STUDY AND INTENTION
A lecture given on 18 August 1966

Thank you. Thank you.
Well now, if I look-if I look a little bit used today and secondhand, the-if anybody thought Clear research took it out of me, man, OT research-WOW! Yeah, you think you got it all solved, you know? How did you get in this much trouble? How did I get in this much trouble? Yeah, man, you try to take the postulate of a 190-mile-high being and while you’re only five foot ten and a half; or something like that, take it apart - it’s ”Where’s your head?” you know?
This is very interesting. When you get Clear, I’ve got a little piece of advice for you: Why, get enrolled in the OT Course and do it step by step, politely and quietly. Don’t get ambitious. I’m the only one that’s expendable around here. Every time anything happens to me they say, ”Well, it serves him right,” and any time anything happens to you, that’s my fault. Yeah.
Anyway, what’s the date?
Audience: 18th of August AD 16.
Eighteenth of where?
Audience: August.
August.
Audience: AD 16.
AD 16. Thank you. You’re helping me out today. And what planet?
Audience: Earth.
Earth. What... yeah, good. Earth?
Well, actually, what this is all about-I really don’t have anything to talk to you about today. I want to make a little bit of a-well, I want to make a little bit of a correction. If you, as I did after the last lecture, go and look up Dharma (D-H-A-R-M-A) to find out what has been preserved of all that, why, save your-self the trouble. Dharma is anything from ”supreme law” to ”the total caste system of India” to ‘fate” and respelled love” and rephrased some other way, it is something else some other way, and so forth. And in no authoritative reference book that I’ve looked at to date that I have around at this particular time, is there any correct definition for Dharma. Boy, that is really great, you know, it’s really great! And in Buddhism it means ”the way,” see.
Now, I tell you, you go around getting your name synonymous with things, you know, and then your name becomes the thing, you know. If you make very good Frigidaires, why, eventually all iceboxes are known as Frigidaires, you see. But it’s worse than that, it’s worse than that. The name
becomes identified with the product rather than the source of the product, which I think is very fascinating. I just thought I would give you that as a little side note on the last lecture, because I thought, ”I wonder what they’re saying about that these days,” you know. ”I wonder if there’s any record of it around,” you know. By George, there isn’t! I notice, however, in many books such as the theosophy texts, and so on, that it is bounteously mentioned, but it doesn’t really say wherein.
Well, the age we’re in, by the way-the age we started, by the way-already has been named. This might also be an interesting side note to you. It’s the Age of Love. There was the Age of Reason and the Age of Science and the age of a lot of other things. But twenty-five hundred years ago, why, Gautama Siddhartha said that in twenty-five hundred years, the Age of Love would begin in the West and this is an interesting prediction because the first thing that Clears start talking about is love, you know. It’s interesting. Of course, nobody ever made this before, so how was he to know? But, anyway, this is supposed to be the Age of Love. No longer the Age of Reason-thank Cod!
Well, there are probably a lot of things I could talk to you about-I don’t know any of them at the present moment that would be more useful to you than another Completions are up so I don’t have to worry about that and you seem to be doing fine on the course, so I don’t have to worry about that. But there is a lecture that I think you could use in a high degree of generality and that is a roundup of the study materials.
There was never really a final lecture on the study materials and in this lecture I will not for a moment adventure to give you a summary lecture which includes all the salient points of the study materials. There are quite a few of them. But there are some additional materials about the study materials in general which I think you might find of great interest. And that is the basis of intent-intent during study. Now, this is a very; very important subject.
As you study, what do you intend to do with the information? Very important point!
There are points on the basis of faulty source, as you are studying. This we haven’t really looked at. We have presupposed that all sources that we are studying are themselves perfect, you see, and have - (1) have information to deliver and (2) are delivering it in a way that it can be assimilated. We’ve more or less assumed that and the student is always asked to take the effect point and assume that he is studying comprehensible, worthwhile material. This fact, all by itself tends to knock the whole subject of study appetite over tin cup because very little of the material you are asked to study has any value or comprehensibility out in the wog world. And it is a rare textbook which actually relays the information and subject matter which you are supposed to assimilate-a very rare textbook.
Now, when you get study gone mad, you really have a mess. This is one of the reasons why there are such a tremendous number of suicides in universities - and there are a great many suicides in universities. The proportion is fantastic. It is not as high as psychoanalytic practice suicides, which amount to one third in the first three months. Did you know that? Well, for some reason or other, it’s never been advertised.
The source of that is the psychoanalytic bureau, or whatever they called it, in New York. We’ve more or less finished that subject, by the way. Very little of it left.
But the suicides which occur in French universities is probably the highest in the world and French students blow their brains out and jump out of
windows all over the place come examination time.
The number of failures in a university do not, however, have anything whatsoever to do with the product turned out by the university. None of these things are related. Because their examinations are very hard does not make it a good university. You see, the ones with the hardest examinations are not necessarily those that produce the most brilliant students. It’s not a coordinated fact.
There are many other facts which don’t coordinate with regard to this and that is because study is a very fruitful field for a suppressive. It, like government, attracts suppressives like honey attracts flies. And you can get all types of suppressive reactions found in textbooks as well as behind the lecture rostrum. As a result-as a result, we have to, when we speak of the subject of study, discuss whether or not the subject itself has a clean bill of health. Is the subject an ethics-or the rendition of the subject-is this an ethics subject?
Now, I will tell you a field which, without any doubt whatsoever, would keep a thousand ethics officers busy a thousand years and that is the field of navigation. Now, I’m somewhat expert in this particular line, but I very seriously doubt if I could walk into a Board of Trade or Bureau of Navigation and pass today my master’s examinations in the field of navigation. I doubt this very, very much, because it has so little to do with navigation. And I have had the unfortunate experience of having had to navigate in many oceans off the cuff; on my own-inadequate equipment, stopped chronometers, and all of this sort of thing, and missing tables, and so forth. And somehow or another these barriers would not put you into a position-must not put you into a position where, of course, you lose the ship. So you navigate.
And the method by which you navigate is the all-important thing in an examination on navigation and that you navigate is the only test that Old Man Sea requires of you.
And I usually-usually when some chap has just passed his navigation examinations with ”A” and walks aboard a ship that I have anything to do with, well, I get very alert. Because this doesn’t say to me that he can navigate at all-has nothing to do with navigation. I’ve had such a chap walk aboard, take a look at the helm and say, ”So that is a wheel! Well, I’ve often wondered. And that is a binnacle, that’s a compass! Oh, goodness! And that’s an engine room telegraph! How interesting!”
And I thought to myself; ”How interesting!” The man had his ticket; he must have passed his examination. But he hadn’t even reached the point of where he knew the environment in which he was supposed to do his navigation.
And you break navigation down to its basic principles, you just have certain elementary principles which are just the facts of it, and they are very, very streamlined, obvious facts. For instance, the whole subject is dedicated to the location of where you are on a sphere. And in view of the fact the sphere also has rocks, shoals and land masses, also has somewhat tempestuous areas which are less safe than others and has calm areas that you jolly well better stay out of; it becomes somewhat important that you know where you are.
And in view of the fact that the sea is a water surface which obscures the things even a few inches below it. .. I remember one time sailing along in a perfectly beautiful flat calm and doing all right and looking over to port and seeing a sea gull walking on the water! You don’t think at that moment I went slightly pale! Because of tide-races which had been caused by a storm or were going backwards according to the tide tables, and so on-the depth of water over a shoal just alongside of me was not twenty feet, but was one inch! So you see... It was supposed to be high water at that time.
Now, therefore, all navigation performed with mathematical activities only can only be counted on to do one thing: wind you up on the rocks. That you’re fairly sure of. Because the whole subject is dedicated to knowing where you are. And the next thing is not running into, on or colliding with objects which you’re not supposed to frequent or associate with. That’s easy.
And then we have some other facts: that the stars don’t move very much; and cliffs and headlands don’t move very much; and the sun, it moves pretty regularly; and the moon moves erratically but very regularly-you can predict its erraticness. And so you can look at these things and if you have a chronometer which happens to have been wound up or can get a time signal from some place, you normally can locate where you are on the sphere by its reference to stellar bodies or, in case of piloting, by recognition of land masses. That’s actually all there is to the whole subject.
Now, do you understand something about the subject?
Audience: Yes.
I assure you that you now understand far more about the subject than a first-year midshipman at the Naval Academy. Because he’s given a book that is named Dutton. Dutton is the bible. Now, Dutton might have been a good textbook to begin with, but it has gotten into the hands of admirals; and it has been ceaselessly rewritten.
Now, the Primer of Navigation by Mixter was the elementary textbook which kept the officers who stayed off the rocks off the rocks in World War II. He published it in 1940; it became the bible of the young officer of World War II. And it now-Mixter is dead-is now in the process of being rewritten by the admirals. And when I read it the other day, I just picked up a copy of it and looked-read it-”This doesn’t sound like Mixter.”
So last night, I got ahold of a copy of my World War II copy of Mixter, and a brand-new copy of Mixter’s that just came off the press, and I read them page by page against each other and it’s considerably different! The words have gotten longer.
Now, Bowditch has undergone this process for so many years that from a little tiny textbook published at the end of the eighteenth century in simple language-so that even Bowditch’s cook could navigate after a cruise to China-has become a textbook about three or four inches thick which is staggeringly full of sines, cosines, haversines, tables, traverse tables, equations and all kinds of mad things. And it’s become an enormous book of tables. If they don’t know what to do with a navigational table, they put it in Bowditch. It is now an official textbook of the United States Navy I imagine there are things in the Royal Navy which have gone this same evolution.
But the main point I’m making here is that you would have thought somebody would have paid attention to such a subject-lack of knowledge of which kills men. See, you can die awful quick through an absence of navigation, you see - and not- sometimes not so quick, sometimes rather messily. You’d have thought they would have made every effort to make it simpler. Well, it’s true that they’ve evolved simpler methods of taking star sights, but their textbooks are so complicated that the first time I ever picked up a copy of the Naval Academy textbook on navigation, Dutton, I read the first four sentences, I read them again; they still didn’t make any sense. I read them again. I put the book down and that’s as far as I’ve ever gotten with Dutton.
Many years later-many years later, I read the first four sentences again and I found out that if you were an expert navigator and needed no information of any kind on the subject, the first four sentences of Dutton made sense.
Well, I think that’s very interesting.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its earliest editions, is a rather simple encyclopedia-very interesting. I don’t like editions later than the eleventh, because you find all sorts of things in editions up to then. They’re rather simply written. They’re written on the basis that a person owns an encyclopedia because he doesn’t know certain things, and he’ll want to look them up and find a quick rundown on them. Well, more recent Encyclopaedia Britannica, I’m sorry to say, publish articles on the subject of landscape gardening that only a landscape gardener could comprehend or be interested in. We’ve gotten into the world of the expert.
Now, the expert, in writing a textbook, very often goes mad. Last night I picked up a textbook on the subject of... I’m using navigation at this particular time instead of photography, as I was using in the subject before, just to get a parallel subject. I picked up a textbook on the subject of yacht equip-yacht cruising equipment. Oh, very, very authoritative text, very modern. And there was a chapter there on binoculars. So I looked into this chapter on binoculars and it’s just page after page after page about binoculars. It’s very interesting because it takes it up from the days of Galileo. It tells you how to build-without being specific about it, but being very complex with complete formulas - a Galilean telescope. I think it’s very useful; I can see me now out on a yacht in the middle of the Pacific building a Galilean telescope. I can see this now.
So anyway, it goes on from this-which is comprehensible-you say, ”Well, anybody would put that in the first paragraph.” No, he puts that in the first two or three pages.
And we go on from there to the assimilation and-of light by glass and various types of glass and how the glass is made, and we go on and on and on about the formulas now by which you grind glass. I can see me now, you see, just outside the Diamond Head at Waikiki, wondering which binocular to pick up and, ”Let’s see now, what is the glass formula that ground the glass of that binocular?” you see. Silly!
So anyway, it just goes on at this mad rate and at the end of it finally concludes, without any preamble of any kind whatsoever, that a yachtsman needs a 7 x 50 type pair of binoculars-an authoritative conclusion based on all of the optical formulas. A yachtsman is not an optician; what’s he got the formulas there for? Completely batty!
Now, the truth of the matter is that that chapter does not contain the following: how to preserve, waterproof and clean glasses being used at sea. And you can wreck a pair of glasses just that fast if you don’t know that. How to set a pair of glasses to your own eye prescription and be able to set up any binoculars that you pick up instantly so that you can use it instantly without fiddling about-didn’t contain that. Didn’t contain the fact that in small vessels, the vibration and the bounding about is such that the shake of the glass makes it impossible for you to detect numbers on buoys, or identities of or names of ships at any distance if you use too high a powered glass, and a 7 x 50 will inevitably blur out on the motion of a small yacht. It is not the glass for a yacht at all. What you want is a three- or four-power for a small boat, and then you can read the numbers on buoys. So even his conclusion was wrong.
Fascinating! He spends all these pages, see? But somebody comes along that’s had to live with binoculars, knows all the things that dumb, brandnew, untrained quartermasters can do with binoculars-you see, he’s used binoculars under all circumstances and he finds out that what the fellow wrote has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject.
But wait a minute, wait a minute. A fellow that’s been using them for years under those conditions doesn’t need that textbook, does he? And if that textbook doesn’t inform the user of any of the data that he will require in order to use... What is this?
Wow! There’s more to this than meets the eye. Considerably more to this than meets the eye. Let’s read a few books picked up at random off the shelf on the subject of the sea. And unless you are very clever-and a Scientologist-you will not notice that all it speaks of is disaster. It just tells you, consistently, page after page after page after page, how disastrous it all is, how you must do this and that because this is going to happen, how you must do that and this because something else is going to happen, how you must not do so-and-so because something else is going to happen. You read in vain how to get another half a knot out of your sail set. But you read all about how the tracks to the front of the sail as they attach it to the mast-not to go technical on you-how these little gimmicks that they put on the sail to go up the Marconi track, how they tear loose in storms and jam sideways and make it necessary for people to get up and climb up mast, which is impossible.
And if you read very much of this, you would not go to sea; you would be scared stiff; just scared stiff!
And even on a person of considerable experience this creeps up on him and he doesn’t notice it. And eventually he starts going to sea, and he gets in a sort of a half-hysterical frame of mind. Beautiful calm day, he’s out in the middle of a channel fifty miles wide, there are no ships in sight and he’s worrying about his azimuths, or did the subpermanent magnetism of the hull change the last time she was in dry dock, and is his compass reading right, and will he pick up-oh, just worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry. He’ll never sit back, you know, and say, ”Great!” you know?
Now, if you want to go into hysterics sometime, read coast pilots. For light reading, for those who like horror stories, that is what one recommends.
I remember one time considering taking the big jump down from Alaska-just going outside all protection in the middle of winter and tearing on down across the wide reaches of the Pacific and fetching up at a California port as a direct bang! you see, with an expeditionary vessel-without going behind anything, and so forth. And I sat there and the mate I had was sitting there, and we were both reading-we had two copies of the same coast pilot. And we were looking it all up-and it wasn’t-but it was not the same coast pilot; his was British and mine was American-and we read it.
It seems that five hundred miles off of the coast there are fantastic currents which, when the wind and fog come together-because the wind comes with the fog at the same time in the middle of December and January-you can absolutely count on being torn to pieces, sunk, engaged, involved, becalmed, messed up and in general finished. And it was so bad-it’s much worse than I’m saying-and it was so bad that he and I, sitting up... It was already, you see, complete black dark outside at high noon, you know, and we were going to take this run and somehow or other we were going to get the hell out of there. And we all of a sudden simultaneously broke into hysterical laughter Nothing could be that bad, you see, but nothing! The British pilot, American pilot-nothing could be that bad!
One time I read about a terrible tide-race. And it was a tide-race. And it told all about how it had sunk a Canadian gun boat and lost two hundred men, and that this tide-race went sixteen knots and - every time the tide changed, and there was a huge rock in the middle of it that split vessels apart but was visible at night because of the spray leaping into the air
Well, normally you would go through these things at slack water anyway. I went through it at slack water, and the cook, all the time we were going through it, was cooking up hot flapjacks and pushing them up on the bridge, because I was sitting there eating my breakfast the entire distance through this mad tide-race.
I shot another tide-race one time, a narrows, where ”anybody that entered it was practically sunk, but sometimes the ships caromed off the sides of the cliffs and kept afloat somehow.” And I was in the middle of this thing in the middle of the night, because there was an error in the American tide tables-a two-hour error-and I’d hit the thing at race instead of at slack. And the water was going through there just boiling white and, man, I came near that in a sailing ship and I was into it before I could do another thing. And the lights of the cabin were shining through ports on the cliffs, so close up that you could see the moss. And the tiller broke, and left us with no tiller So I rigged an emergency tiller in the middle of all of this and steered her on out the other side and suddenly realized we’d gotten through it. And I realized something else about it: I never really at any time ever had to know anything about that millrace at all, if I’d hit it at slack water, high water, or any other way, it didn’t matter if it was fast; it always sends a boat through. What was I studying tide tables for? So it runs fast. You get the idea?
Well, of course, it’s very nice to know all these cautions, but what did the captain of the Indianapolis... He was a US Naval captain. And they have stripes, you know, that go clear up to their cap. This fellow took the cruiser Indianapolis through this first narrows I was talking to you about. And the local pilots cautioned him about it and he’d read all the tide tables and he was a graduate of the Naval Academy and he was a man of great experience, I’m very sure, and so forth. And he had all this information, because every time they graduate, you know, up-I mean every time they get promoted they have to pass complete examinations on everything, you know? I’m sure he had the information-’A” student all the way. And he got the USS Indianapolis crossways in that channel at full race, with its stern stuck on one bank and its bow on the other. This he managed. I can’t for the life of me know how he could possibly have done it.
But if you look very carefully through these textbooks, you will find the bulk of them simply tell you not to go to sea, that it’s very dangerous. And a person who studies them very, very hard and abides by them totally, eventually loses all the fun of going to sea-and doesn’t.
So, there is suppression throughout that field. Now, of course, it is very nice for them to tell you that if you let the boat flood with butane gas and then strike a match, the boat will blow up. We’re glad to know that! It’s very nice to know where the rocks are. But let’s not concentrate on them for the rest of our lives. Let’s also point out where the open, easy-sailing water is, but we never hear about that; we just hear about the rocks.
And we could, then, take any subject and write it up for study purposes as a suppressive subject.
Now, you want to tell people the dangers-sometimes you can tell them too lightly, that’s true. For instance, it-I’d hate to tell people. . . There’s two extremes here: I’d hate to have to omit the idea that if you do an incorrect Search and Discovery you can make your PC quite ill. You get the wrong SP, the person can be sick; he can now get sick, because you’ve restimulated the right one, you see. And that is what’s making him sick. You’re not making him sick, the right one is.
Now, I can tell you that, but now to go on raving and ranting and describing S&D as only how not to get the wrong one because you’re sure going to do it, I could get you into a frame of mind-I don’t say I would-but you could be gotten into a frame of mind whereby you would probably never do an S&D because it’s too dangerous. Interesting! You could be scared right off of doing the right thing because it’s too deadly.
Well, now, that would be how you would curve a subject and make it suppressive. That’s a suppressive rendition of the subject. It’s not the subject that’s... But we could just go on talking about ”People get sick when you do an S&D on them if you do not so-and-so and you want to set up your meter because people will get sick. And your meter has to be trimmed, your trim knob has to be so-and-so because people are going to get very sick. And then it’s your fault as the auditor, you see? And then so on,” and we never talk about anybody ever recovering because of an S&D; we just talk how sick they’ll get if you do it wrong, do you see? Then it becomes too dangerous to do.
Now, they’ve done this about the mind, and they managed to have scared off-the SP on the track managed-has managed actually to scare off all intelligent research on the subject of the mind and soul. You’ve heard time and again how dangerous it is. ”You mustn’t fool around with the mind!” Perfectly all right to take a meat ax to the brain, but you mustn’t fool around with the mind!
I got my belly so full in 1950 of psychoanalysts telling me how dangerous it was to fool around with the mind. But I finally more or less rejected it with laughter, because I looked at who was talking. And when he said fool around, man, he meant fool around, because I found out he could not study Dianetics; he could not do it.
And do you know our main departure from training psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and medical doctors is not really based on the fact we are antipathetic toward them at all. It’s the fact that they can’t seem to duplicate study materials. And it’s just so hard, it’s so tough.
A person comes off the street; you can teach him a Comm Course in a week. Well, you’ll teach a psychologist a Comm Course in something like six or eight weeks. Rough, see? Because the guy has been very suppressively taught. He can’t duplicate anymore on this subject. And it’s contra everything else he has been taught, you see. So it’s all going in sideways and backwards and he’s got preconceived notions and he’s actually in Remedy B of The Book of Case Remedies. That’s what he needs.
Now, the suppressive subject then is something which booby-traps study, and all of the work which you put in to get somebody to know his algebra, and so on, might be all lost because he hasn’t got a textbook which teaches him algebra. You see? Now, what is needed is an appreciation of the study materials by the people who write materials to be studied.
Now, blokes will try; they’ll try very hard. I was reading a book on ocean cruising the other night. It was very fine. It was not ocean cruising but Coastwise Navigation Wrinkles. And he said, ”But what you should use if you have a crew who isn’t trained,” something like that, ”and it’s much safer, you should always have a grid compass.” A grid compass. He starts it out with the fact that everybody must understand his work. That was the condition under which he wrote it. And in the first few sentences here is this phrase ”grid compass.” There’s no further explanation of any kind whatsoever. So, just for fun, I picked up various navigational and equipment texts to find if I could find a grid compass: a picture of one, a definition of one. I picked up two or three nautical dictionaries to try to find a definition of a grid compass. Didn’t exist-very hard, very rough. Now, there was a guy who was honestly trying to do a good job and he skidded because he didn’t know that he mustn’t put in a word that people wouldn’t know.
Now, in Dianetics and Scientology we’ve been consistently up against the fact that we’re beyond the limit of language. The English language does not include the parts of a subject which was unknown. You understand, I mean, if you don’t-if nobody’s known anything about any of these things, you see, well, they have to be named, which unfortunately gives us a lot of nomenclature, and so on, which we could be very happy without. We have to have it because it isn’t in the language.
Now, once in a while a psychoanalyst tries to turn it around, or a psychologist tries to turn it around to his own nomenclature, and you get the real reason why some things which could have been called by old terms aren’t-is because he’s got an entirely different definition and his definition is in argument with the other definitions in his own field, so they don’t know what they’re talking about. So, it’s a completely messed-up area.
Now, where they did have some words, the words didn’t mean what they’re supposed to mean, do you see, and then there’s argument about the definition of those words.
So the solution to this was actually to turn verbs to nouns where possible, to use nomenclature which was expressive to some degree of what it represented. Now, not knowing the study materials when the material was originally written, it was not possible to apply all this and go back to the beginning and sort it all out up the line. Now, this would be a very, very long and rough passage. This would be a tough passage to try to rewrite everything all the way down the line.
Now, we suffer to the degree that we don’t even have a dictionary; we do not have a real dictionary at this time which would give-and that is because every time I get a copy of a dictionary, and so forth, I have to, myself; check the whole thing. And I find myself making changes and corrections in it. And then I have to work very hard, you see, on it, and then somebody else has been working on it, and it’s a major project. And just about the time I will get started, you see some-a lot of it’s been done, and then I’ve got to carry on through with corrections-something will come up, something will be totally demanding of total time, and it doesn’t get done. And this dictionary-we’ve been on dictionaries for I don’t know how long, trying to get you a dictionary.
Well, it’s a rough job. It’s a rough job at best.
But you will find nearly everything is defined in the text where it originally appears. Therefore, were you to cover all of the data, you would get all of the language. And that is one of the reasons why I said that a Saint Hill student had better go back to the original method of study. And the original method of study is you covered it all lightly. You covered it all lightly and you wound up then with a good grip on the entirety of the subject. And then, what you really had to know, well, you then studied that hard for star-rate. But volume was what it took.
Now, of course, you’re up against not knowing where the word was originally used and there are probably a great many tapes missing. I don’t imagine we have many Wichita tapes, and I know we have few or no Elizabeth tapes compared to the lectures. There were eight hours of lecture a day there on many days; five hours was routine, teaching different classes and units. But this gives us a difficulty right there. But we’re clever enough to know we have that difficulty.
And now what I’m going to tell you is going to solve this to a very marked degree, and this is the subject of the intentions of study. For what purpose are you studying? Now, until you clarify that, you in actual fact cannot make an intelligent activity of it.
Now, most students study for examination. That’s folly! Complete folly! You’re not going to do anything with the examiner. You’re sitting there studying for examination, studying for an examination, studying for an examination, ”How will I regurgitate this when I am asked a certain question? How will I respond? How will I pass my checkout?”
Well, it’s very hard to keep ”demonstrate” and ”example” and ”clarify” into examination. It’s so much easier to fall back on ”What did it say in the bulletin,” you see, and get direct quotes of the material itself; when in actual fact that’s really not proper examination. Because the fault that can be found with education in the university, the argument the practical man has with the academically trained man when he first gets him on the subject and has to make him fully acquainted with it-you know, like the guy who’s been out there building houses for a long time and he all of a sudden gets an assistant who’s just been trained in the university to build houses. He goes mad! Guy doesn’t know anything about the subject at all. He’s been studying it for years, yet he knows nothing about it and he doesn’t know why this is.
Well, I can tell you why it is, because the fellow who just went through the university studied all of his materials so that he could be examined on them. He didn’t study them to build houses. And the fellow who’s been out there on a practical line is not necessarily superior in the long run at all, but he certainly is able to get houses built because all of his study is on the basis of ”How do I apply this to house building?” Every time he picks up an ad or literature or anything else, he’s asking the question throughout the entirety of his reading, ”How can I apply this to what I’m doing?” And that is the basic and important difference between practical study and academic study.
Scholastic or academic study is not worth very much. Why you have a fellow go through a course and wind up at the other end of the course unable to audit, it’s because he in actual fact studied for the examination. He did not study to apply it to people. So he winds up with the material unapplied. That’s regrettable. This is why you get failures in practice after certification, and is the whole reason.
Now, if a fellow were just studying for the examination, he would not have to know the exact meaning of all of the words. He could sort of gloss over it and pass it off because he could include the word in the totality of its sentence and merely quote the sentence if he was asked the question. And he wouldn’t really have to know the meaning of the word. So he tends to move out the material over here and have sort of nothing to do with the material while he is busy studying the material, because he can just rattle it off. And this explains the student who can rattle off his material so beautifully but doesn’t know anything about the subject.
See, you say to him, ”Fulcrums.” He doesn’t know what a fulcrum is. He hasn’t a clue, but he knows it fits in a sentence that says, ”The law of the fulcrum is rat-a-tat-tat tat-a-tat-tat,” so he can write it all down rat-a-tat-tat. And he knows how to solve fulcrums because those are the formulas by which you solve them: distance, weight, so on. So he just applies it for the problem he’s given, ”Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat trrm-pa, there we are.”
One fine day he’s got to move a barrel. And he stands around and he looks around at this barrel and he scratches his head and he doesn’t know how he’s going to move that barrel, because he can’t get one end of it picked up to slide anything under it, and he couldn’t hold it up if he did, and so forth. And finally somebody who doesn’t know anything about fulcrums at all comes along, takes a pole, sticks it over the top of a stump and sets up a ”fulcrum,” see, and moves the barrel with the big lever. The person watching this is not likely to connect his lessons in physics with what the workman did. And therefore, we can get very educated dumbbells, and that’s how they’re made. It’s on the intention of the study. He’s studying it to be examined on, or he’s studying it to apply it, and it’s just those two different things.
Now, where a subject is booby-trapped and suppressive in the extreme, it can be studied for examination but can’t be studied for application. Doesn’t matter how complex a study is, no matter how suppressively written, no matter how badly organized, it still can be memorized. It can be spat back on the examination paper, if you work hard enough and your memory is good enough. But you can’t apply it. You can’t begin to apply that subject, because there was no understanding in it with which to apply it. Isn’t that horrible! There was nothing there to be understood and if there was nothing there to be understood, of course, it couldn’t be applied.
I imagine you could write up a whole textbook on the subject of ”weejacks,” and nobody would ever know what they were, you didn’t know what they were, or anything else. You could write a very learned text that was full of mathematical equations by which the whole situation of ”weejacks” could be completely fixed up, and wind up at the other end of it with a subject on which some students could get ”A.” Totally synthesized subject.
Now, on the other side of the picture-the other side of the picture-if you studied that subject for application, every time you hit a bump that was incomprehensible in the text, you yourself would require clarification. If it wasn’t in the text to be understood and if it wasn’t in any parallel text to be understood, why, in order to apply it you would have to clarity it. And you wouldn’t run into a bunch of misunderstoods, because you would stop at them when you arrived at them, and you would get them clarified. Do you see?
Now, your difficulty in studying Dianetics and Scientology is basically the lack of a dictionary. But I call to your attention that I just got through turning you out two tapes and a bulletin which, if you look through them very carefully, you will not find anything in them that isn’t defined in them. You noticed that about them? Well, that’s the Dianetic materials which is directly being applied at this moment in the practice of Dianetics. Now, that’s totally defined for total application, and so therefore, the application is possible and you can study it for application. And we notice that students who are auditing in Dianetics are getting rather interesting results.
Now, in addition to that they’re told to study this material so they can go audit, right now! Do you see? Now, that would produce this other frame of mind of studying it for application.
Now, if anybody is making any-having any trouble with the Dianetic materials at all, it is simply that they have not studied the Dianetic tapes or bulletin for application. They have studied them for examination. Now, if you were to go back, brand-new, as though you’d never heard of it before and study it for application, and every time you got a single sentence of it, wondered how you were going to apply this to a pc or what this had to do with your performance as an auditor in the application of Dianetics to the pc, you would wind up at the other end with no case of indigestion. You would wind up with a complete grasp of the subject, able to get results. Bang! Bang! Bang! Do you see?
But one is taught very bad habits of study in universities and in schools in this society at this time, because so much stress is put on examination. The stress on examination is so terrific that one can become a social outcast through failing his examinations.
I notice in the United States, now, they call them ”dropouts,” ”Rrrhh! Dropouts!” Guy flunked, he’s finished. But it’s also interesting to note that of the four fellows who dropped out (I think it was Princeton) in one semester-now this is very paraphrased data, I’m not going to try to give you their histories -four ”dropouts” in one semester at Princeton, from the lower classes of Princeton (you know, freshman, sophomore, and so on), all were making in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars a year within the year. Wait! What! Whoa! What’s that? Those weren’t the failures; they were the successes in that class.
Now, we check in vain to find a single philosopher, except Mills, who ever got a passing grade in school or who stayed in school to its end. Read the list, man: Bacon, Spencer-just read them off. Bang! Bang! Bang! This one, that one, the other one, oh yeah, well, he was kicked out. He was in there seventeen days. He was at Oxford and they gave him the deep six, and so on, so on. Why? Why?
Well, man for a long time has just avoided this. He knows it exists. But he’s avoided it totally because it’s a complete assignment of failure to his educational system if it can’t teach the bright boys. And he’s given many explanations to it, and so on. But the explanation is simply that the study materials that are given are not for application, and these birds are doers in life and they want material for application, and the university texts are not arranged to apply anything to anything.
Now, I’m not riding a hobbyhorse in my own resentments, but I will tell you this brief anecdote. I was flunked in analytical geometry, and I was flunked resoundingly! I was given a great big ”F.” I know it sounds like a mathematics, and unless you’re acquainted with mathematics in general you’ve probably never even heard of it. And that’s because it’s a dead mathematics. It has no possible use - according to the professors.
But I’d sat back at the end of-the back of the class and I got intrigued with this stuff because it could be applied to aerial navigation. And I found out that you could draw up a formula out of it which would solve the drift of wind-you know, wind drift, and a few other things could be applied very easily-and I found out that it might be a jolly useful mathematics. Oh, I made a mistake, man! That finished it. I made a mistake!
I told the professor-name was Hodgson. If you ever saw a flame light in any man’s eye, it was to see this beautifully dead mathematics being given purpose and application. I told him rather indifferently. I didn’t try to push it through. I wasn’t doing anything, not arguing, very polite. He flunked me just like that-the whole course.
Well, fortunately, I was able to go over to the chair of mathematics of the university. His name was Taylor, he was one of the twelve men in the United States at that time who could understand Einstein. And I don’t think he knew whether he was talking to me or not talking to me, but I told him that I required a reexamination on the subject. So, he ordered Hodgson to take off and make a new examination. And so Hodgson put every formula in the book-you had to know every formula in the entire text verbatim, you had to know every theorem in it verbatim, and so forth. And he said, ”I’ll fix him-trying to make a live mathematics out of a dead mathematics.” I got ninety-eight on the examination.
But this was a direct assault on the citadels of ”We’ve got knowledge nice and dead, let’s keep it that way.” And I erred there by telling him there was a use for the stuff. It was a fatal error on my part. I should never have opened my mouth. I was also flunked one time in a class on free thinking, and so forth, because I’d decided that you could think freely.
The entirety of study materials depends, then, on the material to be studied and the attitude with which it is being studied-the purpose and intention of the student.
Now, if you were to go over Dianetic materials and Scientology materials just on the basis of ”How could I apply this, and how can I use that, and how can I apply this?” And if you examined principally on the basis of ”All right, we’ve got bulletin number 642...” I would expect people to know the auditing commands verbatim, but ”How do you apply this? HCOB blankety-blank date,” you know, and the Examiner said-he didn’t say, ”What’s in this bulletin?” see-he said, ”How do you apply this bulletin?” You just read it. I bet you would get an awful look of horror in many a student’s eye. He has read it to be examined on; he hasn’t read it to apply it. But now he, in actual fact, will have no use for it of any kind whatsoever if he has read it to be examined on. But if he has read it to apply it, then he will find it is useful information. Got that?
Now, I say you have the liability in the fact that you’re dealing with a subject which has no tradition in its vocabulary; its vocabulary is new. There is - singularly horrible to have it missing. There’s a missing dictionary, and so on. But most of the materials, if you’re studying them broadly, are defined in the text themselves and you can gather what those things are. Also, your Instructor generally will know what it is, and you can ask questions to clarity them, and you should clarity them.
Well, now, these materials concerning study amplify, of course, the other materials we had about study.
And I’m very amused at one particular subject, which is one of-probably the biggest football and causes more trouble to man than any other single subject, and that is the subject of economics.
And the subject of economics has been used to forward political ideologies. So for every ideology there is an economics written up to fit it, to a point where people no longer believe there is a subject called economics. But the odd part of it is there is a subject called economics, and it has certain raw, fundamental basics which, if violated, wreck the works. But these things have all been carefully set aside and a brand-new facade has been erected in its particular position in order to forward communism or fascism or some other -ism, -ism, -ism; and then you, of course, you get the socialist using capitalistic economics, the capitalist using socialistic economics. I don’t know how they do that, but they do, you know?
You know the Labor Party right now uses nothing but capitalistic economics. They’re dedicated to the destruction of capitalism, but they’re using capitalistic economics. I don’t know how they’re going to succeed with that. The Conservative, on the other hand, who is dedicated to capitalism, is using nothing but socialist economic proposals to remedy things. I think it’s the most wonderful mess I ever saw.
But there was where a subject was taken to fit a certain, to use a crude word, pitch. You see, the subject was written up to have a curve. ”This is communist economics,” see? ”And the rudigadders of the whuterbuds all go whir-whir, and the formulas are ‘for every man according to his bla-bla, you know? Yuck!
The second you start applying it, it violates the subject that there is a basic subject. There is a subject called economics and it is a very simple subject indeed, and it’s been obscured.
So there’s something else you can do with a subject: You can pervert a subject to such a point that the subject is no longer applicable or assimilable, or if applied, becomes catastrophe. So, that’s something else that can be done with a subject.
That’s what they did with Freud’s work. I’m sure Freud had a lot of workable technology. It’s - doesn’t survive in the practice of psychoanalysis, I assure you. Because what I was taught in 1924 as Freudian analysis isn’t in any textbooks anymore. I know it seems a long time ago to be taught the first time about psychoanalysis, but it is true, that was when I first got this stuff and it sounded very interesting. It’s all gone. I haven’t heard any of that for years. I’ve heard other things. I’ve heard how the ”autoerotic economic system very often recoils upon the society because of the perversion of the id.”
You want to take one of Horney’s books, or something like that on psychoanalysm, and to-read it to a party sometime. Just take a paragraph at random, read it out of context. There’s nobody at that party will believe that that is in that book; they will be sure that you are just quoting gobbledygook. They’re absolutely positive that you will be quoting gobbledygook, because no textbook could be like that. But that’s how you could take a subject.
Now, all of man is being caught up in an economic web. He’s being caught in an economic net at this particular time. Every hour of his day is being monitored by economics. It isn’t-interesting that the subject of economics has been so overcomplicated and so bent and so badly defined and turned off and made so suppressive that nobody can get at the root of what they’re doing. The most beautiful obfuscation, the most beautiful obscuring of motive which I have ever seen.
Now, you are studying a subject in which there is no curve. If it errs in any direction, it’s probably you aren’t warned enough at certain places. But there isn’t any curved intent in this. You’re studying, actually, along the line it was researched.
So that if you were to study this subject for application, you would quickly find out in it what was not applicable and you would find out what was incomprehensible to you, or just is there but is incomprehensible. You would find these things out. And gradually you would get any kink shaken out of your materials, whether I sat down and wrote a dictionary or not. You see?
So anyway, the next time you want a good laugh, pick up some text on
some subject, you know, like ”Landscape Gardening for the Beginner,” and find out whether the book is an ethics case or not. It’s quite interesting. You will find amongst the texts by which man is hoping to carry forward his culture and civilization, you will find the SP very well represented. You will also find perfectly good blokes who go right along fine. But you will also find that some of these chaps, who are very good and have done a good job, are the most damned people that anybody ever heard of.
For instance, Will Durant in writing The Story of Philosophy and attempting to clarify philosophy, and so on, if he’s still alive, actually spent the entire latter part of his life in seclusion in California in shame and horror because so much hell was raised with him for writing that textbook to make philosophy simple and comprehensible to others. Interesting, they hounded the man till he just didn’t want to do anything but die.
There’s a fellow by the name of Thompson that-nearly every calculus student in the university will sooner or later get ahold of this fellow Thompson’s (oh, it’s either Thompson or Carpenter) little textbook; and it begins with what calculus is and explains calculus. And you read the book, you find out what calculus is. And it’s sufficiently simple that you wind up laughing, you see, and you go ahead and you can do something with calculus. But that isn’t the calculus textbooks in the university. I have had professors who severely warned their students against this book, because it permitted the mathematics and its very abstruse language to be communicated to the student. So you will even find teachers who warn people against simple textbooks, and you will find large stratas of the society get a ”down” on simplification.
Well, study materials - study materials needed a few other remarks. Maybe this lecture has helped you out a little bit; maybe it’s clarified what you’re doing. The next time you’re studying something, why, take a look at it and you’ll find yourself up-’And the Examiner 5 going to ask this,” and so forth, and you just haul yourself up at that particular point and ask yourself this question instead, ”Does this have application? Does this amplify my understanding of the mind? Does this broaden my grip of the subject? And if so, how? How can I apply this, if I knew this datum, out in life?” and so forth, ”Of what use would it be to me?” And you all of a sudden will find yourself recover from any indigestion you have from studying too much too fast.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.