Thank you.

How are you today?

We have today a very, very solemn and sad subject to cover — the descent of man. And in your hands at the moment, as have been passed out by the seminar leaders and others, you have slips of paper. These paper slips come from pads of such charts and these pads are so composed so that an auditor in auditing can keep a very accurate track of his preclear and make notes as to what he is doing with that preclear. The pad you have or the slip of paper you have in your hand is a new chart.* I've already discussed this chart, already talked about it, but there you see a graphic representation of the descent of man. But let's take a happier look at it and call it the ascent of man.

Thank you.

Now, we'll take a look at that chart and we will see that a great many values or ideas have been fitted into their consecutive places and we have, in effect, a gradient scale of ability. Now, if you call this anything else but a scale of ability you'll be in trouble. Why? Because a person is not insane simply because he hides something. A person is not sick simply because he's trying to protect something. Now, he could get sick in trying to protect something and he could get sick in trying to hide something. But that is not our concern.

Well, today being the second day of this congress, seems to me like we'd better get down to business and stop this fooling around, this talking about religion and junk and stuff, and getting down to — well, at least solid gold tacks.

That is a chart of ARC. It is the same old chart of ARC that we've been working with for five years which was originated with the writing of the first book and became ARC in July of 1950, which was a long time ago. And we have borrowed the basics of this chart from Dianetics and we are using it in Scientology. And this chart represents the degree that a person can experience — the degree that a person can experience — affinity, reality, and perform communication. Now, that's — is merely a gradient scale. And the values which are on this chart from top to bottom, from bottom to top, are simply a gradient scale of that ARC triangle.

Now, the essence of the situation is that a great many years ago, a caveman named Ugh decided he could do something for a caveman named Oogh. And at that time there were no laws preventing Ugh from doing anything to Oogh, and he fooled around and he said, "Be three feet back of your head." And after that the technology was lost and we've just rediscovered it.

The most fundamental thing you could say about the ARC triangle is that it is impossible — impossible — to communicate in the total absence of an agreement of some kind. No communication is possible without an agreement of some kind. And no agreement is possible unless there is affinity of some kind or type. And no affinity is possible without a communication of some kind.

No, all fooling aside, there is a great deal to be known about processing as it exists today, and a great deal of differentiation should be made by us who are doing processing to understand rather clearly that we are not trying to find something wrong with somebody so we can make it right.

Now, you see how that works out? Now, did you ever try to talk to somebody that you didn't know, had never seen and didn't know where they were? Well, now that would be trying to communicate in the absence of agreement. At least we have to have an agreement on location before we can communicate.

Do you know what would happen if you started to make something wrong — tried to find something wrong with somebody and then made it right? Well, I invite you to look over the axioms of life as contained in The Creation of Human Ability. That which you change persists. Now, let's look at that very clearly. That which you change persists. The only way you get a persistence, the only way you get time, is by changing MEST. By changing matter, energy and space, you get time. And if there's no change, there's no time, and it's as simple as that. So that if you try to change in any degree matter, energy, space and — you get time, you get persistence. What is time but persistence? So that which you change, if it be made of space or of energy or matter, will persist. You should see that very clearly.

• Editor's Note: A copy of this chart can be found in the appendix.

We take a car and we move it around in space — and I call to your attention something that every motorist has noted and no motorist had quite understood: that when he failed to drive his car it went to pieces. Have you ever noticed that? You park it in the garage, that's that; the battery goes down, the tires go flat. Maybe it was up on blocks, maybe the battery was taken over to the service station and put on continuous charge and all of this was done. That's some small prevention of the situation. But then — then three months later you put the battery back in, you take it down off the blocks and you "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," and oil smoke goes out the rear end, won't steer. That's an oddity. The only reason it stayed there at all is because Earth is going around and it was being changed in space, at least to some degree. If it were not being changed in space at all, it would not be there; it would cease to persist. Now this is a great oddity — a great oddity. I don't call upon your superstition in this regard, I merely call upon you to observe in its crude form something else.

And now you possibly know of somebody in your past who did you in or you did in and who is out of your life and you'd just rather not think about him. Well now, think of your attitude — your communication attitude — about that person. Do you want to talk to that person? Don't want to talk to that person. That's the affinity factor — you don't like that person. That person — nah! So, you have an absence of affinity and you don't have any communication. So every time we drop out a corner of this triangle, we drop out the other two corners. It's just as nice a neat little plan as you ever saw in your life.

All right. Let's take a chronic somatic, what we know as a chronic somatic: a pain which persists. And we take this preclear with this nice pain and we say, "Move it to the right, move it to the left, move it up, move it down, move it to the right, move it to the left." Now if it weren't for the fact that life was present, that pain would go on to the end of time — if it weren't for the fact that life was present. Another factor alone occasionally lets you get away with it, and that is the factor of pan-determinism: You're exerting control over something, so you change your mind about its dangerousness. And although you might not feel the pain anymore, believe me, it still exists.

The only funny part of it is that it happens to be a very broad highway on the road back to ability. It isn't just a cute datum. It works. And as long as we pay attention to this triangle and as long as we process in connection with this triangle, we then achieve remarkable successes in enhancing and increasing the ability of Homo sapiens. And then increasing the ability of the beingness that he really is.

You could take a preclear who has had a chronic somatic treated as it is treated in the healing sciences, so-called — as this chronic somatic is treated in the healing sciences — and we know very well that little Roscoe had a bad set of tonsils. We know this. He had a very poor set of tonsils. And so they held him down, you know, kindly, and put the ether mask on his face kindly and when he tried to struggle, why, they kindly shoved his hrrm-rm-hrrm-rm-hm-rm, and they got some water and they scrubbed around like this, and worked him over this way and that, packed him off, changed his position after the operation while he was still asleep and put him in a hospital room right down the corridor. Well this, of course, cured the tonsils. See, he's cured of tonsils — that's a great certainty. Everybody would agree he no longer has tonsils, is this right?

ARC: affinity, reality and communication. Great deal to be learned from that. If a person knew all the factors involved in affinity, reality and communication he could probably communicate with anything.

Well then, how in the name of common sense can a Dianetic Auditor take this person back down the time track into the past and find tonsils and pain in an operation? How does this exist? How can this be? And yet it's done, and many, many of those present have done this. So we have this fellow going through life — (wheezing noises) he can't talk very well, you know, he has sore throats all the time, and we wonder what's wrong with him. What's wrong with him is his tonsils, but they're not there anymore! But that's what's wrong with him: the fact that his tonsils were changed. So the second we operated, we got ourselves a persistence of the condition.

Now, there are several little maxims that jump up concerning this. One of the most notable is: When in doubt, communicate. Apparently it's always better to communicate than not to communicate. Because when you stop communicating, you acquire mass on the subject. But if you want to acquire mass, stop communicating. Do you see this? You stand up to a man and you've been discussing things with him and he's rather a violent sort of a man and you all of a sudden say, "I refuse to talk to you anymore," and then just shut up. The next thing you know, you're going to get some mass — a more violent representation.

They take somebody — I'm talking now about the healing sciences — they take somebody with arthritis. They shoot them full of gold shots and they massage them and they shake them in a bag — I don't know what they do to them — and they work him over one way or the other. And these people curl up a little more and a little more and a little more. Occasionally some terrific thing occurs and they get well — you know, bang! sort of, get well. Well, this bang-get-well idea is something that has haunted the healing sciences for many, many centuries. They felt that there must be a button — there just must be a button — if people suddenly would recover from things. It never occurred to them that they might be, all of a sudden, confronting another being who wasn't sick. Think of that for a moment. The sudden recovery might very well be another being who wasn't sick, because all a life form would have to do, or a life unit would have to do, rather, would be to change its mind about who it was and just abandon all connection with and responsibility for anything and everything it had been, which would come down toward amnesia and so forth, and say, "Well, I'm not that person anymore; I am somebody else."

But the actuality is, is you'll have a preclear who's sitting there with a huge ridge in front of his face, you know. And you say, "All right. Shut your eyes. Now, what do you see?"

We see this in religion. We see somebody walk up to the front of the room to Aimee Semple McPherson or some other great spiritual leader, and we see this person walk up to the front of the room and all of a sudden he said, "Wow! I'm saved!" And Aimee or somebody says, "Roll again," and ... (audience laughter) What exactly has happened? Well, we've had a remarkable communication change but we've also had an identity change. We've had an identity change on the part of the person.

He'll say, "Nothing."

Now, you could say, "I am not (my name)" — see, "I am not (your name)" — "I'm somebody else," and if you were very good at this, you could actually make it stick. You know? You could say, "I am no longer Oswald. My name is Joe and I live in Keokuk." What would happen to the chronic somatic? Well, if he did it to change the chronic somatic, he'd still have it. That's the most fascinating thing.

You say, "What do you see?"

Now, we're not talking — we're talking about a chronic somatic; we're not talking about a psychosomatic illness. We've too long confused these things. A chronic somatic is simply a sensation; sex could be called a chronic somatic. The point is that to have a sensation is not necessarily to be ill. You know, a lot of people believe that's the case, you know — if they have a sensation they're sick: "Something must be wrong with me, I have some feeling in my nose!" And we say these sensations are good and we say they're bad.

And he'll say, "Nothing. Nothing except this blackness."

I processed a little girl one time, and she — about halfway through the session (we weren't processing what she was worried about, we were just getting her located and so forth) — and she all of a sudden looked at me and she said, "Wow!"

How'd he get it? He didn't get it by starting communication, he got it by stopping it.

And I said, "What's the matter?"

Funny part of it is, is you could originate any number of communications and if they just sort of dwindled away and so on and there was nothing much left to talk about or talk to, why, there's no liability — you mean your interest is simply off of the subject now and so on — there's no liability to this at all.

And she said, "Do you know, I've had a headache."

But you start communicating and then stop communication because you have a good reason to stop communication, and you've got a ridge. The best definition I know of for a barrier is something which stops communication. That's a definition of a barrier. A barrier is that which stops communication. Very often an individual is so anxious about communications himself that he gets into this alarming state. He starts to talk to somebody and he feels like he's being throttled or he feels a sudden mass hitting across the mouth. The body is a barrier and it will stop communication. As long as you use it to communicate with, however, it can't stop communication because something is in control of it that isn't stopping communication.

"Oh?" I says.

But we find many people in the interesting and obsessive state of having to stop communication. It wouldn't matter who was communicating or about what, they would have to stop communication. And this is simply the dramatization of a barrier. For instance, the dissemination of Scientology finds, in many places and points in the society, people who simply gibber. And they say they are angry about this or angry about that; or they say, "That's a cult, that's a religion, it's no good, and you shouldn't have anything to do with it." And they go on like this — and that's all very curious, because these people don't know anything about Scientology, you see? This is a fascinating thing. They're talking out of an enormous fund of no data. And they see these communications going out, they see people talking to people interestedly on a subject, they see written material around and they see people getting together and talking together and being friendly and so forth — and this must stop! And it wouldn't matter if it were Scientology or somebody had simply dreamed up a new way to knit — you'd always find some of these barrier people jumping up and finding something terribly wrong with this new way to knit. They simply have to stop communication.

"Yes," she said, "I've had a headache for years, only I didn't know what a headache was, and all of a sudden I haven't got a headache!" She sat there thinking about this. She said, "How am I going to get my headache back?"

Now, why do they have to stop communication? They have to stop communication because communication is in progress. Please learn that, if you learn nothing else. They stop communication because a communication is in progress. That is why they stop communication. These people have an obsessive barrier-ness and the human body, although we don't know anything about the human body and care less, the human body is apparently obsessed in some cases on this subject. It has to stop communication. It's just as though it had a great many automatic barriers that suddenly leap up in the air and get in front of a fellow. This fellow says, "Well, let's see, I think I will tell her how much I love her," and all of a sudden he can't talk. You know, he'd say, "Thh!" Now, where the dickens did that come from, you see? Now, how did that come to be? It came to be very simply, indeed. The body just suddenly said gnnk! He thinks, "Now I am going to communicate," and the body goes gnnk! and the body will shut off the communication to the degree that the person wants to — has to — communicate. It's very fascinating, you know? I mean, the fellow says — he's trying to say, "The house is on fire." You see immediately what happens.

Now, Lord knows — Lord knows what a headache was to her. I don't know. Maybe it was a delightful sensation! Who knows?

One time a few years ago in a war that everybody fortunately has forgotten, a submarine appeared on my port bow — it just appeared. We'd been hanging over it for some time and it ran up its periscope. The first sign they used to make, they used to throw up a patch of oil and then run the periscope up through the oil so as not to leave any salt scum or anything like that on their periscope lens, you know. So a blob of oil appeared and the fellow who was running the engine room telegraphs on the bridge was the only fellow looking in that direction. And he saw this blob of oil appear and he thought that was strange and interesting. We were going very slowly, we were almost dead in the water, and then right up through this big blob of brown oil on a blue sea comes a periscope — swswswswhhh — and looks around in every direction but at our ship! If it had turned another ninety degrees it would have read the biggest doggone 422 that you'd ever seen, fully magnified for the skipper. But anyway, the man on the engine room telegraphs is the only person who observed this incident in its various steps. And he stood there . . . (pause) (audience laughter) The bridge was absolutely crammed with men because we were at general quarters. But nobody was looking right down there; they were looking out there, you know. And the fellow on the engine room telegraphs would say, "Thh." I finally noticed this strange performance and I was all set at this moment, you see, the second I saw this — flank speed and drop a depth charge right ... Even if it blew our own stern off — that was fine, you see — and I said, "Khh!" That was the awfulest mess of noncommunication! It finally came off all right. We dropped a depth charge and so on, but we were laughing about this for days. Nobody could talk!

We found in reviewing, in the healing sciences, the work of Freud — we discovered something very fascinating: that he had people all categorized, and there have been lots of them ever since. And he had them all lined up and the masochist was the interesting one — he evidently enjoyed pain; he enjoyed being beaten and so forth. Freud describes him. Personally I've never met anyone who was a masochist, but I've met a lot of people who hoped they were. (audience laughter) And we have to ask of this: What is the degree of pain? What is this degree of pain? What do they call pain? It's an interesting thing. A fellow comes in and he says, "Oooh, my hip's killing me!" What is it? A little quiver or an agonizing ache? Now, every individual has his tolerance of pain but we are all too prone to assume that pain is a finite quantity which is measurable.

Well, what was happening there? We were merely getting the body's — it feels a tension or an urgency and then it shuts off communication. And a person is, after all, using the body's voice, so the body is perfectly capable of doing this. Well now, we get this condition just a little more deteriorated and we get this kind of a thing: a total and continuous mask or screen of some sort and we say to this fellow, "Be three feet back of your head so we can do Route 1 and get you in good shape," and this fellow says, "What are you talking about? I — I, uh — I'm not going anyplace." Well, what's happened? The body's got a barrier here and a barrier here and it's simply shutting off communication.

Now, we meet somebody else and he is screaming, he is writhing, he is getting down on the floor and chewing the rug because he tapped his finger lightly with a nail file. Now, you've known people that just superexaggerate any sensation.

Now, the cure for it oddly enough is communication, not not-communication. It is a condition of not-communication but if we continue to validate not-communication, we just get more not-communication. Well, the remedy for it is communication. It's an oddity — although it is not the best solution, it's just a test solution — that when these screens appear around the individual, it is an oddity that just Hellos and Okays to the screen will tear them up and do various things to them. Now, the oddity is that this will not banish the condition — it simply tears up the screen. The reason it won't banish the condition is because the screen is being manufactured by an automaticity which can manufacture more screens. And it can almost, and usually does, manufacture them as fast as the auditor is trying to tear them up. The thing to treat in this respect, if we're trying to exteriorize somebody, is the automaticity which provides the screen. Hellos and Okays to that produces some very interesting results because you're disabusing something of the idea that communication is bad.

Now, we commonly think of — again, referring to the work of Freud — we commonly think of sex, and we popularly think of it and so on, as a pleasant series of sensations. I mean, this is more or less definition: supposed to be something desirable and attainable. Maybe this sensation called sex, to a great many people, is intensely painful. And they know it's intensely painful to them and at the same time they are assuming, because everybody else knows that it's pleasurable, that it ought to be pleasant, you see. And they would get into a rather dreadful state of mind about this situation because it would mean they were different than other people, or there was something changed or altered about life — and the funny part of it is, maybe we're all under the same delusion! See? Maybe there's just a popular belief sitting out here that has nothing to do with any of us that says sex is pleasurable, and maybe it hurts everybody. You see how quickly we can go adrift when we start to classify this situation.

Now, there are two crimes in this universe and all crime stems from these two things: to be there and to communicate. Those are the two crimes of this universe — thereness and communicatingness. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the criminality of communicating, you should realize that the law is powerless to act in the absence of a statement by the criminal. It can only punish if an utterance is made.

Now I am fascinated with the fact that one man's experience, described, is apparently understood by another man. This is the most fabulous thing that you could possibly view. Here you have an individual, a personality, and he himself does not have inherently (except as he would make it with postulates) time or space or energy or mass. He apparently has no slightest logical method of creating those things in such a way as to go into communication with some other such unit. And these two people talk gaily together and one of them says, "I have a terrible pain." And the other one of them says, "Oh, I've had an illness similar to that." If you listen to human beings, they talk this way. They go into a hotel — the hospital room, you know, they walk into this hospital room and there's this fellow lying there and he's in a beautiful state of somnolence — he's practically in an hypnotic trance, you see. And they say, "My brother had an illness just like yours. He went on just like you are going and they told him he was getting better and he was getting better, but he died." Have you ever been in a hospital and had visitors? Well, anyway — always happens. It's quite remarkable.

The Constitution of the United States has the Fifth Amendment and it tries to remedy this. Now, this man doesn't have to testify. But if you will look over law or if you will talk it over with a lawyer who knows his business, he will tell you that there's only one way to really incriminate anyone: He has to confess. He has to make a statement that he has done it. And as long as you do not make a statement of any kind — that is to say, you haven't prior to an interrogation written your best pal all about it in your own handwriting, you know — if you haven't put out pamphlets saying, "Now, boys, we're going to overthrow the US government by force," such as the Commies carelessly used to do . . . (That's a very fine thing for the country that they did it, but nevertheless they had a lot of literature which more or less confessed this and this literature is about all they're hung on.)

Now, nobody would do that if he never got a kickback of what he was doing to other people. Would he? That's an interesting fact. People wouldn't go around butchering people with words or swords if there was any slightest recoil, if it could happen to them, now would they? They wouldn't do that. So obviously nothing can happen to a person as a result of having made an effect out of another person. Isn't this obvious?

Now here we have this condition of punishment only when communication exists. But this can invert too, and somebody who is alive and who is demanding communication can become very furious about not-communication, you see. But punishment is, you might say on a broad line, centered on the subject of communication. If you start communicating and then stop communicating, you can be punished. Or if you communicate and say, "Well, I did that and that's it," and confess and sign it all up and so forth, you could also be punished. This universe is very, very heavy on punishment of communication. And this is an oddity, isn't it, since it's a barrier universe.

Well, this is a great oddity. That must be an agreement, too. The recoil itself must be an agreement. "One of the best ways I know," somebody says, "to protect myself from damage is to enforce the agreement upon those who would attack me that they will suffer in some mystic and mysterious way because of their activities agin me." Now, that's an interesting agreement, isn't it? But what a wonderful protective mechanism! Or is it mechanically a fact? These are mysteries. These are mysteries very germane to the field of religion. Is it a mechanical fact that if you go out and cut off Gertrude's head, you'll at least have a pain in your throat? Is that a mechanical fact?

Why should it punish any variety or state of communication? Because communication is the only way out. To continue an entrapment it is necessary, then, to punish communication or some phase of it — to enforce or inhibit communication. In order to continue a barrier, to continue a trap in existence, you would have to debar communication. So therefore, a universe which operates all too often as a trap resolves, and escapement from that universe occurs, when communication is expertly and knowingly handled. And when it is not well handled, it's punished. Now, therefore we get a fixation in this universe.

Well, if you're going to be in communication with anybody anywhere, it happens to be a mechanical fact. But basically it was probably an idea of a wonderful way to restrain. But it has gone so much further than just a wonderful way to restrain that you could absolutely count on the fact, going down here to a taxi driver and start in convincing this hard-boiled fellow that he had harmed you, and he would go into apathy. You actually could do this, if you worked on it long enough.

Now, thereness is simply a part of communication. It is the creation of a station or a terminal from which one communicates. And that is thereness. So thereness and communicatingness are punishable things by those who desire to entrap. And they are good things to those who have some tolerance for and some desire for freedom.

One of the interesting things to do to a human being as a little test of this — an interesting test, too (how solid can an agreement be, is what I'm talking about) — is we take a dog. A dog doesn't think, he just reacts, according to one of the sciences called — hah! — psychology. And I had a dog once that could think — he had me figured out. Anyway, we take this dog, and it's a very funny thing, but these mechanisms are so exact that we can make this dog go into propitiation by screaming and running away from him. Now, the dog comes up and he nibbles at the cuff of your trousers or your wrist or something like that and you say, "Ow! Stop! Don't!" You know? He didn't hurt you at all, and you say, "Don't! Don't! Get away!" and you turn around and you start to run away and so forth. And the dog will get real brave — oh! And if he's in pretty good shape he'll just get awfully brave, and then all of a sudden he'll say, "You know, maybe I hurt him." And he'll come over and he'll lick your wrist — he'll look at you real worried.

So, we get the make and break of personality, of beings, above and below a theoretical line. And above this line a person would find nothing terribly wrong with thereness and he would certainly find nothing wrong with communicating or being communicated to. And above this line he can survive as himself in full knowingness. And below this line we would have an obsession to punish or a feeling that there should be punishment for thereness and communication.

This is the foulest trick you can play on a little kid. The cycle of action of a little kid in this regard is quite interesting. A little kid, swatting away at you, you know — normal childhood reaction — pasting you around one way or the other; you all of a sudden say, "Ow! That hurt! Don't! Stop that now, that hurt!" Kid look at you, probably come over and look at you, kiss the spot to make it well — kid's worried. You've zinged him down Tone Scale to a propitiation and concern over having injured another. Only there was no pain involved. Now do you see where we're going? You can do this. You can do this to anyone. And there's no pain involved.

And that line and from there on down is succumb. And you see this marked on those pieces of paper which you're holding in your hand — survive and succumb. What is above that line? A tolerance for thereness and communication. What is below that line? — an intolerance for thereness and communication. So you could say that to change the state of any being, whether to increase his intelligence or improve his personality, it would be necessary to improve his consideration, to improve his tolerance of the presence and existence of other things and himself, and to improve his tolerance of communication — so that we would have an improvement of consideration as the common denominator of the ascent to higher levels of ability.

I wonder if there's any pain involved anywhere? Well, there isn't, unless you have to convince somebody. Now let's take this mechanism — let's look this mechanism over very carefully and let's have this little kid — this is a tough little mug; he comes from Park Avenue. (audience laughter) And this very tough little mug, he comes over and he says, "Nyarrrh, you big sis," and so forth, and he hauls off and swats you one. And you say, "Ow! Don't do that! Hey you, you hurt. Don't, now!" And he says, "Ha-ha!" you know, and bang! bang! hits you some more. By the way, when they're pretty stuck and pretty aberrated, they'll keep on a persistence along this line and they'll hit you around and so forth, and you know what you'd have to do? You'd probably have to turn on a bleeding wrist to show him — say, "Look, see what you did." And the kid would say, "Gee! I really didn't mean to ruin you." See, now he's convinced.

It's quite important for an auditor, somebody studying Scientology, to recognize those fundamentals because there are no more fundamental fundamentals in terms of practice or technique than these things. There are more fundamental data, such as the exact definition and characteristics of the human spirit, the thetan. There is a more fundamental material in the Axioms which trace the exact considerations which an individual has agreed upon and by which he is living to his detriment.

The problem is, what degree of energy or mass is necessary to convince? How much pain does it take to convince somebody else that you have been hurt? How much pain would you have to turn on to convince some son of the devil? How many swellings and malformations would you have to turn on to convince this person that he ought to go down Tone Scale to be nice? Are we talking about the same mechanism?

Now, we see this as a background of agreements. But as a background of practice, as a background of application, thereness and communication are the keys. And the keys which open all doors are simply thereness and communication.

All right, here is one of the interesting things. We have this person fighting and he's got a spear, and he lunges and we say, "Ow! Hey! That's dangerous! Don't!" and so forth. And he draws back — because he's being paid to do it by some government — he lunges again with this spear. Well, if we just let him come in close and nick us, he's liable to stop. But if that doesn't work, then the next — you see, there's no reason why we should be inaccurate at all, no reason why we shouldn't just get run through in the first place; we can be accurate that way as well as be accurate in stabbing people. All right. And the next time that he lunges, well, we have to get bunged up a little bit more. And finally when we're lying there in a mass and welter of blood and battered armor, this fellow says, "Ha-ha! Poor fellow. Well, he was a worthy fighter," and walks away. What did it take? It took almost a complete destruction of the mock-up to convince this other person that he has harmed or done wrong, and that is death.

So we have, then, on this pyramid — we have the survival band, and we could say a person is surviving when he could tolerate thereness and communication. We could say to some degree or another he is succumbing when he can no longer tolerate thereness and communication. Now, I won't bother to go into the exact thereness and communication characteristics of control since I don't think it is necessary to. When you start to control something, you have to locate it. And to continue control of it, you have to stop to some degree its communications and yet continue your own, making an imbalance of communication — to the unhappy state — the unhappy state of a jealous man who wishes to continue to communicate with his wife and desires no other man anywhere in the world to communicate with her.

So after a person has lived through a number of incidents of one kind or another, he comes at last to the realization that the only way he could really convince others that they had better regard him a little better — since he cannot seem to enjoin it with the sword in his own hand, he puts the sword in theirs and dies, then you have this wonderful mechanism called death. And that's how to really get even with somebody.

Looks to me like that's one channel of communication open and one billion channels closed. And eventually he will neither know, recognize, sense or experience any pleasure from his wife. She will disappear as far as he's concerned. You know people get into a state finally where people will simply occlude — they have tried to cut communication to them so many times that they'll see other people on the street and they can recognize their features very clearly, but the person that they've tried to cut communications about consistently starts to get blurry. That's seldom noticed; but you do notice it on a hearing basis. Somebody whose communications have been cut consistently — that is to say, who has had communications cut by somebody else — the somebody else will eventually not hear or pay attention to that person. You know, Mr. A has cut communications to his wife so consistently and so continually that at last he's out of communication with her, and she says, "Dear, do you want coffee or tea for dinner? Dear, do you want coffee or tea for dinner?"

Ask some little five-year-old kid sometime, "Did you ever wish you were dead? Did you ever wish you were dead?"

"Nuh?"

"Did I ever wish I was dead, are you crazy? Of course I've wished I was dead. That'd make them sorry!"

Now, how does that condition come about? It comes about through Mr. A's desire to cut her communication lines, one way or the other. Either cut them with the family or ex-boyfriends or his business associates, somebody. There is cut communication going on there all the time and eventually, because the individual's trying to keep one line open and all others closed, he eventually goes deaf himself on the subject. We can notice this quite easily. It's less apparent to us that it also happens in the field of sight.

Get some seven- or eight-year-old little girl sometime — and it'd be absolutely impossible, I'm sure, to find one who was in fairly good condition anywhere who would not be able to list you a dozen such incidents. There she would be lying in a coffin, flowers — that'd fix them! That'd convince them they should have been nicer to her! They all should have been nicer to her, or to him.

But it also does happen in the field of sight. His wife buys a new dress. She looks gorgeous. Everybody tells her so. Two months later her husband says to her, "Where'd you get the dress?" Now, there is control — individual trying to keep one line open and another line shut or trying to change lines.

You could take some little kid and you can ask him to repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me." Just that, see — just ask him to repeat this over and over with no former description or comment of any kind — and what are you going to get? He'll start to cry. Just like that. He's already gotten himself two feet deep into the grave, just by repeating this thing: "They should have been nicer to me."

And one of the more obsessive things that can happen in communication is the effort to continue to change communication. Somebody says, "Beans" to you, and you say, "Doughnuts" — that's what he said.

Now let's say that we're going to address fatally — that we were going to address a chronic somatic: some persistent ache, pain or sensation or malformation or condition, or condition of living. We were going to address any one of these — chronic condition — and we would find that if we had the person repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me," this condition will turn on more and more and more. If we're merely treating the fact that he can't earn a living or something of the sort, he'll get worse at it. You know, he'll get even poorer. If we're trying to get him over a broken leg or something of the sort, why, it will start hurting and he will develop complications. This we are sure of.

And he says, "No, beans."

This is the spirit affecting the body, and the thetan running the anatomy and the machine. It's proof, conviction, convincingness. And when they fail with ideas, they make the ideas solid, and we have mass.

"Oh, I've got you now — I've got you now — coffee cups."

What's mass? Mass is an idea that has failed. And it has been changed many times, and heavens, is it persisting! And if you want it to persist some more, roll it around some more.

What's happening here is we're getting a refusal to duplicate — a resistance towards a duplication — and we're getting an obsessive change. Now, control itself consists of start, stop and change. Start, stop and change of thereness — presence, location or even form — thereness; or start, stop and change of communication. And when you think of control, just think of start, stop and change by energy and you have the more — well, the Scientological definition of control, whatever else it might mean, because it works that way.

Now there's really two levels on the Tone Scale. Above 2.0 is survival. Below 2.0 is succumb. In other words, above this artificial, arbitrary figure of 2.0, we have the goal of an individual is to survive. See, that's survival is there. But below that level — and please grasp this fact, please, because it makes things so much easier for the auditor — below that level, the goal is to succumb. Now, we have a percentile of goal. In other words, somebody wants to 70 percent succumb and 30 percent survive, and so we get a very conflicting state of mind, as we could call it colloquially — state of mind. (I don't know what a state of mind would be. Call it an arrangement of ideas, and you would come much closer.) All right. So this person wants to succumb some percentage and survive another percentage.

Right out of this, we get a process. We could say to somebody, "Now, what would you like to have changed?"

Now we go down Tone Scale and we find out this person wants to succumb 90 percent and wants to survive 10 percent. Well, there's not much conflict there. One of the first things this fellow will think of, in terms of himself, is how he could kill himself — if he could think about himself at that level. If he thought about you, he would think kind of how he could kill you, and we get the criminal bands; quite interesting manifestation. Once a person has failed to convince the society around him of his worth, he is liable to take the course, the downward spiral, into levels of succumb which require murder or death as the only sufficient proof — criminality. He cannot have, he has to steal. It's covert havingness; stealing is just covert havingness. And he has to butcher, make nothing of, chew up, slap around anyone in his vicinity. He can't afford to be nice to them. Why can't he? Well, he knows the best thing for everybody: that's succumb.

And the individual says, "Oh, my!" and maybe turns on some terrific automaticity and just sits there and says that and that and that and that and that, you know.

It's just as you run on an individual some process of duplication, and have him then run this process on some body part, like an ear. You know? "Get the idea, now, of the goals of your ear." You know? "What are the goals of this ear?" you know, and you go on. The first thing you run into is — one of the first things you run into is: "Gee, let's everybody be ears!" That's what this ear thinks, you know: "Everybody's got to be an ear!" Big toe thinks, "Everybody should be a big toe." And this person thinks, "Everybody should be dead." And we get that wonderful philosophy, that glorious ornament to the thinkingness of the human race, Will and the Idea, by a guy named Schopenhauer who conceived out of the greatness of his Germanic wisdom and out of the deduction of reduction to absurdity, that the best possible thing for the human race would be for everybody and everything to quit and stop it in its tracks and that would be the end of that! And that's the best thing to do!

And after this is sort of run down — you've said okay to each one of these — you then say, "Well, what would you like to have remain unchanged?" "My case."

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

And we could simply ask these two questions over and over: "What would you like to have changed? What would you like to have remain unchanged?" And we would get a remarkable alteration — some old-time Dianeticist had better perk up his ears right here — in the person's position on the time track. This is the fastest method I know of to change the position of a person on a time track: "What do you want changed? What do you want unchanged? What do you want changed? What do you want unchanged?"

But that's still higher toned than a Hitler who says, "Now, let's see, the best way for Germans to live is to kill everybody." Because the universe is so set together that an individual who goes out to kill everybody, dies himself. There is a retribution. There is a rapid and exact retribution for one's acts.

Why? Because time is change.

If a person thinks he can be happy without making those around him happy, he's crazy. Now, I beg your pardon, that's a technical term which belongs in the field of psychiatry. It is the total and sole proprietary matter of psychiatry. But this fellow is crazy anyhow.

The change of position of particles in space is time and when we agree upon a uniform rate of change, we have physical universe time. And when we process directly at change and unchange, we process directly at time. It's just as easy as that.

Now, here is a great oddity, then: that there is an interaction from human being to human being, and this interaction follows an agreed-upon pattern for there to be sustained any communication at all. If we are going to sustain any communication or concourse with our fellows, then we become liable to all of the laws, rules and offshoots of communication. And if we do not feel ourselves strong enough, wise enough, competent or able enough to support these liabilities, then we have no business whatsoever living with the human race, but should find ourselves a nice little cave someplace back of the Atlas or somewhere and sit down and live on goat milk.

So, looking at that piece of paper you have in your hands, you see there the — right there at that point we have, I think, on that piece of paper, Start, Stop and Change, don't we? Stop is the bottom, Start is the top, Change is the middle. You see where that is there, hm? Well now, those three things together mean control. And we could write superimposed over those three lines — Start, Change and Stop — we could write in lighter letters "Control," because that is the mechanism of control. It's a very important button. The reason I'm talking about that button in relationship to this chart is because the only reason people do not exteriorize is because they are upset on the subject of control. And that is the basic primary reason they don't exteriorize.

Now, an individual could not help but come to that conclusion that hecould not sustain communication — he could not help but conclude that it would be impossible for him to go on communicating with all these people — if he himself believed that everybody, or at least a lot of bodies, should die.Now, you follow this? The individual who has to go and find himself a cage or a cave would be somebody who had already come to the conclusion that everybody else must die. Why? Because talking to people gives him a kind of dyingness, which tells you immediately what the intent of his communications must be. If by talking to people, he himself experiences dyingness, he must then intend no good for his fellows; but quite on the contrary, if turned loose and let go just a little bit, he'll get that sword nice and sharp and get to work.

But let us say that they cannot face straight up to the idea of control, then we have to go south from this very important button and go on down and find out what we've got earlier than that. And we have "responsibility as blame," which is marked on your chart there simply as Responsibility. And that is a lower button. A person believes that to be responsible for anything would be to be blamed for something. If he's responsible for a communication, giving one or receiving one, or responsible for a thereness of any kind, he believes he's in for it. So therefore he wants no responsibility. Yet in an obsessive and unknowing fashion he is actually controlling this thing, and yet he's not even responsible for it; it's a fantastic condition. And yet the spirit gets into that kind of a condition with the greatest of ease! You see what happens?

It's that individual, and the restraint of that individual, which brings about the condition known as police — who, in a rational, sane society, are about as useful as bubonic plague. And yet we're taught that if there weren't police in the society, everybody'd get murdered. Well now, this is a great deal of confidence in our fellow man, isn't it? Whose conclusion is it? It must be the conclusion of a person whose intent and goal is to murder everybody — to show them. So therefore, the idea of restraint, the idea of restriction, barrier and breaking off, must perforce spring from people who had better be barriered.

Now that whole chart is a scale of knowingness versus unknowingness. If anybody really knew what he was doing anyplace on that chart, he would be free and clear at that level. Now, he may be doing a great many of the upper-scale things on an obsessive, compulsive or hidden basis — in other words, he's going on doing these things but he doesn't know he's doing them. So this chart also has this connotation: One has to know where he is on it. It's not what one is doing on it, it's what one knows about on it. He knows he's doing this. And when he knows that he, to a marked degree, recovers his ability to do it and so it no longer troubles him. So he could be controlling something and be down at the level of responsibility. See, he was obsessively, unknowingly controlling something. Well, his knowingness is one step below what he's doing.

The feeling that one is being mauled around by the society is not an unnatural feeling. It is when that feeling amounts to the conclusion that in order to survive, one has no other course but to maul around everyone, that one becomes lost to himself and to all others and had better go find that cave.

He's merely resisting. He knows — he knows very articulately — that he doesn't want to be responsible for things. This he knows. He knows he's doing this. He knows he doesn't want to be to blame. Yet he is — you know, sort of with his left hand in back of his right hand, you know — he's sort of controlling things, somehow or another, but he's not letting himself in on it. But he is letting himself in on the fact that he doesn't like responsibility. Somebody comes along and says to him: "Well now, we're going to put you in charge of this whole service station."

Here are the liabilities of communication. All by himself with no space, no energy, no matter, the individual theoretically could survive in a timeless state which would persist forever. It's a paradox, isn't it? Theoretically, he could do this. Theoretically, one could be in a condition which desired no communication, which wanted no concourse, which needed none, and which wouldn't even know about any. Theoretically, that condition can exist.

And he says, "Nnnyyrrrow! No, I just want to stand here and put the gas in the cars. The county tax problem and the people coming up and ... No, huh-uh!"

But if there is communication, we have to have, first and foremost, two terminals. Even when a fellow is talking to himself, he still has to say part of himself is somebody else. So we're talking about a two-terminal condition. And the moment we have a two-terminal condition and communication, we have a universe in construction. And if that universe sweeps along in its construction to where communication seems to be unbearably painful to the majority of its inhabitants, somebody'd better as-is it.

"I don't want that much communication" is what he's saying. But he knows this, see. He knows he doesn't want the responsibility. What he doesn't know is that he is obsessively controlling in several directions. So, he's at a state of unknowingness about control. He won't exteriorize.

Here we have a condition here of the only panacea — the only real panacea in mechanical terms — for space and energy, matter and time: communication. It is the sole curative element which can dependably change, alter and eradicate, without penalty, space, energy and matter.

Now, he'd be in pretty good shape, though. He knows exactly where he stands on responsibility. He's going to be a private for the rest of his life. Or obsessively the other way, he's going to run everything for the rest of his life. Both obsessive on responsibility. He knows this, however. He knows he's doing this. He knows — this is quite articulate. But he doesn't know he's controlling things and he won't exteriorize. But that fellow's in good shape.

What happens to a person who shuns it? What quality of black glass does his bank become? What happens to an individual who says — having already assumed communication and having gone into communication — now says, "Communication, that makes me feel bad. I don't like that. It's too painful to talk; it's too horrible to contemplate. I've got to draw barriers here and secretaries there and cut telephone wires over here and tom-up mail over in this corner." He's on his way. Where? Well, one thing — he's on his way to believing that everybody is going to be after him and at the same time, to the conclusion that he had better be after everybody. In other words, a Wall Street man.

Let's go a little bit lower and let's get to a level where a great many people reside. They know they can or cannot own and they know about ownership. Their level of knowingness about ownership is very good. They know how you own things. You go down, you put some money down and somebody issues you a deed of title and you drive it off. And that's how you own something. You go down and you buy a license at the license bureau and marry the girl and you own something else — or you persuade him to go down and then you own something else. Meantime saying, of course, that you had nothing to do with it.

Now, this condition is not particularly perilous. But we go four or five harmonics down this Tone Scale, we get into a condition which is very interesting indeed. We get to your political fascist, your criminal, the insane, the psychiatrist. We get to people who have to use mass in a violent way in order to convince any-body of anything.

Now, this level is not a lightly unimportant level. The level of ownership as represented on that chart right there contains the clue and the key — and Dianeticists again sharpen up your ears — of engram erasure (snap) like that. It's right there on that Ownership button. Just as the analyst with his large concern about guilt lived in the band of responsibility — guilt, he had guilt feelings and so forth; that belongs in responsibility. Guilt of blame — other such things. But this "ownership" is apparently so innocent that I never suspected until I suddenly fell across it with a crash that it contains as a button and a level, the guide and key to the erasure of any and all engrams, locks, secondaries or bodies. You heard me, bodies — the erasure of. There's many a preclear who was run in Dianetics, who was not there to erase engrams but to erase his body if he could.

The Chinese know this very well. I, once upon a time, heard a little story about the Chinese. There were two coolies, two rickshaw boys, and they had drawn up in the street and they'd dropped their rickshaws and they were going "Nee-chongy-tonky-alamonpinyon," and — at each other and screaming back and forth. And an American was standing there with a Chinese friend and he watched this conversation going on and on — on. He finally turned around to his Chinese friend and he says, "Hey," he says, "what's the matter with those guys? Why don't they fight?"

Now, what is an engram? It's a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness. And it's pretty darn hard to reach down to the large depths and the deep depths of unconsciousness that some of these pictures contain. A person has a painful experience, something takes a picture of it and then he has that picture. And Dianetics was a science devoted to the eradication of such pictures and their control, so as to bring about a better physical and mental condition. We found practically anything and everything you wanted to find in these pictures. There's only one trouble with Dianetics — it took a long time. And there was only one criticism that could have been leveled at it — it was too mechanistic!

"Oh," his Chinese friend says, "the fellow who strikes first blow confess he run out of ideas!"

All right. Here was this thing called an engram. And in the many years which have proceeded since the release of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, article after article has appeared in the more popular medical publications, such as the Reader's Digest (audience laughter), which talk about birth traumas and so on. Well now, actually this was a Freudian idea — basically a Freudian idea — but Freud never got, to be colloquial, the "put-together" of the brain, mind and picture. See, he never got this. But he did understand that there was something like a memory of the womb and of birth and although he had no method of reaching it, he said that there was some sort of an idea connected with this because he had this as an obvious observation. He'd go into asylums and things like that and he'd see patients curled up in the prenatal position, and he couldn't help but assume that they had some, at least, memory of the womb. And he talked about their desire to return to it and so forth. There was no desire connected with it. It was simply a picture appeared and says, "There you are." And the picture had greater reality than the environment and so we had an insane person suddenly curl up in a prenatal position.

So we have this interesting thing. We have an interesting thing here: We have the idea as sufficient unto itself, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with some space and some energy and some mass, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with lots of energy and lots of space and lots of mass, and then we have the idea which is so perilously and tenuously held that it has to be backed up by the consideration that space, energy and mass is bad and you're going to get it!

Now actually, a Dianetic Auditor in the old days could put any preclear, no matter how sane, through the same positions and attitudes as you'd find in insane asylums. In other words, he could turn on and off insanity practically at will. This was a very interesting thing because a person stopped being afraid of these things happening to him, so he couldn't possibly go insane because of them. The only way a person could go insane is when he is assaulted by some unknown force which suddenly engulfs him to his detriment and terror. And when the force ceases to be unknown and becomes knowable and handleable by the person, well, he says, "So what? So I know about that. So my head feels like it's blowing off. Ha! Engram." This is his attitude. Very close in to truth.

When somebody tries to tell you how bad it is over there and how you're all going to be cut up and you're going to be sliced up and it's going to be horrible things happening to you and you're going to go to jail for 126 years and the jails are terrible and so on and when they start on along this line, this fellow's just confessed to you he's run out of ideas. Certainly effective ones — certainly effective ones.

Now, these mental image pictures and the study of these mental image pictures made up the bulk of Dianetics. Of course, there was a lot of philosophy back of Dianetics — a lot of put-together, you might say, connected with it — which was useful and beneficial. There was an organization of knowledge and philosophy back of Dianetics which made Scientology possible.

Now, people get into this state of being quite easily. They believe that the space and the energy and the mass is the important driving force, and that there is no more important driving force in this world than space and energy and mass. And they believe these are — things are just fabulous. And they believe, at the same time, that the greatest healer is time.

All right. Where we had these image pictures and wherever we had these image pictures, we had misownership. Incorrect ownership alone could throw into restimulation an engram, a secondary or a lock. You had to misown the picture before it could become solid or effective. And the moment that you correctly owned it, that you assigned its ownership to the correct thing, the thing that had made it — the moment you did this accurately, you had no picture — bang! Think of it. Nine, twenty-five, fifty hours on a birth. That's a Dianetic Auditor. He'd get rid of it — he'd grind it out, chew it up, put the preclear in control of it one way or the other. But that little button that you have there on that slip of paper — Ownership Processing — goes click, click, click, brrrrrt! That was birth running out.

Time is not the great healer; it is the great charlatan. Because time, mass, energy and space do not exist independent of the postulates of life. We're merely looking at another set of postulates represented with the urgency of conviction.

So, we're getting someplace and I do have something to tell you, don't I? Quite an interesting thing. You know, the original thesis was written here in Washington. Don't know if you knew that or not. It was written right here in Washington. I used to live down at 1902 R Street — basement apartment. And worked quite a bit on this material. I didn't do any research as such in Washington. I had already worked on patients and people elsewhere. What I was doing here, when I got back here, was adding up and squaring around a tremendous amount of accumulated data trying to find out where it fitted. And the conclusions about engrams and dramatizations and the actions of these engrams were reached down there at 1902 R Street, Northwest.

So we have a problem here when we're looking at a human being. We have a problem. This human being has gotten into the interesting state of believing that he could convince nobody of his presence unless he hands up a body. The only way that can convince somebody you're there is to give them a body. Now, isn't that interesting? Think of it for a moment. It'll start to appear rather ridiculous to you. The only way you could convince anybody you were there, or that you were anybody, would be to present them with a body. We show them a body; that convinces them. It stands in space, it moves with energy, and it is mass — and they know you're there.

Now, it was very remarkable for the object which was doing the miscommunication to be isolated. That was remarkable for that to happen — the exact thing which was enforcing these pains and ideas on the person to be isolated. That was quite something. All right. A method by which it could be erased was something else, and I knew that the picture was at fault, and what was about it, but how to handle and get rid of that picture? And we did quite a bit of work on that, an enormous percentage of it very successful work.

If some of you are having a hard time trying to figure out how the devil they would know you were there unless you did present a body, be aware of this interesting thing: You must be trying to keep from being located.

And here at a time when we don't even need the information anymore — clear up here in 1955 — we have that button on that piece of paper which you hold in your hand. And the way you use that button is simply this: "Get the idea . . . Oh, you got a picture? All right." We have several ways of getting rid of pictures, by the way. We know enough now to get rid of them and get them back. The preclear sometimes loves them. Say, "All right. You got a picture? All right. Get the idea that you own it, that your body owns it, that your body's machinery owns it, that your machinery owns it, that your mother owns it, that your father owns it, the doctor owns it, you own it, your body owns it."

Think it over for a moment. If you think the only way you could make anybody else aware of your presence would be to present a body, then you're presenting some kind of a substitute over here and you're saying, "Hey," you know, "tsk, tsk, tsk. That's me. Ha-ha!" Big joke! Everybody says, "How are you, Mr. Jones?" you know, and so forth. And if Jones is up here not making himself known, he still must have the conviction that he mustn't be located; that something will happen to him if he's located.

And he says, "What picture?" Remarkable! Somewhere along the line you got the right owner!

And there we get the top peak of aberration, and that is the highest level of aberration: "There is something rather detrimental to being located. There is something slightly wrong with being located."

Now, if you'd gotten the wrong owner too long and said, "Now listen, you understand that picture's really yours. You really made that picture." Now, what do you mean by you? You mean a spirit, that's what it means! And this is why all of this has become so pointed and so necessary to understand. When we say you, we mean a spirit, because Ownership Processing on the most casual preclear doesn't work unless you understand that a person is a thetan.

"There's something slightly wrong with locating things" is your black V case. Not only slightly wrong: "I sure better locate nothing. I'd better not locate a thing. If I do any looking, I'm liable to see something, and if I see something, woooo!" But the funny part of it is, is there's no argument or reason at all that goes behind the woooo! but just that — woooo!

We say, "Oh, you — this birth. All right. Now, all right. Now, you've got birth there — doctor keeps dropping those drops in your eyes. All right. You keep seeing this all the time. Well, fine, fine. Now, you know you own that picture. Well, just get the idea now that you own the picture. That's fine. Now, all right. Now, let's get the idea that you own the picture. That you did it; that you own it." The eyedropper and the drops and the doctor and the walls of the delivery room will get solid enough to do 8-C on. It's a misownership, and we get solidity by misownership. Anything that is persisting as space and mass must therefore, perforce be misowned. If you get the right owner, it's gone. And that is the primary lie.

Now, you might accept this idea that fear of being located or dislike of being located or even tremendous desire to be located, such as your exhibitionist (and we've had lots of those since Freud invented them); these factors must contain in them a certain amount of truth if their use on the spirit of man and with his cooperation produces marked changes in his behavior, in his intelligence, in his ability, in his perception and his willingness to be perceived. And if we use these factors and produce marked changes in the ideas, personalities of people, and we better them and make them freer, then I feel that we must be talking somewhere close to truth. It is not necessarily true that we are speaking the truth; we are merely speaking the workability.

And so we take a look at this engram bank. This fellow has birth and eight accidents and the death of his father and his mother and his grandmother and his grandfather and his cousins and his aunts and all of his shipmates. And we take a look at this engram bank with its tonsillectomies and everything else in it, and we used to say, "Well, five hundred hours, I guess." You wouldn't do that today. You'd say, "All right. Now, what's happened to you in your life?"

Truth is a very interesting thing, since the only way we get any persistence of any kind or any form or any energy or any mass is by changing it. Only if we alter truth do we get persistence. This is fabulous, but very true.

The fellow says, "Well, I don't know. I had some bad times, grandfather died."

That means some pessimist is going to come along and he's going to think to himself now — he's going to think to himself, "You mean that everything at which I look has a lie in it?" Well, if you want to state it crudely, yes. If a lie can be defined as an alteration of truth, or a departure from the truest true you know, then that's perfectly true. The floor is there because it's a damned lie.

And you'd say, "Okay. Now, do you have a picture of that?"

But one can easily accustom himself to these lies. It's only when the individual becomes hectic and very upset about lies that stuff that is composed of lies goes out of his control.

"Well yes, as a matter of fact I have a sort of a black hazy thing out here every time I think of my grandfather."

Nor does this give anyone like Hitler a license to deal only in lies. If he deals only in lies, he'll as-is everything, too. He will bring about a condition of such persistency of lies that he won't have any truth left. You must always have a certain amount of truth left; because it is the alteration of truth which gives us persistence, which gives us survival. We must alter or repostulate truth. And if you alter lies and continue to alter lies, you get something else entirely different because you haven't got the first postulate to be followed by the second. Some truth must always be present, and it is only when no truth is left that we get the bad end of nothing.

"All right. Now, let's discover who owns this thing. Now, you get the idea that you own it" — you see a thetan makes pictures too; they're of a different kind. There might be eight or nine of these engrams, all made by different things. "All right. Get the idea your machines own it, your body owns it. All right, that's fine. Now, get the idea that pictures own it, the reactive bank owns it, that you own it, that your grandfather owns it, your grandmother owns it, your childhood home owns it."

Therefore, the lessons which we learn in processing today in Scientology are very, very interesting lessons. They bridge upon and across some of the greatest philosophic conundrums that have ever been advanced by man. What is justice? What is right? What is wrong? What is good behavior? What is bad behavior? There's many a person going around, the only thing that's wrong with them at all, that they conceive to be wrong with them, is that they can't quite figure out how it all ought to be. They see badness and viciousness and villainy on every side succeeding. They see this consistently. They see injustice, bought courts, they see perjury and false witnesses being rewarded on every hand. And something in them says that the only thing upon which this whole universe and all of us within it can possibly depend is truth. And truth, somehow, is decency and goodness and charity and mercy and kindness. They see this, and yet all they see rewarded is viciousness. And they get this sort of a conundrum in their heads and they just say, "Vr-rr-rr-rr-rr! I don't like it!"

Fellow's waiting for the fireworks. You know and I know that on grandfather's death, who was the closest ally the fellow had, there's a tremendous grief charge. Where's the grief? Pfff.' And it never affects the fellow again. Where did it go? Well, it could only affect him to the degree that it was misowned. He would only cry if he had the complete misownership of the picture of Grandfather's death. And if you kept working at him, making him misown this picture — in other words, say this: "Get the idea that you created it. All right. Get the idea you created it. Now, all right. Now get the idea your grandmother created it. Now you created it. And your grandmother created it. And..."

The only thing that's wrong with them is, is they have lost so much of their own basic truth that they are no longer able to combat an untruth. And the only thing you have to do with them is let them recover some of their basic truth; let them see that there is a reward for decency and kindness and justice and mercy and charity; let them see that these things are basic; let them see that communication is not bad, it's good; let them see that decency, honor are extant.

"Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff"

How would you let them see this? Processing. Almost any processing leads in this direction today.

"Now, get the idea you created it."

An individual who has had all of his truth perverted has nothing left.

"(crying) Huh, huh."

Because the only actuality there is, must begin with a certain amount of truth. And then for the actuality to persist, it must be altered. And when we alter the alteration, and then alter that alteration, we begin to walk through a cobweb of lies which is liable to trap anyone — and has even trapped some of the best thinking minds of the last several thousand years. If you don't believe this, read some of the books of the philosophers. Read Plato's dissertation on man. If you've ever read a mad-dog piece of writing, that's one. He had departed far enough from the truth, even Plato, so that he had conceived that man himself was a pretty evil rat.

You see what you'd be doing? You'd be making him assign misownership to it and you would get the grief charge in full. In other words, the picture would become effective! So that Ownership Processing does the fantastic thing of just no effect, no picture. About the easiest slide-out you ever heard of.

Now, processing today depends less upon the alteration of the moral nature of the individual than upon the rehabilitation in the individual of his ability to recognize and to be truth.

Now, because an individual does not really object to thereness, he has to inject a certain amount of unknowing ownership — misownership — into his life. He has to say, "That's my car." Nah! You notice the car's still there. It's not his car either. He didn't make it.

Well, what is truth?

Now, we have two kinds of ownership then. We have the ownership which would evolve through a lie so as to get a persistence of the object so that you could control it. We've got an object and we can control it, see. Well, there's that kind of ownership and we're accustomed to that kind of ownership. Real, actual, truthful ownership is of a different category. You only own what you make. Only the maker of the object is its proprietor and owner. If you made the engram, you own it. But if you know you own it, you haven't got it. So that's why there has to be a lie over there in that wall for that wall to continue to exist.

If you want to know what truth is for this universe, it's the definition of a static, and, I am afraid, a fairly close path of the fifty-one Axioms in The Creation of Human Ability. They work, because they bring an individual closer to truth and much further away from disaster and lies than anything else has brought him. So there must be an interweave of truth in these Axioms, because in their use, one recovers truth.

Now, we have several outfits in earlier religions which used to go around and say, "Repent, repent, repent, take the blame, take the blame, be responsible, be responsible" — look right on your chart there. What would they drive these fellows down into, huh? They would hound them and beat them and say, "Guilt, guilt, guilt, blame, blame, blame! Ask somebody's forgiveness." And the fellow would sink right down into misownership and all of his engrams would go into restimulation and they had him trapped. That kind of thing, if you wanted to call it religion, would make you sick and has made people sick. Why? Because you've told somebody to take on himself the reason for the creation of all of his difficulties. You've said to him, "Now look, you take the blame and then you'll be free." No, it didn't work that way. You take the blame and it'll all get solid, because he made some things and other things around him made some things. You see this? There were different authorships of incidents.

What is the basic truth?

There are people right here right now that still, maybe, are grieving to some degree about some incident like a marital separation or the loss of a child or something like this, that find that persistent with them, who are saying to themselves, "If I just could admit that I really did it." Or, you know "I really realized to a large degree that it's my fault. (sigh)" And it doesn't go away. They're trying to accept the responsibility. They're trying to accept the blame for this incident and they didn't do it! Somebody else did.

The basic truth is that an individual can survive without any communication with his fellows. He can. He can persist one way or the other by his own postulates. He can. And he won't have any games — not a one. He won't have any fun — none. But maybe that's all right, too. And that every individual has within himself free choice to go where he wills, do what he would, think what he wants.

Full responsibility contains the willingness to let somebody else be responsible, too.

It's by the interruption of that free choice by himself and by his agreements that we get solidifies, barriers. And these barriers only become onerous and very bad to have around when the individual has more barriers than he has truth.

Now, any malcondition which is persisting is being misowned. It may be that the person did it and is saying somebody else did it and has a picture, then, which is misowned. He's saying, "I didn't run the car into the tree. I didn't run the car into the tree. The actuality is she was talking so much and so hard, she distracted me so much that the car ran into the tree and I didn't do it. I didn't do that." And they've got the accident right there all the time. They ran the car into the tree and they made the picture. Just like that. And they're shoving the blame off on somebody else so it persists. But equally they have other things which they're saying, "I did it. I was a nag, I was a bum, I should have lived better. I did it." And the thing's persisting. And they didn't do it. Their wife went bad or their husband left them from other causes than their own action and behavior. And this person is accepting all of the responsibility for some other person having done something terrible or dreadful and is feeling bad about it when the actuality is they had nothing to do with it!

And therefore we say to the preclear who can't exteriorize well that we've got to give him some more processing. Why? We've got to change his level of truth, which is to say, we've got to give less stress to these barriers and more stress to the individual. Therefore, when we process a chronic somatic, when we process a body, when we process space, energy and mass, we're changing barriers, and they only persist by being changed. Which leaves us one whole sphere to process, which is much more important than the sphere of barriers, and that whole sphere is the processing of truth itself, which — in you and which is you, a thetan.

Now similarly, the spirit says, "Look at all the trouble I've gotten this body into. Daaah!" And that body's gone down a genetic line and in this Ownership Processing you get a fantastically clear disentanglement of who is what and where and you just see it — the easiest, fastest thing you ever looked at. This thetan is saying, "Well I've made a bum out of this body. That's all there is to it. I made it sick. It must be because I want it to be sick that it is sick and it goes on being sick." The thetan didn't do it. He's saying he did it and it persists. Obviously, he didn't do it. That's all the evidence you need.

And a thetan, thereby and therefore, can be processed infinitely without bringing about a persistence of bad conditions. He can be processed without any liabilities. His problems can be addressed and changed without liability, and the only liability there could possibly be in auditing would be to address barriers, because we would make barriers persist. So therefore, we no longer process barriers of any kind. All we do, perhaps, is to get the individual habituated to the idea that there might possibly be some barriers somewhere, and that he could recognize this fact without dying. And when we've done that, we can go on and process the individual.

You audit him on Ownership Processing and you simply ask him this:

Therefore, we are not in the healing sciences — because there is absolutely nothing wrong of any kind whatsoever with that which we treat, which is the thetan, the spirit of man.

"All right. Now, get the idea that you created all your difficulties, the body created all your difficulties, that you created all your difficulties."

Thank you.

And he says, "When I say I created all my difficulties, you know I get these great big heavy black masses around here."

And you say, "Well, get the idea that your body did it."

"Yeah, they're lighter."

"All right. Now get the idea your body machinery did it."

"Oh, they're much lighter!"

"All right. Now, get the idea that your body did it."

Why aren't we saying you did it anymore? Because he didn't. The most that he did would be to take a picture of the difficulty which had already been done, which would just be a light interest picture. So you'd hit it sooner or later and clear up that light interest picture. But his body was doing things without his consultation and without letting him in on any of it.

Now similarly, we have people around who are saying, "This body has just troubled me and troubled me and troubled me! I hate it! Look how sick it is! Look what it's doing to me!" It's persisting, isn't it? A condition's persisting. Nah!

You better have the thetan say, "All right. Now, get the idea your body did it. Now, get the idea you did it — that you created all this difficulty." "Oh no, it doesn't seem very acceptable to me."

"Well, get the idea."

"Oh, I can get the idea — I can just say it."

And very shortly the body is well.

It's a fantastic button, that Ownership button. It contains the answer to the riddles of Dianetics, as well as the answer to the riddles of why this universe is here. I'll talk to you about that later. But now do you think we've brought something to this congress?

Audience: Yes.