THE ROAD TO TRUTH

A lecture given on

1 November 1962

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They say, „Two minus two equals nothing.“ Now, that’s a very true statement as long as it remains totally in the abstract and is not applied to reality. As soon as we say, „Two apples minus two apples equals no apples“-I don’t know, I think this is a pretty good magician’s trick. Let’s look it over.

A „no apple“ is a relative thing. What happened to this apple? Well, the chemicals which composed the apple are still intact. I don’t care if it was eaten or boiled or baked or burned or buried, there is still something of an apple.

We say, „Well, there’s two apples on the table, so we take two apples off the table and we have no apples on the table.“ Ah, well, that’s true. That’s true, there are no apples on the table-providing time is right. Providing we can accept time as a truth, which I consider rather adventurous, too. Because there were two apples on the table. So we have to say, „If there are two apples on the table and we took two apples off the table, there are now, at this moment of mention-which is coincident with the exact removal of and with no reference to the past or future, and with reference only to this table in this place at this time-no apples.“ Now we’re getting much more positive about this, you see? And yet again, that passes as a truth. Well, it probably is, relatively speaking.

But the idea of saying, „Two apples minus two apples equals no apples“ is very, very adventurous indeed, because nobody-no thetan since the beginning of the world-if an apple existed, ever totally as-ised an apple. It presupposes the total as-isness of something. See, it presupposes the perfect duplication of a somethingness. It presupposes all kinds of magic. And yet in the course of fact digestion, study, all that sort of thing, over the trillennia, we have become accustomed to accepting such things as true.

Now, the figure two minus the figure two equals the goose egg, nothing. Well, as long as that is an abstract „think,“ we can say it’s true, but then it’s only true because we have set it up to be true. And the second we write it on the blackboard, we have pieces of chalk now which are representing the symbols. We have the symbols represented by a symbol. There’s a commodity has entered into it and a somethingness has entered into it and it doesn’t go someplace. You ever erase a blackboard? You have to wash it pretty darn hard to get rid of the last problem in arithmetic that was written on it. See, you get all these relative facts, relative truths.

Now, the person who adventures out on the road to truth adventures with great desperateness. And I wish to pull a long, gray beard at that particular statement because no statement about truth was ever relatively truer than that one. A person who would adventure on the road to truth is taking a terribly adventurous step, very adventurous. A philosopher who seeks to teach-discover and teach truth, is taking his life in his hands. And that wouldn’t be very important, that he is taking his life in his hands. What is far, far, far more important than that is he is taking in his hands the lives of a great many other people. Therein lies his responsibility. I’m not speaking about me. I’m just speaking about philosophers.

Now, what do I mean by „It’s a very adventurous thing“? What do I mean by that? It’s because that is the only track you have to go the whole way on. There is no short stop on the road to truth. That is the only track that you have to go all the way on. Once you have put your feet upon that road, you have to walk to its end. Otherwise, all manner of difficulties and upsets will beset you.

There is no such thing as a relative philosophical truth which is safe if it does not approach the actual composition of the subject matter it addresses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, you have a subject known as workable truth. If you put glue on one piece of paper, you can make it stick to itself or another piece of paper; and that’s a workable truth. You can use that. Post Office Department uses it to keep stamps on envelopes and-all kinds of uses for this, you see?

If you dig a hole through a mountain, you can pave the bottom of the hole and cars don’t have to drive over the top of the mountain. Don’t you see? And a whole series of workable truths go into the construction of this tunnel and this roadway.

Those are workable truths. And this gives the „exact sciences“ (quote) (unquote) a very bloated notion of themselves, because they deal with workable truths.

Now, in the field of man, the first workable truth that anybody will try to give you is that „Nobody can do nothing about him nohow,“ see? „Nothing can be done about it.“ No truth exists in this field. „Man is an animal based on chemistry.“ Where the hell did that come from? It’s an animism of some kind or another. It’s some kind of an odd theory or philosophy that grew up in a revulsion against the control by religion of men’s faith.

Psychology-psyche-ology-is a study which is peculiarly religious and is entirely and completely so up to 1879 when a fellow by the name of Wundt at Leipzig, Germany, concluded that men were animals and had no psyches. And he has taken off from the point of no psyche as a theory-but just mud - and has gone forward and you have your modern psychology. Don’t let anybody tell you that modern psychology is a product of the physical sciences. Psychology, in general, is totally a product of man’s religion of yesteryear; the only place it’s been taught has been in seminaries. You get 1515, faculty psychology is taught in religious universities. You get Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1200 and something, writing textbooks on the subject and so forth. This was entirely a religious affair.

Well, nobody moved in on it sensibly; somebody moved in on it in a spirit of revolt, just like religion has been blown up here and there down the track, as the years have rolled on, by the advances of the exact sciences, so-called. There had been an awful war in these two things. So the exact sciences have now entrenched themselves in a total falsehood in the field of the mind, at the same time developing a totally unworkable psychology to back up the exact science of blowing up the planet. Isn’t that an interesting area to dead-end?

Well, that gives you some of the liabilities of embarking on the track to truth and not going toward truth.

Now, Buddha - Gautama Siddhartha - nobody should say any hard words about this man, because he told everybody he was just a man, he was trying to set men free and he was trying to help people out and so forth. And all that was perfectly true. And he discovered how to exteriorize without being able to stably exteriorize, without discovering any of the rules or laws of exteriorization, without making it possible for anybody else to exteriorize at will.

How many hundred million people, since twenty-five hundred years ago until now, did Gautama Siddhartha totally condemn to utter and complete slavery by not walking down that road all the way?

Because that-those half-truths have been used and used and misused and abused and booby-trapped and monkeyed up and so forth. That’s merely because he didn’t go all the way down the road, don’t you see?

Now, knowing this sort of thing, it takes a rather brave man to walk in the direction of truth because he knows very definitely that he must go on down the road. If he knows anything at all, he realizes that the traps of existence and the upsets of existence are composed of half-truths, and that all work to amuse or enlighten or something is susceptible to being employed in the field of enslavement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They just say nobody knows anything about it. Of course, everybody is willing to agree that everybody is stupid, so they let it ride.

That’s the craziest thing I ever ran into: „Nobody knows what electricity is.“ I imagine that’s taught that way in Japanese today; I imagine it’s taught that way in Swedish, German, French, Italian, to say nothing of English. It’ll be soon taught that way in Africanese, Ghana-ese, or whatever they talk down there. I can hear it now: „Now, this stuff that goes snap, crackle and pop-you see it here, you know; goes snap, crackle and pop. Well, now, the first thing you should know about this“-they always say this, you see-“the first thing you should know about this, is that nobody knows what it is.“

Well, that effectively keeps one from entering any road of truth; that just puts one in a bracket where he can be shocked, blown up, exploded, fried, where he can run out of batteries, where he can go out in the cold morning and start to start his car and not have one start. The direct and immediate results of this statement are everywhere around us today.

Well, that isn’t a road that has not been walked down; that is a road that is effectively barred. Everybody is saying by inference that you can’t walk down that road. That’s the wildest thing I ever heard of! And yet people have been telling people they couldn’t find out about truth for a long time.

And the only reason I really make fun of Immanuel Kant is the outrageousness of his premise. I’ve even used some section of it-to my shame, but I’ve really used it-but it’s nice stuff to explain with. You say to somebody, „You don’t have to know-to begin this subject and to look it over and get some result in it-you don’t have to know the totality of everything before you can begin on it.“ You know, in other words, you don’t have to have walked the whole path before you start to walk the whole path. Well, to that degree, „the unknowable“ has some use.

But Immanuel Kant didn’t use it that way; he used it entirely differently. He said there was the knowable and there was the unknowable; and he said the unknowable ain’t never gonna be known by nobody. And what I want to know is how did he find out about it?

And yet people at this minute are sitting in universities in the world listening with reverence and awe to those outrageous words: that there’s an unknowable that nobody will ever know anything about. That’s one to really tangle with, man. It’s outrageous even by philosophic examination. If you can’t ever sense it or experience it or be in time with it or have any clue of its existence, then how do you know it exists to not be known about?

Now, I think you will find that there is a considerable effort on the part of man, wittingly or unwittingly-aberratedly, certainly-to say that certain roads are closed and that those roads must never be opened. „It is very bad to know about the human mind.“ Well, let me tell you something: if you’re alive, you know something about the human mind. And I’ll tell you what’s dangerous: is never to find out any more about it. That’s dangerous!

And man today faces that danger. And in just the last few days-just the last few days-the cobalt 60 was very close to spreading its fallout far and near over the steppes of Russia, and „made in Moscow“ (or its suburbs) was about to be scattered, trademarked on scrap iron, all over America. Because of what? Because it is so dangerous to begin to know anything about the human mind.

Now, people recognize that it is dangerous to some degree, but don’t really realize what really is dangerous. Because they know of the existence of something, not to know all about that thing is dangerous. And they are conceiving that they don’t know anything at all about it. And let me propose that to you as the most idiotic premise in the field of the human mind.

There’s little Joe Blow down here. And you say, „Do you understand women?“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve sometimes wondered whether or not the time factor wouldn’t upset things, because we also have another time factor involved over here called a „world situation“ and I’ve needed a few clear years, and that has sometimes worried me a little bit.

But the fait accompli was pretty easy to envision, because we’d already made the seven-league boot strides necessary to put us way on down the track toward the end of track anyway.

But now, if you have a reputation for knowing, you enter into a mechanism known as the missed withhold. And as you go down this track, separate from and distinct from your fellows, as being one specially gifted in the subject of knowing about the mind, you have entered into, now, a peculiar liability that has nothing to do with the reaction or liability for simply treading the track of truth. That has nothing to do with that. This is a reputational action. People think that you know the truth and to them the only truth that exists is themselves. It’s a first dynamic truth; their conception of truth is their own aberrations, misdeeds and ideas of right or wrong conduct.

Now, every philosopher has more or less been engaged upon a selection of ideas of rightness of conduct and wrongness of conduct. Particularly the Oriental philosopher has been engaged upon this point. It is totally missing and totally absent from the Western philosopher. He doesn’t much talk about the rightness of conduct. He talks about behavior patterns and he talks about social sciences, and he talks about other things. He doesn’t even talk about ethnology; this is an almost unknown commodity to him except as he applies this, maybe, to some savage race down on the banks of the Bongo-Bungo. He doesn’t realize that ethnology is equally applicable to a savage race living on the banks of Forty-second Street. He actually doesn’t approach this subject very closely. He talks about behaviors and he wants to get away from this.

Well, one of the reasons he wants to get away from this is he’s totally blind to the possibility that there could be an exact right conduct. See, he speaks of a behavior pattern, not a rightness of conduct, whereas the Oriental philosopher, wishing to lead people in the direction of better ways and that sort of thing-Lao-tse, Confucius, particularly-these chaps are fixated on the idea of right conduct: the right conduct and the wrong conduct.

And it’s to a point where, in Japan, if you drink out of the wrong side of the tea bowl, you know, you’ve practically had it; you’re socially ostracized. There’s another island country where if you don’t cross your knife and fork in an exact way in the middle of your plate, nobody ever invites you to dinner again. These are rightness and wrongness of conduct, and it’s adjudicated in those particular ways.

The crux of the situation is that all considerations of behavior, all considerations of the O/W mechanism, are primarily based on ideas of right and wrong conduct. Back of the O/W mechanism is the idea that right conduct can exist. This is the only saving grace of the human race or of any race of beings. It’s a rather touching thing if you get down and think about it: the idea that right conduct can exist. It’s quite remarkable.

Of course, right conduct according to whom? It’s the group mores, your survival factors are put together on this. Your Polynesian with his taboos was trying to maintain a very compact population in an area that raised very little food and therefore was incapable of supporting overpopulations and so forth, so he invented a taboo system, and he made a whole series of rightnesses of conduct. Actually, survival is your monitoring factor of rightness of conduct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re always trying to say their laws are true. They no longer consult the customs of the people in order to pass their cotton-picking laws. And man, how crazy can you get? Where are you going to go for law? Because any law professor I ever had that was worth his salt and was a good Joe always made this practically his first point: Laws are evolved from customs of the people and are eventually solidified in the form of Legislation and become a law of the land. A law which does not so progress either operates as a total tyranny or is totally unenforceable.

You want to know what’s a tyrannical law or a law you can’t enforce? It’s a law that doesn’t evolve from the customs and mores of the people. That’s unenforceable. Can give you numerous examples of this sort of thing. Prohibition: Somebody came along and said, „It’s evil to drink.“ I don’t know what the population of the United States was at that time; must have been upwards to a hundred million people. And there were only a few of them who agreed with that. They waited till some ten million men were in uniform, or something like that-or maybe it wasn’t that many-and couldn’t vote at that particular time, and then they passed this law into existence. And these fellows came home and found out that it was illegal to drink and they didn’t agree with this.

So Prohibition was a mockery. I don’t know how many lives it cost, how much revenue it cost, how much property it destroyed and so forth, and finally even the great and mighty government threw in its sponge-said, „Lap it up; we can’t do a thing about it.“

In other words, not the whole Army, Navy, Coast Guard and everything else-nobody could enforce this thing. Nobody. It wasn’t borne out of the customs of the people. In other words, it went straight in the teeth of what people considered as right conduct. In those days, if a man was a man he held his liquor. What if there was no liquor to hold? He had no definition for a man. In other words, you just pull the rug out, man. Pull the rug out.

Well, this concerns you very vitally. At a very-I very seldom talk to you at a high level of theory-but actually does concern you considerably. It does, because all around you, people are determining truth from what people say right conduct is. See, they say, „Well, you’re supposed to do this and supposed to do that and supposed-to’s, supposed-to’s, supposed-to’s, and these things are true.“

I’ll give you one of these data-one of these data that’s very, very interesting-a datum concerning kleptomaniacs, developed in the field of psychoanalysis. „When a kleptomaniac can’t steal anything, he always burns down the house.“ That’s a scientific datum in psychoanalysis. You think I’m joking, you know. I never actually throw a total punch in this particular line till I can get these textbooks and open them up and start actually reading them at random.

You want to really have a ball sometime, get somebody like Karen Horney, textbook, and sit down with four or five-well, fairly sensible blokes of some kind or another, and just start reading them, with a straight face, from any point in the book forward. Anything I’ve ever said in the field just turns pale. You see, I’m a moderate in this line; I don’t like to exaggerate. But they wont believe you. If you sit there with your face toward them, the back of the book toward them, and actually just read out of the textbook, they will not believe that you are reading the latest and best school of psychoanalysis. They’ll think you’re pulling jokes. They’ll think it’s just nothing but solid gag from one paragraph to the next.

I finally one day saw an engineer-to a group of engineers that were being treated in this fashion-actually, just in a rage, get up and go around back of the fellow who was reading it aloud, and jerk the book out of his hands. And he didn’t even want to read it! And that engineer that pulled the book out of his hands had to actually be forcefully held up against the wall and the book had to be shown to him, and that the person in that chair was actually reading exactly what was in that textbook on the subject of psychoanalysis. And when he did, at that moment the engineer, for the first time in his life, realized there wasn’t a science of the human mind extant on the planet. Up to that time the reason he paid no attention to Dianetics and Scientology: he thought there was a science of the mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All organizations on this planet today can be evolved from the first moment of failure to handle one individual. They couldn’t handle him, they couldn’t understand him, they couldn’t reach him, they couldn’t help him, they couldn’t solve his problems, and so they set up an organization to do it. That organization directly and immediately evolves from the failure to handle that individual.

Now, this doesn’t tell you that this is true of all third dynamic activities. This only says „Earth,“ and this only says „aberrated third dynamic activities.“ But it’s an inversion. You’re on the lower scale. You’re way below the first dynamic. They couldn’t handle the first dynamic, so they developed an organization not to do it.

Oh, I’ll give you an idea. An organization tends to grow up even around me, to this degree. Yet we’re the one organization or the one activity on this planet at this time that doesn’t follow this. But it gets pulled in toward it every now and then, as you-every one of you-know, to your experience. At some time or another, an organization in Scientology has not given you an answer or sent you a book or done something or served your needs at that particular moment or purpose. See? Well, it’s all based on this thing. It’s just not enough MEST or time or space or speed or something of the sort, in order to have delivered that service. But we are the only group that would be capable of doing it and that do succeed in it. We are handling the individual.

And you will never, in your whole history, handle more than an individual. I don’t care what you’re trying to handle or if you’ve set up a government for the planet. You will only be handling one individual; not one individual multiplied many times. Russia shoots individual and loves the masses. I think that’s quite marvelous. How did they get that way? Well, it’s a total aberration on the subject. You follow what I’m saying now?

Now, you can do this if everything you do do, does serve the individual, individually and peculiarly tailored to his needs so that he is not overlooked in the process. But you set up an eddy and an upset every time you have failed to handle one individual. You handle one individual and everything is fine; and you handle-you fail to handle an individual and you will set up an organization to try to do it. You’ll set up all kinds of things to try to do it! You’ll set up all kinds of brutal laws and jurisprudence and everything else to try to do it! Where you have failed to handle an individual, you will set up all sorts of O/W

In Scientology, we’re probably the only organization that has any capability at all of going in the direction of a clear third dynamic, and we’re going in that direction. We use O/W today to park somebody till we can handle him. We never forget we’re handling an individual. And I never forget I’m handling an individual. I’m not handling „people,“ ever. I’m handling you and you and you and you. Because you are truth. I don’t care what you look at as truth to begin with or what you will look at as truth at the end of the line; if there’s any truth to be found, you’re it. If there’s any truth to be known, it’ll be you who will know it. And beyond that and outside of it, there isn’t any truth.

Now, you see what I’m talking about as the road to truth?

Audience: Mm-mm.

Now, don’t you worry about missing withholds on Joe and Pete and Bill as they come into the PE class. Don’t worry about that. You won’t suffer from it. People won’t do bad things to you because you don’t know all about them instantly. As somebody just said to me, your confront is very high. A Scientologist’s confront is way up and very often when you look at somebody you almost cave him in, because he says, „What-what-what does he know about me?“

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

There is many a pc you’ll start to process, or many a human being you will try to tell about Scientology, that you will say, „Why did I get up this morning! It must have been I knew something was going to happen, because when I put on my left shoe I found it was designed for the right foot. And from that moment on, I could have taken warning and simply gone back to bed. And I didn’t. And here I am arguing with this person in this PE Course. And he’s saying, ‘I understand Ron doesn’t believe-doesn’t believe in God.“’ And you’re trying to make some kind of heavy weather out of it or make conversation out of it or trying to fend off this accusation or trying to straighten it up or handle it-you’re going to find yourself at that moment on the road to truth.

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

Audience: Yes.

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

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

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

I actually felt bad about it for-you know-a little bit bad about it for several days. I couldn’t get through to the guy. I couldn’t do anything for him, you know, and so forth, and there it was, and his whole life all busted up, and that sort of thing. I almost fell off the top of the HASI steps at Notting Hill Gate-and that was a long flight of steps, if you remember. There was this guy, hale and hearty, just having finished another intensive. He’d been alive and well for two years, and he all dated it from that moment of being processed by me.

You’ll many times think you fail when you haven’t. The only mistake you can make is to try to go backwards on this road to truth. It’s not possible without completely caving in. A very, very dangerous thing to do.

So this fellow stands up in the PE class, and he says, „How can you people know anything about truth? I understand Ron doesn’t believe in God.“ What are you going to say? What are you going to say? What are you going to say at that moment? Took you by surprise. You didn’t even think he was going to talk! Well, at least be inventive enough to say, „Well, you know, I think you ought to write him about that. Post box out there in the hall. Next question.“

Well, at least you’ve made a start. At least you’ve done something. The wrong thing to do is to back up and construct an organization which handles masses and never handles an individual. Because it is very certain that if you fail to handle this guy who stands up in the PE Course, if you fail to push home your confront on your friend who says he hates you because you might have missed a withhold on him, if you don’t say to him, „Well now, just count off the number of times I’ve nearly found out something about you, Joe. Count them off“-you’re not even asking him what you nearly found out, see?-and press it home. The guy finally says, „Well, aziziz-da-da-da-umm,“ you know? Shatters him! You say, „Well, I failed!“ and you probably didn’t. You only fail if you didn’t try.

So don’t worry about the fact that you know more about them than they know themselves. They only stand up to be handled. The only way you’re going to build up some kind of a clumsy, stupid mess of a nonfunctional Scientology administrative system will be totally and completely based on the one guy you didn’t handle; the one case you didn’t solve. Your retreats are all based on that.

Now, I can only tell you from this point of view that every once in a while somebody kicks the bucket and goes totally beyond reach. That doesn’t make me feel good but I know very well we’ll pick him up later. That’s all part of the road to truth.

Various things happen, various catastrophes occur, people get mad at ... You would be utterly amazed how many people write me today who were furious about me four years ago! Utterly incredible.

Now, there is no truth in the mass of things; there is no truth in moral codes. Truth isn’t to be found there; only agreements. But in the final analysis, there is truth to be found and there is a road to truth. You have that within you and every time you look at a human being you see it in him. And as you know what it is about, the more you know about it, the more you understand it, the less these factors will trouble you.

But even the little fellow in the bakery shop who’s doing nothing but wrap up bread has already started on the road to truth. And his only stupidity is he hasn’t got enough sense to keep going.

So don’t worry about you being on the road to truth and that it’s a very adventurous line or me being on the road to truth; shucks, we’re almost there.

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

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

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

Thank you very much. Good night.