Soderqvist1: if engrams are unable to differentiate how come that a restimulator say a man’s voice can key in one engram, but not all engrams? I mean if the reactive mind exists, then a man’s voice should be identified or equal with all other perceptions in engrams!

Soderqvist1: Korzybski reject A = A
The formula says that an object is equal with itself, that may be truth in our fantasy world of abstract mathematics, but in our empirical word which contain 'time’, an object is not same from one moment to the next as exemplified with a bottle of milk which turn sour after a week or so. Is it same milk? Ok same, but not in every respects! Korzybski ’s General Semantics is A non-Aristotelian system, which fundamentally rejects Aristotle’s, is of Identity, and it differs from said system in as much as non-Euclidian geometry differs from the Euclidian Geometry! Euclid ‘s fifth axiom has always been suspect, and is rejected by Albert Einstein theory of relativity which is a four dimensional non-Euclidian geometry! Brouwer has challenged Aristotle’s excluded third which states that either an object is, or it is not! Nowadays the excluded third is proven false by modern mathematics by the fact that some mathematical functions are computable, close to all others are not, and some is just formally undecidable!
More about here!
http://www.scnforum.org/index.php?t=msg%20...%20#msg_13555

The reactive mind bank is composed exclusively of these engrams. The reactive mind thinks exclusively with these engrams. And it “thinks” with them in a way which would make Korzybski swear, for it thinks in terms of full identification, which is to say identities, one thing identical to another.

If the analytical mind did a computation on apples and worms, it could be stated, probably, as follows: some apples have worms in them, other don’t; when biting an apple one occasionally finds a worm unless the apple has been sprayed properly; worms in apples leaves holes.

The reactive mind, however, doing a computation on apples and worms as contained in its engram bank, would calculate as follows: apples are worms are bites are holes in apples are holes in anything are apples and always are worms are apples are bites, etc.

The analytical mind’s computations might embrace the most staggering summations of calculus, the shifty turns of symbolic logic, the computations requisite to bridge-building or dress-making. Any mathematical equation ever seen came from the analytical mind and might be used by the analytical mind in resolving the most routine problems.

But not the reactive mind! That’s so beautifully, wonderfully simple that it can be stated, in operation, to have just one equation: A = A = A = A = A.

Start any computation with the reactive mind. Start it with the data it contains, of course. Any datum is just the same to it as any other datum in the same experience.

An analytical computation done on the woman being kicked, as mentioned, would be that women get themselves into situations sometimes when they get kicked and hurt and men have been known to kick and hurt women.

A reactive mind computation about his engram, as an engram, would be: the pain of the kick equals the pain of the blow equals the overturning chair equals the passing car equals the faucet equals the fact that she is a faker equals the fact that she is no good equals the fact that she changes her mind equals the voice tones of the man equals the emotion equals a faker equals a faucet running equals the pain of the kick equals organic sensation in the area of the kick equals the overturning chair equals changing one’s mind equals.... But why continue? Every single perception in this engram equals every other perception in this engram. What? That’s crazy? Precisely!

Let us further examine our post-hypnotic positive suggestion of the touched tie and the removed coat. In this we have the visible factors of how the reactive mind operates.

This post-hypnotic suggestion needs only an emotional charge and physical pain to make it a dangerous engram. Actually it is an engram of a sort. It is laid in by sympathy between the operator and subject, which would make it a sympathy engram: pro-survival.

Now we know that the operator had only to touch his tie to make the awakened subject remove his coat. The subject did not know what it was which caused him to remove his coat and found all manner of explanation for the action, none of which was the right one. The engram, the post-hypnotic suggestion in this case, was actually placed in the reactive mind bank. It was below the level of consciousness, it was compulsion springing from below the level of consciousness. And it worked upon the muscles to make the subject remove his coat. It was data fused into the circuits of the body below the command level of the analytical mind and operated not only upon the body but also upon the analytical mind itself.

If this subject took off his coat every time he saw somebody touch a necktie, society would account him slightly mad. And yet there was no power of consent about this. If he had attempted to thwart the operator by refusing to remove the coat, the subject would have experienced great discomfort of one sort or another.

Hubbard, L. R. (1950). Dianetics : the modern science of mental health : a handbook of dianetics procedure (2007 ed., pp. 77-79). Los Angeles, Calif.: Bridge Publications.

Engramic thought is irrational identity-thought, by which the mind is made to conceive identities where only vague similarities may exist. It is necessary that the auditor thoroughly understand engramic thought, for itis with this complete irrationality of identity that he will basically deal. Ashe works with any individual, sane or insane, he must continually employ in the bulk of his computation on the case the equation of engramic thinking.

Engramic thinking can be stated by: A=A=A=A=A.

Hubbard, L. R. (1948). Dianetics, the original thesis (2007 ed., p. 66.). Los Angeles, Calif.: Bridge Publications, Inc.

You've got to audit these ridges through to get rid of these ridges if you're going to treat the body. But you understand that when we're working with this sort of thing, we are, to a large degree, treating the body. And this is a question of who the hell cares! You're treating a body. Bodies are a nickel a million. If you only knew it, any one of you here, any one of you, could pick himself up the line and go out and pick up any body you see go by. This person is going to die someday; pull him out, pat him on the head and say, "Tsk, Mars" - whhit! They go.

I mean, it sounds very horrible to you, doesn't it! It sounds like a terrible violation of private rights. That's because you've decided upon a much higher level of action. And yet, what do you know! It happens every once in a while. It happens. You could do this.

Now, if you are out of your body and stable, and if your preclear is out of his body and stable, the point I'm trying to make is that you have escaped from and stepped sideways from the liability of sudden body shock. If you have done this, all by itself, so that the body can be hurt and so on regardless of the state of knowingness, regardless of the ability to put out energy, regardless of any other of these abilities - you have achieved a knowing immortality for your preclear, or for yourself. You have stepped, actually, out of the line of stimulus-response and being the victim on all of this sort of thing, and of course it makes a tremendous difference to a person. You'd never realize how widely one's values change on such a thing. Because it just doesn't matter how many bodies would kick the bucket. It doesn't matter, you would come up shining on the matter.

You want to perfect that skill, because it's the only thing that ever got you in trouble. See, you were unable to stay outside of bodies when they were given a sudden shock or when they were hurt. So get up through the command range on a body; don't stay down along the other level, and actually, what you've bought is an immortality.

So your body gets knocked off, so what? Very few people have a viewpoint, even when they've been out of their bodies, developed up to the level that it should be. I'm going to give you today some very vital data on this because I've seen that there are two or three points which have not been clearly grasped. And in view of that, why, let's get the data to clearly grasp them,

Now, I don't care - you can say I'm telling you fairy tales about this sort of thing or something; we won't worry about the credulity or incredulity of the data. Don't force this data on your preclear! Because if you force it on your preclear, you'll throw something into violent
restimulation that you'll be sorry for.

But if you find your preclear is having an awful time over something or other in some zone of his body, let's say, some entity is stuck on the time track in that zone and it might be one of the reasons why he can't get out of his body. And if you're going in for the business of cleaning up bodies, you've got to be able to resolve the problem of entities.

And you resolve the problem of entity by finding out where this entity is located in the body and then finding out where it's stuck on the time track, and you will find a death or a transplant or something of the sort occurring at that point. You ask the thetan, the individual, to sort of move into that area and move through that incident and bring that entity up to present time.

Now, he has a tendency to give the entities complete credit for beingness, and the entities don't have beingness; they react to passing energy. The energy goes out from the individual through the entity, and the energy comes out from the environment and goes to the individual and passes through the entity. So the environment can restimulate the entity, the preclear can restimulate this entity, you see? And your preclear looks at this and wonders why in the name of common sense he acts that way.

It's because when he puts out energy in that direction, that entity, stimulus-response-wise, that ridge goes into effect. And he has no accounting for the fact, because he didn't put anything into effect. And when somebody scolds him suddenly or something of the sort, he's perfectly willing to bite their head off, but instead of that he feels scared to death. Why? This is unaccountable.

So he begins to believe there's something wrong with him. And the truth of the matter is there isn't anything wrong with him. That's the truth. The only thing you could say would be wrong with him is he's - has a lot of ridges around him which have facsimiles on them. And these ridges can be thrown into restimulation, and then he stands there and watches this. So, you see, it's a mystery to him. So he begins to think after a while, "I must be nuts!" No. He's saying, "Yeah, I've got some ..."

There isn't any such thing as a sane entity because there's no such thing as a sane stimulus-response activity. But don't think your entity can't think. It can think. It has a certain low order of beingness, not alive - it's running on the thetan's energy, you see. But because of associative nature of energy and other things, it can think, it can act. You can talk to an entity and have it talk back to you and so on.

You can throw the attention of the thetan around the body so as to restimulate the entities, one after the other. But you do this like this:

Now you say "All right, now this right outboard entity, now I'm talking to this right outboard entity, so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so."

And this preclear will say, "It says so-and-so and so-and-so." And you could say, "Do you like ice cream!" And he says, "No, it says it doesn't like ice cream."

What you've done, you see, is take the thetan's energy beam and you've thrown it out here onto this ridge, because you said the right outside, didn't you! So that's direct stimulus-response. It's just a ridge and there it sits, and you throw the thetan's energy at it and your energy is going at it; don't omit that point! You're restimulating it, you've got a beam on it and he's got a beam on it, and so of course it'll talk.

Cute, very, very humorous mechanism, actually, but people seldom feel like laughing, because they can make a man feel like he's being torn to bits. You talk about fear, and you talk about agony and being pinned down and all the rest of this, this is on these darn ridges.

Now, you're looking at - what I've been describing here - you're looking at the reactive mind. You're not just looking at something that's vaguely like the reactive mind of the first book; you're looking at the reactive mind. The first book could be said to be a description of ridges and the behavior of ridges.

If you want to know a lot more about how outrageously ridges can behave and so forth, just read about the reactive mind in Book One, and that is actually the ridge. That's the ridge's behavior.

So the reactive mind has geographical locations in the body, is found to be energy ridges on which facsimiles have been affixed. And the stimulus-response character of them causes very, very aberrated behavior.

They have an associative quality; that is to say, they're this absurd logic that's "one thing mirror another thing" and so forth. But they're down closer to an identity, A=A=A=A, than they are to thinking, really.

And that's the way you tell what this thing is: it's reasoning on a A=A=A=A. You can actually ask an entity certain questions and it will give you identity responses.

Korzybski. Korzybski, in his tremendous piece of work there, was trying madly to differentiate over, above, around, under, alongside of - and for God's sakes, let's do something about - this A=A=A=A of an electronic ridge to which facsimiles are affixed.

Now, you want to know routes out of this trouble, how you get away from this trouble, he points out a route. His route, however...

Although Hayakawa [1] and some of the boys in general semantics believe there's a therapy involved in it, there isn't. You can train and train and train and train and train, when you're training into differentiation, and all you're doing is training in a secondary circuit response.

The fellow starts to identify, and then he gets very careful and differentiates. Well now, he's got a circuit set up that differentiates what he started to identify.

And of course, all you're doing, really, is giving a lot of credit to some ridge. You're giving the ridge credit of beingness, and the guy will get worse, he won't get better. So watch crediting ridges! That's true, isn't it!

Female Voice: Yes.

You've watched that happen.

Female voice: Preclear got worse when you audited ridges.

That's right.

So, if you must be concerned with the body - The thetan, when he moves out, will generally leave the bulk of these ridges in the body. If he moves out knowingly, he just leaves these ridges, and these ridges are sitting in the body and so on. But he has built them up and he's carried them around and he's pulled them in and he's done these various things with them; he's finally fixed this body with a great many ridges.

But these ridges have a very strict pattern, they have a very strict behavior, and this outrageous story I have been telling you about space stations and all that sort of thing is very muchly responsible for the state and action - the weird, insane character - of these darn ridges today.

Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 30 October). The Role of Earth. Standard Operating Procedures for Theta Clearing Lectures. Lecture conducted from London.

The youngest child I have ever processed was 4 years of age and the oldest one I have ever processed was 98! They were equally difficult.

The problem confronting the auditor in Child Dianetics is first and foremost the problem of accessibility. A child does not like to remain quiet. And a child who has been rather badly used in his lifetime is rather prone to resist attention from a grown-up. As a result, that problem of accessibility will stare you straight in the face with any child with whom you work. Your problems are solved, or not solved, on the basis of your ability to establish accessibility.

Furthermore, a child is a problem in self-control. A control circuit is a phrase in an engram which lays into the human being the command "Control yourself" and which takes over a part of the analyzer and installs a false "I" in the mind. Natural self-control is the ability of "I" to control the organism, and as false self-control circuits are eliminated, "I" is more and more able to control the organism until a person starts to pull in toward clear, at which point he can exert a self-control that no circuit ever possibly could have given him.

A child is a problem in self-control because he does not have very much of it, particularly if he has been rather badly used and his attention is very scattered. With an adult you can work fairly easily because his attention is channeled and you usually merely have to turn it back in against his engrams. With children there is the additional step of gathering the attention up, focusing it and then turning it back in against the locks and engrams. The problem of attention covers the whole field of therapy, not just Child Dianetics.

Attention which is very broadly spread is hunting for something on which to fix. It has no targets. This results in an interesting psychic condition known as fear of the unknown, a special kind of fear in that there is danger in the vicinity and yet one cannot select out exactly what is dangerous. As a result, the person begins to be afraid of the unknown because he cannot target it. His attention will then be very badly scattered as he is looking all the way around him.

Then there is fear of a specific object, in which attention becomes too closely channeled and too frozen in one place. This is approximated by being stuck on the time track. It means that attention units are there looking into the interior world at a danger, a menace or a command, which makes it impossible for the person to move easily on the track. That is too close an attention toward the interior world.

There is also the case where these attention units of the interior world (the engram bank) are unable to locate any specific trouble; they are merely scattered all the way up and down the bank, looking everywhere. This person is afraid interiorly of an unknown.

There are four specific conditions. There is the exterior world closely fixated, with attention narrowly channeled (if attention gets too fixated it reduces the analyzer to sub optimum levels); there is the attention too widely scattered on the exterior world, where one cannot locate a danger but knows and feels a danger is present; and in the interior world you get the same two conditions.

A child who is afraid is usually in a highly scattered state of mind, because the child’s data is very light. His standard banks haven’t enough data in them to permit him to select out what is wrong and identify it and so be able to look at it. Instead of this he looks at a wide unknown world, merely because portions of this world are not identified to him. Hence, the extreme terror and fears of childhood. And they are intense.

The world of the child is one of giants and dragons, not because all childhood is delusion, but simply because childhood does not have enough data. Children cannot label everything; therefore they get this spread of attention and a fear of the unknown. In a neurotic child, it is normally this which is the trouble.

So a whole therapy comes into view: the identification of situations and objects on an educational level. You give the child more data. What is wrong with this child is that he does not have enough data and so he does not understand; he is suffering from fear of the unknown. The first and foremost remedy for this is to give the child more data. And don’t give him incorrect data; give him the best data you can.

You start in on this child and simply get him to define words and have him define objects and their uses. You will find that he has the weirdest misconceptions of the world in which he is living, handed to him by the adults around him. You can straighten out a tremendous amount with a child just on that level. You fix up his labels for him.

To this degree, the late Count Korzybski was very much down the groove. You follow along the line of relabeling things for people and reorienting them by General Semantics and you find that with a child it has a much, much larger efficiency than with an adult because you are not just reorienting the child, you are actually labeling the world for him.

You will find out that most grown-ups are very poorly oriented about the world themselves and that not only have they given this child poor orientation and general lack of attention but they have given the child bad orientation.

[...]

If you find that this child is impossible to process and that you cannot get anywhere with him, then you set up a program of educational therapy as a method of gaining access to the case. The three valid therapies in Dianetics are

1. Knocking apart engrams with Dianetic processing
2. Educational therapy in all of its ramifications
3. Handling the environment

Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 8 November). Child Dianetics Part II. Professional Course Lectures. Lecture conducted from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The world of Hubbard as a child was one of giants and dragons.
fixed.

Someone from the General Semantics Institute wrote in recently and mentioned that General Semantics and Dianetics went hand in hand. He is absolutely right, because the reform of language and how to think, how to look at things, how to differentiate—all of these things are of vast importance to a clear.

A person can get up to a point where he has no more aberration and there is no more false data in the bank that is going to be thrown at him and enforced upon him by pain. Now he is free to think about any part of his life that he wants to think about and all of a sudden he finds out that he hasn’t enough data. So he starts getting data and aligning it. A person at the state of clear doesn’t sit around and gaze at his navel, which is something else that is important. Not one of these people have I been able to slow down and stop actually long enough to thoroughly investigate. They take off!

The following is an excerpt from a letter we received recently from the Institute of General Semantics:

"As I see it, the process of clearing doesn’t automatically furnish a man with a system of evaluating and a scientific orientation which will enable him to live most efficiently in our present socio-cultural environment. Nor is it supposed to. It simply removes his engrams and frees his analyzer.

"Now an Australian bushman with a freed analyzer, to take an extreme example, still doesn’t have the scientific data and orientations necessary to sane evaluating by our standards. Conversely, General Semantics, which we believe provides an optimum orientation for sanity, probably can’t be adopted fully by a normal aberree full of engrams.

"To oversimplify, Dianetics will clear his engrams and General Semantics will give him an optimum 1950 orientation for sane and effective living. We hope that workers in Dianetics can be persuaded to give thorough consideration to the notion of Dianetics and General Semantics as a working team. To this end, I am inviting information, advice, suggestions and so forth from Dianeticists on Dianetics and its role. In return, I hope that we workers in General Semantics can contribute something of value to Dianeticists, and Dianetics.

"If you and other workers in Dianetics could come to our summer seminar workshop, we might cooperate to our mutual benefit and to the eventual benefit of people everywhere."

In this, we are now dealing with the field of education. There is Educational Dianetics. It is a rather precision proposition. For instance, it starts out with definitions of a datum and continues on through with evaluation. It covers the field of logic and thinking and the evaluating processes of the mind, and it covers the optimum way to teach, and so on.

General Semantics and morphological thinking are all very well, but remember we have suddenly moved into the field of education. Here opinion can exist, and the self-determinism of the individual. That is not something you can enforce.

You would no more be able to push down the throat of a clear how he should think or what he should use for the basis of his thinking than you would be able to knock the Empire State Building over by sneezing.

So it puts education straight out of the authoritarian realm. Education goes into a very strange state on this because it says the mind, if it is going to be right, reserves to itself the right to evaluate. If the mind is being forced to evaluate, it cannot then guarantee that it is going to be right.

Now it may see reason and it may say, "That’s right. I can use that."

And someone else says, "Well, now, Professor Blimp over at Oxford says definitely that the rear end differential on the Conault Integrator is nothing to use in a problem like this."

"Well, I think it’s useful."

"I know, but Professor Blimp says it isn’t."

And it gets tough right there.

This poses a very bad social problem in the field of education because education has its own social problems. It means that a man cannot have thought a thought in the year 1900 and still reign supreme. He will have to think another thought in 1910 at least.

Continued usefulness and indispensability is a factor. It also teaches that altitude training is no good.

My staff have occasionally detected me snarling didactically when some patient was walking around in a small circle with spots in front of his eyes. But I don’t think any of them have detected me saying, "You’ve got to believe this." I am highly antipathetic toward the idea of forcing something on somebody, because if one does that the use of it for him is limited. Just as a problem is as solvable as it has reason applied to it, this is as solvable as reason can be applied to it.

For instance, if 20 of us are thinking about something and each one of us is running as a self-determined unit on it, no one of us is standing around waiting for somebody else to solve the problem; there are 20 brains working on the same thing. If they are working in a self-determined way, we are going to see progress. But if 19 people are going to stand around and look at the 20th one, expecting him to start turning up all the answers, and then just using what he says by rote, we are not making any vast effect because there are 19 idle brains.

This is not to state that there should be vast disagreement, because if a thing is observably workable or right, it is only observably workable or right if somebody else agrees that it is.

For example, General Semantics was of use to Dianetics. I started going back looking for the first time a word had appeared. It was obvious to me that the first time a word had been defined would carry more weight (due to some experiments I had made in hypnotism).

There might be some misdefinitions. I discovered some very interesting data this way. I found out that although a child might have had the word slaughter defined accurately in the first grade at school, the word might have been defined when the child was 2 years of age in a highly incorrect way. The child would still then carry forward the habit of defining slaughter to himself from the time he was 2, but would remember its definition at the time it was taught to him when he was 6. That was very interesting to me.

Next I found out that the word very often meant an action which had nothing to do with the meaning of the word. So therefore the word would be upset by this action definition. Papa, for instance, had a habit of breaking the furniture and saying, "God, God, God, God, God," which meant that God equalled Papa breaking furniture, to the child. A little later the child would go to Sunday school and he would hear that God was the God of Vengeance, and he would say, "Yup." But what he would see would be Papa. In such a way, misdefinition as far as I could see (and this was very early in my researches) was undoubtedly responsible for a lot of this. I started looking for where it had gotten misdefined— it was obviously the source of a lot of trouble — and it had gotten misdefined in the reactive mind, out of sight.

I started looking for the most hidden moment of definition, and it turned out to be an engram. Then the rest of the mechanics more or less fell into place. So General Semantics is definitely of use in the definition of a word. Korzybski might have gone a lot further than he went, but he went far enough to be a great deal of use.

As a matter of fact, to Breuer’s first belief in the subject of mental catharsis and to Korzybski belong the only acknowledgments that Dianetics really would care to make. Because both General Semantics and Breuer furnished some data.

Sigmund Freud is not in there. I will be polite sometimes to a Freudian and say, "Yes, Freud was a great man"; but actually Freud, when he started to do thinking on Breuer’s work, jumped the gun, went over into the libido theory, then in 1911 saddled us with the delusion theory, and as far as I can tell was wrong all the way on up. But Breuer was pretty right. It was Breuer’s theory that full recall equaled full sanity, as near as I can discover from existing papers.

The jump is from Spencer [1] to Breuer [2] to Korzybski [3] to Dianetics. Freud indicated Breuer’s theories and was working hand in glove with Breuer, but he disagreed violently with Breuer right afterwards.

Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 29 June). Research and Discovery: Vocabulary and Cases. Lectures and Demonstrations. Lecture conducted from Elizabeth, New Jersey..

The field of Medical Dianetics covers Preventive Dianetics to a large extent. All a doctor has to do to work Medical Dianetics is to keep silence around unconscious people, and emergency cases when they come in should have immediate attention with Dianetics. First Aid Dianetics should be applied so that shock won’t register. This field is tremendously large and well integrated, but Medical Dianetics also includes, of course, the field of embryology.

What you most need to know at this moment is something about embryology. First there is a germ cell in the male. This cell divides several times, and each division is a separate entity. There are eight of these generations, but only the last one becomes a sperm. These are the generations which create a sperm from the central plasm that goes through a central germ cell. The sperm differs from other cells in this respect: It has no cytoplasm and cannot simply by dividing create itself again. The cell just before the sperm could. It created a sperm.

Now, in order for that sperm to go on with the life cycle, it has to contact an ovum. The ovum is ejected from an ovary and the ovum itself rolls down the Fallopian tube, right or left side. There are little hairs, you might say, that pick it up and boost it along. The sperm can contact this ovum, and usually does, fairly high up, and then the little feelers roll it down. It has normally been fertilized in the process of rolling down, and it finally plants itself somewhere in the womb. Usually the child will sooner or later occupy a position in the center. However this may be, it is only important to you that the child, as he hangs in there in the first stages, has his back toward the mouth of the womb. So, the preponderance of sharp instruments and so forth thrown into the cervix generally enter the child’s back.

This is a very rapid review of this information. If you want to know more, you can look it up in a medical text on embryology and you will find many fascinating and wonderful things, such as the fact that in the sixth week the embryo is one-sixth of an inch long. That might be of interest that something one-sixth of an inch can record an engram. But these things are microscopic.

So, there is this sequence. A cell has this strange characteristic: Cell A, for instance, is hurt. It divides and becomes cell A’. Cell A’ has the same personal identity as cell A. It knows about that hurt and can register on that basis. Cell A’ divides and cell A" now has the same personal identity as cell A’ and cell A, and it knows all about this injury and will react to it and contains it. And so it goes, all the way along the line. Every cell, in subdividing, translates what this previous cell has known. A cell then, by division, can retain its personal identity down an unlimited number of generations. The memory in that cell is interrupted, evidently, by death alone.

Therefore, we have the phenomena, and biological experiments can be made confirming these things. Korzybski has quite a bit of data on this. It is very interesting material. Also, there is the sentience of a cell and its apparent rationality. Actually, all a cell knows is that it must avoid pain and gain pleasure. Out of that, with the cell as a basic building block, human beings, wildcats and Sequoia trees get made.

There are eight generations of cells in the male prior to the sperm. Then there is the ovum which may be there some days before it is fertilized.

Any injury belonging to any one of these eight generations in the male cells will be recorded finally in the sperm. What is recorded in the sperm will be recorded in the sperm/ ovum, which becomes the zygote. What is recorded in the zygote is recorded in the embryo. What is recorded in the embryo is recorded in the fetus. What is recorded in the fetus is recorded in the infant is recorded in the man.

Here you have a chain of information which is coming straight forward and it goes forward on an A= A= A= A basis. What cell A knows becomes the knowledge of its immediate descendant and so on along the scale until it pervades the whole organism. This is not standard bank material. This is not gained through the perceptics. This is recorded right by the cells. They have their own central nervous system, as do the zygote and embryo.

Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 31 August). Medical Dianetics: Review of Embryology. Public and Professional Course Lectures. Los Angeles, California.

Now, I have been asked how Freud’s “death instinct,” or “death wish,” fits with Dianetic theory. As a matter of fact there probably is a relationship; most of Freud could probably be explained if you looked through Dianetics hard. We run into this sort of thing quite a bit.

You take a barrel with ten thousand beans in it. By some hook or crook you manage to reach in and, out of ten thousand beans that more or less look all alike, pick out the one bean that is important. This is the bean. You look it over and you start using this as the bean and find out you can really do tricks with this bean.

Then somebody comes along and says proudly, “Look. That bean was out of that barrel. That was nothing.”

The point is that the bean was in the barrel but it wasn’t evaluated for importance. And there were 9,999 other beans which could have been picked up with equal alacrity and which wouldn’t have worked. Why didn’t the person who filled that barrel with beans pick out the right bean in the first place? Why did he insist on pouring all those beans into that barrel if he knew what he was doing?

You are asked this question in the field many times, I am sure. “How does Dianetics differ?

You have a couch. It must be psychoanalysis!” And they say, “You look back in Darwin’s theory, and you will find there that it’s by natural selection—the survival of the fittest. Now, how does that possibly differ from ‘the dynamic principle of existence is survive’? It’s the same thing!” It is not the same thing, because we have an aligned body of knowledge.

We have taken “the dynamic principle of existence is survive,” and then we have explored survival and found out where everything fits into the picture properly on survival. So we have an organized picture. There is a big difference between this and a phrase lying back there.

It is true that Dianetics has a great debt to pay to Darwin and it is true that Dianetics has a debt to pay to Freud. But it is very untrue that Freud or Darwin gave enough to put together what has turned out to be Dianetics. A lot of people tried to use Charles Darwin’s work as a therapy and as an understanding of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they have fallen practically flat on their faces trying to use Darwin in extrapolating and evolving a theory of mind. Therefore there must be other things in Darwin they were using that were not true, and obviously it was not properly aligned.

Now, Freud and Jung and some others did the work on the death wish, death instinct, and so on. There have been a lot of these fellows. This idea came in to Europe from India about 1750, and these fellows played with it from 1750 on through till 1940 or 1945. It was played with that long without an evaluation.

We put it down on the bottom of the tone scale and we say “It is succumb, and this is the distance and this is the direction and this is what it is,” and all of a sudden we can predict who is going to commit suicide and who is going to do this and who is going to do that. It is a different proposition but it stems exactly from that source. All knowledge builds in this fashion. People come along and they select out importances. They evaluate the information and fit it to the real universe. They keep selecting out information and fitting it to the universe, selecting out more and fitting it to more.

Men have been trying to crack this riddle for thousands of years. You read the papers of the Greeks on the subject of insanity and so on, and you will find a lot of valid material in there; you say to yourself, “Why couldn’t these people figure out an engram and run one?” You come up along the line and look at the work of the magicians up around the ninth and tenth to twelfth centuries, and you say, “With all they knew, why couldn’t these people possibly have figured this thing out?” They didn’t, though.

Then we look at the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in medicine, physiology and so forth, and say, “Look at all these people knew. Why didn’t they work this out?” There just wasn’t enough data yet, that was all. Pretty soon, though, you collect enough data and fit it together in the right holes, and the next thing you know, you have a working proposition.

People try to subdivide all this stuff and they try to compartment it all out into their own slots. The horrible part of it is that these data did not work well in these separate slots—in this frame of reference and in that frame of reference. Somebody had to come along and change their frames of reference, put them together, sum them up and find out what difference it made.

People who are slamming against Dianetics don’t realize that they are kicking their favorite philosophers in the teeth. For instance, somebody will stand up to you and tell you, “Now, Korzybski really had some ideas! Korzybski this and Korzybski that...” Fine! Alfred Korzybski’s work contributed an enormous amount to Dianetics. Nobody in Dianetics contests this in the least. The whole semantic line that we have been working on is a refinement of general semantics.

Then somebody else will come along and say it is all from general semantics or it is all from Freud or it is all from Darwin or it is all from someplace else.

You are dealing with people who either can’t fix their concentration or have to fix it to escape thinking about it. They have fixed their concentration solidly on one subject, one small subject, in an effort to escape an ignorance on a tremendous number of subjects. That might be called an insanity to which the analytical mind is prone.

Hubbard, L. R. (1951, 28 June). The Complete Auditor Part II. First Annual Conference of Hubbard Dianetic Auditors. Lecture conducted from Wichita, Kansas.

Now, we want to investigate what the single factor of - above all other factors which we can locate at this time, what the single factor is that causes the dwindling spiral in this universe. And by isolating it, demonstrate that it can be remedied by a simple, single technique on a preclear.

The goal which we have of a simple technique on a preclear is a very worthwhile one for this reason: The auditor tends to run - this is just one of the reasons, a minor one - the auditor tends to run upon the preclear that which should be run upon himself.

Theoretically, then, that technique which was the most common difficulty to all people would be one which would be readily accepted by auditors and which would be used consistently and continually. We have such a technique in Step VIII of SOP 8-C. And the name of that step is "Duplication."

Duplication is, itself, the first and foremost necessity of a thetan. He is compulsively dedicated to duplication. And this universe obsessively prevents him from duplicating.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

The thetan has to duplicate, he thinks. He is not content - the thetan is not content at any time - to remain a unit. It's not interesting to him to be a unit, because there's no motion, no action, no time, nothing. It would just be a continuous eternity of "I am a thetan."

His first moment of duplication comes about with what I have spoken of many times here - the chess player. He goes on both sides of the board to play a game of chess. Well, he has to duplicate in order to be on the other side of the chess board.

Well, so we get our first entrance into automaticity and randomity. And that first entrance is with a duplication.

He duplicates himself in order to be on the other side of the chess board and to have a player. Now as he continues to do this, he has more and more opposing players. And he can have also more and more of himself to oppose the more and more players.

Now, this universe, with its fixation on all dynamics on "thou must not duplicate," opposes this principle of "must have another chess player," so that an individual becomes more and more and more and more and more covert concerning the second chess player. And this very covertness eventually evolves into a very complex, aberrated system. It evolves, amongst other things, into complex communications systems which do not readily unravel, because behind every communications system we have duplication.

Duplication is the soul of a postulate. Why is it? Because a postulate is laid in so that something else will happen. Therefore something else must duplicate the postulate. Any order given by the captain of a company is expected to be duplicated by the sergeants. You see that?
Anytime a carpenter sets out to make a bookcase, he is demanding that the MEST universe duplicate his postulate in energy. He has to have a communications system to do this, in order merely to say, "There will now be a bookcase." He has to have some space in which to do this. He says, "All right, there will now be a bookcase." Bing, poof! There's a bookcase.

Well, that's all very well, but one immediately becomes rather unvalued - that is to say, items and objects become rather valueless. Why would he say, "There will now be a bookcase," except to create beauty? But he wants attention because he has an interchange - if he's going to duplicate himself to be another self, then he wants attention from the other self. And we get the attention interwoven with the duplication, so that the basic background of attention is duplication.

A postulate duplicated in MEST forms would be to make pieces of wood or metal form in such a way, and stay in such a way, as to continue to form a bookcase. So in that communications system we have a more complex communications system only because of one thing: The basic postulate that goes behind these walls is, of course, "resist effect."

But there is a higher postulate in every piece of space made. Every piece of space, every space and area, has a higher postulate in it, and that is, "I mustn't duplicate." In order to resist effects, in order to stay as it is, it of course must not duplicate.

Any time you say, "This must stay as it is," you must, of course, understoodly say, "This mustn't duplicate now," unless you are throwing out large quantities of raw material which are expected to duplicate something. Now, that would be something else, wouldn't it? But then you would say exactly what they were expected to duplicate.

But the earliest cast-about of raw material in this universe took place in space, which already had the postulate in it, "mustn't be duplicated."
A god of this universe - an anthropomorphic god ... And I hope that you understand me very clearly when I use this word god loosely and even blasphemously, for the good reason that this thing g-o-d is something which man has set up in his image; and it is merely an ambition on the part of a thetan, it's an effort - a co-effort on the part of thetans to have a playing field and so on.

And there is, actually, beings above the beingness of this universe. There are beings, but they are not this anthropomorphic thing who is the jealous god, who has hate and vengeance and so forth - that happens to be above that level.

And the jealous god - the most jealous god there would be, would be a god who would insist at all times that he must not be duplicated, even to the point of not using his name in vain. He mustn't be duplicated. No graven images. His space - it's all his space and so forth. And we go on this way.

Interesting, isn't it? We have a "no duplicate," in other words, in the space. You mustn't duplicate this space. You mustn't compete with this space. This space is here, there's only one space.

We find a scholar of the level of Count Alfred Korzybski, for instance, writing an entire text and an entire subject - General Semantics - on the premise that two MEST universe spaces cannot concur, and they cannot be in the same space. It's interesting to the degree to which this can go. This is not even vaguely true. It's just space. I mean, you can do anything with space - unless you were convinced that space will not duplicate you, and that you mustn't duplicate space. If you're convinced of that, then you mustn't duplicate. That's your first level: You'd better not duplicate space - not this MEST universe space.

In the first place, any one of you are capable of making this much space. But if you mustn't duplicate this space, if you must back up from such a duplication, then you will have this playing field in common - the MEST universe - with others, if you don't duplicate it.

But all sorts of weird things evolve immediately that you start to duplicate space which others can use. You've set yourself up, for one thing, as God. We mustn't do that! There's all sorts of provisions against this.

Now, anybody who is afraid of space has discovered long since that the space will not duplicate him. And that he, perforce, must at length duplicate the space. And so the thetan becomes nothing. Because he has to duplicate the space in terms of "be this space." So he's driven to the point of either "I can't be" and "I won't be" this space, at which moment he becomes nothing, at the same time not making any space of his own. If he refuses to duplicate the space continually, why then, of course, he stops duplicating space. Because space is just space, it isn't anything very, very strange.

This MEST universe space just happens to occur here. Well, other spaces can occur here, too. And - but if you drive it under cover that other spaces can occur here and convince everybody that no other space can occur here, then you have only one space here.

Now, this space won't duplicate you. Therefore it won't carry your orders. It will do all sorts of things, but it won't duplicate you. Not directly, on a postulate basis.

In other words, you say, "All right. This space - this space will now be twice as big," and it's right there, the same size. But that's only because you've agreed to it. You've agreed on a no-duplication with this space, as I remark again, even dramatized to the extent of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. All through that book you mustn't duplicate space. You mustn't put space within space and mustn't do all sorts of things.

That's a very iron-bound system. Now, we needn't go into this too far because, by the way, this will show up with you, on the process of it. All this material will.

Hubbard, L. R. (1953, 14 December). SOP 8-C Step VIII Definitions. Second American Advanced Clinical Course (5312C14). Lecture conducted from Camden, New Jersey.

Soderqvist1: this is a reply to Caroline’s messages!

Hubbe Boy wrote: We find a scholar of the level of Count Alfred Korzybski, for instance, writing an entire text and an entire subject - General Semantics - on the premise that two MEST universe spaces cannot concur, and they cannot be in the same space. It's interesting to the degree to which this can go. This is not even vaguely true. It's just space. I mean, you can do anything with space - unless you were convinced that space will not duplicate you, and that you mustn't duplicate space. If you're convinced of that, then you mustn't duplicate. That's your first level: You'd better not duplicate space - not this MEST universe space.

Soderqvist1: I have read Korzybski’ s book Science and Sanity, but I haven’t the slightest clue what Hubbard possible can have in mind. Hubbard doesn’t deserve a rebuttal because he has no reference to where this can be found! But I replay anyway!

The Logics are as follows: The Logics are a method of thinking. They apply to any universe or any thinking process. They do not have to apply. You can get the doggonedest combinations simply by disobeying a Logic.

Some data which you should have in advance of the actual Logic, and one is the definitions of logic.

So let's take three levels here. Let's take differentiation and let's take similarities.

Now, in the general course of human events, these data have many times been covered in various ways. You will find a terrific rundown on this in Count Alfred Korzybski's work Science and Sanity, in a field that is called general semantics. The late Count Korzybski did a very splendid piece of work on this. And he analyzes identities of space and identities of time and identities of this and that. And his basic analysis of all this material is unparalleled. I give that to you without reservation; I have never read his work.

That's not said to be clever. The work was described to me in about 1945, I think. His basic tenets must have some degree of truth, because one day I was working out what general semantics should consist of and someone says, "Well, now, I see you've been taking notes out of Science and Sanity." I didn't have a copy of it, I've never had a copy of it. And here you have one of the tests of data: Can two people take the same basic data and by working with it, extrapolating, so to speak...

That word simply means getting some more and some more and some more and some more application out of the same datum; you say extrapolating, that's just theoretical adding up of data, if you want to use that word. It's a good word. I don't happen to know of one that means, really, more precisely what we're doing, in the English language. But you get two people and they're extrapolating from more or less the same data and they get the same answers, you have a little better guarantee of the validity of the data. And if you get several people who do the same thing and arrive at the same point, it's starting to look pretty good. It's starting to look pretty good. Or if you get just one fellow who is extrapolating from data and he's just putting data together and he's going on and on and on putting data together and just keeps working, keeps working, keeps working, you know he's on a right track. But then go over this and take a look and see how you can apply it and whether or not you agree that it's on the right track. And if you see that it is on the right track, why, then you go ahead and use it. Or if you just use some of the processes that have come out of this, and you find they work, then you accept the body of data as a whole. I used to do quite a bit of this.

Now, just working out, how do you think? Differentiation. The ultimate in sanity is differentiation; this is rivaled in insanity by disassociation. But disassociation is actually complete identification, and that's quite different from differentiation. A person can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. He can tell the difference between a cigarette and a cigarette. There are two cigarettes, and the person who tells you that they're the same is being sloppy.

Now, Alfred Korzybski, in working with this data, gave you some extras that you really don't need, and that is a process. Because his process is based on trying to train people to differentiate instead of identify, and the reason they identify instead of differentiating is electronic. And the person who is thus trained becomes slower in thinking, not faster. His IQ drops; it does not rise. That is on test. So it's a mechanical proposition. It's very mechanical. Differentiation.

Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 10 November). Logics 1-7. Logics and Axioms (5211C10B). Lecture conducted from London, England.

Thanks so much for the references and links Caroline!

Questions that come up often for me are: "What sources did L. Ron Hubbard plagiarize from?" "What parts of Scientology that seem to work came from other sources and how did Hubbard change them?" and always I wonder "How the hell did I fall for this crap?"

Through one of your links I found a well organized and referenced site that explains a lot:

Possible origins for Dianetics and Scientology
by Jon Atack
HTML and links by Tilman Hausherr

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/j/origins6.html