NOT-KNOW
A lecture given on 15 June 1961 
Okay. Here we go. What's the date? Fifteen? Gee whiz, 16th of June.
Well, it's like this. I think I better disabuse you of something that at least one auditor was worried about today. And that i8 the fantastic boil-off ability of pcs. They just boil off. I mean, it's really bad. What is boil-off? Now, I can tell you what it is on the mechanical side of it. Now, I can tell you what it is on the thought side of it. And between the two, you will now see that you shouldn't worry about it. There's no reason to worry about boil-off. The situation is that you are very prone to worry occasionally when the pc suddenly conks out and you think you're doing something wrong or something of this character. I know this because you always comment on it in your auditing reports.
Well now, if a pc was to boil off for a half an hour at a crack, and you were to get in no auditing, I would be very happy to know about that. See, if they were to boil off and you didn't get in any auditing, I would be happy to know about that. But otherwise, forget it, huh?
It’s like this rising needle. I found one auditor in an HGC who was practically hysterical on the subject. "I mean, God almighty! The n-n-n-n—the needle rose! And ohh, de-e-e-ar!" Somewhere in the world it is raining. Somewhere in the world it i9 raining. This is the same order of importance. And listen, I got special, screaming, urgent, telex despatches on it now. "This pc's needle is rising" So it's a matter of something to worry about. Well, it was along about this stage of the time . . .
And now, actually, the whole thing has come up again. The auditor in this particular case, we now discover, wouldn't run anything on the pc if it made his needle rise, because it made his tone arm go up, and that was bad. How do you think you're going to get somebody over any bump without their tone arm going up?
Do you know that your case may be behaving so beautifully, and not changing any, and the thing going up a whole tone and down a whole tone, up and down from 2 or 3? And you say you're just getting along fine. And their graph doesn't change and the pc doesn't change and nothing happens to amount to anything. Now, that would be a very severe circumstance, but would be true on a sort of a dead-thetan case. You could get some sort of wobble on the tone arm. You could get a wobble on the tone arm, and it never went up to any extremity, and it never went down to any extremity, and the person just went on being calm and serene forever. You could.
But gee, on these new processes, you'd really have to work at it. You know, I don't know quite how you'd do this. You might—I don't know, you might plug in the ashtray instead of the E-Meter. It'd be pretty hard to do. I don't mean to be sarcastic, but it'd really be pretty hard to do. But nevertheless, it could be done.
Look, that pc's tone arm is going to go to 7, to 1, to 5. And now you're really going to see something happening. I mean, over a course of three or four sessions you're liable to see reads like this. Wham, wham, wham. Wild and weird reads. The tone arm starts around the dial, don't you see.
Because as responsibility increases, the tone arm falls from the dead-body Clear read of the thetan—dead—through 1, down through 7, which your tone arm won't register. Down through 6.5, down through 5, down through 4, down through 3, down to 2, down to 1, down to 7, down to 6.5, down to 5, down to 4, down to 3, down to 2, down to 1.5.
And it could be expected to do all those things in the course of clearing from a case who was on the extreme bottom when you picked him up. You got it?
Now look, if you get worried about a rising needle, look what happens: You're going to say at once, "Well, the tone arm mustn't change position." Because they're hooked together. Let me point this out: that for the tone arm to change position, the needle must rise, at some time or another. It's also got to fall at some time or another, right?
So trying to restrain the action of the tone arm or trying to restrain the action of the needle, on the part of the auditor, is actually an effort to restrain the pc from recovering. And yet we hear of it every once in a while.
Now, boil-off is not in this serious a consideration. Out of your kindness of your hearts—you know, sometimes you are too kind. A lot of you are suffering from an overdose of kindness.
Kindness goes an awful long ways, and I couldn't live without it, and I think it'd be wonderful, and there's been far too much violence. And all these things we understand. But kindness can be overvalued. You can be kind to somebody—so kind to him that you'll kill him.
Supposing you started running a pc and the pc objected one way or the other because the pc had a somatic. And you said to the pc, "Oh, well, we'd better not run that because it's hurting you," and we changed it and ran another process.
And then, we ran a process, and it turned on a somatic. And then we said to the pc, "I'm not going to audit you through that because it's hurting you." You got the idea?
And by the time we'd done that about the third time, the pc would spin straight in. And you would have been kind to him; you would have helped him to death. You see? So there is a fact.
Actually, you sometimes get a very kind manager or a very kind officer who simply winds up getting everybody court-martialed, shot, murdered and burned, you see? They manage it, one way or the other. Because it's just a totality of kindness with no idea of effectiveness. See? Effectiveness gets laid aside, and only kindness stands in its stead. And when that kind of a condition exists . . .
Some bird's doing a bad job, you see? Somebody's doing a bad job, and he's kind and he doesn't mention it. And the guy's doing a bad job, and he's kind and he doesn't mention it.
And then, one of two things happens. Either this fellow's accu- the target's accumulated ineffectiveness costs the lives of a dozen men, or the jobs of a dozen men, or quite unaccountably, the fellow who's being so kind finally gets absolutely outraged when he finds the consequences and shoots the guy in his tracks.
In other words, they're kind right up to the point where they pull out the pistol and drill him in the heart. You got the idea? And very often you'll see kindness under this particular stress. And you'll see somebody being shot down in flames because they're being kind.
I try not to do that. I mean, an organization a short time ago had a warning and then got shot.
And now they're convinced, and I have a cable on my desk, and all is well. And they all of a sudden, mysteriously, have produced out of the blue, students, pcs, see? It's very mysterious. The Academy suddenly got full. I mean, it just happened within forty-eight hours after they received the cable.
I don't know what they did! Maybe they went out in the street and found natives. It wasn't running this way just forty-eight hours ago. But here was kindness.
Now, what would have been the right thing to do, from a "kind" viewpoint, was just to have not said anything about it because it would hurt somebody's feelings, and let the organization collapse, and let the fellow have a big lose, and let everybody in the area that's dependent on the organization all of a sudden, go without service or interest or hope or anything else. And you could have just been kind until you would have killed the whole, lousy, cotton-picking lot. You see that?
Well, this shows up in auditing as never before. If you haul off of a process because somebody boils off on it, you are hauling off of the process which is running off their overts.
Now, what's the matter with a pc? It's his overts, that's what!
All right. Now, theoretically, it's a stuck flow—on the mechanical side. Mechanical side—stuck flow. Flow flows too long in one direction, it gets stuck. When you trigger that flow or try to flow it a little bit longer in the same direction, the pc boils off. Boil-off is a stuck flow. You can make anybody go unconscious by making them stick flow long enough, mechanically. But why is this?
That's an interesting thing, that you can merely make a guy get a stuck flow and boil him off. You can boil off almost anybody.
Some guy who was quite alert, and so forth, you can actually say, "All right. Now you put the ashtray on the table. Thank you. You put the ashtray on the table. Thank you. You put the ashtray on the table. Thank you. You put the ashtray on the table...."
It isn't going to show up that way quite as fast as this command: "All right. Get the idea of somebody putting the ashtray in your lap. Get the idea of somebody putting the ashtray in your lap. Get the idea of somebody putting the ashtray in your . . ." Thu-thu-thu-thu-thu-thu-thu-thu.
It doesn't seem right, you know? Well, he'll do it. "Get the idea of putting the ashtray in your lap. Get the idea of putting..." Zub-zab-zub-zub-zubzub-zub . . .
We've got a little red character running around England right now who is running a one-way-flow process, and it's making everybody nice and unconscious. And she's very happy about it, because she's never had any other target in her life but to make people unconscious. You get the idea?
She's found out if you run a stuck flow, they konk out. But there's nothing, nothing, you see, of any importance about this. You can't ruin a pc.
But look, where did all these stuck flows get parked? Are they over at Graftie Manor? No. Are they in East Grinstead? Probably. Just where did they all get parked?
And as you audit a pc, don't you suppose this pc has ever had stuck flows on the track? Well, where are they going to go when you audit them off? Or are they supposed to be delicately taken apart so it doesn't boil off? Well, you're not taking the case apart that delicately, so the fellow gets a stuck flow—running off. And when he gets a stuck flow running off, he tends to go woag. You got the idea?
There are stuck flows in the bank. And when those stuck flows start coming off, your pc woags. And that is all you can say about it. Got it?
Now, it happens to be a very curious thing, but most of the time, if a pc were to go unconscious, apparently, and you were to continue to give the auditing command, without any acknowledgment on the part of the pc that he was doing it or had done it, the pc would do the auditing command if given at about the same frequency or a little slower than he was getting it when he was awake.
Because the pc doesn't go unconscious. Like the little pea in the seven mattresses of the princess, he is sitting down underneath all the layers of what-not, being quite alert. But he can't keep his eyes open, see? Got the idea? And he actually will obey auditing commands. Why should you stop giving the auditing commands? If he doesn't hear you, he won't obey them, and what have you done? Nothing.
But if he did hear them and he did obey them, he will come out of the boil-off with great rapidity. And I've audited many pcs straight out of a boil-off. Now, I found in about 56, something like that, that you could do this. You could audit a pc through a boil-off by continuing to give the auditing command while he was boiling off. And it is not an implant situation, although it looks like it to you. He comes right on out through the boil-off. Of course, very often he won't remember having done it. And this brings us to "What is boil-off?"
Boil-off is the accumulated not-know that the pc has run on everybody. That's on the mental, not mechanical—the thought-postulate level.
And if the pc has gone around—well, let's say he's been a university professor. And let's say that he has insisted, absolutely, in teaching nothing but the theories of Hegel. And he has held the fort against all comers on the theory of Hegel. Even to the point where, when they discover an eighth planet, he proves conclusively that it is utterly impossible for there to be an eighth planet, because the perfect number is seven.
Do you know that the discovery of the eighth planet by telescope was utterly and completely denied for a long while and the evidence was thrown away of its discovery? Because, according to Hegel, there could only be seven planets because seven is a perfect number.
Now, supposing this university professor teaching this also insists that nobody ever look for any truth anywhere. Oh, klow! You get this bird, a million years after the fact or twenty days after the fact or something like that, and you audit him, and what's he going to do?
He is going to boil of£ And I don't care how many ways you try to run the flow, he's going to boil off. That is all. Because what is unconsciousness but the intensification of unknowingness? And that is all that unconsciousness is, is the intensification of unknowingness. It is the final mechanism of how not to know.
Unconsciousness is well below death, because a person very often gets knocked off and goes right on knowing all about it. What gives with an anesthetist? Don't you suppose—here's a more direct Q and A that's more easily understood. How about this anesthetist? You start auditing this anesthetist and she goes blooeea-bong! Why? She's running a not-know about the operation, not-know about the operation. They roll in another patient, she puts the mask over their face and shoots them the juice, or whatever they do these days. I think they feed them the needle and the whiff all at the same time, and then slap the ether on top of it. They're being thorough these days. If they aren't permitted to kill them, they can certainly put them out.
So you start running this girl and she says—you say, "Well, we've got a little process here which is ARC Straightwire. And we're going to run this process, ARC Straightwire." And we say, "All right. Now recall a time you were in communicati " She's gone!
And you say, "Hey! Tsk! Tsk!" Kick her in the soles of the feet or something like that, the way used—we used to do Dianetically. That's all right; it works.
And say, "I didn't even get to finish the auditing command. Now come on, let's get the auditing command here."
She says, "Auditing command?" Fumph! 
And you practically will have to hold her up in the auditing chair with broomsticks, you know? Go get the broom and prop them under her head and prop her so she'll sit there. Why? She's been running not-know, not-know, not-know, not-know, not-know, not-know, not-know, not-know. You understand? Day and night, she's been dramatizing not-know with velocity.
So there we are. There is an excess of kindness that winds somebody up in the thorough soup. Because, of course, every time she anesthetizes somebody, she lets them be less familiar with pain, and they will recover much more slowly.
"Oh," you say, "pain is a good thing?"
Yeah, I suppose any remedy is a good thing after a guy has gone completely off—completely over the rolly coaster and completely off the end of track, and he's lying there in the bushes, and there's no way to audit him at all, and he is suffering. Well, by all means, whip out your morphine and give him a shot in the gluteus maximus.
But there isn't any point in doing that if you could be effective, you see? But it's only a symptom of ineffectiveness. If you can't be effective, you can be kind. And I suppose that should appear on the tombstone of practically every movement, organization, government and great man that has bit the dust and seen his goals in flinders. "If you can't be effective, be kind." And he didn't try to be effective, he just tried to be kind. And there he went. As a matter of fact, probably all that happened to the Romans and Christianity is they were kind. I've, incidentally, gone over a lot of these court records about the early Christians and the martyrs, and it's quite interesting, quite interesting 
The courts were trying to be fair and trying to be nice about it. And they'd be sitting there in session, and all of a sudden some wild, whirling dervish would scream into the courtroom and say, "I'm a martyr! Execute me!" 
And the judge would say, "Well now, boy, bailiff, would you please find out what the man wants there?"
And this guy'd come screaming up to the front of the room, throwing his arms around, saying, "I'm a Christian! And it's on the imperial tablets that I am to be executed for being a Christian. Now, I am a martyr, so execute me! Because then I will go to heaven and eat pie in the sky from here on out."
The guy never thought twice; he's probably lousy with a harp. But it's been his whole unaesthetic career that he only does those things he's lousy at.
And they frankly would refuse to do a thing to him. And they'd kick him out in the street and go on with whatever trial they were going on with, and all would calm down.
And a few minutes later, the fellow would be bursting into the room and say, ';You are not doing your duty! I am a Christian; execute me!" So they executed thirty.
And in one year in Alexandria, the Homoiousian sect of the Christians fighting with the Homoousian sect of the Christians—and we can only find one difference in their creeds, is one spelled its name with an i, and one spelled its name without one. And in one year, they killed one hundred thousand Christians. Quite interesting what might pursue immediately after this.
The Romans were very kind; the early Christian was very, very cruel. So now we find out the Romans were very cruel and the early Christians were very kind. But the records don't bear this out.
Now, as far as survival is concerned, if you want to survive, I guess, be cruel. I suppose that's the most short-term method of survival. But it's not any long-term method of survival.
But being kind and being ineffective, of course, is a fast way to the electric chair; it is a fast way to insolvency; it's a fast way to bankruptcy of all kinds and descriptions; it's a fast way to the death chamber and the cemetery. And more important to us, it is a fast way to oblivion on the whole track—being very kind.
"Well, we understand that you're having difficulties, Mr. Jones. We understand you're having difficulties, and we will try to help you out, Mr. Jones. You say we're going to have this fence down here, and we'll build this fence for you a little bit better so it keeps your cattle in."
And the more you're kind to Mr. Jones, the more things Mr. Jones realizes he can now get away with. And all of a sudden he moves over too far. And you suddenly say to Mr. Jones, "That pasture, you can no longer pasture your cattle in. And yes, I know that means bankruptcy for you, Mr. Jones, but you've had it." And I think this is a rather cruel operation.
We've just done it here at Saint Hill. Just done it. Of course, we haven't made the man bankrupt, but the staff has gotten so impatient and so screamingly angry at this fellow who always wants favors, that nobody has ever said to him, "Mr. Jones, why don't you pull up your socks?" Nobody has ever said this, you see?
And as a result, we've got a kind of a not-know running in the middle of kindness, don't you see? Because the guy is left unwitting of the fact that he's actually making enemies. You see?
So these people that have been going around saying "Love, love, love thy neighbor, love, love, love"—I think there have been a lot of songs written about it, a lot of hymns written about it. A fellow by the name of Bach wrote some music about it one time. Organ player. Played in some cathedral someplace. He couldn't hire musicians, so he had to train all of his kids into an orchestra.
And anyway, this fellow used to write boogie-woogie, very complicated boogie-woogie, that sounds something like a spiritual orgasm from New Orleans, you know. And he called it "Loving Sheep" or something.
And of course, I figure the abbots of that day were all tone deaf. So they'd look at this music, and it says, "Sheep Amongst the Meadow Worshiping the Lord" you see, as the title of the script.
And he'd say, "You'd better give me my ten bob," or whatever they gave him to write a song.
And they'd say, "Well, that's very nice." And they would buy it, you see, and didn't know what they were listening to afterwards.
Now, you listen to this music, and if you don't listen to the titles, you know, you say, "Boy, those guys—those hepcats get a little more speeded up, they'll almost get a Dixieland, you know?"
I know this is sacrilege. Sacrilege. It's sacrilege against the worship of music.
But let's take a look here at the anaten factor that stems from all of these various philosophies, all of these oddities. Until we finally get a philosophy that is so gargantuan in its unknowingness, that it is its principal philosophy. And when that philosophy arose amongst this particular rave, it stopped philosophy. So that today, doing what we are doing, we seem odd.
We are thinking and we're not supposed to think. And if we do anything in the field of philosophy, you see, what we're supposed to do is read Immanuel Kant. And he said everything there was to know on the subject of philosophy.
You see, he writes a book to prove that you are immediately disciplined anyway and that the overt-motivator sequence really does exist. And then he writes another book immediately afterwards and says you're paid for it, you see? He writes one book to say that... You know, that's his two main books.
And I just noticed the other day, there hasn't been a philosopher since. It's quite interesting. What did he introduce into philosophy?
They call him "The Great Chinaman of Konigsberg." Well, I don't know, I don't call him that.
The only thing I've got against this runt, this intellectual pygmy, is just this—is just this—this one little thing: He invented the fact that the highest level of knowingness is to be totally ignorant and you could never find out about it. It's called transcendentalism.
And he says, "Anything that is really going on, you will never know about. So go ahead, little, stupid blinkety-blanks, my children, and you will realize that anything that you begin to know about, you can't know about it. So there's nothing you can know about anything anyway, so you might as well quit."
Now, it is said in much different language. But the reason it has to be said in such polysyllabic, German compound-felony language is that in bare terms, and in a bare statement of fact such as I've just stated, it's totally unpalatable. And yet you want to read all there is to know about transcendentalism and you will find out that that is it. It is the great philosophy of not-know.
It says, "No matter how much you study the physical universe, you jerks, you ain't going to know anything. You're just a bunch of ignorant bums, because all of that is unknowable."
How do you like that! It's all unknowable.
And you know why the mind has not kept pace—technology in it—along with the pace of physics is because it was stopped on the track by the basic theory that you can't know about it anyway. It's impossible to know about, so therefore, you can't know about it. So ever since that time, all they've been doing is quoting Greek philosophers.
Man, I had a few too many Greek tutors to go around quote 'em! Aw, come off of that! You mean, you go upwards to twenty-three hundred years later, you've still got to have these guys haunting you? No, no thank you. No thank you.
A Greek tutor—that's something you get rid of in very early childhood. And you certainly don't keep it through adulthood. And you certainly don't keep it for twenty-three hundred years. Because the-Greek philosophies are very fine, and we're glad that man thought. But the last time I was down in Athens, I found out what the Greek philosophies were all about: if you couldn't lick 'em, you could confuse 'em. And they did it with two things— philosophy and entertainment.
And I have seen better nightclub operation in a perfectly lousy hole-in-the-wall, nobody-ever-heard-of-it nightclub in Athens than you would find in the finest theaters of New York City. Guys just operating for buttons. They were really good. They were very, very good. They were very good at it. They have saved this all through the centuries. They are the original cabaret owners.
After you get the enemy there and he's conquered you and so forth, you show him conclusively that he can be out-created by turning loose a bunch of dancing girls on him that really get his eyes popping. And he forgets to conquer. They did it to the—they did it to race after race. They did it to Persians, and they've done it to Egyptians and they've done it to Romans. And they're still on top. Pretty interesting. It's a modus operandi for conquest.
And so is philosophy. If you want a complete catalog of the Greek philosophies, take something on the order of the Prehav Scale and figure out each one totally dramatized, and write a total philosophy around that level of the Prehav Scale. And say that is it, and there is only this, and you've got one of the Greek philosophies—or one of the Persian philosophies, or one of the Egyptian philosophies.
Try it some time. Just try and look at the level of the Prehav Scale and figure out what would be a philosophy that obscured everything under the sun except this one thing—what kind of a philosophy it'd be. After you've thought about it for a while, it'll suddenly dawn on you that you are looking at the philosophy of something like Rosicrucianism. That is it, you see? Or you're looking at the philosophy that was practiced in Egypt, or you're looking at Stoicism.
Just look at No Effect. There's No Effect on the Prehav Scale. Now just figure out what kind of a philosophy would you work out that would totally bar out any slightest effect of any character. And you wind up with Greek Stoicism. And similarly, you can do this with every level of the Prehav Scale. It is a reactive scale. So, of course, there's a broad appeal.
Any time you're too broke, your case has gone to pieces, and you've become utterly unprincipled, somewhere up the track, and you land amongst the wogs, always remember that you can dig up a piece of the Prehav Scale and get a marble palace with a gold roof.
Just figure out where they sit on the Prehav Scale and dream up a philosophy to prove it. And if you prove it conclusively that that's where they sit on the Prehav Scale and this is the very best thing to do—ahhh, they'll make you the governor of the joint as well as the high priest.
You see, most philosophy has deteriorated to some kind of a yip-yap agreement with what they have already got. This is a natural impulse, because all you had to do was open a book of the compound philosophies of the ages that is in the library. And you take it down from the library shelf and look for a copy of it where book markers have been at work. And you will find the most fantastic banalities underscored.
Here's a perfect gem of wisdom sitting there. But do they underscore that, you see? Oh, no, they will underscore something heavily, you see, with marks in the margins and notes over here, "God is love."
And you say, "Come off of it, man!"
And you read on both sides of this, it proves conelusively that the guy, actually, is talking about the fact that religion divides itself up into love and hate. And the phrase "God is love" has gotten into a compound sentence. And it says, "In most countries, the more inane religions subscribed to by the very weak pronounce the theory 'God is love.' Whereas, anybody on a casual inspection could demonstrate that if a god is love and yet keeps hitting people with lightning bolts, it couldn't possibly be a mono-theoristic religion."
And this book marker has read that whole thing, and he's gone right into the middle of it, and he's underscored "God is love." And then he's put over in the margin, "This is certainly true!"
Man, I'm telling you, ladies and gentlemen, your postulates and operations on the whole track really stick in the philosophic line! It's a great compliment to your ability to make a postulate stick.
Well anyhow, as you come up the line and look all this over, you get into an interesting frame of mind about this sort of thing. You're liable to get into this kind of a frame of mind: The truth is a subjective phenomenon and only exists as a subjective phenomenon, and there is no broad or agreed-upon truth or anything. You have the philosophy of the only-one: general semantics. See? General semantics.
They've gotten it down to the fact, not only is there no truth, but there is no meaning. And nobody can talk to anybody because everybody means something different by everything that is said.
Well, they might have trouble talking to people, but-I tell you, I don't! So there must be something wrong with their theory. All you've got to find is one wild variable on their theory, of course, and it blows up, and that's me.
I don't have any trouble talking to people. I don't have any trouble getting them to find out what I mean, either. And I don't have the least bit of trouble finding out what they mean. I may ask them three times, and they may practically blow their stacks and figure out that I must be the most stupid guy they have ever met, but I eventually find out what they mean. See? And I'm not out of communication, even if general semanticists are, see? There are all these levels. Failed communicate—we've got it with us.
We have one philosophy on the Tone Scale, totally built out of one level on the Tone Scale: 1.1-ism. It's—was brought forward by the fellow of the name of Dale Carnegie. It's how to be a successful 1.1. Read him if you don't think so.
Man, you never saw such stuff. And you meet most salesmen that have been supertrained in this, and you wind up dodging, never answering your phone, going nowhere near your mailbox, just for fear these people will appear.
So I think Carnegie, having accomplished his goal, pleasantly kicked the bucket and went on to happier rewards. But I think his effort was to stop all selling everywhere! Must have been, because you just try and monkey around with this 1.1 type of selling. Try to communicate with a no-reality. Try to talk to people by never uttering what you think.
You can't communicate with people by never uttering what you think. They'll get this odd feeling of the unreality of it all. Now, why do they get this feeling of an unreality of it all? Because you're running a not-know on them, aren't you?
See, you're talking to them, and you think this guy ought to be thrown down the nearest well, see. You think his product would not even make a good bonfire. And yet, you say, "Well yes, Mr. Jones, yes, we're very interested in—product," and so on. "Why don't you call later or talk to our general manager about it?" and so forth.
What are you doing? You're just making yourself more stupid, that's all. Why? Because you've got a not-know overt.
But believe me, he will sense this. Somehow or another he'll sense this. It sort of comes out of the atmosphere, somehow or another. It sort of drips off the walls that there is no sincerity being accomplished around here. So the communication doesn't occur.
And we get our old ARC triangle. And where reality is not present, a not-know is substituted for it. Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! So you have a definition of unreality. God, I never thought I'd get to that! And the definition of unreality is a substitution of a known for an un—I mean an unknown for a known. If you want to create a big unreality, all you have to do is just substitute an unknown for a known.
The Russians do this rather well with communism. Everybody knew it was cold in Russia and that Russians were hard to govern, and a whole bunch of things like this. And so they put a bunch of unknowns in the line. They even got an iron curtain. You can't even communicate about, with or around the country. And people have an odd, odd feeling about Russia.
And yet Russia is working like mad trying to communicate to everybody. Well, that's interesting, isn't it? They must be running a vast not-know on all of us. Maybe there's some good things in Russia, who knows? Maybe there's some bad things. Maybe there's something workable in communism, who knows?
Because you know desperately, in the final analysis, that the reading of an entire Russian exposition of what the Russian is doing is the substitution of a series of unknowns for a series of knowns. They know what their production figures are. And you get the weird idea that you don't know.
You've read them, see. "Eight-hundred billion pairs of shoes a minute are produced in Russia," you see, "under our great system, and with our great dictator," and so forth.
And you read that figure and some feeling comes over you that somebody has tampered with the statistics. So this winds you up, actually, not just believing that this is false; it winds you up with a whole series of speculations, most of them bad.
You try to figure out how many pairs of shoes would really be produced in Russia per minute. "Let's see, there are three Russians working, and I'm sure they're not making shoes." And you wind up this way. And you finally say, "Well, you know, there's. . ." You conclude only one thing in the face of commie propaganda—eventually, anybody who can think at all—eventually concludes one thing: that you don't know anything about it. They spread this as a big unreality. They are the kings of mystery on this planet at the present time. They have taken over from religion as being the czars of mystery. And that's how they do it.
You can actually get pretty annoyed with a person after a while if every time you asked them how they are, they say they're fine. And you know damn well that they've got a backache and a headache and they feel like hell.
And you say, "How are you?"
And the person says, "I am fine."
You do several things. Amongst them is go down the Tone Scale with regard to this person. The person is substituting a nonfact for an observable fact, you see?
And you keep getting this unreality thrown at you. And eventually, the person starts to kind of disappear. And this very curious phenomena will occur around a person who is doing this to other people. One man, eventually, could not see his wife when she was in the same room. He'd look straight through her and would see nothing but the wall on the other side.
Now, that is one—an interesting phenomena. It is reproducible in hypnotism. You can hypnotize somebody and tell him the table isn't there, and he'll see straight through the table and see the carpet on the other side of it, which was of great mystery and interest, and probably formed one of the primary bulks of research of people like Charcot and Mesmer—these boys. They did an awful lot of interesting things. They'd make people sense things at a distance and do all kinds of things.
Now, what is this factor of reality and communication and not-know? They just add up to a tremendous woag, you see? And it'll demonstrate itself mechanically with boil-off, so that everybody gets more and more stupid.
Now, in the field of philosophy, a fellow comes along and with great authority says everybody, if they achieved it to the ne plus ultra, would finally find out that they couldn't know. And oddly enough, it had enough effect on this society that I think there are people right here who used to buy it. Or you've certainly heard it, but you didn't buy it very hard. But you know a lot of people who have bought it.
"You shouldn't research into the mind, and you shouldn't do this, and you shouldn't do that. And you shouldn't think about it, because you couldn't know anything about it anyway."
Oh, wow, what is this? See? I mean, well, the least you could do is put some invented knowingness there, the way the Christians did.
But to say that it is totally unknowable—all of the secrets of the existence are totally unknowable. Oh, my contempt. I spit! What fabulous conceit the man had, to know that it was all unknowable. What a conceited dog!
Now, if there's a tremendous not-know associated with a person, he tends to persist like mad. And you get all sorts of oddball aberrations going in the society. For instance, the monk Dharma who existed ten thousand years ago in India has formed the basis of most Indian religions. And not a thing is known about him or what he said. Isn't that fascinating?
I mean, Indian religions are based to a marked degree upon the sayings, findings and so forth of Dharma. Chinese religions are based on Dharma. We think it means "fate." That's how far it goes. You look up in the dictionary and you'll find Dharma has something to do with fate or something of the sort. Doesn't tell you what it is.
And you look up in one of these textbooks of one of these Johnny-come-lately Indian hoaxes that they call the great revelations and—Suba-bubabooba-booba-ba I think is their last one. You look up for the—you look up in this textbook on this and you'll find Dharma described in a very fantastic definition which is long and drawn out.
Actually, everything in that textbook, by the way, is incorrect. You read over the—all the definitions of the various missions and words and so forth, of past philosophies in this new gu-gug and you'll find they're all defined with a big zzzzz curve, see?
Actually, Dharma was the name of a monk and that is it. And of course, he had a fantastic influence upon Indian philosophy, so they began to regard him as fate itself. But he is actually a loftier name in the philosophies of the East than Buddha. But nothing is known about him. Nothing So here you have a fabulous not-know, don't you? And you get a terrific persistence of this not-know, don't you?
Well now, look, if it can ride so thoroughly in the philosophies of a country or a people, how do you think it rides along in somebody's reactive mind? Hm?
You might say the least known philosopher on the whole track Earth— immediate track Earth—current, present-time Earth—is a fellow that we don't even know what his name is. We don't even know it's a fellow. Got the idea? It's a fate.
No, it wasn't a fate. It was probably somebody who washed his feet in a brook and put his begging bowl out where it belonged and laid down the law, and said what he thought was right and so forth. And yet, this fellow's been totally devoured in time.
I happen to know something about this particular character myself. But if he can ride that unknown up the track and be the influential background to somebody that we know rather well—Lao-tse, see? Confucius. A Buddha. They all go back to this fellow. And we don't know anything about it. Why is he still there? It's because we don't know anything about him. He's held in place by the not-know. Not-knowingness does not result in an obscurement, but is known to you as not-isness, you see?
So there he is riding on the track like mad, expressed in everybody's mind through India, through China. He's the background of the most broadspread religion of peace that this planet has had. And yet, we call the background of this planet "Buddha," see, the Eastern religions. We say, well, Buddha or Confucius or Lao-tse, or—see? But, actually, sitting right back of their shoulders is this Dharma and we don't even know it's a man; it's fate. You got the idea? Do you see the alter-isness, so forth?
Well now, just take that as an example of what happens in somebody's reactive mind when you get a not-know riding along the line to this degree. What happens? He boils it off, that's what happens! He runs into the Dharma on his track. The total not-know that is still totally in place. And he starts to go clog, woag, thud.
Not-know is the extreme manifestation—in its most extreme manifestation is unconsciousness. Not-know in a lesser manifestation is death. The most extreme manifestation is when a person cannot go unconscious. And we call that insanity. And insanity lies on that band. You have death, which is simply a state of beingness rather than an action. It means the fellow is no longer inhabiting a body. But we can't say what his condition was in at the time he left. He normally wasn't unconscious.
And we go down into unconsciousness and we're below the ramifications of death. And now we go down in below the ramifications of unconsciousness and we find insanity and at that level a person is unable completely, totally and utterly to not-know it. But what is he trying to not-know? By this time he's trying to not-know about the fifteenth substitute. And you get a delusory state that the person cannot not-know.
And you'll find people who are incipiently insane are going around all the time a little bit worried about something that might be just around the corner. They—"Let's see, thuhhh . . ."
You listen to them. Just get the common denominator of all of their conversation. It's the inability to not-know a substitute. Or it's the inability to not tolerate not-knowing a substitute.
It's the ability—their sole ability left is just to recognize that there are intolerable not-knowingnesses that they cannot escape—and that they lie in wait for them. They lie in wait everywhere, everywhere.
And they walk down the street, and just outside the circle of the lamplight... They don't even dare articulate it, you see? Just outside the circle that the lamp is—street lamp is making on the pavement there . . .
And you find them all in a—always in a constant, inarticulate terror about something. Or you find them in immediate and terrible combat against something that is undesignatable. And you find them in a state where they have collapsed before the not-knowingness of what assails them. And you'll get them running the whole Tone Scale about a not-knowingness.
But that Tone Scale occurs after unconsciousness. And it's a Tone Scale—is not-knowingness. They go from an inseni—serenity about a notknowingness. You can find a total nut who's going around saying—he's just entering the field of nuttiness, but it'll be something like this:
"Well, I don't know, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, really, that I don't know. And I don't know really, but it doesn't matter! It doesn't matter and I'm being very serene. The best thing to do is to be calm about it all. And I will just go on being calm about all this, and so forth. And what happens happens and uh, so forth. And uh, I just won't think about it anymore. I'm going to stop thinking about it now. That's right. And what happens, happens. And uh, I just don't know anything about it, so there isn't any reason to perturb myself about it at all. Because I don't know anything about it, you see? And therefore, I have forgotten it all.
"And I'm in that pleasant state, right now, of not even being—not dwelling on it for a moment. And I just don't give it another thought, so that is the state I am in. And that is very nice and I am being very happy. And it's a sensible state to be in, you see, because there isn't any knowing about it, you see? So you just might as well be serene about the whole thing.
"And that's why I'm so serene. I never worry. You think for a moment I am worrying, you're very mistaken. Because it doesn't matter anything to me that I don't know about this. Never enters my mind that I don't know about it. In fact, I don't even know what I don't know about!"
You run into this person. They usually pass for a sane person. They're pretty sane compared to the rest of them.
Now you go on down Tone Scale from that and you get each point of the Tone Scale about a not-know. The person is angry about a not-knowingness. But remember, it—this—in insanity it is always a not-knowingness about an unknown. They don't know what they don't know about. You got the idea? They have no target.
It's interesting. You get a classification of this. Don't hang this appellation around somebody because he's simply upset because he can't find his car keys! This boy is all right. He knows he doesn't know where his car keys are. Not only that, but he also knows that it's car keys that he doesn't know about. See?
Well, that's sane as can be. And he can be very misemotional about this thing on the misemotional scale without being insane. He might be frantic, but he's not insane. No, no, you're looking at an entirely different phenomenon.
This person does not know what he is in—frantically looking for. You got the idea? If you can envision somebody who has lost his car keys but doesn't know that he has lost his car keys and is looking for his car keys but doesn't know it's his car keys that he's looking for, but is just going around, just going around, looking, looking in a terrible frantic state of mind, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking
You see them in asylums. You'll say, "What are you looking for, bud?"
And he'll say, "Don't disturb me! Don't disturb me! I might forget what it is."
Well, forget what it is! He doesn't know what it is.
Everybody—of course, people like Freud immediately go kling-klonk, and try to find out what the man is looking for. Well, of course, the man is looking for nothing. It's simply a phenomenon of looking. You understand?
It's franticness about it. He'll be in grief. You'll see somebody sitting there crying and crying and crying. You say, "What are you crying about?"
Well, they can't articulate what they're crying about. They don't know what they're crying about. They haven't a clue what they're crying about. But if you stated it one way or the other, they're crying because they, of course, haven't been able to find out about what they don't know about.
And that is the way the reactive bank stacks up. Just ting-ting-ting-ting-ting. Right there, bing-bing-bing-bing-bing! They're crying about not being able to know what they're crying about. You see, it's a total reactive-thought device. You'll find them all up and down the Tone Scale and characterize every one of them.
If you want to put together a new scale of insanity and make a name for yourself amongst psychiatrists, go ahead. Because you just describe the Tone Scale and describe each one of these states. But describe the person being unable to conceive what it is that is in this state that he is upset about, envisioning what he would do in those mental reactions, you of course wind up with a hundred percent and only just this one thing, totally fixed on that misemotional state, because he can't know or mustn't know or is curious about knowing or mustn't let anybody else know about what he doesn't know about. And there's where your knowingness doubles up and there's where you get the guy totally fixed on the track.
If you've ever worried about whether or not you're potty and going around the bend, up the chimney or something of the sort, just ask yourself this question: do you know what you're going up the chimney about? Just ask yourself that question, you know? "Why am I unhappy tonight? What don't I know about tonight?" Well, if you can find out about what you don't know about tonight, why, you're very far from insane.
Insanity is the manifestation of not being able to. A fellow can't even find out that he is in grief because he can't find out about what he can't find out about. See? And of course, that—the mere fact that you are able to speculate, moves you out of the total-dramatize category. Just the fact that you'd say, "Let's see, what am I unhappy about tonight?"—just the fact that you could say that—you're not nuts. It's just as easy as that.
But of course, there isn't anything when a person gets into that state. There is nothing there—anyhow. If you understand these various mechanisms, when you look at somebody then they won't baffle you. Because your bafflement is simply a Q&A with their not-knowingness. And the reason you get concerned about insanity and that sort of thing, and the reason you very often find an auditor going puppy to the root on an insane case, and not being able to stop auditing the insane case, is because the auditor starts Q&Aing, trying to find out what the insane case doesn't know. And the auditor gets to try to find out what it is that the insane case doesn't know and the hideousness about it is, is factually, the insane case doesn't know about a don't-know, which of course adds up to the double-compound felony of it all.
So when you don't know about a not-know, you don't know whether not-know, and what it is, and whether or not you not-know it and you don't even know what it is that you don't not-know, you're a candidate—you're a candidate for the spinbin, you see.
There are two things that move it out. One of these things is the fact that you can speculate as to what you don't know. If you can do that, that's sane.
By the way, it's very interesting: you can introduce to a person who is even feeling spinny, you know, a sudden feeling of sanity by just asking them to think of one person who doesn't think they're insane. Did you know that? It's one of the most interesting tricks I ever dreamed up. You just say, "Well, think of one person that doesn't think you're crazy." Person will eventually think of his dog or something and turn sane just like that. Why? You've introduced a knowingness into his unknowingness. And you can introduce just one knowingness into an insane person's perimeter and you'll turn them sane. You just say, "Look around this room and find something that is really real to you." And this person will look all around the room and they may take a half an hour to do it and they eventually pick up a silver tea pot or something of the sort and say, "Boy, this is really real." And you'll just see them go sane.
It's good for one command. That's why it sort of tends to drop out of the lineup. But that's a terrific trick. That's a terrific trick. Both of those. Both of those. You get somebody who's going to blow his brains out and commit suicide and they're so terrified of all the terrifying things that they don't know what's terrifying about them, which is what makes them terrifying. If you were to say to them, "Think of one person who thinks you're sane." That's evidently a total non sequitur to them, but they'll think about it at once. They're almost incapable of not thinking about it. And you don't hear any more about suicide. So you see, it's an interesting little trick to have in your war bag. Hm?
Now, so much for all that. I've given you a very long, rambling discourse here today and I haven't answered any of your questions, and I can see that I have slugged you to some degree. You look a little overwhumped. So I'll tell you how to unwhump yourself—unwhump yourself. We're going to start to give the students Security Check practice. We'll start giving them a Security Check, insofar as possible, along with their auditing. In other words, you have to learn how to do Security Checks and you better learn how to do lots of them of various kinds. So if you just spend an hour or something like that a day or one page of the Joburg a day, security checking somebody, then you can be supervised as to how you're doing the Security Check. And you can be looked over about what you're doing, at the same time you're catalyzing the auditing which is going on.
And those auditors that are running CCHs on somebody shouldn't, actually, be doing a Security Check on them also. That Security Checking should be relegated to this other program. And then you will see faster case gains. It's almost a double-auditor situation.
But you need experience in doing Security Checking. And you need to do enough Security Checks that you become familiar with doing Security Checks. And with your familiarity, there may suddenly pop up something you feel you don't know about doing Security Checks and this is the place to find out you don't know. Because the information is all over the place. Got it?
Okay. Sound like a good program to you?
Audience: Yes, very good.
All right. So that's my contribution to unwhumping you.
In addition to that, I think you're making pretty good progress. I just looked over all of your case reports. There doesn't seem to be anybody hanging up here particularly badly—except you, of course! You seem to be doing all right. I'm actually very pleased with the way things are going on the thing.
But if you don't think that should be the state of affairs, don't get into a frame of mind that you mustn't tell Ron because it'll hurt his feelings. Realize you're just running a don't-know on Ron. Okay?
If you don't think things are running all right for you or your training or something like that and you can't nerve yourself up to say it to an Instructor or something-you think I ought to know about it, something like that-why, by all means just put a despatch on my lines. Okay?
And if you do miraculously find out there's something you don't know that you should know while you are here, and 90 forth, and you don't find it out, I'll think you're stupid!
Thank you.