Vinaire's Blog

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 15 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

.

AXIOMS (Part 3)

These Axioms of Affinity, Reality and Communication are inherent in everything we are dealing with in Scientology.

They are of extreme importance and usefulness. If you want to find where a break in a communication line is coming from, why, look for some affinity that is off, and if you want to audit somebody who is having a rather rough time, then you had better audit them with considerable affinity. If you demonstrate enough affinity one way or the other, you will be able to overcome their communication reluctance.

It’s very important to understand that all these things are basically a consideration. We have to consider that they exist before they exist. We are covering on this track the considerations which Man has composited into an existence.

Man has decided that certain things exist, and he has agreed upon them very thoroughly and so they exist for all of men. And if he had never decided upon these various existences, they wouldn’t exist.

So we look at Affinity, Reality and Communication. We are looking at a long series of considerations which Man holds in common. These are not considerations simply because we in Scientology consider that they exist. We can do enormously important things with this information, this codification of the organization of this universe which has spanned a period of something on the order of magnitude of seventy-six trillion years, and to be able to bust it loose and knock it apart is quite an interesting feat.

In looking at the subject of affinity we see that the first thing to know about it is that it is a consideration, and then that in the ARC triangle the distance of communication is represented by affinity to a marked degree, and the type of particle.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That happens to be a lie, but you could postulate it that way and make it come out. You could also say that if you get two people far enough apart, they’re likely to get mad at each other. A country wars with another country as a result of being far enough apart to afford to get mad. Somebody very furious at you as long as they are on the other end of a telephone line — when you went around to see them, they weren’t mad at you anymore. That’s an inversion on the situation. You closed the distance, and so you achieved a better affinity. There are many ways that you could handle this but again basically it’s a consideration.

When you demonstrate affinity, you are basically telling the person that you can see things the way he sees it. This overcomes his reluctance to communicate. Thus, we may look at affinity, reality and communication objectively as very fundamental considerations that are applicable universally. Affinity represents the distance aspect of communication. When you close the distance, you achieve better affinity.

AXIOM TWENTY-SIX: REALITY IS THE AGREED UPON APPARENCY OF EXISTENCE.

The whole subject of Reality is a baffling one to people who do not add into Reality Affinity and Communication. It’s not “This is my reality and that’s your reality”.

The person can postulate anything he wants to postulate, and he does have a personal reality. He could simply say, “It’s there”, or “That’s real”. Or he can have a facsimile appear which is more real to him than the actual universe around him — the psychotic to whom facsimiles are far, far more real than anything else that exists. Well these are two conditions which we don’t recognize as reality. On the one hand the person merely postulates a reality, and so that’s his reality and other people don’t agree upon it. The other is also a not-agreed-upon reality and that is an other-determined reality. Somebody’s given him a facsimile and has really impressed him with it, and so this looks more real to him than reality. In other words, we have complete self-determined postulation, and complete other-determined postulations, neither one of which is what we consider to be reality. Those are extremes.

What we actually consider to be reality is in the mean of these. That is: what do we agree is real. You and I agree that there’s a wall there — and there’s a wall there. We agree there’s a ceiling there, and there’s a ceiling there. That’s real, simply because you and I safely have agreed that that’s how it is. Now if somebody came into the room and looked at forty people sitting down and said, “What are you all standing up for?” why, you’d have rather a tendency to believe there was something wrong with this fellow. As a matter of fact, the society uses natural selection to take out of the line-up people who have too much personal reality and too much other-determined reality. If this person walked in and said, “What are all you people standing up for?” — if he did that consistently about a number of things and said, “What is that lion doing walking on the ceiling?” there would be a tendency for him to get locked up. In other words, he would be moved away from survival where he wouldn’t procreate. In other words, we’d move these people actually out of at least the genetic line-up. These are called the insane.

Now here we have in Reality a very embracive subject, because Reality is actually Is-ness. And unreality is Not-is-ness. An effort of trying to make things disappear with energy. Trying to make things disappear with energy was talked about amusingly in such places as the Bible and they used to say “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword” and somebody said once “Turn the other cheek”, and what these people were actually saying was: fighting force with force does not bring about anything like a perfect duplicate.

Maybe they didn’t know they were saying that. But using force to fight force brings about an unreality. Oddly enough using force to build force brings about a reality.

Continuous alteration gives us an Is-ness. A Not-is-ness — saying it doesn’t exist — gives us an unreality. So, there we have Reality and Unreality defined.

Now how could you use this principle of Reality in auditing:

Reality is basically agreement. A mechanical agreement is: for two forms to be exactly similar. In other words, one’s a copy of the other form. That’s mimicry, and we learn by mimicry, which is the lowest level of entrance to ARC, and is a very good thing for an auditor to know in any case. What we know then as reality is: the agreed upon apparency of existence.

People have their own viewpoint about things. That is their personal reality. It becomes a common reality only when there is a broad agreement on it.

You become real to another person when you mimic that person. In other words, you have entered that person’s reality by agreeing with him. With the establishment of this common reality you can get into better communication with him.

But this common reality may not be the same as the actual reality, which one perceives from the top of the Know-to Mystery scale (see Axiom 25). One moves away from the actual reality as a one comes down the Know-to Mystery scale.

However, as everyone rises up to the top of the Know-to Mystery scale there comes about a natural agreement.

KHTK AXIOM 26: Reality among people is based on what they agree upon. The actual reality, however, is perceived from the viewpoint of Knowingness.

AXIOM TWENTY-SEVEN: AN ACTUALITY CAN EXIST FOR ONE INDIVIDUALLY, BUT WHEN IT IS AGREED WITH BY OTHERS IT CAN BE SAID TO BE A REALITY.

And we find that those things which have become solid to us, very fixed, must have been agreed upon by others.

The anatomy of Reality is contained in Is-ness, which is composed of As-is-ness and Alter-is-ness. Is-ness is an apparency, it is not an Actuality. The Actuality is As-is-ness altered so as to obtain a persistency. Unreality is the consequence and apparency of the practice of Not-is-ness.

This agreement is part of the total As-is-ness of this universe.

If you ask a preclear for “some things you wouldn’t mind agreeing with,” or “something that you could do that other people would agree with”, and so on, you’ll notice a change in the case. Why? We’re improving his level of agreement. He is actually bound by certain considerations, and until he postulates otherwise, he will continue with those considerations. This is how somebody gets fixed into something.

The whole of existence in this universe actually is run very much like a hypnotic trance.

The worse off a group is, which is to say the less communication they have, actually the more communication can be forced on them, and you see a form of hypnotism there, but the interesting thing is that they must have been prepared by an enormous number of agreements before they got into that state. In other words, somebody else prepared them, so they didn’t care who they agreed with after a while. When someone of higher rank in a uniform, walks up to a soldier and says do something, the soldier will do it. Well, this is a form of hypnotism. You could get a group to agree first that you were simply standing there, and then the next thing that you could get them to agree to is the fact that they were listening to you, and then you would give them a few little things on which they would agree, and at some point you could tell them that the world was on fire, and the audience would rush out to find out or maybe they’d just sit there and burn.

Now what is this all about? Does that mean that anybody bringing about an agreement would bring about hypnotism? Oh, no.

The reason why, in Scientology, we do not bring about a hypnotism even in Open Procedure by Duplication, is that we are undoing the agreements which people have been making for seventy-six trillion years. We’re undoing these; thus, auditing makes a person freer, and freer, and freer.

Now, this fellow on the stage who simply gets the audience to agree and agree and agree and agree, and then tells them the place is on fire, isn’t really going in the direction of making them freer, is he? His intention for this is entirely different. It isn’t that an intention is above agreement, it’s that consideration is always above agreement, and he is trying to work them into a situation where they will accept what he says without question. In Scientology we’re not interested in anybody accepting what we say without question. We ask them to question it. We ask them to please look at the physical universe around you, please look at people, at your own mind, and understand thereby that what we are talking about happens to be actual. This is the series of agreements. These are. I could get people to agree with me about a lot of things and every once in a while, throw them a curve. I could quite imperceptibly introduce a false datum into the science, and people have done this sort of thing, but one can trace back in this development and see that what we’re doing here is laying out the map of what has happened in seventy-six trillion years of a universe.

Your agreements have finally mounted up to a point where you believe this universe is all here and what you’re agreeing to fortunately are the very things which you agreed to. We aren’t giving you new things, we’re giving you old things, and by understanding these old things which we have re-discovered, you become free.

What is this feeling of unreality that people get this unconsciousness and upset and forgetfulness and so on down the list of discomforts of beings. Actually, forgetfulness stems from an effort to make things disappear by pressing against them with energy. You can imagine that if we push against a thought hard enough and say it isn’t there while it’s still there, why, we will surely become forgetful. And if we push hard enough, we will become unconscious. But remember we had to postulate that we could forget, and we had to postulate that we could become unconscious before either of these things could happen. People toss around waiting to go to sleep, then they say, “I am going to sleep.” Well, inspect R2-40 and you’ll understand why the proper thing to do is to simply say, “I’m asleep.” “Well,” they say, “that’s a lie.” No, it isn’t a lie unless you consider that you’re awake. Now, if you said, “I’m awake, and now I am going to sleep,” why of course you wouldn’t go to sleep. The point here is that you could make at any moment a prime postulate.

A person’s IS-NESS is what he sees through the filters of his considerations. AS-IS-NESS decreases those filters. ALTER-IS-NESS increases those filters. NOT-IS-NESS is the denial of IS-NESS, which produces unreality. Things become more solid as one descends the Know-to-Mystery scale. Agreement from others simply keep one’s reality in place because it has approval from others.

KHTK AXIOM 27: One can have his own personal reality, but when it is agreed with by others it becomes a common reality.

We come to the formula of communication.

AXIOM TWENTY-EIGHT: COMMUNICATION IS THE CONSIDERATION AND ACTION OF IMPELLING AN IMPULSE OR PARTICLE FROM SOURCE-POINT ACROSS A DISTANCE TO RECEIPT-POINT, WITH THE INTENTION OF BRINGING INTO BEING AT THE RECEIPT-POINT A DUPLICATION OF THAT WHICH EMANATED FROM THE SOURCE-POINT.

Now understand this word duplicate as copy, and we have perfect duplicate which means As-is. When we talk about a duplicate, we merely mean a copy. Copy, facsimile, duplicate, are pretty much the same thing, and when we’re saying perfect duplicate, we mean the object created again in its place, in its time, with its own energy. So, we send a telegram from New York City which says, “I love you” and it arrives in San Francisco saying, “I loathe you”. Something has happened there, that we don’t get a duplication. Well the more mechanical an individual becomes the less he can duplicate and the less he can make perfect duplicates — so he can’t As-is anything. He falls off to a point where he can’t make a copy. You say, “Go around the corner and tell Betty I love her”, and he goes around the corner and says, “Joe said uh… to tell you he loathes you”. In a line of soldiers, we whisper a message, “H hour is at 10 o’clock,” and when it goes through a dozen soldiers this way, we find at the other end that “We had beans for supper”. This is the inability to make copies. And this is a most disruptive thing, and the most important thing in communication. A workable statement of the formula of communication is simply: cause, distance, effect with a good copy at effect of that which was at cause. That’s all you really need to know about communication.

In an ideal communication the source and receipt-points mesh together like two gears. The impulse driving them is natural when it is aligned with everything around. Communication falls off when the source and receipt-points are not on the same wavelength (lack of duplication).

Distance between source and receipt-points comes about because of falling affinity. The intentions at the two ends are not similar and the attention is not fully there, Therefore, duplication and understanding suffer. The considerations at the two ends are not in harmony.

KHTK AXIOM 28: Communication is a co-action between source and receipt-points like two smoothly meshing gears, where the impulse passing back and forth is in complete harmony with the considerations and intentions involved.  

AXIOM TWENTY-NINE: IN ORDER TO CAUSE AS-IS-NESS TO PERSIST, ONE MUST ASSIGN OTHER AUTHORSHIP TO THE CREATION THAN HIS OWN. OTHERWISE, HIS VIEW OF IT WOULD CAUSE ITS VANISHMENT.

Any space, energy, form, object, individual, or physical universe condition can exist only when an alteration has occurred of the original As-is-ness so as to prevent a casual view from vanishing it. In other words, anything which is persisting must contain a “lie” so that the original consideration is not completely duplicated.

If Joe created something and then said, “Bill made it,” that’s a lie, so he gets persistence stemming out of a second postulate, the lie.

IS-NESS is persisting by its very nature. Its view gets corrupted when ALTER-IS-NESS is practiced. This corruption goes away when AS-IS-NESS is practiced. When other authorship is attributed to some change made then that lie persists. One may start to believe in that lie and lose one’s ability to change it back.

KHTK AXIOM 29: IS-NESS persists by its very nature, and so does any change to it. When other authorship is assigned to a change, one loses the ability to change it back.

AXIOM THIRTY: THE GENERAL RULE OF AUDITING IS THAT ANYTHING WHICH IS UNWANTED AND YET PERSISTS MUST BE THOROUGHLY VIEWED, AT WHICH TIME IT WILL VANISH.

If only partially viewed, its intensity, at least, will decrease.

This is very true. A thorough view will always make an aberration vanish whether it is done through auditing or through subject clearing.

KHTK AXIOM 30: The general rule of auditing is that anything which is unwanted and yet persists must be thoroughly viewed, at which time it will vanish.

AXIOM THIRTY-ONE: GOODNESS AND BADNESS, BEAUTIFULNESS AND UGLINESS, ARE ALIKE CONSIDERATIONS AND HAVE NO OTHER BASIS THAN OPINION.

Goodness and Badness, beautifulness and ugliness are dichotomies. Per KHTK Logic 7, a dichotomy may be represented on a scale that extends to infinity at either end. Any point on this scale shall have a relative value that may be assessed for consistency. Such a value is, of course, a consideration when assessed by a viewpoint.

An opinion is a view that may have been verified somewhat for consistency with other data but hasn’t been verified to be totally consistent.

KHTK AXIOM 31: Goodness and badness, beautifulness and ugliness, are alike considerations that may be consistent with other data but not fully verified.

AXIOM THIRTY-TWO: ANYTHING WHICH IS NOT DIRECTLY OBSERVED TENDS TO PERSIST.

It’s true that if you don’t As-is it and you’ve already said it’s going to be there, why naturally it will be there. But this is worse than that. You find somebody working and paying some attention to the work but never paying any attention to his machine. And you’ll find he has facsimiles of the machine just all stacked up everywhere. He’s never As-ised the machine. Or you find somebody who has always looked at lighted objects in dark rooms and has never looked at the darkness eventually seeing nothing but darkness when he closed his eyes. He’ll have a “black bank”, in other words.

Things in your environment that you haven’t paid close attention to get stacked up in your mind as facsimiles. But if you have observed them closely then they simply get assimilated in your mental matrix and become natural part of your thinking.

KHTK AXIOM 32: Things that are directly observed get well assimilated and do not have to be recalled.

AXIOM THIRTY-THREE: ANY AS-IS-NESS WHICH IS ALTERED BY NOT-IS-NESS (BY FORCE) TENDS TO PERSIST.

AS-IS-NESS improves the IS-NESS. IS-NESS is persisting anyway; but when it is altered by force, then it becomes NOT-IS-NESS. NOT-IS-NESS persists more solidly, and it is difficult to undo. People who have obviously irrational fixed idea, are installed there by force (NOT-IS-NESS), Those irrational ideas are heavily justified and, therefore, cannot be undone with rational arguments.

KHTK AXIOM 33: When IS-NESS is altered by force, it becomes very persistent NOT-IS-NESS that cannot be undone easily.

AXIOM THIRTY-FOUR: ANY IS-NESS, WHEN ALTERED BY FORCE TENDS TO PERSIST.

This is essentially a repeat of Axiom 33.

KHTK AXIOM 34: (Same as Axiom 33).

AXIOM THIRTY-FIVE: THE ULTIMATE TRUTH IS A STATIC.

A Static has no mass, meaning, mobility, no wavelength, no time, no location in space, no space. This has the technical name of “Basic Truth”.

As AS-IS-NESS is practiced, one climbs the Know-to-Mystery scale towards KNOWINGNESS. Total knowingness is the attribute of the universal viewpoint in which all data is totally assimilated. From this universal viewpoint one sees things as they are. This is the ultimate truth.

KHTK AXIOM 35: The ultimate truth is the knowingness of the universal viewpoint.

AXIOM THIRTY-SIX: A LIE IS A SECOND POSTULATE, STATEMENT OR CONDITION DESIGNED TO MASK A PRIMARY POSTULATE WHICH IS PERMITTED TO REMAIN.

Examples:

Neither truth nor a lie is a motion or alteration of a particle from one position to another.

A lie is a statement that a particle having moved did not move, or a statement that a particle not having moved, did move.

The basic lie is that a consideration which was made was not made or that it was different.

Hubbard defines postulate as “a consideration generated by oneself as a self-created truth”. But such a consideration is true only to the degree it is not only consistent with existence but also explains it. The primary postulate simply brings an understanding of existence, whereas, the second postulate is simply a NOT-IS-NESS that resists the understanding of existence,

KHTK AXIOM 36: A lie is a second postulate that is designed to resist the understanding of what is there.

AXIOM THIRTY-SEVEN: WHEN A PRIMARY CONSIDERATION IS ALTERED BUT STILL EXISTS, PERSISTENCE IS ACHIEVED FOR THE ALTERING CONSIDERATION.

All persistence depends on the Basic Truth, but the persistence is of the altering consideration, for the Basic Truth has neither persistence nor impersistence.

Now we come to something which is tremendously interesting because it is the proof of the fact that we have reached an ultimate truth and an ultimate solution. And that ultimate truth is itself very, very important to an auditor because that tells you whether or not Scientology is a total subject.

We could show this by a line representing knowledge, going upward from no knowledge as follows:

ALL DATA KNOWN
ONE NEW DATUM KNOWN
NO DATA KNOWN

From no data to one new datum to eventually at top ALL data known.

But this is actually a circle. At the top is NO DATA KNOWN. Just before the top is ALL DATA KNOWN, and as we move to the top and then return to NO DATA we then move to the next point of ONE NEW DATUM KNOWN and so on around the circle to more and more, then ALL data, then again none:

ALL DATA KNOWN
NO DATA KNOWN
ONE NEW DATUM KNOWN

You see that on this circle everything known, and nothing known are adjacent.

Well, we have reached that point in Scientology because we know that the ultimate truth, the ultimate solution, is the Static.

The solution to a problem is the As-is-ness of the problem, because by solution is meant: what will cause this problem to dissipate and disappear. With As-is-ness we have reached the solution to all problems. We have reached an ultimate truth. So that we know we have in Scientology a total subject.

The IS-NESS is persisting according to its nature. Basic truth is the objectivity of seeing things as they are. When all data is known it gets assimilated into a field of continuity, harmony and consistency. The ultimate truth is arrived at this point of knowingness. This point lies at the top of the Know-to-Mystery scale. It is called the Universal Viewpoint. One arrives at a solution only when one sees things as they are.

KHTK AXIOM 37: The basic truth is the objectivity of seeing things as they are.

AXIOM THIRTY-EIGHT:

1: STUPIDITY IS THE UNKNOWNESS OF CONSIDERATION.
2: MECHANICAL DEFINITION: STUPIDITY IS THE UNKNOWNESS OF TIME, PLACE, FORM, AND EVENT.

He knows something happened, but he doesn’t know what happened. He can’t add it up. He can’t do anything with it. We call that stupidity.

1: TRUTH IS THE EXACT CONSIDERATION.
2: TRUTH IS THE EXACT TIME, PLACE FORM, AND EVENT.

Thus we see that failure to discover Truth brings about stupidity.
Thus we see that the discovery of Truth would bring about an As-is-ness by actual experiment.
Thus we see that an ultimate truth would have no time, place, form or event.
Thus, then, we perceive that we can achieve a persistence only when we mask a truth.
Lying is an alteration of Time, Place, Event, or Form.
Lying becomes Alter-is-ness, becomes Stupidity.
(The Blackness of cases is an accumulation of the case’s own or another lies.)
Anything which persists must avoid As-is-ness. Thus, anything, to persist, must contain a lie.

He says: “I am a man,” so he’s a man. That’s the exact consideration. He is not telling a lie until he has said I am a man — and then has masked or hidden the fact that he is a man, and says, “I am a woman”, Now the odd part of it is that he made a truth when he made the first postulate. And that which denied that truth then persisted. The second postulate always persists. I give you R2-40. The dissertation in R2-40 in the Handbook makes this much clearer. The second postulate introduced time. Persist is time — that’s all. Mortality, immortality — this is a matter of time. It’s also a matter of Identity, but it’s basically time. That which is persisting means that which is time-ing. And if you have assumed that after you made a postulate you then had something which permitted you to make another postulate, you’d have to postulate time there, wouldn’t you? It’s quite interesting. So that your second postulate then introduced time, merely because it’s the second postulate. You had to introduce time. You see, there is no time in the Static, natively. Time is just a consideration. All right. So, you introduce time. You get a lie. Now any time the first postulate is masked (this is mechanical by the way, this is the way it works) and you put a second postulate in front of the first postulate it’s the second postulate which persists, but it derives its strength from the first postulate.

Entered into the solution of this subject of Scientology and life was this datum, that stupidity is the unknowness of consideration. Well, then truth is the knowness of the consideration, isn’t it? Right back there we have that perfect duplicate. We found out that when you got the As-is-ness of anything, if you made a perfect duplicate of it it would disappear. So, truth is a perfect duplicate. But that’s a disappearance. Well, if that’s a disappearance then all you’ve got left is the Static. So that truth is the Static. And it follows through just as clearly as that. It’s a mechanical proof. It’s as mechanical as any kind of proof you ever wanted in any field of mathematics. It’s totally mechanical.

Now again a problem is a solution only when you get the As-is-ness of the problem. We get the As-is-ness of the problem, therefore what have we got left? We’ve got the As-is- ness of the problem and we have nothing left. Oh, but we don’t have nothing — we have a Static. So, we find out that the ultimate truth is also the basic truth, contains no time, no motion, no mass, no wavelength, and we find also that the ultimate solution contains no time, no motion, no mass, no length. So we come back to something which is not an imponderable: does and can one of these Statics exist? Yes, that too we can subject to proof, and we can subject it to proof immediately, instantly and easily. Nothing to it.

You just ask somebody who’s in not too bad condition to “Be three feet back of your head.” You can ask him to be anywhere, to appear anywhere in the universe, and he can. You ask him to manufacture space and energy, and he can. You can inspect actually whether or not this is taking place. And you’ll find out that it is taking place, and you’ll find out that Man is basically a Static. So, he doesn’t move. He appears. Therefore, we have this thing called the Static. We have the perfect duplicate — the As-is-ness. We have an ultimate truth and we have an ultimate solution. At this point in Scientology we have wrapped it up. There are a great many strong points on the track where there’s a lot of data hidden, and chaos and confusions and that sort of thing which we’ve by-passed, a lot of things which we haven’t described adequately — for instance I’m not even satisfied at this moment completely with our description of Affinity, but I can tell you this, that they are knowingly by-passed points.

The other evening (at two o’clock in the morning) I suddenly found that I had arrived at the edge of a cliff, looking at End of Track. There isn’t any more road out there, that’s all, because we’ve come back to the Static, and we have found out what this Static is, we can demonstrate its existence, we can demonstrate what it does, we can prove it and we can all agree upon that proof, and we can do wonderful and miraculous things with it. The forty processes contained in the Auditor’s Handbook* can do those things just like that.

When you know well this material and can apply it in the first few of these processes, you will be doing very, very well. * Auditor’s Handbook: 1954 edition of the book which, greatly expanded, became The Creation of Human Ability by L. Ron Hubbard. See book list in back pages.

For Hubbard, Static is a thing of faith like the “unmoved mover”. The problem with Hubbard’s logic is that the abilities of the Static are persisting. He is not accounting for that. He has not resolved the problem of the Static. What happens when there is no Static?

KHTK AXIOM 38:
1: Stupidity is the unknowness of consideration. Truth is the exact consideration.
2: Mechanical definition: Stupidity is the unknowness of time, place, form, and event. Truth is the exact time, place form, and event.

.

Hubbard’s postulate of “Static” is similar to Aristotle’s postulate of “unmoved mover”. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action.

In Hubbard’s case, his concept of AS-IS-NESS applies to everything except to the Static. This is inconsistent.

.

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 14 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

.

AXIOMS (Part 2)

It is a remarkable thing that life itself can be codified in terms of Axioms. It has not been done before. The first time it was even attempted was in 1951 when I wrote the Logics and Axioms, which I did simply to give an alignment to thought itself. And as a matter of fact, copies of these Axioms were sent over to Europe and in 1953 I found them in Vienna fully translated into German. It’s quite remarkable. Over there they were terribly impressed simply because it had not been done before. Nobody had before codified life to this degree, and nobody had codified psychotherapy. And they were not impressed with whether the Axioms were right or wrong, it was only that nobody had done it before. In these Scientology Axioms we’re not quite doing the same thing. Those 1951 Axioms of Dianetics were quite complicated and these fifty Axioms we now have are nowhere near as lengthy, but their reach is greater, and they pack a great deal more punch.

Life has never been codified before in terms of axioms. This is something unique.

We come here to the interesting subject of a proof of ultimate truth. If we have reached an ultimate truth, then we have reached an ultimate solution, and who would ever suspect, really, that an ultimate truth or an ultimate solution could be subjected to mechanical proof. We have done just that. We have discovered the phenomenon of a perfect duplicate.

AXIOM TWENTY: BRINGING THE STATIC TO CREATE A PERFECT DUPLICATE CAUSES THE VANISHMENT OF ANY EXISTENCE OR PART THEREOF.

If you can bring someone to make a perfect duplicate of anything it will vanish. We have a perfect duplicate clearly defined:

A perfect duplicate is an additional creation of the object, its energy, and space, in its own space, in its own time, using its own energy. (And we could append to that “the considerations which go along with it”, because it couldn’t be anything but considerations.)

And: This violates the condition that two objects must not occupy the same space and causes vanishment of the object.

If you ask somebody to simply make a perfect duplicate of, for instance, a vase, just exactly where it sits, it will begin to fade out on him, and he can do that to almost anything.

Why doesn’t it fade for somebody else? This is quite remarkable. Everything in this universe is displaced or misplaced. When we talk about a lie, we really don’t mean that simply changing the position of something is a lie. We have to alter the consideration regarding it to make a lie. It isn’t really a lie that everything is so scrambled in this universe. It is scrambled. Just in the last moment or two several cosmic rays went through your body. Those were particles which emanated from somewhere and they arrived where you are — they had been enroute for a hundred million years. To get one of those cosmic rays to vanish we would have to find its point of creation, and we would have to make a duplicate of that ray at the moment of its creation, and then we would have to make a duplicate of having done so. At that instant that cosmic ray would vanish.

This is very interesting to the physicist, it’s very interesting to almost anybody, and it is demonstrable. You can do this. I asked an auditor one afternoon simply to “look to the garage wall over there” and to choose a very small area, and “find the atoms and molecules in the wall there, and put an attention unit” — a remote viewpoint — “next to each one, and follow it immediately back to where it had been created.” He was leaning on the fender of the car, and he did this — and he came off the fender of that car as though he had been shot. The object itself, this tiny portion of the object, had started to disintegrate. And he rushed over to it to hold it in place with his hands!

Why doesn’t the whole universe vanish? Well, probably on the very site of this building there was another building once and that building has been broken up and the bricks have been moved and part of it is out there in the street, and part of it is still in the ground below and part of it — maybe some brick dust — got on somebody’s suitcase who went to World War II, and part of it’s in Germany and it’s spread all over the place, and here are all these cosmic waves and rays going all over the universe — and to get each one of those at its moment of creation in the time and space, and to make a perfect duplicate of all this, would be quite a job. It’s not an impossible job. It requires an ability to span attention. You would get a physical object to disappear so thoroughly that everybody else would know it was gone.

You see that it isn’t true that an object sitting before you at this moment, or your chair, has always been in that position. Nor is it true that the materials in that chair have always been in that position, nor is it true that the atoms which made up the chair in raw material form were always in that particular ore bed or in that particular tree. So, you see it’s quite complex. This universe is scrambled.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make it vanish, however.

As we can produce this phenomenon, we know we have an ultimate solution. The perfect duplicate was the little latch string hanging out that opened the door to an ultimate truth. Well, what would an ultimate truth be? An ultimate truth is a static, and an ultimate solution is a static. In other words, an ultimate truth and an ultimate solution is nothing. Get the As-is-ness of any problem, make a perfect duplicate of any problem, and the problem will disappear. You can subject that easily to proof. So if you can make a problem disappear by simply getting its As-is-ness, then you’ve got the solution to all problems, or the ultimate solution. Well, the MEST universe itself is just a problem, and so if you could get its As-is-ness, it would disappear. It would disappear for everybody. Well, let’s study that and, and get that very well and get what the definition is there, in the Axioms and Definitions. This is the total solution, by the way, to the vanishment of engrams — what we were handling in Dianetics. The vanishment of ridges, of all energy forms and manifestations, all these can simply be accomplished by making perfect duplicates of them. That doesn’t mean that you should now make nothing out of everything or get your preclear to try to make nothing out of everything, but that it just can be done.

Making a perfect duplicate seems to be a mental exercise that is left to the person to figure out. There is no clear explanation given here on how to make a perfect duplicate. When duplicating a vase, you can make a mental picture of it, but how do you create its energy and space again? How do you create them in its own space and time? How do you use its own energy?

To do that you will have to repeat the exact sequence of actions that it took to make that vase, at the location where that vase was made using the same raw materials employed to make it. If you are just doing it mentally then you must at least know the techniques used in making that vase, the raw materials used, how those raw materials were obtained, etc. It comes down to fully understanding what one is looking at. With deeper understanding one’s viewpoint changes.

Hubbard is talking about a theoretical principle, the ultimate of which is having a viewpoint that can see in depth what is there. There is complete understanding. No anomalies exist in the reality of things. Any anomalies that come up are resolved quickly. There is knowingness as the viewpoint can grasp the oneness of continuity, harmony and consistency in everything.

KHTK AXIOM 20: Bringing a person to create a perfect duplicate causes the vanishment of any and all anomalies (discontinuities, disharmonies and inconsistencies).

AXIOM TWENTY-ONE: UNDERSTANDING IS COMPOSED OF AFFINITY, REALITY AND COMMUNICATION.

We understand understanding a bit better when we see that it is simply the ability to get the As-is-ness of something. For example, we could say “I don’t quite understand this car. Don’t quite understand what’s wrong with it. It just won’t start.” And we walk around it and look at it and then we find out that we haven’t turned on the key. And we turn on the key. We’ve understood it, in other words. We have unmocked the fact that the key was not turned on and we have turned on the key (which actually is practicing Alter-is-ness). If we walked around a car and said “I don’t understand what this object is… I don’t understand what this object is … AH! it’s a car!” We would feel immediately relieved. We’d feel a lot better about the thing, but if we were to get its total As-is-ness there would just be a hole sitting there.

So understanding is As-is-ness and understanding in its entirety would be a Static and so we have the fact that Life knows basically everything there is to know before it gets complicated with lots of data, merely because it can postulate all the data it knows. All knowingness is inherent in the static itself. A thetan who is in good shape knows everything there is to know. He knows past, present and future. He knows everything. This doesn’t mean he knows data. This merely means that he can As-is anything and if he can As-is anything believe me he can understand it.

Man’s salvation I’ve said several times depends upon his recognition of his brotherhood with the universe. Well let’s misinterpret that just a little bit and say Man’s salvation — if you want to save him from the universe — would depend upon his ability to make an As-is-ness of the physical universe at which moment he wouldn’t have a universe, and this would be total understanding.

Understanding has three parts: Affinity Reality and Communication.

You can actually compose from ARC all the mathematics there are. You can combine ARC into mathematics. You can accomplish anything with ARC that you want to do. Symbolic Logic, even calculus, could be extrapolated from ARC.

Affinity depends upon reality and communication. Reality depends upon affinity and communication. Communication depends upon affinity and reality. If you don’t believe this try to communicate sometime with somebody without any affinity at all. Get real mad at somebody, and then try to communicate with him. You won’t. Try to get somebody to be reasonable when he is very angry and you’ll find out that his reality is very poor. He cannot conceive of the situation. He’ll give you some of the weirdest things. There is no liar lying like an angry man.

If you raise somebody’s affinity you will raise his reality and communication. If you raise somebody’s reality, you’ll raise his affinity and communication. And the keynote of this triangle happens to be communication. Communication is more important than either affinity or reality.

To understand is to get the AS-IS-NESS of something. Of course, there are degrees of understanding (AS-IS-NESS). Ultimate understanding is the Universal Viewpoint. The universal viewpoint is pure theta and not Static (potential) as Hubbard calls it.

In the universal viewpoint, all data is assimilated to become one. In other words, it becomes continuous, harmonious and consistent. It turns into knowingness.

Understanding has the aspects of affinity, reality and communication. They always go together in all circumstances. Communication, however, is the entrance point to understanding.

KHTK AXIOM 21: Understanding (AS-IS-NESS) has the aspects of affinity, reality and communication.

AXIOM TWENTY-TWO: THE PRACTICE OF NOT-IS-NESS REDUCES UNDERSTANDING.

In other words, something is there, and we say it’s not there.

Someone is driving down the road like mad and there’s an enormous boulder lying in the middle of the road, and almost anybody, just before the crash, will say the boulder’s not there. And by golly it’s there. And this makes him feel he’s a weak thetan. He failed. And the funny part of it is that if he were to immediately As-is the boulder down the road, instead of denying it’s there, and if he could make this a perfect duplicate, the boulder would disappear.

He doesn’t do it that way. He sort of puts some energy up and pushes against the boulder, and says, “It’s not there, it’s not there. I deny it.”

Well, he’ll have a mighty thin understanding of the whole thing.

He doesn’t want to communicate with it, so he says it’s not there. He doesn’t want to have any affinity for it at all, so he says it’s not there. And believe me his reality cuts down. The practice of Not-is-ness reduces understanding, and that is what Man is doing constantly. He’s trying to avow that something that isn’t there is there, and he’s trying to avow that something that is there isn’t there, and between these two things, giving it no As-is-ness at all or new postulates of any kind, he’s having quite a time of it.

NOT-IS-NESS means denying what is there and assuming things that are not there. There is no communication with the reality and no affinity for it either. Therefore, the reality is very low. The understanding is, therefore, very much reduced.

KHTK AXIOM 22: The practice of not-is-ness reduces understanding.

AXIOM TWENTY-THREE: THE STATIC HAS THE CAPABILITY OF TOTAL KNOWINGNESS. TOTAL KNOWINGNESS WOULD CONSIST OF TOTAL ARC.

Here we have a condition of existence which is As-is. That would be total knowingness. Well, if we had somebody who could say “As-is” to everything and trace all parts of everything back to their original time, location, and simply got them as they really were, we of course would have nothing left but a Static. We would have zero. We wouldn’t even have space.

If you wanted, by the way, to make this whole universe vanish, you would have to be able to span this whole universe. You would have to be as big as the universe. You could drill somebody up to the point where he could do that.

The state of AS-IS-NESS is a viewpoint that can see things as they are. In other words, it is totally objective. We call this the universal viewpoint. From this viewpoint, one is able to grasp the whole universe completely without any filter. One has total knowingness.

Total knowingness means knowing the oneness of continuity, harmony and consistency in everything. This doesn’t mean everything is reduced to zero. It is just that everything is perfectly aligned and there is no resistance to finding anything. It is not a static condition of mere potential.

KHTK AXIOM 23: A person has the capability of total knowingness of the universal viewpoint. Total knowingness would consist of total ARC.

Definition: The universal viewpoint views things as they are without filter. In other words, it is totally objective.

AXIOM TWENTY-FOUR: TOTAL ARC WOULD BRING ABOUT THE VANISHMENT OF ALL MECHANICAL CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE.

All mechanical conditions of existence. It wouldn’t bring about the sudden death of everything. It would bring about the exteriorization of everything. It would mean the vanishment of all space and all form. Mechanics.

Differentiate between a consideration — a postulate — and a mechanic. Be sure to get the difference between a quality such as complete trust, a quality such as full responsibility, in other words the qualities along the top of the Chart of Attitudes — and the mechanics. A person who is all out for mechanics, and won’t have anything to do with considerations, believes completely that considerations are of no worth and that mechanics are the thing (“You can put your hands on it, you can feel it, you can touch it”) — this person would have to be made thoroughly acquainted with the existence of these mechanics before he could As-is them sufficiently to reach a level where he would have the ability to consider. He has sunk below the level of mechanics.

That’s why 8C Opening Procedure, which acquaints the person with his immediate environment, works as it does.

Well, when we say mechanics, we mean space, energy, objects and time. And when something has those things in it we’re talking about something mechanical. That’s all that would vanish if you As-ised all of existence — just the mechanics — and you could turn right around and postulate them all back again too with great ease.

ARC shall bring about total understanding, and, therefore, the universal viewpoint of total objectivity. All fixation will be gone, and the mechanics will simplify greatly.

KHTK AXIOM 24: Total ARC would bring about the total objectivity of the universal viewpoint.

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.

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.

To sum this up we have, under Axiom Twenty-five:

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 is a matter of distance or similarity. Greater affinity means lesser distance and greater similarity. The Know-to-Mystery scale is an Affinity scale. It is a genius idea arrived at by Hubbard to describe what happens to the viewpoint of a person as he increasingly succumbs to ALTER-IS-NESS.

At top is Knowingness, which is the intuitive grasp of everything. There is oneness of knowledge. At the next level of Looking one has to look to find out. At the next level of Emotion, one knows things by his emotional reaction to them. At the Effort level a person depends on mental image pictures to think with. He must touch and feel things to know them. Thinkingness comes below the effort band as figure-figure. When a person drops down the scale below figure-figure, he is into a point where he figures with symbols. A symbol is a packaged thought. This is increasing condensation as one goes down the scale. Symbols condense into Eatingness, which is a dog eat dog kind of behavior indicative of fixations. Eatingness condenses into Sexingness where attention is fixated on future survival. Below that is the level of always Mystery where one is pretending there’s something to know earlier than the Mystery.

KHTK AXIOM 25: Affinity is a scale of attitudes which falls away from the objectivity of the universal viewpoint, through the interpositions of distance and subjectivity, to create identity, down to close proximity but mystery.

By the practice of ALTER-IS-NESS individuation progresses from the Knowingness of complete objectivity 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.

.

These axioms are a codification of life. One of the most wonderful axiom is AXIOM 25.

.