6211C01 SHSpec-207 The Road to Truth

It is very difficult to go around remembering all the time. You get
stuck!

Pontius Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Truth is a very near ultimate in
its most severe interpretation. Lots of people have stated what truth is
without realizing that they are putting an absolute where there is actually a
maybe. Truth is a relative commodity. The best approach to truth is
contained in the mathematics used in connecting telephone switchboards. They
don't select out subscribers with arithmetical truth. Arithmetic is a
theoretical truth. It is only theoretical because there is no commodity
connected with it. It is a truth of symbols. Errors only turn up when people
say the symbols mean something in reality. "Two apples minus two apples
equals no apples," is a magician's trick. A no-apple is a relative thing.
There is still something of an apple. You can say, "Well, there are no apples
on the table after you take two apples off." That is true, as long as you
accept time as a truth, which is adventurous! The statement is only true for
one particular time and place, yet it passes as a truth. It is a truth, but a
relative one. No thetan since apples came into existence has utterly as-ised
an apple. So "Two apples minus two apples equals no apples," is only
relative, unless it presupposes some kind of magic. We have become used to
accepting such things as true. The abstract 2-2=0 is true, but it is true
only because we have set it up that way.

The person who adventures out on the road to truth adventures with great
desperateness. It is an adventurous step. A philosopher who seeks to
discover and teach truth is taking his life in his hands, as well as the lives
of many others. Therein lies his responsibility. It is adventurous because
it is the only track you have to go the whole way on. There is no short stop
on the way to truth. You have to walk to the end of the road. Otherwise, all
manner of difficulties and upsets will beset you. There is no such thing as a
relative philosophical truth that is safe, if it doesn't approach the actual
composition of the subject matter it addresses. If you address the subject of
the physical universe through the physical sciences, you will find weird
things in your path. The savants of these sciences use the phrase, "exact
science" with great impudence, considering the complete difference between
what is given as truth in two different fields, like chemistry and physics.
There is an article in The Encyclopedia Britannica at the turn of the century
that wisely said that people wouldn't find out much about time and space until
they studied in the field of the mind and got the conceptual basis that
preceded time and space. Physics has gotten the world in trouble by building
weapons that can be used by men who aren't sane.

There are workable truths. which gives the "exact sciences" a bloated
notion of themselves, because they deal in workable truths. In the field of
the study of Man, people try to use, as a workable truth, the notion that no
one can do anything about Man because he is merely an animal. This idea
started as a revolt against religion's control of men's faith. Psychology is
a study that is peculiarly religious and was so until 1879, when Wundt
theorized that Man has no soul. Up to that point, psychology had been a
religious study, looking at the will, reason, etc. Somebody moved in on it in
the spirit of revolt. Just as the advances of the "exact sciences" have, here
and there down the track, blown up religion, so the "exact sciences" have now
entrenched themselves in a total falsehood concerning the mind. At the same
time, they have developed an unworkable psychology to back up the "exact
science" of blowing up the planet. That gives you some of the liabilities of
embarking on the road to truth and not going towards truth.

Gautama Siddhartha discovered how to exteriorize without discovering the
laws governing it or how to let someone else exteriorize at will. How many
hundred million people did he condemn to slavery by not walking all the way
down that road? Because half-truths have been used and misused ever since.
Knowing this, it takes a brave man to go in that direction. He knows that the
traps and upsets of existence are composed of half-truths and that all efforts
to enlighten can be employed to enslave and entrap, by the fact of two-way
flow. Aesop's Fables originally had no morals. They were just amusing
stories.

This is pertinent to what you are doing, because in the microcosm of a
single person, you have the macrocosm of the universe. The universe proceeds
from basic postulates. You can go on from these basic postulates to spot the
goals of gold and lead and the methods of livelihood of quartz and schist.
They aren't alive, but they follow a behavior pattern. All flies wash their
faces in the same way. It is wonderful, the way some postulates stick! Moss
or Man, you are looking at the same cumulative structure, based on some
intentions and dedications. You could reanalyze the world of chemistry or
physics on the basis of postulates and intentions. One of the booby traps of
studying science is the sort of statement typified by, "Nobody knows what
electricity is." This is in fact just a remark, not even a postulate! But
everyone takes it as a truth, so they go into agreement with it and therefore
are debarred from discovering more truth. People have been telling other
people for a long time that they can't find out about truth. The idea of the
unknowable has some use, but only to let people see that you don't have to
know all about something before you start to find out about it. Emmanuel Kant
used the concept of the unknowable differently. He said that the unknowable
would never be known by anybody. Well, how did he find out about it? Even by
philosophic examination, it is preposterous. If you can't experience it at
all, how can you know it exists to be not-known?

There are some roads that are agreed to be closed. For instance, there
is an idea that it is bad to know about the human mind. ["Some things it is
better not to know...."] If you are alive, you know something about the human
mind. What is really dangerous is to find out nothing more about it. In the
last few days, the cobalt-60 was close to spreading across the steppes of
Russia and [the plains of] the U.S. Because of what? Because it is so dangerous to begin to know anything about the human mind. People recognize that it is dangerous, to some degree, but they recognize what is really dangerous. If you know of the existence of something, it is dangerous not to know all about it. People concede that they don't know anything at all about it. That is an idiotic premise. In the field of the mind, they are already aware of the existence of figure, think, calculate in other beings, so they are already started on the road to knowledge of the human mind. It is very dangerous to go no further. So the search for truth isn't the province of a few. Everyone has started to know something about it. But not to know more about it than they do will cause them to die. That doesn't even seem startling, it is so accepted.

If a group decides to go all the way on the road to truth, the more they
know, the less dangerous it is. What is really dangerous is to suppose that
people think, and to know nothing more about it than that. It is also very
dangerous to be spotted as one who is walking towards truth, unless you go the
whole way. It is booby trapped. Everyone is very suspicious of anything
being known, because people who have jumped up and said something was known
have often lied. If they pretended to know more then others, they have
committed overts. If they found some partial truth and never got any further,
but instead spread bric-a-brac in all directions as The True Wisdom, they have
committed the overt of consigning perhaps billions of people to slavery. So
there is no substitute for walking the track. LRH has never doubted that he
would bring off this study, though he has often wondered whether or not the
time factor would upset things. We needed a few clear years.

If you have a reputation for knowing, you enter into a mechanism called
the missed withhold. If you seem to have the gift of knowing about the mind,
people think you know the truth, and to them, the only truth that exists is
themselves: a first dynamic truth. This includes their own aberrations, their
ideas about rightness of conduct, etc. So you run into missed withholds. A
scientist wants to get away from right and wrong because he is blind to the
possibility that there could be an exact right conduct. The idea of right
conduct has been a particular concern of eastern philosophers. It has been
ignored in the west. All considerations of behavior and the O/W mechanism are
primarily based on ideas of right and wrong conduct. In back of the O/W
mechanism is the idea that right conduct can exist. This is the saving grace
of any race of beings. Survival is the monitoring factor of rightness of
conduct. The behaviorist would try to tell you that right conduct is a first
dynamic matter, that it is not survival, but self-preservation. This misses
the boat. A person commits overts, not because of self-preservation, but
because of survival. That is his rightness of conduct. The difference is
that, in fact, one acts out of more than one dynamic. Right conduct is always
a group activity, not an individual one. No matter how much a person speaks
of integrity to himself, his ideas of his own rightness are based on the
concepts of the group to which he belongs. So we get third dynamic aberration
of right conduct as underlying all O/W and missed withholds. The only thing
senior to O/W is the pure mechanics of existence, as given in the early
Axioms. Those early Axioms are very close to absolute truth. [A thought:
Absolutes are unattainable because the only absolute is a static and that is
nothing, hence it is unattainable, because it cannot be had.]

The aberrations a person engages in are his efforts to discover right
conduct, with the handicap that mores change from group to group and lifetime
to lifetime. So there is no road to truth on the subject of right conduct.
If you realize that a thetan's aberrated condition results from:

1. A search for right conduct;

2. An effort to adhere to codes of right conduct;

3. The breaking of codes of right conduct,

then you are walking the road to truth. Moral statements are the entrance of
arbitraries into conduct, not truths. This fact is unknown to legislators,
who always try to say that their laws are true. But in making the laws, they
no longer even consult the customs of the people, but instead try to reverse
the social order. However, laws which don't evolve from the customs of the
people:

1. Operate as a total tyranny.

2. Are totally unenforceable.

Prohibition was a good example of this fact.

This concerns you, because you are in the business of determining truth
from right conduct or "now-I'm-supposed-to's". People think that right
conduct is truth; they think they have some data, when they don't. Your period
of peril is past. There was a time when -- taking you as a unit of truth --
there was a question whether or not your state of understanding of yourself
[could be] materially improved by study and processing. However, it is now
clear that if anyone will sit still and if the auditor does the right
processing, this will occur. We started out with everyone stupid as Hell on
the subject, including LRH, originally. Now we have gotten to the point where
someone can know all about where he has been, what he has done, and where the
Axioms look to him like clearly-stated obvious things.

We are essentially in the business of individuals. Don't forget that.
No matter what you are trying to do or handle, whether it is a world
government, or whatever it is, you will never, in your whole history, handle
more than sn individual. If you fail to handle an individual, then you will
have to set up all sorts of groups and laws to do it. The raison d'etre of
most earth organizations is the fact that they could not handle an
individual. This brought about their construction, not their demise. This
isn't true of all third dynamics, only the aberrated ones here on earth. This
is actually an inverted third dynamic. They couldn't handle the first
dynamic, so they developed an organization not to have to do it. Despite that
scientology is the one activity on this planet that doesn't follow this rule,
there still tends to be an organization that gets pulled in and grows up
around LRH. At times this organization fails to deliver service, due to
shortage of time or material or personnel. But on the whole, we are handling
the individual. Russia shoots individuals and loves the masses. This is
aberrated.

You can handle the individual if everything you do is individually
tailored to serve his needs, so he is not overlooked. Whenever you fail to
handle an individual, you set up an upset. So you will set up an
organization, laws, and all sorts of O/W to do it. We are probably the only
organization today going in the direction of a clear third dynamic. We use
O/W only to park an individual until we can handle him.

"There is no truth in the mass of things [and] no truth in moral codes.
Truth isn't to be found there, only agreements." There is no truth apart from
the individual. If there is any truth, you are it. If there is any truth to
be known, you will know it. When someone almost caves in because you have
confronted him and made him wonder what you do know, i.e. when you have missed
a withhold on him, your only mistake is not to reach him as truth. You are at
that moment confronting the road to truth, and you have got to travel it,
because you have already started to. There will be many a PC that you will
start to process, many a person that you will tell about scientology, of whom
you will say, "Why did I get up this morning?!!" If someone says, "I heard
that Ron doesn't believe in God," the wrong thing to do is to unload, jump off
the road. You handle it. All your disasters anyplace will stem from the
instant you backed off, turned around, did something else, and set up an
organization to handle this jerk. You will only fail when you don't try,
because if you make some stab at it, he won't go away. You will be surprised
to find that you will pick him up somewhere down the track. Many times you
will think you have failed when you haven't. The only mistake is to try to go
backwards on the road to truth. That is dangerous. If you fail to stand up
to someone who is mad at you because of his missed withholds or to the guy in
the PE course who says, "It can't be true because Ron doesn't believe in God,"
that is when you fail: catastrophes occur; people get mad at you. You cave
in. But that can be changed or handled. If you fail to handle an individual,
you end up setting up an org to handle masses, but not individuals.
Individuals only stand up [and yap] in order to be handled.

There is truth to be found, and there is a road to truth. You have that
in you, and every time you look at a human being, you see it in him. Rut you
don't find truth in the mass of things and in moral codes. Since you
understand what [human nature] is about, the more you know and understand it,
the less these factors [like having to handle a banky individual] will trouble
you. But every little fellow has started on the road to truth. His only
stupidity is not to keep going. We are almost there. The main road and the
thorns are behind us. We only retreat from our position to the degree that we
don't realize that you can't start a case, you can't embark on clearing a
planet or an individual and do it diffidently, without to some degree seeing
it through to a final conclusion. Your only disasters will stem from failure
to follow that road all the way through.