Not to take anything away from Ron, but a lot of what he said and wrote was obvious. This is particularly true in the Administrative technology.

For example, long before Ron made it a basic part of Admin, "statistical management" was a known brand of business management. Of course, like any human endeavor, there were many schools of thought about management and how it should be conducted. "Statistical Management" was just one of them. But you have to remember that Ron was two things above all else: and explorer and an engineer. In the wog world, management is an art, open to a lot of opinions and a lot of fads which come and go. But if you approach management as something which can be solved and whose solution would be based on a relatively few principles (which would have been Ron's assumption, since this worked on everything else he researched), then the problem of management became a lot more tractable and a lot less opinionated. For Ron, the idea of statistical management would be, more or less, the obvious choice. But it would need some tweaks to make it workable.

For example, if you accepted that every job had a statistic, then you had to ask what you would base the statistics on. That would lead to the idea that every job needed a purpose and a product. That would lead you immediately to the idea that every job would contribute in some way to a larger product and a larger product, until you came upon the final product of an entire organization. This would be a slight refinement to wog statistical management, probably one that Ron inserted, which was missing in wog statistical management, but one which, as we've seen, is obvious.

Ron's true breakthrough in this area (and one which is entirely due to Ron's research) is the idea of conditions and formulas. How do you manage stats? Well, if you had stats, you'd obviously graph them so you could see which way they went and to what degree. You'll see graphs like this in the stock market pages of newspapers and magazines. But how do you handle the management of a graph which is moving in this or that direction at a certain slant? In comes the engineer. The preliminary result was a lecture Ron gave, called "The Five Conditions". In that lecture, Ron laid out the five conditions which were observed at the time. (Later refinement yielded five more conditions, four of which don't relate directly to stat graphs, but do relate to human activities nonetheless.) These conditions are rather obvious when you observe stat graphs and are easily defined. Once having established the conditions, one had to ask how one might manage each condition to yield the next higher condition. Otherwise, simply observing there were statistical conditions wouldn't be worth much.

The conditions formulas were the next breakthrough and the true heart of stat management. How would you manage each condition? Well, it turns out that if you're an engineer, you find graphs for each condition, and then you enquire what was done to change that graph from the condition it was in to the next higher condition. Simple surveys would shake out certain commonalities. Here you stopped doing what didn't work. There you poured the coals on what had been working. Here you put effort into communicating what was needed and wanted. There you economized. Enough of this research and you have a set of steps which can be taken at each condition to transition that condition into the next. Having come up with the steps, an engineer would then test these out. If your stat graph was in a certain condition, and you applied the steps for that condition honestly, did the stat go up? Conversely, if the stat didn't rise, could you positively say that the steps weren't honestly done to their full extent?

Put this all together, and you have stat management as it is codified in the Admin Tech. One other breakthrough arose as part of this research. It was that, any activity was in a condition, regardless of whether it had a statistic or not. And there were certain conditions which wouldn't show up as themselves on a graph, because they represented states too low to show up on a graph. These were the lowest conditions, Confusion, Treason, Doubt and Liability. Once you applied the idea of conditions to human activity, these lower conditions tumble out of the mix and end up having formulas, just like the upper conditions.

I don't think Ron ever spoke about how the conditions/formulas research was done, but the above is a fair bet.

In a different area, take the five part invoice system. Breakthrough? Not particularly. It would have been just sort of obvious. There were five part invoices available at the time and machines to handle them. And if you tallied up who might need invoice copies, why and how many, five would do the trick. This system obviously wouldn't work for a grocery store, but did work well for an Org. And so this became part of our Admin Tech.

Some parts of our tech came about through observation of the whole track. The beginnings of our seven division org board were detailed in the lecture "Org Board And Livingness". In that lecture, Ron tied the various departments or divisions into a philosophical machine, another breakthrough which came from simply observing how humans progress from state to state, what those states are, and how they relate to progression of administrative divisions. The sections and divisions mentioned in the lecture come from the org board of a very long lived whole track administrative system which ultimately failed for lack of a few divisions. So this whole system was based on observation on the whole track, and some simple refinements to make it more workable. Ron says as much in the lecture.

The book Dianetics Evolution Of A Science (EOS) is a fascinating engineering study of how Ron came up with the principles of Dianetics. Dianetics was an extraordinary leap in Man's understanding of why Man behaves and thinks as he does. But it was almost entirely a feat of simple engineering. Conducted by a man who approached it as an engineering task, and took care to carefully observe the obvious without bias at every stage of the process. The idea that Man is only aberrated by those things and events he does not remember is an incredibly pivotal fact, but one only evident to someone doing the research Ron did.

Some may differ with me on the use of the term "engineering". When I was a child, I revered the terms "science" and "scientist". In my mind, nothing could be more worthwhile than the pursuit of science and scientific knowledge. As I got older, and continuing up to present time, it has become clear to me that "science" is a poisoned well. It is dominated by dogma, and those who disagree are treated as infidels and sub-humans. Science today routinely rejects observations it cannot explain, if they do not fit dogma. It reacts to the world not as one might expect of a true search for knowledge and wisdom, but as a religious subject. Much of what science claims to be true is actually just consensus opinion, and much of that turns out to be false. Science today is the barest shell of what it once was, but truthfully, it has always been afflicted by a certain amount of dogma. And today, much of the dogma is dictated by universities and large corporations.

"Engineering" on the other hand, is entirely concerned with the workability of whatever it is applied to. A poorly engineered bridge will not stand. It isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of verifiable principles. It's about numbers and scientific laws. A pragmatic "engineering" approach can be applied to anything. "Technology" as we understand it is entirely wrapped up with engineering, and has little to do with science, except for the original scientific principles on which it is based.

Take the atomic bomb, for example. The potential for an atomic bomb was known long before one was ever created. The principles existed and the scientific theory was sound. How to do it wasn't even much in question. There were several ways it could be done, and these were known to scientists. The problem was an engineering one. The components of the bomb were expensive, complicated to produce, and took a lot of time and effort to manufacture. Once manufactured, more engineering needed to take place to determine the exact mixture and placement of components to ensure the bomb exploded as expected. The work-out and assembly of all these pieces didn't occur until the U.S. government was ready to spend the money to do the actual engineering. Then it was simply a matter of manufacture, assembly and testing.

My point is that engineering and science are two entirely separate activities. The science comes first, and must be sound for the engineering to work. Science lays out the MEST universe principles necessary to go forward with the engineering. Applying those principles to the end of making a machine, object or invention is engineering.

One more point about engineering. I said before that science today ignores those phenomena it cannot explain. Engineering can't afford to do that. Building roads, bridges, buildings, electronic circuits or anything else requires one not ignore observed phenomena which might influence construction and fabrication. Otherwise, failure is certain.

Getting back to Ron, some things which Ron taught were purely new and purely the result of research he did. How do you "list and null"? Without the practice of auditing, this isn't a question which would be either asked or answered. But once auditing becomes a practice, "listing and nulling" becomes something an auditor must know how to do and do well.

Even logic and reasoning itself yielded to Ron's analysis and research. In the Data Series, Ron detailed how things became illogical (and what made things logical). This was a breakthrough of staggering proportions. The mental tools this part of the Tech yielded were of extraordinary usefulness in every human activity. But it required the questions, "How do things become illogical", and, "What makes things logical" in order to make any progress on this line. Not many would ask such questions, but the answers become obvious once you ask and then observe.

Some things arose from earlier wisdom. I've heard it said that the ARC triangle more or less appears in ancient texts. This may or may not be true. But its refinement, the relationship of each point to the other points, and the idea that, as a principle it rests below much other wisdom is Ron's contribution.

Ron said that wisdom belonged to everyone, regardless of where it came from. In Scientology, Ron did a considerable amount of work to pull together germs of ancient wisdom, current directed research, and clear simple observation to deliver a complete package which would accomplish its aims without a lot of extraneous tidbits and opinions. Anything which didn't contribute directly to the practice of auditing or administration was left out. For example, while there is some information on nutrition in the Tech, there isn't a lot. Only that which was necessary (for example, on the Purification Rundown) was left in and detailed. Ron knew a great deal more about nutrition, biological systems and medical treatment than he ever spoke or wrote about. But it wasn't needed as part of Dianetics or Scientology. So it either wasn't spoken about, or spoken about rarely.

My point here is that a great deal of what Ron wrote about involved simple obnosis. That is, many of the conclusions he drew were conclusions you, too, could reach or have reached if you simply bothered to obnose as he did. Ron made the point many times that it wasn't his intelligence or courage or anything else which allowed him to come up with Scientology where no one had before. It was simply his purpose to do so, and his willingness to honestly observe.

I'm not trying to lessen Ron's contributions at all. I've studied quite a lot of what Ron has written and said. And many aspects of Scientology are more or less mundane, if you cared to observe in the first place. And obviously much of it, while still based on obnosis, is extraorinarily wise and useful. All of it is critical in moving Man from the state he's in to the state where he once was.

But most important of all, if Ron could pull together a whole technology of the universe and spirits simply by observing the obvious, what might you be able to do, using the same tools? No need to figure out how to de-aberrate Man. Ron already did that. But what about politics? What about government? What about geology? Archaeology? Meteorology? What more could you know or discover?

And would your life be better or worse for your efforts? What about the world?