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A SUMMARY OF STUDY

A lecture given on
4 August 1964


Thank you.
This is the what of what?
Audience: August 4th, AD 14.
August the 4th, AD 14. A memorable day, because it’s the day after bank holiday parade and nobody has pneumonia from the usual rain that they have on bank holiday. Very memorable day.
Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, August the 4th, AD 14.
All right. You seem to have hit a few records here lately, in your examination grades. Your examination grades on lectures and so forth, are coming up, up, up, up and I’m very proud of you with this. Thank you very much.
Aside from your own brightness on the subject, some of this is attributable to the fact that I’ve been talking about and teaching you something about study, and I think you have learned quite a bit about study in the last many weeks; and that is the subject of this lecture.
I want to give you, in this lecture before it gets cold, a brief summary—no matter how rough and ragged and no matter how well worked out later—of the things I have learned about study. And I break my record by lecturing from a note. But I don’t want this to go too far before I make it a matter of lecture and record because I found out it was already getting dim in me skull. And I keep very little information in my skull lately, and that I do put in sometimes tends to get dim because it gets lost. So I didn’t want that to happen and I want to give you this information about study.
Now, there’s not been a technology of study or a technology of education. Now, that sounds like a very far—fetched, fantastic statement, but it’s true—it’s true. There was a school technology, and—sort of—but it didn’t have too much to do with education. You see, there was the technology of how you go to school and how you get taught in school and how you teach children to go to school and how you go through grades and how you get examined and how you go through the college and so forth. There was an awful lot of this school technology. And you should differentiate between a school technology and an educational technology—it’s the first thing I’d ask you to do—because education very seldom, in its final touches, has anything to do with a school.
The engineer who goes out reports to the job and he’s been beautifully taught along various ways on how to do the calculus curve of mensuration on how much gravel there is in an irregular pile. And by getting the calculus curve of several sections of this pile measured and formulized very carefully, he is then able, in looking at this barge and measuring it up, to finally tell how much gravel there is in this barge.
This actually happened—happened in Cavite before the war, many years before the war. This young engineer had just gotten out of school and he did just that. He went down and he calculated the amount of gravel in the barge by calculus. And it was very arduous.
And he’d been sent down by the chief engineer of the yard to find out if they had enough gravel. And he didn’t come back for most of the afternoon. So finally, the chief engineer got very, very curious about this and he went down there to find out where this young new engineer was and what he was doing and whether or not the sharks had gotten him or something. And he found him down there just putting the finishing touches on it, and he gave him—the young engineer gave the chief engineer—with great triumph, the fact that he had 150.7—9 cubic yards of gravel on hand. He had pages of calculations. And the yard foreman, a Filipino, standing near at hand, looked very sourly at the young engineer and he said, „Is that what you were doing? „And before the chief engineer could even get in there and find out what it was all about he said, „You see those white paint marks on the front and the back of the barge? Well, they tell you how much gravel is in the barge!“
I’ve had a wonderful example of how pedantic schooling can be as opposed to education. I read a dissertation last night on the subject of slides. The preparation of lantern slides. And boy, this was the most intricate calculations of how close you had to be to a screen and how—the density of the lantern slide had to be in order for you to get a proper lecture hall projection. And these went on and on, and if I hadn’t myself had experience in this particular line, I would have taken all this quite seriously. But it was somebody—I guess his pen just got to going and he couldn’t stop it. Because what you do if you have dim lantern slides is get a brighter lamp. You don’t move a projector backward and forward in the hall and calculate the superreflectiveness of the screen and all that sort of thing. Now, with great experience then—and it is considerable experience, you see, I know slides and densities and that sort of thing, by experience—I knew that this data I was being fed so laboriously had very, very little importance. See, it was interesting. You know, it was interesting that anybody would write that much on the subject.
But Reg and I and Bonwick at a circus not too long ago, with a mismatched voltage line and common bed sheeting hung up between two circus poles, enlarged a picture four to five diameters above anything ever intended for either the picture or the projector. Everybody was delighted; they looked beautiful. We had a twelve—by—twelve screen of bed sheeting which even had puckers in it. There was only one slide that it made look odd—one slide out of about two hundred—and it just happened to fall, this pucker did, in a young man’s face and it just fell wrong. Not a critical proposition at all.
You take any old density of slide and show it in—throw it into a projector, then, with enough lamp—and you put up a sheet that will reflect and you’ve got yourself just about the finest lantern slide show you ever wanted to see and there isn’t anybody going to say a word about it. Two pages of text out of how you calculate the density of a lantern slide—not a critical problem.
So, education would take into effect, as opposed to schooling, the relative importance of the data being taught. That’s very, very important. The relative importance of the data being taught, by which, one would say, the relative applicability of the data being taught—the applicability. Now, schooling, as opposed to education, has in actual fact no thought, no real thought of applicability, no such thought.
It is just as important to the pedantic or scholastic school of education, this technology, that „Pliny, in the year umpty—ump—dash—ump, did hereinto aforesaid with semicolons, discover that there were sturgeons.“ Now, what you going to do with that datum? Yet a man’s whole career could have been wiped out, you see, by an inability to have vociferated this fact. This is under „fishing,“ heading of „ichthyology,“ see; fishing, fishes. Guy goes down to the bureau of fisheries, see? On his final examination paper he was asked, „Who and what and when discovered sturgeons?“ You can just see him now—young fellow in the bureau of fisheries out there off the north coast of Norway, blowing about forty degrees below zero trying to count the number of herring boats out there he’s going to have to rescue in the next twenty—four hours, using this datum about Pliny. You can just see this now. Inapplicable!
So, there’s a sort of a pomposity that goes along in the field of schooling that has no real basis in education. You’ll find this in the arts. You will find people who really think they are artistic and really know something about art, who are simply capable of rattling off a number of pictures. „There’s this picture and that picture, and there’s the other picture and so forth and it was painted—it was painted by Jules Drool, you know, and in 1710.“ See?
You say, „What did Jules Drool paint it with, bud? What did he use?“
„Oh, uh—ha—ha. I think it’s an oil.“ But he knows it’s 1710, see? And he knows it was Jules Drool, and he knows the name of the painting is Shameful Morning or something.
But you ask this bird—you ask this bird, you say, „What did he paint it with?“
„Oh, I think it was—uh, I think it’s an oil. I—I think it’s an oil. I—I—I think it’s an oil. It’s an oil.“
He ain’t got the point. It’s very valuable to know what they were painting with when. See? That’s quite valuable. You can use that. Well, you’d—just a crudest possible use—you see something that is painted with ICI Best House Paint, as represented of having been painted in 1510, you know that’s wrong, because they didn’t make peanut—oil—emulsion paint in ... I mean, that’s crude, see? But you can see that it does have some applicability in the detection of authenticity. What did he paint it with? That’s very—that’s a good applicable datum, you see?
I’ll give you a parallel datum like this. I was tearing apart encyclopedias yesterday to find out if anybody else had ever mentioned a certain art form. I could find it no place but I did find in the dictionary that „doré“ meant „gold colored.“ I thought that was very interesting because the name I was looking for as an art form was a doré type and so I didn’t know which way I was going on this thing. I thought it was probably a man’s name, probably interfered with—with Gustave Doré, you know, and his etchings. No, it wasn’t after a man’s name and so the thing has never survived as a name, because it wasn’t a man, you see? It was simply a goldish form of art reproduction. So they called it a doré type and the name is so esoteric that it has only survived in the super—super—professional lines. If a guy was really on the ball and he delved into everything, he’d know there had been such a thing as a doré type, see? But otherwise, he wouldn’t know anything about it. Everybody knows what, for instance, a daguerreotype is, see? Nothing like that. But what was a doré type?
Well, that becomes important in examining the development of picture display, the display of pictures and so forth. So there was a type which did a strange piece of picture display. Well, you should be able to run such things back. Beyond that, in actual fact, whether it was Mr. Wall or Mr. Pall who invented it when—has nothing much to do with it. But how it was done, you see, at such and such a time—oh, that would have quite a bit to do with it, see?
So, when you’re dealing with education you have to be very careful not to lean over into the significance. Don’t lean over into the significance exclusive of the mass. That is a very interesting datum. Now, when you get into significance versus mass, you get into action; and action could be defined as significance versus mass, of some kind or another. That’s rather drawing a longbow, you understand, but the reason one engages in action or doingness and so forth, is he has some kind of an idea of accomplishing something or making something or avoiding something or ... He has—there’s a significance there, you know? There’s an idea about it. Even though—even when we look at a lot of particles flying around in the air and we say: „That’s a confusion,“ we’ve added significance to the mass, don’t you see? Do you see that?
But in education when the significance is never added to the mass but stands in pristine purity all by itself, you tend to get a jammed curriculum—no doingness. Let’s get down to earth about it, you see? I’ve just given you an example of it—I’ve just given you an example of it, of who—who invented what, see? And now we say, „And there was a great deal of conflict between these two men at that particular time. One of them—one of them had a greater idea of the destiny of his development than the other one did.“ Oh, what’s this got to do with anything? It’s a disrelated datum, don’t you see? It’s just a significance. It hadn’t anything to do with the doingness or the action, had nothing to do with the mass that you are now confronting. All it does is throw you a curve, you get the idea?
So, school is expert at throwing curves until one begins to wonder whether or not school ever has education in mind. So, you could have a school technology which would teach, which would never really educate, never really train anyone. You see that? But it could be marvelous. You could fill your whole university through courses of the work of Thomas Hardy. You could have The Plight of Miners in Roman Times on the Cornwall Coast. You could have The Number of Synonyms and Antonyms used by Hunters and Huntresses in the 16th Century. You could have courses which flunk people because they referred to the wrong word, they used the wrong word in connection with the wrong group of animals, you see? You know, like you have „a covey of quail,“ you see, and „a covey of foxes,“ you know, that kind of thing, see? Very pedantic!
But what is the basic error here? The basic error—I’ll come back to it now—the basic error is simply failing to add the mass or doingness to the significance, see, failing to add the mass or the doingness to the significance. You say, „This fellow was a good painter. He painted and he painted and he painted and he painted and he painted. Well, he painted a lot.“ You could say this in 90,000 different ways. „He drove seven—his first seven wives batty by the fact he never paid any attention to anything but his painting.“ Well, it’s good curiosa but it is not an educational datum. It’s just curiosa. What did he paint, see?
Your student then must be taken into consideration. Your student is trying to get to be a painter. And I’m afraid they’ve spent so much time teaching them on how many wives the painters have had, or haven’t had, that their idea of painting is to get married and divorced or to become a walking catalog.
Well, of course, if you’re a judge, if you’re going to be a professional judge or a professional critic, not a painter but one of these birds, naturally you want to be practically a walking catalog, see? You want to overwhelm everybody. It’s good one—upmanship, you know? You walk through looking at things this way—this way. „Yes, this man over here, he’s copied—he’s copied Hans Verboten. Yes, that’s a very obscure painter of the 1416.“ See, you want to know things like that, you know, if you’re going to be that.
But to be a painter—and that’s why you’d almost never turn a member of the arts out of a university. That is almost impossible. It’s unheard of and—to teach short story. They ruin more writers! Well, it’s of interest how they do this, and they detach the significance and the action. They separate these two things so it becomes a pure significance without any action or mass connected with it. And when you have done this you have then sort of wound a guy up in a no—confront of the subject and you’ve introverted him. And the way a student becomes introverted is to give him too much significance and too little doingness and too little mass.
That’s still knocking you for a loop. You keep looking at me with your heads tipped over here and I want to know what’s so incomprehensible about it? No, it’s slipping somewhere.
I don’t know how to state it, really, any more plainly than I’m stating it. If you’re going to teach a fellow about roller balls, give him a roller ball! Is this—is this difficult, see?
Don’t teach him the history of roller balls! Am I making more sense?
Audience: Yes.
All right. Does it—does that make sense? It doesn’t?
Audience: Yes, yes.
So, when you have detached the significance from the action and separated these two things apart, you can have schooling but you can’t have education. And that’s basically how it’s done.
If you want to wind up with a whole bunch of do—less graduates, if you want to wind up with a whole bunch of painters who cant paint, a whole bunch of doctors who can’t doc, engineers who can’t eng, then by George, you’re going to just—all you have to do is take the doingness and the mass connected with the subject and park that over here as something you really don’t want to have much to do with and go into the total significance of it all. And then you make a highly impractical person. And this is the only way it’s done. There aren’t a number of other ways to do this. You wind it up hard enough and he never does go out of school, he never does leave school; he becomes a professor.
Now, I’ve learned that for a person to teach who cannot do, is a terrible mistake. Let’s get right down to earth here, in Scientology. If our Instructors couldn’t audit—guahhh! What goes on? If our Instructors couldn’t audit, what catastrophe would we face in all educational lines? Supposing they all knew the history of auditing and then supposing they could give you chapter and verse of everything ever written on the subject and tell you exactly where to find this and tell you how many pages it had; supposing they could do that—but they couldn’t audit. This would be somewhat catastrophic. And any trouble that an Instructor has in teaching has a little bit of something to do with something he doesn’t confront about the doingness or the mass of the subject. You got the idea?
So, this Instructor finds that he really doesn’t like to teach geometry or something like that. Well, he can’t do anything with geometry. Do you see? He’s got a blind spot in this particular direction.
Now, this became so notable from my inspection and study of study that I was practically struck dumb on the subject. It goes to this degree: that a person who is simply writing the reports of people who can do is too far removed for the execution of a good textbook. A person writing reports of people who can do, no matter what people this person consulted, is too far removed from the doingness and mass to make a studiable, good textbook.
That is remarkable.
Now, you understand all this background I am giving you here on this particular subject—came about when I realized that if we were going on upstairs and we knew something about the mind, that we had to wrap up another subject which is entirely separate to the subject we were trying to wrap up. This is our inheriting the dropped balls of yesterday. They didn’t wrap up the subject of education, so we have to wrap up the subject of education, you see, in order to educate; just for our own practical application, see? Well, they didn’t do it. They got a lot of money for it, they were paid to do it and they didn’t do it, see? So you feel the same crossness that you would feel at the switchman that you had down there on the railroad tracks and he drew his pay to throw the switch and he didn’t, you know? And the Twentieth Century Limited went off the rails, see? And you say, „That blas, of blah, blah, blah, blah—that was his job and he didn’t do it,“ see? Same way, same way. Here we are. We’ve got a difficult subject to confront because one is studying what one is, and we should have had the whole subject of education beautifully wrapped up. But instead of that, it’s just muddied up. There are many preconceptions in this line.
So, I recognized that it was necessary—even though we had made great inroads on this—I recognized that it was necessary that I get a new viewpoint on this subject. Therefore I picked up an analogous, or a similar line of study, in that it’s a practical subject—if you know certain things and you do certain things, you get a certain result, see? That type of a practical subject—and yet one that sort of borders over into the field of the arts, don’t you see, so that you have to have some judgment and taste and so forth. And I picked up this subject—one, because it was available, two, because I had some interest in it—but basically because it did show a fairly decent pattern of what an auditor would do.
In other words, he has certain theories and actions which he’s supposed to perform which, when applied, will produce a certain result if he uses judgment and good taste. Now, you’d—it isn’t the same thing: auditing and photography are very long from the same thing. But auditing does have this in common with photography, that when you do certain things, and you do them right, you then wind up with a result, with a certain result. But if you do these things a bit wrong, you don’t wind up with a result, you see? But also, if you do these things and you do them without using good sense, see, you also don’t wind up with a result, see? It’s a comparable action.
So I picked up this particular field and took a full, blasting, exclamation point, professional course on this from the word „izzard“ straight on through. Now this was all sandwiched in during the last few months of everything else I’ve had to do. And I learned, however, a great deal about it just by experiencing subjectively something that was off the subject of what we are doing, something that I had a dilettante knowledge of and so forth. And as I showed you the other day, I think it was starting to come up with a professional result. So then therefore, the course was well studied and did lead to a finite result at the other end of things.
I’ve gone past the point now of just studying it and I can actually develop those points and portions of it necessary to produce the better result, don’t you see? It’s gone over that borderline. For instance, it’s all right to do this and that and the other thing and you do that exactly by the textbook. But if you’re terribly good by the textbook, why, you can then give it that extra frill over here that makes it come out on top, don’t you see? In other words, you can use the textbook so well that you can think while you’re doing it. Do you see that? Now, that is what I have been going through.
And I noticed a great many points very early that would never have struck me if I were not working in a completely new field of study. This is not a field, by the way, that I was absolutely new to. I’ve actually been trained in darkrooms and that sort of thing from a practical viewpoint. So, from another viewpoint here—that I got an idea of—that actually just practical training isn’t enough. You can’t just give the guy the tools and say, „All right. Well, dabble around with it and go to work on the Daily Express and watch the birds rushing in and out of the darkroom at the Daily Express and if you do that long enough, why, you will become a good photographer.“ That’s not true! I have fabulous evidence that this is not true. The evidence lies before you every morning when you glance at the paper. What they commonly call a news photograph is so bad and oddly enough most of those boys are untrained. The top—notchers that you see around, the real headliners and that sort of thing, oddly enough, are trained.
It isn’t, then, a gift that they suddenly pick up, see? It isn’t this vast talent—fellow sees a camera—“Oh!“ you see, and this huge streak of light goes through his skull of that brilliant inspiration and he clicks the shutter and then he has pictures all over the front of everything. It doesn’t work that way. And he can go through all of the menial jobs he wants to in the field of photography, cleaning plates and all the rest of those things, through to the last bitter end of the thing and he will never become a top—notch photographer. They’re doing it all the time because this is the way the newspapers get the young men to come in and work in their darkrooms. They tell them this and that’s not true.
Top—notch photographers of England are most severely trained photographers you ever had anything to do with. They are just a little bit too severely trained, if anything. But they’re hot. You get Tony Armstrong—Jones, my God! If you ever saw a man use standard photography, this guy uses it with a capital „S“ with an exclamation point. He can’t even take a picture of his own new baby without setting up the exact textbook lighting for a baby picture, see? He doesn’t even get thrown by the event of being a father, you see? He goes and gets the exact lamps and he sets them up at the exact angle and he fixes them up this way. He got a fluke picture by doing this—it’s just one of those flukes. You run into them all the time—you take advantage of them. Nevertheless, his lighting was absolutely textbook. This guy is a headliner, see? He’s taken design photography now, and in the—in the big Sunday Times Magazine Section—he had an article in there a couple of Sundays ago and I know he just laughed like mad when he published that lead picture in there. He’s standing outside of a building, he gets the perfect architectural texture—he’s been elected to the Design Council and so forth—he takes—stands outside the building, he gets the perfect texture of the brick, perfect texture of glass, perfect texture of everything, and shoots the inside of the building like daylight. And I know what he did. He said, „Nobody will notice it but a pro, but let them figure out how I did it,“ see?
He knew the public would just be interested in it sort of as a picture and so forth. But I’m sure that it was in the back of his mind, „Let somebody figure out how I did this,“ see? I don’t know how he did it. I know how I would have done it but you don’t shoot from the outside of a building in glaring sunlight and get the total detail of the inside of the building without doing cutouts or something and this is no cutout. How did he do it, see? And I know he sort of laughed to himself because he’s put together, of course, two brands of very standard lighting. Knows his subject cold, you see? So he—but he uses it in this peculiar way with color film to get this fantastic result. You never stand outside of a building, see it in perfect detail and look into the room inside and see it in perfect detail at the same level of light. And then you don’t shoot this in color. No latitude to the film.
But a pro can be counted on to do things like that. But when you break him right on down, why can he do things like that? He knows all the right ways to do it and therefore he knows how to „fail“ at doing what he’s doing and then he can think that extra step, see? He knows his equipment and so when he can think that one more step, that makes him a champion.
The leading glamour photographer of England is a fellow named Tom Hustler. They’re always calling in Tom Hustler to shoot some star or something of the sort. They rave about his pictures. Well, it’s quite amazing, because Tom Hustler never took anything in his life except a standard professional photograph. He never took anything. He doesn’t even add that extra. He is so standard that he’s painful to look at if you’re a pro, see? The hair light is always exactly where the hair light is supposed to be—that light that you see in portraits that gives the little gleam to the person’s hair, see? His main light, the big one, and the fill, they’re always in exactly the right position. His background is always exact. It’s just a technically perfect photograph, do you see? There isn’t anybody else in England taking them.
Lancere, the great theater photographer, I am told—I am told—their great theater photographer. I saw some pictures by this character the other day, he’s about as standard as a pig lost in the swamp, see? And the pictures look it—they’re faulty. And his lighting is not standard and he doesn’t know what to do with the lighting. I think he’s got baby picture lighting he’s lighting stars with or something of the sort. He’s just not a pro. You see? Shows up—bang! People look at the picture; and you show them one that is perfectly lighted, you say, „How about this one,“ you see?
They say, „Oh! That’s a beautiful picture,“ you see? And you show the next one and it’s got a technical imperfection in it and they, well, they don’t like that so well. They can’t tell you why, this is a common guy off the street, see? Now, photography has got the common denominator of the public taste. What does the public want to see and what does the public like to see?
So now, we have a new subject in photography—this is another reason I chose it—brand new subject. Just a little over a century old. About 1810—1810 somebody said, „You know, I get a poiple shadow on a piece of paper when I paint it with some funny chemicals“ and there it all began. Color photography is so far from new that they were actually projecting color photographs on the screen for the edification of audiences—not hand—colored or anything—as the same time as Mr. Brady. But, that’s all new. That’s a Johnny—come—lately subject, isn’t it? It’s not really had time to pick up too much snob. It’s not had time to get lost.
So, to make my point, when you give it all mass and doingness and no significance, you also fail. In other words, you can send this fellow up as a darkroom assistant to the Daily Mail, have him packing cameras for somebody or other, and have him standing in there at Lancere’s adjusting lights for half a lifetime without his ever really becoming a pro.
So, professionalism has to do with the significance and the doingness and the mass. It has to do with all of those things. You can’t have all doingness and no significance, and you can’t have total significance and no doingness and wind up with a final result in the way of a student. Education, then, would consist of a balanced activity which would treat with equal importance the significance and the doingness of a subject. You would treat these things equally. Now, this is not a new thought—it’s not a new thought. It’s been with us for some time.
But it was terribly confirmed to me on an inspection of what is standard photography today and having been over the jumps and being almost finished with this course and ready for my finals, I thought I had better just make all these notes of it and so forth. But one of the things that stuck me in the eye all the way through the line is the pro, the real pro, was the fellow who knew the significance and had experience in the doingness and the handling of the mass. And that was a real pro; a real professional.
Now, you say, „Well, what about this fellow who comes busting out of the middle of nowhere and he all of a sudden develops this whole fantastic panorama of new material?“ No, you were looking at a pro. You didn’t look at anybody who suddenly busted out of nowhere uninformed and so forth. But his education might easily—because it wasn’t being taught anyplace—the significance was backed up by a great deal of additional hard study, see? You still had the study there, see? He studied like mad.
Let’s take somebody like the fellow who projected the first color pictures. I bet you he could have given you the number and book of practically every photograph that had been taken in the history of photography, which went back of him only about 20—30 years. He must have known them, see? He must have known them all. Then you go back into it a little bit further, you’ll probably find out he was a chemist by training, see?
Professionalism, then, doesn’t leap full—armed from the breath of somebody’s hope. Professionalism is sweated for. And also, professionals are distinguished by the fact that they work hard.
Dilettantism is supposed to mean „good at many things,“ but actually I would rather extend its meaning a little bit to saying that „unprofessional at everything,“ because part of professionalism is hard work. You, really—to pick up all the significance of a subject and to put that into a doingness action and so forth, rough, rough, rough.
Now, that all sounds very interesting but there is another factor involved in it: Is, you don’t have to have done everything that was done in order to be a pro and that is a very hopeful thing. And I learned that the hard way. You don’t have to have made a piece of photographic film in order to become grounded in making photographic film, see? That’s lucky for you, you don’t have to make a human mind in order to fix one up. That’s carrying the point a little broad but you actually don’t have to have run Standard Operating Procedure of July of 1950, in order to call yourself a professional auditor. If you did that, why great—great, see? Fine. But you take someone who’s being trained in 1964, to ask him to do that would be silly.
Right now, to—this stage of study, for me to go and get some chemicals of some kind or another and some old horses’ hooves and boil them up, and—so as to have some gelatin and put these things all together so as to make one of the original forms of wet plate, and expose it wet in one of my cameras—which was the way they did it, you see and so forth, well, it’d just come out at the other end. I—what would I say out of this? „Well, I’ve done it.“ So what? I’m not going to do it. Not again. That would wreck the camera, of course. Do you see what I mean? That can be overstressed. Now, we get to the overstresses.
The doingness can be terribly overstressed. I’ve already showed you significance can be terribly overstressed. „Pliny did write on the—ye old wax tablet,“ which he wrote on with a stylus, which that day had a dull point, because his slave had a headache, „that sturgeons...“ See, you can go crazy on this subject, see, of significance. You can go nuts. You can wildly overestimate what a student has to know. You can also underestimate it.
But the wildest shot, when they get to formal schooling, is to shoot the moon with this thing. Just go overboard with it, just go crazy with it—make—drive everybody around the bend with it, see? It’s sort of a method of forbidding somebody the subject, see? See? „If you can’t tell us all the papers of Sigmund Freud, you can never be a diplomate in psychiatry.“ It’s a fact, the total examination for the highest rank of psychiatry is simply the title, the date written and the place of publication of each one of Freud’s papers. I know I exaggerate and a psychiatrist, if he were here right now, would say, „Oh, how you—rowr—rowr—rowr—rowr—rowr—rowr,“ you know? He’d sound like Vixie out here when you kick her. But he’d be lying in his teeth, because that’s his diplomate examination. I know—I knew a psychiatrist, nursed him through a psychotic break, because he was taking it.
And I don’t think you can get much closer to the examination without, in actual fact, taking it yourself. And that was what was driving him around the bend. He was preparing for that exam that way and he took the exam that way and that was it. It was very funny watching him prepare for the exam, he’d keep rolling up on a ball, sucking his thumb; rolling up in a ball, you know, in the fetal position on the couch so he could study this. It was very funny. I never did tell him, „You know, brother, I think you’re keyed in.“ But overweighted significance is a way of defeating a student, way overweighted.
Now, you can err to the degree that you’re giving him a subject which he’s never going to do. Now, let’s take it over into Scientology. You’re giving him all the data, necessary to run Standard Operating Procedure of July, Elizabeth, New Jersey and so forth. And the mistake is to give him all of it. He’s never going to use it.
All you want to know, you—all you want to give him is enough so he can identify it. If he collides with this thing again, he said, „Hey, that’s Standard Operating Procedure of July,“ you know, „back there, Elizabeth.“ „Early days, Elizabeth,“ is about all you want to get through there. „Yeah, that sort of thing. Finger snap, yeah.“ Something like that. „Oh, yes. They did that, early days.“ Have some dim idea where this thing fits, you see? That’s about all you want to get across to him. He’s not going to do it, see? So therefore, if he’s not going to do it, you’ve got to strip the significance off of it. You got the idea? That’s the way these are kept in balance. If the guy isn’t going to do it, take the significance off of it. See, you’ve got to keep these things in balance. If he’s going to do it, pour it to him, man!
Let’s take an esoteric process like bromoil. Well, they didn’t use to have panchromatic film, so it drove them mad. They didn’t use to have a film that responded to color, so it drove them absolutely stark, staring mad trying to get a tree light enough so that it looked like a tree, you know? When they made a picture of a tree, they had an awful time with this sort of thing. So they did this fantastic process, like photolithography. I won’t burden you with any of the details, because—ohh—horrible! It makes me shudder to remember it. Nobody’s ever going to do a bromoil, unless he’s a doodle—daddle type of darkroom bug, you know? See, he’s got to be a real darkroom bug, because there’s much simpler methods of producing the same result, do you see?
Well, some old—time photographer that is a real purist and so forth, in New York, would listen to that statement and he’d say, „I don’t know that you’ll never do a bromoil. You can’t be sure, you know. I myself have done bromoils and so forth. Only took me thirty days one time to do one bromoil print.“ That’s about the length of time, see? Oh! Cruel! And right when I was coming down the home stretch with my course I had a half a textbook on how you did bromoil prints. A half a textbook! It is there in its most painful excruciating detail, but not, incidentally, in such a way that you could really do one by referring to the text. It goes like this, the order of action, which is another point down here which I’ll get to—the order of action is all wrong in it. That is to say, „Now make sure that you lay this wet picture,“ you see, „this wet print out on the back of the tray that will fit it, or glass, and make sure that you lay it out and pin it all down carefully. Now, before you do that, make sure that you have the other print ready, because you’re going to need it in a second.“ Oh, no, see? You’re on what I know as order of. You’ve got down to this line, and you’re slavishly going down the line mentally doing the action, you see, and then you find out you’ve made a mistake, see? He tells you now that there was another action you should have done before the action he tells you to do, see? Zzrrrrrrr! And you have a feeling like you’ve made a terrible mistake.
But bromoil is there in its most excruciating detail and has not been done seriously for a number of years. You could probably win a salon exhibit with a bromoil print. You probably could today. Judges would stand there and they’d look at it and they’d say, „What’s this?“ They’re quite beautiful. „Uhh, what’s this? My God! A bromoil, you know? Gee, you know? Give him first technical prize.“ That’s about all you’d get for it, see? „Somebody has actually done a bromoil print—wow!“ See? And they’d say, „Gee,“ you know? They themselves would know what this involved—being trained people, see? Public would go by, look on down at the rest of the pictures; wouldn’t stop any eyes.
But it would have meant about thirty days, or something like that, of pure, dripping sweat. But to be taught how to do it, down to the last comma, down to the last bit of temperature, down to every mistake that you could make in doing this thing which you’re never going to do, absolutely takes the cake right off the top of the oven. Wow! See? There is all this doingness which is never going to be matched with a doingness, you see? So all this significance is then built up with an undone never—will—be—done doingness, so it all becomes significance.
So, the doingness all but moves over here into the significance department, don’t you see? And it doesn’t just unbalance it; it winds you up with some ghastly headaches, I know. I say, „Well, I’ve got to get through this to get to the end of this course or I don’t get any diploma. Got to make it. ‘So you take a stipple brush.’ Now, let me read that again. ‘You...‘„ Ghastly, you know? You’re never going to take a stipple brush. You couldn’t care less.
So they couldn’t make prints in 1890! All right. Great! We don’t happen to be having that trouble today. Like asking you to study the aspects—you are studying to some slight degree, but they are very useful—but studying some of the aspect of a „pc lists that were made in 1950“—they weren’t published—but what could—you know, no meters, see—so what could the auditor detect without any meter? What would the pc do that would indicate this, see? And then giving it to you in total, painful detail. All you’re going to do is read your tone arm, see? But giving you this other in total painful detail, „You sit there and you audit with your fingers on their pulse,“ you see, and now give you the whole rundown of the Japanese or Chinese system of pulse counting by pressure because that’s the more complex system.
That was actually what I used, the Chinese system of pulse counting, trying to get up on it—how—oh, you’d be surprised, man—you sit there today—you were absolutely at the beginning of road nowhere in the—just about 14—15 years ago, there was no way to tell what the reaction of the pc was; there was no way to tell what a hot subject was; there was no way to look into anybody’s mind; there was no way to record it, if you did. Just a nowhere view, see? Grim.
But now, for you to be taught, who are never going to do it, how you detect a tone arm response without any meter because of the various physiological manifestations of the pc, the motion of the chest—very important, see, the change of breath, coloration; eye coloration. There is a whole subject of how do you know if a process is flat by the eye coloration. Very interesting subject! How would you like to learn the several thousand words that were written on this subject?
All you have to know, if you were taught this, is that there was such a subject. You see? You could very easily learn there was such a subject and there is the subject, which is what makes the E—Meter important, see? This other subject is so complex that the E—Meter solves this other subject, which is „How do you tell what’s going on in the pc?“ And that subject had many ramifications, see? And if a process is really getting to a pc, his eye color will change, you see? Or his pulse will smooth out, you know? That’s about all you have to know. The rest of this is bric-a-brac.
All right, somebody can spend his whole life, whole life working in the field and realm of bric-a-brac and have a good time. There are fellows who study the history of bromoil—not do it—study the history of it—as almost a full—time hobby or profession or something, see? So, you can get these incredible significances built up in a subject which actually don’t amplify the doingness or the expected action of the student. Then this is giving him doingness which becomes a significance.
So we get to the next point of the line which is the conversion of doingnesses to only significances. And if a subject does very much of this, you’ve just about had it. If you convert all the doingnesses of a subject over into significance—that’s how you do it, is you take some subject which is not going to be performed and you describe it far beyond any necessity. Then you’ve got a conversion, see? Now, if you can go the reverse, you can say the significance is convertible over to the doingness. And you have just had an example of that—the fellow is never going to make a bromoil, so you make him make a bromoil. See, it’s properly merely a significance today; it’s just properly a significance. There was a thing called a bromoil print. Fine, it existed, see? What it was, was it depended on the same principle now used in photolithography. Gelatin holds water and water repels oil, see? Uses these various principles. Interesting to know, see? You can cover it in a paragraph or two, see?
Now, if we go too far on this particular line, by making some person do some ancient, old act, which he is never again going to do, we’ve taken something that should have just remained there as a significance and we have pushed it over into a doingness action. And it again upsets the student most ghastly. I’m sure he would have—I’m sure it’d be cute to grind some wheat with a millstone, you see? It could be a hobby, don’t you see? It could be very nice, but there would have to be some good reason why you were doing it. Do you see? A good reason why you were doing it, see? And if it’s just that you want to see how they did it primitively, well, maybe that’s a good enough reason, see? But that’s if you want to do it. Did you notice the choice of words? To make a student do it is a fantastic error. Silly! And his reaction to your effort to teach him is an ARC break. He can’t figure out why the devil he’s doing this in the first place.
So we come to the conclusion that the doingness and the mass of a subject are the current, applicable and useful doingnesses and masses of the subject and those are what should be taught—hard. They’re applicable—the applicable doingnesses and masses. In other words, the student should be taught what the student is going to be doing. And the significances that should be taught to the student are—don’t compare to what I just told you. The significances are enough background so as not to get—and this is something they’ve all missed, and this is how an engineer gets to be forty years old and goes old hat—is enough significance so that he doesn’t get stuck in the mechanical doingness he’s been taught—and you’ve got to give him enough significance. In other words, that’s a little bit more significance than you would expect to give him. And that’s why you give him the history of it, to show that it was developed and give him some sketch of its development. And that’s why you show him how the thing evolved and what the doingnesses of it were.
So you see, it becomes asinine to make him do these old things. You’re just trying to show him that there were some other doingnesses, don’t you see? And you’re making him conversant with the principles with which he’s operating and if he’s sufficiently conversant with those, then the doingness and the other action which he is being taught don’t become obsolete because he can think, see? And that’s the difference between a pro—that’s the difference between a „pro“ and a „practical man.“ It shows up quite additionally, is a pro always does it by the textbook, with a difference; always does it by the textbook, a bit better. And when the thing shifts, it doesn’t look like a shift to him, it looks like simply the same thing with its face slightly shifted. Do you see? It doesn’t look all that brassy new.
Now, you’ll hear people around—you’ve just shifted how you do a repetitive command—and you will have people around that tell you, „We’ve changed all of Scientology.“ Well, they had learned the practical action—they’d learned the doingness of giving a practi—a repetitive command, but they had no theory over here of why they were doing this, or what was—what one was trying to accomplish with this, such as flatten the mental comm lag, do you see, that the guy’s going through, or anything like that, flatten the process. They just knew this thing of a steady grind, so the second you changed one comma in it, they thought you’d changed all of Scientology, don’t you see? But the guy who has grounding on the subject and who knows what processes are and what they’re supposed to do, he would say, „Yeah, well, that—that. ..“ He’d give it the proper significance, you see? He’d say, „Well, ah—that’s an out—slightly out of ARC, so it should be shifted slightly, see? That knocks the pc a little bit out of ARC. But this other wording, that’s very clever. That doesn’t knock the pc. See, that doesn’t give him a ‘no ARC,’ you see?“ Yeah, nothing changed, see, to him. Everything looked calm, normal, so forth.
Now, a professional then is able to advance and a practical man quite commonly cannot advance. A theoretician, then, would be well taught, but seldom educated. Somebody who is just dealing in theory and nothing but theory, and so forth, could be absolutely beautifully taught, he could be wonderfully schooled, but he would not be educated in that subject because he would have had the doingness missing in that subject. His doingness would have been gone. He’s just an expert on the painters of the nineteenth century, that’s all. He knows the theory of all of their paintings—just the theory. It’s not being done anymore, nobody ever expects to do it again.
But you’ll find odd bits of the society and culture get parked like this and he can become important, just because millionaires these days are trying madly to save their cash with art. Art and land increase in value. So, there’s guys walking into salons today who know nothing about art, but have just got that 100,000 bucks that they want to get deposited fast before inflation eats it up and they feel if they bought a big, nice, good, solid piece of art, that would be known into the future, then of course, it’s worth a 100,000 now, but when money inflates, it’ll be worth 200,000. Like land, it would have increased its value with the inflation, so therefore it’s like gold, you see?
So he walks into the gallery and he looks at this painting, „Huh! It’s a girl holding a what?“ That’s the total knowledge he has of any of this, so he’s got experts and the expert can’t paint, but he can tell him the real from the false, something like that. But if that guy himself had no doingness of detection or doingness of anything else, his opinion wouldn’t be worth anything either. He wouldn’t be able to see and he’d be able to palm off everything. But you’ve got quite a culture—winds up in some very odd spots and you occasionally look into some of these spots and you’ll think you have a total theoretician or something like that, that you’ve got a totality and you may very well have.
But there’s nothing sadder than an expert on steam—driven road equipment. I imagine there is one in England today. He’s an expert, the last practical expert on the subject of steam—driven road repair equipment. Did you ever see any of these things in textbooks? They’re steam engines that have rollers, and they go up and down the roads and—in the days before the internal combustion engine. He’s the last—he was the world’s—he was a good practical man. He never had any theory of any kind on the subject of steam, or propulsion or anything else, but he’s awful practical on the subject of these things, you see? He was all doingness and no thought. Well, he antiquated. He became antique. He became unemployable, actually.
So, when you break up this balance in an education, then you haven’t educated the bloke and you haven’t safeguarded his future. A fellow is betrayed, then, to the degree that he is not educated and only schooled; and that is most of the protest of the young: that they are being schooled, not educated. They’re not being fitted for life.
I’ll give you an idea how far adrift it can go. I asked my kids the other day to write something, write their names, sign their names. And boy! Of all the tongue—between—the—teeth actions, you know! Oh, that was grim! They had no signatures. I came down on their teacher like a ton of bricks, you see? They’ve done—do lots of—lots of exercises in the field of writing, they couldn’t sign their own name. Marvelous example, don’t you see? Yet I’m sure that they’ve been very busy making circles and very busy making slant exercises and very busy doing other things and very busy doing everything but write. And somewhere or another, if you wanted to know what was wrong with that and why that occurred, somewhere or other the doingness moved into the field of theory or significance, see? The doingness moved, became just a significance. But it isn’t a doingness, don’t you see? I mean, writing words has very little to do with traveling ovals, as they call them and so forth, see? So, you can just go just so far with traveling ovals and you get no—there’s no doingness there.
So the guy is actually in motion, but it isn’t an educational doingness. And that’s where an Instructor could make his mistake, you see? Because people are busy or active or acting, then he thinks they are doing. It all depends on what they are doing. If they’re not doing something that is immediately going to add up to an action applicable by them in life to the accomplishment of a result, they’re in the field of significance. And they react like they are in the field of significance. They become very stultified and bored and protesting and annoyed. See, they themselves have recognized that they’ve exceeded the doingness, that this doingness has nothing whatsoever to do with what they’ll be doing. So they fall back then, and they just treat it as a significance because it’s purposeless. It doesn’t go anyplace, you see? Nothing’s happening so it might as well just be a significance and therefore all the motion is no motion at all. So, all the motion being no motion, really, they get this funny, bored, you know, feeling, like, you know, they’re not moving. Here they see all the motion, but they’re not moving. And actually it’s a significance, which has some motion in it and it doesn’t have anything to do with going anywhere. And they get this funny sensation—it actually develops a physiological sensation. It’s being up against something, but not being able to move through it. Funny, funny sensation. It’s identifiable.
Well, those fundamentally are the basic balances of proper education. Whatever else you want to say about it, those are the basic balances. There are a lot of very specific things, there are a lot of odd and very sharp and very true and very positive and very practical aspects of all this. But education is the—should be the activity of relaying an idea or an action from one being to another, in such a way as not to stultify or inhibit—the use thereof. And that’s about all it is. You could add to it that it permits, then, the other fellow to think on this subject and develop. He should be able to think on the subject and develop on the subject.
In other words, he takes this idea that you’ve given him, and it applies only to murals. You’ve given him enough background and so forth, and you’ve told him this applied to murals. And one day he’s looking at a miniature and he says, „For heaven’s sakes, that also applies—for this particular job that I’m doing—that other principle applies to the miniature.“
I’ll give you one, I can think of one right offhand. A photomural should never be painted until it is actually assembled on a wall, if you’re going to paint a photomural, see? Well, I can think of an association that a guy would get in his skull, if he was having any trouble doing miniatures. Supposing for some wild reason or another somebody came up and wanted him to do a miniature on ivory. Well, this is feasible, you can do it. So, if he knew photomurals, and he knew a lot of other work, and he knew lantern slides and so forth and then also he knows how to go back and find how to make an emulsion (you know, one of the basic emulsions that—make it out of egg white or something) he knows what textbook to find it in. He’d probably whop all this together and then he would also know that you certainly better not paint it until you’d totally finished it, see, and in other words, the information is loose in the guy’s head. It’s flexible, he can use it, see? It isn’t jammed into his head crosswise so that it just associates just with one thing, see?
Don’t give it—education shouldn’t give people the technology in such a way that the technology is not useful to them. They’ve got to be able to think with it. You’ve got to remember that when you teach this engineer in a university all there is to know about nuclear physics, that in just about a dozen years, through the investment of national governments and other things, and particularly since it’s very destructive, we know that national governments will invest, very heavily. And we know that this field is going to change. And we’re going to teach him all there is to know on the subject. Well, we could make just a technician out of him for common, ordinary, garden—variety actions of reading meters; or we could teach him current technology or current theory as a biblical fact; or we could teach him in such a way that he could think in the subject. And of them, the only fair thing to do is teach him in such a way as he could think in the subject because it’s an advancing subject, and he won’t become an antique in a dozen years, see? If we did anything else, he would become antique because this thing—after all, governments are in there shoveling the money into atomic development and so forth, left, right and center. They’ve got guys on pure mathematics and they’ve got guys on this and guys on that.
And they’re—I don’t care how they say they’re—but I always get suspicious. They say they’re „abandoning the production units of Uranium 235,“ and then the following sentence is added onto this. We take it—yes, they’re abandoning the manufacture of 235, we’ll buy that. Now, the „because“ is what you—what you wince on. „Because there’s already sufficient quantities of it to answer all possible needs for the next 500 years,“ see? There’s that „because.“ The first sentence, all right. All right. So they’re going to abandon this development. But their „because“? Maybe so, but we don’t really think so. They’ve discovered something else, brother. They’ve discovered something that makes U—235, you know, look like last season’s high—button shoes. And of course they’re not about to let it out.
Every time somebody discovers one of these secrets, or the secretary of state, or somebody like that, of the United States gets on a plane hurriedly in order to tell the last atomic secrets to Khrushchev. I don’t think that’s his job, but that’s what he’s been doing lately—this bird, he goes ramming across and around and about and screaming about this and screaming about that. No. There isn’t any of these secrets that have been stolen such as the Fuchs and that sort of thing, as damaging as they were, that didn’t excite the government into a fantastic internal convulsion on the subject of „Develop something new, something better, something that hasn’t been stolen yet.“ And their best prevention of espionage is not political because that they’re sour at. Their best prevention of espionage is just being newer.
So, I imagine the poor kid being educated right up now in Birmingham on the subject of atomic physics is probably already 10, 15 years behind the mark. He’ll probably get out and he will look very bright and he will say, „All right, now we take the riga—bongs,“ and so forth.
And the fellows on the place say, „The what? Oh yes, yes. We remember that. We—it’s—we—that’s historical.“
That was his last course, see, was in riga—bongs, you know? Oooh! „Well, what are you fellows doing?“
„Oh well, we haven’t time now, but there’s a pile of textbooks over in the corner. Those are our more recent notes.“
Well, education, then, to fit this fellow for life would have to fit him for this operating atmosphere. It would have to fit him to think. At the same time they’d have to teach him that disciplines are disciplines and actions are actions but at the same time they’d have to teach him to think with these actions and advance these actions and carry them out to a finite and final conclusion. They’d have to do these things. Well, that’s quite a trick, to teach somebody, on the one hand, that this is an exacting discipline, and on the other hand that you should have a loose and flexible attitude toward it. Quite a trick, isn’t it?
Well, you recognize what the strain is. You’re trying to make a practical person who applies it to a result, who can give it that extra fillip, you know, that extra little zing that pushes it on through. He can think on his feet, in other words, and—so that he won’t antiquate. Give him all this so he won’t antiquate. Well, that’s quite a trick.
Actually, that is being demanded of Scientology as in nowhere else. And anybody studying in Scientology is under considerable stress and strain because of these various factors. You have a madly advancing subject, which is advancing beyond the expectancy that it was—its expectancy keeps rising, don’t you see? And which is already taking off from the—from the basis of having exceeded all former expectancies. See, and now it is still advancing and its expectancy level is rising, see, consistently. I mean, more and more is developed that broadens the view more and more, see?
And so therefore education in Scientology becomes a much touchier proposition than in any other analogous subject and it’s very rough. It’s very rough. That is why I undertook to find out what are these various balances and what do you do and so forth. And how do you bring somebody up to a point where he can study this thing without too much casualty and upset.
And what are the touchy points, then, of education? And of course, education is a subject that has not been worked out. By definition—there isn’t even a definition, you see, such as I just gave you a moment ago. They don’t operate in a school with a definition. Well, that’s wonderful because what trouble do you get into if you read a paragraph beyond something that you haven’t got the definition of? You get into trouble, promptly, instantly and immediately, catastrophic trouble. Well, education’s been in trouble ever since it started to do something which it never defined. That’s the basic thing wrong with education, see?
Let’s call somebody who is being educated different than somebody who is being taught. Let’s make that shading of difference here. And then let’s get the technology of schooling and understand that the technology of schooling somebody does exist and that man has had that for quite a while, but it doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with the technology of educating him, which has been relatively undeveloped. So just because one is going to school is no reason one is getting educated, see?
But there’s terrific technology wrapped up around school. And that the success of any taught subject is to the degree that it keeps its significance sensibly balanced with its action and the masses associated with it. And that’s a sensibly balanced subject. And the odd whip—around can occur here that actually a person can think he’s engaged in a doingness when actually he’s engaged in a significance because the doingness is never going to be applied, see? And he can actually be engaged in a significance which is really a doingness, on the other side of the fence, naturally. If it balances one way, it’ll for sure balance the other way. He can be engaged in a—in a significance of the action of contemplation. And it’s as silly as that, don’t you see? It’s too silly to require very much stress.
What is the significance of an action? Well, if an individual was terribly significant about everything under the sun, moon and stars, you could, of course, work up significance into some kind of an educational subject. Don’t you see? So the significance itself would lean over and become a doingness. Sounds silly, but it’s true.
I’m now talking about the „expert on art of the nineteenth century,“ see? And there are fellows who make a terribly good living, which is the achievement of a final result of education. After all, I don’t care how much communism we’ve got amongst us, you know? The guy is making a living by simply being a walking dictionary, see. Memory expert on something or other—he’s somebody or other. He knows all the formulas there are to be known on the subject of paint. He never mixed any paint, he wouldn’t know what to do if you showed him a paint can, he actually abhors the smell of it—it makes him quite sick. But he can sit there in a little cubicle and be an expert on the subject of paint. So his, of course, has become—his significance has become his doingness. Perfectly allowable. The society has that.
So, somebody writes him a letter and they say, „Dear Expert Jones: We are working with the formula of rosin and—uh—su—and—uh—amber, and we are trying very hard to develop the—so on. Could you please give us the background music to this here paint?“
And he says, „Well, that paint was originally used on the Tyrrhenian Sea and uh—so forth and their amber was different than anybody else’s amber,“ and he goes on and on and on.
At the other end of—the guy, the practical bird, takes a look. „Hey, no wonder it won’t paint! Their amber was different. There’s a different type of amber—that’s Russian amber and Russian amber, it has an awful lot of beeswax in it,“ or something, you know, whatever it is. „Ha! This paint requires wax.“ So we dump some wax in. All right, now it paints things. See?
But this bird didn’t have any idea of applying this to anything. If he said enough on the subject then somebody who was doing the subject, you know, could make some sense out of it. So there are experts.
There’s guys like Einstein. He sat around and did a wonderful—he had a total doingness that was of significance. He figured and figured and figured and figured and figured and he figured everybody into a hole. But he sure stimulated guys. More mathematicians were made trying to understand Einstein than any other single man that ever worked. The joke of it is, there might be nothing in his work at all. It’s sort of idiotic to say that—somebody comes along and tells you that the speed of light is c, and it’s never any different. What’s he talking about? What light? Well, now, I don’t even think he says it’s the light between 3,600 angstroms and 5,600 angstroms. I don’t think he got that definite. He just said, „The speed of light.“ Well, that’s great. Does he mean light as we normally see light? Well, light, in actual fact is simply the light vibration that you see, don’t you see? By definition, that’s light. Well, then he must have meant that light, visible light. Well, great. I’m glad he did because when it goes through a prism, it no longer travels at c.
Well, what do you say? It could no longer travel at c for this excellent reason: It emerges from the prism at different speeds. Otherwise you would never have a spectrum.
Oh yes. But now, you’re only talking about wavelength and you’re only talking about the amplitude of the wavelength and that sort of thing and that’s why it turns the corner. No, I’m afraid that that cant be true either. It must be at a different speed because if you’ve ever watched soldiers in an evolution, the fellow on the outside is going faster than the fellow on the inside. Have you ever noticed that? Well, light, to bend and fan into a dispersal when it goes through a prism, must be handling something that has to do with speed.
But because everybody has gone stone—blind on this because Einstein has said quite the contrary, don’t you see, now they’ve got to have some weird idea, and actually it might interest you to know that they have finally abolished light. I thought that was mighty nice of them.
They’ve now got it worked out that color is only something that is manufactured by the eye to relay to the brain and doesn’t exist in actual fact anywhere. That’s actually told to you—that’s being taught me right now. I think it’s a wonderful idea. But if the guy hadn’t read a psychology textbook before he wrote that textbook, I would be happier about it. There’s something wrong with all of this, for this excellent reason, is, a vibration is a vibration. I don’t know why you have to get psychology into it. That’s the influence of Locke and Hume, you see? These old birds.
„If there was a sound. . .“ Descartes, yeah? „If there—is there sound in the forest if there is nobody there to hear it?“ Well, what do they want to chase themselves up those blind alleys for, man? Because they’re very easily answered. They are confusing the role of a thetan because they haven’t got him. And of course, he’s the wild, missing variable in all of their equations.
So, all right. So the thetan builds the universe. Now of course, he can experience it. You can experience what you can build, so therefore there would be such a thing as light. It all depends on how you’re looking at it, and from what mental science you are looking at it, as to whether or not you make pronunciamentos concerning it one way or the other. But you might get an idiocy that would go something like this: „Now, light doesn’t exist because you aren’t. Now, if you were, then light couldn’t. Because, you see, if light really does come through the pupil of the eye and excite the brain into various sensations known as color and so forth—but if these things do not exist in actual fact, then of course nothing is behaving outside of your skull at all. Nothing is happening outside of your skull.“ You are saying such things as, „A cook can never eat the cake he bakes.“ See, this is the plea for total introversion. You follow me, don’t you?
Therefore, if we’ve got to have an argument about „If the tree falls, is there a sound if nobody’s there?“ If we’re going to have an argument of that character, then let’s have some real arguments like „Can a cook bake a cake and eat it?“ See?
But you’d have to go upstairs into the role of a being in this universe, or a thetan. You’d have to come off the kick of the „Big Thetan“ idea, see? You follow me? „The Big Thetan built light, and you can only experience light and you don’t have anything else to do with light except experiencing light, therefore you’re a total effect, brother. Lie down.“ See? You get how these tricks are worked?
Well, in education and so forth, you’ll find out that it’s very safe to advance from a basic premise or a basic assumption, and to make it very clear what basic assumption you are advancing from, and then not try to spread this assumption over into a thousand different things.
They have assumed, in physics, the conservation of energy. Well, let them talk about that loud and clear and then let them not talk about the organization of mass. Because they’ve merely started from the conservation of energy. They haven’t said anything about mass. But now they try to drag in mass by saying mass is merely a bunch of energy. Why did they do that? Because their basic assumption is the conservation of energy. „Energy can neither be made nor destroyed, by anybody, particularly you.“ See, that’s the basic assumption of physics. So this naturally is energy, see?
Now, it’s not the conservation of space, it’s not the conservation of time and it’s not the conservation of mass. So now everything, then, has to become energy because they’ve started out with their basic assumption. Therefore they themselves become blind to where their subject took off, and therefore where it’ll err. It’s going to depart, see? The second something comes up which is not energy, it’s going to exceed the basics of finite physics and that’s all that’s wrong with that because they didn’t start with anything but energy, don’t you see? So, they’re not going to go anyplace but energy.
We’re in a very safe relationship to this. We start with the being: you, a thetan. We can prove that you, a being as a thetan, exists. We can prove that, and we can back you out of your skull and you can stand without a body. So you’re not a body. That’s very simple. We don’t do this very often and don’t require you to do it as one of your class exercises because it makes people sick and unhappy. But it does happen and it does work. All right, so we start out with the basic building block of the universe: a thetan. Now, we’re on fairly solid ground there, but of course having done that we are now exceeding all former basic assumptions which start subjects.
Now, in trying to communicate this idea, then, we collide with all preconceptions. We collide with everything in the background of people, we collide with all of their upsets in the past, with practically everything under the sun. We can only go, then, in the direction of processing. We cant go in the direction much of the theory and philosophy of the universe because the only way we will really win is in the direction of processing, handling and doing something with the unit because the unit is not educatable at a degraded state. See, that’s elementary. So, unfortunately then, we have to know about all there is to know and know it better than anybody has ever had to know anything before, particularly about education because we can’t teach anybody to do it.
You’re tackling a very tough subject. It’s a very easy subject. You’re tackling essentially a very tough subject, in Scientology, which has been made as easy as possible. And my efforts have been devoted to, in the last few months, in studying study, to make it even easier.
Now, I haven’t told you very much in this lecture that you can use, but I’ve told you something that you might have some inspective relationships with, you know?
Well let’s say, a whole school system of a country miseducated all the youth of this country with malice aforethought. They would get to a point where they couldn’t receive a datum. So, they’re in a war, and, the enemy—the enemy sends them a despatch and says, „We are going to attack tomorrow morning,“ but they can’t receive a datum. They’ve got it that plain and clear, see, and they are all in bed, and they all get shot down in flames and that’s the end of the country, see? It gets down to the reductio ad absurdum of not being able to observe anything, not be able to perceive anything, not be able to understand anything and have no ARC with anything, which looks to me like a sort of a „thetan death“ situation.
So, it looks to me like there is a great deal of comparison between miseducation and aberration. And it also looks to me that a great deal of work could be put in on this field from a standpoint of deaberrating people at the lower levels. I’ll give you an example, just offhand: „Tell me—“ this would not be a repetitive process—but, „Tell me a word that you have not understood in this life.“ And then you make the guy go ahead and clarify it. I think you’d get some of the most interesting resurgences. I think some of the many of the personal problems of the individual would blow up in smoke.
But here, just on this other subject of study—of studying the subject of study—one walks forth with a brand—new avenue of lower—level disentanglement and lower—level therapy lines which look quite promising; they look quite promising. But what I’m mainly interested in is you, a Scientology pro training people, have to know something about this subject. I’m interested in your education right now as you exist. And I’m trying to make it as easy as possible on you and teach you something about it.
Thank you very much.