HISTORY OF MAN SERIES 1: ORGANIZATION OF DATA

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HISTORY OF MAN SERIES 1: ORGANIZATION OF DATA

A lecture given on 10 March 1952


Lecture 19A of the Hubbard College Lectures (HCL-19A) of 10 MAR 52, also issued as the first cassette of the Time Track of Theta series.
The R&D transcript (new volume 10) was compared to the old reels. Only a few trivial discrepancies were found and are marked inside < > symbols. And there was one case in the second lecture where a phrase was in the R&D and left out of the tape, possibly due to splicing out a garbled section, and that is marked within << >> symbols.
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Want to talk to you tonight about – some more about the History of Man. I don't know that it is particularly a History of Man all the way through, but it's the history of what we call a theta line.
There is some difference between a theta line and an organism, the difference being that an organism is MEST universe. An organism is a carbon-oxygen motor, low-heat engine, runs at a temperature of 98.6, has a circulatory system. You could actually, in a biological laboratory, build and grow a muscle engine. Wouldn't have a bit of theta in it. A muscle engine. You could hook up a flock of muscles to a crankshaft and grow the muscles and it would run the crankshaft. I mean, as simple as that. A carbon-oxygen engine should therefore not be confused with the human mind.
Now, the human mind, again, should not be confused with a theta line. When you consider a mind, you consider a unit mind. It is a – in most of your concepts of the mind, you think of the mind as something which an organism has to pilot and monitor it. An organism – one organism has this one mind.
Well, that would be a subdivision of the theta mind or the theta line. The theta line would be a timeless, spaceless influence, capable of making recordings, capable of animating and motivating and controlling, forming, destroying, conserving: matter, energy, space and time. Now, that is theta, and you could consider that this sort of a situation existed.
You understand now that I am not talking to you from the field of mysticism. I am talking to you from an embracive field which also embraces the field of mysticism. This data neither admits the principle of mysticism nor debars the principle of mysticism. It neither admits the principle of science nor debars the principles of science as it is practised today.
This is merely – these subjects, mysticism and so forth, are just routes toward discovery. A lot of data has been collected out of them.
Now, let's look at this subject both as to theta and the material universe and see if we don't have something vaguely resembling order coming out of the chaotic concept which most people have regarding mind.
What I am telling you here is not necessarily true. It happens to be very workable and is relatively more true than anything which has been so far presented, since it embraces and organizes many fields which have been, in the past, merely specialized fields.
Let us consider the subject – the whole subject of knowledge.
Scientology would be the study of knowing, or the science of sciences. Therefore, the basic concept on which it is built should be of interest to you. This is an analogy which will tell you something about that.
Up here we have what we will call bin 1. Bin 1 is full of data. Knowledge is perforce concerned with data. If you consider a datum broadly enough to also include a motivation, a cause or an existence, then bin 1 up here has nothing in it but data.
But let's consider that bin 1 has in it nothing but TRUE data. Here, for instance, would be, if it exists anywhere, the data considered in transcendentalism – the organization of knowledge which exceeds and goes above all knowledge. In other words, all knowledge is above the range of human experience, according to somebody like Kant, Hegel, – Hegel particularly. Hegel haggled around and got himself to be a very confused boy, and he got himself so confused that he says, "I'm just going to abandon the whole shooting match, and I'm going to tell you and me that anything that is worth knowing is beyond the realm of human experience. It cannot be sensed, measured or experienced by a human being. That gets me out of my difficulty and you're stuck with it." Typical Scholastic thinking.
And yet the world was stupid enough, by the way, for a hundred and some years, to let Hegel lie across the path of human advancement. For instance, the astronomer Piazzi discovered the eighth planet. Hegel simultaneously had published a monograph demonstrating conclusively that there could only be seven planets, because seven was a perfect number indivisible by itself and others and the Constitution or something.
And so do you know that nobody went out and took a look! Nobody went out and took a look at Plazzi's planet, They just read Hegel, And the planet was up there. All you had to do was look through a telescope and see that it was in – its path was influencing other planets, and there had to be a planet there. But it took them a long time to get around to being smart enough to say, "What we can sense, measure and experience is more valid than what we can guess." Now, oddly enough, the ... You know Ohm's law – that very important law in electricity? Well, I've forgotten how long Ohm's law was considered to be beyond bounds, but it was fought and not used by people of Hegel's complexion. Actually here was a natural law, and a person like Hegel could come along and repeal it. Well, of course, nobody would get any electronicking done if you didn't have Ohm's law. Nobody bothered to measure it. They just said, "Well, it says here on page 86 that Ohm's law ain't, so it ain't." I'm sorry to use the word ain't, but it better fits with the complexion of such thinking – thinking quote unquote (laughter) – as these lads were using.
I had a doctor come in – he saw my name on a grip – down in Washington, DC, about a year ago. And this doctor came in and he was going to give me a shot. I'd just come across the country and I was coughing – probably had Service Fac One in restimulation. Anyway, a little penicillin would have fixed me up.
So I whistled up this doctor and he came in, and he saw my name on top of a grip. And he came in very sunnily, and the second he saw my name, he sort of froze up. And he said, "What do you do'" and "What are you?" and so on, He was a very nasty fellow anyway. And I said, "I'm an engineer," and – which is quite truthful. And he knew damn well who I was So he tried to give me a big breakdown on the fact – he said, "Well, there are people around that think things are useful just because they're workable and that people ought to have something to do with them just because they're workable." He says, "That's no argument at all" – jabs an eighteen-gauge needle into my gluteus maximus (laughter), and says, "I couldn't consider why anybody would work in that field anyway," pulls the needle out, doesn't bother to stop the blood flow, packs up his kit and leaves.
In other words, we still have Hegelism around. They'd rather read on page 82 that this is so than go and look.
Well, this bin of knowledge up here might contain absolute knowledge. It might contain absolute knowledge. And if it did, it would also contain all this knowledge which Hegel himself couldn't experience. There would be no limit to the amount of data contained in this, but it would all be true. It would all be true. It'd be close to absolute truth, if not absolute truth. Now, this is just for an analogy.
Now, if we consider – consider knowledge to be a circle, we find out that we have a continuing line here. At this point on the circle – just draw this circle, and then from the center out draw a line. Now, on the right side of that line – exactly on the right side of that Line – is one datum known. One datum, that's all. Now, existing right with it, but perhaps a tiny bit out of alignment with it, would be another datum. There'd be two data known,
Now, as these would advance in a clockwise direction, we would find that we would be accumulating more and more data. This would be what would be known as thinking by figuring out a theory and then looking and seeing whether or not you found data to support the theory.
Now, around the clock here would come more and more known, more and more known, more and more known, more and more known, until just before we got to that zero, we would have all things known – not a single missing datum. Everything known. They're right next to each other – everything known, nothing known, and two data known actually occupy the same spot. They actually occupy the same spot on this circle.
But as we move clockwise on this wise, we collect more and more and more and more data. And finally, as we go all the way around, it's all known.
Now, philosophy, extrapolative thinking, that horrible word, pragmatic thinking... Pragmatism, by the way, used to be a good word until the universities got ahold of it, and now it says that it's – oh, the most wonderful definition. It says "humbuggery" and "bellicosity" and "thinking by induction" and it has about – oh, a whole bunch of meanings. I'm being jocular about what it says there, but there are all these meanings surround this word pragmatism. Actually, basically and originally all pragmatism meant is you just took some data and went out and found out if it was true by measuring it up against the physical universe,
Well, if we started backwards from all things known, up this way, we would just getting into the – be getting into the more and more theoretical. Now, it's very hard to advance from everything known and keep abandoning things you know – keep abandoning things you know, counterclockwise here, until you finally get down to two data. In fact, it's practically impossible to do that.
But you can start here with two data known and inductively locate phenomena in the physical universe. You can do this. You have, then, a yardstick by which you can find out what's known and what isn't known. And you can locate phenomena. You can say, "Well, look, this phenomena is supposed to exist; according to – according to these two data, that phenomena – there's a lot of phenomena that exists. Let's go and see if we can find it." So we go and look and it's there. Well, that's fine; we find a lot of phenomena.
But coming back this way, you're just dumping things off the freight car, so to speak, all the time, and you're not looking for new phenomena. You're trying to somehow explain old phenomena by throwing away what you have, and so on.
The latter method which I'm describing to you is the method which, in all seriousness, science has been using for a long time, It results in such things as super specialization.
Why. you go down a hall in a medical building and you check in and you say, "There's something in my eye."
And the doctor looks at you and he says, "No," he says, "I'm an optic specialist and you'll have to go next door. An optic surgeon is next door, and what I handle is the cornea.
And you go next door and you find out he handles the pupil. Well, this spot of dirt is in the white. And you have to shop around for quite a while, and you find somebody with this – that handles the white part of the eye, you see, and he takes the spot of dirt out ONLY if he is a surgeon for the white spot of the eye. By the way, I'm going along with old Doc Pottenger. I know the old man – he's a great old man. And he says, "If there was just some way we could break down this G. D. blankety-blank-blank specialization," he says, "maybe we could cure something."
Well, this method of thinking, then, going back here counterclockwise, is scientific thinking "Let go and gather a whole bunch of data. Let's gather a lot of data and let's look at a lot of phenomena. And after we've gotten everything we can find on the subject, then let's go find a theory for it. And let's just take any old theory that happens to come along and see if it explains some of this data. If it does, we're all set."
As a consequence, science won't advance around here counterclockwise, but just keeps sort of wandering off, and it gets off here and there and gets all confused about it. And it has been doing so, so that you get cytology arguing with biology, arguing with evolutionists. And these theories are all different. These theories were not arrived at inductively, and these theories do not predict new phenomena.
Scientology is an effort to go around the clock clockwise – to take data and then look for material, look for the phenomena predicted by that data and see if it exists in the physical universe.
Well, it's an interesting – an interesting field, Scientology, because all it's trying to do is pick up all the loose ends of people who were trying to travel backwards in this circle. It's trying to get a unification of science, combine it with a unification of anything – the humanities, religion or even mathematics, aesthetics. It's trying to bring these things all into the same field so that they can all be used.
Now, that all by itself is a worthwhile goal. It wouldn't have to have anything to do with processing or application, curing up anything in people, to be quite worthwhile as a goal. As a matter of fact, it does that. It does that.
It'll predict – by the way, you can take Scientology and you can predict what should be the whole field of biology and where it should mesh with cytology and where that should mesh with evolution. And you will come out with a package of data and phenomena which, if you presented them to the cytologist, to the biologist and to the evolutionist, you would find a point of agreement. They would agree on the data which you had there.
Now, I'm giving you that to show you that, theoretically, there is just one set of data, but that set is of infinite size, and if it were all true we would put it up here in bin 1. Bin 1, this square.
Now, there would be a third bin, however. How do you get to be human? Well, as a matter of fact, the only way you can be human is by being wrong. Actually the wrongest you can get is dead, you see, but you're pretty close to it when you agree to be human. For instance, you sense that – a person, for instance, tells little social lies and he says – he's polite and he's this and he's that, and he doesn't exert his own self-determinism very much in social concourse with the rest of the human race. And as a net result, he is permitting himself to be thrown out of his actual course of existence. It's wrong – social lies are wrong and so forth. But he has to be wrong to be human. He couldn't be very right and be human.
Now its the same way with all this data down here. This is bin 3. Down here is bin 3. Now, bin 3 contains in it relative truths, workable truths, things you can sense, measure and experience. You don't have to be able to sense, measure and experience anything in 1, but down here in 3, that's human knowledge. And this is varying and shifting continually. And there isn't a datum in it which is absolute. Every datum in it has a little bit of wrongness about it. It's only relatively true; it can be sensed, measured, or experienced.
This includes how to make clam chowder. It includes what they will be wearing in 1953. It includes the field of biology. It'll include literature, anything – just data, data, data, data, data – all relatively true, subject to opinion, subject to viewpoint and so forth. But it's what has passed in the human race for knowledge.
It all depends on what strata of truth or what degree of truth you're demanding from this bin. And you can go out and get a lot of opinions – each one of them is data. You can learn all about painting simply by going and taking a critic's manual of the great masterpieces of the world and memorizing it. You don't ever look at the paintings. Something here is van Gogh, and it said there in the critic's manual – he's an authority; you just read that, that's a perfectly valid datum – he says in there, "Van Gogh was yakety-yakety-yak, wela-dee-da-blah-blah-blahdeblah-blah and showed at various times a tremendous inclination toward power and strength, but he blahdeblah-blah-de-dah-da-blah. Now, the list of his paintings are so-and-so. This is known in Europe. This painting is known here and that painting is owned there, and this painting is particularly good for being balanced on all seven tricycles," or something.
And you get this – you get a whole command of the subject of van Gogh without even faintly getting any command of aesthetics. But do you know, you could go out, with having memorized that entire manual on the famous paintings and paintings of history, and pass for a tremendously aesthetic person. You could. You could go around and any time anybody mentioned something by – well, some obscure Finnish painter, and you'd say, "Oh yes, yes, his Blue Girl, I always thought was terribly 'rankatewa' don't you think?" And they would look at you and they would say, "Hm, an authority, an expert." And they would be very polite.
Now, you could know all there is to know about painting, about music, in that wise, without ever knowing how to paint, never knowing anything about music, really, and with knowing nothing about aesthetics, having no more taste than a cow, and yet get by. And all of that's perfectly valid information. That's all – that's a valid performance. After all, people have been acting like that for centuries. And it's a perfectly valid performance to memorize a bunch of this data and say, "I am now cultured."
What's cultured? Well, that all depends on the time. For instance, a fellow couldn't be cultured two hundred years ago unless he was prepared to sit down and lose a thousand pounds every night at the gaming table. Well, our definition has changed – definition has changed. Now he has to lose it on dog racing or something.
But all of... You see, I'm giving you this to try to show to you that the word cultured – without any definition of what we're going to agree on to he cultured, well, we can have all sorts of oddities here. A fellow memorizes a book and becomes cultured. Well, then, what's cultured? It's just whether or not we've agreed on the formula one is going to pursue to get cultured. That agreement will take bin 3 and rearrange what a person has to know or do to be cultured, you see?
So that a large segment of the human race that was more or less knowledgeable about data in the world could get together and sort of agree – sort of agree that hereinafter people who were to be considered in the line of the arts had to be able to practice the art. They had to know aesthetics and practice the arts – not memorize. And right away, all this alignment of data in bin 3 would change.
The difference between bin I and bin 3, then, is what we happen to be using at the present time and what we've agreed upon is relatively useful to us. You see? That's all there is to it. In here comes fashion, styles, changes, and so forth.
For instance, fashions in physics have changed markedly. It was fashionable once upon a time to be entirely different and quite otherwise than the modern physicist. It's most fashionable now to use mathematics that he himself doesn't understand, and to sit around and hope that something won't blow up in your face. To – it's fashionable to say, "Well the law of conservation of energy is in question but it's not in question and so on. Fascinating subject right now. But just twenty-five years ago, this science – this exact science of physics – was quite otherwise, quite otherwise. It was a precision science. Nobody worried about a thing. All the data in here was just in beautiful condition – oh, wonderful! And nobody questioning it – everybody agreed on it. It was solid, It was almost a static. It was almost as though it was bin 1.
And then, of course, somebody comes along and digs up a little more of Maxwell's work and Einstein's equations, and quantum mechanics gets invented and the Germans do this and we do that, and all of a sudden here's the whole subject – it's just up in air. You don't know from, actually, one month to the next, what's happening in physics: This month light is a particle, next month it's a wave and so on. And the fashions – fashions in the mathematics used in it change. So, again, the whole subject is in flux. It's random now as a subject.
So knowledge changes in bin 3 in accordance with what we've agreed upon about the physical universe. It doesn't matter what we've agreed upon, that data can get into bin 3. And we can agree that something is true which is utterly false, and it'll still appear as a datum in bin 3. We can agree that all of us can make the tides of the ocean overflow and drown the Land on Shrove Wednesday or Ash August." And we can agree upon this. It doesn't necessarily have to happen. It's a datum. Now we can work on that.
For instance, a lot of people agreed once upon a time that the Roman Empire – Rome itself was suddenly going to disappear in a boiling mass of lava, red hot lava, and that every Roman in the town was going to perish in that boiling mass of lava. And they agreed upon this and they agreed upon it and they agreed upon it, and everybody sat around and waited for it to happen. Every body hated Rome. And they waited for it to happen and they waited for it to happen and they waited for it to happen, and it just didn't happen! And this became discouraging.
One time, by the way, they set fire to it just to make it come true, and then blamed the emperor. And then blamed him again when he crucified some people for having done it. Very interesting.
But the point is that they had agreed upon it. It was an accepted datum. It was so thoroughly accepted that men would have killed each other rather than to have overset this datum: "Rome is going to go up in a cloud of hot lava." And Rome didn't, so they had to invent hell. (laughter) And that's right; that is the source of hell. They finally said "So we're talking about a symbolical Rome." We couldn't make this town go, so we had to change data in bin 3. My authority for this is Edward Gibbon. Edward Gibbon is a thorough Christian – thorough. Only I'm very – I'm sure, I'm sure that the Church and so forth is very happy that he has written with such long words so that so few people read him. Actually, he reads like a dime novel, and his blasts on this subject are – they really char the paper.
But anyhow, there's bin 3 – even contains Gibbon. It also contains the endowment lists, that is – what do you call them? Oh, the index – what is that thing they called – what do you call it?
Male voice: "Index of Forbidden Books."
"Index of Forbidden Books"! Well, it's something like that. <I knew the Latin.> Well, just to be blunt here, we have the channels between 3 and 1, and those are the channels of search. Mysticism, religion – all of those things come on this second-channel level. That's 2. And those are the routes of knowing. And the data in 2 is just how you get data out of 1 and into 3.
Scientology is actually a route which pretends to embrace everything here in bin 2. It doesn't matter what route is used, will be used, can't be used or anything else, or what argument is against using it – that is bin 2.
And what Scientology is, is bin 2: How do you get knowledge from 1 to its relatively highest degree of truth, into bin 3?
I hope you understand that so that no holds are barred in this subject. If you can find out that the Arabs had a method of blowing sand into certain shapes and finding out what was in bin 1, believe me, that is in the sphere of Scientology. Just like a slide rule, topology, the science of physics, or US government orders – US government orders – they're all in the same bin. Now, they're all embraced by Scientology.
And I hope you get a little better understanding, then, of what we're trying to do. We're trying to get the highest level of knowing that we can get, and this is a system of trying to get that highest level of knowing. So, no holds are barred in this subject.