Thank you.

Hi ya! Welcome to the congress.

We got a congress yet?

Now, we usually start these congresses off with a bang. But we've seldom attempted a production as great, as earthshaking, as reaching into history, as today.

Audience: Yes!

Now, you think you're at the congress, don't you? No, you isn't. You is at Cape Carnivorous und ve foreign scientists vat help der American government is going to launch der first unsuccessful saterilite. Now, I vill have to have a bit of assistance. I am ashamed to say I have to have an American to help me, but there's somebody – somebody has got to do something here. Now, ve – our able assistant here, who is de entire – der entire technical staff of Cape Carnivorous and 'ere she goes!

Good. Have you got a congress yet?

[Noises, laughter – see introduction]

Audience: Yes!

Vell, now there ain't nothink goink around the air. Ve – ve foreign scientists vat help America get der heads cut off, ve – ve very disappointed, but ve can put up sputnik anyvay. Now, dis is the first unsuccessful launching of an American satellite, and punks like Eisenhower and these other Americans, you don't vant nothing to do with them, because look vat ve can do!

Good. Are you here?

Vell, der ve is – der ve is. And now ve know. Ve got it down, too. That's better than de Russians. Now, all kidnik aside, this was a great invention. Dat it vent wrong had nuttin' to do with American scientists.

Audience: Yes!

The funny part of all of this rocket parade that you see – the very amusing thing about rockets and American science in general – is that people tell you it's losing. And I'll tell you something very funny: It isn't losing; it's way ahead, but it hasn't yet had a chance with the government. I mean that seriously. It hasn't had a chance with the government yet.

Good. Are you here?

I don't know why, but the government seems to be a little bit overwhelmed from abroad. And maybe one of these days they'll turn around and notice they have some scientists here in America that can do a few things. But if that day doesn't come, we have still launched a sputnik.

Audience: Yes!

Well, I'm very glad to see you here at this congress. We are actually bigger than our last year's mid-year congress. Thank you all for coming. We have so much material to cover at this congress that I am very – I get a funny thing when I start to cover material. I mean, I get the idea that there's so much of it that I better kind of drag it all out, you know?

Well, good. Thank you.

The truth of the matter is, there are three programs here in three days. You've seen a fourth program that wasn't scheduled until almost before the congress began. But there are three programs here that we have to take up, and the first of those today is simply Scientology and Project Clear; there's quite a bit of data on this. And tomorrow there's another project which is of considerable interest. And the next day, there is another project which you will find probably of even greater interest and which is represented by the big question mark which you see up on the signs. So, we actually had better get on with it.

We have here some material to be covered in this particular lecture that I think all of you will find of great interest. And that material – let us start right out here in high gear – has to do with a thing called a Clear. You've heard about this for seven years and it has a considerable history.

We are, organizationally in Scientology; we are only really about four years old. Dianetics and its organizations were as uncontrolled as any preclear you ever had your hands on. That was quite an interesting sputnik in itself; it was an interesting rocket. But the truth of the matter is that it did not represent solid growth; it represented spontaneous enthusiasm.

Clear. What is a Clear? Well, I refer you to the first book, a chapter titled "The Clear," because we have not, at this moment, exceeded it one single bit in its terms there or escaped it or quibbled with its definitions or done anything else with it. And that, in itself, is a little modest piece of success -is to turn up here with something that auditors can do. The first Clears were made totally by myself and the effort wasn't duplicated very often.

I want to give you a little idea of how far we've come.

And we had this subject being one of the most questionable subjects of Dianetics: What is a Clear? Well, I'm not going to give you ad infinitum, the Book One definition, but I will describe one to you, in quite real terms. A Clear is somebody without psychoses or neuroses; no held-down fives, in the parlance of Book One. An adding machine is crazy if you have one of its figures held down, and if you held down five in every addition, the addition would be wrong. If you held down five in every multiplication of a multiplication machine, the answer would of course be wrong. Every subtraction would be wrong, every division would be wrong, if one of those figures was always held down, no matter what else happened. That's what happens in the human mind.

The first organization that I controlled was called the Office of L. Ron Hubbard. It was in Phoenix, Arizona and it was opened up in the early part of 1952, and it carried on mainly trying to reorient the situation. It had mainly Dianetic business and at that time a fellow had decided to wipe the organizations out one way or the other, and he was busily doing so.

Something is held down. "Republicans are all bad." No matter what other data is entered on the machine, "Republicans are all bad" is entered into the computation. And even though some of us might agree with the fact that Republicans leave a lot to be desired, we do not add them into every single computation we make, fortunately. But a held-down five does. That's, right there, added in, subtracted, multiplied, divided. Every time any work is put on the thinking machine, the figure five is held down: "Republicans are all bad."

We started to swing into Scientology in the late fall of that year, and Scientology started getting underway. We still had some Dianetic business. And then we get up to the next year: I was abroad for a whole year; there was very little done. We get up to 1954. There you see the decline of Dianetic business and the starting of Scientology business. They are different, believe me.

We say, "Well, I think I'll eat some supper" We add this up on the machine and it comes out, "All Republicans are bad because I'm going to eat some supper" "I would have more supper to eat if Republicans weren't so bad," might be reasonable, but it really doesn't belong in every computation that's on the machine. Do you see that clearly?

In other words, from the moment that we really began to work with Scientology, we were a success, and we have continued onward and the curve has been steep. And at this moment, across the world, there are more students in training in Scientology, there are more auditors in practice in Scientology, and there are more offices and actual businesses engaged upon in Scientology than there ever were in Dianetics by about a factor of five.

All right. This analogy, the held-down five, actually comes from I think Harvard or MIT or some such place; I've forgotten the grade school it was developed in. But they had a big machine – they had a big machine, and the machine was crazy. Any time you fed data to it – a machine comparable to the UNIVAC, ENIAC or Atomic Energy Commission – other machines – and every time you put a problem into the machine, the machine gave a crazy answer. Every time. And they started tracing through the machine and they finally found a drop of solder had fallen across two leads so that no matter what problem you put on the machine, the figure five was entered into the result. Do you understand that?

But it's quiet growth, very orderly growth, very stable, very steady. And this curve which we see here has nothing to do with whether or not we're making money. We're not making money. Every penny we get is expended at once into research and projects of one kind or another, or into the running expenses of the organization. This is quite interesting. The organization is not busy making a profit. Every time it can get ahead a penny, it immediately starts something new.

Now, the mind has this peculiarity, that if you keep adding a single datum, no matter what the problem is, it's crazy. So that we get something that looks like this: We get a person, let's just envision a bank here as a series of mental image pictures. Here's some mental image pictures, one kind or another, and the pc says, "Well, I think I will go to supper." His going to supper's modified by these two pictures, or one picture, or six hundred, see? He says, "I think I will tell her I love her," and his decision is modified by these two mental image pictures. They're always there.

But what do we see here? Not a sudden spontaneous explosion, which then tapered off – and which took about three or four years to damp out entirely – but we see beginning with 1955, this steady growth. You get the picture? And all organizational activities are going on that curve. It's a steep curve and every bit of that growth is honest and sturdy and has no real liability. Now, that's what I mean by building an organization; what I mean by building a subject.

Now, modern Euro-Russian psychology didn't know very much about these mental image pictures. Knew something about eidetic recall; it said morons and small children often recall things by seeing pictures of them. This comes under the heading of obnosis; these fellows couldn't observe very well.

What have we had to do to get ahead with this? It's quite interesting that a new thing in the world, it would be a marvelous miracle if a new thing could be launched in the world without any enturbulance at all. You know, you just launched it and everybody said, "That's fine," took it and it grew, and that's all there was to it. Ooh, no! No, no. That isn't the way it goes. It goes Boom! Crash! Thud – apathy, enthusiasm! serenity! apathy, apathy – 1.5 – 1.1. Fascinating. It's just a rolly coaster. Well, that rolly coaster was in progress for the first three years of the seven we have been in existence, and that rolly coaster was a rough one. Any old-timers here know that. That's been rough; and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for staying with it.

Truth of the matter is, if you ask any citizen on the street to close his eyes and look, ask him what he's looking at – you will get one of these answers: Nothing, blackness, an invisibility, or a picture. And the more numerous answer will be "picture." Now, if you were to persist in asking this question, "What are you looking at?" the fellow who says "nothing" at first would then say "blackness" or "a bunch of rockets" or he would say a lot of things, but he'd stop saying "nothing."

What do we have to show now? What do we have to show for all this time? We have a lot of things to show that you wouldn't really suspect were assets. And I know you didn't come here to listen to some dull lectures on the subject of economics. You want to find out about you, and so forth. Well, the best thing I can tell you about you is that you're a success, and I'm trying to right here now: You are a success. Because if the organization prospers; if you prosper the organization prospers, and if the organization prospers you prosper. It is merely an indication of whether or not we're disseminating. It's merely an indication of whether or not we're getting out.

A fellow who sees invisibility, of course, anything he sees is invisible, and he takes a little more doing. The fellow who sees only blackness actually has something wrong with him. The fellow who sees an invisibility has something wrong with him. The fellow who sees nothing has something wrong with him. This is factual; if you graph these people on APAs and so forth you will find that's the case.

Now, you sit in one little place and you talk to this one and he says, "Well, that stuff, my mind. I know nothin's wrong with my mind. I generally keep it home on the piano." We talk to this fellow, we talk to that fellow, we talk to another fellow; one right after the other, and they all say, "Nyah-nyah." Our parents say to you, is "Are you crazy, fooling around with something like that? What's the matter with you? Why don't you leave all this betterment stuff alone? Be happy like us." We lose all our friends; we make a lot of enemies, and fortunately, we make a lot of new friends that were worthwhile this time.

The bulk of the people you'll ask this question of will tell you they are looking at a picture. The crazier ones will tell you that they are always looking at the same picture: Mother beating Father, or something. They always have this picture. It's always there and visible.

I'm reminded, by the way, of several conversations I've had with guys in the organization, gals – very amusing – their accounts of going "out there," away from the organization, away from their group and away from their Scientology friends. It's always a sad story. Only Edgar Allan Poe could have done it justice. Very amusing.

The ones that are much crazier than that can't see the picture at all but it's all there and in full effect on 'em. They've got a screen between themselves and the picture and some kind of a black field here, and the picture modifies everything they do. That doesn't mean everybody that has a black field is being modified, but it does mean that this picture is present and is exerting its influence on the individual. And we get this analogy of a held-down five.

I did it myself once. First time I ever went away from the Foundation or the organization – totally outside, you see, and totally out of contact – was for a period of only a few days in California. And I just left and I was rubbing elbows with the – what Roosevelt called "the forgotten man." Only he didn't, and he didn't forget him enough. And I was busy doing that and I drove back toward the Foundation at the end of this period – this visit – and all of a sudden, all of a sudden I began to cheer up. Until that time, I hadn't realized that I was miserable. It wasn't – it wasn't that people were just talking the same vocabulary I was, but they were alive; they would answer when spoken to. When they said something, it was generally worth listening to. There was communication; there were people; the place was alive. I felt like somebody that'd walked out of a cemetery.

In other words, this picture, and it is just a picture, no more than that, like modern advertising or anything else, it's always there. You think – you say, "I have a small headache." If modern advertising had its way, your small headache would immediately make you think of Bufferin, and they buy pictures for billboards and they dramatize this thing. And they draw pictures for billboards and pictures on the TV and pictures everywhere encouraging you to think of Bufferin every time you have a headache. The only trouble is there're several other advertising firms that want you to think of Anacin, aspirin and other compounds. So the net result is that when a person has a headache, he thinks of confusion.

So I know, I know what a person does when he goes out from an HCA class or something like that, and he goes out and sits down in the middle of Milwaukee or someplace. He's had all this tremendous communication, all these new friends, and he walked off and he left all of them, and there he is in the middle of Milwaukee or someplace.

Now, when this fellow here that we're looking at has several pictures, one right after the other, and they're all stacked up, no matter what he does he sees the whole conglomeration, he's got that many held-down fives. And you have here a picture of a person who isn't a Clear.

It's a great tribute to Scientology that he doesn't commit suicide in the first week. Some people succumb. Some people succumb; others organize a group and they're still with us.

Now, where do we get this term "Clear"? It's off the button on an adding machine that says "clear." That's the very, very, very esoteric source of the word; the extremely mystic and romantic source of the word. If you look on most adding machines, there's a little button over here and it says "clear" on it. What's that mean? It means something very, very elementary: It's simply when you press the button, the picture on the adding machine, if it's in good shape, turns from this over to simply the guy. In other words, the held-down fives would all clear. A Clear can clear his thinkingness, and his thinkingness is clear. It is cleared of these mental image pictures. Now, there isn't anything else in the mind but mental image pictures. I hate to have to say this, but that's the truth. The mind is composed of various assortments of mental image pictures accompanied by postulates saying they will do so-and-so and such-and-such and combine in such-and-such a way. Of course, there are those of us who have run into machinery in the mind, big machines of one character or another. These machines are, again, simply influencing devices.

But it makes a new world; and that's the first thing we should really realize. It doesn't just "make somebody better and cure his sciatica and...” and do something like that. What it does is make a new world! And we see a world that way. We, we see the group that we associate with in our own area, we see these people, we talk with them, we group process them, we work with them; and the next thing you know, why, they're all talking and you're very glad to talk to them and everything's going along well. If you're unlucky, why, you don't start a group and it doesn't hold together.

Now, whether you say that all there is in the mind is the picture, we still have this question – well do you consider this machinery that handles the pictures part of the pictures? I'm afraid that you'd have to, to some degree.

But you have actually created, to some degree, a new world; a world that people are alive in, a world where people answer when spoken to, a world that is very very definitely a good world to be in. Now, maybe some of the people in that have faults; maybe we're catty and say, "Well, you know, confidentially, confidentially, she always talks to the preclear when she has him on the backtrack," you know? And we say, "Well, he's all right, but I sure can't stand the way he runs 8-C." A healthy, critical world, you could say.

But an elementary look at this – and I've shown you this trick at other congresses – I'll show you again in the hopes that you will use this on groups.

But pity the poor fellow who joins a group and goes down and works in the insurance company and comes to the group once a week, and goes down and works at the insurance company and comes back to the group once a week. I wonder if it doesn't drive him slightly mad; just the contrast, one way or the other.

Works like this: What is the mind? Well, what is this thing called the mind? Well, there're only a few factors with which we are dealing. The first factor is the material universe, and if you look around you I think you will find the material universe. If you feel around you, even close up, you will sense something of the material universe. Now, why don't you do that; why don't you just look around and see the material universe.

I heard somebody say recently, "If I could just find out what their level of communication is, if I could just find out what they would talk about, if I could just get down to their level somehow or another, I wouldn't mind being with 'em!"

All right. Now, that has to do with the material universe. Ordinarily, this is covered by the sciences of physics and chemistry. They're not covering them so well these days, but they're doing all right.

It would surprise that person to know there is no level. There is a slightness of effect. You could always say, in a whisper: "I think the weather's going to be all right tomorrow." The person would probably look at you and say, "Is somebody talking to me? This has never happened before!"

I got a frantic wire the other day from a scientific congress that was occurring in, I think, Boston, no, pardon me, Boston, [accented] and they wanted to know if I had any proof I could offer that thought created matter. They'd suddenly stumbled onto some mathematical proof of this one way or the other, and they wanted to know if I had any proof of this at all, and I sent 'em back a wire telling 'em that, yes, we'd had somebody mock up large mock-ups and stuff 'em into his body and increase his weight thirty pounds in a few weeks and then, by getting the reverse flow, to reduce his weight back again. We've actually made that experiment. That's quite an experiment to make, by the way, because it takes a devilish lot of auditing and the fellow has to be awfully good at solid facsimiles and mock-ups and things of that character before you can perform the series.

Now, very often, people get an odd idea of all this. They say, "Well, I was perfectly happy. There I was, back there in the 40s, I was perfectly happy. Nobody ever bothered me; I never bothered anybody. I just went along in my own way; I wasn't at all worried about the mind or anything about it. I was happy. And look at me now! Ruined! I used to be able to live with my family. Now, I wish I could kill 'em! I'm ruined; I've been in Scientology too long."

But we have done it, taking thought alone, without increasing somebody's diet, and increasing his weight and decreasing it. So, I sent 'em this data and I got back a highly enthusiastic wire saying that my data, as sent to them, had been of great assistance, so I hope they were all edified. That's all I've heard about it.

But, fortunately, he stays right on in Scientology, when he finds out that earlier he was too apathetic to care what was going on around him. Like a log or a piece of wood drifting in the stream, he was living a life without feeling, without communication. Well, if you're going to live a life without sensation, feeling, communication, ARC, understanding and a few other minor quantities, why live?! Why live? Why not just be a – just take the cog out of the machinery that one is and just go out and lie down in a field someplace and expire, because there's no point in it; because the things I've named are the pay you get for living; and there's no other pay.

But that's the material universe. Now, it's generally solid and it has spaces in it and small fragments of particles drift through it and various phenomena occur, all upon a rather standardized agreement. You have things like gravity and all that sort of thing. Those are the laws of the physical universe. Now, man understands these fairly well. He doesn't understand the source; he doesn't understand a lot of things about it. He's made the mistake of saying, "conservation of energy." It's rather interesting; I don't know that anybody has actually really carried out a proof of conservation of energy. In other words, you burn up a piece of paper and collected all its component parts, you have the same piece of paper again in terms of weight and mass, because I don't think it'd be possible to do that. To collect the heat, take the heat, the smoke, the ash, and recondense these things again. I know if I could burn a piece of paper and then recondense all the things released from the piece of paper, I'd consider myself, well, not a genius, but pretty good.

The pay is communication, sensation, ARC, understanding, cooperative endeavor, enthusiasm over goals, activity; the feeling one is going someplace and doing something. These are the only payments that can be made to anyone for living. There are some things that try to substitute for them: mink coats, Cadillacs, and big bank accounts. Person says, "Well, if I could just make a couple of million, then I would've been paid for it." Well, you and I know the answer to that. We see some of these fellows that slaved through it for 20-25-30 years, let everything go by the boards but that first couple of million, or something like that, and there they sit in the preclear's chair with ulcers. They were paid, apparently; they were apparently paid; paid in cash – but they weren't paid in communication, sensation, understanding, feeling of a job well done, ARC. These payments they didn't get, and it made them sick! So the – is something real about living, and that something real is life. Not MEST, although MEST is a good substitute for reality.

I don't know if they've ever done this, but it's nevertheless an accepted fact; and it is the foundation on which the material universe is built – conservation of energy – in the scientific mind. His stable datum for physics, chemistry and so forth is conservation of energy. Always is here, always was here, never went no place, ain't never been no place, never will cease, ain't not begun. You get the sort of an idea? I state it grammatically like that so that you will get the degree of respect I feel for it.

Now, the funny part of it is, that if you can get paid in the commodities which I have just mentioned, you usually get paid in cash, too; and there's certainly nothing wrong in having a few hogsheads full of cash.

What it is is actually a total apathy of defeat that says, "You can't do anything about it," and maybe some people can't, but I'd consider myself invalidated if that were the case. Anyway ...

A bunch of my friends in India when I was a kid used to tell me of the horrors of material possession. I would sit there stuffing ice cream in my face in a restaurant, you know, listening to them tell about the horrors of material possession and how bad it all was, see? And I used to say, "Slurp, slurp. This guy's nuts!"

The material universe, then, is quite a subject and it lies out there and it's all full of elements and certain laws. And you could see that, so that's real interesting, but something that practically no scientists have ever done I'm going to ask you to do now: That's to locate your body. Now, if you – do you notice you have a body there?

But wherever we look in life; wherever we look, we see people who have kind of ceased to be people. They're a cogwheel or a thing. Most people are small islands of grief surrounded totally by subapathy. These men who lead lives of quiet desperation. It's said, you know, that most men – married men, lead lives of quiet desperation. Don't wake up because it would be too painful. Well, if they don't wake up let me ask you this question, "How are they going to get paid?" See, how they going to get in communication and how're they going to get any sensation and how're they going to get any understanding or cooperation or some goals up the line or a feeling of working together. How are they going to get any of these things if they cannot experience them? And if life makes you drop down to a point where you cannot experience so that you can bear it, then you have experienced the worst trick that life can play upon you. The worst trick life can play upon you is not getting shot, otherwise people wouldn't sit and watch these TV plays. I think the total plot is: Fellow walks on scene, somebody gets shot. Fellow walks on scene, somebody gets shot. It's an interesting plot.

Audience: Yeah.

But nobody would turn on TV if getting shot was so horrible that nobody could stand it. You get the idea?

Well, now, that body is an interesting thing; it's an interesting thing. It's an automaticity of one sort or another which carries on according to certain laws and so on and is composed, they say, of cells and so on. It enters into the field of biology, biophysics, medicine; these are the various fields that cover this body. I notice that they never mention art, but I have seen some bodies that I considered fairly good works of art. In fact, I've whistled at a few, and I think you girls have seen some young men that you considered works of art. So art enters into the body considerably, and also experience enters into the body. Well, a body is a mobile unit and it obeys certain laws.

Now, here we have – here we have then a situation where an individual shrinks back from experience; he shrinks from experience of any kind, and after that he can't be paid anything. There's no way to draw his pay, no way at all. If you can't experience, you can't be paid. And if you can't be paid, you can't live. And that's about the way it is.

Now, we had some idea of what was going on out here in the physical universe. Well, when we take the body, now we're not on solid ground at all. And the best we can say about it is, "You have a body." Well, just notice it and you'll agree with me. I've had people do this; the first time they ever noticed.

How does an individual get into a state where he can't be paid? By not getting paid. Isn't that weird? I mean, I – you think I'm just making a joke here and saying, "Well, that's a cute epigram or something of the sort, the way not getting paid is not to get paid," but the funny part of it is, that's all there is to it. That is all there is to it.

Now, the laws and rules that this goes along on are many and extensive, and we used to think they were very pertinent to Dianetics. They really aren't. What we were handling in Dianetics had an influence upon the body, and may have been very well some of the stuff of which a body was built, but we didn't have to worry as much about a body as we thought. The body really belongs in the field of pure creation or religion or medicine or library science, but it belongs somewhere. But the point is, you've got one, and you can experience the fact you have one. Is that right?

If you're not paid long enough, you can't draw your pay. That's the rule. It's funny, but that's the only rule there is. If you go for a long enough period of time without experiencing anything, the next time you experience something, you will find you can't experience it. It's a havingness on the subject of experience and that's all it is. Havingness and experience.

Audience: Yeah.

One of the cute tricks to play upon a thetan who is saying, "Oh, isn't it dreadful because everything is so painful! Everything that happens to me is painful. I go out in an automobile, accident, goes over a cliff: I get hurt. I – every time I turn around, I look up in the – have to pass by the hospital, and I realize all those people are in there suffering and experiencing this terrible pain." And he talks about pain, "And my mother, the pain she suffered when I was born. I know; she told me every day."

All right. So much for the body. We've knocked off, now, two parts of the problem with which we are concerned: The problem of the universe and life in it. Two elements here we've disposed of. We could count 'em. And this that I'm doing, by the way, was never done before Scientology; nobody ever said, "Well, there're this many elements and you have to study 'em in order to know about it."

It's very amusing to get this fellow and put him in a preclear chair and have him do old Expanded GITA on pain, SOP-8 1953. Very, very amusing. You have him waste pain. Just – it's a little trick you could pull on one of these guys that's protesting about hurt. You just ask him to invent a way to waste pain, or "Tell me a way to waste pain" – it doesn't much matter how you run it. You don't even have to audit this well.

All right. We got the material universe and we got a body now, okay? All right. Now, here's the third one: The mind. The mind consists of pictures, combinations of pictures, and they can be fixed or not fixed or they can be fleeting or they can be purely imagined or they can be copies of the physical universe. They can be all sorts of things. They can be hallucinatory pictures that never existed but you think they did, all sorts of combination, but the final result is that the mind consists of pictures; pictures in their action and interaction against each other. And the action of these two elements we have just named, the physical universe and the body, their action upon the pictures.

The individual says, "Well, waste pain. Give it to me; I don't want it. Yeah."

So, here's two elements and we get to this third one, the mind. All right. Can you get a picture of a cat? Do so. Get a picture of a cat. Got the cat?

"Another way to waste pain."

Audience: Yeah.

"Well, you'd inflict it on all the dead bodies in the graveyard." That's quite a standard response. He'd go on and on telling you ways to waste pain, ways to waste pain. All of a sudden, a little thought's liable to occur to him. How do you waste pain? By not experiencing it! Dreadful thought.

All right. Good enough. Now, that, in some small form, is the mind. Now, if you didn't see a cat, you just saw some blackness or something like that, you probably still have the idea of the cats on the other side of the blackness. You've still got a picture of a cat. A lot of people have got very good cats, some of 'em got very bad cats, and some cats are behaving and some cats are misbehaving. But the point is, they're mental image pictures of cats, right?

You have him waste pain a little bit further and you finally come up with a real 35-cent cognition, and he'll say, "You know, there's nothing very wrong about pain." And after a while, why, he comes through and he says, "Well, frankly, I know now why I have a bad kneecap. It's the only way I can hurt myself satisfactorily." And after a while he says, "Pain, pain slurp, slurp pain; oh, wonderful, wonderful; pain's wonderful; pain is just great; pain is the best. There sure isn't much of it in this society, is there?"

Audience: Right.

Mother tells you not to get hurt; the schoolteacher tells you not to get hurt; the cop tells you not to get hurt; the Careful Driving Association tells you not to get hurt; not to get hurt, not to get hurt; nobody's getting hurt. Gee, the good old days when nobody ever warned you, that you could just fall down steps, and everybody didn't think anything wrong with it at all. He said, "Well, he fell down steps." Nobody was critical about a thetan furnishing himself with a nice, quiet little pain spree.

Huh? All right. Now, you have the mind there in its simplest form and combination. Now, in Dianetics and Scientology we could show you some things to do with that picture of a cat which would astonish you. Put another cat in front of the cat you just mocked up; put two cats out there and hold them rigidly, facing each other.

Now, what I tell you here is true, and actually you – you should run it on somebody if you have any doubts about it, because it's one of the more fabulous mechanisms.

You get an interaction between the cats?

People don't experience pain for so long that pain becomes painful. They can't have it; they don't want it; they tell you it is very bad. The funny part of it is, if you let them waste pain for a long time, why, they come around to the point where they can have some pain. It's very fascinating. In other words, there's nothing wrong with pain; except not having any.

All right. You get all sorts of weirdities of this character in the mind. But the mind basically is just this picture that I've asked you to put out there. Got it? This really is this sort of thing. Now, you can let go of the cat if you want. But if we had a picture of a cat here, one way or the other, and this cat was always here, we would say to ourselves – we would say to ourselves, "Well, I think I would eat dinner," and we'd have a slight, tiny, little feeling that we ought to say "meow." Or we'd say, "Well, I think I'd go to bed," and the thought would occur "after I put the cat out." "I think I'll go for a drive in the car; I hope no black cats cross my track." This cat, see. Always a cat, a cat, a cat, a cat, a cat. That's the held-down five, you get the idea?

In other words, if the person doesn't have pain for a long enough period of time, then pain is something they can't have. If pain is there in abundance, they can have it.

Well, the mind enters this picture into thinkingness; you got that? Now, that is the thing we're talking about. It stores memory, it has lots of uses, but when it is a totally fixed, never banished, pc-not-aware-of-it-at-all picture of a cat, it actually enters a cat into the thinkingness of a person. So that's very elementary and it could be much more complicated than this, and has. But the basic element of the mind is this picture of a cat. We've disposed of three elements now: The material universe, the body, and the mind. What we mean by mind, when we say mind: Picture of a cat.

Well, what's the score of this fellow who tells you that life is too ugly to be lived? What's the score? What about this fellow who says, "I cannot live because life is too painful." What's he telling you? He's telling you that he hasn't lived.

All right. Get the picture of the cat back, now, or put another one there. Got that picture of a cat again?

Now, I don't say that you ought to go and smash yourself up three times a week and twice on Sundays, but if you do, at least be aware enough to experience it nicely. Don't just waste it.

Audience: Yeah.

Of course, you can get so skillful that you don't hurt yourself anymore. I got into that horrible state one time. I was riding motorcycles cross-country out in Arizona; a little light, quiet sport I used to indulge in to shake the engrams – other people's engrams out of my head. And one day I said, "I think I'll run start, stop and change; start, change and stop, SCS, as a process on this motorcycle.”

All right. Now, we ask you the sixty-four dollar question: What's looking at it? All right. You are, hmm? Well, now we have to do with thought and a thetan, and that's it. Four elements. The thing that's looking at the cat; the cat; the body and the physical universe. Those are the four elements of study, because the thing that is looking at it can also think. It doesn't need any assistance, we have found; it can create. It doesn't need any assistance in creating. It can register, it can remember, it can forget, it can forecast, it can do all sorts of things. But you could experience it right now just on the basis that it can see a cat because you can see a cat; you got the idea?

It's lots of fun out there, you know; wide-open country and there's nothing in it to hurt you but the cactus and gullies and sharp rocks and snakes and scorpions and things. And anyhow, you would just start out across country and don't know if you ever heard of this sport or not, but it's – I'm sure you have. You open up the throttle – you used to play a game called straight line, and you start from here and go to top of that hill, way over there, in a straight line with no deviation. Of course you can't see what's in between (or you pretend you can't) and you just go straight to the other point with a minimum deviation. Makes an interesting game.

Now, what is this thing? Well, the first thing we know about it is it isn't a thing. Because it could handle or create masses, meanings and mobilities, it isn't a mass, a meaning or a mobility, unless you mock it up that you call yourself Joe or Ann. You could mock up an identity that goes along with you, but this youness which looks at the cat, which influences the body, which lives in the physical universe, is the total scope of our study. Socrates would die of no work. And Aristotle would have died of horror. Herbert Spencer would've had to have taken up something else, and Spinoza, oh, yes, Spinoza.

So I said, "Well, I could win this game every time if I would take this motorbike out here in this flat space and run SCS with this motorbike." So I did. I just ran the motorbike around. I had an auditor, and he was giving me the commands. All of a sudden, a terrible disappointment came over me; awful disappointed feeling. I realized that I had the motorbike under such excellent control that it was not only improbable but impossible to have an accident with it! No slightest chance of experiencing pain. It's very funny. I didn't ride for two or three weeks.

Spinoza would've had a few things to say about this. He said, "You have neglected one thing, and that is the creator of all this." And I would've said to Spinoza, if we'd been on speaking terms, I would've said, "If you can find anywhere in this picture of the thing that looks at the cat, the cat, the body that surrounds all this, and the physical universe (the walls), if you can find anything else in here to experience that these elements cannot experience, I will accept whatever you have to offer as an addition. But so far, you have offered an idea, a creator. That's an idea. And this is capable of ideas, so therefore, we don't have any proof." And Spinoza would've had a fit. Or he would've said I was an heretic and had me burned at the stake.

After that, why, I'd got so that I could let the air half out of one tire, you know, and slip one of the chain sprockets there a little bit, you know, so it might chip off and took to riding a motorcycle again. I had audited a motorbike up to minus randomity, as we used to say.

Anyway, the point is that our sphere of interest does not have to include any factor we cannot experience. Now, we say, very well. Well, our destiny may be guided by gods, demons, devils and everything else. Sure, there are gods, demons, devils; nobody ever said there weren't. You run into 'em every once in a while, but that's in the realm of experience. Wake up in the middle of the night and have a demon breathing down your neck, why, you know what a demon is. Particularly after you've had too much to drink.

Well, now you could audit your body up to minus randomity too. But the only reason you'd be upset about minus randomity would be if you were running down your ability to experience. And if you depend on a body utterly to give you experience, why, then of course you will always have randomity with the body. You will never bring a body up to skillful management and if you totally depend on one to give you all of your sensation and experience ...

The point I'm making here is we – it is not vital that we include the factor of a creator; see, it's not vital that we include this in this experience computation.

The "only one" is in a terrible situation. He has only his body. Get the idea? He's below experience, then, isn't he, because his own body is under control, very thoroughly under control perhaps. Other people's bodies however, are not under control. So a person who is in communication and who is living is surrounded with randomity. There's all kinds of bodies around him that are not under control. If he can experience them in any way, if he can communicate with them in any way, then there's lots of experience. And if he continues to have lots of experience – experience doesn't have to be of a smash variety. That's only when a thetan, you know, becomes so anxious about experience the only experience he thinks of is being able to shoot a cop or dump a car over a cliff. He thinks that is terrific experience. If he – you know, he's on his last legs.

Now, you can go out further than that if you wish to and believe in one. But why do you have to believe in one? Now, listen, you don't believe in this stage up here; it's here. You get the idea; there is no solidity of belief in this other thing. Now, I'm not saying there is one or there isn't one, and I'm not even speaking from my viewpoint on this. I'm merely saying that these four elements of the thing that looked at the cat, the cat, the body and the physical universe take in that which we take in and work with. And, get this, we have not found any further elements necessary to the solution of the finite human problem.

But the individual – the individual who is in communication with others of course has tremendous quantities of experience, and gradually his tolerance of experience rises and rises and rises; and eventually he can tolerate almost any kind of an experience.

Now, that is quite remarkable. No other elements have been necessary than these elements, or elements of this kind or class, to the solution of the finite human problems. Well, that doesn't necessarily solve everything of all time; it doesn't tell us a lot of answers to various things. But as far as we're concerned, it goes as far as we need to go to attain this thing called a Clear.

What is the first sign you see of a break-up of an individual? He ceases to be able to experience bad luck without breaking up.

To say that we don't need to know a great deal about the creator, the supreme being, or lots of other things to get the problem into workable form is actually quite a milestone, because you'll find that early philosophy was totally involved with trying to guess the identity of something they could not sense, feel, measure, experience, and they lost themselves entirely in this morass of speculation and religious argument – ecclesiastical commotion. They finally started burning each other at the stake because they couldn't get an agreement on the subject, and when man starts burning himself because he can't agree with something of this sort, why, I'd consider he was a bit adrift, wouldn't you?

I saw a fellow one time; he wasn't too old and some banker or other had grabbed this fellow's bank as part of a chain bank. And it was robbery; there was no doubt about it, the fellow had been robbed. Everything he had in the world had been grabbed. He went into a nervous breakdown shortly afterwards. He was a young man; he had a stroke; and he hung along in that state for about 20 years and then kicked the bucket – died, I think the people in this society call it. He banged out of his head and went elsewhere.

I don't say that it's dangerous ground to speculate in it, but you don't have to. Now, you can go ahead and have God and all the rest of it; nobody's arguing with this at all. Not even trying to say, "You must not," but neither saying, "You must." Big difference there.

Well, this one experience of losing a possession had occurred in a zone of minus experience, you see. He didn't have enough experience, and all of a sudden he got this tremendous experience of loss and he went all to pieces. Just cracked up complete. I consider that very interesting. And at the time I was talking to him and first heard about this, I couldn't understand what he was protesting about! He was very skilled in handling people as a banker. It wasn't he who had failed; the bank had actually passed out of his control at the time it failed, and it was just his stock that suddenly became worthless. Broke him, but he could handle people. His friends and his personal life were all intact; he had lots of skill, he had lots of ability. I would've thought it would've been a wonderful time to go join the French Foreign Legion, or something. What a beautiful excuse to go have some experience.

There is an organization, I think they have a place over – called – I've forgotten the name of the place; it's someplace in Italy, I think. And it tells people they must. And any time you solve things with telling people, "If you don't believe, we are going to get you excommunicated," you don't have a science folks, you have a hoax. If a man cannot be persuaded by the reasonability of a thing, it ain't. As far as he's concerned, it isn't. So, why bother?

Instead of that, he had had so little experience in his life that he just sat there and went to pieces. That was about a quarter of a century ago, and I couldn't understand it when it happened. I just couldn't – I couldn't sit where I was sitting and understand thoroughly what had happened to this other fellow. Why did it affect him so much as to tear him to pieces?

Now, you can show people this: The material universe, they've got a body, they've got a picture of a cat and they look at the picture of the cat. It's the first time they've ever seen the four elements. Of course, you've seen all this trick before, but these four elements laid out in that nice parade and we say, "Well, those are the things we need necessary to handle this particular problem of human beingness or human livingness, and we need no further elements than this."

Take some admiral. You know what an admiral is, don't you? They still have them. They've gotten rid of all their ships, but they still had the admirals. And they have to have somebody to consume gold lace. And anyway, you take an admiral that's been sitting on shore base. See, shore base, shore base, shore base – years and years and years and years and years – and you all of a sudden send him to sea. He'll look at the little bit of randomity of a boat bobbing around and he'll start to get queasy at his stomach.

Now, it's necessary to know that in order to keep looking in the spheres I've just outlined for all the other things we think might be there but can't be sure about, and we'll find each one of them falls into a class.

One admiral I suddenly took to sea one day – I think he'd been on the beach for the last 20 years or something like that – he was an admiral from the Spanish-American war, I think. Anyway, this old boy, this old boy kept sending me notes in the navigation shack, trying to find out whether or not the storm was getting worse. Well listen, he was on a corvette and a corvette feels like a storm if it's going through a millpond. The boys used to paint hinges on the deck and little signs "Don't stand here or your ankles'll get broken." The engineer – the engineer had been known to say, "There is no reason why we should punch holes in the hull to take cooling water into the engines. Why not just continue to dip it up with the funnel?"

A Clear, then, is a person who can have a universe – this would be the ultimate definition – around him, you see, and have a body. No more than this; not a good universe or a clear perception of it or anything else; that was never said with regard to a Clear. Nothing said about really the condition of the body beyond this, that he had no psychosomatic illnesses. In other words, mentally caused illnesses; these were gone. No other condition of body; he wasn't – he didn't grow horns or wings or something of the sort. He had a body. And now, the important thing about the Clear: He could have a picture of a cat or not have a picture of a cat, but if he had the picture of a cat, according to our later observations here, he would have to mock it up, but it would be a good picture of a cat; you've got the idea? He doesn't have any residual automatic pictures. He's Clear. In other words, there are no pictures that jump up and modify his thinking. He has taken the responsibility for his own thinkingness. He does his own thinkingness, and this isn't done with anything but him.

The last years of service of this old admiral had been spent in a great big battleship. I'd swear, one battleship could hit another battleship and neither battleship would ever find out about it. Only time I ever saw a battleship really taking water over the bows was down off Cape Horn once. And then I only saw a picture of it, but she was taking water over the bows. This old boy, in other words, had had no experience of motion, so the little bit of motion we were making going through the Southern Sea was nothing, and he was worried about it; he thought it was a storm. It upset him. Didn't have experience, couldn't stand it.

Now, he could modify his thinkingness if he wants to, but he doesn't have to. He can resort to pictures to tell him what to think, but this is kind of odd because he knows everything that he could make a picture of; anyhow, if he's no longer holding on to pictures. So he could do this sort of thing. He could say, "I wonder what I read in that textbook," mock up a picture of the textbook and read the textbook. But of course this is funny because the truth of the matter is he read the textbook and something about him persuaded him that he had better forget the textbook. And that thing was a picture. He had a picture that told him it was better to forget the textbook than to remember it.

I wonder if that isn't what's wrong today with the bulk of America. I wonder if they haven't got it all ironed out so. I won't say that the FBI is sitting so well on crime because I think the amount of crime is on the increase. But if you have to stoop to crime just to have experience, boy are you a poverty-stricken experiencer.

Well, a Clear, in our very modern definition here, would have to a marked degree the power to forget and remember at will, but that is not included in the basic definition. A Clear is simply then a thetan who can have but need not have pictures and who knows that he's mocking them up, who doesn't then, therefore, have neuroses, psychoses or psychosomatic illnesses, which would be illnesses caused by pictures. Do you understand that? It becomes a terribly elementary thing. It doesn't even mean he's outside his head. That's a special kind of Clear; that's a Theta Clear. There're two types of Clears that've been discussed in the past. One is MEST Clear, the other is Theta Clear. Theta Clear is outside of his head and a MEST Clear is still in his head.

But I think they've got it all ironed out so that the per capita experience is very poor. Vicarious experience by television; about the best they ever get. Therefore, a little bit of something happens and it seems to be a mountain. This little bit of confusion occurs over here and it apparently is overwhelming. Somebody sneezes; major incident of the day. You get the idea? They're low on doingness because they haven't been doing.

But here's the main thing; here's the main thing that you'd associate with this definition, is the individual doesn't have obsessive data fed in all the time by mental image pictures that he is aware of but not aware of; you get the idea? His own thought patterns are not modified by pictures of experience, and that is a Clear.

Now, you could expect a change of pace in any society to bring trouble, and it has been a change of pace. There has been a change of pace in America. Gee, for a while there we had Injuns and grizzly b'ar and we didn't even have rifles to shoot them with; that was the fun, you know. We used to have – you know, a grizzly bear has a reputation of being able to stop fifteen or sixteen bullets, two or three or seven straight through the heart or brainpan and still keep on charging. Nobody told you what kind of bullets. But a grizzly bear was nice and formidable. You didn't have a good sound roof over your head; even though you had a professional roof, you spent most of the time carrying pans up and down to the attic.

Now, how do you create a Clear? Well, boy, that's so easy today. To think how hard we worked, how we slaved to create Clears, and how many techniques and processes we've gone through on this Project Clear. We even sort of went into apathy about it about 1954, and I don't think you've heard much mention of it until all of a sudden I brightly and alertly and suddenly sat up and said, "Project Clear, let's go!" It was without – it was a change of pace, that's for sure.

I mean, there's – things were going on. You had Injuns and floods and epidemics and above all that, you didn't have enough communication so the government could keep any law and order. The government was helpless. Government sends a letter out to the Dakota Territory saying "Wild Bill Hickock will cease and desist," you know. They just didn't do it; they were just in apathy about it. They couldn't experience all the experiences in the country, so they didn't try to govern them.

This one we didn't need. We didn't need to say anything more about Clear. Everybody was getting along perfectly happy; they'd forgotten it, forgiven it. They'd forgiven me for getting the idea, which I think was darn nice of 'em, by the way. But I hadn't forgotten, and I'd been lying in wait, stealthily. Waiting, waiting for a moment to pounce.

And everywhere it was a near thing. Life was a near thing. You heard me say that the human body is geared up to barely miss death three times a day, and it is. It's over a long period of time. But life in America in the early days was a near thing, and now it isn't even a thing. What experience – what experience do you think that somebody has – oh, I don't know, doing something in an office? One week to the next, week after week after week, there're very few experiences, very little change of pace. What's the final result of this? A change of pace throws him.

Now, truth of the matter is, Scientology has never bloomed and blossomed with a brass-band approach since 1952, 53; just never has. Fifty-three was when it was really in swing. Simply because I never let it. Now, this is an interesting confession to make, right here in front of you and God and everybody. But, boy, I had a curb bit on that thing that tight, and I'll tell you why: Because a sudden and sweeping popularity of this subject, such as Dianetics experienced, would have interrupted, as Dianetics did, the sedate and even course of investigation and compilation of data and the discovery of what really made things tick. And if Scientology had ever been let out of hand so that all of a sudden there were brass bands going on at every corner, selfishly I can tell you I wouldn't have gotten my work done.

Now, it isn't really that we have to have tremendous quantities of experience, but we do have to have a bit of change of pace. Here was America living high and dangerously, then they got Roosevelt. You can't even starve to death in the country today! See, here was everybody on his own, free enterprise, get in there, do or die, millionaire today and a bum tomorrow, bum today and a millionaire tomorrow; office boy to president, president to office boy. Randomity.

That's about what it amounts to. Because I knew approximately where we were going, and I knew we weren't there. I knew that we were better off than man had ever been off on the subject of the mind; we knew more, we were doing more things, we were more able, we were learning all the time new things, we were progressing regularly and well; but we weren't there. We just weren't there. I couldn't give you and rattle off to you in 30 seconds a definition of exactly where a person was going. I could've said, "Well, he's a Clear," but that was not an action definition. That is a state, not the way to get there. That was the location in space, not the road map of how to arrive.

Here we went. Game, lots of it, and all of a sudden and then, now it's in this nice low plane: sit and look at TV. That can be a deadly thing.

Imagine me, I was sitting back here all this time, drawing this road map like mad; we already knew – there, see? Working like mad to finish a road map. Well, if Scientology had ever started to boom beyond control so that it would've overflooded every boundary and border of orderly progress, I'm afraid I would've been the first one to sit down and scream, and said, "No! Let's not be foolish here. Let's have a few things in the bag."

But what if the reverse happens? We're going along here, looking at TV and all of a sudden something happens! It's too much change of pace – too much change of pace. And as a result, it is debilitating as plus to minus, minus to plus. Here over a long period of time, nothing happened. Then all of a sudden, something happens. Guy doesn't go up here, back onto that new emergency plane; he goes lower. Sort of dangerous not to let your population have any excitement. 'Tis. Sort of dangerous to prevent everything everywhere from happening.

These things we have to have. We have to know how to train an auditor. We have to be able to take anybody, even a psychologist – . You think that's a joke, but anybody that's been in the Academy knows that it's a horrible fact. He has been untrained as a Scientologist so that we have to really bring him back up to a human being and then train him. But we had to have things that would train even him, otherwise we'd throw away the bulk of the people interested in the mind in the United States. That would've been a hell of a loss, wouldn't it have.

In the old days, a Dianetic Auditor actually wiped out experience in the preclear. All right. It was very efficacious. But as far as the general morale of the preclear was concerned, he was looking for experience in his mind because he didn't have it in his environment. Therefore, the auditor was performing a service which was distinctly different from therapy. He was letting the guy dig up some old experience just so he'd have something like his idea of how much experience he ought to have. Do you get the idea?

Of course, there're a lot of us say, "No loss at all." But we needed to know how to train people. Well, we didn't have that until 56 – middle of 56 started to really get our teeth into it and get going well. But we were still learning like mad in the middle of 57. We're still learning, but the pressure is off. I mean, we know that, worst comes to worst on almost any point, we've got five or six different answers that we can throw into the breech. You know, if anything goes entirely wrong, or something like that, with a student, we can do something.

And there's many a person got audited just to have some experience. See that? Many a person got audited for that reason alone. Somebody came in London one day and – "I'm perfectly all right. I've had about 125 hours of auditing and I'm in very good shape and I don't have my illnesses anymore, but I keep hearing about this thing called an engram." She'd been audited by Scientology and she was in good shape, but she had never run an engram. And actually, made a big sales talk with the Director of Processing over there, just to be permitted to lie down on a couch and have an engram run. And she did for about nine or ten hours have this engram run, and she was happy as could be and went out and she was very cheerful about the whole thing. She didn't need it for her health; she just wanted this little additional experience, don't you see?

Here's the interesting thing, then. If we couldn't train a Scientologist to audit and audit well and successfully along the line, then it wouldn't matter what he knew. What he knew would've been a dead loss.

Well, we look over our national life, we could see what would happen in the face of a sudden cataclysm, a sudden emergency descending upon the country at large. Those people who had been sitting around doing nothing (minus experience) to a point where they wanted no experience at all, would not be able to handle themselves or the cataclysm. They would go down, they would go under; and we would be left with some shattered, nervous wrecks. But other people, who had a different idea – and after all, everything is basically ideas – another person who had an idea that a few cataclysms he could use, he probably wouldn't go under; he'd probably start living. You get the idea? So some of the populace would go down and some of the populace would come up.

Now, we had to train in such a way that we didn't make a little martinet that went through a certain number of answers. We had to train him in the fundamentals that he was built with, his own fundamentals of beingness so as to expand that beingness and ability; and if we could do that, we had an auditor who could think, who could learn and who could operate.

We have it in our hands, in Scientology, to determine which part goes down and which part comes up. An interesting responsibility, let me assure you. Since if we don't take responsibility for it, probably get us, too. But let's take a – let's take a look at this, in terms of plus and minus experience in life. You say, "I can't understand why this – why this dear old lady went to pieces. After all, she led a very sheltered life, none of these criminal influences or insane influences ever came near her, and all she did was sit in her kitchen. And then later on, when she got lots of help, she did nothing but sit in her sitting room and knit, and so forth. And nothing happened, and all of a sudden she went crazy!" Yeah but remember, that nothing happened is somebody else's evaluation; somebody else's evaluation. Maybe according to her, something fantastic happened. Maybe her best china teacup got knocked off by the dog, see? And this appeared enormous to her in contrast with the life she'd been living. Her operating climate was so low and slow that she crashed when she hit a blade of grass, do you see?

All right. Well, we've got the mechanics of that pretty well straightened out, but how about an organization, huh? You think I was gonna sit in there forever with these big piles of – I'm a martyr! Most people are martyred after they've done something, you see, but I've been martyred here for years by piles of paper that high, paper, paper, paper. Dispatches, letters, reports.

Now, somebody else was just doing fine; he was flying low and slow in another fashion. He was flying dangerously indeed. He was skidding around economic corners the like of which nobody ever heard of It was always a question on Monday whether or not there would be any groceries by Saturday. He was operating on the – on the idea that the lower the income the higher the finance, and boy – his was high. He had about three girls on the string, including his wife. That kept him excited, too. There was nothing immoral about it; he just hadn't ever quite made up his mind. He had managed to infuriate his rich uncle, who was delaying for him at every corner and had made pals out of some bums that he didn't like.

Somebody comes in – used to come into the office to see me and I'd part the papers like this and look out of the peephole at him, and so on. On business matters, if you please, on any kind of activity that you could name except research, I never minded research papers; that was my job. But business, you know, buying desks and nonsense of this character. Ah, we didn't have organization down, not even vaguely.

And one fine day, we put him in the parlor and tell him to knit, and he goes nuts! Don't you see? Here he is, living a tremendously exciting, rah-rahrah life and all of a sudden, why, we say, "Sit there and knit, brother." He goes pshoooo! We say, "But nothing happened to him; we tried to make life easy for him. We tried to take care of him. I'm sure he was better off I'm sure that he was better off not having all those horrible worries that he had before." Who called them worries? They might not have been worries to him.

Now, you look at this Washington organization now; if you were to go over to London and look at London, and London's just had a little recent upheaval. We changed Association Secretaries, which always causes randomity of some sort, but you'd find a pretty smooth-running organization sitting over there in London right this minute, and I haven't been there for a year. You get the idea? Almost a year; I was back there in April, a little while. But I haven't been there to work at it since October of 1956, and it's running just fine, fine. It's doing its job; everybody's doing his job well.

So as we look at life, it is very hard to determine what is a good life and what is a bad life. As far as I could say, a life is mostly determined by enough activity to suit the individual and not too much change of pace from that activity. Well, if the fellow's a trapeze artist in a circus or a test pilot or something like that – why, that's the amount of activity which he really should continue and maintain.

Well, why is this a triumph? You say, "Well, General Motors's been doin' it for years! General Electric, Prudential Insurance, they all got it licked!" Listen: None of those jokers could've licked a Scientology organization. Now, you think that is a funny statement, but it happens to be a very true one, because their organizations look like about three kids' blocks piled in a row compared to a Scientology organization. Scientology organization is about the most complicated thing you ever had anything to do with. It is so complicated that only a good auditor survives long on staff. It's complicated.

We find in this that we have one tremendously destructive idea in the country today called "retirement." How we must hate our older people to want to kill them off; because that is the surest way to do it. This fellow's living a busy life and all of a sudden we say, "You should think about retirement. Someday you ought to retire; someday you ought to retire; someday you ought to retire." After this, he says, "Yes, someday I ought to retire; someday I ought to retire." He's groggy on the subject and one day he retires, and we get him – very much lower yearly level of average life expectancy of retired men, don't you see? Change of pace killed him.

I'm not trying to impress you with the fact, but we run about 15 businesses at once, and practically anybody in the organization has got to sort of pitch the answers straight up.

So, I suppose the one thing that you would try to achieve in life would be enough activity to suit you and to maintain that change of pace; maintain that pace, because it itself is a change of pace.

Now, how do you run such a thing? What is the pattern on which it operates? You probably aren't convinced, but in most organizations, the post of shipping clerk is supposed to be a very lowly post; and the shipping clerk walks over and he picks up an invoice, looks at it, reads the number off of it and goes over here, takes the item off the shelf; brings it down here, wraps it, puts it through a postage meter and goes out to mail. He goes over here and he takes his inventory books and he sees he's short on this many items and he orders 'em. And his job's done.

But the funny part of it is, is we're living in a world today that is changing its pace at every turn. All of a sudden our old enemies of death in old age and starvation and so forth, they're gone and nothing else is particularly replacing that. And then we have inflation, deflation, economics and pretty soon we're all worrying about the government or something like that. But we ourselves are not as active as we were once, on our own economic fronts. We'd sort of fight the government partly at the same time, too.

He doesn't manufacture the books, or see to their manufacture, or have anything to do with that. He certainly doesn't manufacture tapes. He certainly doesn't buy all sorts of commodities of one sort or another, and he certainly doesn't keep check on people's memberships. He doesn't double in brass in a dozen other capacities like a Scientology Shipping Clerk does. And it isn't because we are simply organizing it sloppily. Actually, it's about the neatest-looking shipping department you ever had anything to do with. But it's just got so many things that happen in the shipping department, for lack of any other place to have them happen, that the guy's gotta be a confounded raving genius to run the joint, just the shipping clerk. So it has to really have a pattern.

That pace has changed. The world is facing probably one of the greatest cataclysms she will have known in the last few thousand years in the next – probably immediately upon us – war, which will change the lot of the survivors from a civilized state to barbarism. That probably will be the main effect; you'll probably go back to carrying water in a pail, if you're still there. A change of pace can occur here again. There's been changes of pace from savage America to civilized America. Now, there'll probably be a change to something, for a while at least, that'll have made it very well look like Stone Age America. And the final thing is that we aren't trying ourselves to arrange any pace in life. We're trying to increase the adaptability of individuals so they can meet what comes, and so, of all things, they can live more.

Now, hardly anybody here is without business experience of one kind or another. You know that a hospital is very easy to run. Well, you know, a hospital's hard to run, okay. But what's it consist of? Well, it consists of some doctors and some nurses and some rooms and you put people in, you have administration cards and a filing system and you have a laboratory, vestments, and it all goes on these routes and it's – . Boy, if we only had to run just a hospital. Gee, wouldn't that be lovely? If there was no more activity involved in the organization than the hospital -. A hospital-type organization would compare to the HGC, and the HGC has almost as much administration as a hospital. And if it blew up any in size so that we were getting 40 or 50 preclears a week, it'd be far more complicated than a hospital, because patients in a hospital are not permitted to have opinions.

An individual who cannot live can't be paid. An individual who can't experience changes of pace successfully can't live. So our mission is to increase the livability of people, more than anything else. That we have been doing now for several years. In the next couple of lectures I'll be telling you how we are doing that successfully right now with Project Clear.

We have all the administration and so forth, in the final analysis, in embryonic form, in the HGC; but that's running right alongside of the Academy, which has all the administration that any school has to have. Now, you just start adding this up. A research department, a testing department, a this department, a that department; and the first thing you know, you're looking at one of the most complicated businesses. And we didn't find out until recently, until we had it licked, that it was one of the most complicated businesses that anybody ever looked at; and that was why, whenever we have brought in a good businessman from the outside, the guy has just sunk. He's just gone down, and there was a little bubble on top of the water with the words "glug" coming out of it.

Thank you.

He actually has – we've had some very good ones, and they've really just gone by the boards: They just couldn't face it.

So we thought that we were being complicated and peculiar. We thought that we were being odd, you see; we just thought that we didn't know our business. And we worked and worked and worked to get some sort of organizational form that'd function, and when we finally got the whole thing organized, we found out that we were running one of the most complicated businesses in existence. Man, it's complicated and if we hadn't had that complication licked and if we had gone and experienced a tremendous wave of popularity, we would've gone down with the most resounding crash you had ever heard of. We couldn't have stood the traffic. In other words, we had to have the organizations organized in such a way that everybody had means of handling things.

Now, people in the organizations have hats. A man can actually be relieved off of a post and take over another post, and somebody can take over his post without causing very much randomity. In other words, it's pretty smooth – smooth-looking picture now; it's easy to handle.

But it was a complicated business and we didn't even know it. We were running more darn separate functions and finding each function necessary. Why? Because we're an embryonic civilization. We don't look at things or do things the way the civilization around us is looking at things and doing things. So therefore we have to take unto ourselves those functions which cannot be performed for us, and these are legion.

So, what do we have here? What do we have here? A tremendous number of technologies that had nothing to do with research and investigation had to be developed before we could get anywhere. Now, all of these or the major ones have been developed and patterns exist for their continuance, so only now it is safe to do something in the form of research and investigation and say, "Well, here we are." See, it's only necessary to be up to snuff so that we don't have any huge backlog of research to do; tremendous numbers of unsolved problems that we will suddenly confront and go appetite over tin cup with in the middle of a tremendous popularity. It would be fatal to get a tremendous popularity and find out that nine-tenths of the people of the United States had lopsided epicenters. We may have only collected the people who didn't have lopsided epicenters. Maybe you're the only people in the world that don't have lopsided epicenters, see? You can actually get into some peculiar ones.

Now, you think that's funny. I didn't know anybody in the whole world had a black field. The total innocence with which I engaged upon Dianetic processing. I actually handled a tremendous number of cases, from 47 to 49, lots of cases, cases, cases, cases and nobody ever walked up that had a black field or an invisible field. They all had a field. They could all see pictures. And some of 'em were afraid of their pictures and some pictures were dim and some pictures were sharp; so I simply educated them to have good pictures, audited 'em and found out later on that I simply gave them tremendous confidence with regard to their pictures, the pictures blew and they didn't have pictures anymore and I had Clears!

And then, the spring of 1950 – sounds incredible, but that's why I say, you may be the only people in the world that don't have lopsided epicenters. Spring of 1950 we got practically nothing but dub-ins and black fields. Hmm.

We had one fellow that – we'd keep asking him to – what he was looking at and tell him to get a picture of something or a picture of something else, and he kept saying, "Yes," and he said, "Yes" for a week and then we finally found out we were talking to a circuit and he hadn't seen a picture yet. So of course he hadn't had any alleviation – nothing had been erased.

Imagine. Well, if we had in the future a possibility of this sort of thing occurring to us, if we hadn't taken care of such random factors well in advance, then we would not be at liberty to be very popular. Do you see that? We could get a sudden sweep, and we weren't up to it with research, we'd never covered it; we could get wiped out, see?

So, every time you engaged in a tremendous popularity of the subject, you were also flirting with the destruction of the subject, as long as it wasn't well formed. Do you get the idea? Just like building castles in sand, till you get a little mortar mixed up in 'em so they set right, why, don't let any waves near 'em.

Now, where do we suddenly ease off? Well, it's sort of like watching a continued picture, you know: You finally get to the place where you came in. And that place is of course this magic word "Clear." You came in with Clear, I hope you don't go out with one.

Now, here – here we have attained this rather easily. I run a fantastic risk, by the way, with any of this material, and so do you. You're liable to go along for years being the people who know all about it; but what you've finally turned out is sufficiently simple that people turn around and look at you and say, "Oh, is that all you know!" We're not in that position yet, believe me.

But this whole business of Clear and clearing people and so on has been a dream of many years, and a nightmare of some of those years. Why people suddenly insisted on having totally held-down fives and nothing else, I wouldn't know. Past track: Oh, it was a terrible thing that happened in July of 1950; it was worse than spring of 1950; spring I just got all the black cases in the US; they all arrived the same day, I think. I never seen one before; I hadn't a clue – totally outside of any experience I had.

Actually, it wasn't till 55 I got this black case wrapped up. Wrapping it up's very easy: Have 'em mock up blackness in the blackness and shove it into the body. And even though he goes anaten, you keep on auditing him. Even though he goes unconscious, you keep giving the commands, he keeps doing it and eventually he remedies havingness of blackness. If this doesn't work, get some black objects and have him keep 'em from going away. It wasn't even anything to worry about!

The guy comes up with some thin little things that he says, "Yeah, I guess that's a picture." And after a while, why, he puts up a cat and he says "Dyah!" And you say, "What's the matter?"

"Hyoo!"

You say, "What's the matter?"

"Well, lllloo!"

And you say, "Tell me what is happening."

He says, "Well, a horrible monster just appeared in front of me!" He'd gotten his first picture; up till that time he was guessing.

Now, in the middle of 1950, this terrible thing called "past lives" suddenly showed up. From the first thing that happened – one of the first things that happened is the Foundation directors had a total blast-out on the whole subject because they wanted to pass a resolution forbidding anybody to mention them, investigate them, or look at them any further. I consider it very interesting. That was the beginning and the end of my participation in Foundations. That was an interesting thing for anybody – any board of directors of a (quote) "Research Foundation" to do, to forbid the investigation of a certain field. That was because it got over into the schools and got the students excited, 'cause everybody could get a past life, evidently, even when they couldn't get a present one.

This, by the way culminated – you might not ever have connected the things up, but this culminated really in Bridey Murphy that you heard so much about. And everybody was saying, "Why don't we get in on the Bridey Murphy bandwagon?" And I sat back and laughed very quietly, "Whose bandwagon was Bridey Murphy on?"

Now, here's the main thing about past lives, and we ran this in the London Express: It isn't getting people into 'em, it's getting them out of them! It isn't their rarity, it's their tremendous abundance; they're all over the place!

This fellow is sitting there looking at a picture of a revolutionary British soldier, you know; he's looking at this picture, he sees it quite often. Nobody ever asked this question because nobody knew about mental image pictures; everybody thought that nobody looked at anything, because this opinion was arrived at by people who were totally black fives. You see, we never got any psychologists in to amount to anything before the spring of 50, and a lot of these people are totally black.

All right. Now here we've got this person looking at the picture; there he is looking at the picture all the time. It never occurs to him that it's a picture he made of something and that it really happened, and what that he pronounces as hallucination, delusion or imagination is too often horribly factual.

Now, you start fishing around with this just a little bit, and he is rather amazed, the first time this picture has ever been joggled, to have the British soldier raise his tower musket and blow the preclear's silly head off! That's why he had it arrested just before the point, see? All you had to do as an auditor was move him a little further on the scene and boom!

Now, where we get a thing like all of a sudden past lives, why, today it would cause us no concern at all. We've been through all that, brother, have we been through all that. Any old-time auditor can tell you more about the past track and American history and Roman history and Grecian history and Chaldean and Babylonian history and history on a planet 200,000 years ago and what they do in space opera and how psychiatrists acted 8 billion years ago and so forth; and of course the society at large, being rather stupid, would sit there with its mouth open and say, "What are you talking about?" Heh, go away with stomachaches, bullet holes in their backs, spear ... That's of course why they're saying, "What are you talking about?" They just don't like the sensation of that spear going straight on through.

Or the meteorites coming in through the windshield as you stand on the bridge. They don't like that, so they say, "What are you talking about? It's all unreal to me." And you say, if you were real mean, you'd-all-only have to say, "I'm talking about those meteorites coming straight on through the bridge shield."

And they'd say, "What do mean?"

"The meteorites coming in straight on through."

And the guy says – he'd say, "I don't know what you mean – only I now don't have a head."

Well, these pieces of randomness we are not likely to run into. We've got this pretty well taped; we know where we're going and we're at a good safe foundation in the field of search, and probably will spend most of our time now researching what's been searched.

Anyway, it's safe to go someplace with this idea of Clear, so in the next hour I'll tell you how to get there.

Thank you.