CHAPTER 10 - THOUGHT AND REASON
"An individual becomes unaberrated
when he ceases to be in the driven thought band."
L. Ron Hubbard
THE SCALE OF POSTULATES
The whole background of Creative
Processing could be said to be the proper understanding and handling of
gradient scales.
A gradient scale would be
always a little more of what was. And so we could reach out then from the
tiniest point into the widest possible sphere.
His postulates eventually
become such a horrible thing as orders.
His orders eventually become
requests for cooperation.
His requests for cooperation
eventually become wondering why it didn't happen.
Then pleading with people,
then asking for sympathy, and on out the bottom.
And there's your curve of
deterioration and it's the deterioration of a postulate. And the curve
of a postulate as it deteriorates from above 40.0 down to 0.0 is the curve
of deterioration of the preclear.
Remark: So, auditing processes
should work in the direction of reversing this scale.
THOUGHT AND KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge is something that
most of your preclears will just shudder about destroying. As they have
translated the word "knowledge" as meaning "a fact", they have to hold
on to their facsimiles. So they feel they can't destroy their facsimiles
because their facsimiles are knowledge, but this is not true. Their facsimiles
as records are of no great value. Present time action is of greater value.
If the file could exist without file cards, throw it away. Keep the knowledge,
get rid of the file cards.
Because data is contained
on energy and is as forceful on an individual as he is unwilling to face
fac-similes, then data becomes composed of force - facsimiles, pictures
of force. If he can't handle force, he can't handle the pictures and can't
handle the data, and so gets into the state of "unknowing".
The first level of abstraction
is a merger between objects and thoughts. The first thing in the field
of language, which is an abstraction, is "forget" and "remember". Forget
is inhibited having, remember is enforced having.
The highest level of abstraction,
on the other hand, is a created desire to obtain. For his interest, no
thetan ever needed anything in this universe.
Conviction is the next highest
level of abstraction, in order of their importance in processing. For anything
the fellow wants, he has to be convinced of an existence. Conviction is
right there next door to desire.
What is the entire anatomy
of thought in this universe? I would say, conviction, at the origin of
thinking processes. Trying to convince people is the same as trying to
move them around. Conviction is a demonstration of existence and a person
who is convinced, has been convinced, in this universe, of a trickery.
Because the universe doesn't have any existence except the capability of
a thetan.
LOGIC
Logic is a gradient scale
of related data. And logic could be said to be the aligning of data by
gradient scale.
Mathematics is symbolical,
and as a symbolism carries forward all manner of nearly impossible relationships,
which can then be applied with some approximation to the real universe
or to any other universe.
It is all very well to say
one equals one, till you ask, "One what?" It's very nice to have an abstract
datum "one" and this abstract datum is a symbol that will represent another
"one". But let's say one what? and we say, one apple. And if we say one
apple equals one apple - oh, no. One apple does not even equal itself.
I give you Korzybski on
all of that. He's done good work on that, and we needn't labor it any further.
Extrapolation - it's what
you figure from, into. That's just what we're doing in present time - it's
approximation. We're estimating the rate of change of havingness and predicting
the havingness change when we're estimating the future.
Remark: the word "equal" has several definitions; a mathematical definition as "the same as" would apply only to quantities being compared, figures, symbols or expressions that use the equal sign (=), resulting from or evaluated by arithmetical or mathematical operations. With regard to objects, the applicable definition of the word "equal" would be "like or alike in quantity, degree, value, etc." Physical properties quantified by measurements are compared to units of measurement, and the equations of Physics represent the formulation of inductive scientific laws about the behavior of physical properties in measurements or experiments, in an abstract or event-independent sense.
REASON
At about 22 on the Tone Scale down to about 10 or 12, you're getting reason. It's not an aesthetic or otherwise, it's just mental action, on any wave length. And it declines from that 12, it gradually goes on down to 4 and then it spins in quick.
At no time should an individual
make the mistake of believing that a symbol is the thing. People who insist
that the symbol is the thing are not only badly aberrated - they are insane.
The best definition of insanity of which I know would be: this person widely
believes that the symbols are the things.
MEST is itself insane, because
it cannot determine or align itself. It has to do it according to a pattern
determined for it. And anytime anything has to have everything done for
it, you get an insane object. Sanity would be the ability to reason. Reason
can be done in abstracts, and reason can be done by logic, but logic is
not the thing. Logic is a method of extrapolating from one datum and building
a bridge of tiny gradients to another datum.
The symbol "apple" is not
an apple; you cannot eat the symbol "apple". That is the best test of it.
All the lines of logic have
then, therefore, this liability: that people can confuse an abstract with
a reality. The abstract is not the reality - never.
ABERRATED THOUGHT
An idea contained in a mass
of energy and inflicted upon the individual out of a mass of energy, and
by a mass of energy, isn't an idea, but an energy pattern - a certain pattern
of energy hitting a person. This would be what you might call an aberrated
idea.
Every aberrated thought
is preceded by a counter-effort. You can run down the track on any aberrated
idea a person has and find that idea all wrapped up in energy for which
he is taking no responsibility, and which, therefore, has a command value
on him.
At the level of Homo sapiens,
thought is something you use to propose and resolve problems relating to
survival - and you have Homo sapiens' definition of mind. That's a different
type of thinking from the postulate, and a different type of mind because
it plots itself against time.
At the theta level, the
mind is amusing itself. It's postulating purpose so that it will have purpose.
But it's not a driven activity.
Get something intimately
related to survival going haywire, and Homo sapiens will think. At his
level, it is true that necessity is the mother of invention. Above 40.0
there is no necessity. There's no necessity to be right, and no penalty
for being wrong.
THE PSYCHOTIC
The energy used to think
by the psychotic is no personally manufactured energy at all. It's just
a glue of energy once used. He's just got it all pulled in on him like
mad, and he only obeys the commands in it.
Stream of consciousness
is a lack of energy to think.
This is the essential difference
between the psychotic and the sane person: The psychotic obeys the law
of particles - he gets hit from some quarter, and he moves off in a new
direction, he got this erratic zig-zag. The sane person obeys the law of
free aligning action. He might stagger a little bit when some particle
hits him, but he continues to align action and is not a particle.
Your psychotic also looks
and feels like an object. He has no responsibility; he is handled, he doesn't
do the handling.
THOUGHT ON THE THIRD AND FOURTH DYNAMIC
An idea can exist without
relationship to space or energy. There are ideas floating along the track
in this culture which are killers. They're just ideas, but they're not
floating along in time, because they don't exist in time.
They are in agreement with
people, and therefore people, conceiving that they move in time and have
to have, suppose the idea to be in motion. Because it's with them in present
time and their havingness in present time is different than the present
time which immediately passed.
DIFFERENTIATE, ASSOCIATE, IDENTIFY
The backbone of thinking
ability is Differentiation, Association and Identification. Out of association,
you get logic, you get action thinking. And out of identification, you
get insanity.
Remark: Identification is
however needed for orientation; without identification of anchor points
with themselves in successive moments, there couldn't be time.
A=A=A=A. This is the behavior
of the reactive mind. Everything is identified with everything on a certain
subject. A spelling might be different, the word would be the same, the
fellow would have it confused. The literal command value of an engram -
that's identification in the line of thought.
Up on the tone scale you
could have enough differentiation to have several complete universes and
then have these complete universes segregated or in communication with
each other without destroying them.
The most associative we've
got is tracking the gradient scale of agreements which is known as the
MEST universe. So, we've got association, that's linking this and that.
Identification relates two
completely contrary things together. An identification card says your name
is so and so and that you are a human being. Isn't that weird? One of the
reasons you pack a body around is because it's a good identification card.
But I don't think it's a good identification card, because it weighs a
lot of pounds and it gets on buses and off of buses, and you need all sorts
of things to cart the thing around. But nobody would recognize you if you
didn't have it. Now that's an awful lot of poundage to carry around just
to have some fingerprints.
When you get identification,
you've got you, a producer of universes, and a regulator and changer of
all things, mixed up with being a piece of MEST. And the most identified
a guy can get is buried.
The cycle of reason begins
with differentiation, continues through association and passes on through
to identification.
There's differentiation
at one end and identification at the other end. And logic sits in between.
On a common denominator
that you've found by association, by logic, you can go both ways.
You have to reverse the cycle
on the preclear.
Interrelationships of reason,
of experience, of the MEST universe, interrelationship of all the laws
of motion, and of the law of the cycle of the universe itself are postulated,
then, on this tone scale, and in order to raise an individual up the tone
scale you only have to get him to reverse any one of these cycles (Start-Change-Stop,
Creation-Alteration-Destruction, Space-Energy-Time, Be-Do-Have) and the
others will reverse. In order to bring an individual up the tone scale,
then, from the infinity of the MEST universe back up to the zero of the
MEST universe, you would have to work him then from the low part of the
scale up the scale.
It is in essence a workout
of disagreement, it is a method of making an individual disagree with the
MEST universe. And a man who can finally disagree more and more with the
MEST universe and do it on a gradient scale so he is not grossly upset,
is, of course, going upscale continually.
Have and have not in terms
of human experience make positive and negative experience.
You run the emotional scale
backwards and you'll find your emotional scale fits exactly across that
scale of differentiation-association-identification. Sympathy, low on the
tone scale, is "I am being my fellow man," for instance.
We get this solid pack idea
of identification. Anything that comes along that vaguely relates to this
commanding energy, the energy which handled him which was Mama and which
is now in the engram bank, anything that moves into present time throws
the bank into restimulation and actually will handle him in the same way.
And he can't find the difference between one and the other because he's
got them in identification.
What we want to do is differentiate
Mama.
THE LOGICS
Definition: The word "Logics"
is used here to mean postulates pertaining to the organizational structure
of alignment of data.
Remark: The Logics apply
both as an analysis of human thought, and as an orientation of Scientological
methodology. Not all of them are commented here.
Logic Three: any knowledge
that can be sensed, measured, experienced by any entity is capable of influencing
that entity.
This Logic is aimed straight
at a fellow by the name of Kant. Transcendental Logic or something says
that any datum worth having is beyond man's power to know. That's hogwash.
It never has been true because it states that in this universe a one-way
flow can exist.
If we are the puppets of
some sort of a monitoring agency which could command us and affect us and
influence us, and yet we would never be able to contact nor experience
the puppet master, well, to hell with the puppet master.
That knowledge which cannot
be sensed, measured or experienced by any entity or type of entity cannot
influence that entity or type of entity.
Nothing can tamper with
you unless you agree to permit it to. And there is no stronger law in this
universe really than that, as far as protection is concerned. If you start
saying something is destructive, it can only then become so. That person
who has not agreed upon the destructivity of force would theoretically
be untouchable by it.
"Logic Four: A datum is a
facsimile of states of being, states of not being, actions or inactions,
conclusions or suppositions in the physical or any other universe."
Too wide, a little bit too
wide a definition. Let's modify that definition by this: It's a datum resulting
from a postulate. We've got a postulate, you know, up in the Q's. Now let's
just say, "a datum is something that results from a postulate". Can be
an idea, a thought, or anything else.We don't have to put that in terms
of energy, because postulates are things that govern a large order of activity
and any part of that order of thought or activity could be a datum, couldn't
it? And it does not have to be stated that it is engraved upon energy and
that is the definition of a facsimile. A datum is not necessarily engraved
upon energy. This is true for this universe but it is not true for all
universes. What's a datum? A datum is anything which proceeds from a postulate.
Logic Five: A Definition
of Terms is necessary to the alignment, statement and resolution of suppositions,
observations, problems and solutions and their communication.
Definition is taken up so
beautifully and expertly by Count Alfred Korzybski that it is very difficult
to improve in any way upon his classifications of definitions or his understanding
of definitions.
The idea of action definition
merely states that the definition of something should lead to putting it
in action or remedying it.
When you're defining things,
particularly in Scientology, define it by what it does or its cure. Don't
define it by what it is like or what it's unlike or anything.
Give them as much of what
you do to cause or cause an effect on this thing you're defining in the
definition as you can and still be brief - get an action definition. The
concept of action definition is certainly something I've never before seen
stressed in the field of philosophy.
Logic Six: Absolutes are
unobtainable.
That's an effort in this
universe to stop the terrific idea of absolutes. Examples: 0o Kelvin -
the absolute zero of temperature, pure metals.
The moment it ran into an
absolute wrong, or an absolute right, the universe would be destroyed.
Mostly it works out in processing.
You don't get absolute reductions, complete states, and so on. Why? This
universe and most universes favor a gradient scale of data, or space, or
action, or objects. It's always a gradient scale.
Logic Seven: Gradient scales
are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data.
The reason why it works
so well in Creative Processing is because it was a gradient scale of agreement
that brought the person here, and it was a gradient scale that made the
universe. If you agree to a little bit you can agree to a lot. If you don't
agree to a tiny little bit, you can't agree to anything.
Logic Eight: A datum can
be evaluated only by a datum of comparable magnitude.
Corollary: Any datum has
only relative truth.
Corollary: Truth is relative
to environments, experience and truth.
Logic Nine: A datum is as
valuable as it has been evaluated.
For Homo sapiens every thought
is
preceded by a counter-effort. That's to some degree stimulus-response thinking.
It is not true of a thetan. And so the Logics, as listed in APA (Advanced
Procedure and Axioms), apply generally to thought and its behavior in any
activity. And the axioms apply peculiarly to Homo sapiens.
The high road to Cleared Theta Clear is a gradient scale where everything in this universe is to be compared by a datum of comparable magnitude.
CONVICTION AND CRITICISM
The guy's got to convince
people he exists. Existence is, if not force, force making objects. If
he does not have force, people are not convinced he exists. And if he does
have force, people are convinced he exists. When he tries to convince people
that he exists, one of his later answers is to smash hell out of them.
They find out he exists. When he can't use force, that answer is denied
to him, so his inability to use force is a demonstration he doesn't exist.
Invalidation is done by
force. Convincing somebody is done first by a thought and then by force.
Invalidation is, "You don't exist".
Convincing somebody is saying,
"I do exist," or "You do exist," or "They do exist." And it's best done
by force.
When you walk up to a wall
and put your hand against it, you're convinced it's there because you can
feel the solidity of it. If you didn't feel the solidity of it you wouldn't
be convinced it's there.
Well, what's criticism? If
a fellow is fencing, and he crosses foils with an expert and that expert
just undoes the buckles of the fellow's mask, and starts to unravel his
fencing sweater - it would seem to me like that's be a little critical,
wouldn't it? Remark: There's an old movie where in a hilarious scene Zorro
starts to tear down the dress of a beautiful woman fencer - with a predictable
outcome.
He's afraid of being hurt.
Afraid of having his space collapse around him, and afraid of becoming
matter. And therefore he's afraid of criticism because he has identified
it with force. Which it is. Criticism is the shadow of force. And the threat
of force. If you're afraid of being hurt physically, you'll be afraid of
being criticized.
A criticism unspoken, to
most people, is an overt act, and they don't realize it. They just think
a criticism, and they've done an overt act. They're that wobbly on their
pins.
CERTAINTY IN PROCESSING
You're exploring a preclear.
Find the highest level of
certainty, the highest level of truth which he could attain. And you would
evaluate that preclear to a marked degree with that. Let's go look in the
opposite direction. We're going to make him capable. What makes him incapable
is an inability. So let's look him over and find out the specific inabilities.
If we remove those, his native ability should restore itself.
Let's look for the lowest
level of falsehood we can find in the case, and that would be the falsest
datum. And let's turn it into a little bit truer datum, until you had something
sitting before you which much more closely resembled truth for himself.
We don't want him much as
truth for the MEST universe because that's MEST and we've got plenty of
MEST. We want him for himself, not for the MEST universe, and he is himself
a universe.
The greatest certainty will
tell you the highest datum that the preclear can reach at that time. If
you can find that certainty for him you'd be amazed. He'd probably turn
on and glow like a Christmas tree and walk out of the place. All you did
was reach in somewhere in the vicinity of his beingness and find out that
he knew one thing above all other things. And the fellow can get pretty
excited.
You get a lesser reaction
when you demonstrate to him, "Do you know that you believe that all coconut
trees have the Empire State Building in them?" Some ridiculous datum that's
as silly as that and he takes a look at it and he finds out he's been forming
up a whole lifetime on it.
But that's invalidation
to go at it that way, really, so you just sort of take it by mock-ups and
let it work out. But as you work it out, you will find that as you're attaining
recognition in him of a higher level truth toward his true capabilities,
when you're getting him up toward the higher truth of his own self-determinism,
what makes his being tick, he's becoming freer and freer and more and more
of an individual.
The only real certainty he's going to be able to get is the certainty that he himself has his own illusions. When he gets that certainty, he goes up the line of knowingness.
Deal in certainties. Know
only that you know and go on from there. And when you know that you know,
why, operate. Work on that data.
You should separate data
out into various bins, it'd be on a gradient scale: we partially know about
this, and we know a little more about that, etc. The most valuable part
is always that portion of it which you were the most certain. I consistently
have done this trick in investigation. I've taken all the maybes and thrown
them out the window and hung onto a few certainties.
DESIRE, ENFORCE, INHIBIT
In Scientology, we keep picking
up things and then orienting them back to a point. In other words, we're
demonstrating data, a central datum and its evaluation against many other
data. And we just keep picking that up and bringing it back in.
Having to have and not having
to have are a form of agreement. And we keep swinging back into agreement
which we undo with mock-ups - simple, isn't it?
Having to have and trying
to avoid having to have - it's a very funny thing that this works out so
easily. This speaks of, first, a cultivated desire: The person had to have
a desire in some direction or another in order to go down tone scale.
Desire is way up tone scale.
So we come down tone scale a little bit on desire. Then when his desire
paled, somebody, of course, had to enforce it to keep it going. That brought
him down tone scale a little further. And when he'd enforced it to a point
where it was impossible to do without it, then you inhibit it so the guy
can't have it.
And that's any item or thought
or belief.
When we get down to cases,
we find that this happened to the preclear. First he desired, then he finds
out that he's got to have what he originally desired, and then he can't
have it. And it just goes flick-flack down scale. So as you run a preclear
up scale, you've got to run him up scale to Desire.
For an arthritic knee, desire
to have the knee. He had a desire to have a bad knee. We'll find out he
made it a bad knee so that he could preserve it and have a knee. He made
it a bad knee so nobody else could have it. That's your origin of chronic
somatics.
He makes the body sick so
it won't be too desirable. In other words, he's clear down bottom scale
with his body: he's down in Inhibit.
He says, "Look, the reason
you don't want to eat me is because I'm really poison - boy! Look at the
arthritis in that knee." So let's get him to have a desire to have a knee.
Under Desire, we get an
expansive thing. Desire is a created space.
Above that level it's a
postulate. Just below that level it starts to be a flicker of agreement.
First moment we enter the
MEST universe, we get this expansiveness. High on the tone scale, desire
can be a very wide thing. The harmony and beauty of aesthetics nowhere
show up like they do in a big space.
Value is in terms of space.
There we have desire at work: big space, certainty and if any force is
there at all, the force is subordinate to the agreement that there should
be force there.
THE FILECLERK'S GUIDE TO THE PDC
CHAPTER 10