What’s the secret of the MEST universe? That there’s no secret, of course. That would be right there in the groove with the MEST universe, that would be the MEST universe’s best trick. It makes the obvious and hides it, because it’s a crude, relatively unworkable, solid, rather onerous sort of dopehead’s dream, who wasn’t too bright.
And if it’s the inevitable average, brother, I don’t think much of some of the other universes that collided to make this one. Because it’s dopey, this one. It’s not a bright universe. Its total value evaluation is force. It’s down on the force band. And that’s silly. Because something that’s on the force band won’t work. The one thing that won’t work is force. Under no circumstances has force ever worked! An idea any day of the week can lick the pants off of force.
All these great flaming suns, all these huge inimitable expanses, all these tremendously, tremendously cold and inhospitable spaces, all these dead planets and dead stars, could be reduced to a pile of utter nothingness of rubble by an idea.
You don’t believe it? Well, don’t believe it. And the only thing I can ask you to do is make a clinical experiment on it. Try it. Try it in a small, little sphere — a little sphere of action. Take somebody you know who believes in tremendous force and think of the insignificant idea which would defeat him utterly.
You actually have to be able and willing to handle force. But how do you handle force? With force? No! You can’t handle force with force because that gives you ridges and more force. You see how that is? You can’t handle force with force. It isn’t that force begets force, or he who dies by the sword lives by the Bible, or anything. I mean what it is — I’m not scrambling that up on purpose, really. That was just a slip of the Testament. Here’s — and, by the way, it is to a large extent, a book of force, which is where it falls down. And the only time religion has ever fallen down was when it believed it had a god of force. A god of force can always be licked.
You can take the mightiest cyclotrons in the world that exist today, and if you just get the proper idea they will become dust. Force has to be handled, maybe, by force, but the actual fact is that an idea alone can vanquish force. If you just had — if you had a command and control over space and time the way you should have, you could simply ‘pshew’ onto another time track any force that ever came near you.
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It doesn’t take any idea at all. The only reason why you ever have trouble — if you ever do have trouble defeating force — is because you just don’t think of the idea, and usually because you overreach with your idea. You haven’t any concept how simple the idea has to be! You want to get complicated because you know it’s lots of force, so you think you want to have lots of idea.
This is not order of magnitude; they don’t follow the same order of magnitude. Actually, they go quite in reverse. They go quite in reverse: is the more force there is, the less idea it takes to handle that force. Because an idea is awful powerful. And you can get an idea so powerful that it’ll just shoot above, around and over and through this mass and this force, and it just never hits it.
– L Ron Hubbard, excerpted from lecture ‘The Thetan As An Energy Unit’, 6 November 1952
Moving On Up a Little Higher 