THE ROAD TO TRUTH

A lecture given on 1 November 1962

All right. Here we are, lecture two, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, 1 Nov. AD 12.

I could give you a very masterly lecture now on the subject of truth. Truth. You see, I don't really feel up to it, but that's one of these histrionic-type activities -giving lectures on truth. I've stated it much better in other times and places; I didn't keep any notes on what I was saying. It's very difficult. Go around remembering everything, you know, you get stuck.

It's very applicable to talk about truth. If one knows anything about missed withholds or really got the idea of what missed withholds are, why, you have to get some grip on this thing called truth.

There was a fellow by the name of Pontius something-or-other; I think he went around washing his hands all the time. He had some kind of a fixation on it. Freudian complex. Before Dianetics. And he asked this "propoundous propunderance": "What is truth?" And it was a very good thing that he asked that at that particular time: solved everything.

But the point here is that truth is a very near ultimate. See, it's quite close to an absolute in its most severe interpretation. And if you were to say that something is true and not know at the same time the Axiom that absolutes are unobtainable, why, you would fall into the error of putting positives where there existed only maybes; and that is a very, very severe error.

Ah, there's been a lot of blokes on the track of one type or another, some of them wearing kimonos and some of them wearing togas and some of them wearing sandals and some of them wearing nothing at all, and these fellows were always going around telling people what truth is. Chaps like Plato and Socrates and fellows of various moment- philosophers, religionists, vast numbers of people-have been peddling a commodity called truth.

Well, truth is a relative commodity. And the best approach to truth is contained in a mathematics that you probably will have very little knowledge of and I have very little conversance with-it's almost pretentious of me to discuss this mathematics -but it happens to be the mathematics which is used to connect up your telephone switchboards in major cities. It's how they select out subscribers and so forth; they don't select them out with arithmetical truth.

Arithmetic is a theoretical truth but only so because there's no commodity or definiteness connected with it. It is a truth of symbols as long as the symbols remain symbols, and the only errors turn up when people say the symbols mean something and then they get into a great deal of trouble.

Now, to be just a little less pedantic about it, you address the subject of this universe in the subject of the physical sciences-the sciences, and you're going to find that there are many weird things in your path if you are going to simply address it through the savants of the various (quote) sciences (unquote). Heh! The insouciance of these people, you see, to actually use the word "exact science." It's an incredible impudence.

You walk into the chemistry department, you find one construction of an atom. There it is; it'll be sitting up there someplace around the department or the laboratory, and it'll show you the exact relations of molecules, one to another, in any given element. And there it is; it's all in model form; it's put together with wires-and students can go and look at that, and they're all very fine. And that student will be perfectly all right unless he goes over to the physics department. Because in the physics department they have an entirely different model and that is the same molecule of exactly the same element.

This is marvelous to behold because these two departments are, each one, departments of "exact science." And yet they are very often across the hall from each other. The student gets very confused. He goes into the chemistry department and if he doesn't say, "The atoms are composed this way, that way and the other way," he's gonna flunk, man! And he goes across the hall and here's an entirely different model, has no relationship to the first model, and that is the atom of the same element that he's just been studying. And he's going to get flunked in physics if he doesn't say it's that way! I think that's very fascinating. These are exact sciences, are they?

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the turn of the century, there's an article there about time and space which is highly informative. A very wise man wrote that article. And he said he didn't think many people will ever find out very much about time and space until they studied in the field of the mind and got the conceptual basis which preceded time and space. Now, that's in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the turn of the century.

With that much wisdom confronting them, you would have thought that the exact sciences then would have pursued some interest in where all this came from. But their mud theory got in their road; they got all stuck up with it, you know? And there was that mud theory. And, oddly enough, it isn't even a new theory. It is found-oh, I think, about three thousand years ago in India, is the origin of our modern, "exact science" mud theory- And I think it originally was described "and it was mud from there on down." They got tired of explaining all this.

Now, there are the boys with their exact sciences and their exact truths, and they're playing with fire. Actually, it may be called "exact science" to them, but when they start telling people that these are truths, that these are absolutes, and then make a model of the atom one way in the chemistry department, and make it the other way in the physics department, I think it's time for somebody to decide they didn't know what they were doing.

The world right now is in most of its trouble because of the (quote) advances (unquote) in the field of physics. In the field of physics they know how to blow something up but not how to keep it from blowing up or retard its blowing up at a distance. See, they have all the overt weapons but none of the preventions for those weapons. I consider this very fascinating because before you build an atom bomb, you should have built a sane man. A sane man precedes the structure.

Now, you have a subject known as workable truth. If you put glue on one piece of paper, you can make it stick to itself or another piece of paper; and all work to amuse or enlighten or something is susceptible to being employed in the field of enslavement.

The slave makers always use it; it serves as the mechanism to trap by the two-way flow, don't you see? Somebody comes along and want to set everybody free and naturally the reverse flow on it is to trap everybody. One has to recognize this as an action.

Well, we take this fellow, Aesop. You've heard all about Aesop; you've read about the fox and the grapes, and you read about all kinds of Aesop's fables of one kind or another. Now, I'm sure that you are today a much more moral person, and much better for it.

The only trouble is that the original manuscripts of Aesop were recently located and there's not a moral in the lot. They are just amusing stories about animals. There is no final lesson in any one of the stories. Every one of those lessons has been added to Aesop's fables. And we today are accustomed to think of the moral as a sort of an Aesop's fable thing, you see: he tells a parable and that teaches us to be good. And that wasn't what Aesop's fables were; they were simply something to amuse people and lighten the tedious hour. I think it's quite wonderful. It even enters the field of fairy tales.

Now, all of this is extremely-not apparently very pertinent to what you are doing, but in actuality it is, because in the microcosm of a single human being, of the single person, you have the pattern of the macrocosm of the universe. And one could deduce that the universe exists from a series of basic postulates and proceeds on down the line in development from those postulates. You could even spot the goal of gold, the goal of lead. You could even spot the methods of livelihood of quartz, serpentine schist, hornblende, to name some combined elements-the rules of what they do. It's not that these things are alive at all; it's that they follow a certain dictated behavior pattern.

I was sitting looking at a fly this morning while I was eating breakfast. And he washed his face in exactly the way that all flies have washed their face for a long time. And he fixed up his wings in exactly the way flies fix up their wings. And I thought, "I wonder how many hundred trillion scrillion quadjillion flies have washed their face that way." And I thought to myself, "By golly, it's wonderful the way some postulates stick."

You get dead matter, the world of insects, lichen, moss, man-it doesn't matter; you're actually looking at the same cumulative structure based on certain intentions and dedications. The whole world of chemistry could be reanalyzed on the subject of postulates and intentions. The world of physics could be similarly analyzed.

Instead of sitting there wondering how many "microjilts" are supposed to be imposed into the ohm, an electronics man would much better spend his time, if he really wanted to make some progress, in an effort to analyze the pattern of intention which goes up and constructs a certain power behavior. What is this? And if he could grasp that, then he would grasp electricity. But he shirks his duty by the simple reason that the first statement made to him, as he walks into his polytechnic school or as he joined his Boy Scout troop -doesn't matter where he connects with this stuff called electricity, he always connects with it-and his first postulate on it is "Nobody knows what electricity is."

And this is said to him as though it means something. I think that's wonderful. In fact, everybody knows this statement, but exactly what have they said? Analyze what they've said. They've made a remark. They haven't said anything. They've just remarked something. They haven't even given anybody any reason why nobody should; they haven't told you nobody could.

to you as the most idiotic premise in the field of the human mind.

There's little Joe Blow down here. And you say, "Do you understand women?"

He says, "Hell, no. No man'd ever understand women." He says, "You can't figure them out. One day they're this way; one day they're that way."

You ask his wife, and you say, "You understand anything about men?"

She said, "Yes, they're a pipe. You know what they're doing. You know what it's all about. Except you never get your way."

What are they talking about? What are they talking about? They're talking about knowing something about somebody's mind, aren't they? Somebody's behavior pattern, aren't they? In other words, they're aware of the existence of think, figure, calculate, in other beings. Well, that has already started on the road to research and knowledge in the human mind; and it is very dangerous to go no further.

So where do we get this thing if you embark upon a line of truth as a special action only proposed or done by a few select individuals. No, it's the shopkeeper and the bus driver and everything else. They've all started to know something about it. But it would be very dangerous indeed. In fact, it will cause their deaths not to know any more about it than they do.

I mean, that's such an acceptable fact to you, it doesn't even seem to be a startling fact. Not knowing any more about the mind than they do will bring about their demise. They will die from this! Everybody says, "Yes, of course." You see how accepted it is? And yet it's quite a startling fact. They're going to get an ultimate extinction through starting upon this stupid line.

But let's take a specialized case where a group of individuals decide to go for broke on the subject of knowing about the human mind. They're going to make a clean break; they're going to go through this, and they're going to go down the line, and they're going to know all about this, and somebody amongst them is going to tear the answers up left and right, and dig them out from underneath this and that and the other thing, and they're really going to make some progress along that line. Listen, the more they know, the less dangerous it is.

The really dangerous entrance point is to suppose that people think, and know nothing more about it than that. That's dangerous! Not to walk off that point further in the direction of truth, is a dangerous action.

But any philosopher who singles himself out, or any engineer or any research person who singles himself out as the person who is going to be spotted as the person who is walking that track-now, that becomes very, very dangerous if this person doesn't walk the whole track. See, that's selectively dangerous. You share in some of that dangerousness.

It's been so booby-trapped that everything is very suspicious of anything being known, because people who have jumped up and said something is known, have very often lied. Now, if they have pretended to know more than other people on this subject, they have then committed overts. And if they have then turned up some little piece of bric-a-brac and have never gotten any further than that, but spread this bric-a-brac in all directions as "the true wisdom," they have committed the overt of committing perhaps millions or billions of human beings to slavery. And I think that's a considerable overt.

So there's no substitute for walking the track. You've got to go on down that road, particularly in a spot such as mine. You got to bring this off, man.

Now, there's never been any doubt in my mind about bringing off this particular study. This is not something I have engaged in any doubts about.

But it is not that an individual acts for his self-preservation and commits overts because of his self-preservation. That is too direct a look. He commits overts because of survival. It is his rightness of conduct, see? It's a slightly split-hair difference, if you follow the thing.

The behaviorist would try to tell you that it was-he is a-there is a school of activity known as behaviorism; I didn't refer to that. They try to say that it is totally and only and always a first dynamic existence, and therefore it isn't survival, it's self-preservation. And by this, they miss the whole boat. They don't even put their foot on the gangplank. They hardly even walk up to the right dock, you know, and they go right on off into the river. No boat there. Never intended to be one there, either. I mean, that's really missing the boat. Because right conduct is always a group activity and is never an individual activity.

No matter how much the individual speaks about integrity to himself, it breaks down eventually into a group activity because his ideas of his own rightness of conduct are based on the group to which he belongs.

So we get the third dynamic aberration of right conduct as underlying all O/W, underlying even missed withholds. The only thing senior to it is the pure, pure mechanics of existence: There is a thetan and a thetan does these things, you see? Your very early Axioms are quite unrelative as truths. They're just about as close to truths as anybody will ever be able to push it, see? They're right up there pushing the Axiom "absolutes are unobtainable" so close that there is hardly any distinguishing it at all.

But the aberrations which he then engages upon are his efforts to discover right conduct: What is right conduct in self? What is right conduct in others? What is wrong conduct in self? What is wrong conduct in others? And, of course, from lifetime to lifetime he lives in different groups and his sets of mores change and change and change and change.

So there is no road to truth on the subject of right conduct. You just study nothing but what is right conduct and then take what the group says is right conduct and you're not going to wind up with truth.

Now, if you realize that it's a search for right conduct and an effort to adhere to codes of right conduct and breaking of codes of right conduct, which then bring about the aberrated condition, then you are walking a road to truth.

Now, let's get this subtle difference; it's quite important to thee and me. Borrowing liberally from the Book of the Winds and-Book of Changes and so forth: Confucius, he say, "Young man who support elderly parents, he good man," see? Well, that's perfectly all right, right up to the moment when somebody says, "This is truth," because this is not truth! This is only a species of right conduct; it's only a belief of right conduct. In other words, it's actually an entrance of arbitraries into conduct. And therefore, if the entrance of arbitraries can be considered truth, I think we've all had it.

That would make all the laws passed by the US government, the English government, the Chinese government, true.

Particularly today, the US government is always trying to legislate truth into existence. I think it's the most marvelous activity; highly complimentary. I mean, fellows trying to lift elephants with their little finger should always be patted on the back and so forth. But I think it should also be pointed out to them that those elephants are a little heavier than the stress-analysis structure of the small finger.

They're always trying to say their laws are true. They no longer consult being treated in this fashion- actually, just in a rage, get up and go around back of the fellow who was reading it aloud, and jerk the book out of his hands. And he didn't even want to read it! And that engineer that pulled the book out of his hands had to actually be forcefully held up against the wall and the book had to be shown to him, and that the person in that chair was actually reading exactly what was in that textbook on the subject of psychoanalysis. And when he did, at that moment the engineer, for the first time in his life, realized there wasn't a science of the human mind extant on the planet. Up to that time the reason he paid no attention to Dianetics and Scientology: he thought there was a science of the mind.

Now, that's one of the primary things that you run into. People have a whole bunch of data over here which are what they're supposed to do, and these are right conduct-and that to them is truth-and what you're not supposed to do.

For instance, the law defines sanity as the ability to tell right from wrong. I consider this marvelous. In what land? Well, don't ever try a Zulu in an English court. And don't ever try to try an Englishman in a Zulu court. Because there's going to be some things messed up, going to be some withholds missed.

Now, here's your peril (your period of peril is past, to be alliterative): It was over a period of time as to whether or not-taking you as a unit of truth-you, individually, could have your state of understanding of yourself and those around you materially improved by study and processing. Now, if anybody will sit still long enough and if the auditor will do the right things at the right time, why, this is going to happen today; this is going to happen.

You could also carry it out to very nearly an ultimate, very close to it. You can get the fellow back to a point of his total realization and recognition of exactly what he has done and where he has gone-in other words, clearing and exactly how he's done it, and how it formed up, and so forth. And if you were to take raw meat and push them up to a three- or four-goal Clear, why, they might not tell you for other people, they might not be able to articulate it (which is the main trick, after all), but you hand them a book of Axioms and they say at that time, "Of course. What are you showing me these for?" Or "Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, yes, of course, of course. That. Oh, yes, yes. That, right. Of course, naturally. Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right, that's-of course. Yeah, that's pretty good." And mostly what they're saying is "pretty good" is "That's fairly well stated. Yes, I'd say the same myself if I could." All they're doing really is expressing some kind of an agreement. You're not teaching them anything, because they now have a subjective reality on it.

We've got a reverse-end look on this thing and we're starting at the point which is hardest to start, as everybody is stupid as hell on the subject, see? And originally and basically that included me, see? So you see where we have went to.

Now, we are essentially in the business of individuals and you must never forget that. On the road to truth, you are in the business of individuals. I could give you a long and tiradious lecture on the subject of the third dynamic and how it gets loused up, but I don't think it'd serve anybody's purpose. Just let me say en passant that most organizations, as they exist on Earth today, exist, in their first instant of genus, on the fact that they could not handle an individual, one individual. The failure to handle that one individual then brought about, not their demise, but their construction.

almost cave him in, because he says, "What- what-what does he know about me?"

Well, your only mistake at that point is not to reach him as truth. You are confronting, that moment, a road to truth and you've got to travel it because you've already started to! You have looked down it!

There is many a pc you'll start to process, or many a human being you will try to tell about Scientology, that you will say, "Why did I get up this morning! It must have been I knew something was going to happen, because when I put on my left shoe I found it was designed for the right foot. And from that moment on, I could have taken warning and simply gone back to bed. And I didn't. And here I am arguing with this person in this PE Course. And he's saying, 'I understand Ron doesn't believe-doesn't believe in God.'"

And you're trying to make some kind of heavy weather out of it or make conversation out of it or trying to fend off this accusation or trying to straighten it up or handle it-you're going to find yourself at that moment on the ro4d to truth.

Well, I'll tell you the wrong thing to do, is unload-jump in the ditch. That's the wrong thing to do. Your success in the future totally depends upon your ability to walk that road and not to jump off of it because all of your disasters anyplace will stem from that exact instant when you failed to walk that road and turned around and did something else and set up an organization to handle this jerk. You see that?

There's this guy. He's saying, "Well, Ron doesn't believe in God. And I understand this. I heard this every place. So how can-you can say he's a truthful man?" See, this guy knows what truth is. You have faith in the big thetan, see? It's kind of a 1984 in-with a cross above it, you know? And that's truth! He's been taught all his life you must have faith in this thing. He's been taught that is right conduct. He sees somebody isn't instantly following down this, and snapping and popping and making the sign of his particular cross. I know of several crosses and how to make several signs of the cross, but we're not making his sign of the cross. So therefore we are not truth.

See, he's got "right conduct" mixed up with "rightness of conduct is the source of aberration," and these are entirely different remarks. He doesn't realize he's nuts! That's one of the first things he has to find out. Well, you're going to find there are many ways to teach him this initial step, and you will fail and you will succeed and you will do this and you will do that. And listen, you will only be wrong-and I'm not now talking about right conduct of a Scientologist; I happen to be talking about survival in the early Axioms at that level -you will only fail if you don't try, if you don't make some stab at it. Because if you make some kind of a stab at it, you'll be surprised; he won't go away even though if you didn't handle him in that first fifteen seconds and you put him on the shelf to pick him up somewhere on the track.

You'll be surprised. This happens to me every once in a while. I processed somebody one day; he was lying in a sickbed. I thought he was going to die. I thought I flipped the whole thing; I thought it was gone, sunk, that was it. Never processed such a lousy session in my life. You know? I couldn't even get the pc practically to answer the auditing command. I got him to say it a few times, you know? And I finally patted him on the shoulder and said, "Well, I hope you'll be all right," and so forth. Tried to put in a little hope factor before I walked out of the room. The man was dying, see?

I actually felt bad about it for-you know-a little bit bad about it for Behind us lies the most thorny, messed-up track you ever saw in your life. Wouldn't navigate it again for a-for a box of biscuits. But the truth of the matter is, well, we're there; that road's behind us. Possibly take us quite a while to sit down and find out where we are, now that we're there. But that's allowable, too.

But we'll only retreat from our position to the degree that we don't realize this fact: that you can't start a case, you can't embark upon clearing a planet or an individual diffidently without to some degree seeing it through to a final conclusion. And your only disasters will simply stem from your failure to follow that road all the way through.

Think them over and mark them up sometime along the line and you'll see how true those words are.

Thank you very much. Good night.