The very remarkable progress which Dianetics and Scientology has made is apparently pretty well unprecedented now. But we must remember that we've had an awful lot of clever people associating with one another, doing things, demonstrating that things couldn't be done.

Thank you. How are you today?

We've had some cases around who are absolutely certain that they have been of no assistance whatsoever because they've just stuck, you know, right there: "Nothing's happening." Some of them have had this as a motto. (audience laughter) And having hung this motto high, they gave others something to shoot at.

Audience: Fine.

And most of these cases at this time, I am happy to announce to this congress, have been shot down. That's very remarkable. I know of very few of these hold-out cases — matter of fact, I don't know of any of these hold-out cases — who have experienced no change or betterment from processing. I don't know of any now.

Good. Good. Group Processing getting anywhere with anyone?

We had a very famous one. I'm looking at one of his auditors right now. And this case was in black basalt. It was not a case of energy deposits; it was a case of black mass deposits. And auditors chipped away and the guy got better and he acted better, but he did not know he was any better. And he went on like this for a long time — from 1952 to early 1955. And that's a long time for auditors now and then to take a run down, and break out a hammer and a chisel, and see if they couldn't get him a little bit more pleasantly situated, at least, in this black mass.

Audience: Yes.

And the auditor is present today who gave this person several weeks of processing in Phoenix a relatively short time ago and exteriorized this case fairly stably. And even this case said, "My golly, things sure happen in Scientology."

Well, that's fine.

All right. The reason why we've made quite a bit of progress is because man has been making quite a bit of progress. He's had a little bit of leisure. He has been a little bit less hepped on the idea of food, food, food, and he has bought himself a little bit of time so that some amongst him could think or — along other lines than mere bare survival. And that's actually why we've arrived where we've arrived. But we have arrived someplace. Don't let anybody that you're trying to talk to Scientology about tell you we haven't.

A couple of small misnomers — as usual, rumor and conflict goes rife. Wherever you have a human communication line, you have a communication heh! — line. If you realize all these walls are made out of second postulates which are incorrect, and they have to perforce contain a lie, then you can see that communication very often contains an error.

Now, the hideous thing is that people at large are not aware of a very interesting thing — that anything at all can be done about anybody. They are not aware that anything can be done about anybody.

The HASI in Phoenix, Arizona continues — continues to teach the HCA, BScn Course as always, and the Hubbard Guidance Center there continues to process as always; no upset along these lines at all. The HASI goes on. As far as organizations in Scientology is concerned, these go on too. There are a great many more of them coming up than there are now. Of course the central proprietor, you might say, of the trademarks of Scientology and so forth are the HASI; so the HASI stays in a control position with regard to these things, simply to guarantee an excellence of processing — without which Scientology would not go a foot. Now, we owe that to the public. We owe that to you.

The cop who gives you a ticket takes it in his normal stride that this is just the way it is. The hospital attendants who've picked the remains out of the drunken-driving wreck, the very best thought in various professions that should have to do with this, are all agreed that there's nothing you can do about it.

Now, here is another thing. The training courses which are available, are available from people who have the right to train — who operate training establishments. And there are two or three of these in the East and training is very good. However, the HASI continues to train.

And that is the principal agreement you are running into when you try to tell somebody about Scientology. Now, that's how far south you have to go: Something can be done about it. And if you were able to tell somebody, not about Scientology, past lives or Dianetic prenatals, but just this: "Something can be done about maladjustment, poor behavior, poor control and human relations that leave something to be desired." Now, if you could just drive that message home — "something can be done about this" — you would have accomplished more in getting that person into two-way communication than almost anything else you could do.

Now, in the whole problem of training and processing, it is a very poor thing to give somebody less than everything one has to offer. In other words, the auditor who does the auditing should at that time be in possession of the very best processes he knows and the very best he can do at the time. The PABs are remarkably responsible for this sort of thing. I haven't heard too much lately — fan mail, you might say — on the PABs, but they continue to come out. I write them. I put them out. I try to keep people up-to-date with the Professional Auditor Bulletins.

And why? It's because in saying Scientology works and it does this and it does that and it came from here and there, and there's auditors and preclears and this is the way it all goes and so forth — instead of going into all this sort of thing, you should realize that when you're talking to even a professional man, who should have kept up with the times and hasn't, that you are talking to somebody who doesn't believe anything can be done about it. Quite a bit lower than that — who hasn't even thought something could be done about it. But if he did think something could be done about it, or was saying something could be done about it, he knew he was talking about fakery or quackery.

These are mailed from the HAS London, another organization. And London is very punctual with these; one of the most punctual publications we have. I believe there was only one issue which was even vaguely missing on the PABs on this coast. Only one issue. And that was in a plane that crashed. And if anybody is missing one of his PABs, just write to London and say he didn't get it; because there was a planeload of PABs that did crash and burn, I think, in Greenland. And the mail was recovered to some extent and a few fragments of these PABs were sent through. It must have been very explosive material! (audience laughter)

So automatically anybody who comes up and says you can do something about this condition is a fake, a quack, a charlatan, a bum. Why? Because it's an obvious lie that something can be done about it. So therefore anybody who can do anything about it can't do anything about it, so therefore he's a liar.

But the special memberships and professional memberships in the HASI continue to bring you publications.

And that is the principal barrier which stands before the communication lines of Scientology and prevents a better dissemination of information.

Now, here we have the fourth day of this very fine congress. You certainly are great people. And on this day I would very much like to fill in, with a few fast rushes, the material which I've been going over. My brain thought all this up, by the way. That's the best way to remember this, you know. You know, you think up something and you say, "Boy, I sure got a nice brain there that thought that up." Get a misownership on it and you've got it. One of the reasons people don't retain anything they learn in school is merely because they continue in the considerable and terrible error that the information belongs to the school. And if you continue to say, "Well, that's arithmetic there — the property of the arithmetic teacher," and if you don't feel that you made it all up yourself, you're not going to remember arithmetic. And in that is the secret of how to study. That is the secret of how to study: Own the information.

Now, that's a simple barrier, isn't it? It's an amazingly simple barrier. But it's sort of "How far south do you have to go?"

Now, every now and then we get an HCA student ... We have quite a time in the Phoenix HCA class, because the Instructors are all eager beavers and they work real hard with a student. And there's a week of indoctrination now before they even go into the HCA Course — just bring them up-to-date so they won't mess up auditing and so forth, and so the school runs along very calmly. And one of the students was trying to memorize the Axioms out of the Creation of Human Ability which you have here at this congress, and he was trying to memorize these Axioms — they were not in the book at that time, they were simply on a mimeographed sheet — and would come around to me every day or two and tell me how wonderful it was for me to have thought up and put together all these Axioms. "But the only trouble," this student would keep saying, "is that I can't seem to remember them. I read them and they're gone. And it's just such a wonderful job that you did."

In other words, you have a cop down here and he's on the juvenile delinquent unit, and he goes around and he arrests them and he throws them in jail and they get out of jail and he throws them in jail and he gets them out of jail and . . . And he says, "After a while they'll go to the big house and then they'll, you know, serve two years and they'll come out and we'll put them back in and then they'll come out and we'll put them back in and they'll come out. And that's the way this all is and there's nothing can be done about it anyway." And he says, "What's the use of arresting these car thieves? What's the use of arresting them? You just send them to jail and they spend a year or so in jail and they get out and twenty-four hours after they get out, why, they steal another car. There's nothing you can do about these people. They're crazy. And there's nothing you can do about the mind, and so it's all hopeless. So why should I be nice to anybody? Why should I be decent to anybody? It's just all a sorry mess and there's no piece of string you could pull out of it and start it getting unraveled, noplace." That's his state of mind. Only he doesn't even know he's in this state of mind, usually.

Instructor got hold of her and said, "Now — now, will you please get the idea that you wrote these Axioms." She never had any trouble thereafter. She remembered them all verbatim. Of course I got less admiration, but we got a better student!

Now, let's see how this barrier all by itself would influence a large society such as this. Here we have this remarkable thing: a computation that the only way to bring about law and order, or to bring about control or direction or even betterment, is by applying more restraint, more law, more handcuffs. And that is the computation.

Well, now that is the secret of how to study and that's a little datum that you might find useful — you might find very useful.

Now, it's not a willful computation particularly. It's just the way it's all done. The more force we apply to the criminal, to the juvenile delinquent, to the stupid — the more force we apply to the student who will not study — the more stupidity, the less study, the more juvenile delinquency, the more crime. In other words, we're just adding to it — add, add, add, add.

The ability to possess information or objects depends upon the ability to misown it. In the view of the fact that your parents and teachers worked so hard and so arduously for so long to get you to be a truthful character, I can't then conceive of how, if you were made to be such a truthful character and how everything had to agree with absolute fact, you're here remembering or owning anything. How do you fit these together? If you know you have to tell the truth all the time and must never under any circumstances lie about anything or misrepresent a single fact anywhere, it is a certainty — a certainty — that your havingness will get shot. Why? Because if you continue to pick up the absolute correct ownership of every subject you study, and if you never tell yourself the little fib that "well, I did it," or "somebody else did it," you'll get no persistence of the data. Do you follow me?

Now, someplace along the line, some group has to take the responsibility over of turning the tide of this course of thought. And in view of the fact that we are dealing with thought and not with masses, we can do it. In view of the fact that we are dealing with the spiritual side of life and not its swords, it can be done. If we tried to do it with the sword, we would still be doing the same thing that the society is doing: control with handcuffs, jail cells, operations, electric shocks, duress, punishment, bad 8-C, threat, fear. All of these things give us simply more deterioration. But we don't have to go along that line.

You'll never own a car if you were totally truthful about it. There's the car: it was created by Detroit. You go on saying, "Well, I've got a slip of paper here; that's a lie, however. Detroit owns my car." It'll be an awfully thin car you'll be driving down the road. It won't be very real. You have to have the faculty of saying to yourself, "Well, I've certainly got a nice car here."

We have found a singular fact. And this fact you needn't particularly communicate to other people because they're not likely to take it. They're not likely to assume this fact. And that is that a small increase in freedom brings an increase in civilized attitude.

Now, if you wanted to assert a better ownership or control of the body, you would do exactly what people do all the time when they are difficult to exteriorize, which is to say, "Me. My body. My body." And if you had difficulty in getting out of your familial arena, you would have made this mistake (you know, you couldn't exteriorize very easily from your family, or you couldn't exteriorize your wife or your husband from the family; that's one of the more difficult problems, trying to exteriorize the marital partner from the family, comes up every now and then) — we would have this kind of a lie going forward: "My family. My father. My mother. I am their child." And you'd be interiorized into the family; you'd be a very close member of the family.

Here's a great oddity, because the society at large doesn't believe this. If you increased somebody's freedom you would increase the amount of trouble in the society; that's the way they would think about it. And that happens to be a lie.

Now if we go on the basis that all proximity and contact with anything alive or any group is bad, this will make you very unhappy. Little child's going around all the time saying "my mother." Well, let's look over what happens here. My mother? No. Body's mother, if you please, see? "Body's mother" is the correct statement. And that'll as-is all these terminal closures. Well, body's mother — "How are you, body's mother?" And you'd never get stuck in Mama's universe. Just never would, you see? You'd never get stuck and start thinking Mama's thoughts and having Mama's lumbosis. See? But if you go around saying all the time — the incorrect ownership, the misownership of Mother — "my mother" . . . This thetan, understand, who came here from — well, he just narrowly missed a very long rap in the penal colonies of Orion or something (that's para-Scientology) — he got here, you see, and he took over this body and he's never had much relationship with Earth or this family or the genetic line or anything, and then starts to say "my mother" and starts to call himself an Earthman, and then wonders why he gets so heavy. You see, he's stated a misownership which gives him mass.

By decreasing freedom you increase trouble. By increasing freedom you decrease trouble. That's the truth.

Now, let me go into this a little more carefully with you because it's absolute black magic when you start looking this over. It's very simple — extremely simple.

Now, somebody comes up to me once in a while and he says, "Now, under processing, under processing isn't it really true — now, confidentially, Ron — isn't it really true that you uninhibit somebody?"

In order to have any space or mass or the persistence of any object or even idea, the element of misownership has been injected by this race, this planet, in this universe at this time. That doesn't mean that you couldn't make a postulate if you were good and Clear. You could simply make a postulate and say, "There is a mass. It will persist. It is persisting," and that would be that. And it would stay there on and on because you said it would, until the moment when you remembered that you said it, at which moment it would go whssh! and that would be the end of that mass. To keep yourself from thus accidentally as-ising your wife, you then say "my wife." And they were so anxious about this from cave times forward up till the beginning of this century that wives were chattels — they were owned. I think you could even mortgage them and borrow money on them from the finance companies. So they were property.

I don't know what field he's talking in. See, "uninhibit somebody." He's assuming that everybody's inhibited. This isn't particularly true either. He's assuming a whole bunch of irrational things — that there are big, black beasts that crouch just below the surface and thin veneer of the society, and these beasts at any moment are liable to bounce free. His level of belief in his fellow man could not be written and sent through the mails! But he believes that the second we would take off any restraint, we would find ourselves confronting a bunch of rather poorly behaved gorillas at the very, very best. If you make somebody freer, they immediately jump for the trees and begin to swing by their tails.

Now, we wonder why the knights of old and so forth got so stuck on horses, you know, and got so hepped about it; or why all the girls down here at Warrenton, Virginia are so stuck on horses. You ever run into any of these "horsy" girls down from Warrenton? They're quite interesting people. They keep talking about "my horse" implying they created the horse. My, that's a nice solid horse, you know? "My horse, my stables, my farm." And then you say to them some fine day, "Let's take a ride in a car" or "Let's take a run up to New York" — they're not going to exteriorize from that situation. They're not even going to be able to pull the body out of it. Because it's all misowned, and therefore they've closed terminals with it and it is terrifically solid.

It is a completely unjustified conclusion, because we discover that when a calm, permissive attitude is taken around a child who has been in bad condition — who has been upset, nervous and so forth ... Calm — that doesn't mean no control. You people who have inherited from psychology the idea that the modern way to do with a child is just to leave them alone and let them run — no, that's not the way you raise children. You have to put a little bit of control on them, otherwise they get sick. You have to control them with certainty and good 8-C or they get sick. Remember that.

Now, gravity itself depends on ownership. So if you kept talking about "my planet Earth" or if you concocted or went along with this fantastic lie: "Man was born by Earth out of a sea of ammonia, and it was all an accident but Earth gave birth to us all" — boy, you'd get heavy. That's why the modern scientist has flat feet. He keeps subscribing to this theory that Earth produced him.

And we take this child who has been nervous and upset, and we give this child a little bit greater freedom, a little more participation in the game. We consult with the child as to whether or not it's all right to go to the show. And sure enough, the child's liable to get kind of discombobulated for a few days, wonder what on earth is going to happen. Something's wrong, see? And they'll rattle around and then all of a sudden they'll say, "You know, there's — there's a little reality about this. They really do want my opinion as to whether or not to go to a show." And all of a sudden the kid settles down and becomes a civilized person.

Now, how far can we go on a via? Now, the test is, by saying "Earth made me" and just by believing that consistently and continually, would a person get any lighter and finally levitate? No. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! He would get into such a pass eventually that he would not be able to carry even the smallest suitcase. It would just be too heavy. Work would be unsupportably terrible. "What? Having to pick up that sofa pillow? Having to pick up these feet?" See? "I am an Earthman, I am a body." You get the idea? "Earth made me. It is my planet. My farm. My land. My mother. My horse." All implying that you made Earth, planet, Mother, horse, you know? Or that Mother made you — a thetan. And boy, you'd certainly get dead in the head after a while, believe me. And then you'd kind of start skidding. And you'd finally wind up where the Greeks kept their thetans. You know where the Greek interiorized into? He interiorized into the stomach. It's fantastic, but he did. You find it in all of his scientific writings. Thinkingness is done by the stomach, and so forth. You look back in very ancient literature. They believed that the soul was in the stomach. All right.

The way you make an uncivilized person is to deny him civilized conduct. If you assume his civilization and give him the freedom necessary to participate in the game called life, you guarantee his good behavior.

We look this over and we find out, then, that these principles of ownership and misownership permit us to acquire, to have or not to have, practically at will. And if you had this factor under good control you could exteriorize out of any situation or off of any planet or out of any trap — if you had this right down (snap), you see. Now, very often a person has to come up to a point of where he can face this idea of ownership. That is merely a matter of how well his postulates stick. That chart I gave you the other day is a gradient scale of how easily an individual can make his postulates stick. And when he can't make his postulates stick very well, and is below the level of ownership — you see, he would be well down — then he thinks "I own this and I own that" and he does such a faint job of it that he doesn't as-is everything.

How do you suppose we're ever going to get rid of a criminal population if at all times the criminal on being released from prison is then shunned by the society and never hired for anything? Where can he turn but more criminality?

But as soon as he comes up scale and gets into pretty good shape, you'd say, "All right, now get the idea that you own your mother."

Similarly, the backward child has to study longer, has to sit there longer, has to work harder, has to grind harder, in order to get anyplace: less freedom, less freedom, less freedom. They actually get more and more and more stupid. They're dumb, so the thing to do with them is really pour the education to them. Give them examinations; tell them that if they don't get A in arithmetic, Pop and Mom are going to feed them to the garbage man. In other words, threat and duress. Funny part of it is that every child that's being educated already knows arithmetic. The chief invalidation is teaching him again. He already knows how to read, so we teach him how to read.

(pause) "That's funny, I feel different."

Nobody ever assumes this child can know or do anything, and this attitude continues on throughout his life. Very few people assume anything good about him at all. Nobody assumes that he can do anything. And as long as this is the attitude of the society, look at the enormous danger poised before that individual's eye at all moments. Look at that danger. The danger is "If I really fit myself into this society — a society of people who believe that I am stupid and incompetent, that I have to be taught everything eight times — if I really fit myself in and cooperate with my fellows and do unto others the way I'd like to have them do unto me, with the prevailing attitude, I would be the deadest duck I'd ever met. So I don't dare let myself get into a position where I am in cooperation with my fellows. I have to hold back and stand aloof because it's too dangerous to let these other people run my machinery."

See, you'd get an instantaneous separation of universes — if the fellow was in real good condition, you see? Instantaneous.

Now, what do you suppose somebody is doing when he talks to you, but running some of your machinery? And what do you suppose you're doing when you talk to somebody else, but running some of his machinery? And if you thought he was going to run your machinery very, very poorly indeed, you'd sort of pull back the machinery and let him wiggle this corner of that antenna and just about no more.

He'd find himself working for the bureau of external securities, or working for the committee that is going to probe the security of all the security agencies or something like that, and he'd keep talking about "my committee, my job," and his wife would less and less find herself capable of getting him out to a movie or getting him out to a bridge game or a picnic or getting him to take a little run up to New York and see a play or something like this. His wife would just find it harder and harder to do this. Well, what's happening is the individual, every time he says a misownership which is "my job, my office," you see, and "I have to do this and that" and so on, he's just pinning himself down tighter and tighter and tighter — he's getting a terminal closure because he's getting more and more solidity, more and more mass and more and more electromagnetic attraction. And as he gets more and more electromagnetic attraction, he is less and less able to pull himself off of those bulkheads.

And this is about the existing state of social intercourse. People are willing to let other people run about one one-billionth part of the machinery, because it's too dangerous, because the belief, one person to another, is too poor. And people at all times are being convinced of this with jails, handcuffs, little blue toys standing on corners whirling nightsticks. Everybody's being policed beautifully. The banks police you. The job is always there. They say, "All right. Well, I don't know how long we can let you stay on. You're not really earning your salary, but we tolerate you somehow" — you know, this sort of an attitude, every hand. Quasi-participation — call it that.

Now, every once in a while you say to somebody, "Be three feet back of your head" — he is. You say, "All right, copy, copy, copy," and the rest of Route 1 and he's not going along too well. And he goes over and he happens to touch the back of his chair with a (quote) "hand" (unquote) or something like that, and then he goes "Nynng-nynng-nynng-nynng-nynng-nynng. Huh! That's horrible stuff, that MEST. That's terrible! Terrible! You get stuck on it." What's he done? What's the answer to this? The answer to this situation is simply that he has so much misownership on that wall that he sticks to it. It has enormous gravitic attraction for him, a thetan.

If you had every player on a football field afraid to touch the ball, and every player bound and determined that the others were not going to touch the ball either, you'd sure have some football game, wouldn't you? You'd have twenty-two men out there and the ball sitting in the middle of the field, and these guys would be arguing with each other: "Well, you're really not trustworthy to touch that ball. I don't know whether I want you on my team or not, because of so on and so on." Be a great game, wouldn't it?

And after a person has been on this planet and told this lie long enough and often enough and believes it thoroughly enough, he, as a thetan, accumulates mass to such a degree that gravity has an attraction for him and this condition could exist: You say to somebody, "Be three feet back of your head," and let's say he got out, as occasionally he does — "Be three feet back of your head," he goes out and he goes right down to Earth, bang! See, gravity is working on him. And you would say that a solid body is simply something which has been so thoroughly misowned and which is so thoroughly misowning, that it is sufficiently in gravitic attraction with Earth that it sticks here regardless of the centrifugal force. That's gravity. That's also weight. That's also thinness.

Did it ever strike you that life at large could be as much fun, on its broadest scale, in the fullest definition of a nice football game? There could be as much enthusiasm to even the small, mundane, ordinary things as there might possibly be to playing a very exhilarating game? It's almost far-fetched, isn't it, to think that talking to one's fellow man and engaging in cashing a check and doing this and doing that could be a continuous, exhilarating experience, even though it wasn't big and huge and dramatic.

Now let's take this terrifically thin person. They see a wall and they go zong! You ask them to eat something and they say, "All right, I'll eat a hearty dinner. Have you got any toast?" No, they won't eat, they won't acquire mass and so forth. Now this person is probably doing something obsessively quite in reverse — but obsessive, you understand. This person is obsessed with the idea that they cannot have and cannot own and all this is — all the total obsession is — is they cannot tell a lie.

Well, the television sets today convince us that we at least have to be named Webb in order to have any excitement in the society. The only way we can get some excitement is to have somebody bad enough to murder people. The comic books, those serious dime novels they call "the comics" on Sunday — these things are all selling the level of message which the society believes is a game. They believe that there's terrific action and bullets and . . . As a kid, anyone of our generation undoubtedly had the feeling like, well, life wasn't really worth living unless you at least had a war or something going on. You know? We had to have big violence, big game, big stakes. Oh, I've been through a few wars in my day, and I've never been so bored in my life. Why? Because nobody in them knew how to play a game.

And a person who is absolutely obsessed with telling the truth — where we define truth, you see, as agreement with this universe — you see, there are two kinds of truth. Truth is one, what's true, and two, is what is in agreement with what has been and is being at the moment, which same contains a lot of lies.

It isn't the amount of motion or action, it isn't the stake, it isn't the grandeur of the trappings that make a game. It's the willingness of those about us to play a game which makes a game. And when we lose sight of that, we lose the game and life becomes a serious, onerous, arduous, dog-eat-dog endeavor.

See, there's two kinds of truth. This fellow, he says, "Well now," he says, "I am basically a static. I can do this and that." All right, that's a truth. There's another kind of truth. He was down at Joe's Bar last night until 10:03 drinking Scotch. And he says to somebody — asks him the next morning, "Now, where have you been?" — and he said, "I was down at Joe's Bar last night until 10:03, drinking Scotch." See, now that is agreed-upon truth. Other people saw him there and so on. He can prove it, in other words. Actually, it doesn't matter a darn. Somebody says, "Where were you last night?"

And the degree that people are unwilling to play the game in this society is measured by the number of handcuffs, the number of jails, the number of hospitals and institutions and the number of laws.

"Oh, I went to the opera."

Now, it takes a few laws to make a game. You'll always have to have some barriers and restrictions to make a game. But when you get too many, you get no game, except this game: the game of making more laws that will make more laws necessary. And that's a game for attorneys, but not for citizens.

Person says, "But there's no opera playing in Washington at this time." "Huh! There isn't? Well I just created some."

Now, wherever we look, then, and find people miserable or unhappy or believing that they could not possibly survive or have a good time, all we're looking at is a community which is composed, in the majority, of people who cannot play a game and will not let other people play one.

Now, this is not really a departure from truth; it is a walk into imagery — creative living. He just creates a time track. But a person who has been utterly and absolutely convinced that he must not at any time create any time track even vaguely independent of what everybody else has experienced, is pinned into an obsessive truth. They really don't know they're doing this, and they'll get pretty darn thin. They will lose things. Things will disappear on them. They have a tendency to fade away. Why? Because they've got to state the exact and correct ownership of everything all the time and they're doing this all the time. So they're not owning anything. And boy, if you could just be this person as a thetan for a little while, you'd look out at the wall and boy, that wall would be thin. You run this person on 8-C and this person is very doubtful of how deep the fingers will sink into that wall. You know, everything is light, filmy, no substance or substantialness to existence, and these people are thin.

Now, that's — that's an interesting thing. If we want to classify and qualify the last stages of psychosis, it would be "no game anywhere with nobody and that's that, period." That's also a cactus, like they grow in Arizona Arizona grows good cacti.

The other person is misowning on a grand scale, see? This gives him weight, gravity and so on. The other person is owning, as obsessively, on the exact correct scale, and he hasn't any weight. Fantastic, but you'll see this happen.

Now, the last stages of exit is simply "no game." And when we get duress and punishment all out of proportion to the communication necessary to continue a game, we get no game.

Now, if you want your car . . . And you see, if you know the secret behind all this, it's very simple for you to own and misown at will. Now any time that you had a car and you liked the car and then you sold the car and felt bad and experienced loss, you see — well, you, of course, must have ceased to misown the car — I mean, you didn't go about it properly. You said, "There goes my car." Well, the moment you sold it, you should have simply given yourself the new postulate, and you simply said something like "Made by Detroit, his car. Goodbye." You'd feel no grief. You know, "It's gone. So what?"

Well now, some people may believe that there is a game in going around and shooting, arresting, fighting, drawing people up in battalions and firing by volley, or playing catch with atom bombs between one agency in Washington and another agency in Russia, but there aren't very many participants to this game, are there? There's no slightest chance for the average citizen to participate in a game called atomic warfare — no slightest chance. They haven't even got a good civil defense outfit that you could join, you know? You couldn't even wear a tin hat — whatever good a tin hat would be.

All right. Now we take a departed ally. People going around and saying, "My grandfather is dead. (sniff)" Or black screens, and so forth, see? What's the thing? You could have said "my grandfather" — that would have made him very solid — right up to the moment he died. And you would have said, "Genetic line body's grandfather no longer exists. Cause of death, his. Picture of death, mine." No reaction. That's cancellation of reaction. Merely state the truth of the situation. In other words, when you stop playing a game, straighten out its ownership before you leave the field; because if you don't, you won't leave the field. So how do you get off a playing field? Just get the correct ownerships of everything. You loused all these things up so you could have a game. Now let's admit that we did this and then admit the correct ownership of all the pieces and spaces in which the game was being played and you can leave the playing field.

But here we have the common denominator of what we could call civilization. Civilization would be, of course, a gradient term. But we could say a good civilization would be that civilization in which the individuals of which it was composed could play a game and knew they could play a game and were playing a game called culture. And if that attitude could exist, you would immediately, of course, have human rights, respect for one's fellows — all these things would fall into line. These are symptoms of how well the game is going.

Here's your football player who was the star of the college team and so forth, and now he's selling bonds. And they say, "Well, that's Mr. Grange or somebody, and he was all-American for such and such a time." We look at this fellow and we say, "Why in the name of common sense can't this individual stop playing football? He's now forty-two years of age. He was once an intelligent man. Why is he still playing football?" Well, you don't recognize entirely the complete mechanism behind it. He's not only playing football; he never left the game with Army. He's still there. And he gets to be forty-six and all of a sudden develops what they call athlete's heart. Why should he develop athlete's heart? His heart is still playing football.

And when human rights are being thrown aside, ignored, well, there's no game in progress, that's all — in spite of the childhood bible, the comic strip. It believes that only when you're permitted to murder, kill, rob and burn can a game be in progress. That is the message carried to us by the Sunday papers. And that is the message which every child erroneously learns.

In other words, any playing field is a playing field because you're misowning the game and players and the ground on which it's being played. The musician says, "My music, my organ, my piano." Says this very consistently, and so keeps in mass form, music, the instrument — stays in there playing the game. And then one day for some reason or other decides to be a painter. You should ask yourself, why doesn't a musician every now and then suddenly become a painter? Well, the oddity is, they do. They do. They get tired of playing music and start painting or something like this — they'll swap fields. But oh, my goodness, the person who does this is practically a Clear — I mean, they're just natural, you know — and boy, are they in good shape if they can do this.

They think of the Western badmen. It's a lot of fun, by the way, fooling around the West — it used to be a lot of fun. There was very, very little connected with hauling out one's six-gun and shooting somebody else. I mean, there were always a few bad apples around someplace or another, but they killed each other off and the rest of the guys had a good time. That was really what the West was all about.

Now, we take this person who's not in this terrific condition and they're saying "my musical instrument, my music, my career" so forth, talking about this, you see, and then one day they find they're not getting much attention for this or something, and they decide to paint. Where are they? Where are they, really? Where are they stuck on the track? They're sitting at that instrument. They'll be there for years, because they never left the playing field.

Any primitive culture, any frontier, has a characteristic which is not mirrored in our Western stories, which is not mirrored in our Western movies and that great authority on everything — driven home with its gamma rays — the television set.

Now, sharpen up your ears, you people who know your Dianetics. This is the mechanism of getting stuck on the track. And although the word can stick a person on the track — a phrase and all that, a person can get stuck on the track with these — there is a more basic, a more fundamental mechanism than this. And that is, they misowned things till they had a playing field, and then when other factors entered and the game ceased to be playable, they never left the playing field. In other words, they never straightened out the misownership they started with. They had to have misownership. You know, it wasn't their field at all. They didn't have anything to do at all with making this field — nothing whatsoever. And then they say, "my playing field." See? Misownership. They have a body, a doll — a biological doll, such as you wear. And this biological doll is the piece they are using to play the game. And so they say "my body," you know, "I made it." But they make very sure that they stole one, so they didn't. And they say "my fellow players." Well now, that is actually correct. So they have to find something a little bit wrong with them so they don't quite own them. You know, they have to be a little critical, introduce some feeling of doubt about the "my-ness" of "my fellow players." And that keeps a crowd around!

Now, these great authorities all agree that a frontier was a place where everybody shot at everybody. Do you think people who would shoot at you could handle your machinery well? They wouldn't. They wouldn't.

And then they say "the enemy" — they belong to "them." But the funny part of it is, to have a really good enemy you had to have a lot to do with creating him and then you had to say "I didn't have a thing to do with it," and you'll have a nice, solid opposition. Nice enemy. See how easy it is? Then when the game's over, just straighten out the factors of ownership of that game. There's no consequence or liability to it; you exteriorize from that game.

The actuality of conduct on a frontier is quite different. And having lived, been raised, on a Western frontier in Montana before it got very civilized, I know very well what I'm talking about. And having seen one later in Alaska, I also know what I'm talking about — that isn't civilized up there yet worth a nickel — and other parts of the world which are frontiers. And everywhere I have gone where men were few, men were valuable, and they ran good 8-C on each other.

Now let's take language. Why is it if your genetic entity was once French, you do not like a nightingale speak French? In the first place, you haven't stirred it up. In the second place, the GE has never left the French playing field. And it's sort of a stuck line on the whole thing. This is a fascinating fact. The GE isn't going to up and talk French anyhow. You've got to talk the language that the GE talks.

Up in Alaska you go back of the — well, go back in the muskeg someplace, and you see a cabin sitting there. It's unlatched; there's no lock on the door. There's firewood stacked there, there's a frying pan, there's some bacon, there's some flour. All you're expected to do is at least leave as much firewood as you found. If you've got a few more supplies than you can usually use, you could leave those too and you probably would.

But why, if you as a thetan had a French body, why don't you talk French now? Why can't you talk French? Well, as a matter of fact if you did an improper jump out of the French playing field, if you didn't separate from it at all well, you'll get yourself into the beautifully stuck condition of being so confused about French, not being French, that the whole thing becomes a mystery. "I can speak French, but obviously I am not French, so why should I be able to speak French? But I can't speak French, and that makes a nice mystery." And you go around not even able to learn French.

Here is the level of hospitality and friendship which would be unknown. Wonder how long it's been since somebody in Washington left his front door unlocked so that anybody could walk in and cook himself a steak?

Because, in the first place, when you separated from the French race, youdid an immediate "they," if you were a smart thetan — "those Frenchmen." See,you got about twenty-five feet above that dead body and you said, "Look atthose Frenchmen down there." There went your French. Because you werevery, very careful to say so if you were smart. If you wanted your French back,just start realizing how French you are. One liability goes along with it,however. You're liable to get out of your head and find yourself over Nimes orReims. You'll move back over the old playing field and you will move back outof present time and will things look funny! See how you would go about that?So if you were at all able, when you exteriorized from a dead body yousaid, "Their body, those Frenchmen, their Earth," you know — bing, bing, bing — "partially mine, not mine," and you'd have it, you see, because you do havesome slight series of incidents connected with it that you did contribute to.But the ordinary job that is done on exteriorization of death is simply this one: they say, "Those Frenchmen, that body" — no more, wipeout, forgotten, gone, period. In other words, the guy does an almost violent proper ownership of the whole works and detaches from it and still leaves himself with a little fragment of the whole thing by then introducing some other factor and then by saying, "Now I will have to forget it all."

So here we're presented with a lying picture of a frontier, and our children are led to believe that the finest thing in the world that you could do is go out and kill everybody.

See, that is another factor and not a necessary one at all unless you're trying to convince somebody that you shouldn't be locked up in the Bastille. Most thetans have a fear of past crimes, so on. You know, what I told you yesterday — they're hit and then they think "I'm guilty," you know? They get hit and then they say, "Well, I must be guilty of something because I was hit." So they're killed, so they say, "Well, I must have been guilty of something, because there it is, dead." And his immediate conclusion is, "I'm wanted, by the wrong people." You get the idea? The shock of death is sufficient to convince somebody that he's done something. That's why he very quickly reverses on the responsibility scale. And that's why he has a dwindling spiral.

Well, why does the kid believe this? And we get to the root of the trouble immediately: because he can't have a game as a kid! He can't even have a game with his fellow children because they're insufficiently well respected, one person to another, by the adults. No respect given them to amount to anything. There isn't any game to play; they can't participate.

So an exteriorizing thetan ordinarily is not going through a really proper procedure at all. He's merely saying, "No responsibility." But he just happens to hit this Ownership button properly and then he adds the extraneous "Forget it" — you know, otherwise he's liable to be arrested or something of the sort — and that's that. And he's gone, he's out, he's no longer interested, and that's the end of that game as far as he's concerned. So he does this — bang-bang! Just — he knows enough to do this.

They come in and they try to — you watch a little kid about a year and a half, two years old, he's liable to come in and grab a dishcloth while you're washing dishes and try to wipe the dishes. And if you're indoctrinated thoroughly in this Western-hemisphere civilization — heh! — you'll take the dish away from him and put it back up where it won't get broken.

But there is extraordinary pressure on it that shouldn't be there. Because he's dead, he must have been guilty of something. This proves it, doesn't it? He's dead, isn't he? There was a blow or a shock or an explosion or something happened, because even a quiet (quote) "natural" (unquote) death — whatever that is — generally, on exteriorization there'll be some explosions of ridges or something like that. There'll be a disturbance, an electrical disturbance — there'll be a shock-back as far as the thetan is concerned. He goes then believing that it was he who killed the body. That's about the least thing he'll believe. And maybe in the next life he floats along with the body, you know, killing it. Why? Because he's a killer. Well, why is he a killer? Well, the last body he had died, didn't it? See the stupidity of the — there is no real logical .. .

And after you've done this from two years of age to seven years of age, you have somebody who has been thoroughly trained that he can't work. And then when he's thirteen or fourteen and fifteen, that's the time to sit around and hold your head because he's never going to be any good.

If you wanted to rehabilitate this — just that — you start exteriorizing by whatever process, Ownership or anything else, you exteriorize somebody from his body and then have him get again the correct ownerships of the forgetters. Who said, "Forget it"? This between-lives area thing is merely so a person can say, "They said forget it." And that makes the forgetter persist. See, the forgetter has been misowned and this gives a bad memory that psychology talks about and so forth, and about which we are not interested. See, the forgetter has to be misowned to be effective. But the odd part of it is, the memory doesn't. Because a thetan basically knows everything, so the only thing he can misown is his stupidity if he wants it to stick. That's why you can change people's IQs — you just get the ownership of their stupidity. Very simple.

Where'd he get no good? Two to seven. That's an interesting thing. Because he might break the dish. Well, for God's sakes let him break the dish, but don't break the kid!

Now, you see how you would use this practically? Let's get it real straight. If you want to possess and have, you'd better misown. See? And by "misown," we say just assign the wrong creator, and you'll have something and it'll persist. Assign the wrong creator. "This car was built in Florida." "It was made by me." "This beautiful John Alden yacht that I designed." You see? And then when one changes his game, to go through the very nice little ritual of assigning back the proper ownerships, and bother the forgetter. First thing you know, you'll wind up with all your experience intact, and none of the playing fields.

Now, wherever we look, we find this bad 8-C going on, which is simply a protest by the individual: "I'd better not have anybody else run my machinery because he'll wreck the whole works. And I'm convinced of this, because on every corner, where he's not needed, there's a cop. I'm convinced of this because there are terrific, terrific numbers of books written about the — what you can and can't do: people have to be restrained." And all of this stems out of the fact that we'd better not associate with our fellows or we'll get in an awful lot of trouble. That's kind of it, you know? It's kind of a lesson driven home.

There are people walking up and down the street all day long, they're stuck in playing fields all over the place. They're in a factory in their youth, they're in space opera way back when, they're in a time when they were a priest. You say to some old-time Dianeticist who's come into Scientology, "Now, we're going to ordain you as a minister."

Well, if that is an existing sort of state of affairs where people — where a half a hundred people can live in an apartment house, as they do in the East, for fifteen years and never even know their next-door neighbor's name — if this sort of thing can happen, they must have fallen apart rather badly, rather widely.

And the fellow goes, "Nnyyeeeoww! No! None of that!"

Well, if they've fallen apart it becomes an interesting problem to hook some communication lines back up. Because the only way they'll ever be happy is with some lines hooked up. You can sure count on that.

Well, rather than argue with the guy you simply say, "All right, now get the idea of being a priest. Well, what can you be that's real close to it?" "Well, I could be a demon." (audience laughter)

It's a very easy process. All you have to do is hook some communication lines up and the rest more or less starts taking place. Because it's just a failure of communication, and these people learn by communicating that their machinery and their beingness and possessions aren't necessarily going to be ruined simply because somebody else tells them something or gives them something or they go out somewhere. You see? They'll learn this on a kind of a gradient scale.

I just work him around, have him be various things of this character. The next thing you know, he'll tell you confidentially, "Well, I — I feel a considerable confidence in the idea that I could probably be a cardinal, but not a minister."

But let me assure you of this: that if everybody in such a society were to believe that nothing could be done about it at all — let's say they weren't particularly in apathy about it, but they'd simply been taught this as an educative datum, that there is no remedy for antisocial actions — if they all believed this, then you have a guarantee that the situation will deteriorate.

Have him be a few more things like that and he says, "I don't know why I've been worried about this."

So that's our primary barrier. That's the primary thing we have to overcome with Scientology: Something can be done about it. Not what can be done about it — see, that's up there too high. It is possible for something to occur that would put a person into better relations with life and his fellows. The society doesn't know that, has no inkling of it.

Well, he's been worried about it because some time or another he was either violently antireligious in some role or — he lived that life — or he was a persecuted monk or something of the sort. He's led an unsuccessful life.

You go to some fellow and you say, "Well now, things are pretty bad and so forth, I know, but have you had anything done about it?"

Now let me show you this: Every life we lead and die from, we catalog as unsuccessful. Let's just look that over. Every life we lead and die from, we catalog as unsuccessful. Truth of the matter is, you successfully got through that one. All right.

And he'll say, "Oh, I went to this one and I went to that one — there's nothing can be done about it."

Very germane to this subject of ownership and responsibility and control, because that's all the same little ladder, I'd better tell you something about another process which is quite close to this.

There's, by the way, an organization in this country which calls itself the "Better Gyp Bureau." And the Better Gyp Bureau is heavily endowed by anyone who wants to pull a fast curve on the society. This organization, with an office everyplace in the United States, writes continually this message: "Anybody who says he can cure anything is a quack. If somebody tells you that something can be done about it or a condition can be bettered, you should immediately call the Better Gyp Bureau so that we can tell you that the man is a fake."

Why won't individuals uncommunicate — break communication? Fellow's stuck to the wall, he won't let go of it. All right, ownership is your first key and clue. This brings about an obsession on his part that he must not break communication once started. And he begins to feel that he cannot possibly break a communication if he has begun it. Now, this is idiocy. Because you wrote Eisenhower a letter means now that you have to write Eisenhower letters. Well, that's the way it figures, isn't it? You started to communicate. If you're unable to stop communicating any time you started communicating, you're being penalized to some degree, aren't you?

Oh, it's fantastic! But that is the truth; I'm not exaggerating it. "Anybody in the country who says he can even start research in any direction toward doing anything about cancer should be immediately shot." And it says continually there that people coming in, saying they can do things for illnesses "which have already been found impossible to heal by competent authority ..." What competent authority is there on the face of this earth that can tell you that there will be no progress in the field of healing? I would say that anybody that said that was an incompetent authority and ought to be asylumed. And yet — yet this is the propaganda we face: "Nothing can be done about it."

Now let me tell you about a completely and utterly and fantastically unworkable process. This is the most unworkable process that anybody ever investigated. It has no benefit; it's all liability. Would simply be this question asked over and over and nicely acknowledged — it'd sound just like an auditing session. I hope no psychologist gets hold of this, because he'd have to do it just to find out if it happens. He would! Have to. So I'll give you the rest of it, how you would solve it. It's just an experiment. It's a wild thing that you could do to somebody. You say, "Now, give me some things you could go out of ARC with" or "Give me some things you wouldn't mind breaking communication with." And he gives you some and you say, "Fine. Fine. Good. Good. Give me some more things you could break communication with" or "go out of communication with."

Do you think it's right for the highways of this country to have strewn upon them more dead and wounded than occurred in the US forces in World War I, every single year? Do you think that's a good, sensible sort of a society? Or does that sort of put people on their nervous edge when they take that wheel? Anybody who can think at all, who can look around him as he drives, is liable to some of the sillier antics. I know I've seen some interesting things occur. I haven't had any accidents myself but one, and I hardly would call it an accident. A woman suddenly — her name was Wanda; she was a psychic reader. She all of a sudden — I was traveling at about twenty miles an hour and all of a sudden she came from the fourth lane over of a four-pass highway. There wasn't even any corner to turn there — car went out of control and suddenly ran into the side of my car, just like that. Didn't hurt me or the car any to amount to anything. I made sure of that — picked the car up and moved it over quickly. But I looked at this girl — she was going hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu. She had a driver's license! She couldn't talk for twenty minutes. No two-way communication possible, much less "What accident has occurred?"

And he'd say, "Fine" — then he'd tell you some things — "Fine."

I thought, "That's an interesting thing," drove on down the road myself, skipped the whole thing. Few days later I was threatened with having my driver's license revoked for not having written a certain paper in to the driving bureau. You know, you had to make a certain responsibility statement of some kind or another, and not having made out the piece of paper within the twenty-four hours or something that was allowed — not knowing it was necessary, not being guilty of the accident — I find out all of a sudden I'm going to have my license revoked. So I call up and I say, "Now, by the way, I don't want to be facetious or anything like that, but are you revoking the other driver's license?"

And you say, "All right."

"No."

See? What a nice auditing session it sounds like, you know. Right up to there. Just sounds like the real McCoy. Sounds real good, you know. And you say, "Give me some more things that you wouldn't mind going out of communication with." Well, this is so logical — so very, very logical. Because the truth of the matter is, the only reason the man is stuck on the track is because he won't go out of communication with the past. See, he just won't. He refuses to. Still got it. Wants it. So obviously we have to repair his ability to break communication. Otherwise, we won't get him cleanly breaking clear of the time track at all, will we? It's the theory behind this. Nice theory, isn't it? So we say, "Give me something else you wouldn't mind going out of communication with."

"Why not?"

And he gives us something of "I wouldn't mind going out of communication with my mother."

"She hasn't done anything."

And you say, "That's fine. Now, give me something else you wouldn't mind going out of communication with."

No, all she did was run into a car. I failed to make out a piece of paper!

(said angrily) "Well, I wouldn't mind going out of communication with my boss."

Now, that's a gorgeous state of affairs, isn't it? Yet if you walked into the state police or the licensing bureau or the drivers' license bureau of any of these local governments and you said, "Well now, I am a Doctor of Scientology and we could probably do considerable to decrease the accidents which you have in your state by giving a ten-minute examination to each person who applies for a driver's license. And now we could give them this little examination and then we'll carry it against the records for six months. And at the end of the six months we will have marked everybody who will have had an accident by that time. And then if you agree that this is what happened, then we can institute it as a regular affair, and this isn't going to cost you a thing. We'll even provide the person to stand here and give the thing while the people are taking the other examination."

And you say, "That's fine. Now, give me something else you wouldn't mind going out of communication with."

Place after place this has been offered. But it's being offered to people who know nothing else, but they do know that nothing can be done about it.

The fellow's saying, "The whole planet!" He'd simply go into a rage. And he'd go into enough, sufficient anger and rage that you would find him unauditable right at that point. He would blow — he would blow the session. I've done this several times just to test it out. (audience laughter)

Yet there's a great oddity about this little examination. It was to determine the accident-proneness of the individual. And we tested it for quite a while and made a very reliable little test out of it. And it's just two sides of one piece of paper. And it actually does — it actually does coordinate beautifully. You can tell, practically by the grade of the person, how long he's going to drive until his next accident, or whether he's going to have one or not.

Having the antidote right to hand, it was very easy to do and get the guy turned around and back in and run the rest of it. Couple of auditors have done this just to make sure that this was the mechanism, and it is the mechanism. The effort to go out of communication with, eventually gets himself so stuck that he goes into a rage. And rage is the emotion which is designed to break communication, but doesn't. It just stacks it up. You recognize the emotion there. It's just the effort to go out of communication, that's all — and to keep on informing people you're going out of communication with them. And the boy does not come up above rage with the process, because he blows the session and goes out of control. Now this doesn't much matter what person you're running it on. That's what they do. That's the end of that. So it's an utterly unworkable process. (Day or so, they'll settle down and start living again.)

And we found something very interesting when we started to coordinate this accident-prone test with tone tests and psychometrics — standard psychometric batteries. We found out that they coordinated one for one. They were right straight across the boards. In other words, we weren't testing anything peculiar when we were testing accident-proneness. We were testing just the same things that were being tested over here with personality

But here is this situation. A process which sounds like a legitimate process evidently is completely unrunnable. And obviously, if you wanted to get somebody unstuck on the time track, the most logical thing in the world that you would do would be to rehabilitate his ability to break communication. Certainly you've got to break communication with the past in order to get him totally in present time. He's got to be willing to let go of something on the time track before he'll come out of it.

In other words, this little accident test, which was designed to clean up a few highways, operated as efficiently in telling the capabilities of a person as very elaborate tests over here did. So there isn't very much trouble involved and it's quite an accurate thing to do. It isn't even hard to dream up. But it's being offered to people who know nothing can be done about it at all. Now, you'd think it'd be a very worthy endeavor.

All right, where's all this lead? It led immediately to Consequence Processing. The first edition of Consequence Processing ran this way — it's the very first one — "What would happen if you got angry?" On and on and on and on and on, and eventually cleaned that up and the fellow said, "Nothing," you know? He'd swerved. And then you can say, "What wouldn't you mind going out of communication with?" and you'll only get a little sputter and yap about it. You've already solved the consequences of anger. He's fighting anger, and as long as he cannot break communication, time, the single aberration, will continue to depress him down the Tone Scale. With each forward ticking moment, he will get stuck tighter and tighter and tighter down to anger and then blow it, and through to the lower harmonics.

We coordinated the grades of this test against the ability — because it was given to a lot of students, too — against the ability of the person to run 8-C upon his fellow students. Exact coordination.

And that is the mechanism of the dwindling spiral. There's no more complex mechanism than that about it. Do you see it now? With each ticking moment, time is breaking communication for him. And if this process "What wouldn't you mind going out of communication with?" winds him up in anger, certainly time, going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick — which is "Break communication, break communication, break communication, break communication" — certainly would wind him up in going down scale. And that's how people descend down that Tone Scale and why they wind up where they wind up. It was the most basic reason. How do you clean it up? Consequence Processing or Ownership Processing — or consequences of ownership, so forth; you could combine these.

In other words, we were selecting out of the society the people that nobody ought to let run their machinery until they had some processing and knew what to do with a machine.

But the way that you would handle this would be — most basic and fundamental way — "What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you got angry?" It is evidently apparent immediately that if we are going to get anyone totally above 1.5 on the Tone Scale, we're going to have to run "What would happen if you got angry?" sooner or later.

Now, here again we have the interlock of interpersonal relations; and this interlock is a very easy thing to look at, to plot, because it's simply how well can a person give a command and see it through to its end of cycle before giving another command? Or how well can a person receive a command and carry it through to its end of cycle before taking another command?

Now, a thetan can get up above 1.5 on the Tone Scale with the greatest of ease, but you can get a body up there, too. It's the body that gets stuck in covert ... The game called society is covert hostility — propitiation, politeness, so forth. That's stuck below 1.5. It's very dangerous when it's stuck below 1.5. There's no reason why this game could not be carried on above 1.5, but as years progress and arthritis sets in, the tickety-tick, tickety-tick, tickety-tick of time breaking communication, breaking communication, every cycle is saying, "Break communication, break communication, break communication, break communication." Of course, it's also saying, "Make communication." It's saying, "Make communication, break communication" for its whole cycle. And if an individual cannot have "Make communication, break communication, make communication, break communication," he can't ride along the time track. He'll just simply stick harder and harder and more and more into misowned incidents.

This is a great oddity, but this give-and-take is civilization. And when people can receive and give commands with ease, when they can control each other to this degree on a give-and-take basis and with certainty, we have a very positive and dynamic culture.

This is the mechanics of this universe. This is how this universe throws down scale the luckless thetan who is living in it. Because he believes, as everybody believes, that there are vast consequences to anger, and every time he starts to get angry — which is to say break through this — he's said, "No, I mustn't get angry. I'll get sick and people will get mad at me and I will starve to death and there are horrible consequences will occur if I get angry, so therefore I've got to kind of float along with this time track one way or the other." And he starts to pull loose from various points on the time track where he's misowning and gotten stuck and he feels himself starting to get mad and he says, "No, no, no. I'll just have to float along with this time track."

If everybody is simply walking around saying, "Well, they're all responsible and we're just — everybody's going to be responsible and there's no reason for me to give anybody orders and so on," we have everything falling apart. That's an oddity, isn't it? Well, we found out that a person who shouldn't be at the wheels of somebody else's body also shouldn't be at the wheels of a car.

We have to restore to the individual the freedom to be apathetic, if he's in pretty bad shape, and then the freedom to be angry — or simply the freedom to be angry.

And so it's a very interesting thing that with the greatest of ease you could pick out of the society those people who would cause the accidents. They evidently amount to about 10 percent. All you'd have to do is knock out their driver's licenses until they had enough Group Processing till they could run 8-C and tolerate a few orders.

One case, by the way, fooled me one time very recently right on this same fundamental. I started running this process, "Now, what would happen" — I knew this person was stuck all over the time track and this person was not high enough up scale to run Ownership Processing or Responsibility or anything else, so I simply started in, in just the fundamental that I already had, and this fundamental was simply this: "What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you didn't get angry? What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you didn't get angry?" by which we mean plus and minus running as is marked on these charts. "What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you didn't get angry? What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you didn't get angry?"

How can a person possibly drive according to the law if he cannot receive the content of the traffic law? What else will he do but speed if he can't even assimilate the speeding signs? You see? Now that's a command, isn't it? It says "Thirty miles per hour this zone." This person can't receive any orders. Sixty! Ninety! And believe me, if he's in that condition, he doesn't know whether he's got ahold of a steering wheel or a baby bottle. Usually the car is driving him!

I was getting no comm lag. So I says, "Aha! Process too high. Let's start down at the bottom." I started down to the bottom and chose just at random, at the bottom, "sleep" or "unconsciousness," and ran this flat. "What would happen if you got unconscious? What would happen if you didn't get unconscious? What would happen if you got unconscious? What would happen if you didn't ..." Got that cleaned up. That cleaned up fairly easily; came right on up scale through various other, you know, "What would happen if you hurt? What would happen if you didn't hurt?" which is above anger. No comm lag again, so I dived back down scale once more — said, "Couldn't be, because this person is not an apathy case." Well, as a thetan, this person wasn't an apathy case, but the person's body was stuck solid in apathy. And I said, "Well now, all right, let's just take the Tone Scale now. What would happen if you got apathetic?"

I said to one of these new cars, I said, "How are you driving your people lately?" You know, it didn't answer? You know, the thing was out of communication? It was crazy!

"Thuhhh! Thuhhh!" Terrific comm lags.

Well, all right. Here we have across the boards, then, the anatomy of a culture. And the anatomy of a culture is the willingness and ability of the people in that culture to play the game with one another, to give orders and complete cycles of action, to receive orders and complete cycles of action, to cooperate. And to form up teams and sides and argue about it. Not necessarily, you know, go out and kill everybody, according to the TV — it's not necessary to fight to have a game.

"What would happen if you didn't get apathetic?" Oh, terrific comm lags.

When you are playing an interesting game of chess with somebody, are you fighting with that person? No. When you're playing football, unless everybody on the other team is mad or everybody on your team is mad, it doesn't generate into a fight. It's a game. It's only when things get very gameless that we have to have a fight; and that convinces everybody, you know, that a game is in progress.

Person was stuck on the lower harmonic of anger — as a body. Cleaned this up, went up Tone Scale, got up — there was nothing much on grief — more or less cleaned up and got up to anger and cleaned that up rather easily and then ran "What wouldn't you mind communicating with? What wouldn't you mind breaking communications with? What wouldn't you mind communicating with? What wouldn't you mind breaking communications with?" and the person just ran like a well-oiled dream and soared right on up Tone Scale — 2.0, boredom, conservatism, enthusiasm as a stable tone.

Now let's take a look at somebody who is unable to receive an acknowledgment. Do you know there are a lot of people around who are unable to receive an acknowledgment? An auditor in Phoenix the other day did a very interesting thing. I told you all about this: Got in front of the lady and said, "Good!" You know, received an acknowledgment.

So I wonder how many cases in Dianetics and Scientology are parked below 1.5 as a physical body, or as a thetan and body, simply because they do not dare be apathetic or angry? How many? And is this the barrier which prevents a person from coming up Tone Scale rapidly? And yes, my experience in the last few months and weeks has told me that it is.

The actual thing about it is, never in her life had she ever received anybody's acknowledgment. She had said yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, and they'd said yes, but she never heard the yes. She just went on yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. And they would — people would say, "Yes, Gertrude." And it never got through. Stuck telephone line, you know? It's one way only. Such a person requires an impact before they know they've been acknowledged.

An inability to break communication will depress a person on the Tone Scale. So we have a very interestingly simple mechanism for getting a person up scale. We have to get the consequences of these emotions and the consequences of no such emotion, see? Consequences of apathy, consequences of not being apathetic. We have to get the consequences of these emotions or anything else that occurs. Right along with this are the consequences of unconsciousness and the consequences of pain. We have to clear these up to some degree.

I had a fellow one time; he was quite drunk on board ship. He came roaring aboard ship at about 2:30 in the morning. There wasn't hardly anybody around. We'd just come in; everybody was dog-tired. The boy on the gangway was standing his watch without an officer of the deck. And this guy, who had just been assigned to us in a draft, slips off the ship and comes back roaring drunk, going to bust everything up. I peeled off the bunk and went out to see what all this commotion was.

If you wanted to solve an engram all the way across the board, you would certainly have to run something on the order of "What would happen if you became unconscious? What would happen if you didn't become unconscious? What would happen if you got hurt? What would happen if you didn't get hurt?" and run these things flat. Those are pretty high-toned, by the way. But that, of course, runs out the most holding basic of an engram. We knew in Dianetics that it was pain and unconsciousness which pinned the engram where it was. So you can run that by Consequences Processing.

He'd thrown the quartermaster's notebook and a spyglass and so forth — he'd thrown these overboard. And I said something to him — just said it straightaway — told him to snap out of it. He didn't receive any acknowledgment. There was no statement made to him; he didn't receive a communication at all. He received no acknowledgment for what he'd been doing. I told him he shouldn't do that — that was an acknowledgment of what he'd been doing. There wasn't any communication there at all.

But you won't get people up Tone Scale as long as they're afraid or unable on the subject of apathy and anger. Now that doesn't mean you want everybody going around mad-dogging with anger. The funny part of it is, they only go around mad-dogging with anger when they can't be angry. They only go around being obsessively apathetic when they can't be apathetic. They only go around crying, crying, crying when they can't cry. When they can do these things, they don't have to do them just to prove it — and we get into proof.

He went on roaring around, practically walked through me and so on. So, took him by his tie and ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock!

Neat process right along there, by the way, is proof. You say, "What have you got that would prove anything to whom?" Or "Invent some proof." Fabulous process. This whole category of "invent" — invent some time, invent a game, invent proof — rather fabulous processes.

He said, "Oh, hello, Skipper."

Consequences, then, on the Tone Scale is the most vital process that you'd have to get rid of to get a case coming up scale. Because they're going to hit a barricade. And the barricades, if they're above apathy, will be anger, and if they're apathetic or around there someplace, will be apathy. And the mere thought of breaking communication will put them into the solidity of apathy or grief or anger — the three ridges. Just the thought of coming up to present time would be enough to pin them into apathy or grief or anger. "What would happen if you got apathetic? What would happen if you didn't get apathetic?" resolves this.

All right. There's a certain percentage of people like that in a society and they kind of spoil it for the rest of us. What's their idea of an acknowledgment? Let you run into them, of course. Crash, crunch — "(sigh) Somebody else is in the world, too."

So this goes along to a marked degree with Ownership Processing. Of course, Ownership Processing is sort of a sledgehammer. You simply say to the person, "Get the idea who owned it and who didn't own it" and so forth, and there's no energy left around to be stuck to. But this doesn't mean he's going to be terribly happy about it. No great liability connected with it such as other processes — Perfect Duplication and so forth — but he doesn't quite like to give up that much MEST, he thinks. He'll have rationalizations; whereas "What would happen if you got angry? What would happen if you didn't get angry?" — he comes out of that cleanly because you change his consideration. And when you change the consideration or the ideas of a man, you make him well; and when you change his MEST, you've changed his MEST.

When they've finally badgered you and hounded you and so forth .. . There's the lighter variety — they've badgered you and hounded you and talked to you and said the same thing over and over and over and over and you've kept saying, "Yes. Yes. All right. We'll do it. Okay," and so forth, they just keep right on, keep right on — you finally say, "Damn it, shut up!"

Well now, do you see these mechanisms? They are quite interesting and they bring processing out of the dark ages of "maybe" into a considerable certainty. Anybody whose case is lagging — he's getting lots and lots and lots and lots of hours, you know, and he keeps piling it up — can remember times when he kind of started to get mad or started to feel apathetic during a session, checked himself or the auditor checked him, and he went on running the process. In other words, he tried to come up scale and go past those bands, and social agreement says, "Thou shalt not rage" and so he just sticks right there. How many preclears have gotten parked below that band, there's no telling. But now that you know this, there's no reason why they should be parked there any longer.

"(sigh) Somebody spoke to me." They found it out right then.

Thank you.

Well, you know, my machinery — I don't know about yours — is delicate. And when people tell me that sort of thing and so forth, I generally short-circuit a couple of antennas and things like that.

But gee-whiz, it's hard to have a civilization where you've got these terrifically base levels of contact — where it's only an impact that can communicate, you know? Because these people go around and find impacts so they'll know they're in communication. They're not the kind of people you want running your machinery. And so we get a society falling apart.

We run into one of these people, we'll run into ninety-nine good people. We run into one of these people — we're hit hard enough, we say, "What do you know, ninety-nine other people are just like this, that makes a hundred." We say, "Well, that's life. That's society."

And here we are, a vast number of people who are good, decent people, going around, looking at life, not having too bad a time with it, successful in our own way, able to talk to our fellows very well — making, really, two errors. One: that it's — there's any liability at all in talking to anybody. There is no liability at all in talking to anybody. We make an error when we suppose there is. There isn't even any liability in talking to a cop.

Of course, I'm not going to say what you have to say to a cop to get an acknowledgment through. I ran into one cop one day; I had to ask him, "Where did you learn to drive?" This was non sequitur enough so that he kind of blinked on this. "How do you know what good driving is?" I mean, I wasn't the guy who was arrested, by the way. He was pestering somebody on the sidewalk, so I merely went over and horned in. None of my business at all.

So I asked the cop where he learned how to drive, where he thought he was going, what kind of a car he was driving, if he was married. Why was I doing this? I asked him for his license and his identification card. By the time I reached into my pocket and pulled out a notebook, he got in his car and drove off.

It was none of my business. Or maybe a society is everybody's business. If you're playing a good game at it, believe me, it is everybody's business.

Now, the other mistake that we make is that nothing can be done about it. Yeah, an awful lot of things can be done about it. We see somebody sitting there and they look thuuh, you know? We ask them, "What's the matter with you?"

You know, that person would have to be practically psycho in- order to give you any kind of a growl or be offended or anything else. They usually answer you, and they tell you and so forth.

We bump into somebody in a streetcar or on a bus, in a hall, so forth, we don't say anything to them at all. Why not? Somebody talks to us huffily, snaps and snarls a little bit. What I usually do to them is say, "Gee, what did you have for lunch?" Anything to snap them into another communication line.

But there isn't any reason for either ourselves or the society to go on making these errors. Auditing is basically communication. We have the vast, vast advantage today of knowing the formula of communication and knowing what communication can do and how to use communication.

There's one point I would like to make now, is that a lot of auditors penalize themselves on communication by being auditors. Therefore this group, or the group of Scientology, could penalize itself. Because it knows so darn much about communication, it then feels totally responsible at all times for using it in its most optimum state. And this is a rather sorry state of mind, believe me.

This fellow walks all over your toes, you know, and bumps into you and knocks the package out from underneath your arm and so forth, and you want to say to them, "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

Instead of that, because you're a good auditor, you figure the guy is pretty badly out of communication and you pat him on the shoulder or something like that. You either don't talk to him or you give him some auditing or something, you know? Liable to do the most remarkable things. Well, this is a kind of a slavery in itself, isn't it? Hm?

Well, let me tell something real funny about this. Although you know optimum communication, even if you know optimum communication — or because you do — not one person present could be sloppy enough in the use of communication to deteriorate this society in any way. Because you know what communication is, you have at once some responsibility for the way you communicate, and to communicate perfectly when you have to. But you also need not assume the total responsibility of always communicating perfectly. This would be irrational, wouldn't it? It'd be . . . (applause)

Now, I want to tell you a little process, just to wind up this lecture — little process. Very germane to this. Very remarkable. You sit down and ask a preclear who is worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry — you just ask him over and over, "Well, what can be done about it?"

And he'll give you the social response: "Nothing."

Ask him again, "What can be done about it? What can be done about it?"

Now, somebody rushes in to you — maybe you're running an office or something of the sort — and they rush in and they say to you, "And the mail all got ruddy-rodded and we didn't put any stamps on it and it went in the mailbox and — ooh!"

And you look at them and you say, "Well . . ." You know that you're perfectly at liberty to say, "Well, you damned fool! Next time I catch you doing anything like that I'm going to fry both of your ears." You're perfectly at liberty to say that.

As a matter of fact, people feel better and that's usually more acceptable when they've pulled a boo-boo than anything else. I know I practically made somebody well one time: I just started — sat down and started insulting him. Found out his level of communication acceptance; it was insults. I said, "You're one of the dirtiest louses I ever met in my life. What a dog."

And the fellow — "(sigh) At last you understand me."

Well, you could just ask this person, "Well, what can be done about it?" or "What can you do about it?"

If you wanted real smart help around you, you'd never solve their problems for them. You'd go on solving the problems on an executive level, but you'd just keep asking them, "Well, what can be done about it? What can you do about it?" Person after a while will sit down and consciously lay out a half a dozen solutions, one right after the other — bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — instead of no solution or just one solution, you know? They could lay out a half a dozen solutions. "What can be done about it?" You've rehabilitated their ability to independently arrive at a solution to a situation, no matter how bad it is.

In the first place, they believe that doing nothing is a solution. And I can tell you from our researches that the one thing that you must not do about things is nothing. No matter what you do, no matter how wrong you are, don't do nothing. That's the most fatal course. Sounds odd, but it's true. To do nothing is fatal.

You know why? It'll even turn off your memory. It pulls you right straight out of the responsibility level and drops you down into ownership and then hide. See? You say, "Well, I can't do anything about it. That's the end of that." And you know, you'll feel terrible, right away.

You run this process on a preclear — ask him things that he doesn't have to change. Now that sounds like a good process, doesn't it? Things he doesn't have to change, he doesn't have to control, he doesn't have to work with, something like this — and he'll just get sadder and sadder and sadder and sadder.

The things wrong with a person who is very hectically worrying about all the things he has to do, is because he doesn't have enough to do. That's all. It's just a scarcity of doingness. That's what's wrong with him.

Well, a scarcity of communicatingness is usually what's wrong with communication. So, when in doubt, communicate.

Now, we used to have in Dianetics a great deal of understanding, and we still do have, of what can be done with words to an unconscious person. Here's this fellow lying there, he's unconscious and we start talking. Nyyaah!

Do you know what's wrong? It's the scarcity of the words in the vast absence of words. We put a few words in this complete vacuum of words and they stick. Do you see that? They become so valuable, he cherishes them so much, that he pulls them straight in with total command value. Doesn't question them at all. And that's how an engram phrase becomes aberrative. There are too few of them, and so each one, to an unconscious person, is a pearl or a diamond, and they hold it — you know communication is real scarce right there.

What he hopes is that he'll get enough communication to run it out. And if you stood there and you said yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, on and on and on and on and on, and quoted the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and the Volstead Act, you know the person would finally wake up? "Phew!" And if you added a few more and got him out of that state there wouldn't be one phrase you uttered to him that would be aberrative! Give him enough communication and you run it out. Give him a little communication and he'll hold it pressed preciously to his bosom. Now, that's something to know. That's something to know.

So you could say to an auditor who has done a lot of auditing the following process with considerable result, and that's "What could you say to an unconscious person?" He's liable to comm lag on this quite a bit, because he doesn't feel free to talk to people under certain conditions.

Well, a person ought to feel free to talk enough to run anything out and that's how free you ought to feel. Don't inhibit your communication; enlarge it. Don't be upset because somebody's liable to say you are obsessively communicating. Tell them they're obsessively inhibiting!

Just because you know a lot of these things puts a responsibility on you, but just because you know Scientology is no reason or license to stop living. You should be able to live much more fully. But you feel very free to use or not use exactly what you know, to use it as you think it ought to be used, to create the effect you want to create or just to create a random effect. That's a wide license, isn't it? The material is yours. Go ahead and take it.

Thank you.