I'd like to talk to you about confront.

Thank you.

And when you speak of experience, you must perforce be speaking about the ability to confront. That's fairly obvious, isn't it? You can't inspect something unless you're willing to confront it.

The subject of tonight's lecture has unfortunately been cancelled. I forgot my notes, and you know how necessary they are.

Let's look at the mechanism now of someone who wants to inspect something or become familiar with something, who, while he inspects it, is giving himself all manner of jolts and upsets.

Factually, I want to talk to you about something very fundamental. Possibly you'll find this a much better lecture than the one that was thought up for me.

Now, supposing he rigged up something like this.

I want to talk to you about the differences between Scientology and other studies which have taken place on this planet. And I think you very well might want to hear my viewpoint of that. Not necessarily that it's your viewpoint at all, but you might find my viewpoint interesting on what I conceive to be the differences in the current study of man and those that have been attacked or attempted before. Would you like to hear about that?

He said, "Well, I'm going to look at this big electrical panel and I'm going to inspect it."

Audience: Yes.

And then he wired it up so that every time he came close to it, a 7 million volt arc arced off his nose between himself and the panels. He went over here and he built a couple of big tesla coils and he wired them all up through here, you see, and he connected the back of his head to the back of the coils, you know, so that every time he looks at the panel, he says, "bzzzzzt."

The basic — first basic difference is that Scientology started out on the assumption that nothing was known. And if you read a book, Dianetics: Evolution of a Science, it talks a great deal about "everybody knows." There were certain things that everybody knew. Everybody agreed that these things were true, and having agreed to these things, they were thereafter not inspected.

Now this appears to be a rather silly thing for anybody to do, doesn't it?

The studies of Scientology started out on the basis that there weren't any.

Audience: Yes.

Now, it's a singular triumph to discover an humbleness — a singular triumph to discover an humbleness of finding out that you're stupid. It's a tremendous blow to your pride and a tremendous gain to your intellect.

Well, why are you doing it? Those are the problems I have.

Starting out on that basis we had launched something directly and immediately opposed to every other supposition that I know anything about that had been made in former studies of life and man. These things started out on some grasped positiveness, some tremendous positiveness, and took off from there.

Now imagine somebody being told and taking on total faith the idea that every time he inspected an electrical panel he would get a murderous shock. Supposing he did that and took it totally on faith and went up to an electrical panel and didn't get a shock and then assumed there must be something wrong with him.

Now, if you don't believe this, why, it's all right; go and look.

So then he fixed it up so he'd get a shock when he looked at electrical panels because you weren't supposed to.

You take most of the fields of the spirit. They have been clouded by the fact that there were supposed to be, or supposed to have been, a great many people around who knew all about it and who knew a great deal more than you would ever know.

Well now, this is the kind of odd logic — and it is logic — you know, logic is a lot different than knowingness. Logic is a method of proving yourself conclusively wrong in spite of what you know.

Even in the field of philosophy, to say nothing of the field of religion, we had one that went like this: "There are unknowables." Transcendentalism. "There are unknowables. No matter how smart you get and no matter how much you learn, you're still going to be stupid." We didn't start from there.

And as an individual believes something should happen, can actually build up a logical concatenation, a logical series of associations, which prove conclusively and forever that it will happen.

The other hidden assumption, you see, of course, that it was possible to know. And that's a very interesting assumption because it says, "If you are ever to be the effect of anything or if anything is ever to be the effect of you, it is rather obvious that some communication will occur." You grant that? Must be a communication from you to it or it to you before you can ever be any of the — ever be an effect of it.

Now basically, I'm talking about how an individual prevents himself from confronting something. We can see this in much less esoteric terms in a little boy who is told he must never go swimming. Just never go swimming. He just mustn't go swimming.

Well, that gets us down simply to the very interesting fundamental of simply discovering those things which we are going to affect and those things which are going to affect us. It can't possibly exist that there will ever be unknowables that would ever have any effect on anything as far as you were concerned. So if there are unknowables, then they could be totally neglected until such time as we'd looked up and found a bullet going through our head or something of this sort and said, "One more knowable coming up."

"Now, Johnny, you mustn't go swimming. You mustn't go swimming, Johnny. You mustn't go swimming. Never. You'll drown. I knew a little boy one time. He was just about your size and he went swimming and he drowned."

Now, there's the fundamental difference. It's a viewpoint of "hope to know something," not the fatalism of "There are a great many things which we will never know." That's a fundamental switch. It starts from the basis of "We don't necessarily know anything but we can inspect."

Oh, listening to this for fourteen or fifteen years, as far as little Johnny ever got on inspecting swimming underneath this terrific bombardment of how bad it was to go swimming, was to ask his mother when he could go - swimming.

And oddly enough you'll find this cycle-of-action repeated, this cycle of knowledge is repeated every time a person is processed. It's quite amazing. From tremendous wisdom, enormous pomposity of knowingness, he all of a sudden finds out he doesn't know a ruddy, blasted thing. And by that we make our first progress. Beginning to know that one doesn't know is not a lesson in humbleness but one in wisdom.

And his mother said, 'Well, you can go swimming when you learn how." This we laughingly call education.

Let's see the difference now between that and some university teaching. Professor comes up to the rostrum: "Hhmm, hhmm. Now, you students must realize that there are a great many men who have lived and that anything that you find out in this field has already been found out before."

Now little Johnny gets to be the age of twenty-two, is standing innocently on the edge of a pool, falls in and knows exactly what he's now supposed to do: He's supposed to drown.

Well, that's what we call enforced humbleness.

The acceptable behavior. He would be a traitor to all logic, the human race, home, flag and Mother if he didn't drown. So he's very accommodating and he drowns.

Now, compare that with this idea: If it is true for you, it's true. And if it's not true for you, it still isn't true. Not even if Ron told you is it true. It's just not true, that's all.

Well actually, injury and difficulties in life are of this sort of thing. I know we take a fellow and we drop him a hundred feet onto pavement and he goes squash.

And any time somebody comes along and says, "Faith. You must have faith," he's not talking Scientology. He might be talking something else but he's not talking Scientology.

And you say, "Well, how in the name of common sense could Ron or anybody else add this up into an absolute piece of idiocy because there the fellow is splattered all over the pavement."

Now, let's see how a person would make his gains in this field. He would make his gains in this field by being shown a way. But how far could we show him this way? We'd have to show him the way in such a way as it didn't invalidate him nor bring him to a preconclusion.

Well, the difference is he isn't supposed to splatter all over the pavement, basically. But look what he had to accept before he could splatter all over the pavement.

Now, believe me that's delicate ground right there. And that is so difficult of solution that all of auditor training developed over a period of thirteen years, has been devoted to grooving that in so that the auditing occurred with the maximal freedom of the preclear to find the truth, the minimal walking off into confusions, the maximum gain in terms of truth, the minimum education. Now, that is a very interesting tightrope.

1. That height was dangerous.

Now, this thing "the way" or "the road to knowingness" is sown with many pitfalls and very possibly the intentions of many earlier endeavors might have been in this sphere. But in showing "the way," they also began to map the pavement and put up the milestones. And after a while, when they became modern enough they did not neglect advertising posters on both sides of the right of way saying all sorts of things, such as, "If you drop enough pennies in the poor box your soul will . . ." Well, I won't go into that. These little advertising posters. "Now, you are perfectly at liberty to recognize the truth of our teachings, but if you for one single second do not espouse the whole of them, we're going to do something awful nasty to you. But, of course, you have the perfect truth in the thing."

This kind of an approach where Ferdinand of Isabella fame could have all manner of people tortured, maimed, ruined, burned, just because they thought there was a different syllable in certain lines or should be another syllable someplace else. These are the pitfalls of showing the way. After a while, why, everybody becomes certain this is the way, and then just make sure that all the signposts tell the person what he is to conclude while traveling on that way. And when you've got that, you've got a road down and a road to slavery.

Freedom of truth is something man has not been noted for. He's not been noted for this at all. He's been noted quite the contrary for a slavery of something somebody said was true. And that is a very, very vastly different thing than freedom of truths.

And if you exaggerate all those things, you are supposed to splatter all over the pavement. Is there any reason why he shouldn't fall a hundred feet, bounce, pick himself up, dust himself off and say, "Whee." Even if it hurt a little bit when he hit, there's no reason why the hurt should continue.

I don't care what you conclude is true. I haven't the slightest wish about it one way or the other. And just within the last year we took an interesting turn technologically, a fascinating turn technologically. We started out — it was a double reverse. We started out — and in Dianetics, which has to do with mental anatomy — you will find in Dianetics that it says man is basically good. Unfortunately, it also has something to say about the fact that everything is wrong with him is what's been done to him.

Let's look at that as an actual fact.

Now, all these years went by and we began to get the idea that he must be a sort of an evil pup if he was doing what he was doing, until we found something new — but it was something which was just run into — and that was the only harm he can ever come to in the long run is that harm he has done to himself. And we can prove this, within a limited scope of the word proof.

Now, if we can take a burn — the fellow has just burned himself — and by a Touch Assist... And if you've never done a Touch Assist on yourself when you hurt yourself, go hurt yourself someplace and run a Touch Assist. Oh, you don't have to do that.

It's proved quite conclusively that these profiles which you have been shown, which you know about, improve fastest if we take the viewpoint that all that is wrong with the person is what he has done to others that he didn't like to do. And that's all that happens, apparently, to a person. I said apparently, but this is simply a truth that we ran into along the line of technology, but it is not true unless it worked for you. We're perfectly prepared for you to be entirely different and to be a victim.

Why is it that an inspection of this burn results in its disappearance? Well obviously, somebody or something must be holding the burn in place if we can make it disappear. Of course, this argument I'm using is not very logical to somebody who has never seen a burn disappear. That is one of the more spectacular little, tiny, junior pieces of magic that a Scientologist can pull off.

No, evidently — evidently the only person that ever did anything to anybody at the widest outside look was the person himself. And why did he do it? He apparently did it to restrain himself, or he apparently did it and then recognized that he had to restrain himself, and his recognition of the fact that he could apparently do evil was so overwhelming to him that he decided to withhold his actions more and more and more and more. Why?

Some momentary injury — a burn, a bruise, something like that — he does a Touch Assist on it. He says, "Look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers," and all of a sudden, the thing goes "Yipe," you know, and the fellow says, "Well, there you are. So, and how is it now?"

Well, apparently the fantastic reason behind this is that he's basically good. Well, you have to kind of reach this conclusion. Providing you look at it from all sides and become totally familiar with it and see how people respond and see how they don't respond, you find out that man is basically good.

The fellow looks at it and it's only slightly blue or something like that, so they knock off. Well, actually, they could go right on and run the blueness on down.

But I'm not even trying to sell you that conclusion. I'm just telling you that within the experience of processing and technology it's rather turned out that way. And for me, I'm quite happy about it, quite cheerful about the whole thing.

One of the wildest things I ever saw was a totally sprained ankle, one of these six to eight weeks in alternate hot pack sprained ankles disappear utterly and so on in about twenty minutes of a Touch Assist.

Now comes the fantastic thing of: if he is basically good, how can he commit so much evil? Well, apparently he never commits any evil, but he becomes someone else and his ideas of that person are that that person is capable of evil actions and that he has to restrain these actions; and he is so busy restraining these evil actions that he begins to do evil actions because he can't restrain them. And we discover that when a person is no longer himself, he is no longer responsible for his actions.

But what was the wildest thing about it all is that the coaches and the other people around who had seen the ankle swell up, when it went down again, assumed that it had never been sprained. They were incapable of inspecting this, you see. Because it doesn't happen.

Now, how does he cease to be himself, for heaven's sakes? Well, that's another study. How does he cease to be himself? Well, he pulls himself all out of shape trying to restrain himself from being himself if he thinks of himself as evil. All these are very interesting conclusions but they are not conclusions unless they work for you. I'm just giving you this idea — that's the type of thing.

You see, an ankle is supposed to, when sprained, stay sprained for a long time. It's like sometimes Scientologists aren't supposed to heal and don't do very much healing in the way of straight healing and so forth. It's idiocy. Why worry about it? Fellow wants to be sick, who are we to fix him up? Well, it's a waste of a Scientologist's time.

Now, man is apparently worried about a great many things. He's worried about good and evil. The question I've just talked to you about is a philosophic question of some length and magnitude. Is a man good or is a man evil?

Now if he goes at the case and fixes the person up so that he doesn't have to be sick, that's quite something else, but to address an illness or something of that sort's rather nonsense.

Now I say to you, "Well, man is basically good." And you look at me and you say, "Well, that's fine. I'm glad Ron thinks so." I hope you say this, and not "Aha! Ron says man is basically good. Therefore they are basically good and that's all the thinking I have to do on the subject" — you lazy bones.

So anyhow, an individual says that he shouldn't confront an injury. It must be that someplace in this injury is a decision not to confront the injury. If confronting the injury after the fact makes it well, then it follows logically, factually and knowingly, and more importantly, can be within the realm of anybody's inspection experience, that it only stays injured as long as it isn't thoroughly inspected.

No, this is a philosophic question: "Is man good or evil? What is good? What is evil? What is the nature of life? What is death?" These are all questions that come up along the line and have been coming up along ever since man, on this planet certainly, had any language with which to express himself. He has been worried about these things. He's thought about these things._

Now we're dealing with something very fundamental that people get very intimate with called pain. And if you could do something about the pain in life or their pain resulting from living and so forth, why, you would be doing something quite remarkable, I think you would admit, but actually not very important — but it's something quite remarkable.

"Is there a God? If so what's his name? What's prayer? Do I pray or not? Can I defend myself? Am I just a little chip on this vast sea of things or is there anything I can do about it? Am I a prisoner? Do I have to lay aside my own honor in order to comply with civilized existence?" You know, all these kinds of philosophic questions. And the odd part of it is, is they are not the questions of the classroom. They are not the questions of the classroom at all. The ditch digger, the little kid walking down the street — these are tremendous, unresolved problems to them which endlessly confuse their days. You'd be amazed.

Now being able to confront causes the pain to disappear. Making a person unconscious causes the pain to disappear. Well, you know that.

"Well, they say George is going to die. What is going to happen to George when he dies?" You get the idea? "They say he will some day." "They say Mama is going to die some day. Well, 'die,' what is that?" You know? "What happens to Mama when she dies?" You see? "And what would happen to me?" And see, all kinds of involvements. Worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry. And all of these worries come from uncertainty, tremendous uncertainties of one character or another, which simply is the fellow has never made up his mind as to what is truth. He has all of these problems rocketing around inside and he can't make truth out of any of them and his life becomes a chaos.

I mean, a fellow's got a broken tibia or a dislocated medical bill or something, and somebody comes along and takes a big, long horse needle and dips it in some stuff and aside from the initial pain involved in it going in, a sleepy lassitude begins to occur. And the burned finger or the broken arm or sprained ankle, and so forth, no longer hurt.

And what questions are they? Well, it's those questions basically that Scientology best tackles. And I myself have never given you a list of what those questions are, but they are questions of this nature: "Is man basically good? Is he evil? Are the intentions of the world, and so forth, toward me this way and that way? Is there such a thing as God? Did my mother and father really love me? What is love?" You know? Goes on and on and on in one long, confusing, squirrel cage. And it generally winds up as logic, thinking, philosophy, working the road through all this morass, somehow or another succeeding in spite of it all. Tremendous amounts of study. "Maybe if

And somebody says, "Well, isn't that interesting!" An opiate is very, very interesting. And it continues to be interesting right up to the time you start running it out.

I go and be a ditch digger for four years or if I sit on a pinnacle in the middle of the desert and eat dried soup or something of the son for fourteen months without ever speaking to anyone, maybe all these things will resolve," you see, and extraordinary solutions of one character or another coming along.

Now you don't only have to erase the pain, you have to erase the opiate that is on top of the pain in order to get at the pain.

Well, what does Scientology do about these things? Do you realize that Scientology is a distant cousin — it so now establishes itself as a distant cousin; it isn't a full-blooded thetan relation.

What is unconsciousness? What is an opiate?

The earliest traces of this sort of thing is probably Dharma.

An opiate is something that renders a person insufficiently conscious that he can't confront. He can confront so little and so poorly that he can't confront enough to feel any ache or pain. That's what an opiate is.

I was very amused the other day. There's some book that has come out that has decided to be a total mystery. It's a total mystery with craggy knowingnesses hidden beneath the waves. The waves are quite dark. It misdefines all of these things, this book does, for its own purposes. I picked it up. It's just out of the bookstore; it's very current. It's supposed to be something about Indian philosophy, and so forth.-

Unconsciousness is another method of not confronting. That's all. It's another method of not becoming familiar. And man has developed a whole mechanism along the lines of these opiates. A person that has to have tranquilizers all the time is a person that doesn't dare confront anything, is just turning his back on life and he feels if he can turn his back long enough and retreat far enough, he's got it made. He hopes. He hopes he's got it made. But of course, one day he keeps retreating and he runs into a wall. He can't go any further.

Well to show you how far things can go off, it doesn't even accurately define the terms of Indian philosophy, you see. So Dharma is found to be something that has to do with the inner knowingness of self-righteousness. Well the last time I saw Dharma that wasn't what he said.

Of course, the thing to do is to put in more opiates, isn't it, huh? And more opiates. And more opiates. And more. And more. And they stop working.

Factually, Dharma, basically and originally, was the name of a monk who is now known as a legendary monk who lived approximately ten thousand years ago and who was interested in telling people that there was a way out of it all.

Now he's in bad shape until some drug company invents a new opiate.

That came down along the line. The next big point we hear about it is a fellow by the name of Gautama Siddhartha, over in northern India, sat under a Bodge tree, hence Buddhism. That's right. That's correct. And this fellow found out he wasn't in his ruddy head. That's what he found out. And he made up a lot of good reasons, and he was a very, very intelligent fellow indeed. And he explained this various ways. That's come on forward more or less till now.

All unconsciousness is, is a compounded unwillingness to confront. It's just a final answer to confronting.

But look, many of the things which we know in Scientology are known in Taoism, they are known in Buddhism; but there are eight billion more things known in Taoism and Buddhism that we don't know. Different, huh?

Most people who can't see life at all are below the level of stupidity. They're into a delusory area where they think they know something. And it's very funny when you start to run out all this artificial information, one of the first things a preclear does is go unconscious. And that happens when you're busy running a Touch Assist on somebody's burned finger. The oddest thing you ever saw.

Now, there is a tremendous number of things in Scientology that _ appear in a tremendous number of places. Naturally, because very, very clever intelligent men have been thinking about life for a very, very long time, and if they didn't dig up some answers, that was pretty stupid of them. Don't you think so? It was inevitable that they dug up some answers, inevitable.

Somewhere along the line, why, the person goes wog, wog, no sensation, nothing. And he comes up on the other side and usually right on top of the wog it hurts like the mischief. Whew. Woof-woof-woof He actually, almost automatically, lays in this unconsciousness mechanism.

The only thing that's new about Scientology is it says "Why don't you dig up some?" And, of course, that's not totally new either. Zen Buddhism is supposed to dig up answers.

Every time a person goes unconscious, he puts himself just that much further back down the track. I'm not talking about sleep now. I'm just talking about the fact that he won't confront it. He just backs up further. He drops a curtain of not-knowingness between himself and life. A curtain of nonawareness between himself and life. And he feels if he can just draw a thick enough curtain between himself and life he's safe.

There's a lot of these ramifications to this sort of thing. If it's true for you, however, it's true. And if it isn't true for you, it's certainly not true. It isn't, either.

Why would anybody do this? He would do this simply if he believed life was totally painful.

And Buddhism has fallen a bit by the wayside by saying, "There is such a thing as exteriorization. A man can be three feet back of his head." Or they don't quite put it in those terms. They say, factually, that a person is himself and is not a body, only they have as a goal, ending the cycle of bodies, ending the cycle of going from life to life and having a new body in each life and going on this tremendous life cycle and just going on and on and having more bodies and more bodies. And that's what they are upset about.

How does life become totally painful? By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.

Ah, but Buddhists don't even know how to exteriorize somebody so that that other person can find out. They say, "Sit down and meditate for a while." And I've known a lot of people that sat down and meditated for an awful long time and I've asked them, I've said, "Have you flown out of your head yet?"

Well, people have been going this way for so long and have been doing this for so long that it's a way of life. The way to get there is to go wog.

So, they started taking it all on faith. They got lazy. Maybe back in the days of Gautama Siddhartha, maybe he said things like this. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't; we never know, duplication being so poor on the track. But they started taking it on faith. Oh, wow! All this does is start some more "everybody knows." Don't you see? It's just, "It's true because the Dalai

People die. What happens to them?

Lama says so." Oh, no. Oh, no. He's not living in your head. Look, you'll see he's not there.

Well, it's a cinch that if they live again, they don't ordinarily volunteer very easily to inspect the life they have just got through living. They very seldom do this. There are very few people that you meet on the street and you say, "What was your name in your last life?" that will look at you intelligently.

And therefore, you can get prone to all sorts of errors. And after you've got everybody totally believing that they can take it all on faith and be comfortable because there's enough truth in what you are saying to make them very, very comfortable about it, then is the time to start putting up billboards on the side of the "Tao" or "the Way" or something like that. Advertised facts. The slight political advantage of getting everybody to believe, also, this little tiny point is also true.

Yet we're up against something like this: We're up against what life is, not what somebody hopes it is. See, we can go on studying what we hope life is way over and down this labyrinth and in that sewer and up the other line and bury ourselves in the muck and mole holes of existence and say, "Well, we're studying what we hope life is. We're studying life as total love because if life is total love, then everybody'd love us and nobody'd hurt us and we'd be all right." Or some such computation. Look at the terrible shock this person gets. Life is total love. Well, might be. But not the way they're doing it.

Well, they never find it out because they have no tradition of finding out things for themselves or recognizing truth when they see it. And when they have no tradition left of that, they become slaves.

Somebody comes along one day and says in a very nasty, nagging, stupid sort of voice, "I hate your guts." It's an awful shock to this person. It's quite an invalidation. Means he lost.

And when all lines of reason have become a tradition of accepting the faith or accepting something somebody else said, unexpected [uninspected], as truth, you have to do what we have done here in the last couple of decades, and that is simply decide you don't know a ruddy, blasted thing and start all over again. And of course, when you do, you start out on a road of the freedom of truth.

Well, one drops a curtain across those areas of his life which he feels it would be very, very dangerous to inspect and we're up against the idea that we have to inspect that which is, not that which we hope is and therefore, when we're busy inspecting, we inevitably and invariably run into nooks, corners, crannies and emerge on highroads, and boy, do we find ourselves by our lonely selves. It's certainly empty in all directions. Why, there hasn't been anybody out on this highroad for so long that there isn't even a signboard on it. Nobody's even selling Fords.

If you have no political pitch, if you have no vested interest, if what is being codified is being codified totally and only for the sake of true or not true, you become freed of these "for everybody knows"; these "everybody knowses" drop out.

We come back off of this highroad, and we turn around to somebody, and we say, "Hey! There's a road up here."

And there is no slightest advantage in getting somebody to believe some great fundamental truth totally uninspected. The only thing you can do, basically, is say, "In this vast sea of knowledge, this ocean which is full of raindrops, each one of which very like the next, each raindrop is a datum, and there's an ocean full of these data. Actually, there's a way to sort these data out for yourself, and that way is by familiarization and inspection."

And this person's down there, you know, in this labyrinth, and they're going this way through the nettles and everything, you know, and we say, "There's a road right up here," and they keep going through the nettles.

And the only way that we have in Scientology is a sort-it-out thing called auditing which permits the individual to inspect certain basic important data which will lead him to certain conclusions, if he cares to have any conclusions, and if he makes any solid, irrevocable conclusions, will also lead them out of him._

We walk along the road for a while, you know, following their course through the nettles, and so forth, and we finally say, "Hey, you idiot, there's a road right here."

All that processing is, is an invitation to inspect. That with which you become familiar you can know. Now, that is one of the basic and early assumptions of Scientology. That with which you become familiar you can know.

Person says, "I know, but if I don't keep defending myself against these nettles I'm in, I'll get stung."

That with which you do not become familiar is pretty hard to know. I think you can agree with that; that's a very easy one.

You walk up to somebody; he's absolutely ruining his morale and his family's patience and everything else; he's trying to paint. And he can paint all right. He's painting away, you know, he's painting away, doing a pretty job — paint, paint, paint, paint, paint. He's just fine. The pictures are great. But every time he paints one, he tears it up. How is he ever going to get to be a painter? And the family keep asking him this, you know, "Why do you tear them all up? Why don't you take them down to the magazine? Why don't you take them out and show them? Why don't you hold an exhibi — ."

Familiarity. Inspection of something without fear will certainly bring you to any existing truths about that thing. Right? Inspection of something without fear.

"Oh, I know what I've got to do. You tear them up."

So all auditing does is release the person's ability to inspect, and when he can inspect without fear, he can know the truth of things. And the odd part of it is that once you know the truth of something it can't bite. Now, that's an added bonus.

Well, a Scientologist gets ahold of this fellow and he thinks the guy's perfectly entitled to be able to paint and display a painting. He thinks that's perfectly all right and he starts to process the fellow and he looks in vain up and down this current life track, you know, he looks all over: paintings, paintings, there's nothing on painting in this life track.

We first began to smell this one a long time ago. We found out that when we audited somebody on a present time problem and got him to totally inspect all the facets of this problem and got him used to the idea of having problems similar to that problem and got him so he wasn't afraid of problems anymore and he inspected the problem, the problem disappeared. But it didn't disappear in him; it disappeared in the physical universe.

Well, he starts asking embarrassing questions about 1468 and about 1597, and so forth, and he gets needle drops about this and that and he keeps asking the fellow more or less if he'd ever painted any other time and the meter he's got him on, you know, is falling off the pin and the fellow says, "No. I don't know what you're talking about."

And auditors used to tell me, "It's the most astonishing thing. There was a girl in here the other day and I processed her. And what do you know, she's always had trouble with her brother who is out in Wyoming, and a long way away. She's always had trouble with him and he won't communicate with her, wouldn't write to her, wouldn't have anything to do with her. She was very worried about him. She had trouble over an estate. I processed her on her brother and got problems like her brother, got her to invent these problems, and what do you know: the brother wrote to her and offered her an equitable settlement."

Well, he's simply saying, "That is an area which is so painful that it's absolutely impossible to confront any part of it. If I did, Lord knows what would happen because it's a self-proving proposition. It's absolutely and utterly convincing. I lived that life and it killed me. So obviously, if I inspect it again, I'll kick off."

What's going on here? Well, evidently what's going on here is we can only injure ourselves. And when we have eradicated self-injury, other things apparently recognize it.

Then you finally find the life you want. He was an art critic who committed suicide at last out of a respect for public decency. And the fellow can hardly help himself. We get him inspecting the idea of being an art critic and the next thing you know, pictures of being an art critic and this and that, and he goes anaten, and it feels terrible and he's got pains here and there and it's awful and he feels pictures splattered against his face, and wow, wow, and he comes through it. And he looks at being an art critic, and so on. It doesn't mean anything except he gets off his nastiness at inspecting other people's pictures, you see.

I'll give you an idea of this. If you had an army — supposing you had a whole army and you became totally familiar with just one army. And I do mean totally familiar; I don't mean totally respectful. And you became totally familiar with this army.

He just gets off all those ovens. Well, he's trying to keep himself from being that nasty now. And he's trying to keep anybody from ever criticizing his pictures because he knows what would happen. It would practically murder him.

A Scientologist to do this would get you familiar first with a private. And if you couldn't face a private, he'd get you familiar with one of the private's buttons. And having familiarized you with one soldier, he would get you to inspect a couple of more. And the first thing you know you would even be able to confront a second lieutenant and that takes some doing. By gradient — in other words, taking a little bit at a time of the same class of thing and inspecting this class of thing a little bit at a time — actually a person could be totally familiar with a whole army.

So you fix him up and he can paint pictures and he can display pictures and he can exhibit pictures and he feels fine about pictures and everybody's happy with him as a painter, and so forth. And the family's happy with him and he's happy with him and it all goes well, except there's this.

And do you know I'll bet you that not only would that person never again get drafted, but he probably couldn't be shot. I can see it now. He himself apparently creates the back-communication from the world. That is to say he creates the evil communication or the bad communication. He makes these things himself.

He turns around and says to somebody, "Well, I finally arrived as a painter because I ran out a life in the last part of the nineteenth century when I was an art critic on the London Times."

I've watched one dear old lady now for some little time get herself into the soup in all directions and I began to be interested. She was getting into so much soup that it was splashing on the carpets.

There's a horrible dead silence in the audience. He's hit an area of no communication. He was unwilling to confront it; we got him to confront it and inspect it; it couldn't have been confronted and inspected if it hadn't been there; there's no good saying it was a delusion when it knocks his silly head off.

So I watched just how she was getting herself into this soup. She really had to work at it. It might have been very esoteric and unobservable to her how the whole world was against her, but it sure wasn't unobservable to an outsider looking at it. She would just work like mad before she had finally created a war. And then she would say, "See what they're doing to me and here I stand innocent." No wonder her apron — just absolutely a mass of bullet holes. Not only would she start the war, she would then immediately postulate, "Look what it's doing to me." Fascinating, you know.

Then he tries to communicate the fact to get somebody else to confront it and I don't know if they think all of the times they've been art critics, but most of them sit there and look awfully strange.

Well, it might have been a funny game at one time or another on the track, we've also learned something else: that you can get along without this game — get along just fine without this game, as a matter of fact.

They're not usually as carping as people think they are. They are actually just kind of stunned and sometimes you'll see their self-defense mechanism spring into full play.

Life has certain basic fundamentals. Any truth about life, any of these fundamentals surrender anything they have in the way of answers if a person totally inspects something. Now, this is not inspection by electronic computer. This is just inspection, straight away.

You know, they actually attack wildly in any direction but their own inspection.

We had an old one, "Look, don't think. Look, don't think."

Well, this fellow who has straightened himself out as an artist, he tries to tell some people about it and he has a hard time making the grade and he feels very lonely, you see. He feels very lonely being the only man in the world that ever lived before, so he obviously has to become a Scientologist to have any friends.-

My boy and I one time were tearing around on a motorcycle and the headlamp went out on the motorcycle. So, just that day I had made a lecture on the subject of "Look, don't think." And we had this motorcycle and we brought it in alongside the steps. The headlight wouldn't work, so he and I took the cover off, took the bulb out, took the wiring apart in back of it, traced the wires all down, pulled all the wires out from underneath the tank. We had a horrible example of the truth of that day's lecture. The battery terminals had never been connected. And for another two hours we were hard at work trying to put back together again the headlamp. And he looked at me and he says, "Well," he says, "look, don't think."

No, not necessarily that, but he certainly has an excellent example there of the unwillingness to confront. Now actually, if he talked about it enough and talked about it long enough — the trouble is he doesn't talk about it enough. If he talked about it long enough, this fellow who is fighting him, the fellow that he's trying to tell it to, who fights him hardest, would be the first that would pass out.

But that was very true. If we'd just simply familiarized ourself with the motorcycle, and kept our hands off of it, it would have been immediately apparent because the cover to the battery box wasn't even fastened down and any idiot could have seen it. But we were electronics people, we were. We tore it to pieces. "Look, don't think." It's very interesting.

He ought to take that one on as the easiest victory. "Well, don't you think it's reasonable that somebody might have lived before? Where would you think any of those mental image pictures you have come from?"

No, by increasing one's familiarity with any zone of existence — not by any — through any particular system; just by increasing one's familiarity, all manner of things can occur.

The fellow says, "What pictures?"

Miracle healing occurs just exactly on that button — just increase one's observation of existence. If miracle healing is going to occur, it's going to occur on that particular basis line. It's going to recognize what's there, not what is not there.

"Oh, the pictures you see just before you go to sleep." "Oh, that one."

This is a fantastic thing, and it's in the experience of any Scientologist. Touch Assist. He burns his finger, and he goes "Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Well, I better process that."

Well, however it works out, we get an interplay of willingness to experience and unwillingness to experience. And these two things are complicated by the fact that we are sometimes unwilling to have other people experience things and sometimes force other people to experience things that we can't experience ourselves, we feel.

Now, sometimes he'll stand there and run through the engram that has been created by burning his finger, which is a familiarity with the incident. But oddly enough, he can also get there quite remarkably simply by inspecting his finger.

And whenever we do that, we've really set ourselves up in a beautiful plastic case. We make other people experience things that we ourselves know we should never make anybody experience but know basically that we ourselves couldn't experience.

The Touch Assist is easily the best for this. Just look at these fingers through this finger, see. Just keep touching this new wound here, you know, and each time getting the idea of looking at this finger through this finger, you know. Just look at the finger, look at the finger, look at the finger. You find — you don't have to say, "Look through this finger," because soon after a while you find out you are looking through that finger. And just look at this finger, look at this finger. Just get the idea of looking at his finger, looking at his finger, looking at his finger. And factually speaking, blisters and burns and all kinds of things just go right on down.

And when we do that, why, then we have a zone or area in our own track that we know we shouldn't experience but which we're actually responsible for because we made somebody else experience it, don't you see?

That's how all first sergeants go to hell. That's used in a technical sense.

Now, the danger is simply this: If he kept it up another fourteen or twenty hours, would the finger disappear?

Now there's another operation which has been going on which brings up this whole subject of inventing zones and areas which are inexperienceable. Inventing an area or zone of knowledge which can't under any circumstances ever be experienced because it's a total non-agreed-upon whole cloth fabrication. Man, that's pretty wild, one of these things.

It's quite interesting. Somebody the other day was saying, "You know, I used to have three warts on my fingers and then I took to sitting here just looking at a finger through . . . And I haven't got any warts anymore."

Somebody invents this whole thing and he says, "It's so big and so forth, and if you ever get in there you'll go mmmm and grrrr and they're terrible and you grraa and oh, don't ever get near — oh woof umph." And there it is. Stay away from that.

Well, a cure for warts. What do you know? But it's not just a cure for warts. The real warts in life have to do with tremendous facts that everybody knows and that they must adhere to utterly and must never get rid of and must be so respectful of that they never dare inspect any part of them that might unsettle them at all.

The only trouble is somebody tries to look at it, decides it doesn't exist and gets skeptical. So this other fellow has to make it worse. And he says, "Well, there's a whole second level that's much more — much worse than the first level. The first level's nothing. Anybody can get . . . The second level..."

People go through life and their confusion is a sea of uninspected data, uninspected facts.

I hate to remark upon it, but I think by the time of Dante they had seven hells. Well, it's pretty good. There's all kinds of these things.

The only thing that you can do for anybody in the final analysis is get him to inspect his own life and his own environment. And if he inspects his own life and his own environment in any kind of an orderly way and — you know, not running away every time — he looks over here and then runs away and then looks over here, and two years later gets courage enough to look over here again. No, you can help him out by every time he runs away you say, "Look." And the guy says, "Well, I don't know, I — it's pretty dangerous, pretty dangerous."

Inventions that are inexperienceable and basically, they're inexperienceable because they don't exist. And that's one of the primary causes of inexperience. And if you've too often worked with a nonextant, inexperienceable zone, you might get the idea that no zones are experienceable. And a lot of people do get this idea. They say, "Well, there are no zones experienceable. There just aren't any. You can't experience this universe."

There's tremendous, almost unlimited methods of self-deception, almost unlimited methods of delusion. Man is probably richest in the numbers of ways he can make suckers out of his fellow man with lies.

I know one whole group that formed toward the end of the nineteenth century which believes utterly and completely and positively that the physical universe is utterly inexperienceable. You hit them over the head with a club, they say, "Well, can't be." Big bumps rising, you know. Blood spattering all over the place.

Hard words, but when a man here doesn't know what's the truth, then what he says to the man over here certainly doesn't relate as any truth.

And they say, "Well, that club is insubstantial matter and doesn't exist." Well, that looks to me that that's carrying it just a little bit too far.

In the final analysis all you can get anybody to do is inspect himself, his environment, life, and find out what's true for him. And those things that are true for him, they'll be pretty true. And you'll find out that if he does it all the way, then we all agree on what's true.

Now it may be true that all things are inexperienceable. That's fine, except you can very readily banish that as a stable datum. There are some things that are experienceable.

But the second we all agree on what's true and that these things are truths, then we can get very lazy and we never have to think of it again,-and Ron can all write it down in a book, and the next generation that comes along only has to memorize this so they will know what the truth is. Well, that I don't think any of us want to have happen.

So these things that become inexperienceable by reason of their nonexistence can be all messed up by taking an experienceable thing and saying it is nonextant and therefore inexperienceable.

That's Scientology as I see it from my own particular viewpoint.

And this nonexistent thing called the physical universe, you rap on it, you can't hear a thing. You kick it, feel nothing. And as for bodies, totally insubstantial. Can't feel anything. Bodies don't exist. They're merely a delusion. Complete delusion. See? (cough, cough, cough) Excuse me. Complete delusion.

It doesn't say that the numbers of truths in life are limited or that they are very few. It doesn't say anything except that if we look we can learn.

Well, you'd say somebody's up the bend. He's halfway out the spout. You know, bullet tears through him and he stands there looking straight through the hole and he says, "Well, that's a good thing there's a hole there because there's no body there anyway."

And all it says, in the final analysis, is that as far as we've gone we found out that it paid off very, very well. By looking, we learn.

Well now, if you get the fellow who is saying that to experience being a body, one of the first phenomena you run into is unconsciousness — dope-off, boil-off, anaten, grog and so forth.

When we finally get through looking, I'm afraid if we look hard enough there won't be any universe left here. But I haven't noticed any matter disappearing lately just because you were looking at it But you let me know when it starts to cave in. Will you?

Get him to experience his hand. There's an old gag along this line which is very amusing: is, you get somebody to flop his hands and ask him who's doing it, you know, that sort of thing. And very often because he's been flopping his hands and you ask him who's doing it, he has to notice his hands. You see, that's what the trick is. And he looks at these hands and he — it's the first time he's seen them, you know. It's a great shock to him.

Now, I have probably never given a very basic and simple rendition of exactly what I thought Scientology was or how it worked or how we looked at it again. And I'm sorry if I have shattered any preconceptions as to what a tremendously top-heavy and overpowering structure it must be.

Now there are lots of byroads then that a person could lead to. But I recall one individual, the poor fellow kept chattering about the akasic record. He was a preclear and he just kept talking about the akasic record.

But you would be surprised how little language there is in any formal language of Earth which is designed entirely to communicate the truth. We've had to invent a little language in order to communicate the truth because the way to reach the truth had not been identified very well. So we've identified some of the signposts.

And this akasic record was stored someplace and it had an enormous quantity of books in it and everybody's deeds, acts, past, future, present, all knowledge, everything else, was lodged in this akasic record and there was nothing you could do about it because they knew all about it and you couldn't vary the future and you couldn't have any self-determinism in this life because it was all in the akasic record already, wow!

Very often somebody gets all mixed up in the signposts. "Engram, preclear — what's this, what's that? Oh, you Scientologists, you just have too many terms."

Well, that was obviously a zone of nonexperience, wasn't it?

Funny part of it is, a naturopath told me that not too long ago. He told me, "You Scientologists have just too many terms, that's all. It's just too confusing," and so forth.

Obviously, he had never been in a library calling itself the akasic record and read everybody's books on the subject.

And I said, "How many special terms do you have in naturopathy?" He didn't know. I says, "Well, we know how many we have, 472. Thank you."

So I took the only other course of getting him to inspect the akasic record and got him to inspect the akasic record. Now how did I do that? Well, I just inspected the source of the akasic record. I found out who'd told him about the akasic record and then ran a communication or inspection process upon that person. And that was the end of the akasic record.

Well, we have 472 terms. Most of them are not even used. The vocabulary of Scientology is probably, in active, actual use, somewhere down around 125 words; which of course is perfectly all right because we are a bunch of people that found out we didn't know. And therefore when we start to talk, why, we start to talk in terms that we have some agreement on that we do know. And I think that's excusable. But you don't even have to know the terms to do any inspection. You don't even have to know what these terms are to do any inspection. All you have to do is look.

Somebody that had great altitude with him had told him all about this and practically beaten his head off with the subject, you see. The second we discharged this communication, the akasic record disappeared. You see?

Now, I will say that there's some liability in looking because you often get your head half beat off. So the second lesson you have to learn is, having looked, get up nerve enough to look again. And having looked again, why, get up nerve enough to look again. And because this is sometimes a very lengthy process, why, it's kind of best to have an auditor. He is looking at us, making sure that we keep looking, not flinching.

Now it isn't quite like that in the physical universe. Your teacher told you about the physical universe when you were a child in school. And if you run out the teacher, we still got something there.

Wherever we have gone, whatever we have learned has simply been along this process line. What is valuable that we have is valuable because it shows how to look without totally getting your head knocked off.

We can run out anybody that told us about the physical universe, practically, in modern times. And nothing happens to the physical universe. It's still here. It's still very much here. So it's worth getting familiar with.

The gradient scale of looking. Showing you directions that you can inspect. Keeping you from getting lost totally in the confusions of where people have thrown enormous edifices to be inspected and when you get all through you find it is an enormous edifice that was to be inspected. There was no truth in it, neither was there any value in inspecting it, but it sure did arrest the eyesight as you walked down the road. I won't name any particular subjects like medicine or anything like that. I'll just .. .

And you can become familiar with the physical universe and if you became familiar enough with the physical universe, you would probably find out exactly where the physical universe started, ended and where it was going and you would know all there is to know about it.

Wherever anyone adventures on the road to knowledge, he of course makes lots of mistakes and falls on his face and goes anaten, all sorts of things happen. The only thing I'm really proud of in Scientology is we have fallen on our face such a few times that it's actually a very proud record. We could have fallen on our heads consistently and continually every five minutes of the day and night for a very long time but we didn't. We were more right than we were wrong, therefore we can increase IQ, increase personality and do other things.

But you wouldn't know what the nuclear physicist has found out about the physical universe because he's also found out a set of insubstantial data that can't be experienced and he's making awfully sure that nobody can experience it. He's being very careful that nobody ever experiences an atom bomb and lives through one alive.

And the total fruits of these things is simply made possible by the fact that we kept at it. We were more right than we were wrong; we're still here. We are taking off to a higher level, a new height, organizationally and internationally, so forth, than we have ever attained before. Big things are happening. They are great big, very complicated things. And in the midst of all these complicated things it's a good thing to look around and realize that we are actually, basically simple people, even sometimes idiotic people. And remember that the subject itself is basically very, very simple and it's within grasp of everybody.

Now he isn't actually a student of the physical universe. He's a student of the structure of the physical universe, but he's looking inside the back of beyond. He's looking in further, further and he's getting disappearing more and more and more and more and more, and you take most of these fellows and you say, "Look at that wall."

And somebody that says he doesn't understand Scientology has made a terrible confession. All he has said is that he can't inspect, because that's all Scientology asks you to do.

And he looks up out of his atom, you know, and he looks and he says, "What wall?" And looks back.

And if Scientology says, "Why don't you inspect something?" and the person says, "I don't understand Scientology," that person did what? He failed his first gradient.

Now the very use he's putting his information to tells you he must have a very strange idea about the whole thing because out of this, he's making something that nobody can confront: an atomic bomb. He's just making sure nobody can confront this thing. Wow! Pretty interesting when you come to think about it that that much information could be totally devoted in its end product to something nobody dared confront. Good.

Well, that's all it is and that's all it means.

Well, in Scientology you can go about this the other way to, also, and you can inspect the physical universe, nuclear physics or anything else that's inspectable in this line, and you can actually knock kicking the liability of being bombed out of existence. It takes quite a little bit of doing, but you actually can do this.

First time I ever realized this could be done, a fellow drove up in front of my house in Arizona, when I was out in Phoenix, Arizona. And we had an organization out there, and we were sitting out in the desert doing all sorts of interesting things.

This fellow drove up in front of the house and he just barely got the car into the drive and stopped, you know. And he sat there and he groped out the door, you know, and he groped around. And I saw him out in the front yard. I brought him in. His face was totally burned and his eyelids were swollen almost completely shut. He'd been driving on the road and he'd seen a horizon flash of a bomb test in Nevada. That far away.

He'd been looking in that direction at the wrong moment and it had practically fried his face. His eyes had started swelling up, and so forth. He was over closer to Nevada than we were when he saw this.

And I thought well, well, well, well, well. So all I got him to do was tell me where he saw it and where he was now. And where he saw it and where he was now. And where he saw it and where he was now.

And his eyes — the swelling went out of his eyes and his eyes got open and his face turned less red and everything was just getting along fine and then he recovered and that was that. Just on that silly process.

Of course, what I was doing was running the engram of having seen it. He himself was holding the effects of this thing in place. Obviously, he must have been because I wasn't processing the atom bomb. I was processing this guy.

And he was the only one present while we were processing, see, that had anything to do with the bomb. I hadn't seen the bomb. He had.

So we removed the impact of his having seen a bomb and what did we get? We got a cured face.

Well, this is very peculiar and quite heartbreaking to a physical scientist of these days. Very upsetting to them because it means that their total effect that nobody is supposed to experience is experienceable.

Something to remember, by the way, if anybody gets playful with these things, although we haven't studied the subject with any great exhaustiveness and so on, we could probably take care of some large percentage of the fringe burns rather easily just by Locational Group Processing.

We know we can do that because we've done it. How much more we could do of that would depend on how nonanaten everybody was that we were trying to process and how willing they were to confront the physical universe and how capable they were of sitting in a chair and being processed.

You see, this is all different factors that are involved here, but certainly we could get people burned sufficiently serious that without processing they would die. Certainly we can do that because we've done it. All on the basis of experiencing something. Re-experiencing something or seeing pictures of it which they already have and getting the familiarity with the picture and so forth.

Well, why did they get the picture? Well, they got the picture by resisting the actual experience and sort of printed themselves a picture — is what they really did.

The willingness to confront is what all this finally boils down to. The willingness to confront. The willingness to confront life. The willingness to confront, participate — participate isn't anywhere near as important as confront, oddly enough, in actual processing tests.

That's just as far as technical processing is concerned. Because the individual is here and he is himself — he is not a body — this is another little fact that drops out in your lap.

By the way, if somebody doubts that, I must remember to you the old, first exteriorization process that demonstrates to somebody with great sweeping and sudden truth that he is not a body.

We don't do it because it gives him the sensation of dying. He'll stay stably separated from a body for anything from fifteen minutes to three days and then he gets an old time when he left a body dead or something like that — he gets that keyed in again — and he feels unhappy and feels like he's just died or something. So we don't do this directly.

You could do this indirectly. As a matter of fact, it's almost impossible to stop somebody from going out of his head if you've processed him far enough, but the old one I must recall to your attention is: take somebody that's in particularly poor condition that's being very scornful or is being very mean or something like that or is trying to convince you utterly that you are a body or something like that, and just say, "Try not to be three feet back of your head." I must recall that to your attention. Because he finds himself back here promptly. There's his body up there.

"Try not to be three feet back of your head." He's stuck in his head on a reversal and it hits all lower level — very low level — cases and medium level cases that people are trying so hard to stick in their heads that the moment you tell them try not to stick in their heads, they push themselves out. It's kind of weird.

The fellow's out there in the middle of thin air. What you notice at once, his face changes shape usually, where it works, you see. His face changes shape, color of his skin changes, voice tones change. Maybe he spoke with a stuttering or an accent or something like that before. He now speaks very clearly. He's now thinking very logically. He's not all mixed up in what — he always thought he was thinking with his brain. And he's tried to think with his brain for so long, he's got all mixed up in his brain, you know.

He's got this idea, you see, of he's there, and it's not just an idea because it's an observable fact, but he's so unused to experiencing the universe directly — not through a pair of eyes; he's nice and safe, you see — he's so-unused to this that he puts up all kinds of pictures. And he gets all kinds of delusory messes on this thing and he thinks he's in hospitals and all sorts of weird things.

And then he goes flip and he goes back in, and you say, 'Well, now are you a body?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'm a body."

What you're looking at in such a case is, an individual is unable to experience what he has just experienced.

Sometimes for a whole day he will tell you, "Yes, I am a spirit. By golly, you know. What do you know? I am a spirit. I am outside of the head. And I feel so good, you know, and I'm outside of my head and so forth. And I'm not a body. I always thought I was a hunk of meat. And I'm not a hunk of meat. Gee, this is wonderful."

And you meet him 48 hours later and he says, "What head?"

These are the liabilities of inspecting existence. All sorts of interesting things occur while you're trying to inspect existence.

Of course, if a fellow is in pretty good shape or a little kid or something like that, all you have to say is just "Be three feet back of your head."

And he'll say, "Yeah."

And you're waiting for something to happen. Little kid's liable to say, "But isn't that rather close in?"

This thing has been going on for a very, very long time without anybody noticing it. All kinds of oddities exist in life and of course the truest of them are the least confronted of them because they would be the things that you would immediately snipe at if you were trying to make slaves and prisoners out of people. See, they'd be the very things that you wouldn't want them to see clearly.

You'd say those things are pretty bad. You know, spirits? Ghosts? You've ever been in a castle? Ghosts coming down, chains. Pretty bad people, ghosts. They screech and take care of your soul. All kinds of odd operations occur around any particular large area of truth because you can only make a slave out of another being by making it impossible, or trying to make it impossible, for him to observe truth.

If an individual begins to observe or experience truth, he becomes incapable of being a slave because he can't be hurt. He isn't afraid of life. He's ethical or moral or something like that because he's ethical or moral, not because somebody's going to punish him if he isn't ethical or moral. That's a different rationale.

Oddly enough, you find that the clearer a person gets, the more ethical - the person is. I haven't robbed a bank in years. You know, piggy banks, of course — mm-hm. Now — decades, centuries.

When you blur out some area of truth on an individual and when you say, "You mustn't inspect that area of truth," then the person becomes that less true. You get the idea? He is that much less a truth because he can't be or experience this area of truth over here, don't you see?

So then he's sort of backed into that much less truth and then he's that much less truth — some other zone gets obscured and then there's some other zone gets obscured and some other zone gets obscured and another zone gets reinterpreted; and finally he's just all the way backed out of being anything that's even closely resembling truth and he is in a valence. It goes gradually — if he is less and less himself because he himself is truth, less and less and less himself, and gradually he'll become more and more and more somebody else.

But there's nobody else there to be except something he synthesizes. He has to dream up something else to be. And whatever he dreams up that is something else rather than truth to be, to that degree he's a prisoner. Because any person who isn't himself is, of course, to that slight degree, a prisoner. Because he's a prisoner of lies and probably the only thing a man could be prisoner of would be lies.

Look at a prisoner in a prison. There he is in the prison. Well, he's put in the prison because the society tells him he's been a bad boy, so he must not and will not and cannot any longer confront. Get the idea? This is supposed to reform him. Make it impossible for him to confront life in any way. He's supposed to become a better man.

And then the statistics tell you that if a man is sent to prison, he again goes to prison and if he goes to prison again, why, then he goes back and goes to prison again, and he goes to prison . . . And it doesn't work patently but they keep doing it. It's obviously the most unworkable sphere of reform there is because crime statistics keep increasing and the numbers of prisoners keep increasing, and so forth, so that's why we should do it. It's obvious.

Now here's this fellow — here's this fellow in prison. Now how is he in prison? Well, the big problem is, is how in the name of common sense could he ever go to prison? How could he stay in a prison?

In the first place basically, as a being, he is not a body. Anything he knows or is has no substance connected with it at all. He can go straight through walls -psst. That's a fact Till you've done it a few times, you may not believe it, but it happens to be true.

How do you get anybody in prison? How do you get him to stay there? Boy, that's a tough problem. Completely aside from why should you ever put anybody in prison is the problem of how is it possible. Well, it's only possible by stripping the truth away from the man until he no longer knows the truth.

And the basic thing about criminals is, they cannot tell right from wrong. Now, they say that's a definition of insanity, but it's not. It's a definition of criminality because if a man could tell right from wrong, he would probably do the right things. But when he no longer can tell right from wrong, he does the wrong things.

I found out much to my surprise the other day why kleptomaniacs existed and it was terribly simple as a mechanism. A kleptomaniac cannot observe property. So he never knows whose it is. He's unable to differentiate in the ownership of property. He doesn't know who it belongs to or whose name is on it or whose it is or anything else.

So of course, he sees a piece of property, he just picks it up and takes it away.

Of course, actually, he doesn't do it at all. It kind of leaps into his hand. They're actually always telling judges this, you know, but judges never believe them.

"Well, Your Honor, it just was there and the next thing you know, it was in my pocket."

"Yeah."

Nobody believes them. Yet that's actually from their viewpoint what happened. They can't determine or control property. They can't handle MEST. So naturally, I don't think it's the law at all that builds the prisons. Couldn't be. The fellow can't differentiate what property is and can't tell what MEST is and can't go through MEST and hasn't anything to do with it — now, no material object has anything but menace to it as far as he's concerned, so naturally, you put him in the middle of four walls and he's going to stay there.

Oddly enough, if you leave him there for awhile, you can even open the door and he won't even walk out. That's a fact. I imagine if you went out to Wormwood Scrubs and left all the cell doors and everything else open, there'd be a certain percentage of prisoners that'd never walk out of the place.

They'd probably have a sit-down strike or start screaming because nobody was serving them food or something like this.

No telling what would happen, but what would happen to sane men in that position or sensible men in that position is not what happens to criminals.

A criminal has lost his ability to differentiate. He can't tell anything from anything. He has a total confusion about property. He doesn't know who he is. It's pathetic. But the only way he can become a criminal is by ceasing to be himself.

He becomes a criminal valence which does this and does that and there is nothing you can do about it. He is no longer himself. Truth is not in him. And he is no longer in any way truth. All because of what?

He himself locked out various zones and said he couldn't confront them anymore. He said there were areas of truth that he mustn't look at anymore. And saying these are things he mustn't confront anymore, he just moved back into lies, lies, lies, lies, lies and eventually was in a total fabric, a total labyrinth of lies and naturally was a total prisoner.

Now how would you get out of a prison if you were in one? I'm afraid you'd just do it by confronting. Everybody to some slight degree is a prisoner. He is a prisoner only to that degree that he is unwilling to confront an area. An actual physical area. Or an actual area of truth. He's a prisoner.

Man is having trouble with finance? Obviously, is unwilling to confront money. If a man is having trouble with marriage, there's some part of marriage that he can't confront. And where he can't confront things, then he mocks up and creates some artificial structure which has no basis in truth at all and confronts that instead.-

You want to set men free or if you want men to be free or you yourself want to be freer than you are, all you have to do is find out what you're willing to confront and what you're unwilling to confront. Basically, run long enough, oh, that would free a man of almost anything. It would permit him to find out almost anything. It would be a very informative process. But it's a long process, it's a long process.

The only reason it's a long process is because at first when he runs it, he is running it as somebody else, not himself. And when you ask him "What are you willing to confront?" he says, "What am I, Joe, in the valence of Mother, willing to confront?"

Takes him a long time to get back to a point where he can confront Mother, don't you see?

Now there are various other factors which enter into this. You could ask him, "What have you got yourself confused with?" Not a good route. Not a good process, but it certainly drives the point home. Because he's got himself confused with everything that is unable to confront. He's preventing himself from confronting by being things that can't confront.

All sorts of oddities occur. That isn't a whole answer to existence because there's another factor that enters in along this line, and that is the fact that man is basically good and tries to help his fellow men. And valences come into being, actually, when he fails to do so and considers himself bad. But that's beside the point.

The point is that he's trying to inspect life for somebody else, not himself.

Of course, even if he did that long enough, he'd eventually wind up inspecting life for himself. But this is where we get the zones of familiarity and this is where we get life and this is where we get communication, and so forth.

And it comes down to the original thesis of Scientology is that that you familiarize yourself with, you can recognize the truth or untruth of. And it's a direct process which does this and it's not a very difficult one to run.

It's a very odd thing to find that most preclears when they come in to be processed are being processed so they will not have to confront something.

And of course, one of the first things that breaks down under processing is their unwillingness to confront. So they're amongst the first to recognize this. Say, well, they didn't want to confront life, so that's why they're here.

Then of course, there's a lot further to go on something. There's a lot further to go on a case.

But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows.

Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.

Now, in Scientology we think it's a good thing to get man to do this and that itself might be a novel and individual view. However, we hold on to it. And it's a peculiarly individual view that man deserves to be helped and that man can help himself and that life is worth living. And even though that's a very peculiar set of rules to go by in this year of 1960, we nevertheless go by them.

I want to thank you very much for being here tonight. I consider it quite a compliment in view of the fact that I haven't had any practice lecturing and I forgot all my notes and didn't have anything to say. I want to thank you very much for coming here.

Good night.