Lecture: The DEI Scale
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1952, 11 December
Document title: The DEI Scale
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Philadelphia Doctorate Course
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Document ID: PDC-35
Description: In this purposefully "rambling" lecture, Hubbard uses Christianity to illustrate his scale and "dwindling spiral" of Desire-Enforce-Inhibit. Describes the seven hells, the magic number of seven; introduces Aleister Crowley's religious ideas and "level of worship," characterizes the current state of religion relative to his DEI scale.
Now to some degree (this is the second afternoon lecture uh.. December the 11th) – to some degree you may find some of the data I give you – uh.. unless you take a look at the way it’s being oriented – somewhat rambling. Well, maybe it is rambling. Uh.. but uh.. actually, I’m demonstrating something to you – we keep picking up things and then orienting them back to a point. In other words, we’re demonstrating data, a central data and its evaluation against many other data. And we just keep picking that up and bringing it back in.
And we start talking about running regular things. Well, we show how that swings back in again.
Uh.. having to have and not having to have is, of course, a form of agreement. And we keep swinging back into agreement which we undo with mock-ups – simple isn’t it? Having to have, and trying to avoid having to have – it’s a very funny thing that this works out so.. so easily. This speaks of, first, a cultivated desire: The person had to have a desire in some direction or another in order to go down tone scale. The thetan was picked up way up tone scale and Desire, and uh.. so forth, is way up tone scale. So we come down tone scale a little bit on Desire.
Then when his desire paled, somebody of course, had to enforce it to keep it going. That brought him down tone scale a little further. And when he’d enforced it to a point where it was IMPOSSIBLE to do without it, then you inhibit it so the guy can’t have it.
And that’s any item or thought or belief.
Let’s take a thought on this line – let’s take Chrstianity – that’s a handy example. Lot of people know something about Christianity. There are a few still left in the society who do. And uh.. the uh.. we get Desire at the top. Yes, sir, sure enough, you tell somebody, “Life immortal – this is the route to life immortal. Here we go.” And of course, everybody knew that there was a route to life immortal. They knew that instinctively and many other religions before Christianity had gotten into beautiful condition by selling Immortality. I almost called it, “Pie in the sky” but I – that’s a Communist term and I don’t want to be partisan.
Uh.. the war of ideas and ideologies is a fascinating war. All right? Here we have, then, immortality and they rig it out aesthetically – give it good value that’s all. Here it is a nice aesthetic. You desire to have immortality.
Now, then the next step is – you go through this ritual, you get immortality. That’s good. The next step is, down the line from that, that it’s very, very good – little stronger salesmanship – and uh.. by the time the guy has bought this, he then buys the next step down the scale which is, “And if you don’t buy pie in the sky” – pardon me – “immortality uh.. if you don’t buy this, we’re going to send you to hell. And hell’s a terrible place.” And you know hell was really – really interesting at first. It was just “Hell.”
By the way, do you know what the first Hell was? Everybody hoped, but thoroughly, all through the civilized world, that Rome, the corrupt prostitute of all nations, would roast in its tracks. And they hoped because of the volcanic action of Italy, that one day the ground would suddenly go “Burp!” and a roaring sea of lava would eat up Palatine Hill and the rest of Rome. This was the slave master of the world, and they wanted Rome to turn into a sea of lava. And at first when they talked about Hell, they weren’t talking about any personal Hell, they were talking about fire would occur. And they were trying to sell everybody on the basis of the disappearance of Rome. This was really – a bunch of press agents probably got – I’ve got a friend that says, “You know,” he said, “I finally figured out how all this happened. There was a bunch of the boys got together in Rome and uh.. they worked this all out – something like a bunch of hot advertising men or something – press boys – and they worked this all out and they sold it in an effort to undo and bring down in a crash the Roman Empire.” And it sure went in that direction. Of course, he’s just joking. (It’s all true, in actual fact.)
And uh.. when uh.. when uh.. they got uh.. Rome all burned up and in flames, they thought, then they’d all be in fine shape. Well, that was the level of salesmanship at that time. It had dropped down from a good, aesthetic, beautiful desire, down to a desire that had to do with pain directed toward a certain object (Rome) mixed up.
Now, people still weren’t buying pie in the sky the way they ought to buy pie in the sky, so the next step down was, “You know we’ve been a little bit…” Uh.. by the way, they.. in Nero’s time a bunch of criminals set fire to Rome and uh.. this ambition was almost realized. And then they all blamed it on Nero. And uh.. said – attributed it to the sympathetic vibrations of his violin strings or something. And uh.. we got uh.. pie in the sky as a glut commodity. You know there hadn’t been – they first expected, you know, just heaven to suddenly open up in this lifetime and there they’d be – there they’d be, right there. Oh, no. That wasn’t what happened, so they finally were saying it was after death that this took place. Oh, bunch lot less people started buying it.
So they said, “We’ve gotta make this commodity salable,” so they turned it into currency and enforced it with bayonets.. – but spiritual bayonets. They said, “The hell of which we spoke is an actual hell, and you have your choice between going to that hell or going to heaven after death. And it all depends on whether or not you were a good boy before you died. And we can reach you after you’re dead – which is a temporal justice of kinds that uh.. we enjoy.” All right, next step then – people didn’t buy that worth a damn. A lot of people rushed in and uh.. they had to make it a little bit better. And do you know, before they got through, they had seven hells?
Once in a while you’ll pick up this magic number “7″ on the track. It’s a prime number and therefore interesting to mathematicians. And there were seven this and seven that and seven stars and seven something or other. And there are seven hells.
Now very often you will find some preclear who is doing a bad spin on religion on account of religious implants, and you’ll find these confounded seven hells sitting there. And they’ve forgotten they ever heard of Dante’s Inferno and the Seven Hells – they’ve forgotten this utterly. There was a hell of ice and a hell of fire and a hell of something or other, and I don’t know what all the hells were but it’s an interesting study in sadism.
But uh.. that was enforcement. We’ve gotten down tone scale to enforcement, you see. And then they came down tone scale, finally got to a point where nobody was believing that but it took an awful long time for that curve to fall. And that curve finally fell at its lowest ebb of enforcement on earth – I mean, the heaviest ebb was the hands of the Grand Inquisition of Spain under an infamous dope by the name of Torquemada whose life I have read in a book bound in human skin – how fitting.
Now Torquemada, Grand Inquisition – boy, they couldn’t be convinced that people weren’t convinced about these seven hells. Nobody’d ever come back and told them about ‘em. Uh.. they.. they couldn’t be interested too much in pie in the sky; they got much more interested in action here on earth and a lot of other things. And so the autodafé really was a convincer. They’d put ‘em on a stake and they’d put the.. put the stakes around them.
The only.. the only crime was whether or not you accepted Church Doctrine. And a man could become a heretic for carrying his prayer book backwards. It was just getting to a level of idiocy on enforcement. Anything you did that was even vaguely to the disinterest of uh.. the Church was greeted by an autodafé.
British seamen uh.. caught in a.. in port or something like that, arrested, “Oh, uh.. you don’t believe in God exactly the way you’re supposed to, therefore you’re an heretic” – what do you know? They burned ‘em, just like that – that was all. Put ‘em against the stake.
They had hell of fire then which was personal, highly personalized hell. And there it was. They had brought it down to an enforcement and their havingness of it had become so scarce that it was no longer an idea; it was an actuality which was an enforced actuality and so on. That was the grand tide of enforcement of the Christian Church.
And, what do you know? After that they got down tone scale to inhibition. They inhibited your having God unless – that was about the punishment level, that they inhibited you having God unless.. you had to think a pure thought, or you had to spit pure spit or something of the sort. And uh.. you.. you were – there you were, and you couldn’t have God unless you were a pure soul and you wouldn’t know anything about it at all, and you had to have God at a price of, oh, I don’t know, 30 talents in some cases.
Recently some dame uh.. some babe uh.. pardon me. I.. I keep classifying her correctly. Uh.. some “lady” uh.. paid His.. His.. His uh.. Royal – uh pardon me, uh.. His uh.. I don’t know. What do you call the guy? Oh, yeah. His.. His uh.. uh.. Pope Pius? Pope Pius, that’s right. Paid him a million bucks-dollars cash to ratify her divorce properly. I mean, it had all been granted by states and bishops and everything else, but she finally had to pay him a billion bucks-dollars to knock it out.
But inhibition.. inhibition, it’s got scarce. The mercy of God became very costly. It became more and more costly and more and more costly, more and more costly until it isn’t available at all now. You know, practically outside of one or two guys like Pope Pius, and I suppose there’s some whirling dervish up in the middle of the Stygian wastes or some place that you could go in and give ‘em a quick buck and they would say, “All right, we’ll give you a God — there you are, signed receipt.” And it would be about the level.
Christianity has gotten to the point where it’s terrible scarce. You wouldn’t think so with all the churches you’ve got around, but I was talking about Christianity.
Now people have run many other things into this field. They have run practically every way you could think of to do something or be something or act some other way into this level. And you can get all sorts of things from a church now – anything but God.
You can get basketball, bridge, bowling alleys, dances, bazaars – almost anything you want to. But don’t go in and ask for a hat full of God, because they haven’t got it to sell. It’s got an inhibition and then scarcity, but if they gave you any God it wouldn’t be the idea, the spiritual idea at all. It would be a piece of MEST. You can buy God – you can go down and buy a cross – and it’s MEST. It’s all solid now.
Isn’t that interesting? Where we have Desire, Enforce and Inhibit and out through the bottom. And you have a dying, if not dead, religion. One whole nation swallowed in blood to get rid of it and bought another slave master much worse: Soviet Russia. Uh.. other nations have a level of tolerance and fortunately never abandoned that thing which Rome abandoned.
Rome died the day it denied itself. The principle of self-denial is a very interesting principle. The fellow starts buckling up the day he says he didn’t say it, when he did. You know, he keeps saying.. he keeps disowning, disowning his acts, disowning his acts, no responsibility, less and less responsibility and he’s gone.
And Rome was founded on the secure foundation of religious freedom. All races could worship anything they wanted to worship. And on that basis it thrived and it absorbed any country because Roman law was superior to any other law there was. There was more fairness, better courts and better protection under the cloak of Rome than in any other governmental system on earth at that time. And people were even happy to have a Roman rule in preference to tyrants, fascists – something of the sort.
Romans were tough. They didn’t mince about things, but they had law and a province or a newly acquired country could, in time, become fully accredited so that they would have Roman citizenship which was right to right under law.
And people actually would surrender up to Rome on this bait: justice. And she became powerful under this. She became powerful under it because she respected man, she respected the right that man should have, including the right of religious freedom.
By the way, that is a very, very relative term. You, for instance, today sit here with a constitution which guarantees religious freedom but, by golly, what would happen to you if you started to worship Baal? Man! How that would ring in the tabloids. If you started to worship Lucifer, if you started to worship any of the various gods…
One fellow, Aleister Crowley uh.. picked up a level of religious worship which is very interesting – oh boy! The press played hockey with his head for his whole lifetime. The Great Beast – 666. He just had another level of religious worship.
Yes, sir. You’re free to worship everything under the Constitution so long as it’s Christian. Don’t become Mohammedan. Nobody will come around and shoot you because you’re a Mohammedan, but don’t try to start Mohammedan churches. You’ll be discouraged very definitely.
As such, the freedom which man is guaranteed in the English-speaking world today is really not as wide as the freedom which he had as a Roman.
‘Course, part of that freedom was if he got too badly off and too far into debt and unable to protect himself and if his friends all deserted him, he could be sold into slavery. Or soldiers taken in combat could be sold into slavery. They did not take these soldiers in combat and put them in a stockade and make them work for farmers (there’s no slavery in the modern world). Uh.. there’s no slave camps in Russia. Slavery’s dead. Uh.. what they do is.. is.. is.. is they get these fellows on a want and an inhibit and – in.. on an enforce and inhibit cycle and say, “You get your Saturday paycheck if you worship at the right time clock.” That’s the God of the modern society: The time clock. He has a face the same shape as the dollar.
And uh.. your society in Rome, then, suddenly denied itself. There was a race which was teaching certain doctrines – Christians, unwanted uh.. unwanted gentiles, came into the Hebrew countryside and studied that religion and took it back out into the world. And uh.. the people in those areas around Jerusalem and so on, didn’t have a pioneer spirit with this world.. with this, they disowned these people, but these people still went out and preached this. And it had an interesting ingredient in it that no other religion up to the time had had in it. And Rome was unable to understand this. And that ingredient was hate. It’s perfectly all right, it.. it.. it.. it’s uh.. another thing to have in a religion. It’s neither bad nor good. These people were not trying to do a messianic job on the rest of the world, but gentiles used to come in there, and they’d join the church and then they’d go back to other places and start beating the drum for this new religion. That was before Christ.
And then this legend of Christ came along and people really started to beat the drum. Again, the Hebrew races and out she went – Ha-wham! And people went mad on this. They spun, they went up and down the pole like a.. so many firemen at a five-alarm fire. They were.. beautiful condition. They’d rush into Roman Courts and say, “Okay, here I am! Excuse me!” The Roman judge would say, “Well, really! Now after all. Can’t we just take this under advisement?” And they kept getting justice and they didn’t want justice; they wanted blood, death and murder. They wanted to be a martyr!
Oh, that’s a fascinating chapter and Rome finally said, “We’re so damn tired of this that hereinafter aforesaid Christianity is not going to be accepted by the Roman Empire,” and what do you know – crash! Down came the Roman Empire – denied itself. It denied its principles and freedom and had begun to inhibit something. It had inhibited.. inhibited God in one respect or another and down she went.
Interesting, it… You know that empire still kept going for another 800 years under various guises, but it certainly went up and down after a while. In the year five hundred and something A.D., the total population of Rome consisted of two wolves walking in the ruins of the Forum. Right back, the cycle had turned all the way.
And we had this, then, as a descending spiral. And the reason I’m punching all this stuff up, I’m demonstrating something on a national, or Third Dynamic, level. It came back to this lineup: Here you had a philosophy injected which first entered with a desire, became an enforcement and an inhibition, it died. And the first time there gets to be a heavy inhibition in any line, a thing dies because that inhibition level is, itself, death. This tells you, then, your preclear starts in this way. First dynamic, second, third, and forth – doesn’t matter where you pick him up. Here you’re looking at him.
You know that your preclears were a part of this whole picture? This dwindling spiral of religious freedom became part of the woof and warp of the life of most preclears, who actually followed through that period.
And now today they’re left with, then.. there’s just the ashes. There’s.. there’s nothing more sterile today than.. than religion. It is dull, just dull beyond dull. It can’t be had – it’s too scarce.
You could go around any place you wanted to and set up a soap box or something of the sort, and start giving people God, and you’d survive. Evangelists do that on about the cheapest.. cheapest guitar, git-fiddle level imaginable. They get over the radio and everything else. They’re just perfectly willing to give somebody God. And.. and.. by the.. the communication lines that are set up are just fabulous. And yet this isn’t general at all; this is not a religious revival. This is the last flick-flack sparks of the fakir who is picking up at the pitch stand something that was once very grand.
I have no partiality with regard to religion. Anybody who wants to sell pie in the sky or hot air needs no license to survive from me.
Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 11 December). The DEI Scale. Philadelphia Doctorate Course, (PDC-35). Lecture conducted from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.