Refund and Reparation

We have unloaded the useless facts, organized the useful facts, discovered new fundamentals, and out of this whole thing we have a science. That is the way sciences get built. In fact, pieces of Dianetics have been known for the last million and a half years. A witch doctor of a hundred thousand years ago was probably quite smart on the subject. A lot of principles of the human mind were known and used. An Egyptian priest was a pretty smart character. In medieval times, there was a magician’s cult. The magician had a lot of strange principles. He believed that one could cause an effect, and the cause of the effect was important. That doesn’t sound like much today with all of our knowledge of science, but believe me, that contains in essence what made it possible for Francis Bacon and others to really work things out.

Cause is what is important, not effect. If you study effect alone, you become part of the effect and becoming part of the effect, you are therefore acted on by the cause. So, you don’t want this cause to disappear mysteriously. What you want is to get back with the cause, and then you can overcome or create as many effects as you want. That was the principle of the oldtime magician.

In Dianetics, we are dealing with causes. I don’t quite know what lies behind what we have in Dianetics. There is something just behind affinity, communication and reality. Everybody agrees with reality, and as long as we agree there is a reality we are in communication with our perceptics and we are in affinity with the universe at large because we have agreed that there is affinity and reality and communication with each other. But there is something a step back of this. It might even be that reality only exists because of our communication with each other, which exists because of some order of affinity. In other words, the whole thing might be just an idea.

It is very dangerous, I know, to explode good ideas. You get a terrific reaction from people if you do. Someday, somebody might say the right set of words and we will all just disappear! In all of this, we are fighting for cause. As the science advances, it will be because we have paralleled the mechanical action of the mind, and it will advance in a direct ratio to the nearness with which it approaches that cause.