One of the great tragedies of vanity in mankind is that it makes him believe he knows much he does not know. When many of us come in contact with a technical word in a subject that we are not really acquainted with, we at least look it up in the dictionary. But if we are studying a very technical subject about The Science of Man, and there are several textbooks about The Science of Man, there are things that are written down that are a challenge to man if he should find them. They are highly technical, highly scientific, but they use ordinary words in a very technical sense. We read these books that we know are loaded with many kinds of information, but vanity says we already know it because we know one meaning for the words that are there and we assume that we, of course, know all the meanings of the words. One of those common words is the “world.” One man said, “Fear not I have overcome the world.” Really, a better translation of it is, “I have risen above the world.” In another place it says, “Keep oneself unspotted from the world.” Most of the time we think of the world as the Earth or at best the society all over the earth. We never possible stop to find out how it’s used in this very technical sense in the way of The Science of Man.  So suppose we inquire into it a bit, and as it has been said before, take nothing for granted, take nothing because it is said, but investigate, experiment with it and find out for self.

The conditioned self is a picture of the world. There are four basic ideas that make up what is called the “world” in the technical sense of The Science of Man.

1. The first of these ideas is that there are IDEALS, there are what ought to be, that man is capable of knowing what ought to be, that he knows what is good, what is bad, and he thinks in opposites. He knows what is right and what is wrong. He thinks in opposites. He judges constantly. There is an old, old story that says they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were told that if they ate of it they would die. Of course, man doesn’t believe that today because everybody thinks he knows the opposites, is capable of judging, and he believes he is not dead. But I, the awareness function of X is dead. The conditioning operates in the name of I and tells X false information. And it is death to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and every one of us ate of it and we did die. And we are in this effort of slowly, carefully studying the self, attempting to arise from among the dead and be alive by being aware of the self. So the first idea of the world is that there are ideals of what ought to be and they are, of course, opposite to those things that ought not to be, and that man thinks he is capable of judging.  Many places he reads, JUDGE NOT, and he thinks of it as a moral code and then he justifies it by saying, “Well, I will judge justly,” and he still judges compared to the ideal, and he is still dead.

2. The next idea of the world is that it’s possible to SELF-IMPROVE the self as it is, only just improve it and thereby actualize the ideals to have everything like it ought to be. Of course, the basic decision, the basic motive, the basic purpose of living is the four dual basic urges to be non-disturbed. That is what one has set as the ideal. Then the next six decisions, three in A and three in B on your picture of man, are attempts at self-improvement. If you go through all the ideas of self-improvement that you may have ever been in contact with, you will find they’re all there. You can behave differently, which is number 5. You can believe different things because someone told you to believe it, number 4. You can do certain ritualistic performances or you can do all sorts of things that are commanded in one form or other, behave in a certain way, believe and do as you’re told by your authorities. You can blame all manner of things, number 6. You can blame negative thinking and you can try to think positive and, of course, thinking positive is trying to believe something you believe to be a lie or you wouldn’t be thinking positive, you’d just agree with it and go on. So all the efforts at self-improvement, and the libraries are full of books on self-improvement, there are institutions from one end of the earth to the other bent upon self improvement of the man and of other selves. We are always trying self-improve, whether it’s to improve this self or to improve that other self so I won’t be disturbed.

3. The third idea of the world is that one will have SIGNS AND DEMONSTRATIONS as to how well one is self-improving. If one is reasonably comfortable and has a reasonable amount of wealth, one takes that as a sign that one has improved considerably.

4. If one should suddenly lose their wealth they will find something to BLAME, which is fourth idea of the world. So one has a sign that one is either succeeding in self-improvement when things are going reasonably well or has a sign that something is interfering if one is not doing so well. If one loses one’s health one finds something to blame, a diagnostic term. One says, “I am a victim of arthritis.” So arthritis, some sort of entity which is flying around in the air and says, “There is John, I will bite him or there is Mary, I will attack her.” Another one is a victim of multiple sclerosis. There is something called multiple sclerosis that floats around in the air and periodically it sees someone and says, “I am going to attack them.” So we have something to blame when things are not going well, and we have self-esteem that we have succeeded in our efforts to self improve when things are going fairly well to our liking. In other words, we’re having a certain amount of pleasure and comfort and not very much pain. We’re having a considerable amount of attention and very little being ignored and rejected. We’re having quite a bit of approval and not too much disapproval right now, or none. We have a certain number of people that we can control, we feel important. If we can’t control them we feel inferior. For every time we have a pain we look for something to blame. We never accept that maybe I am doing something. That is only reserved for, when things are going well. When things go like we want them we say our self-improvement techniques have worked. When things don’t go like we want them to, according to the four dual basic urges, we find something to blame.

In this, of course, man is blind, but these are the ideas of the world and we would like for you to write down the four ideals of the world. We would like for you to observe if the self lives by these four ideas: That there are IDEALS of what ought to be and, of course, what ought not to be which are good and bad, right and wrong, should and should not. The land of opposites, what are used for a basis for judging self and others, conflicts, struggle, resistance, all the way up to wars. That one looks at all the efforts that one puts in to improve the self and improve other selves. That one also keeps somewhat of a record of all the time things go fairly well and one takes the credit.  One never gives any credit to X.  I can walk, I can type, I can eat, I can digest my food, and all these many things of which one hasn’t the faintest idea of how it even takes place; I can see, I can do all these things. You see no credit or glory or honor is ever given to X; it all is taken. And then when things don’t go well, according to the four dual basic urges, one doesn’t take credit for that. One finds something to blame which we have looked at as building accounts against people, which is to load a grievous burden again on self to carry around, and one which we have looked at, somewhat.

Man has built many philosophies on how to self-improve, how to achieve the ideal, how to achieve that which he lists as being good. The Science of Man is not a philosophy. It is a series of experiments and observations that are given to us that we may experiment with them and observe with them. We could say that it might be a light with which we could look in dark places, places we have never looked before, and then we are using it. If we accept it as a philosophy or as an ideology, something to be quoted, argued about, organized, build an institution about, of course, we have not understood it, we have not valued it; it is only some interesting words to use. It is a series of instructions as to experiments. It is a series of possibilities of something existing that we have not looked at. It throws a light on many things, but it is always left for each one of us to experiment with, to use it, to verify, to find out for self. Without doing this we, of course, only heard the Teaching and did not use it.

There have been many people who have heard the Teaching and they have attempted to make a philosophy or an institution or an ideology out of it. We will look and see what some of these efforts have resulted in. We are not condemning them or justifying them. We can only turn a light on what happens when one attempts to use the Teaching other than for experimentation and for self-discovery, when one tries to use the ideas it presents as an ideology or to build an institution about.

1. The first thing in using the Teaching as an ideology and as a method of self-improvement, if you please, which is an ideology, is that we will be TOLERANT of people. Tolerant means, when we verify it and use it for a minute and experiment with it, is that “I see that you are very inferior to me, you are very much le