The following is excerpted from my favorite book The Phoenix Lectures by L. Ron Hubbard.
AXIOM TWENTY-FIVE: AFFINITY IS A SCALE OF ATTITUDES WHICH FALLS AWAY FROM THE CO-EXISTENCE OF STATIC, THROUGH THE INTERPOSITIONS OF DISTANCE AND ENERGY, TO CREATE IDENTITY, DOWN TO CLOSE PROXIMITY BUT MYSTERY.
By the practice of Is-ness (Beingness) and Not-is-ness (refusal to Be) individuation progresses from the Knowingness of complete identification down through the introduction of more and more distance and less and less duplication, through Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness, Symbolizingness, Eatingness, Sexingness, and so through to not-Knowingness (Mystery). Until the point of Mystery is reached, some communication is possible, but even at Mystery an attempt to communicate continues. Here we have, in the case of an individual, a gradual falling away from the belief that one can assume a complete Affinity down to the conviction that all is a complete Mystery. Any individual is somewhere on this Know-to-Mystery scale. The original Chart of Human Evaluation was the Emotion section of this scale.
Affinity, in terms of mechanics, is simply a matter of distance. Affinity is basically a consideration, but it does represent itself mechanically. For instance, Total Knowingness goes down to Lookingness. You have to look to find out. Well that’s different from simply knowing without looking. We go down to Looking, now we go just a little bit lower than that. (This Know-to-Mystery scale is by the way an Affinity scale.) We go into Emotion, and then we no longer have knowledge by looking. We have to have knowledge by emotion. Do we like it — do we dislike it? There are particles in emotion: “I don’t like it” — in other words “I have some anger particles about it” or “I have some resentment particles” — and by the way a preclear has his reactive mind full of these emotion particles.
Now if I “have to feel it to know it is there”, I’ve gone immediately into Effort. And my affinity for something would be good if I could feel it and it would be no good at all if I couldn’t feel it. You get a Step V, a Black V, who is swearing by mechanics (and swearing at all life forms) and builds atom bombs and such things — and he tells you that he cannot contact life. He can’t contact this thing called the Static, therefore he “can’t believe in it”. This is very interesting. You ask him why, and he says, “Well I can’t feel it.” He’s twisting the snake around, so it’ll eat its tail. He’s proving it all upside down and backwards. He says he can’t get the existence of something he can’t feel. And the odd part of it is that we can measure electronically the existence of life. There is a little meter on which we ran some tests, and we can actually demonstrate that one individual can turn on in another individual at some great distance from him a considerable electrical current, enough to make this little machine sit up and sing. And the other person can turn it on at will, and the person on whom it’s being turned can’t stop it. Here is a manifestation that can be measured. We’ve done the impossible there too. We’ve done the impossible in many places in Scientology. You can’t measure a Static, but we’ve done so by having a person, at a distance, bring a mechanic into being.
When a person gets down to Effort on this scale then he’s into a level where he’s “gotta work”, everything has got to be work. He’s got to touch everything and feel everything before he can know anything. A person in the Effort band, by the way, as he gets to the lower part of that band, has facsimiles. He’s got mental image pictures. He’ll even do weird things like this: he will get a picture to know what’s happening to him. In other words, he’ll get a mental image picture of a past incident in order to get an idea. He gets the picture and then he gets the idea, he doesn’t get the idea and then get a picture. You want to watch that. Sometimes you’ll find a preclear who’s doing this. You’ll be saying “All right, get the idea of being perfect.” And your preclear will sit there and say, “I got it.” You want to ask him, “How did you do that?” That’s a wonderful question to ask a preclear at any time. “How did you do that?” And he’ll say, “Why, of course, just like everybody else. I got this picture and this picture came up and I looked at it and the picture said, ‘Be perfect,’ and it showed me a circle, and a circle — well, that’s perfect.” That’s how your preclear was doing that. He wasn’t making the postulate at all. He was waiting for a picture to come and tell him what it was all about.
Now we go down from Effort into Thinking, and we get our “figure-figure” case. This case is hard to get along with — he can’t work. Life is not composed of thought, particularly. It’s composed of space and action and all sorts of things. The Static can do all these things and is not necessarily “all pure thought”. Thinkingness comes in down the scale at the level below Effort. And it comes in as figure-figure-figure-figure-figure. Now a person can postulate without thinking about it, and if that’s what we mean by thought, that’s fine. But usually what people mean by thought is figure-figure. “I’ll just figure this out and I’ll get a computation and a calculation, and I’ll add it up to… now let me see… can you go to the movies? I don’t know,” — the kind of answer a little kid gets. “Now let me see. I’ll have to think it over. Give me a couple of days.”
We don’t know how all of this mechanic got into a postulate, but they’ve let it get in there. So that’s the level, Thinkingness.
Now we go downstairs from Thinkingness on this scale and we get into Symbolizingness. A symbol contains mass, meaning and mobility. A symbol is something that’s being handled from an orientation point — a point which is motionless in relationship to the symbol. It’s motionless, and the symbol is in motion, and has mass, meaning and mobility. “Where are you from?” “I am from New Jersey.” This fellow is telling you that he is from an orientation point called New Jersey. It’s motionless and as he runs around the world, he is always from New Jersey. He has mass, meaning and mobility. He has a name. When a person drops down the scale below figure-figure, he is into a point where he figures with symbols. Now that’s a condensation, isn’t it? Each of these was a condensation.
The next one down the line, below Symbols, is Eatingness. Animals eat animals. Animals are symbols and they eat other symbols and they think they have to stay alive by eating other symbols. This is real cute and eating is quite important of course and it can be a lot of fun, but here you have a real condensation. In other words, Effort got so condensed that it turned into an inverted kind of Thought, and that became so condensed that it packaged thinking — that’s what took place there — it became so condensed it became a Symbol. A word, for instance, is a whole package of thought. So packaged thinking is a symbol and packed symbols are a plate of beans.
Below that, when a person doesn’t believe he can eat any more, when he thinks he is not going to survive, he will go into the Sexingness band. If you starve cattle for a while they’ll start to breed, and if you feed them too well they’ll stop breeding. Quite irrational, but then who said any of this was rational? Cattle who are starved or lacking certain food elements will decide, well, we’ll live again in some other generation — and they’ll breed up a lot of calves. Of course, there’s nothing to feed the calves on but they haven’t paid much attention to that. In Arizona we have an interesting fact — we have some very beautiful cattle who have stopped breeding. They’ve just been too well fed. The way to get those cattle breeding again would be to simply start starving them. Freud by the way was so condensed he had to get way down there to that condensation level of Sex “in order to find out”.
Below Sex we have a new level of knowingness, the level of Mystery.
Mystery of course is the complete displacement of everything, and everything in a terrific confusion. The anatomy of Mystery is unprediction, confusion and then total blackout. First, he couldn’t predict some particles, and then it all seemed awfully confusing to him and then he just shut it all off and said, “I won’t look at it anymore”. That’s what Mystery is, and your Step Fives by the way are very, very concerned about Mystery. They’re very concerned about Thinkingness and trying to solve the Mystery. Well the Mystery is already solved in an ultimate truth. The ultimate solution of course is simply the As-is-ness of the problem. And the As-is-ness of a Mystery is simply the Mystery. That’s really all there is to it. There really is nothing to know back of a Mystery, except the Mystery itself. It’s just As-is-ness. But Mystery is the level of always pretending there’s something to know earlier than the Mystery.
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