I think we are too, Matt. Do you know, that I am working so hard that something has got to pay up soon. When something (that I have worked for) pays up then we get to update our computer equipment (and a whole lot of other things besides). School must feel a little like that too, Matt. Sometimes anyway. There must be times when you are so involved with trying to figure out something that your mind just goes through idea after idea. And then there comes a point where you are certain that one of those ideas is just right. As you look at that feeling of certainty you can begin to get excited about the possibilities there could be if your idea - the little seed of an idea - is growing as you think about and learn about new things. While that idea is growing and making more connections with other ideas they all seem to grow together to form an idea so BIG... (and with it your certainty that the idea is such a good idea)... Well, that is something to think about while you are learning things (since they will be growing up together with the big idea).

I think that everyone has a big idea. Some people call it their "life's work" and some call it their craft or trade or art or skill - or ambition. But those who just call it their job have forgotten their big idea and they grow the wrong branches on their trees of knowledge. Once they forget the big idea - because they avoid thinking about anything important - the other ideas they have become more important to them: Getting a job or keeping a job or avoiding having to have a job. If they become distracted by these things then their idea never gets nourished because they steal any new knowledge from your big idea and insist that it is used for all the little ideas, the pointless things in life. And once they do that they are no longer impressed by big ideas but by those which have grown big at the expense of what once were the really big ideas. Even in these people (and they are people you meet every day - like teachers, farmers, soldiers, firemen, fishermen, secretaries, businessmen, scientists, politicians, ...) there are still the roots, buried way down deep in the soil which gives life to them, the little idea which was going to become their REALLY BIG idea. And you can see them searching desperately for it, Matt. They buy BIG cars because they think they might find it there. And they look around and are jealous of those who are happy because they seem to have found their BIG idea (which they have - or at least they are growing their big idea by feeding it the knowledge it needs).

It's not easy to finish an idea like this message, Matt. Especially knowing that you are there at school, unsure of whether anyone understands or cares about your big idea. I know you care about it - so much that it makes you sad, sometimes, when things you are told seem to contradict your big idea. If ever any statement contradicts your BIG idea, Matthew, it is a false statement but yours is certain and true. If ever you become bored in your studies because things do not seem to be contributing to your good idea then you might have forgotten, like all those others, that all knowledge is useful in getting to see your good, really big Idea into the world with such authority that no-one will doubt you ever again. That, my friend, is the highest ambition you can have and if you can get those who have forgotten these things to remember what was once the most important idea they had then you will, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, be a man, my son.

Even if you aren't sure of your really big idea (and it has taken 38 years for me to become sure of mine) you have to keep collecting the knowledge that will feed the really good idea - the one that will make you a man - because the more you learn the bigger and clearer and simpler and more sensible that idea becomes until it is so simple and obvious that everyone can understand how clear and simple and valuable it is. Some people already have developed their ideas to this level (or close to it); great artists and poets, scientists, craftsmen, the happiest and kindest of farmers, the best teachers in the world - they are all the very best at what they do and they are the best because they have discovered that idea and nourished it with new knowledge and protected it against those who said it was a bad or worthless idea.

All ideas begin as worthless ideas and some of them remain worthless ideas because the more you study them the less interesting and less important they become. Other ideas grow when you study them and as they grow they get easier to see and, like trees planted beside a river or on a hillside, the roots of those ideas hold everything around them together. Those ideas are worth growing and you never know (until the idea has grown some) which ideas will grow into a really big idea. You just grow each one, by feeding it knowledge, finding out, thinking about the relationships between those things you know and those things you don't. And some ideas you grow will wither away of their own accord whilst others flourish.

Each idea needs a particular kind of knowledge in order to grow and different kinds of knowledge require different skills to obtain - a bit like those adventure games you are so fond of, where a player character needs to learn spells or practise something in order to defuse a trap or open a casket of treasure. The BIG idea needs every kind of knowledge if it is to be protected, to be special and to grow strong.

And the sad thing is that there is nothing out there, in the real world, which can tell you which idea is the right idea - the one you should nourish with all the knowledge you can find. You already have that idea inside now, growing with all the other ideas you have and if you continue to work as hard as you have been doing to learn all that you can then you will soon begin to recognise the little seedling which will grow into the biggest and most important idea you will ever have.

I have had some big ideas, myself, in the past. I feed each one with knowledge and watch to see how it grows. This current idea seems like the biggest I have ever had and now I need to keep feeding it with knowledge and thought. I need to show it to others and defend those parts I am sure of and listen carefully to opinions of others on those parts that I am uncertain about. You too, will have to defend those ideas that you are certain of and to find knowledge to feed those parts that are weak and shaky; above all this you have to keep learning about everything so that your very own best idea has everything it needs to grow.

25^th Jan…

So, Matt… Having chatted to you on the phone you will realise, now, that I intend to publish this message one day. So be careful what you write since it will be seen by a lot of people.

Any time I write something which you don’t understand (and, remember, it has taken me 38 years to understand some of this stuff) you may ask a question. I keep thinking of thousands of things I could write to you about and they are all connected with my big idea. Most of the things I do at the moment, from getting up in the morning to making coffee to writing and talking and just plain thinking, are connected with my big idea. That may seem quite a lot but it is a pretty huge idea and it does connect to a lot of things.

Well, that is one of the main problems with any idea, good or bad. People take time to understand an idea and they don’t usually feel happy about it until they do.

Sometimes ideas get collected together and called a religion or a science or a philosophy. When ideas get collected together like this it can cause problems since people agree with some of the ideas but not others. This makes it difficult for people to become interested in that particular religion or science or philosophy - because they don’t agree with some of the ideas they ignore all of them!

My big idea is to look at the similarities between religions, philosophies and science rather than the differences. This may not seem like a very big idea but it certainly leads to some humungously big things.

When you look at the differences you tend to split things up; something we call schizophrenia in psychology circles. Schizophrenics split things up into smaller and smaller things, trying to make sense of the world. When they have them into so many pieces that they can’t remember them all they then put them back together again and any gaps that are left they fill with their imaginations. Doctors call these imagined bits "delusions" (and they are very cynical about them). But this is what scientists tend to do too and that is one of the reasons that science is getting harder to understand.

There are some real c00l scientists around now though, Matt. They have some good theories about the Earth and about physics that also tell us a lot about how the brain (and the mind) might work. I may touch on some of their big ideas as we go along.

Before I go on to other things, Matt, some news. I have decided to call myself doctor Phil Jaquiery. This should cause a few problems because most people don’t think you should call yourself a doctor unless a university or medical school has given you the title. That is all stuff and nonsense! One of the meanings of ‘doctor’ in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary is "learned man" and that certainly describes me. In deference to their hang-ups about the name I use a little ‘d’ rather than a big one. Oddly enough, in America they give doctorates out to anyone who writes a thesis but the American Heritage dictionary doesn’t give the meaning "learned man" whilst here in England the dictionary knows the meaning but the universities don’t seem to! Oh well. It is a good wheeze, though, since people say "You can’t call yourself a doctor!" - even after I have shown them the meaning in the dictionary. Mum said I should call myself a guru instead but the Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines guru as a "Hindu spiritual leader" and I don’t think I am one of those. She suggested it because she said people are less likely to get cross if I call myself a guru rather than a doctor but in my view I am being more honest to call myself a doctor.

Words are funny things. Words cause all kinds of problems when it comes to getting people to understand your ideas. Not because of what the words mean but because each word can mean so many things. Usually we can tell what words mean by looking at their context (the other words that are around them). In English the word "net" probably has more meanings than any other. We can mean net as in Internet, net as in fishing net, net as in prices including VAT, net as it ‘get’ something, net as in basketball goal, … Lots of meanings. So we might be able to tell what kind of net someone is talking about when they say "he kicked the ball into the net" - but we have to be careful, he may have been annoyed at the basketball umpire and kicked the basketball into the big net that separates the players from the audience!

You must create your own god. To do that you must behave the way you want your god to behave (so that he knows what he has to do). Most folks think that heaven doesn’t happen until you die but I like to believe that if you have built heaven around you before you die then you will have that heaven and if you create hell around you then you will end up in hell. That is certainly true on earth and it seems as good a thing to believe as any other. But you must create your own heaven the way you want it to be.

I imagine I will get into a lot of trouble over that belief since people who believe other things tend to insist that they know the "truth" when nobody else does. But those people tend to have pretty frightening gods who punish cruelly.

I have also discovered that religions seem to tell us more about how our minds work (especially our unconscious minds) than about god anyway. I read a wonderful book called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by a guy called Robert M. Persig - you probably have a copy in the school library. I bet I mention it quite often in this message. Persig pointed out that God and Good are pretty similar and I like to believe that they are actually interchangeable in most instances (or should be!).

Truth is an odd thing too, Matt. When we were very little it was easy to tell truth from lies. We believed what we could see and hear and taste and smell and feel. But little babies feel some strange things. Little boys like to feel their willies and little girls like to touch their bits too because it feels good to them. But "society" doesn’t like people to go around playing with their genitals (called masturbating, but then I am sure you knew that) so parents tell little children not to do it. That gives those little children a problem because their body tells them one thing and their parents and relations tell them the opposite, so they get really confused about the truth for a while. Most of them stay confused about it forever.

Probably little kids wouldn't understand something as complicated as "Masturbation is OK when others aren't looking - especially Auntie Florence because she got taught something very bad about masturbation when she was little!" - or people will say that is the case, anyway. They will come up with all kinds of excuses why they have to teach their children lies rather than the truth. Mostly it is because they weren't taught the truth when they were little. I probably didn't teach you the truth either, Matt. That was because I didn't really know the truth when you were little. Or, I wasn't sure of it anyway.

The only thing more dangerous than a *little* knowledge is none at all.

Often it is quicker and easier to teach lies. Or more convenient or less embarrassing. There are all kinds of names for these kinds of lies, Matt: tact, diplomacy, being sensible, little white lies, keeping secrets, ... I bet you can think of a few more too.

When they get to school things get even worse for kids because teachers tell them 1 plus 1 equals 2 and the teachers also tell them they are stupid for not knowing that. Just like the very little children, who had to learn that playing with their genitals was wrong, the school children are taught that something they were certain about - that they are pretty damned smart - is wrong too. That isn’t an easy thing to learn when, until that point, the school kids knew they were smart. Once they have learned it they find everything difficult at school.

What school teaches kids, then, is that learning is difficult and that they are stupid. But those are lies that teachers got taught and they pass it on to the kids they teach. Teachers don’t realise what they are doing so you can’t really blame them and if you ask them about it directly they will just say you are being stupid! (as you well know).

Teachers often teach lies but it is a difficult thing to change because they don’t want to believe that they are teaching lies. Anyone who tries to change it gets in trouble (as I will for even suggesting such a thing). But I believe in telling the truth even if it gets me into trouble. That is called integrity. Not many people have integrity (although they will all claim to have it). When I was talking about your big idea earlier I was also talking about integrity. Defending your big idea when people don’t understand it is a kind of integrity too.

The problem is that once you lose your integrity (by accepting as true something that you know is false - e.g. that you are stupid when you know you aren’t or that there is something bad about playing with your genitals when the only bad thing about it is that people get embarrassed about it) then you can never know right from wrong. At least, not until you have gone back and insisted on the truth about everything.

Once you know just one thing that is true then you can see if anything else is true by comparing it to the thing you know is true. If you have a ruler you know is straight then you can see if anything else is straight by putting your ruler up against it. If you know that 2 + 2 = 4 then you know that 4 - 2 = 2 as well. If you knew the most important truth in the world - that you were born perfect, knowing what to believe, that you have as much right to be on this planet as anyone else and that you can do anything that anyone else can do - then you could easily tell whether all kinds of things are true or false.

Again, most people will not believe me about that but most people lost their integrity and have forgotten the most important truth. So they have no way of telling whether anything is true or not.

There was a psychologist called Alfred Adler who may have been close to discovering this truth of mine and Freud was pretty close to knowing it too. Freud had a word for the earliest, strongest and most important things we learned wrong, Matt. He called them "primal" emotions. I believe the most important ones are primal fear, primal guilt and primal doubt. While people still have these primal emotions they have a hard time being happy and noticing the truth. Primal doubt is the one causing me the most problems at the moment. Since everyone suffers from primal doubt they doubt anything truthful I say. It is not that they can put their finger on what is wrong about what I say - they just have a "feeling" I am not telling the truth. But that feeling comes from their emotional primal doubt and not from what I have said at all.

Later on I will describe a way to get rid of some of these primal emotions and I will also give some more examples of how they are formed.

26^th Jan…

I intend to find out how close Adler came to understanding my idea. Once you have your big idea then you can see how close other scientists and great thinkers have come to understanding your idea. People do this anyway, when they are developing their own ideas. They are so proud about their ideas that they want to show everybody how different their idea is to everybody else’s ideas. I am not so proud about my idea as they are (not because it isn’t a good idea - I am convinced that it is a brilliant idea - but because it is very similar to ideas that a whole lot of great men have had before). So I concentrate on what is similar between my ideas and the ideas of others.

Remember that when you concentrate on differences you become schizophrenic and understand less about how things fit together. Another way of saying this is that concentrating on differences leads you further from the truth and concentrating on similarities brings you closer to it. There will be fierce argument about this idea because many people think that looking at similarities tells you nothing and that concentrating on differences tells you everything. They only believe that because they forgot how to tell the truth many years ago. Sadly, I haven’t found a way to prove what I say to be the truth - or not to the extent required by science. Perhaps one day I will find a way. I can explain many things to you, Matt, and I know you will believe me because there is a little flame of truth inside you that hasn’t been killed yet by all the lies that are being forced upon you. You might find what I say a little doubtful but that is because of the damage that has already been done to your flame of truth and your big idea rather than because there is anything doubtful about my philosophy.

What I just said will sound crazy to most of the world, Matt. Most of the world doesn’t know how to tell truth from lies so they don’t believe anyone is telling the truth (or they only believe those who punish them most for believing what they thought was true). Perhaps you can begin to see what I am up against here; there are billions of people in the world who believe that nobody knows the truth and I am one of the few who believes that deep down everybody knows the truth. Deep down they all do but they have been taught not to believe it.

Some people will look at that paragraph and say "That sounds like a religion. dr Phil is telling you to have faith that he is right and to trust your feelings but we all know that feelings are untrustworthy and we have known that since the very first time we were taught that masturbating is wrong". Well, they are right. What I am saying is like a religion. I am saying exactly what they are suggesting I am saying and that is very like a religious thing to say. But I am not teaching a religion here. The Big Truth is very, very similar to the Big Lie. That’s what makes it so easy for people to make you believe lies. If a teacher says "I only gave him a friendly pat on the bottom" then he is very nearly telling the truth. The boy he patted might not think it was a friendly pat at all though. He would know that it was similar to a friendly pat but it was also very, very different but other people would not be able to feel the difference and wouldn’t know who to believe. If that boy lets everyone believe the teacher then he has a real problem because he knows it wasn’t really a friendly pat at all. After everyone has insisted that they couldn’t see much difference between what the teacher did and a friendly pat on the bottom the boy might be forced to accept that there didn’t look to be much difference but he won’t be very happy, will he? In fact, my idea is that he will never feel really happy again. Or not until someone understands the difference and reassures him that he was right and the teacher was wrong. It would also make it more difficult for that boy to be sure of what he feels about anything because the world seems to insist that he shouldn’t believe his feelings.

So you can see that the more you are forced to compromise your integrity the more difficult it is to keep it in the future when someone is telling you to ignore your feelings or that your feelings don’t mean what you think they mean. When people can compromise your integrity then they can control you and make you believe anything they like and you won’t feel what they say is wrong - you will just feel angry like that little boy did. You can imagine that the teacher could make that little boy do anything he wanted after that because he could just say "Nobody will believe you anyway because they didn’t last time. They will just say that you are making it up or making a fuss because you are so stupid that you’re having problems understanding the school work". That little boy would have no way to respond to such a thing because he would know (with a terrible sinking feeling and more anger) that the teacher is right.

When people start saying that my idea sounds like religion, or sounds like a cult or is just Freudian bullshit or rehashed Adler or Zen Buddhism, then you won’t know what to believe. You need to believe that they are very nearly right, Matt, but that they are also just as wrong as what that teacher did to the little boy.

When we began this you were really keen to give it a name. People like to give things a name because then they think they know what it is. We could call this the "Zen Approach to Psychology" but then we would miss the contribution that the psychoanalysts made and we would miss the bit that came from Christianity or we would miss the bits that come from quantum mechanics, neurology and behavioural psychology too. Indeed, as far as I can see they would have missed the whole point by just as far as the difference between what that little boy felt and what everybody could see. For the moment I would suggest that we keep our working title of "What’s the big idea?"

Because people could miss the point when they think they understand the words I write I have to be very careful to provide examples to back up what I am saying. I would be very pleased to have you help by being "example monitor". You could make sure I have the very best examples to back up what I am saying. When you are looking for examples make sure they show the very strongest similarities with what I am saying and be careful if there are too many differences.

If we want to understand the truth about god then we need to concentrate on the similarities between religions. Any religions that are too different from others may tell us very little about god or they may tell us the critical difference. By "critical difference" I mean the difference between the truth and lies; the difference between what the little boy felt and what the teacher said he did. The critical difference is the most difficult thing to notice in the world - which is why people argue so much. They argue about all the differences, hoping to find the critical one - the difference that makes the difference.

When people argue about the difference between different kinds of therapy they concentrate on all of the differences in the hope of finding the critical difference. And likewise with all other things people argue about.

The critical difference is so important that we should probably have a special name for it. Since we will be mentioning it so often it might be an idea to just abbreviate it to "CD" (so long as we don’t confuse it with Compact Disk - since there isn’t any difference in the name).

One of the other major problems that my big idea will face is that it is too simple. Scientists like to think that they are cleverer than anybody else (which is very nearly true!) so they like complicated theories that are difficult for other people to understand. They always say that they explain things in such a complicated way because they don’t want people to miss the point and misunderstand them (which is also nearly the truth). I like to keep things as simple as possible because it makes sense to me that people will be more likely to understand simple things than complicated things.

Scientists (and religious people and sportsmen and technicians) make up special words for complicated things and they insist that this is so people know exactly what they mean. Ordinary words have so many meanings that they aren’t very useful for very specific things, so sports and science and many special subjects have "jargon" words which have very particular meanings to those who are interested in that particular field. The people who use jargon words are nearly telling the truth when they say that jargon saves them time when talking about their subject but the real truth is that people aren’t very good at learning jargon so they can still easily misunderstand (which means the scientists, or whoever, have to explain their jargon all over again or argue with others about what the jargon means).

Jargon changes, just like all other kinds of language. I had a long conversation with Ed about some writing exercises he had to do (because his teachers believed that tidy writing is more important than anything else he could learn at school - Oh, and they weren’t very good at teaching tidy writing either). He had to copy out a passage from Robinson Crusoe and he pointed out to me that the grammar was very strange. He thought it was wrong - the way it was written - but I pointed out that when it was written it was probably very good grammar. Teachers don’t tend to teach us that grammar changes and that one kind of grammar is good for one kind of writing and another kind of grammar is good for another kind. Teachers tend to teach that grammar is "right" or "wrong" instead (because it is easier to teach that a particular grammar is "right" than that different grammar is useful for different things). Anyway, teachers (who know that different grammar is good for different purposes) don’t mind teaching that "good" grammar is "right" because they know that children who go on to university or higher education will be taught that there.

I don’t think it is very good to teach children one thing when they are little and then something completely opposite (or something that makes what they were taught before "wrong") when they are older. That makes children even less able to tell what is right from what is wrong; to tell truth from fiction.

Another reason why teachers (and parents and governments) do this is because it seems easier to teach rules than principles; and these people don’t always have very high principles anyway.

The difference between rules and principles is another of those things where the difference makes the difference. Another CD. Rules are inflexible; fixed and unbending (but you do hear people talking about "bending the rules"). Really, people should know what the underlying principle is before they bend a rule but once you get into the habit of bending rules it becomes easy to bend even those ones where you are not quite so sure what the underlying principle is. Anyway, bending rules doesn’t show much integrity, does it?

I believe that there is more integrity in breaking rules than in bending them. But I only believe in breaking rules when they contradict my principles. Another way of saying this is that I break all the rules but never go against my principles. In my opinion this shows that I have very high integrity but I don’t think many people will agree with me. One thing that makes my view on this difficult to grasp is that rules are given to you but principles you must decide for yourself and that is a way of saying "I only follow the rules I feel like following". When someone says that then everyone worries they will break some important rules and that they only don’t follow rules because they want to be naughty. They won’t understand me because they have missed the CD between what I say and what they say. And that is easy to do because we are almost saying the same thing. Sometimes we are using exactly the same words but we mean entirely the opposite to each other! There is that primal doubt thing too - so they feel doubtful about me or my intentions even when they understand what I am saying.

Another reason people feel doubtful is that they have been taught that you have to obey the rules and that you should learn your principles from other people; from the Church or school or parents or governments. Again, their lies are very nearly the truth. You do have to learn a lot of principles from others. The most very important principles - that you are smart and good and deserve to be on this planet just as much as anyone else - you can never learn from anyone else. You were born with those principles already in place and once you lose sight of them you will have problems getting them back again.

Matt, there are a few things you should know about writing theses (like this one): Scientists have a few rules about theses which are there because they are afraid of others stealing their ideas (as if they could!) and to prevent people from jumping to the wrong conclusions if they read the thesis before it has been published (and checked by other scientists). I don’t really have those worries because I would be delighted for others to steal my big idea; they might have something tremendously valuable that they can add to it. Some might suggest that there is a danger that they might work out what my big idea is before I do and publish it first (so everyone thinks it is their idea). That doesn’t worry me either since they would have to have as much integrity as I do if they are to follow my arguments to their logical conclusion. If they don’t have an "insane" amount of integrity (and I will explain that statement later) then they will never reach the conclusions I am heading towards anyway. And they would never be able to defend my idea against all of those who will say they are telling lies. If they draw conclusions based on what they have read so far then they will have got the wrong idea too, and will have only themselves to blame for having done so.

You can understand scientists (and inventors and artists, etc.) guarding their ideas jealously because ideas are worth money. Really big ideas are worth really big money. Some ideas are so big that they are guarded by secret service departments in various governments around the world and fought for by huge armies. People murder for big ideas and steal them and keep them secret. I believe my idea is even bigger than that - so valuable that it is invaluable and so important that it should be free to everybody. Their birthright.

I don’t know if I will ever get any money for this idea - or not directly. People may pay me to talk to them about my big idea and there are some plain good folk out there that like to support good ideas and they might send me some money just to keep developing good ideas. If someone paid me to develop this idea then I could spend less time doing computer work and hypnotherapy and more time working on my big idea - checking that everything about it is true and making sure that it is really easy for people to understand. Others might feel that they can trust me to help them because I seem to have the right ideas and they will pay me for that.

Anyway, Hambro weren’t interested in my big idea. That is probably my fault rather than theirs because I just spoke to them on the phone and I may not have given them a very clear outline of my idea. It might have been because all my professional training is in hypnotherapy rather than pure psychology and they might have found that frightening (because lots of people are frightened about hypnosis). Also, I only spoke to Hambro’s office in England rather than their head-office in America. Perhaps the people in England aren’t allowed to make decisions like that and were too lazy or uninterested to ask head-office whether they are interested in my idea.

You can learn something here about finding support for your own ideas: If you want people to take you seriously it is often better to write than to phone (especially if it is a really big idea that needs explaining). It is usually more effective to write to someone near the top of the company or university or government agency that you are talking to. It is seldom of much use to talk to someone who isn’t allowed to make decisions about the kind of support you want. The more simply and clearly you can explain your idea the better. I am pretty certain about that since I can’t really think of a lot of exceptions to it so we might call that a principle for getting people interested in your idea. There are obvious exceptions to that principle but those exceptions usually say more about the people or companies where that principle doesn’t apply than about good ideas! Some people are only interested in complicated ideas because they think all good ideas are complicated. That is not really surprising when you think about how they were taught. You also need to be sure that your big idea is important to the company and to make sure they know quite how important it could be.

Back to my idea, then. If my idea is half as valuable as I believe it to be then I can be absolutely certain it will be a very dangerous idea too. If it is valuable to governments then governments will try to "own" it and if that happens then they will have to do something about me - the author of the idea. If they believe that it is better that people don’t hear about my ideas then, if they feel really strongly about it, they might lock me in prison or in a mental hospital (where they are allowed to make me take drugs to stop me being able to think so clearly). Or they might even try to kill me. The same is true of large companies and my ideas could cost drug companies a lot of money.

Large institutions behave just like people behave. People get jealous of other’s ideas or get cross because they want others to believe something different. They fight for their ideas and tell lies which make it seem like good ideas aren’t so good after all. I have to warn you of this (and I have warned Mummy too) because I want you to understand that if I have a nasty accident it might not be an accident at all but something that was done by someone who didn’t like my ideas. You may get into trouble for my ideas too and I want you to know that I will understand if you say that you don’t agree with my ideas so that others don’t tease you about them. That wouldn’t be a very good display of integrity but there is some value in living to fight another day and the level of integrity required to stand up to such things is difficult to attain.

I know these things are possible (even though they are such terrible things that they really shouldn’t be possible) because other people have been treated this way about their ideas (especially the very good ones). Governments, in particular, still do these things to people with really good ideas and you only have to look in the newspapers to see some examples. Or read about Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Sigmund Freud was another man who had some really great ideas but people didn’t like his ideas and now most people think he didn’t really have any good ideas at all or that science has since proved him wrong (which is not surprising because that is what they wanted to do all along and science is pretty good at proving things that they want to). Many people only know bad things about Freud and they pretend he was wrong about everything because he used cocaine. Well, I think Freud did use cocaine but that is one of the least important facts about him.

You know how it is at school when you run out of bad things to say about someone - you insult them instead. Perhaps you call them names and say the opposite to what they say. Grown-ups are no better than children in that respect; probably much worse. One of the things they will call me is schizophrenic. It will be a very difficult name to shake off because it is so nearly true. In the previous few paragraphs I was talking about some of the dangers of having a valuable idea, well, psychiatrists will read that stuff and call it paranoia (and they would be right).

When psychiatrists decide whether or not someone is insane they find out as much as they can about the person and then they look all of those things up in a book called DSM-IV (or DSM-V, I am not sure which one they use now but it is all the same book that just gets revised every few years). DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and they call it that because they see how most people behave and they call that "normal". If someone is paranoid and has hypochondria and delusions they look those things up in the DSM and find that someone who has all of those things is schizophrenic. Well, Matt, I think that they could easily say that I have all of those things and so they would be quite right to say I am schizophrenic. But there is always the difference that makes the difference…

I am very lucky because Sigmund Freud studied one of the most famous schizophrenics. The man was called Dr jur. Daniel Paul Schreber and he was an appeal court judge - so he was pretty famous already. What made him most famous, though, was that he wrote a book while he was in a mental hospital called "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" which means "Memorabilia of a Nerve Patient". That book explained just how crazy this guy was but it also helped him to get out of hospital because he said "Even if I believe such crazy things I can still look after myself and my family and I am no danger to anyone else so there is no reason why I should be kept locked up in a mental hospital".

Nobody felt very threatened by Schreber’s ideas and he was certainly no danger to anyone so they let him out. If his ideas had been as threatening as mine might be then Schreber’s story might have had a different ending. If I am ever in Schreber’s condition then it still might not have a good ending because these days the drugs they give to mental patients are so strong they can make anyone look like they can’t look after themselves or that they might be a danger to others (and, of course, they could just lie about it in the way they lie about so many other things).

Delusions would be easy to pin on me too since people can call whatever they don’t believe "delusions". Even worse, if I ever tell people that I am god (and I could easily justify such a statement since I believe everybody is a god or, as I said to you, they create their own gods) then that is almost certainly listed as one of the most serious delusions you can have.

Hypochondria is another symptom that they could easily accuse me of. The other day I burned my hand very badly on the steel handle of the big frying pan. It had been in the oven so it made a bad burn very quickly. I ran it under the cold tap for a while and then showed it to Mummy (so she can tell you how bad it was) and it hurt like hell. When I had run it under the cold tap for a while I said to my unconscious "I know that pain is there to tell me something but I have done all I can do to make it better so there is no need for the pain anymore. I could take it to the doctor or to the hospital but they wouldn’t do anything more than I have already done". After I explained that to my unconscious the pain went away and by the next morning I could only feel the smooth and slightly tight skin where the handle from the frying pan had ironed it smooth. There was no pain at all and by yesterday almost all signs of the burn had gone. If I explained about this to a Christian they would think it was a miracle but if I explained it to a psychiatrist they would say it was hypochondria.

Hypochondria is when someone comes up with an extraordinary explanation for a physical illness so a psychiatrist would be quite correct in pointing out that my description above sounds a lot like hypochondria. If I say that I have a cold because my body doesn’t want me to shout so loud they will call that hypochondria too (or delusions, which are similar).

So psychiatrists could easily prove to anyone that I am schizophrenic and are likely to go on to say that I should be locked up in a mental hospital and be given ECT (electric shock treatment) or powerful drugs. Even worse, some mental hospitals still do lobotomies (where they destroy part of your brain with a very sharp instrument that they poke in behind your eye).

That all sounds like pretty scary stuff, don’t you think, Matt? I was not intending to scare you but to give you some information that will help you to make sense of the situation if something strange happens. Most of people’s problems stem from situations that they could not make sense of without accepting something that is false and I don’t want that to happen to you. Or not in connection with something as important as this. You see, if something should happen to me then I should like someone to carry on the work I am doing and I am sure that you and Ed and Mummy and a few others should be able to find people to do that (or you would be able to do that yourself if you really wanted to). If something did happen then I am also certain that people would carry on trying to prove that my ideas are wrong.

00:41, 27^th Jan…

Well, integrity is hard work, Matt. You remember I was talking about rulers and how they can tell you whether or not something is straight? A ruler can tell you a lot more than that. If you hold a ruler up to a wall (you can try this experiment at school) you will see that it shows up all the bumps and wrinkles. Integrity is like that too, Matt. It shows up all the bumps and wrinkles in other people.

Keeping your integrity risks everything. That lesson is taught in the Bible and, I am sure, we will find it in other religions. Jesus kept his integrity. He continued to tell the truth even unto death (they like to say things like that in the bible). He risked his life for the truth.

You might also notice the same theme in some of the X-Files. Mulder seems to be a man of integrity. And Scully too. They both stand up for what they believe even when they believe different things. The thing that helps them work together is that they concentrate on the things they believe in common.

Look at what I am doing, Matt. I am looking at similarities; at things that have something in common. This allows me to refine my understanding of these things. To find a simple model or symbol which can show the core element which things have in common. This will lead us to the essence of the thing; to its Truth.

So finding similarities leads to truth and finding differences leads to confusion, at best, or lies. Away from truth there are an unlimited number of directions. To lies, to withholding the truth, to tact, diplomacy and all those other "similes" we found earlier. But our list of similes have something in common (simile means words that have meanings in common) so we have noticed yet another most extraordinary thing: there are an unlimited number of directions that you can move away from the truth but only one direction you can move towards it…

WOW!!! That might be the most difficult part of the course. I think some explaining might be in order.

But, before we do, let’s think about science for a bit: Some people believe in science they way others believe in religions. These people usually call themselves scientists in the way that those who believe in Jesus call themselves Christians. Scientists believe that fate created the world and science to help them understand it. Christians (and Hindus and Buddhists and Islamic people and, …) believe that God created the world and created their religions to help them understand it. Since science and religion are similar they must be the same thing. If we look to see what is common between science and religion then we find that people - the same kind of people with the same kinds of love and problems and wishes and aspirations and neuroses and oddities - are common to both systems. And both science and religion are trying to do the same thing - to help us to understand the world we live in and to help us to understand ourselves.

Science and religion both come from the mind of man so it is obvious that they will say and do the same things as man says and does; they are but reflections of his thoughts.

But people don’t agree with each other. Goodness, gracious, gullible me! Neither do religions! Neither do Scientists! Neither do Christians or Zen Buddhists or rival Islamic factions!!!! BECAUSE THEY KEEP LOOKING AT THE DIFFERENCES WHEN THEY SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR WHAT THEY AGREE ABOUT!

It is sooooo obvious that nobody sees it. Every time we concentrate on differences we get disagreements, separation, hurt, angst, war, lies and death. Matt, when we concentrate on differences we use our conscious minds unconsciously and when we concentrate on similarities we use our unconscious minds consciously.

Our conscious minds are so limited; remember 7+/-2? Our unconscious minds are comparatively unlimited. Our conscious minds are organised to spot differences because noticing the difference can be the difference between life and death; between survival and distinction.

Our unconscious minds are organised to notice similarities; remember that science has indicated that our brains work by a process of association - sameness, compatibility; all the similes are for togetherness, love, life, fitting in, being part of the family, compatibility, congruence, peace. You hear about someone being "together" or having got together. We say "let me just get my thoughts together".

Things are like this because we are like this. All of our truth is god’s truth. All truth says the same things. The truth comes from us when we are being true to ourselves and that makes us true to each other. That is what integrity means and that is why it is so important.

My big idea, Matt, is to prove this to the world by using science and religions - things that people have put there to help them understand the world and the universe and other people. All I have to do is to point out what our language is saying, what science is saying, what religions and philosophies are saying ABOUT US! All I have to do is to concentrate on the similarities between things and I will get to the truth. Similarities always lead to the truth and differences generally lead away from it. There are an unlimited number of ways you can go away from anything and only ever one direction towards something. EVEN PHYSICS AND GEOMETRY SAY THE SAME THING. And maths does and geography and history and art and chemistry and biology. There is truth in all of these things as soon as we begin to concentrate on the things that are the same about them.

When you look at the similarities between things the differences are obvious. When you look at the differences the similarities become more difficult to notice. If we want to clearly see what is different between two things then we must first concentrate on what they have in common. Otherwise we will take away parts which are common to both and believe them to be differences. We do this so unconsciously that we do not even notice it happen. We call these differences "the same difference" - and devalue that similarity by doing so.

Matt, I will next talk a little about proprioception - our sixth sense. Most people don’t know that they have this sense because they use it so often and so naturally and so obviously and unconsciously. I could turn this into a shaggy dog story, Matt. I could build it up and describe the beauty and power of this sixth sense and point out how important it is in everything we do. I could describe people (the very, very few people on this earth) who don’t have this sixth sense and how they can’t walk and can’t feed themselves - even those who have only lost a small part of it have difficulty with such things.

I could build it up and build it up until you appreciate what an important sense it must be, but I know how disappointed you would be when I pointed out to you what it is because it is so obvious that people don’t even count it as a sense at all.

Proprioception is the awareness of where your body is. If you close your eyes and put out your arm you can tell where your arm is because there is a sense, feelings from inside your body, of where your arm is.

Terry Prachett knows all about this stuff, Matt. He knows that kids can see things that adults can’t because kids believe their senses and adults have been trained not to.

This is a whole new branch of science, Matthew. It is my gift to you. Your legacy from me. You are free to accept this gift from me or to reject it and I will not judge you on your decision. By your decision you will have judged yourself but I will have done the only absolutely honest thing I can do and that is to offer it to you as a free choice - indifferent to which way you choose but in the absolute certainty of what the result of your choice will be. If you choose it then you must do so with integrity since my science only works for honest scientists. Dishonest scientists can replicate my experiments and they will reach the same conclusions that I do but they will still refuse to believe me. They will notice only the differences between my results and theirs. Honest scientists will copy my experiments and they will reach the same conclusions as I have and they will agree with me on the similarities. Honest scientists will agree with me on the truth. What we have in common is the truth.

If anyone agrees with me on the smallest truth then they will have discovered the truth in what I am saying but if they disagree with me because they concentrate on the differences they will not know if my difference is the truth or whether their difference is the truth. They would be no closer to the truth than they already are.

Everything they say has a grain of truth in it and I want to point out their truth to them but they will not thank me for doing so until they accept the truth. I don’t mean "until they accept my truth", I mean "until they have accepted the truth in what they say to me". That is their truth and it is still the truth - whether theirs or mine it is the truth and it is the same truth. Ask them and they will insist that they have told me the truth but when I point out what their truth means they will shout that I am misunderstanding them. That I haven’t understood their truth. But how will we know who is telling the truth? I don’t believe that they know the truth that is in what they say. But I do. I know how to find the truth. Look for similarities. Use your unconscious mind - and believe what it tells you. Your unconscious - Jung’s collective unconscious - is the first author of all the truth in the world.

Once you can trust your unconscious mind to give you the truth it will always give you the truth. If you expect your unconscious mind to tell you lies then you will never believe it even when it tells you the truth.

Trust your conscious mind to recognise differences. When you need to see the difference that makes the difference - the CD - go first to your unconscious to find the similarities and then your conscious mind will immediately (or soon after) recognise the differences and, in particular, the critical difference.

This stuff is really, really easy to understand. It is so obvious as to go almost un-noticed. But I am beginning to notice it. It is easy to understand but difficult to "get". It is always easy to understand the truth but it can be really, really difficult to accept.

Freud got discredited despite telling the truth because the truth he told was too difficult for people to accept. Isaac Newton and Christopher Columbus told the truth but it was (almost) too difficult for anyone to accept. But there is hope. Some of Freud’s truth leaked into the world and has stayed here as part of our language. Isaac Newton’s truth leaked into the world, even though it was nearly impossible for people at the time to accept it, and has remained a part of our science. Christopher Columbus brought us the truth that gave new lands to the people of England and the rest of Europe and changed the whole shape of the world from flat into spherical and it has stayed that way ever since. Once the truth is brought to the world - once people understand the truth - it remains there and causes all kinds of problems to those who will not accept the truth.

But when you give people problems they hate you for it. Isn’t that true? Even if it is not you that they have a problem with but the truth they will still hate you for it. Jesus brought some truth to the world and they crucified him for it. They hated him for it; but some of that truth has lasted for 2000 years.

Before you accept this gift from me, Matt, you must decide if you are willing to accept all of the hate that is directed at those who bring truth into the world. It would not be a free choice for you if I did not point out the downside as well as the benefits of this gift to you. In many ways what I am offering you is a white elephant. Something completely useless but that you still must feed and stable.

There is no direct benefit from holding to the truth, Matt. It doesn’t promise you money or happiness or friends and it guarantees to return anger from evil. The only hope I have is based on a saying the Americans are fond of using: What goes around comes around. You only ever hear them say it when someone is being nasty and they only say it then because they hope that nasty things will happen to nasty people. But if it works like that then the opposite must be true as well - nice things must happen to nice people.

Right now I am seeing if my faith in this cosmic law is justified. We have no money, Matt. I have no money to pay any more school fees. I have no money to upgrade our computer equipment and software. I have no money to buy food or clothing or pay the bills. There is only god and I and the desperate hope that what goes around comes around. That by remaining true to myself I will attract truth to me. That by keeping my integrity I will be completely trustworthy and that if there is any good anywhere in the world it will be attracted to the good in me.

If I starve to death and you and Ed have to leave school and Mummy leaves because I can no longer give her security then it will prove to me that there is no good in the world and I can’t live in a world which has no good in it.

I did have a job - a business relationship which would give me money - but I have given it up because there were only lies and mistrust and badness in it. I cannot earn money from evil - or I will not because I believe that what goes around comes around. Even if the evil we do affects no others it will still effect ourselves.

Even if you choose not to accept my truth as a gift you can take into the world you must at least keep it secret until the day when someone appears who can take it to the world; someone who is prepared to sacrifice all of the bad in themselves in order to encourage the truth. If you can’t even keep my truth protected somewhere because it causes problems I will understand. I understand these things because I love you, Matt, and I love you because I understand you - I have recognised the similarities between us; I have seen the truth that you and I share.

Matt, when you test someone’s eyesight you grade their vision on a scale. Normal vision is written at 20/20 vision. That means that someone with normal vision can see what someone with normal vision can see at 20 feet. 40/20 vision is different. It means that someone can see, at 40 feet, what someone with normal vision can see at 20 feet. We call these people "long sighted". 10/20 vision means that someone needs to be standing as close as 10 feet to be able to see what someone with normal vision can see from 20 feet. [I will have to look up that information to make sure it is the right way around otherwise people will write to me to tell me that they had heard different!]

The importance of this vision thing struck me as I noticed what page I was on, Matt. I saw it said 20/20 - normal vision. As we go on and add pages to this thesis people’s vision should improve. Now I am on page 22 of 22 (22/22) which means that nothing has changed since we had 20/20 normal vision two pages ago. This might be because I am trying to teach too many truths too soon. I am mixing metaphors; confusing the truth because I am combining truths before pointing out what the similarities are between them.

In the end all truths boil down to one truth. If you can find god by seeing what is similar between religions then you can find the truth - the One Truth - by comparing what is similar between truths. If you find out what two truths have in common then you have found a small part of the truth. If you find a third truth that has something in common with the first two truths then you become more certain of the truth - what they all have in common. If you look at all the truths in the world then you will find that what they have in common is the One Truth.

But you can’t just walk around in the world and say "Hey world, I have found The truth" - because nobody will believe you. Why should they? It probably doesn’t sound like the truth to them because it doesn’t agree with all the lies inside them. But we can teach them to find the truth for themselves by teaching them to look for similarities in things. If they keep noticing the similarities then they will become more and more convinced of the truth. Convinced of the real truth. They will end up believing me because they have done the one scientific experiment that can prove the truth and they can’t help but find the same truth I have if my truth is the truth.

I know this is hard for you too, Matt. I know how confusing it can be for anyone to learn the truth - especially for those who do not believe anyone knows the truth or can know the truth. All I can do is to keep telling you things that are true and hope beyond hope that you will recognise the truth that all of my truths come from.

Soon we shall have to concede to another consideration that scientists have. We shall have to go back to all the sources from which I draw my truth and provide references. That will allow scientists, with their careful and responsible methods, to discover the truth in what I am saying for themselves by seeing that I am being truthful when I quote the Bible and Freud and Persig and Newton and all the others; to see that they were saying the same things that I am saying. That will also allow them to perhaps notice even more of the truth than I have discovered. Perhaps they will see with even more clarity the truth towards which all of my theory points. Perhaps it will help them to recognise ways that my truth can be used to do better science and better psychology and better business and better education. So it is important that we do it.

You might be able to help me with that and you may have friends who can help. You might discover other truths that I haven’t noticed in the places where I have been looking for my truths. If you do these things, Matt, then you will be one of the greatest scholars in the world - and certainly scholar enough to earn a scholarship from Winchester College regardless of the rules they use at present to select scholars and regardless of the tests they have or the time-scale they work to.

You might remember that I promised to help you earn a scholarship and then Mr Price said that there was no possibility - that however bright you are and however hard you work there is no way you could pass the scholarship tests for Winchester. Well, I didn’t believe him then and I sure don’t now because I can see how you can become a scholar at Winchester (or Eton or anywhere else in the world). Scholarship is study and if you help in my study then you will be a scholar and I will do whatever I have to do to make Winchester recognise it. In the same way that I have accredited myself with a doctorate and I will do everything I need to do in order to make sure that the world recognises my doctorate as at least as valid as that issued by any university or medical school.

People will argue that I am not being honest in accrediting myself with a doctorate. They will tell me I’m lying because the truth is different to them. That is because they have not noticed the truth, the integrity, in what I have done. They might say "Well, it is half true - the average IQ of doctors is 130 and Phil’s IQ last time it was checked was 149 so if it is true that we give doctorates as recognition of intelligence then Phil deserves a doctorate" - which is true enough but is still ignoring my truth: that doctor also means "learned man" and I doubt anyone would believe that to be anything but the truth about me. When they argue with my truth they do so by showing that Doctor is also taken to mean something different! They are concentrating on differences again and that presents them from seeing the truth - my truth.

Time to introduce a friend of mine, Steve Parhill: Steve is one of the most effective hypnotherapists around. Like all the others I am sure that there are things that he doesn’t agree with me about but there are, I am sure, a much larger number of things we do agree on; things we have in common.

Steve posted this story on the Internet (and I think it is quite appropriate in connection with what I said above:

Dannion Brinkley, flat line for 48 minutes he wakes up in the morgue with the bag of paperwork/toe tag/etc. on his chest, he then makes 117 recorded and documented predictions of which 70 or more quickly come to fruit, and he's instantly an expert on NDE and, oh yea, the feds come knocking. After becoming renowned for his hospice and healing work, he's meeting the top dawgs at the NIH. One scientist states the biochemical excuse for NDE and Dannion tells the guy he has no idea what he's talking about. The Scientist says something close to, "Sir, I am Colonel @#$@^, M.D., Ph.D., BVD, MFB, etc.... Who are you to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about?" DB thinks and replies, "I'm Dannion Brinkley, D.O.A.!

When you tell people the truth the will usually tell you something different (which is not to say that there is no truth in what they are saying). There is truth in everything but it is impossible to recognise truth in others until you have recognised the truth in yourself.

No truth can ever make a lie of any other truth. It can show up the lies in what others hold up to be the truth but it can never disprove any other truth. Instead truth confirms truth and exposes untruth.

Establishing the truth of what I say is terribly difficult at the moment because the first thing that truth does is to show up all the bumps and wrinkles and neuroses and problems in whatever it comes into contact with. I am losing friends at the moment, Matt, not because I am being mean to them but because I insist on telling them the truth. They go away knowing the truth but angry with me because they see how hard it is to have a relationship with someone who is dishonest and so many of their relationships are with dishonest people and businesses and ideas that they see how they would lose those relationships if they demanded the truth from others.

I am hoping to take all the flack for you, Matt. I am hoping beyond hope that there is some good in the world, some honest people who I can rely on to make sure there is a haven for the truth; to make sure you have a world in which you can trust others to tell you the truth because the recognise the truth and live it. Because every action they take is a truthful action and everything they say is truthful.

If you tell the truth amongst truthful people they love you for it. If you tell the truth to liars and cheats they will hate you for it because they don’t like the truth. Honest people love the truth and dishonest people hate it. Honest people are generous with the truth - they offer it to others as a gift. Dishonest people hide the truth - they guard it and keep it to themselves. That is why honest people are generous and dishonest people are tight fisted and secretive. Dishonest people are not only trying to keep the truth to themselves but are trying to keep the truth from themselves.

So I can tell that Hambro Inc. are a dishonest company - because they are keeping the truth to themselves (they would not tell me why they were not interested in my idea) and they are trying to keep the truth away from themselves by ignoring the truth in what I say. I could get into a lot of trouble for even pointing this truth out. Hambro is a very rich company and they can afford to take me to court and they can be fairly confident that there is enough dishonesty in the justice system to be sure of punishing me for telling the truth. But I have equal confidence that there is enough honesty in the justice system to ensure that they are to make me withhold the truth. But this hope of mine will not be proven until Hambro takes me to court and then all the world will see how much honesty or dishonesty there is in the justice system.

Any such battle for the truth contains the risk that there is not enough honesty for good to win against evil. All I have to fight my side of the case is the truth but evil has everything at its disposal to fight the truth. In this world and at this time evil and dishonesty has all of the money, the most powerful people and organisations on its side. And I have only truth.

People know the truth (because it is inside of all of them) but they have no access to the truth because it is hidden away in their unconscious and they insist that their conscious minds are aware of the truth. But the truth is difficult to get hold of with your conscious mind - it seems too complicated and, indeed, it is. Whenever the truth is split down into more than seven plus or minus two bits it becomes impossible for us to comprehend it with our conscious minds and we can only recognise it with our unconscious.

The truth is the same as understanding. When we understand something we know the truth. Knowledge helps with understanding - which is why I asked you to feed your ideas with as much knowledge as you can find because I know that if you do you will find the truth. Understanding means forgiveness - or, rather, understanding removes all need for forgiveness. You can see this, too, reflected in the language we use: When someone punishes someone else we ask the person who is punishing to show some understanding. People only ever punish others when they don’t understand them.

I cannot punish or condemn Hambro because I understand them. I understand that I have not made the truth clear enough to them and I am sure that when I have done so it will bring out the truth in them. Hambro are by no means the least honest company around - there are others far worse, and governments and schools and health systems. None of these dishonest organisations are guilty of being dishonest but of being unable to understand the truth. It is unfair to convict someone of being unable to understand the truth - as you know full well from school. How do you feel about a teacher who punishes you for not knowing something? You feel hurt. You feel wronged. You sense that the teacher is being dishonest. Well, if that works between teachers and children then it must work everywhere else. If it is true in education then it must be true in business, in government, in justice - in everything.

Truth means too much to too many people, Matt. If I bring truth to psychology (which I certainly intend to do) then I must bring truth to everything else as well; to schools, to hospitals, to businesses, to universities - I must take it everywhere. While I have the truth entirely to myself I will have to fight all of my own battles because all of the dishonesty in the world will be attracted to me. Once someone else accepts the truth there will be two of us to face all the dishonesty in the world. Once an organisation like the International Association of Hypno-Analysts accepts the truth then there will be a whole organisation and me and my truthful friend to face all of the dishonesty in the world. Once the justice system understands the truth we will be able to bring dishonesty to justice (careful how you understand that - others will turn it about and believe that I am advocating making the justice system dishonest).

You might be beginning to realise how I am not only telling you the truth, Matt, but explaining what the truth means to the world. If the truth means pain to the world there will be pain. If the truth means happiness to the world there will be happiness. If the truth means having to say you are sorry then the only truthful thing you can do is to say sorry. If the truth is that evil wins out over good then evil will win out. All I can do is bring truth to the world in order to find out what the truth is.

Few men have had the courage to do that, Matt, because they realise what the truth means (or if they don’t then they find out as soon as they do it). The truth is whatever you are left with; whatever you will accept. If someone accepts that they will stay ill then they will stay ill. That is the truth. If someone can only accept that they can spell some words and not others then that is what they will be left able to do - to spell some words and not others. That will be the truth.

If I were to stop writing my thesis now then the effect it would have on the world will point out in the most inescapable fashion what happens when you stop short of telling the whole truth. We would see what effect the little bit of truth I have explained so far will have. The truth is what we have left once someone has told the truth and everybody has responded to it. The truth is the way people respond to the truth. The truth about Hambro is how they have responded to the truth from me. The truth about you is how you respond to what I am saying.

You might think that I am saying the same thing over and over again (and I am not surprised because it is true). Everything I have said, all that has truth in it, is the same thing. When you once you discover the truth then you have discovered all the truths in the world and when you become convinced of that one truth then you will be convinced by any other; for all truths are the same truth.

One of the most important questions people will ask me is "How do you know that you know the truth". That is one of the most important questions that anyone could ask anyone because if you can explain how you know the truth then you have explained the truth. I know my truth is The Truth because I went about acquiring it in exactly the same way that anyone else can acquire it - by looking at the similarities between things. By looking for it. By accepting all the things that the truth means once you have found it.

The reason that scientists write up their work is so that other people can carry out the same experiments that they did, or research that they did, and (hopefully) arrive at the same conclusion. If a scientist does an experiment and draws conclusions from that experiment then they tell others about the experiment, giving them all the information they need to carry out the experiment and to draw their own conclusions or to design a tighter, more precise experiment which could show up any wrong conclusions that the scientist has stated. When enough (and who knows how many enough is?) people have carried out the experiment and drawn similar conclusions then people agree that the conclusions are the truth (or closer to the truth than they were before the first scientist designed his experiment).

So that is what I am doing, Matt. Good science. I honestly believe, with all my heart, that I am doing good science here and I am completely open to anyone who might have a better way of doing science. Just so long as it is better science. As long as it gets me closer to the truth - since that is what Man wants science to do; it is certainly what I want science to do.

DiRGe0513 helped me out with a quote:

That is something that we have begun to do here; to define our terms. Many scientists argue that there is no need to define truth - that the process of science produces truth as its end result - but you might have realised by now that it is possible to do science without arriving at the truth. This must be so - otherwise there are a lot of people out there who claim to be scientists but don’t do science. They can’t be doing science if they are not arriving at the truth if that is what science is supposed to do. This is simple logic, Matt. The simpler your logic the easier it is to see the truth.

I am not even sure that people fail to see the truth. It may just be that as soon as they recognise the truth they also recognise the implications that the truth has and they are scared of the implications of the truth. Notice that I didn’t say they are scared of the truth - merely that they are scared of what the truth says about them and about their family and friends and businesses and governments and science and everything; what the truth means to them rather than what it is.

In seeking the truth we cannot avoid the fact that it will bring us new understandings and new meanings. Whilst we have only a little of the truth we only have to deal with a few new meanings. If we ever know the whole truth then we will have to deal with everything that means in the universe.

So we are not just seeking truth but seeking meaning - finding a way to make sense of the world. That is something we have been doing since the moment we had the smallest, most primitive faculties with which to do so. Certainly we have been doing so from the moment we are born and I would not be the least surprised if we began to make sense of the world while we were still in the womb.

Matt, if I use any words that you don’t understand then ask me about them because if you don’t understand them then others won’t either. If I describe a concept to you which you don’t understand then ask me about it and I will explain what I mean. In the end it is more important that you understand my meaning than that you understand the words I use. Words can never tell the whole truth - only meanings can do that. Words are symbols we use to approximate meanings but they are not the meanings themselves. With a bit of good luck and careful selection of the words we use then the statements we make can point to the meanings; can show in which direction we should look to find the truth.

Soon we shall be using some pretty big words and we will use them in very particular ways but we shall still have to make sure that others understand what we mean. Even choosing the right words does not guarantee that others will understand what we mean. Different people understand words in different ways. "Beach" means a place with fine sand, sunny days, still water, knotted hankies and sun tan lotion to some people. To others it means huge waves crashing on the shore, waxed surfboards, sand in your wetsuit and campfires and beer at night. To others beach means being pressed into the damp sand by someone twice their size and being subjected to the worst experience of their lives. We have a responsibility to choose our words so carefully that our meaning is unmistakable and you can see from the examples I gave above that doing so is not so easy as it seems.

Fortunately we do not have to define all the words we use since we can include references to other works (books etc.) where the author has defined a word in the way we want to use it. We can save ourselves hours of explaining by using the explanations that others have already made. We can even call to our service complete explanations for whole concepts where someone has explained them in a clear and truthful way. But we must vet all of our references to make sure that they are the truth or show us the truth.

It won’t be long before others help us to discover and explain the truth, Matt. Already DiRGe0513 has helped, as has another wonderful friend of mine called Paul Doering. I will use the examples he sent me later in the thesis but for now you should just know that there are good guys out there - it isn’t all doom and gloom.

Bianca is being wonderful too, Matt. She just believes me about all kinds of things. And says so too. I think that she respects the truth even when she recognises what it means in terms of her relationship with others. She is one of the few people I know that believes in evil. Because she believes in evil she must believe in good (and she does). I say "must" because you can only believe in evil if you also believe in good. You can only believe in something if you also believe in its opposite (if it has one).

People say "You can’t have one without the other" - which is true enough - but they think it means that if you have something good then evil will snatch it away from you. That is often the case but only while there is more evil than good in the world. If ever there was more good in the world then good would take everything away from evil. There would still be the knowledge of evil - so we haven’t removed evil from the world - but evil would have no substance, no power to corrupt and destroy.

People also say "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" but they misunderstand power’s part in the equation. Power is neutral - neither good nor evil - but it is what makes good or evil effective. Good has no effect until it is given power but neither does evil. You can have evil thoughts, just as evil as you like, so long as you never give those thoughts power. You can have a psyche like a saint and do no good in the world if you never give power to your good thoughts.

But here I am. Nutty as a fruitcake. I have opened a book of spells which I can’t close again. The world will change or we will finally learn the truth; that there is more evil in the world than good.

Don’t leave me at this point, just because I have gone all mystical on you. I will prove, with good science, how predictions for the future come from the unconscious in the form of religions, mythologies, language, art and song. All of these things are saying "Here I am, your unconscious mind, telling you the truth, as best I can see it, about the world I know and what I can predict from the state of it".

WOW again! That statement might just take a little while getting your head ‘round.

28 Jan 16:50

Matt, I slowed down on writing for a bit in order to deal with a few practical problems. Do you remember me telling you about gumption? Of course you do. Before you start a job, any job, you have to find some gumption and serenity if you want to a) enjoy the job and b) do the very best you can do. If you find your gumption has gone while you are doing the job then there is no point in carrying on with the job until you have recovered your gumption (unless you are happy with doing a less than perfect job of it and depressing yourself into the bargain).

Well, my gumption is under severe threat at the moment. Not surprisingly because I am facing people up to what they say about themselves. Not what others say about them. Not what I believe about them. But what they say about themselves.

Let me give you an example. I am looking for ways to ensure I can support you and Mummy and Ed and, at the same time, bring my message to the world "with such authority that no-one will doubt". One idea I came up with (and it sure seemed like a good idea to me) was to look around for the most responsible newspaper I could find and introduce them to the story - my big idea. I settled on the Daily Mail, a newspaper that Mummy suggested because she believes that they do fair, balanced and careful reporting. That was just the kind of newspaper which might be interested in the truth. Another reason that I found this important is because the more people who know about this story the more protection you and Mummy and Ed and all my friends have if people react badly to what I am saying.

Again, I did some dumb things, Matt. I could, perhaps, have waited until morning to alert them to what I was talking about but I was very excited at finding a way forward and unable to sleep. I also thought to myself "newspapers - newsdesks in particular - are open around the clock so I could ring right away". And I did. I was put through to the newsdesk and spoke to a girl there at some unreasonable hour in the middle of the night. I explained, as succinctly as I could and with as much integrity as I could muster, what our story is about. Now, you have had enough problems, I am sure, in understanding all of this and you can imagine the problem I have in explaining it in such a way as to generate interest rather than to make people turn and run from this crazy man saying these crazy things.

Maybe I am a walking hoover for all the neuroses that people carry around with them, bringing them to the surface where they can be seen. I am a pretty extraordinary hypnotist who has just got a whole lot better and perhaps I can get down through the unconscious to people’s fears and inadequacies at lightening speed. If anyone has a better understanding of my behaviour - which shows the similarities between my behaviour to that of others - then I am open to suggestions. If, instead, they look at what is different about me then they will only find that I am abnormal. If they look at the differences they will find I am different - they would be moving away from the truth - but if they look at the similarities then they will find that I am a perfectly normal person who has a small neurosis, no worse than that of any other being on the planet, and BIG ideas.

If they criticise me for my big ideas then does that seem honest to you? How much power do any ideas have if you don’t back them up with actions? I am only using words, body language and tone of voice to convey my big ideas. The only practical thing I have done in all of this is to talk to people, insist on their interest, and to post a few messages on the Internet (just words again).

So let’s you and me find out whether words can have any effect on anything. Let’s just see whether words can change anything or whether they are there purely for our amusement (which you have to admit is an effect of sorts). Let’s see what telling the truth does, Matt, because if telling the truth doesn’t achieve what I believe it will achieve then words are either capricious or ineffective.

You can test for yourself - with NO reference to anyone else - whether or not truth is effective and of value by telling the truth and seeing what the effect is. Now, I know that you know what to expect when you tell the truth: People will say you are stupid or retaliate in some way. Teachers will shout and punish, parents will send you from the room, people will cry or run away. What are they running from? What are they punishing for? What right does anyone have to do anything but believe you if you tell the truth?

People will insist that you must be diplomatic, use tact and not hurt the feelings of others. Some will tell you that it is OK to tell some truths but not others. How can that be? If I am wrong in all of this, Matt, that doesn’t make me dishonest because I am telling the truth honestly, sincerely and to the very best of my ability and understanding. That isn’t wrong - can’t be wrong - if we are supposed to believe the Church, if we are to be bound by the laws of this country (which, surely, are there to stand up for honesty and protect the good), if you are to believe anything of anybody. If you cannot rely on getting the pure, unvarnished truth from anyone you speak to, Matt, then you can Trust No-one (as they say in the X-Files).

If you cannot trust me to tell you the truth, if you can’t believe your teachers or your government or science or the media then what point in having any honesty at all?

Let’s see just how honest the Daily Mail are: I spoke to a woman on the newsdesk and explained what I could. I did as best I could, with what I know of the truth about this thesis, to get her interested. Before I continue with what happened you need to be able to recognise the difference between when I am recounting a fact and when I am offering an opinion. When I talk about real things - what I did, what I could see or hear or feel in response to what I did - then I am recounting facts as clearly and honestly as I can state them; with the kind of honesty that you are supposed to have when swearing on a Bible in the highest courts in the land. Now, there is only ever any point in me being that truthful if I believe absolutely that courts want the truth when they ask you to swear on the bible. If they are only interested in half the truth or are ambivalent about the accuracy of what is reported to them then I should give them what they want rather than what they tell me they want. Isn’t that reasonable logic?

Matt, when you are surveying you need to begin from a known point of reference. When you are measuring something you need to have reference to one thing that you can be absolutely sure of. You need to start from somewhere that is true, known and reliable. Even if the only thing in the world that you know with any certainty is yourself (and that is what Cogito Ergo Sum is supposed to prove) then you have something to measure by. A caveat to that is that you need to be sure that your measuring tool can tell you something about what you are measuring (and we shall have to consider this point further when we get time).

Another point that I have to bring to your attention (because I hope that I am bringing you to understand good science here) is the "scientific method". Remember that I have been explaining the rules for writing and publishing theses and why those rules are important? Well the scientific method is the hinge-point, the known point, the most reliable and certain thing upon which the whole of scientific practice relies. So we had better convince ourselves that it really is a good rock upon which to build our scientific knowledge. [I haven’t forgotten about the Daily Mail, I am just laying the groundwork so that you can be as convinced as you can be that I am sane, responsible and telling the truth]

The scientific method describes how scientists test their ideas about science. When a scientist is trying to figure something out he first takes a guess. He comes up with something called an "Hypothesis". If we look hypnothesis up in the dictionary it says:

Pretty well defined, don’t you think? If we look at where the word came from we find hypo = under or deficient and tithenai = to place or put something. So an hypothesis allows us to put forward an opinion or prediction about something, on a tentative basis for the purpose of testing and establishing a truth. To put something less than certain in a position where we can deduce its validity.

Now, creating an hypothesis does not prove anything true (beyond the fact that you can create hypotheses). Hypotheses have to be tested before they are of any practical use and that is what the scientist does next - he designs an experiment which will test the validity of his hypothesis. By test the validity I mean that a good and useful experiment must be designed such that it tries to disprove the hypothesis; to show it to be false. People assume science tries to prove things right but actually the way science works is to disbelieve as much as possible, to establish what they want to believe, and then to do their absolute damnedest to prove themselves wrong.

You may wonder why scientists take this approach when it must, surely, be easier to prove things right than to prove things wrong but the truth is that it is much easier to prove that something is false than to prove something is true. I will give you a practical demonstration from real life and let us see what happens when the Daily Mail hear about this. What I would like to test is the belief that the Daily Mail is telling the truth about themselves; that is my hypothesis.

When I described what is happening in here to the woman on the newsdesk at the Daily Mail (Associated Newspapers probably - it is not always easy to tell who you are speaking to on the phone) she listened until I said "It is a message I am writing to my teenage son who is away at boarding school". I was gob-smacked by her response to that: without hesitating for a moment she said "Sir, stop, I think you should talk to your son".

OK. Let’s see if we can make sense of what she was saying, as much as we can imagine about what drove her to say it and what advice or judgement she could possibly be trying to impart by saying that. Let’s be absolutely honest before we even begin so we have a known point to measure things against. All we know at this point is what the woman said and that I had been speaking to her. It would be most generous of us if we can do what they call a "reframe" in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP - a very modern branch of psychology - of which more later). Whatever motives she might have had for saying that she knows and we don’t and, short of asking her, we have no way of finding out. Even asking her may not be reliable in the slightest unless we can guarantee her honesty and integrity.

So let’s do this reframe thing. How we do it is to find the very best motives we can possibly imagine which still fit the facts, i.e. the words she used in the order she used them. This is called, by most people, "giving someone the benefit of the doubt". In order to get some gumption behind us we can do a little exercise (because we know we will not only enjoy the work but do the very best we can if we start from what NLPers call "a resourceful state").

The exercise is easy: just read the following…

When you see an apple in the supermarket, ripe and red and nestled in amongst the other apples then joy may fill your heart that you have found the perfect apple - an apple that was being as true to the concept, the essence of apple, as it was possible to be in the place that apple was grown. Imagine, as you picture that apple, the tree it grew on and what that tree needed to produce such an apple. Ponder on the seasons which must have passed as that tree grew from a tiny seed you could hold on the very tip of your smallest finger. Relive the air that surrounded, powered and battered that tree according to the seasons. Sense the minerals down at its roots which nourished it and became incorporated into its structure as everything, the moon and stars, its protective bark, its copious, delicious foliage helped it to grow to become the kind of creative life-form that could produce such a perfect apple. When looking at that perfect apple you must appreciate everything that it is and everything that it has been. And think about what that apple could become: a snack that just hit the right spot, salvation from hunger - to the full extent that an apple can fulfil that purpose, a delicious and succulent element in a hot, lightly browned and steaming apple pie - made with care and love for the ultimate happy meal with your very best friends. And you will have appreciated that apple.

Now imagine picking that apple up from the supermarket shelf, lifting it from its position on and between the other apples, imagine picking that apple up and then turning it around to reveal a bite-mark, brown and wrinkled around the edges with a little bloodstain where the biter's gums have bled where they were pulled back by the firm skin of the apple. And then see what reframe you can come up with in order to put the very best, most genuine and sincere BEST interpretation on that apple - to make sense of it in the most generous way you can.

Your ability to do this will tell everyone how capable you are of understanding apples. Of whether you can find optimism and hope in yourself and in those around you. Of whether you have the unique ability to appreciate even yourself and what you have achieved. Of whether you are in a position to understand others.

If the best you could come up with is a pissed-off employee playing a practical joke on the public (because he doesn't respect them), or on his employers (because he feels unappreciated or injustice by them) or if you lost sight of the good apple and could only view with horror the bite mark in that apple then you are in no position to judge or understand or do the first thing to help someone.

If you can keep hold of the feeling of knowing that apple then you are in a great position to think the best of anybody.

Let me make my best guess and see what I get (remember that this will tell you more about me than about the subject under discussion). I imagine that the woman I spoke to really, genuinely cares about good and deplores suffering. I imagine that she was horrified to think what the effect might be on a child of your age if I were to drag you into the lime-light in connection with what must have sounded to her like an extremely controversial story. She may well have had in mind the kind of pressure that the Princes, William and Harry, have been exposed to by the world’s media and I would not be at all surprised, then, at her response. Indeed, if that is the case then I could only offer her my gravest and most sincere respect for what she did - which was to close the conversation at that point and hang up on me.

I haven’t thought of a more optimistic interpretation of events than that and I offer recognition and appreciation to anyone who can do better. That interpretation (and it is only an interpretation on my part) was the best I have been able to come up with and, without the benefit of further evidence, I will proceed as if it were true.

OK, so I have drawn a blank on the newsdesk but I believe absolutely in my truth and the importance of it. Never mind whether I am right or wrong - time and the actions that people fill it with are the only things that can remove all doubt in this matter. The truth - my truth, what I sincerely believe - I back up with actions and then the validity, or otherwise, of my thoughts will be made manifest in the world. This is good science in my book.

Next stop was to ring the Associated Press switchboard and ask who might be interested in the fact that someone on the newsdesk had put the phone down on me. The very patient man who was handling my call recommended that I give the Managing Editor a call in the morning and even vouchsafed that he would be in between the hours of 10am and 6pm. I thanked him (I hope profusely) for his time and helpful attention and waited till morning.

It was near lunch time when I called the Managing Editor’s office and asked to speak to Lawrence Sear, the Managing Editor. Whoever answered the phone was polite, informed me that Mr Sear was in conversation and asked if there was a message she could pass on to him. In response I asked her to get Mr Sear to phone me and gave her the number to call. That was it until early afternoon.

Later, having heard nothing from the Mail, I phoned back and, rather than insist on speaking to Mr Sear, did my best to explain the situation to the woman who answered the phone. I have to admit that she did show remarkable patience and seemed to hear what I was saying. I decided to escalate things somewhat and believed they might take me more seriously, and recognise how seriously I was taking myself and my idea, if I were to use a trick the IRA use. You may wonder how the newspapers or police know if a terrorist threat comes from a real terrorist organisation or a hoaxer. Well, before terrorists begin their reign of terror (or with their first substantive action) they arrange with a newspaper and/or the police a password so that the paper or police can be sure of the organisation which is threatening a terrorist action or claiming responsibility for one that has occurred. So I talked passwords to her and pointed out that they may be grateful to be able to be secure in identifying any caller claiming to be Phil Jaquiery as me (since both the paper and I would know the password). That could save them an extraordinary amount of trouble should someone try to impersonate me for disingenuous purposes. So I gave her the pass phrase I would use and she promised to pass my comments on to Mr Sear.

45 minutes later (OK, so I seem to be a tad restless about the lack of response I had encountered so far) I again called Mr Sear’s office. Same woman. I said "It’s phaedrus the wolf, does that mean anything to you?" and she said "Yes". Great; that bit works. Next I express my disappointment at having seemed to achieve absolutely zilch with regards capturing the attention of Mr Sear. And here is the nub of my argument which I presented, I hope, as clearly as I present it here:

Sensing further resistance on the other end of the line and in response to my frustration I pointed out to her that the Daily Mail has this to say for itself:

"Britain’s brightest newspaper, the Daily Mail - the unrivalled leader in its market - is renowned for the excellence of its journalism and the vigour of its writing. Its Sportsmail team of experienced journalists are widely hailed as the best in their profession, telling the big stories with speed, incisiveness and accuracy"

Now, ignoring for a moment that the grammar and punctuation is no better that I have achieved in this document (since it implies that only the Sportsmail team contribute anything towards the Mail’s speed, incisiveness and accuracy), you have to admit that this is not a bad list of attributes for a newspaper to have. If you want to see this information yourself then surf on over to

http://www.soccernet.com/plus/about/dmail.html

That is where I found it and that is where you can find it if the Mail still stands by these comments. If they no longer stand by these comments then Mail readers should be aware that the Daily Mail no longer considers itself the best in the profession, telling the big stories with speed, incisiveness and accuracy. Woah! What an admission that would be. I would have preferred that they made such an honest admission on the phone when I told them that my experience of them seemed to put a lie to their comments on the Internet.

I pointed out that they had certainly not given me the impression that they were at all speedy in their search for big stories - perhaps they really mean the literal truth when they use the phrase "telling the big stories with speed". Taking that sentence literally we might assume that they tell the big stories with speed but make no commitment or claim to find or investigate the big stories with speed. They could argue that they are still being honest, but you and I, Matt, might feel ever so slightly less able to believe that they are being entirely honest.

Incisiveness is a great word for a newspaper to use. It means penetration to the heart of a subject and clear, sharp, and vigorous expression. Hmmmm, did you get the impression that they were really keen to get to the heart of what I was saying? I sure didn’t. Accuracy then: well, let’s wait and see on that one - we may be able to tell something about that if they ever do report on this thesis or on my experiences with them.

My assessment based on these experiences - and I doubt that I could interest the Advertising Standards Authority in investigating this; maybe I should try - is that the Daily Mail does not live up to what it says about itself. This may not immediately concern you, Matt. It is certainly unlikely to concern anyone else; we seem to be completely anaesthetised against noticing any misgivings we might have when such a company seems to lack integrity. Especially when that company is a newspaper which we would really like to be able to rely on for true information.

How often have you heard the cry "Don’t believe everything you read in the press"? Now there we have a statement with a ring of truth about it. But should newspapers be so capricious in their honesty? Is it right that we should expect the newspapers to report falsehoods? What point newspapers if their integrity cannot be absolutely vouched for?

29^th Jan 04:50

Isn’t it funny how people don’t know their bodies anymore? They hide bits and are embarrassed about bits and when they are anxious they think they are hungry or desperate for a cigarette (sorry to those who have quit smoking).

Somebody on alt.hypnosis (probably my friend DiRGe0513 again) said "Some people are the victims of whoever last spoke to them". Ha, ha. But certainly true. We all are victims of who we last spoke to or what we last ate or the most recent thing that scared or excited or saddened or interested or worried us. We are victims of the world around us because we have no understanding of it. As we gain understanding we gain control over it. Just gain control.

What we do with the control we have shows us to be evil or good, lazy or conscientious, dull or creative, frigid or sensual - any of the unlimited choices we have between our fears and our wishes. Soon I must introduce you to another contemporary genius, my friend Chris Lofting. He has a brain the size of a galaxy and has come up with the most beautiful model that describes the relationships between dichotomies and wholes. It is time I reviewed Chris’ work again because I know it will all fit nicely with the thesis we are developing here.

Oh, before I go… don’t worry that you might forget some of this stuff - it has all gone into your unconscious, right back where it came from. I believe you have always known the principles of this stuff because they all boil down to the same primitive truths in the way matter breaks down into atoms and neutrinos and electrons and positrons and you were born knowing these truths as you were born made of positrons and electrons and neutrinos and atoms and flesh and blood - the body you can feel - but educated and refined, nourished with both knowledge and everything you need as you grow older, protected by what good remains in the world and, by god, there must still be a lot of good about still for mankind to have survived so long.

Now we need to give power to good and we can only do that with absolute integrity and knowledge and the ability to notice what people and all beings in our world have in common. Which of these truths is the most important? Whichever truth you know in your heart is important. But you will never trust your heart while there are primal doubts and primal fear and primal guilt in control of your thoughts through the power of these emotions.

There are good tools and there is good knowledge with which we can deal with these primal emotions and there is information from our unconscious in everything that mankind has touched and changed and applied his creative spirit to.

We have a goodly number of hypotheses to prove or disprove here, Matt. We have much ground to cover before we can do so and in the process of investigating the things we need to understand we will see other hypotheses on the way. It seems like a never ending task, all this learning, and that is because it is very nearly true. The truth is that there is very little that we have to know in order to understand life but that last little bit is not easy to get.

Once these few truths are widely known then a new age will dawn - and this has been predicted by the unconscious, in our art and literature, religion and folk law.

When we understand everything that is out there we will understand everything that is in here. But what a slow and painful process that is and it leads us into complication and confusion and division and war.

If we turn it round we find that if we understand everything in here - in the unconscious mind, our own minds - then we will understand all we can see about us, all we can feel around us, all we can touch and taste and smell and we will be at peace and powerful with positive emotions and what we will be surrounded with is beauty and love and appreciation and tenderness and all things which are interchangeable with good.

The principle here, Matt, is that if we want to understand our world then we must look into our unconscious mind but we cannot do that until we understand our unconscious mind. If we need to learn about our unconscious mind then we have to look out into the world to see what our unconscious minds have created.

We will only ever be able to distinguish what has been created by our unconscious if we look at similarities in different things because our unconscious works with similarities - with wholes, completeness, togetherness, the bohdi or satori of the Eastern religions, the bliss and inclusiveness of Western ones.

When we begin to look at what people have in common we will begin to recognise that we were all born and brought up, by whatever means, and that wherever we come from, whatever languages we speak, regardless of our many different religions and cultures and educations, we all share similarities. In looking at these things we will recognise, must recognise as an inescapable fact, what it is to be human.

If nobody cares enough about my ideas to make it worth them helping me to take care of the things I have responsibility for (like you and Mummy and Ed) then they certainly won’t care that there are more to my ideas than are expressed here. Then they would miss out on learning more of my ideas or understanding all of the ideas I have already stated. It is that good/bad or care/don’t care thing again, Matt.

A good way for you (and others) to read this thesis is to have a couple of high-lighter pens and use one colour to underline all the bits you agree with and another colour to underline the bits you don’t understand. What is left when you have done that are all the bits you disagree with but we can just leave those alone for a while. As you go on reading you may find that some of the things that you didn’t understand you now understand and agree with do they can get coloured in with the colour you use to mean "I agree with this". Since you will be colouring over text which was already highlighted (with your "don’t understand" colour) the two colours will mix and you will immediately be able to see what you have learned by reading this.

You might even find that some of the things that you didn’t believe in the beginning you believe now and those things you can colour in with your "I agree with this" colour. When you have done that then nobody will know, and you will forget, what you began by disbelieving. When you have all of this thesis coloured in then you will understand and agree with all of this. It may be that there are some things I will have to change before you can colour in the whole thesis and I am prepared to do that just so long as I can see I have made a mistake rather than that you have failed to colour something in as "I don’t understand". I am grateful to anyone who points out my mistakes but merciless towards those who insist I am making mistakes when I am not. So make sure that it is me that is mistaken and not you and don’t blame me if I demand that you write a thesis to explain your point.

Being wrong isn’t a problem (no matter how badly they treat you at school when you are wrong). Being wrong doesn’t mean that you are wrong (as a person), it just means that you made a mistake (and everyone makes mistakes). Mistakes can be put right but wrongs are more difficult to deal with.

I had better take some time out to undo a wrong that may have been made about your school. I didn’t do this wrong, Matt; others wrong Mount House when they assume more than I have said. They don’t think the best and when you don’t think the best of someone you are making a mistake (or worse, you are doing them a wrong - which, as I have said, is much harder to put right). Do not become despondent about your school, Matt, because your school is the very best prep school that I know of and for all the faults I have mentioned here it is still one of the very best. If you are going to one of the best schools then just imagine how bad it is for other children at other schools.

Anyway, schools are only ever as good as we demand them to be. If we are too scared to demand that schools teach our children the truth then they will continue to teach them in the way that they already do. The truth is what you are left with when you have done as much as you can be bothered to do. I can understand why schools are the way they are (even good schools like your school) - it is because people would rather have bad schools than have the integrity to fix all the things that are preventing them from becoming excellent schools. Some people will tell you that these things are unattainable - that they can never be put right - but they have forgotten that everything can be put right if you have the integrity and gumption to do it.

There is another truth I must tell you, Matt, just because it is true and others will say that I am being dishonest if I do not admit it. The Bible says "By their fruits shall ye know them" and that, to the very best of my understanding, is a very good definition of the truth about people. Disregard everything people say to you and concentrate on what they do to you (and themselves and others and the planet). What they do is the truth about who they are - whether or not they admit it, and most people don’t.

So here is a truth that will worry you for a moment until I have told you the full truth: One of the people who has had a very difficult time believing my truth is Mummy. That can’t be because she is dumb since she is actually one IQ point more intelligent than I am. That isn’t because she doesn’t like me because all of her actions say that she does; and actions tell the truth about somebody. That isn’t because she doesn’t understand what I am saying or because she disagrees with what I am saying but because she has a huge primal doubt and primal fears and primal guilt. When you have really big primal emotions ("big" because what fixed those emotions in place was terrifying and completely incomprehensible at the time) then you cannot accept the truth no matter how much you want to because the primal emotions tell you the opposite to what you want to believe.

Now, you would have thought that with all my knowledge and ideas I could sort out Mummy’s primal emotions so she could be free to find the truth inside her (whether or not that is the same truth as my truth). But you can’t do anything about someone’s primal emotions unless that person is ready to trust you completely; trust you more than they have trusted anyone else in their lives. And primal emotions don’t stand up and say "Here I am, come get some" (Oops, that was a little Duke Nukem 3D creeping in there). They fight to stay where they are because they were so important when they were first made. They saved her life at the time, so you can imagine that if someone offered to take them away she would be really scared that she might die without them. And they insist with all of their power that she would die with out them - almost as if they had a life of their own and they are scared of dying.

Primal emotions are not only the most powerful emotions that we have they are also the models upon which all of our other emotions are based. If ever you threaten to take away someone’s primal emotions they fight for their lives with every trick they can think of. If they knew that they are really just sick emotions (mistakes that can easily be put right with enough truth and understanding) and we were just helping to make them better then they might be delighted for us to do so.

Let’s refer to the person who is helping someone get better as a "Therapist" because that is what they are. And let’s call the person with PEs the patient. The primal emotions make the patient think that the therapist is bad so that the unconscious doesn’t have to admit to the patient’s conscious mind that the PE really belongs to the incomprehensible experience in infancy or childhood which created it.

Now, it isn’t easy to help someone who believes you are trying to hurt them and it isn’t possible to convince someone with primal doubts because the primal doubts will cause them to doubt you. Can you see how clever these PEs are?

If PEs have such an important role in our psyche (our conscious and unconscious mind) then they must have, or must have had an extremely important job to do; and indeed they do.

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02 March 1998...