Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 5 - Psychosomatic Illness

About 70% of illnesses are psychosomatic; perhaps more will be discovered to be so once Dianetics has been in use for a while.

That all illnesses are psychosomatic is absurd because germs have their survival dynamic too.

The germ (bacteria and viruses) theory of disease (from Louis Pasteur) (exogenetic) plus the non-germ theory of disease from Dianetics (autogenetic) plus biochemistry cover all of pathology.

Three stages of pathology: predisposition, precipitation, perpetuation.

Treatment of genetic malformations and damage from injuries are outside the scope of Dianetics (but note that Clears rarely have accidents).

The common cold is psychosomatic. It is usually generated by one engram suggesting it and another confirming/reinforcing it be creation of actual mucus.

Engrams, inherited disabilities, accidents and germs are the four causes that reduce the organism physically from its optimum state.

• Some "inherited" disabilities turn out to be engramic.
• Engrams predispose people to accidents.
• Engrams predispose people to and perpetuate infection.

Theoretically, cancer and diabetes are engramic in cause, particularly malignant cancer. This theory has not yet been tested; arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers and sinusitis are all psychosomatic.

Verbal suggestion in drugged subjects can turn the senses up or down in volume. E.g. to make a person see "almost as well as a cat" or (by turning sight down) able to read through the glare of almost blinding light with apparent comfort.

Hypnosis transfers analytic power from the "I" to the operator through the law of affinity (man must be in affinity with man to survive). This effect would have survival value in animals which run in packs.

The heart can be speeded up or slowed down by positive suggestion alone. Blood flow can be restricted in a nominated part of the body, so that e.g. a cut hand can be made to bleed little or not at all.

I.e. words spoken into the deep strata of the mind can cause physical effects in the body, including the endocrine system (as evidenced by watching it rebalance after the removal of engrams) and the autonomic nervous system.

I.e. the mind controls the glands, not vice-versa.

E.g. the following engram content would inhibit testosterone production in a man: "Sex is horrible, really nasty; I hate it."

(Note the semantic analysis needed; what we consider "higher" mental activities, i.e. words and concepts, have a very deep connection within the organism.)

There is a dwindling spiral here: engrams reduce physical tone through malfunction in the life function regulator. Reduced body tone makes mental tone go down. Reduced mental tone makes body tone go down. "A man starts to get sick and, having engrams, he gets sicker."

Psychosomatic illness is very superficial and is the first thing to lift in auditing. It can be alleviated without clearing.

Hormone injections have more effect when inhibitory engrams have been removed. Drugs don't have consistent effects because the engrams put the "survival" illness back into place.

ACTH and perhaps others in its category shift the individual on the time track, moving from one chronic engram to another.

Violent treatments (e.g. electric shock and surgical treatment of psychosomatic illness) appear to work when they do because they give an additional shock which changes the effect of the engram bank on the body. This aside, treatment of psychosomatic illness by removal of tissue, whether in the brain or some other body part, is not effective in any way. (It is sometimes requested by a patient in response to a "get rid of it" engram.)

There are five classes of psychosomatic illness (all of which cross-class in one way or another):

1a	Inhibition of fluid flow (e.g. constipation, arthritis)
1b	Magnification of fluid flow (e.g. high blood pressure, diarrhoea, sinusitis, priapism)
2a	Inhibition of physical growth
2b	Magnification of physical growth (possibly includes cancer, as over-healing)
3	Predisposition to disease caused by chronic psychosomatic pain (e.g. some tuberculosis, liver and kidney troubles, rashes, common cold)
4	Perpetuation of actual disease caused by chronic psychosomatic pain (e.g. some tuberculosis, conjunctivitis, running sores, any non-healing condition, bizarre pains with no pathology)
5	Verbal engram command (any of a vast array of possible conditions, e.g. "I have bad feet")

In class 4, an actual injury or condition can accidentally fix on a previously-injured area and keep an associated engram keyed in, making the condition chronic.

There can be psychosomatic "pain" (due to the injury in the engram incident) which is not felt due to an anaesthetic command such as "he won't feel a thing".

Engrams can allow precipitation of germ-based disease by command (e.g. "I feel sick") or by general lowering of physical tone and therefore resistance.

Given the action of engrams, especially in children, in the predisposition, precipitation and perpetuation of disease, and the worsening of effects due to restimulation, one wonders what the effects of disease would be without all this.

Evolution theory misses change due to survival necessity when talking only of random mutation.

A Clear is not easily made ill, virus or no; in an aberree, illness closely follows depression of the mental tone level.

Psychosomatic illness includes actual pathology, not just hypochondriacal tendencies (which is a special case of class 5).

Psychosomatic illness has little to do with sanity level, as it requires only one or two engrams of a specific nature to become manifest.

A aberration is a mental derangement; a somatic is a physical derangement. Both are present in an engram.

An individual will not manifest somatics if he is in the winning valence, but he will harm others (the winning valence delivered the engram). If this is repressed (by self, others or society) he will switch to own valence and will manifest the somatics as well as the aberration.

Sexual perversion (including homosexuality) is classified as a psychosomatic illness based on vicious engrams. A pervert is always ill in some way or another.

Due to engramic nature, a pervert is so extremely dangerous to society that tolerance is as bad for the society as punishment.

Manichaeism preached that all mental illness came from sex, which is evil (I though LRH was describing Freudism!)

Prevention of blasphemy has value because, entered into engrams, blasphemy makes the insane zealot and the murderous atheist.

Only pro-survival engrams become chronic. Therefore chronic psychosomatic illnesses have a sympathy (pro-survival) engram or engrams behind them. This is because:

• In them, one usually adopts one's own valence (it is the survival valence, as nice things are said to self).
• The reactive mind (in which the law of affinity also operates) puts forward the somatic to attract affinity (the illness is a "precious possession").

It is not possible to "spoil" a child with love and affection; they need all that they can get. An unattended sick child gets sicker.

The second the analyzer identifies an engram as such, it loses 20% of its power to aberrate and usually 100% of its value to cause psychosomatic illness.

Lifting of locks can alleviate a condition, until the reactive mind digs up another engram.

Drugs can temporarily alleviate a condition until the body, at the command of the reactive mind, finds a way round them.

Psycho-surgery and ECT can "cure" a psychosomatic illness, along with the personality, the intellect, and often life itself.

Pleasurable (or even neutral) memories are permanent; pain is perishable. Locks disappear like chaff when the underlying engram is gone.

Pro-survival engrams are much harder to remove than contra-survival engrams, though they are at least easier to find: they're right there in the surface as psychosomatic illnesses.

(Contra-survival: "here's a valence I can use to survive"; pro-survival: this engram guarantees own valence survival.)

All psychosomatic illnesses can be cured with Dianetics.

Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 4 - The "Demons"

A couple of dozen philosophical principles were needed to develop Dianetics out of the super-complexity of human behaviour. E.g. introduction of an arbitrary, law of affinity. Particular use was made early on of the "Knowable and Unknowable" work of Herbert Spencer.

"Absolutism is a fine road to stagnation."

Mysticism and metaphysics, while not necessarily invalid, were not necessary in the construction of Dianetics and so were ignored (although previously studied).

Socrates was said to have a demon (inner voice) which predicted good or bad fortune and warned him if he was about to make a mistake.

Demons turned up in Dianetics research and could be created at will in drugged subjects.

A demon is a "parasitic circuit", an action in the mind which approximates another entity than self, and is derived entirely from words contained in engrams. It presents data to the analyzer as if spoken, i.e. a voice inside the head.

It is a safe assumption that almost every aberree has at least one demon circuit.

Demon circuits are "parasitic" because they "compartment off" some part of the analyzer (i.e. are able to do analytical computation outside the awareness of "I").

It is possible to set up a demon circuit using the entire analyzer, leaving "I" on a tiny and forlorn shelf, entirely dependent on the demon for his thinking.

A demon circuit is an engram, there includes the normal mechanisms such as pain, reduction of intellect and eventual illness of one sort or another.

The most dangerous demon circuits are those which contain a seemingly all-powerful exterior entity, which would solve all problems and answer every want.

Fully keyed in this makes a spineless puppet of "I" and, in the presence of other engrams, results in serious insanity.

Other engram command types (occlusions, compulsions, etc.) can also be embodied in demons, although "proper" demons are those that seem to speak to the person.

(The lock, seen as "mental anguish", has been blamed as the cause of aberration in other studies.)

There is a power of choice exercised in the reactive mind about which engrams will be used: "the happy little moron who runs the engram bank".

Where possible, it ties up analytical mind circuits in service to engrams (thus creating "demons").

This is the other source of attrition (in addition to analytical shutdown covered earlier) of the individual's analytical power, totalling to perhaps 98% loss.

Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 3 - The Cell and the Organism

The engram has remained hidden as the single source of aberration probably because of the infinitely complex manifestations that can arise from a simple engram.

We theorize that the nerves and the brain developed to bleed off electrical energy from injured cells, to reduce damage to neighbouring cells.

Also that a cell has a survival dynamic and cells cooperated in colonies then organisms then developed the analytical mind in order to increase survival potential (a better structural theory than there has been because it predicts function).

However, such structural theories could be proven wholly wrong without affecting the workability of Dianetics.

Function always precedes structure. E.g. electricity was understood and harnessed long before the structure of the atom was understood.

Progress in the field of the human mind has been baulked because it has been addressed by medicine, an art rather than a science. A basic philosophy of live is required in order to progress.

To date, the cell has been poorly studied, and then mostly in death. Observations in Dianetics can be explained only by (a) a human soul entering at conception or (b) some sort of sentience in cells (preferred).

Cells evidently retain engrams. Pain temporarily reverses the higher sentience evolved into the brain "as though the cells were sorry they had placed so much power in the hands of a central commander".

The reactive mind may be the combined cellular intelligence (a handy structural theory).

Pain causes the analyzer to shut down either to protect it or because the organism believes an engram is best in an emergency.

Shutdowns of various durations and degrees are caused by injury, anaesthetic (poison), suffocation (including drowning), reduction of blood to the analyzer (wherever that is) due to shock, physical loss of blood, anaemia or restriction of flow through the throat.

Also natural sleep causes a degree of shutdown, though not very deep or serious.

There is a very important correspondence between tone level and analytical power, and more to be concluded from this than you would think.

The one common denominator in all engrams is some degree of analyzer shutdown. Therefore restimulation shuts down the analyzer to some degree, even though there is no present-time pain. This is a very mechanical ("push-button") operation.

Analyzer shutdown can also be caused by engramic command, e.g. "you are stupid".

Engrams can be held in chronic restimulation.

Removal of the two causes of shutdown gives rise to a fantastic increase of intelligence in a Clear.

The number of engrams recorded (probably in the hundreds) does not affect tone level, only the number keyed in and in restimulation.

A person can educate himself over and above his engrams to some slight degree.

Engrams in restimulation can cause chronic or temporary (e.g. a rage or depression) insanity.

Legal test for insanity (to judge culpability for a crime) is itself insane. Of course the person was insane at the time of the offence. The test is (however inaccurately) looking for chronic insanity,which is beside the point.

A Clear is not predictable due to a wide power of choice, but an aberree is wildly unpredictable due to (a) the unknown content of his engrams, (b) what situation will contain what restimulators is a matter of chance and (c) his power of choice, given the factors in restimulation, cannot be established.

Engram "thinking" is that to replay the recording is to again survive the situation. But there may be many contradictory command in the engrams in restimulation (those on the same "engram lock chain"). This leads to headaches, conflict, anxiety and nervous breakdown.

Because consciousness was bypassed during the engram recording, it cannot recall the content from the standard memory banks.

Removal of an engram does not depend on the analyzer contacting it.

"The reactive mind could be the very lowest level of analytical power, of course, but this does not alter the scientific fact that the engram acts as if it were a soldered-in connection to the life-function regulator and the organic coordination and the basic level of the analytical mind itself."

Keying in is the hooking up of the engram as part of the operating machinery of the body.

There are three kinds of thought:

• Analytical: rational as modified by education and viewpoint.
• Reactive: A=A=A of engram computation.
• Justified: analyzer attempting to explain reactive behaviour in an effort to be right.

Dramatization is the person acting out the content of an engram. At full force, this can be a replay of the recording, possibly amended by the little analytical power left available.

This behaviour can be suppressed by later overriding engrams (e.g. society's punishment).

A valence is the personality of one of the actors in an engram. A person will dramatize a winning valence (which is never the themselves: receipt of the engram is a failure).

A person will accumulate "half a hundred valences before he is ten". Forget about split (dual) personalities!

If dramatization is suppressed ("breaking of the dramatization"), the person will slide into own valence (at least he survived the incident, says the reactive mind), and will experience the pain and commands in the engram and will become ill.

There is no point cataloguing types of irrational or insane behaviour; they are all just symptoms of the action of language in engrams.

There are only a few more fundamentals to be covered:

• Parasite circuits.
• Emotional impaction.
• Psychosomatic ills.

The reactive mind was an evolutionary blunder. Mankind can now take an artificial evolutionary step (clearing). "The bridge has been built across the canyon."

Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 2 - The Reactive Mind

The cell, colonies of cells (organs?) aggregations of colonies of cells (organisms, e.g. Man) are all seeking to survive.

Dianetics does not deny the soul or divine or creative imagination but limits itself to the finite universe, which is all that is needed to resolve the problem of aberration.

Dianetics was developed from 273 case studies.

There are gaps in the standard memory banks during moments of "unconsciousness", which are caused by  anaesthesia, drugs, injury, shock or illness (delirium).

It may well have been that the brain is an absorber for overcharges of energy generated by injured cells (just a theory; not part of Dianetics).

During a moment of intense pain, the analytical mind behaves like an organ to which a vital supply was cut off; its action is suspended.

The reactive mind is a (poor, but perhaps it's a difficult problem biologically) solution to keeping the organism operating during these times.

The mind records, on some level, continuously until death.

Aberration is similar to the action of post-hypnotic suggestion, which was studied to help identify the cause of aberration, and which is actually a pro-survival (sympathy) engram, laid in by sympathy with the operator.

Commands in post-hypnotic suggestions can cause repressions, compulsions, neuroses, psychoses, schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, manic behaviour, depressive behaviour and hypochondria; i.e. a semblance of any insanity (but not as deeply implanted).

Hypnotism is too dangerous for a parlor trick because of its wild variability (can key in latent engrams).

Actual insanity does not need to emerge into the consciousness to be released.

Hypnotism demonstrates the working parts of aberration:

• Reduced awareness/self-determinism.
• The command.
• Occlusion of the command.
• Carrying out the suggestion (dramatizing).
• Justification.
• Fault-finding.
• Release.

The reactive mind can take over from the analytical mind fully or partially (e.g., loosely speaking, reactive mind 2/3 on = analytical mind 2/3 off).

The reactive mind is a sub-moron level of intelligence, but is extremely rugged and can be useful in extreme circumstances, e.g. to drag a burned man out of the fire.

An engram is defined as a "definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue." It can be permanently fused into any and all body circuits and behave like an entity.

It is not exhausted by being restimulated; in fact it becomes more able to exert its power the more often it is activated.

The engram banks record pain and painful emotion; the standard banks do not.

Emotion comes from engrams, endocrine response and the enhancement or reduction of the dynamic.

Proof is in workability: when engrams are erased, the person behaves rationally on the survival conduct pattern.

Animals all have a reactive mind too. In Man, it no longer has survival value.

There are 3 types of engram:

• Contra-survival.
• Pro-survival (more aberrative, because the law of affinity is stronger than the threat of pain).
• Painful emotion.

The reactive mind "thinks" in identities: one thing is identical to another; A=A=A=A=A. Any datum is just the same as any other datum in the same experience.

Engrams have to be keyed in to be effective (this proves to the reactive mind that something like the event in the engram can happen again).

The more the perceptions in the engram are restimulated, the more it becomes activated.

If the organism doesn't do what the engram says, the physical pain turns on.

A person doesn't immediately react to an engram by fleeing because other (rational) factors are considered, including the dynamics, e.g. the person's affinity for another who is restimulative. So pains from the engram can become a predisposition to illness, or a chronic illness. This may be counteracted to some degree by a general high tone. However, neurotic suggestions will still be somewhat effective.

A lock is a standard memory which gains too much power because an engram has "moved up" under the standard bank. The key-in is the first lock on an engram.

The lock has similar perceptic content to the engram, but may be on a different subject entirely.

The language content of engrams, especially homonymic content and generalized personal pronouns, cause them to be far more aberrative than they would otherwise be.

Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 1 - The Analytical Mind and the Standard Memory Banks

The analytical mind is a perfect computer, based on the data available.

Aberration arises from the nature of the data offered to the analytical mind as a problem to be computed. Data may also be false or lacking (due to education, or physical impairment, e.g. blindness).

The "I", or monitor, can be considered to be part of, and inherently in control of, the analytical mind.

Percepts are filed first, then presented to the analyzer.

Percepts are filed along with thought stream/conclusions, present and past.

Any single percept is filed as a concept. Everything is superbly cross-indexed.

There are several standard banks, and there may be duplication for redundancy. There is one or more banks for each perception.

Everything is filed correctly in a physically intact person, regardless of aberration.

The standard banks include recordings of words (heard, read or, as in Braille, felt); i.e. the semantic interpretation of raw percepts.

The analytical mind constantly checks and weighs new experience and conclusions against old, and "generally is very busy being right."

Through the mechanisms of the life function regulator, the analytical mind can control any function of the body, when it skills itself to do so.

It can install (and later change) training patterns into the organism.

This is not "tooth and claw" behaviour, but warm, honest sanity, in the individual and in society.

Dianetics: Book 2, Chapter 1 - The Analytical Mind and the Standard Memory Banks

The analytical mind is a perfect computer, based on the data available.

Aberration arises from the nature of the data offered to the analytical mind as a problem to be computed. Data may also be false or lacking (due to education, or physical impairment, e.g. blindness).

The "I", or monitor, can be considered to be part of, and inherently in control of, the analytical mind.

Percepts are filed first, then presented to the analyzer.

Percepts are filed along with thought stream/conclusions, present and past.

Everything is filed correctly in a physically intact person, regardless of aberration.

The standard banks include recordings of words (heard, read or, as in Braille, felt); i.e. the semantic interpretation of raw percepts.

The analytical mind constantly checks and weighs new experience and conclusions against old, and "generally is very busy being right."

Through the mechanisms of the life function regulator, the analytical mind can control any function of the body, when it skills itself to do so.

It can install (and later change) training patterns into the organism.

This is not "tooth and claw" behaviour, but warm, honest sanity, in the individual and in society.

Dianetics: Book 1, Chapter 5 - Summary

Aberrated conduct is still conduct/activity across the dynamics intended to increase survival. However, as it is based on irrational data, the outcome is likely to be destructive (and certainly non-optimum).

Interesting note: descriptions of dynamics 3 and 4 include "(urge of)  the group for (survival of) the group", "Mankind for Mankind" and "the group for Mankind", as if these entities have their own dynamics, independent from the individual.

First dynamic includes "self as spirit".

The analytical mind: perceives and retains data, composes and computes conclusions, poses and resolves problems across the dynamics, with the purpose of directing self and others toward survival. (Hesitancy in putting solutions into action comes from self-deprecation?) It thinks in differences and similarities.

Intelligence is the relative ability to do the above.

Dynamic is the energy available to do the above.

Both of these are necessary to optimal survival, and both vary from individual to individual.

Potential Value = I · D^x. Only realized in unaberrated individuals (aberration can cause potential value to be misdirected.)

Engrams inhibit intelligence with false or incorrectly evaluated data.

Engrams disperse life force, i.e. the dynamic energy.

Happiness lies in overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of goals, and (transiently) in the indulgence and contemplation of pleasurable experience.

The reactive mind records physical and emotional pain, and all perceptions during moments of full or partial unconsciousness. These recordings (engrams) are unavailable to the analytical mind (partial/foggy recall of perceptions if not fully unconscious?) Engrams cause all aberration and psychosomatic ills.

The somatic mind, directed by the analytical and reactive minds, puts solutions into effect on the physical level.

Training patters are placed in the somatic mind by the analytical mind to handle repetitive actions, and can be removed or adjusted by the analytical mind; habits are placed in the somatic mind by the reactive mind, and can only be removed by that which can affect engrams (i.e. auditing).

Emotion is:

• engramic response
• endocrine response
• inhibition or furtherance of life force.

Dianetics: Book 1, Chapter 4 - The Four Dynamics

Theory of the dynamic principle of existence was originally proposed in terms of survival of self. This turned out to be unworkable in the real world as it left phenomena unexplained. Ditto if considered only in terms of the survival of groups ("the pack"), all mankind, or sex.

Workable if survival of all four of these are considered.

Dynamic 1 - Self.
Dynamic 2 - Sex and family.
Dynamic 3 - Groups.
Dynamic 4 - Mankind.

Each includes its symbiotes, i.e. all those things that contribute to and are necessary for survival. E.g. one might be concerned for the survival of a school only as it affects their children, i.e. as a second- rather than a third-dynamic activity.

The dynamics form a continuous spectrum, not a strictly demarcated group.

There can be competition between the dynamics, both within the individual and within the society, on a rational and an aberrated basis.

Man inherently operates on the Equation of Optimum Solution, upon which a "conduct survival pattern" is formed (i.e. maximum survival across the affected dynamics). This is how a Clear operates. The solution determined by the individual is modified by education, viewpoint, and time available, and can be non-optimum because of lack of data or false data.

Self-sacrifice, like selfishness, is not an optimum solution.

Aberration actively impedes the dynamics.

Study Tape 9 - Training: Duplication

There are two ways to get someone out of apathy; one applies to pcs and the other applies to auditors.

Some early academies had the attitude that they should just get “good” people (whatever that means). Along the same line, the idea might be “if only we could audit these poor students, they might be able to do some auditing themselves”.

This attitude resulted in very bad auditors. “Of course they can’t audit well; it’s because of their case!”

It must not be true that an auditor has a case, otherwise no auditing would get done.

“If he’s slightly warm, and you can see a mist on a mirror held against his mouth, he or she is in shape to audit.”

Some very low-level cases have been driven in to the absorption of data, the regularities of practice, to an actual recognition that what they were doing ended up in a very, very powerful, fine gain for the pc, and that they could do it.

LRH announces that, since this has now happened, “the thing can be boot-strapped”.

The intention of some people, even after auditing, wouldn’t uniformly be for the freedom of man.

A society of some audited and some not would divide up into two or three classes.

There is no such thing as a successful civilisation that is made out of slave masters and slaves.

The speed of the effect created by Scientology is determined by the efficiency and effectiveness of it, not by “the inertia of the masses”.

By doing the job faster, you save many of the cataclysmic effects of what might happen.

What can be seen in the pc in this regard (speed of progress) can also be seen in the civilisation; the pc is the microcosm, the world is the macrocosm.

There are only enough auditors if they also have the ability to train other auditors.

You should devote most of your time to the apt students.

For anyone to assign the length of time it takes for someone to learn something is adventurous. It can’t ever be factual.

For a very bad student, you could use the “duplication of a datum” exercises. This increases learning rate.

As a training mechanism, your first gradient is duplication of the words, without understanding. It doesn't matter what data you use to do this.

The art of getting something done through a committee has never been perfected.

If you don’t want to get something done, appoint a committee, and don’t put anybody on it who has an individual responsibility for any piece of its work.

If you want to cause a committee to hang up, introduce a button that will cause them to take no responsibility, e.g. “do a study”, or “wasn't that last proposed by Bellham?”

The duplication drill will teach someone in this state that the button doesn’t have to keep them from duplicating.

It takes quite some drilling for someone to be able to observe the obvious (“obnosis”).

This happens because when he thinks of something, the significances of it plunge in and he thinks he has to pay more attention to that than to what is going on. He’s “consequence happy” and not really in present time at all. He’s stuck in “trying to comprehend”.

Also, if you state something very non-significant, they get upset as there’s nothing there to attack, and they get terribly disappointed.

Also, a person can get stuck on interest in the datum. Still not just duplicating the datum.

All this is going on on the basis of stimulus-response, and it’s the bank that’s responding. So this drill is another way of digging up a thetan.

Eventually, the thetan just responds. Some say this makes a person into a slave, but that doesn’t happen to be true. He has to be able to do this before he can answer back.

Up to that point, you get people talking back about things that aren’t happening, and that’s very disconcerting.

At the same time as being able to duplicate, the person can cause himself to be duplicated. The better your ability to duplicate, the better you can be duplicated.

It’s better havingness too, because you start to have the things you’re surrounded with.

Understanding comes after duplication. The fellow who can’t simply duplicate is frantically trying to understand.

Every government in the world at the present moment is totally seized with this as a mechanism: they don’t have to understand anything because they can always have it studied.

Democracy does not work in the absence of understanding.

The first step is non-comprehension, non-duplication, confusion.

The second step is merely the ability to duplicate.

The third step is the ability to comprehend, to understand and therefore to observe.

Judgement lies in that field and this is a road to judgement.

Pure duplication, comprehension and judgement are not on the track. They are also avoided in religions and religious philosophies. They are touched on lightly by Plato, Socrates, etc., so this is a new skill.

The greatest overt there is is enforcing a non-comprehension.

“Don’t know” is a button all the way up and down the scale.

You can monitor case gain by the number of withholds gotten off. They weren’t withholds up to that time.

The closest approach made by philosophy to “don’t know” or “not know” is “can’t know” (Kant and Spencer).

Lack of judgement is due to not-knowingness. Knowingness begins with duplication.

There are only two crimes in this universe–”being there” and “communicating”.

One must therefore become comfortable with being there and communicating.

The route to that is duplication of a datum.

A datum is a location that doesn’t have to be pinned down; a cousin to a thetan.

A thetan, chased out of spaces, begins to use ideas for location. They feel comfortable with an idea, and that idea that they feel comfortable about is an identity.

The conclusion is you can learn to have judgement by duplication of data followed by understanding, and it’s any data gives you judgement in general.

Beyond that, you cannot teach judgment and still have it be the person’s own judgement. You can only teach a person data.

A person can be bettered just by teaching them data. One of the highest profile gains was in an ACC that contained only lectures, no processing. Increasing skill in judgement is a different activity than this.

Scientology is not taught so as to develop judgement in the data of Scientology, but the data is true and so it tends to stick.

When you come through being taught the data into a realisation of it for yourself, that is “making it your own data”.

So after understanding, for true data, comes a fourth step, which is the totally self-determined realisation of the existence of the data.

This mixes up other-determinism and self-determinism and therefore has pan-determinism. The person becomes pan-determined over the data and so has reached a high peak of the ability to judge something.

This may not be a perfect route to this end, but it is the first one.

The student has to duplicate Scientology data for checkout, and this increases his ability to duplicate the pc and not Q&A with his originations.

I.e. the insistence on duplicating Scientology data is part of this procedure.

As such, it improves understanding of subjects not related to what you are studying.

Aside: not to understand what the pc says is a misdemeanour of the first water.

If an auditor is having an awful time trying to duplicate a bulletin, you must also assume that he is constantly “trying to understand” (i.e. not simply duplicating) the pc’s originations.

One phenomenon of this inability to simply duplicate is the various misemotional tone levels exhibited by new students as they are made to duplicate the data–resentment, apathy, etc.

Routine and rote are a poor substitute for understanding.

LRH is trying to get auditors to process by realisation, comprehension and the exercise of judgement.

Study Tape 8 - Study and Intention

Intent during study is very important: as you study, what do you intend to do with the information.

Most textbooks do not fulfil the criteria of (1) having information to deliver and (2) delivering it in a way that can be assimilated (the Study Tapes really assume that they do).

The universities with the hardest exams, or the greatest number of failures, do not necessarily produce the most brilliant students.

Study is a very fruitful field for a suppressive. It, like government, attracts SPs like honey attracts flies, in text books as well as behind the lecture rostrum.

E.g. navigation: the exam has little to do with the reality.

Ron explains the fundamentals of navigation to show how easy it is, in contrast to how difficult it is made to appear.

In navigation, use of only mathematics will wind you up on the rocks.

Text books seem to be taking the route of only being comprehensible to the expert. E.g. Encyclopædia Britannica.

Also, text books can contain incorrect emphasis and incorrect data.

A book can give a “doom and gloom” view of a subject so you constantly worry about things going wrong. You lose the fun of it or don’t do it.

This is suppression of a subject.

A suppressive treatment deals with the dangers and neglects the good points (e.g. easy waters in sailing).

You must not neglect the dangers that are there, but don’t over-emphasise them.

The SP on the track has done this with the subject of the mind–“it’s too dangerous”. This has scared off all intelligent research.

What is needed is an appreciation of the study materials by people who write material to be studied.

Scientology has a lot of nomenclature because it has to name things that weren’t previously known.

The study materials weren’t known when the nomenclature was devised, so it could have been done better.

At the time of the lecture there is no dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology, but nearly everything is defined in the text at the point that it first appears (however this fact is hindered by a number of missing recordings, e.g. Elizabeth and Wichita).

Therefore Ron recommended that a Saint Hiller used the original method of study: cover it all lightly to get a good grip on it all, and then what you really had to know, study that for starrate. Volume was what it took.

Missing definitions is solved to a marked degree by “for what purpose are you studying?”

Until you clarify that, you cannot make an intelligent activity of it.

Studying for examination is complete folly.

It’s very hard to put things into an exam that show ability to apply.

The practical man is impatient with the academic man because he cannot do.

The basic and important difference between practical study and academic study is the practical man asks the question “How can I apply this to what I am doing” of whatever he studies.

This is the whole reason why you get failures in practise after certification.

A person studying for examination does not need to know the exact meanings of all of the words because he can just rattle it off as part of the original sentence in a pat answer.

He tends to move the material out “over there” and have nothing to do with it while he is busy studying it.

A booby-trapped, suppressive subject can be studied for examination, but can’t be studied for application, as there is nothing there to be understood.

In Dianetics, the student is being told to study the material so he can go audit right now! This brings about the frame of mind of studying for application.

One is taught very bad habits of study ion schools and universities because so much stress is put on examination. One can become a social outcast (“dropout”) through failing his exams.

However, “dropouts” are very often very successful (four early dropouts earning more than $25,000 each).

We check in vain to find a single philosopher, except Mills, who ever got a passing grade in school or who stayed in school to its end.

“Do-ers” rebel against the inapplicability of texts they are given in university.

Some “professors” even guard the “deadness” of a subject and suppress any attempt to make it useful (maybe because that would take it out if their hands).

The entirety of the study materials depend upon the material being studied and the attitude with which it is studied; the purpose and intention of the student.

The subject of economics probably causes more trouble to man than any other. The subject of economics has been obfuscated by the slant put on it by various “isms”.

Therefore trying to apply one of these false economic systems will be difficult.

I.e. you can also pervert a subject so that it is no longer applicable or assimilable.

This is what happened to Freud’s work, which originally had a lot of workable technology.

By studying for application you can identify what is comprehensible and get it sorted out.

You will find teachers who warn people against simple text books, and large stratas of society get a “down” on simplification.

Study Tape 7 - A Review of Study

There is no existing textbook or technology on how to study, not even in courses on education (so called).

Tests in Johannesburg showed children’s IQ decreased as they got older due to MUs. This demonstrates the fact that educational technology is out.

The longer you study, the more chance you have of running into words you don’t know and can’t get defined.

It is just misunderstood words that bring about stupidity.

Pro artists are not course graduates.

Writing courses don’t teach writing. They contain a false technology.

There is a subject called writing, but it has not been codified, even by writers.

Art technology is only codified when you start to descend into the graphic arts, i.e. reproduction (= technical application). E.g. retouching photos, engraving.

The photographer could do everything the retoucher does, just with his camera and his lights. The retoucher steps in when the photographer fails.

It appears that in any very technical area, a lot of technology builds up around an area of correction.

If you have a heavy corrective technology, something isn’t being done right in the first place.

E.g., that people are dissatisfied with the condition or appearance of their bodies implies a missing tech of how to build bodies!

Success of psychoanalysis depends upon the comm. cycle of the analyst, not on any tech.

Every time one of Freud’s patients got off an overt, he recovered. Freud overlooked this. It is one of the places LRH discovered the overt.

All of education, as it is practised today is a complicated corrective technology.

The effort is not to relay an idea, it is to keep the fellow at it, getting him through school, exams, etc., or keep him from something (e.g. “misbehaving”).

Imagine the stress experienced by someone who is stuck in the “second paragraph” and, instead of being taken back to the first, is forced by threat of failure to get through the second.

This, repeated consistently, explains why children get dumber the older they get (i.e. the more “education they have had).

This results in a person “short-circuiting” their education to get anything done in the subject. He winds up as an “only one” in that area, denied the information that would have helped him. I.e. non-application of what has been studied.

A decline of IQ could be expected to follow a misunderstood word. The longer you went past one and the more you had to know it, the stupider you could be expected to get.

Miseducation will have a serious effect at national level. E.g. in Russia all the students in one plant left the area after their on-the-job training.

Communism had/has a fondness for changing, not the vocabulary, but the meanings of words as in Orwell’s “1984”.

Roosevelt made “freedom” mean “freedom from” something. That’s not freedom if you’re fighting against something or worrying about it happening.

The leisure class and upper class in England were probably “educated to death”.

Continuation of a culture is entirely dependent upon possessing a technology of study.

The future of the human race hinges on people, and if you don’t make good people you are going to have trouble.

If you teach children thoroughly that they are no part of anything, they will become just that. You might as well hang a sign across the school gates saying “Juvenile Delinquent Factory”.

Not only is educational tech missing from schools, but there’s a pretended technology in its place.

Processing and study tech go together hand-in-glove, as they are both directed at making people brighter.

Education is the route from Scientology Zero to One.

“Why can’t someone at level zero see Scientology” is too complex a question. They can’t see, period. They have been trained into stupidity.

Ron gives a wonderful example of trying to explain a rose garden to a blind man. I think he’s talking about his experiences trying to explain Scientology to others.

You fail to communicate when you fail to realise you’re talking to a blind man.

From past experience, most people do not expect anything to happen, even if they know the “technology”, so they’re not able to give it that little extra push that makes it work.

So they don’t, really, know what knowledge is.

Ron talks about the impending introduction of the sandwich course into British universities.

To get someone into Scientology you could
a) get him into a state where he could learn
b) show him there was something to be studied
c) show him there was a body of information about study
d) show him there was a body of information to study.

Education addresses PTPs for the person; he can handle his problems better when educated in them.

You don’t have to be clever with this, just be obvious. E.g. teach them that they should observe. Take the obvious and expand it.

This point applies broadly to dissemination and lower level teaching of Scientology. Don’t give gratuitous detail; work on the obvious.

In Scientology, you’re not up against the meanness, cussedness, unwillingness, or even ignorance of the society, you’re actually up against its incorrect study technology which makes stultified and ossified individuals.

Study is one of the best methods for bringing someone out of a withdrawal from life.

Study Tape 6 - Study and Education

So far Study Tech hasn’t covered the professional practice of what one has learned.

The whole subject of education has as its end product the accomplishment of certain doingnesses and ends/aims professionally. It is very different from a dilettantish “walk around the edges”.

To call the modern school system education is quite laughable.

You can’t just “educate” someone with no end in view.

An enormous amount of money is spent on a person’s education without them becoming educated.

Arithmetic is hard to teach because it has no stated end goal of itself. (There is actually a statable purpose to it.)

Arithmetic has therefore become degraded, something you “have to know to do higher maths” when in fact it could be used to solve some problems for which algebra or calculus are used.

There used to be people very skilled in sight arithmetic, able to add up columns of very large numbers.

Nobody is delineating the purpose of arithmetic (not “a purpose doesn’t exist”) so one doesn’t consider he can become educated in it.

As the purpose of a subject falls away, so does the subject itself, no only in the individual but also in the society.

Vice-versa (and more obviously) there is no purpose to studying a dead subject.

The difference between a live study and a dead one is a live subject has a use, a dead subject does not.

A live study becomes a dead study (for the society and the individual) (a) because it really is no longer of any use (e.g. buggy whips) and (b) because one omits it (including its purpose) as part of the educational process.

Therefore a person cannot become educated in a dead subject as it has no end purpose/product.

It’s a question of what purpose is there, not what purpose could we dream up to put there.

A person studying a dead subject can easily become obsessed with it—he can’t demonstrate his virtuosity and nobody will listen (he seems like a crank).

If somebody doesn’t listen to you talking about Scientology, it’s because you didn’t explain the purpose it might have or them personally. It also has to be, to them, an attainable, doable purpose that they can believe.

For an educational subject to exist, it must have an attainable, valuable purpose that can be made real to the student.

The value of the subject depends simply and utterly on the value of obtaining the stated purpose.

A culture is held together solely by education (taught or experienced).

There are two types of subject: “vital” and “nice”.

Education achieved is remunerated to the degree its service is understood to be valuable by the public.

Two of the most highly values services are stockbrokers and undertakers.

If a subject continues to be needed it will be preserved and relayed.

You can destroy a subject by destroying its purpose or its relay, or by tacking lots of things on to its technology that don't belong there.

The number of opportunities to fail are directly proportional to the length of the approach.

This is balanced by the need for a gradient.

Preparatory action or length of course of study should not be so long that it needlessly multiplies opportunities for failure and not so short that it takes a person up too steep.

An educational subject is simply that something that winds up in a doingness and is approached by the process of getting educated in it. That’s a hell of a thing to have to say, but hardly anybody really knows this.

People are constantly engaged in activities which they do very badly and fail at like crazy and it never occurs to them that they’ve never been educated in the subject.

Teachers who are themselves failures at a subject dramatise their failures and cause their students to fail.

“No writer really knows whether he has a style or not until he has sat down and written a couple of hundred thousand words.” I.e. you should do the thing you’re learning to do.

A subject has to be accepted by the society in which it exists for it to be a professional subject.

True knowledge will give a correct emphasis and merely theoretical knowledge will give a wrong emphasis.

Unrealities enter when an educational activity teaches solutions to problems that don’t exist or fails to solve problems that do exist. Experience allows you to determine which is which.

All subjects (even “pure” maths, etc.) wind up in a specific doingness if they’re subjects in which a person can become educated.

A subject that doesn’t wind up with a specific doingness is significance without the mass.

You could understand that you were studying nothing and therefore expect no mass and not get upset by its absence.

Lack of mass phenomena are described at this point in the tape.

Understand this in its purity: educating a person in a mass which he doesn’t have and which isn’t available produces physiological reactions. It’s just a fact.

You would expect the greatest incidence of suicide or illness in that field of education most devoted to studying absent masses (e.g. the French educational system).

You can get the urge to apply something you are studying; to the degree that you don’t, you get upset.

Physical phenomena for too steep a gradient and bypassed definition are described here.

These are distinct phenomena which tell you which barrier to study you have encountered. There may be a fourth and a fifth.

Lack of mass is the least “upset” of these.

Differentiate gradients from definitions as they sound similar. Gradients apply to doingness but hangs over into understandingness. Plotted course of forward motion is what interests us.

Phenomenon of assigning difficulty to wrong place applies to gradients.

The restoration of doingness depends only upon the restoration of the misunderstood word, the misunderstood definition.

Study Tape 5 - Evaluation of Information

The professional liability of a Scientologist is the fact he's dealing with significances and masses. You get these mismatched (slightly wrong significance for the mass or vice-versa) and you get catastrophe.

A professional develops a familiarity and an ability in his field to a degree that seems dangerous or upsetting to the public at large.

"Motivational Research" is used in advertising, but the people doing it don't know what makes people tick and so they aren't very successful.

By knowing the mind, you should not have any trouble with dissemination.

If you know the basic answers, 90% of the time things don't worry you and the other 10% of the time you can do something about it.

You find out most things via words these days, and words are booby-trapped - they've got the mind push-buttoned.

You nearly always assign the trouble to the wrong part of the sentence or material because the actual problem is something you're not confronting.

Second-hand knowledge is extremely valuable, including the fact that it helps you get the maximum benefit from first-hand knowledge.

This is the way you maintain and carry forward a culture of any magnitude.

If you introduce someone (e.g. an illiterate culture) to the existence of knowledge related to their existence, you had better follow it up with education in that knowledge, otherwise they will become stultified and die.

Communism controls people by playing on their ignorance of words and has an impressive array of political vocabulary to help with this.

It's the illiterate people of the world that get overwhelmed and defeated. The death of a civilisation is based upon its accumulated not-understandings.

There are two extremes: "I know everything therefore there's no reason to learn" and "I can't learn because I don't know the words". The correct course is in between.

The thing to do is know the words and stay alert - you'll find out there's always some technology being boiled up someplace.

It is particularly likely for someone prominent in their field to become complacent and fall behind. This is a danger a Scientologist faces.

To succeed, a person must observe, understand and do.

The less direct the observation, the greater the understanding has to be.

Understanding adds up to ARC. In study, understanding is a substitute for mass.

You have to understand the relay of the information as well as the info itself.

Second-hand observation can be due to time - e.g. observing a tree via a sprout or a stump. (There are "types and brands" of understanding not otherwise covered in the lecture.)

Our understanding of second-hand data must include an evaluation of the reliability of the information. "This is where the bulk of sentient beings fall down."

This civilisation is in the apathy of saying "We don't have to know because someone else knows."

You don't always have to know what something means to continue but if you get a headache in the next half page it's because you didn't understand it. Your knowledge/use of Study Tech can include this.

A person can approach a subject as a dilettante but shouldn't then get the idea that they are an expert (i.e. the trap of thinking you know all about something so don’t have to learn).

A dilettante will trip over nomenclature, as specialised words are used for specialised observations.

A lot of the culture is known only as an understanding to various degrees without any intention to do. This is fine; you regulate your doingness as required for the use you have for the subject.

Just don't make a habit of it!

Doingness requires much, much, much more understanding than just lookingness, and sometimes your first results are very disappointing. In this case you need to improve your understanding.

Or realise "it never worked anyway", but that's rare.

Don't learn "it's too difficult".

As well as accomplishing something, doingness is also another method of achieving understanding. If you find yourself bogged, go and do some of it.

You need to be able to extract useful info and basics from the gobbledegook that might also be present.

Know what you want the data for and evaluate it with that in mind. Otherwise your use will be minimal and you become "stultified", "horrified" and hung up on words.

Study Tape 4 - Gradients and Nomenclature

The aim of the development of Study Tech was to improve the ability of the student to learn (i.e. change his subjective reaction to the subject) by altering the teaching methodology used - pan-determinism at work!

In schools and universities, subjective reality on the part of the student is achieved by threat of failure or expulsion. I.e. no address to what's needed to support the student's efforts to study.

In schooling, the teacher does not observe the student applying for real what he's learned, and so does not have a good idea of the success or failure of the course.

The school system fails to observe that education is not very successful.

Most studies expect the student (after graduation) to be very amateurish.

Scn. is a complex subject to study. There are many parts to learn to obtain the exact result required.

You teach someone on a gradient to avoid them becoming confused.

When someone gets confused, he has fully gotten the earlier step. He's not confronting the current step.

The only error you can make in using gradients is to start with too high a gradient. This is an easy mistake to make. The modern university does nothing but make this mistake.

The basic gradient is to have the student there, which is skipped in most elementary schools.

The actual confusion to handle in the student is not the one the student (or instructor) thinks it is. It's the earlier skipped gradient.

The one that comes up on the meter is the later, stronger confusion.

"The thing the student is apparently having trouble with is never the thing the student is having trouble with."

The skipped gradient is due to a word in that step that was not understood.

Study can produce very strong physiological reactions.

When you get a physiological reaction, you've got a skip on the gradient.

The skipped gradient may not be in the preceding paragraph. It can be a more fundamental datum from years before, or never seen.

The apparent problem occurs after the actual skipped gradient has been keyed in. That area is a blank to him - words will vanish off the page.

Find out where the student wasn't having trouble. The problem/word is at the tag end of that.

Instruction consists of guiding a student along a gradient of known data.

Good instruction is a system of backtracking. The student will go forward quite happily by himself until he gets stuck.

The student will be positive he understood the last point on the gradient. The evidence that he didn't is that he is having trouble with the next point.

If the earlier gradient than where he got stuck is also badly misunderstood there's something before even that.

Study is a concatenation of certainties, confidences and competences.

Let a student get into trouble before you help him out.

Study uniformly spread across a group is a mistake - they're all at different places on the gradient.

Don't ever take up with the student what he says he doesn’t understand.

The trouble is in the bracket of "doing well there" and "having trouble there".

There was some indication in 1947 research that a misunderstood can have an significant negative impact on a life.

In that teaching is relaying data to a person that he can understand and use, and that words are involved in this (along with actions), the definitions of words has an impact on study.

You can get in as much trouble by not naming a distinctly different part as you can by naming one too complexly.

If you take a person up the gradient too steeply he will get lost at some step, always because he is confused about the prior step.

The responsibility for the subjective reaction of the student lies in a very large measure with the instructor.

The problem is really always a word or phrase.

The fault could be with the text, e.g. typographical error, info not there.

Study Tape 3 - A Summary of Study

There has not been a technology of study or a technology of education.

There is a "school" technology but it doesn't have much to do with education.

Education, in its final touches, has very little to do with school.

Schooling can be very pedantic to no good purpose.

Education would take into account the relative importance (applicability) of the data being taught.

Significance must be accompanied by the mass. E.g. the development of techniques for displaying pictures is useful, who invented it when is not.

When you get into significance versus mass you get into action.

The student must be taken into consideration when teaching - i.e. what's he learning to do?

A student becomes introverted by giving him too much significance and too little doingness and too little mass.

This IS the way you make an impractical person.

Any trouble an instructor has in teaching has something to do with something he doesn't confront about the doingness or mass of the subject.

A person writing for people who do is too far removed from the doingness and mass to make a good studyable textbook, no matter who they consulted.

Photography is similar to auditing in that if you do certain things right and with good judgement you get certain results.

You can get so good at what you’re studying that you can think with it and improve on the textbook.

Just practical training is not enough. I.e. all mass/doingness and no significance also fails.

A pro can be counted on to produce extraordinary results. He knows all the right ways to do it and therefore knows how to fail at it and he can think that extra step.

The real pro knows the significance and has experience in the doingness and handling the mass.

Professionalism is sweated for.

You don't have to do everything that has ever been done in order to be a pro - i.e. the doingness can also be overstressed.

If he's not going to do it, strip the significance off of it. If he is going to do it, "pour it to him man!"

Doingness described (or even practised) that is never going to be done is just significance.

Also, by making the student do something he is never going to need to do for real, you convert things that should remain as significance into doingness.

A person might choose to do these old doingnesses for fun, but you wouldn't make a student do them. It causes an ARC break as there's no purpose to it.

The doingness and mass of a subject that should be taught, and taught hard, are the current applicable doingnesses and masses.

You teach enough significance so the student doesn't get stuck in the doingness he's being taught.

He needs enough significance to be able to think with the subject, and that's a little bit more significance than you'd expect.

An understanding of the history/development of the subject helps you to think with it. That's the purpose of learning these things, not to be able to do it the old way.

If involved in a "significance" doingness, the student reacts like he's in the field of significance, becomes "stultified, bored, protesting, annoyed".

This is an identifiable sensation (first mention of physiological phenomena).

"Education should be the action of relaying am idea or an action from one being to another in such a way as not to stultify or inhibit the use thereof."

It also permits the person to think with the subject and develop it.

A person who can think with a subject will be able to advance along with it.

The person must be able to follow disciplines to achieve the expected result, but also maintain a loose and flexible attitude.

You can also be engaged in a significance which is actually a doingness, e.g. "the action of contemplation". Also, the expert for whom the significance is his living.

A subject, starting out from a basic assumption, must not lose sight of that assumption (e.g. physics with conservation of energy).

We must go in the direction of processing rather than the theory and philosophy of the universe because the being is not educatable in a degraded state.

Study Tape 2 - Studying: Data Assimilation

Nomenclature is a major stumbling block in any study.

You need to know what the definition means, not just the definition itself.

As we move on we find there probably could have been better nomenclature, but by this time it's too late to change (inhibits comm., puts person with old terms out of comm.).

Those people are the authorities who can get results.

We don't use psychiatry's nomenclature as (a) they don't produce results so it's not really a terminology and (b) it would carry over into Scn. some of the failure of psychiatry.

Scn. has about 472 major technical terms, c.f. 20-40,000 in the medical vocabulary "of very peculiar words that don't mean a thing".

Terminologies have a social status - ease of use implies ability. Also a snob status - e.g. carnival terms are different than circus terms for the same things.

Use of terminology acts as a signal system between people of similar knowledge.

Normally, above the snob use of terminology in a profession, there is a "slanguage" of terms (i.e. it has become less serious) - e.g. organ designers have "firewood", "noises" and the "Blackpool snarl".

Scn. has short-circuited the "pompous" stage straight into "slang" terms.

If nomenclature is all-important, you don't know the subject.

You can have an instantaneous grasp of a definition or a "fumble" grasp (which isn't good enough!)

By not knowing the nomenclature you can form the opinion that you don't know the subject, or that there's something incomprehensible about the subject.

Before studying a page it would be smart to look it over and make a list of MUs, clear them up and then study the page.

There's a danger of being thought stupid for not knowing terms and you might become reluctant to find out their meanings. You might then pretend to know to preserve your status.

"One unknown piece of nomenclature left behind you can absolutely ruin your comprehension of the whole thing you're studying."

Clearing up Definitions appears to be the slow way of studying, but it's fastest in the long run.

Several things can get in the way of understanding an idea. One is that the idea is similar (but different) to something you already know so you read it as the already-known datum.

Another thing that can get in the way of understanding is that a datum is unbelievable. Make sure you know what you are unbelieving.

90% of unbelievables are cleared up by clearing the terminology and the thing itself and finding you're unbelieving the wrong thing.

The other 10% is normally handled by setting up examples of how it is and isn't that way; applying it to yourself and life to see how it fits, have you ever seen examples of it etc.

Bypassing definitions inhibits communication between you and the book, you and other auditors, you and the PC.

Having read a history textbook, if you want to know dates, look in the book!

When there is no training available, a fairly reliable method of study is to "cover everything in sight" - i.e. read all the books etc. that are available.

There are not "bright" and "dull" students, because this classification has not led to any results in producing bright or fast students. Instead, there are careful and careless students.

Learning is not remembering the text, as this includes no understanding or application. Rote learning can be detected by asking for the definitions of words.

A slow student also shows up this way - no understanding, can't define words.

Repeated clearing of a word will eventually make it no longer a barrier to comprehension - i.e. you get an instantaneous grasp of it.

With a full grasp of the nomenclature a person with a textbook knowledge of a subject should be able to apply it. He would then gain familiarity and so improve.

Even lack of knowledge of English falls under the banner of nomenclature.

Study is really the first place you fall down due to your small inabilities in language/nomenclature.

It's easy to disregard small not-knowns in language when you are relatively high on the scale of ability in that language.

Study Tape 1 - Studying: Introduction

The ability to learn is fundamental to the ability to audit (or to do anything).

All great successes are built on attention to fundamentals.

More than 50% of Scientology consists in the know-how of application.

"By the time you've rewritten James Watt, I think you've lost steam engines."

Study Tech must therefore include how to pass a technology along without losing it.

It's almost customary for a body of knowledge to come into being, some part of it get selected for development (& poorly duplicated) and the rest of it be lost (e.g. fixed wing is only one of 13 heavier-than-air methods of flight).

Civilisations can be lost on this basis.

One reason you might stop studying is because you had studied something false. That's not a good reason - you just have to include judgement and evaluation of what you are studying.

Rote learning includes no judgement or understanding of the material.

Study has to do with, basically, willingness to know.

The discipline of how you audit is very difficult to relay by written word, which gives a danger of losing the technology. However, it is easy to transmit by example.

The problem with study is not the relay of technology (i.e. processes etc.) but of how you do it.

This is in bulletins. It's comm. cycle, good indicators, etc. These can get brushed off lightly in favour of a trick process etc.

To study something, you must get over the idea that you know all about it or that there is nothing there for you to learn. I.e. you must be willing to learn.

Proper study of a subject will take you from the position of having only fixed ideas to an understanding of the fundamentals and thus the ability to exert judgement over what you are studying.

A lack of understanding can be detected from a lack of product.

The conditions of an activity should not necessarily monitor whether you get a result or not.

One can pretend knowledge of a subject, even to himself, to protect a status or reputation.

To criticise something technically (i.e. to express an opinion), you need to be able to do it yourself.

Someone who knows what he knows (has developed judgement) is willing to learn further. Someone operating off of fixed ideas is arrogant - considers it as an insult if it is suggested they don't know something.

True fundamentals are always "stupid", "nonsensical" and "not worth knowing", which is why they remain un-as-ised.

Where you fail in instruction is where you haven't isolated the first (or next) lesson to teach.

Dianetics: Book 1, Chapter 3 - The Goal of Man

The dynamic principle of existence is: Survive!

Dynamic = power, force, energy, motion. "Motivating" implies external stimulus; for me, "energizing" is better - gives a sense of internal power/energy riving the organism.

Survival graph works at the level of the life form as well as the organism. (Cognition: sensation of "mind" on other dynamics.)

Example of birth/death as a cycle of action, and this being a prerequisite for nearly infinite survival/continuance of something.

Zone 0 - Apathy
Zone 1 - Anger
Zone 2 - Bearable existence
Zone 3 - General happiness

I am currently in Zone 2, and want to be in Zone 3. Cognition: this is the real reason to want to get up the Bridge, not because I'm "supposed to". Doing what I am supposed to (i.e. other-determines) is a substitute for self-determined behaviour, because I can't or don't evaluate the situation for myself. Too many overts of omission (not brave enough to do the right thing)?

"Pleasure is the reward; and the seeking of the reward - survival goals - would be a pleasurable act." If you're not enjoying life, you are not pursuing survival goals!

There are four tone levels: physical (acute and chronic) and mental (acute and chronic). Physical tone is not of much relevance in Dianetics. Explains for me a confusion re whether a very low mental tone actually results in death; I guess yes, eventually: it might take a while for the physical tone to fall to the mental.

Note that LRH has already developed the tone scale in some detail: see description of different levels within zone 1.

This chapter gave me a real sense of the workability of Dianetics, because I better understand its goals, i.e. improved tone level, fewer illnesses, leading to better survival for the individual, the family, groups, and thus mankind.

My main reservations have been about the strength, faithfulness and with which memories may be retrieved, particularly in the Clear. Perhaps this is just a reflection of my own failings.

Repulsion from pain and attraction towards pleasure are inherent in the individual (inherited from the species). Dullness or reversal of these is due to aberration.

Personal note: I should make myself aware of actual effect of drinking, over-eating, masturbation on self, ignoring "morality" (although awareness of being immoral perhaps has its own negative effects).

Pleasure (in all its amazing variety, as wonderfully evoked in this chapter) is more of a "necessity" in the pursuit of survival than is the mere avoidance of pain.

Dianetics: Book 1, Chapter 2 - The Clear

Quality (faithfulness) of perceptions, and emotional reaction to them.

Quality, fullness of recall of past perceptions. Use of return for this.

Imagination of perceptions. Ability to create a scene and experience all perceptions as clearly as if recalled. Ability to place oneself fully inside the scene. (Initial personal attempt placed myself exterior to the scene; when conscious effort made to put myself into it, succeeded and felt joy at the experience.)

Creative imagination: the source of real creative action in the real world. Present in lesser or (much) greater levels in various people.

Sentience: the awareness of current, recalled and imagined perceptions from which conclusions are made (which can lead to further conclusions). Decision for action or inaction (which is or is not put into effect).

Aberration vs. rationality. The mind always reaches the correct conclusion, based on the data (perceived, recalled, imagined) available, as modified by observation, education and viewpoint. Aberration lies in having incorrect data. (Cognition, related to example in book of drink driving: it's OK for me because I am different to other people - incorrect datum, explains other personality flaws.)

Not yet covered in book but known from previous study: conclusions are stored with/as one of the perceptions of an event and so can be a source of invalid data.

The Clear is one who has removed all invalid data and so can operate on full self-determinism. Man is inherently good. Evil is aberrant behaviour arising from incorrect data, not part of basic personality. Evil is physical pain (cognition).

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