefully,
because he's in a kind of a bad condition. Now, you treat him
very carefully, and so forth, and don't go in suddenly and mess
all this up, because your attention really is needed over here on
much more important things." Get what you'd do here. It'd be
pretty wild, wouldn't it?

So, you could intensify any given situation, or simplify any
given situation; or, by the correct handling of data, return to
any given situation its own self-determinism over what it's
doing.

Just by the process of education alone, just by the process of
educating the people immediately associated with living a marital
life, on the subject of "These are some data about life. You pays
your money and takes your chance. There they are. You want to
look them over, okay. If you don't want to look them over, all
right. Because this is kind of the way it seems to be. Let's look
around and see if that's the way it seems to be." Orient them a
little bit, give them some stable data, restimulate some stable
data. All of a sudden, why, their environment is liable to
straighten out and run much more smoothly. This you would call
counseling. Or would you call it education?

Now, here then is a tremendous field in Scientology, and it does
appear that all you're doing is not just increasing the learning
rate of a person, but increasing his power of choice over what he
has learned. And if you can do that, why, then he can lead a much
better and more successful life.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]
