CONFRONTING | THE STORY OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY |
Well, that does my heart good; I see I'm welcome in Great Britain still. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, have we got a congress here? | |
& Well, have you got a congress yet? | Audience: Yes! |
& Audience: Yes! | Very good. Very good. |
& No kidding. Really got a congress? | I'd like to tell you today, here at this first lecture, I'd like to tell you something of the story of Dianetics and Scientology. Some things I've never I confided to anyone before. Would you like to hear that? |
& Audience: Yes! | Audience: Yes. |
& Are you here? | Well, the start of this story is probably a long, long time ago. And those who don't believe in past lives will not be offended, because we won't go that far back. We'll just take this lifetime. |
& Audience: Yes! | The story actually starts back when I was about twelve years old and I met one of the great men of Freudian analysis - a Commander Thompson. He was a very great man, an explorer And it's very fit that we mention his name here in this particular hall, because after all, all the great explorers of Great Britain more or less are haloed here. |
& Well, I could start auditing you at this time, but I won't. | And this man was responsible for a great many discoveries out through the world, hut he was also interested in the human mind, and his name, as I said, was Thompson. He was a commander in the United States Navy and his enemies all called him Crazy Thompson and his friends called him Snake Thompson. |
& Okay. Right now, we're again at that impasse that I haven't a clue what I should be talking to you about now. I just - one of these things, you know? And I just sit up night after night after night, you know, preparing notes, preparing notes, preparing notes. | He was a very careless man. He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department. He was rather looked down on. But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud's. He had no boys of his own, and when he saw me - a defenseless character - and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over. |
& However, a thought does occur to me; a thought does occur to me that you might like to hear about the clearing technique of 1947 Would you like to hear about that? | What impressed me: He had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did to me was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho .... |
Audience: Yes. | Anyway; at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where they have all the books on everything, he started shoving my nose into an education in the field of the mind. Now, that's a very unusual thing to do, to take a twelve-year-old boy and start doing something with the mind. But he really got me interested in the subject - up to the point where I was pretty sure that Freud didn't know what he was talking about. |
& Now, I can assure you that somebody is going to go and try to do this, but if that happens, why - and you're the pc - why, you send him down to the HASI and we will have replayed the first and second lectures of this congress which will be there and available on tape, you see? | But actually Commander Thompson had a very open mind on this, and he used to tell me, „Well, if it's not true for you, it's not true.“ And I found out that he got this from a fellow named Gautama Siddhartha. Now, you really don't know Gautama Siddhartha as a man (but that's all he was) because better than two-thirds of the world population now considers him, a god. But the first thing that Gautama Siddhartha ever said about his own work was that he was just a man. This he tried to make very plain. And the other lesson, back there about 600 B.C., that he taught everyone is that if it isn't true for you, it isn't true. It was probably the first time that statement was ever made in this rather didactic universe. I find it's a very good statement. It agreed with my own personal philosophy very well, because if there's anybody in the world that's calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn't want to believe, it is I. |
& But send that auditor down to listen to the first two lectures concerning the skill required of the auditor, because to run this one I'm just talking to you about - I don't know how I ran it myself. How I got this good, I don't know. I look back with considerable awe and say, „Boy, how my auditing has deteriorated.“ | But on this very impressionable background I found, at least, that somebody had a hope that something could be done in the field of the human mind. And I think that was Freud's great contribution - that something could be done about the mind, Now, that doesn't mean - that doesn't mean, of course, absolutely and accurately that something will be done about the mind. It just means that there's a hope that something could be done, and I believe Freud really deserves a great niche in history just for that all by itself. Regardless of what he thought could be done with the mind or how he thought it could be done, he was really the first man that ever stood up and said there was hope for it without whips, clubs, straitjackets and the rest of the paraphernalia by which certain strata of this universe attempt to (quote) cure (unquote) insanity. |
& By the way, about a year or so ago, I ran several sessions exactly using the TRs, not varying one hair on the TRs, you know. Doing each part of the auditing session perfectly, you know, right down the groove. Total TRs, see. Pc got twice as well. Well, anyhow... | Now, there was a great humanitarian. That he concentrated so thoroughly upon sex was simply, I believe, a symptom of his own times. And I believe that the Victorian era, which was just ending at that time, had impressed everyone with this idea that sex was the main hidden thing. And in some other period, if you had something on the order of eatingness, you see, you'd find a Freudian philosophy - type of philosophy - invented on the subject of eatingness. You see, eating was very bad, it was very hidden, and therefore aberrated everyone. You see how that could be? |
What it required - what it required to use this technique was undoubtedly an understanding which engulfed even me. So, let's go on with this and take a look at what it was. Today we will call it by a name, and you will hear more of this today. It's called confrontingness. You'll hear a great deal of this subject of confrontingness. As a matter of fact, the whole theory of auditing can be derived from and based on this thing called confrontingness. Very interesting - very interesting subject. It's TR 0. That's the first thing you ask a student who is learning to be an auditor to do. First thing you ask him to do is actually almost the answer to everything. It weaves in as every - is part of every single TR. If you don't have TR 0 running - which is confrontingness, confronting the pc - running at the same time you have TR 2, which is acknowledgment, you don't get any TR 2. It's as easy as this, you see. TR 0 is part of each other thing. | And some other society which had nothing in the world and was totally dedicated to mystery, you see, would have a big cult on the subject of „mystery is something you must hide, so therefore all is mystery.“ And I believe the US and - particularly, and Europe in a much earlier period went through a mystery band. Religion, you know. And somebody in some other age might say that all that is wrong with man is religion, because it would be the most hidden thing - the one thing that you must never admit to would be sin. |
And so it becomes part of everything there is in the mind. It becomes a datum really of comparable magnitude to survival. It's a great big important datum, confrontingness. Now, you can think at this moment of two or three things which you wouldn't want to have to confront in the next couple seconds. Think of some. Think of something that you really hate to confront in the next couple or seconds. You got some? | And I suppose that the general semanticist, operating in the world of symbols, would hold out that symbols themselves, on a little bit higher band, would be the only thing wrong with people. And you could write a whole Freudian analysis around the subject of symbols, you see? And a Little bit higher, some working society might possibly come forth with, „All that's wrong with man is effort.“ And some other society might come out, or some other man or philosopher in that society might say, „The only thing that's wrong with man is emotion.“ And somebody else might say, „Well, the only thing wrong with man is thought.“ |
Audience: Yes. | And you would have the - really, the Know to Mystery Scale represented on every hand; that that which is the most repressed in the society, and that which is talked about the least, is that thing which becomes wrong with the society. And it would all break down to the fact „That thing which you mustn't communicate is what is wrong.“ |
You thought of some? | Actually, that's all I ever got out of Freudian analysis, beyond the fact that if people remembered things they occasionally got well. And following this line along the line as the years went on, I found my own environment changed. And this environment became more and more complex as far as I was concerned. My father was an officer in the Navy, and he moved me from here to there. And I don't think to this day I've ever had a course in short division. It's quite remarkable. It's sometimes called to my attention by my banker that my arithmetic.... |
Audience: Yes. | But anyway, here we have a picture of a young man who was being moved around and seeing new and strange things and talking to interesting and new and strange people. And do you know that all that period it never occurred to me - never, never occurred to me - that somewhere there wasn't the total answer. This was not something I knew; I thought that everybody had the answer to this, but I was the stupid one. You know, I was the only fellow that was left out in the cold. |
Aw, there's a couple of you dogging off here. I don't permit that. All right. Now, you have got a couple of things, hm? | So I went around studying this and that, and I found myself in Asia and found myself able to contact and operate in the field of Asian mysticism. I studied quite a bit of mysticism. I'm always - I'm always offering staffs to do the Indian rope trick. I know how to do the Indian rope trick and I'm always making it - making a bid to do this. The only proviso I put on the line is there must be a very few of them that I pick out, and the Fee is a hundred dollars per person, and there must be no cameras present. The only people broadly for whom I have ever done the Indian rope trick widely, boldly and successfully has been a group of psychiatrists. |
Audience: Yes. | You'll find, by the way, that the psychiatrists in the United States are of two opinions - two opinions. One, that Dianetics and Scientology are - they're very bad. They cut into their business, so it's very bad. They're very bad. And that it's regrettable that Hubbard is crazy, because he's a wonderful psychotherapist. And anything that happens in Dianetics and Scientology is because Hubbard is such an expert psychotherapist, you see, but the subject itself has nothing to do with it. Any time you tell a cult - I beg your pardon - any time - excuse me. Any time you tell a profession broadly - any time you tell a profession that anybody can do their job, you're in trouble. And that's in effect what the first book on Dianetics says. Well, the years rolled along - the years rolled along and this was a light hobby as far as I was concerned. Didn't occupy very much of things. I was a fiction writer, I enjoyed myself wonderfully at fiction writing and life was going along wonderfully. That's even before I was in college. |
Why? Come on, let's think this thing over again. Why? Why would you hate to confront these things? | When I got in college I made a certain series of tests and experiments and found out that poetry, of all things, seemed to be poetry in every language to everybody else. That was a very peculiar Thing. Why is it that poetry - why is it that poetry is that musical rhythm which communicates? Why should it communicate? You read somebody a poem in Japanese, he can't speak Japanese, he says, „Aha,“ he says, „that's poetry.“ Why should he understand poetry in Japanese? Similarly, you read somebody almost any poetry but some of the more „modern“ poets in any other language and you'll find out they'll agree that this thing is poetry. |
Now look, I'm talking about you, not your ornaments. All thetans walk around carrying an ornament known as a body, and they put ornaments on it known as clothes. Now that they've put clothes on it, Freudian psychoanalysis works sometimes. They collect odds and ends and bits and pieces They use hire purchase and keep collecting things, you know? They collect cuff links and earrings and gold teeth. Girl up in the Klondike one time collected totally diamond teeth all the way across the front. She wanted a flashing smile and she got one. | And this puzzled me. What is in the brain, the head, the makeup of man that makes him recognize poetry? So I tested it all out on a Koenig photometer - very elaborate physical experiments - and found out that poems in Japanese (which I spoke at the time and have forgotten since), poems in English - I got ahold of an Indian student, got him to come over and recite some Indian poetry - all made the same curve on a Koenig photometer. And I said, „Isn't this wonderful? We have discovered something - the aesthetic of language - which records on a physical instrument. And isn't this beautiful? And the people who know all about it over there in the psychology department had better know that you can test all this on a Koenig photometer.“ And at that moment I fell off the cliff. |
Now, think of those things now that you thought that you wouldn't like to confront. Now, why wouldn't you like to confront them? Now, is it true that you - that you couldn't confront them? Or would it be that if you, as a body, confronted them with your diamond teeth and your clothes and your ornaments and that sort of thing, you'd go poof or something would happen to you. Isn't that correct? | I went over for the first time to the psychology department and found out for the first time in my life that there isn't anybody who knows all about it on Earth. That was a shock to me. You see, I'd never seen a mystic do anything but practice with confidence. And I had never seen an engineer express anything but confidence and know]edge of his subject when he was building railroad bridges. And I was used to a world where men were expert, where they were positive, where they could get results, make an effect and knew their business. And I had just put a foot in a morass which not only didn't know, but didn't care to know, really. And these experiments were simply looked at: „Well, that's quite interesting. Why did you do that?“ |
Audience: Yes. | Well, I got interested enough after that ... There were some people - there were some people around who would do mathematics for me, so I did their psychology and English for them, and that's how I got through college because I was never in class. And I used to read the psychology textbooks and go over and take their examinations for them because it was very easy. There was nothing to it. All you had to do was name the parts of the brains and the parts of the heart. I don't know what the parts of the heart have to do with it, but it was in the textbook. And there was no attempt to understand thinkingness, there was just some wiggle-wiggles that synapsed on the relays and you put the rat through the maze and that was it. I'm being very sarcastic; there's undoubtedly more to psychology than that. But none of it includes any understanding. |
It's the ornament that would get hurt, right? And because you're busily protecting the ornament, you, by various considerations, would hurt like hell, probably. Isn't that right? | In other words, here was a segment of human knowledge which was letting us all down. And at that moment I got very interested. It wasn't my ignorance of the subject. I studied hard before I found out that what those professors were telling me was true in their own mind: that there was no hope for it, that you could never change anybody, that people with an IQ retained that IQ forever and they'd had it, that stupid people remained stupid people and unable people remained unable people - and clever people were all crazy. And it was the degree of stuckness that they had on this subject of change in the human mind that particularly annoyed me. How stuck can anyone get? |
Audience: Yeah. | I'd say „But look, I know when I go to class to take an examination ...” By the way, it was Prohibition in those days way back when, so of course there was much more drinking done. And I used to occasionally go out with some of my friends who were mostly newspaper reporters and so on, and we'd have a few drinks of bathtub gin brought in by the very best gangsters. And the next morning I knew for sure I was awful stupid. So I told them, „Look, if you could take a few drinks on the night before and become stupid the next morning, haven't you changed your intelligence?“ And they said, „That has nothing to do with it.“ |
Huh? So, this hurting like the dickens would keep you immediately informed of the fact that you weren't protecting the diamond bracelet, see? You get the idea? | So here was a segment of human knowledge which, as far as I was concerned, was left wide open. |
Audience: Yes. | I kept on writing. I wrote more and more successfully. Everything was going along fine. Went down to Hollywood, wrote pictures, things like this. Had a very full life, as a matter of fact, professionally. And all the time I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about. And I couldn't even tell my friends; they didn't understand. They said, „Here's Hubbard, he's leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff.“ They said - couldn't understand, every time I'd try to mention it, why I would be interested in anybody's mind or anybody's life. I used to plague them most awfully and ask them embarrassing questions. |
It's a warning mechanism. You'd say, „This robot which I carry around is so valuable that I will have an advance warning system which when anything taps it which would destroy it, if it kept on, I will hurt.“ Do you know that a body never hurts? It's just you that hurts. Next time you have a tooth-ache, don't make the mistake of saying the tooth is aching. If you knew the truth of the matter, a tooth can't hurt. How do you know the tooth is hurting? You hurt! And until you realize that you hurt so you'll be warned about losing one of your diamond teeth.. I don't know why you had diamond teeth put in, as a matter of fact! But this - it's mystifying. | And by 1938, I thought I had a common denominator to all life. After all, I had associated rather thoroughly with twelve different native cultures, not including the people in the Bronx. And I had a pretty good idea - pretty good idea of what this study would comprise by that time. I found out that primitive man and civilized man had a great many things in common, but not all of them had one thing in common, except survival. Only survival did they all have in common, let me state it that way. They were all evidently trying to survive one way or the other, whether they were civilized or uncivilized, whether they were Tlingits up in Alaska or Aleuts or Chinese or Tagalogs or Chamorros. Whatever they were, they were trying to survive. |
Anyway, it's not that tooth that is hurting at all. See, it's your idea of that tooth that is hurting. And you've got it all rigged up gorgeously. Boy, vias, machinery, zig-zag circuits, lights, flashing lights, you know! Bells, small sirens. Gets a little hole in it, your automaticity says, „We're about to lose a tooth.“ So you accommodatingly hurt. I think that's nice or you. | And this urge towards survival became a very definite study after 1938. And we all would have had this a lot sooner and it all would have been done much more neatly and there wouldn't have been so many vias on the line, if about that time a fellow by the name of Hitler, who had been mad since 1933 and had been screaming since 1933 - we all heard him. And somebody decided to take him seriously. Now, I don't know who first took him seriously, but it was a mistake. And the next thing you know, why; we were all involved in a common war, which evidently now has been totally undone and has to be done all over again - but that's the way wars are. Wars never solve anything, they just put the solution off a little further. |
You wonder how people can get psychosomatic illnesses simply by looking at somebody who is ill. You know, Grandpa or Grandma or somebody or other had the lumbosis (it's a famous Scientology disease - lumbosis); they had lumbosis and you all of a sudden come up with a tremendous case of lumbosis in a session. You know, somebody's running through and saying, „What part of your grandfather wouldn't you mind being?“ That's not a good process, but it'd serve to louse up most any pc. And Grandpa's got lumbosis and all of a sudden, why, you turn up with this same case of lumbosis complete with all somatics. Well, there shouldn't be anything mysterious about it, because you're the only one there to hurt in the first place. And it you can manufacture pain that you extend to a body, obviously pain can go all the way up the dynamics. How about the little girl that bleeds every year at the exact places where the thorns pierced Christ, huh? How about that - those many cases that do that, hm? How about the pcs you've had that all of a sudden stretch out... hm? How about those people? | And during the war - during the war, I had some very interesting experiences on the subject of the mind. I was on one ship that had about seven hundred men on it, and we were getting two people a week going mad. Two people a week went mad on that ship. That's an awful lot of people going mad. But in view of the fact that we had no replacements, they were simply left on duty for the most part. |
In other words, you maybe - someday you're looking at a town that's being bombed or something like that and you know men and women and children are blowing up, you know? And you say, „That must hurt like hell,“ and accommodatingly, sympathetically, you hurt like the dickens. Get the idea, hm? You have some penchant for feeling pain. As a matter of fact, if you run „Waste pain“ on a thetan, he finds out all of a sudden that he doesn't mind it at all, that it's just another sensation. According to his mottos, „Any pain is better than no pain.“ „Any feeling is better than no feeling.“ And „Any adventure is better than anything.“ | We particularly contested taking off duty one chap who had had the bad taste to want shore leave in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and had come up to request it of the executive officer, and had found the executive officer in a shower. The executive officer was not well liked on this ship. And the executive officer, from the lather and spray of his shower, said something coarse and uncouth to this fellow. And this fellow whipped out a knife, dived into the shower, chased the executive officer out, and we had the wonderful view of the executive officer running round and round the deck with this madman behind him brandishing a knife. I remember stepping out of my cabin with the gunnery officer where we'd been playing cards or chess or something, and watching this pair go by on their first round. |
So, here's this - here's this thing called confrontingness I just ask you, what would happen? I ask you now again. What would happen if you actually confronted what you just thought of a few minutes ago? What would happen to you? I didn't say confront it with something. I didn't say put an ornament up there. I didn't say hold a body up in front of whatever this thing was, see? But you just confront it. Now, think it over again. What would happen if you confronted it? Would anything happen? | And the gunnery officer said, „Here,“ he says, „I've got a - I've got a gun. Let's stop this.“ |
Audience: No. | And I said - I said, „Why?“ |
Wouldn't that be boring! Nevertheless, that's the truth of the case, isn't it? Do you recognize some truth in this? | About that time, why, two masters-at-arms entered the parade and it became very, very amusing. So we watched it go by. There hadn't been any amusement for a very long time and we - Finally we got tired of it and the gunnery officer and I checked the madman by putting out a foot, and the crew wouldn't speak to us for a week. But this fellow had to stay on duty. |
Audience; Yes. | The medical doctor of that ship and I had the same cabin. And I'd been studying the mind for quite a while, and the men in the crew would come up to get bandaged up or something like that at all hours of the day or night. When the medical officer was out, they would get me, you see. And I'd process them one way or the other. And when he was there, why, he'd give them pills and sew them up. So they had a good time of it. And I had an awful lot of subjects matter to study. The medical officer turned it all over to me. He was kind of bored with it all anyway. He was on the verge himself. |
Hm? Anybody still feel that he'd blow up? | And at the end of the war I had the misfortune of standing in the wrong place. It's always your fault, you know; you're standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment and something else arrives and tries to occupy the same space. This is always embarrassing. But the end of the war I spent about a year in the hospital recuperating from an accumulation of too much wartime Scotch and overdoses of lead and things like that, you know. Oddly enough, they gave me a psychiatric examination as they gave all veterans and found out... By the way, that scared me to death - scared me to death. I went in, took the psychiatric examination, and when he finished up - he was very pleasant - he started writing. And when he finished writing two pages worth - very interesting - he finished writing two pages worth. . You generally took your own records back to the ward. And I was watching this, you know, saying, „Well, have I - have I gone nuts after all?“ |
Audience: No. | And he took these two pages worth and put them in my folder, and I said very smartly and happily - the way you get; you get to be an awful 1.1 after you've been around the armed services for a while - and I said, „Well, I'm going right back to my ward. I'll take the folder back.“ He said, „Oh no, it will be taken back by a messenger.“ |
& Well, if there's anybody around that still feels that it'd be very painful, the address of the HGC is 87 Fitzroy and in Washington it's 1812 19th Street. Commercial. | I didn't sleep much that night. Next morning after breakfast I said to myself, „Hubbard, think.“ So I thought for a while and all of a sudden realized that I had better cook up a toothache and get a dental appointment and have all of my records be given to me so I could take them over to the dental clinic. So they gave me all the records and I tucked them under my arm and I went out to the dental clinic - toward that direction. There was a nice little evergreen sitting outside the door. And it was out of public view, and as soon as I got near that evergreen, I just ducked, see, real quick and opened the records, you know. Oh, here it is, see. And this almost indecipherable scrawl goes on for two long, arduous pages. And I waded through these terrific technical terms, you know. I read it all very carefully and got to the last paragraph, and it said... Oh, there were words in it that long, and the page - and the page was only that wide. And I got to the end and it said, „In short, this officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.“ |
Run, don't walk, to your nearest auditor. If he's a good auditor, you'll even walk away. | So I sat down weakly on a bench and said, „Well, I have evidently survived it, you know.“ And I was feeling very, very good, when at that moment a marine walked up to me, took me by the arm, and he says, „You have a dental appointment and I have been sent to find you.“ So they took me down and filled a tooth. Well, that's what you pay for curiosity. But during that last year, I studied at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital library. And I found out by the simple expedient of taking off one collar ornament I became an MD, you see - very simple. And they don't let anybody in a medical library except doctors, you see, of the MD class. But by stepping up to the desk with only one collar ornament, you see, on the Left side - and for a couple of bucks having a marine on crutches come by and say, „Good morning, Doctor“ - I was able to get in a year's study at the medical library. |
Anyway, do you see something now about confrontingness? Do you realize that you do have the ability to confront something? Hm? Well, where do you get the notion that you can't confront something above and beyond this idea of bodies and ornaments? Hm? Well, where do you get the idea that you can't confront something? Think it over. Where do you get the idea? Isn't it because things disappear? Hm? Things vanish, don't they? Can you think of something you had when you were a child? Hm? | I studied the endocrine system and studied this and studied that and dreamed up a few experiments of one kind or another. I wrecked a whole research project, by the way. There was a doctor with the improbable name of Yankewitz, and Yankewitz was conducting a series of studies on prisoners of war who were being released by that time from German camps and from Japanese camps that had been overrun. And this Yankewitz was trying to fix them up with testosterone and other endocrine compounds. Well, I had all of his records available to me, because he and I were - we played dominoes and things together evenings. And all of his records were available and he was keeping very, very sharp metabolism tests and other things to show the results of endocrine fluids and extracts on prisoners, you see. |
Audience: Yes. | Well, it's very simple. All I had to do was get the name of one of his series, take him out in the park, sit down and do some psychoanalysis and the beginnings of Dianetics and Scientology on him, pull the second dynamic apart and put it back together again, see, and then have him go in and take his metabolism test, you see - Yankewitz said to me one day, he says, „Good heavens!“ he said, „Something has gone wrong with these records.“ He said, „The cases just aren't turning out right; some of these fellows are getting well.“ |
Can you think of something you had when you were a child? | Well, I found out by those experiences that function monitors structure, that thought monitors matter and that matter does not monitor thought. Because those people who were given injections and treatment in the absence of psychotherapy didn't recover; they went the same level. Was an interesting condemnation of the therapy; But those people that I had caught behind a tree or on a park bench and had slipped a few yards of Freud to - and a little bit of the beginnings of Dianetics and Scientology - would all of a sudden go up scale, you see. |
Audience. Yes. | In other words, by treating thought and thinkingness, I found out that I could monitor the experiences and the condition of the person, but I found out similarly that the drugs did not. And that is a very significant series of experiments, which are unfortunately not totally available to us, but are probably still on file in a folder with a great big question mark on it in the Navy Department in Washington, DC - because it was a failed project as far as Yankewitz was concerned. |
Well, where is the actual object now? Don't blow a grief charge; we haven't any floor auditors. Where is the actual object? Well, you don't know. Boy, you sure were a destructive kid, weren't you. But he truth of the matter is, isn't it, that you are not confronting it. It isn't that you can't confront it; it isn't that you've lost - you have lost the ability to confront it. It's simply that it isn't there! Isn't that right? | Now, if - this was the first - the first broad test of it all. Thought was boss. Thought was king. Thought could change structure, but matter could not really change matter - but thought could change matter. Isn't this fascinating? You could vary somebody's weight by changing his thinkingness. If you could do that, then, what did we study? Did we study more structure to make man well, change his behavior pattern, follow it through? Did we go on studying the brain? No, No, never. Never. It would only be thought. |
Audience: Yes. | Well, a short time afterwards, the government decided to give me all of my back pay. And they'd been holding my back pay from me. I'd been on combat duty for a couple of years without being promotable. Every once in a while I'd receive a set of orders and it'd say, „Go to the front lines,“ or the equivalent thereof you know, and I would say to the medical doctor, I'd say, „All right.“ And I'd say to the personnel officer, I'd say, „I'll go, but where's my other stripe? You're sending me to a job that requires an awful lot of gold lace, and if you inspect this carefully with a microscope you'll find there isn't very much on my sleeve. And it isn't the rank I worry about, but I've blown the fortune, you know, and that extra hundred or two dollars a month would come in handy.“ And they would say to me, the equivalent of „Orders is orders, Hubbard. I know you're not in fit condition to pass an examination for further advance in rank, but nobody said you weren't in a fit condition to go out and fight for your country.“ So I went out and fought for the country. Got bored after a while with that, too. But all of a sudden at the end of the war they decided to change their mind. By that time I was out of the service, so that, of course, was the time to be very helpful and promote a fellow's morale so that he would serve his country because he was no longer in the armed services. See how this works out? So they gave me a nice big thick sheaf of treasury checks. Well, in addition to that, I hadn't had it too bad; I'd sold a movie - Dive Bomber - you may have seen the thing. Wallace Beery, so forth, way back. And I'd sold it right at the beginning of the war and I'd opened up a safe deposit box and I'd never told any of my relatives about it and I'd popped ten thousand dollars in one thousand dollar bills into it and closed the lock tight. |
Well, you know you can get so upside down about this that you believe that you can't confront anything. If you can't confront a boss, it's usually simply because you - sometime up and down the track, you've been missing bosses. How do you like that? You know, although it's traditional in the Anglo-American forces to hate officers, it's probably because there aren't many of them. In fact, I've looked around and found almost none, particularly since the last war. They died out two or three generations ago, I think. Oh, that was gentlemen. Excuse me. | So when I got out of the war I didn't take that for finance. I must confess to you that this subject „study of finance and advance“ was not really by the sweat of the brow. I took that and bought a yacht and went down for a cruise in the West Indies when the war was over. But when that was gone I realized I had to have some money. So I collected my treasury checks and that was what financed the first of the research from which we benefit now. It's very funny but that was what financed it. I went right down in the middle of Hollywood, I rented an office, got ahold of a nurse, wrapped a towel around my head and became a swami. And I said - oddly enough, I gave nobody my name, I didn't say what I was doing, and by 1947, I had achieved clearing. |
Here's this fact, however, that somebody says he cannot confront authority. Well, there isn't very much authority around, to tell you the truth. Somebody snaps and snarls at you, you think you have to hang your head. Why do you think you have to hang your head? Why do you have to go „Nannah“? Why don't you just answer up with a cheery „aye, aye“? Hm? It sounds like an interesting thing to do. | I worked like mad. And in Los Angeles occasionally, the local operation there will once in a while, occasionally, receive a call saying, „You know, I've seen a picture of Dr Hubbard, and there was somebody who looked quite like him that operated over in Hollywood years ago and that did something or other with me and I have been quite well and happy ever since. Is it the same man?“ And, of course, they have orders to say no. They'd spoil the whole series. Those people were never told anything, and yet some of them were Clears. |
Boss comes in and he says, „Hoo-doo ho, ho, ho,“ and other things that bosses are reputed to say, you know? Ah, now you're just being a victim of „now-I'm-supposed-to“; you're supposed to go like this, see? You're supposed to duck. Now, you're supposed to not quite look him between the eye. | Now, those were the first Clears. And they were left there without further education or anything of the sort to act as a progressive series. |
Every once in a while, somebody gets absolutely flabbergasted in the HASI, you know? They crank their nerve up, see? There's something going wrong; there's a particle moving incorrectly in the comm lines. Happens every now and then, let me assure you. Sometimes you're the particle. And this particle's moving incorrectly and this poor staff member has just stood it, see, you know? Stood it, stood it. He keeps holding on to himself and saying, “Why? Why does the Director of Administration permit this sort of thing?“ and goes on handling misrouted particles, you know. And he says - says, „Well, I'll tell him. I'll tell him.“ And gets worked right up to it, opens the office door, goes in, and says, „Why do you permit these particles to move this way on this line!“ | My office in Washington got turned upside down just a few weeks ago when I suddenly found out that the name and address of one of them had been lost. And there must have been something psychic about it all, because at the end of the week this person wrote in to me, not having written me for some years. Told me that they were fine, living a very successful life, everything was going along beautifully, gave me a full report on the case and so forth. And even my office started to look at me peculiarly. |
Director of Administration says, „What particles?“ | But these people serve as the long series of cases, and they are not tampered with in any way; They were cleared; they've stayed that way - those that I'm still in contact with. Some of them have been lost in the shuffle. |
Fellow says, „These invoices for ruddy rods.“ | One of them was a psychiatrist. When Dianetics was first published in the United States, this chap said, „You know, a fellow processed me to a state called Clear some years ago, so it must be a very ordinary thing. He was down in Hollywood at the time. Of course, I've never done any psychiatry as such since, but I don't see what everybody's so excited about. This fellow Hubbard undoubtedly learned from this fellow in Hollywood.“ He was so right. Well, coming on up the track - coming on up the track, looking it over. Wrote a book finally in 1950 in the United States and put it out and the next thing you know it was a bestseller and it rode at the top of the list in the New York Times and everything was going along fine and it was a total boom and it was a tremendous success and it was sweeping]y, catastrophically successful - and I found out I had no administration, practically no organization, I had nothing. And the world fell in on our heads in the United States and we'd had it. |
„What about them?“ | Dianetics became very well known overnight. Very well known. A lot of people pitched in and started helping. And from that time on up to now, these wonderful people have continued to help, and it's stopped being a sort of an „only one“ deal. There are lots of names in the hat now and a lot of people in the game. Makes one feel rather good, because they're very good people. And what's happened, simply, is there was a hole in man's knowledge, you see. And somebody moved into the vacuum, you might say. But there were a lot of other people who became aware of the fact that there was a hole in man's knowledge, too, and who saw that the vacuum was being partially filled and who pitched in and gave it a great big hand in finishing it up. |
„Well, I have to handle them with four separate motions when it only needs one!“ | Now, from those beginnings (which are actually not very dramatic) until now, we've taken an enormous jump forward. And not even I recognize how big a jump. After - once in a while, I have to stand back and give myself a sales talk, you know? I say, „Well, Ron, things are certainly wheeling along.“ And I say, „Yeah, don’t be overconfident son. An awful lot of work to be done yet.“ |
„How? Well, let's see. Yeah, well, you only have to handle that with one motion. We'll change it up the line here, and we square it up here,“ and he'll handle it with one motion. So, what the hell? Boy, you certainly lost a good opportunity to confront there, didn't you? Hm? | Now, the truth of the matter is - the truth of the matter is that when you start to fill up a vacuum of this character, it rather tends to pull the people apart who are trying to fill up that vacuum. And people from the earliest times who have been auditors and who have worked forward with this have had themselves some rather dramatic experiences - probably much more dramatic than mine. |
In other words, they get the idea that they mustn't ever even talk up, and when they do talk up, why, they find out nobody barks them down. It's just an idea of not being able to confront. Do you get the idea? | What have we done? We've stepped on the biggest stupidity button man had. This is almost totally unknowing unknowingness. Right on the middle of this stupidity button, here we come along and we tramp - not delicately nor lightly, you know. We don't pull it off the way the professors used to, which is just to this effect: We don't pull it off on the basis of „Well, we think, or we suppose, or possibly, or maybe, if you looked at the situation, you might discover that some portion of it, possibly, we think, might become - of course, you shouldn't be too rash about it - understood in some way, perhaps, if enough millions were poured into the research in the next fifteen or twenty thousand years.” |
Audience: Yes. | That crisp attitude actually does mirror the Ford Foundation and other corporations which have tried to do something in this particular field. I'm not decrying these people and saying they're all totally bad. They merely are. Because when these big organizations without drive, without sincerity and without great dedication step on this stupidity button, they simply get stupid. It overwhumps them, and you know overwhumpingness is far worse than being overwhelmed. It's much more so; it's by the cube. |
Hm? | And when these fellows come along and step on this stupidity button, they just go out of sight in the morass - they tend to. |
And once in a while they do this to me - although most staff feels - can talk to me about most anything, and often does. They go at it at a high scream sometimes, you know, just come in and practically beating the desk and so forth. They seldom go this high, you know. Then they walk out and said, „Well, I'll be fired. I'm finished. Scientology, done; I'm through. Certificates will be cancelled, thrown away Probably throw the body in the nearest garbage can. I wonder where the arrows are that point to the nearest between-lives area. And he'll probably zap me, you know,“ and so forth. | Well, of course, we don't do such a bad job of getting over-whumped ourselves now and then. We suddenly walk into some sector, we get too many people to handle, the popularity springs up too broadly, problems of organization, problems of social import come up, and we confront these things and they're brand new, and we try to apply solutions to them from Dianetics and Scientology, and we get sort of dazed ourselves. We're not doing a perfect job, not by a very long ways - not doing a perfect job at all. But by golly, we're trying and, by god, that's more than anybody else ever did. |
And then they say, „What'd he say? And what was he doing saying 'Good'? And what was he doing saying 'I'll look into it'? What was that all about?“ Practically spins them sometimes, you know? And all of a sudden they find out they can say anything they please and it doesn't cost them anything and after that they start communicating and doing a job. It's an interesting thing to discover. | We're trying hard. And the people who are in this, and the people who are working in this do a lot more things right than they do things wrong. And all you have to be to live successfully is just a little better than 50 percent right. If you're just a little bit better than 50 percent right all the time, you can't help but win - providing you're never wrong on the important points. |
First sergeants and other people, petty officers, very often cultivate quite the opposite idea. They say, „If you ever open your mouth in my direction, I know I must cure you of confronting in order to have an efficient crew member or efficient soldier,“ see? „Unless people have been cured totally of confronting, why, they are no good.“ Stable datum for the society. „If people are permitted to confront authority, why, they'll bash the whole thing in the head, you know? No telling what would happen if all the troops could confront the general.“ | The history of these organizations which have sprung up around the world is a consistent history of order coming into confusion. If you don't think that a quarter of a million interested people on one continent won't make a confusion, you should have been there - some of you were. Wham! Crash! „Let us know more about this.“ Well, the reason the first book got written was because I got tired of a mailbag of mail every morning, asking me more questions. And I got tired of dictating a letter, each one the length of several chapters of the book. So I sat down and wrote the book. |
I tell you what'd happen: they'd just win all of the victories that were in sight, that's all. That's what they'd do. They're only some good to you when they can confront something. Why don't you let them start in with you? It's a good idea. | The publisher received it in a very naive sort of way, by the way. He said, „Well, maybe sell five, six thousand copies.“ So he ordered that many and before publication date he was totally sold out. The American Book Company to this day remembers the flap of trying to get enough Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health published in the US. |
People come in with complaints; they've buttoned these up, they've managed to get their nerve up, they've actually - went out and took a couple of quick shots of scotch, and they come in and they lay this complaint knowing they're going to be blasted out of the chair, and there's no blast. Well, that too, is a letdown. It gives - it gives less blast to confront. | When it was published over here, actually its circulation was stamped on rather hard by this again - a limited ability to issue enough books. And the sales fell off as a result. |
But the truth of the matter is that the belief that one cannot confront does not rest on his own ability to confront. His own ability to confront is obviously infinite, isn't it? Now I want you to think of something that you couldn't possibly ever confront. Come on, think of it. Never in this world, ever in any other world, not even if you could go back up and down the time track could you confront it. Come on, think of something. We could spend the rest of the congress here, by the way, asking the same question. This is one of those trick questions. | But in 1952, I decided it was time that I went out into the world and left the insane asylum called the United States. Now, that's a cruel statement; most of the Americans in the crowd will be resentful that I would say that the US is a spinbin. But on the subject of psychotherapy, it's a real spinbin. You just mention the subject of the mind and everybody restimulates into a roaring psychosis in official quarters. Really mad. |
You ask somebody - I'll tell you a trick auditing question. This is good coffee shop auditing. There is good coffee shop auditing, by the way. We just never let students in on it so they use regular processes to audit in the coffee shops, you know? And They go in for fish and chips and sit there at the table and audit real processes, and they shouldn't do that because there's perfectly good coffee shop processes. And you can leave a person hung up in them and everything. | I decided I deserved a rest, so I came over to England. Came over here just in time to have a British subject as a daughter. Diana was born within a week of my arrival here. Mary Sue got along fine; the two of us got together with some of the people whom I see right before me, right this minute. We put together the first organization, we kept it running, we somehow or other kept it on the road. It didn't have a totally calm history. There were points in it that a critical observer would have considered rough. And there were moments when sitting on top of it was something like sitting on top of World War II. But that organization has grown from very, very small beginnings to rather imposing proportions. And all of that really, has been due to the sincerity, the dedication and the ability of the British and Scotch and Irish and Welsh around here - have not only helped put it together, but have kept it together and kept it rolling. And we're making a big dent in the society. We don't realize what a big dent we make in the society, but we certainly do make a dent, It's getting to be more than a dent now. Scientology is very well accepted in England compared to the mad controversial attitude that greets it still in the United States. |
But here's one of them, is „Look around here and find something that is unknown.“ That's the most gorgeous process. Here's another one: „Look around here and find something which is uninteresting.“ That's the most wonderful process you ever saw. I mean, it's one of These processes that never gets answered. See, he looks around and he says, „Well, that's a - well, I don't know, you know...” One of these fabulous things. | But they used to get humorous on the subject in the United States when Dianetics and Scientology was mentioned. After a while they became very serious when it was mentioned. After a short time, I'd say about two years ago, they would get shouting angry when it was mentioned. And now the powers that be just cry a little bit when it's mentioned. |
Well, confrontingness comes under this heading something you could not possibly confront, see. You'd fish for it in vain. If you don't believe it. and I don't ask you to believe it; if it's true for you it's true and if it's not true for you it isn't true. Try and find something that it is impossible to confront, and after you get mired down totally, find an auditor. It'll wind you up in the soup if you pursue this thing infinitely without an auditor. Why? Because there were times when you must have believed that you couldn't confront something, otherwise you would never have joined the army or done other foolish things. Not that there's anything wrong with joining the army. The only thing wrong with joining the army is that you're in it. | It's perfectly all right for us to put them down all the way into apathy, because only we can pull them out. |
It's not that you should be all out for peace; you shouldn't be. I can't consider anything more boring than to have totally peaceful existence. The only thing wrong with war is wait, as far as I'm concerned. That's just personal opinion. When there's something happening, there's something to confront, and when there's nothing happening it's just handfuls of nowhere. You say, „Well, way over there someplace there's something to confront, you know? And if they just let me go here then I would go like a hot rocket in that direction and I'd be able to stand there and confront it.“ Of course, when you get there, you find out what you're being asked to confront is a bullet or something like this. You're not able to go in and tell the enemy what you think of him. Next war I go to I'm going to get one of these megaphones. Anyway... | Many other movements which have occurred in man's history have been much more sweeping, much more dramatic, stayed with man for a very long time and actually are not to be compared at all with Dianetics and Scientology, which is a rather calm, orderly progress without any attempt to become an overwhelmingness in the society under one symbol or another, but is sincerely dedicated to just making a better world out of it and making it possible perhaps for man to live a little while. |
The idea behind it is that man makes a game out of having possessions which go to pieces if they confront certain things. Now, let's go work out on the body side of it and talk about possessions for a moment. This might be more real to you. We start to confront the mains, see, and so we take - you better - better do this careful experiment. If you do this, you'll find out something about the body. You take and wrap a piece of copper wire around each of two fingers, see, and then shove them into the light plug, you see, and don't draw them out for a while. And then look at your fingers, and you'll find out they've been damaged. And if you're proud of this possession called hands and if you're very artistic in handling things and so forth, why, you'll no longer be able to excite the envy of your friends or sit down at the piano or something of that sort, you see? And that teaches you not to what? Not to confront things or not to let your body confront things? Which does it teach you? Not to let your body confront things. | There have been many efforts in man's history which are far more gallant, far more romantic, more colorful, more aesthetic. Take the work of Gautama Siddhartha, that man knows as Buddha. This man's work was spread out through Asia. This man evolved some ideas that were very acceptable to the people around him. He didn't have any communication networks. He didn't have much assistance. The next thing you know, he had brought civilization to 450 million people who before that had known only barbarism. The teachings of Gautama Siddhartha spread through into Japan and brought the first writing and the first arts, really, to the Japanese people. A world where it was dog-eat-dog became a place that man could live in. Half of the known world and two-thirds of its population had been totally changed in their quality and so forth by the simple activities of Gautama Siddhartha and his friends. |
Now, of course, a lot of people go around and say, „Well, that is the - a good excuse not to have a body. And that's why I'm trying to make nothing out of this body, so that this won't happen. So therefore, if I chop this body to pieces and mess it all up, then it won't ever get messed up or chopped to pieces.“ You work this out; I can't. It doesn't equate. | Now, that was a tremendous attack upon the barbarism of man. And that was a very romantic and a very gallant attack. I'm afraid we're in no such category; since we have the benefit of everything that's gone before. We have the benefit of knowing many of the things now that he found out, and they weave themselves through our lives and they weave themselves through Dianetics and Scientology without our even being able really to isolate them and say this and that came from this or that place. There have been easily fifty thousand years of thinking men, and from all of them you could not help but gain a little truth. And so we haven't done any springboard as a total single effort that leaps into plain view like flash and flame and illuminates everything. I'm afraid that we have been wise enough to benefit by all those other chaps that have had something to think and something to say down through the years. There have been lots of them and they've said a great deal. |
So here's this thing called confrontingness. What is this thing called confrontingness, then? It comes down to defense and protection, problems of defense and protection. But that even - doesn't even have to enter into auditing to any great degree, if you don't want it to. | And only their efforts in bringing about civilization, only their efforts at damping out barbarism, have made it possible for us to have enough leisure time now to really get a show on the road. We owe a great deal to these people - a great deal. We don't have to believe all the things they said. Like Gautama said, „If it isn't true for you, it isn't true.“ We don't have to take everything they learned or follow their cults or patterns. But we can certainly benefit from what they have done, and what they have done has not been inconsiderable. It's been a very great deal. |
You get the first clearing process, 1947, which I phrase this way: I gave the person confidence in looking at pictures. I showed him he could look at pictures. I would have him go out of the room and walk in and look at the room and then sit down, close his eyes and get the picture momentarily that he saw as he walked in the. room. And then we would go over the picture several times, and what do you know? It would disappear. This we call erasure, very improperly, I assure you. This is not erasure. So there's an improper phrase in Dianetics. It's an ability to confront up to a point where there is no necessity to have it. And all anybody evidently is trying to do is prove that he can confront something by having a picture of it, and that's about all there is to it. | We owe a great deal, then, to the past. We owe a great deal to our present civilization. We owe a great deal to those forces which have made it possible for us to have enough leisure, to think enough thoughts and to organize enough and write enough to do what we can do today. Gautama Siddhartha is the first person who said you can be Clear. And all he told you, however, was all you had to do was conceive mind essence. If you just conceive mind essence, you've had it. Ask those who have tried. |
So, I used to take somebody and I'd have him, by various mechanisms, get a lock, you know, a little, light mental image picture, maybe a lock, you know, on some experience that he had had, and get him to confront it. Only I'd get him to have confidence in being able to get the picture. And then I would cultivate sonic in the picture. I would cultivate perceptics of other types, tactile, so forth. And I'd get him to be able to confront this whole thing in picture form. | His goal comes true today in Scientology. It's not a new goal, but we can do it today. We can do it. We can make good many of the promises which have been made. |
Now I'd have him get another picture. Oh, this'd take hours and hours and hours and hours. I'd coax him into confronting another picture and another picture and another picture, and pretty soon we'd pick up some sad moment in his lifetime when he'd just left and we'd get a picture of that. Usually this one would be black as ink, see, all messed up, so forth. And I'd find out what part of that he could look at, you see. And we'd gradually develop bits and pieces of this bit of ink, and it would turn out at first with a kind of a foggy two-dimensional black and white, you know? And then we would develop the emotional context of it, and the next thing you know, he'd spill tears like Niagara Fal1s. I wouldn't pay any attention to spilling tears. I'd just say, „now, let's find the grief in this thing until we can see the grief in it.“ The next thing you know, why; he could observe the grief and feel it or not, as the case may be, and he would be able to confront that grief. And he almost invariably found it was somebody else's grief in the picture. He was crying somebody else's tears, which is quite, quite remarkable. And he would never realize it until he'd run this what we call a secondary, see? | That doesn't mean we have to make good another man's promise. But it does mean that man has dreamed a dream for a very, very long time that he himself as an individual and he himself as a society could be free, that he himself could know and be in control of his own life to a marked degree. And man has dreamed this dream for eons and he has put a great deal of thought and effort forward in the direction of achieving that dream and that goal. And I can't say to you grandly that we have totally gotten it all wrapped up and that we will never hit any vagaries of any kind. That we will not hit any rough spots in the road, that from here on it's all smooth out. |
And then we'd get the knife nicely sharp and we'd stick its point into the most obvious engram that contained pain and unconsciousness we could find and we would bring it up into view and get him to have confidence in looking at it. I never used the word confront. This makes this whole thing translatable. We can talk about it now; we've got this word confront. That means things. It never occurred to me. So, he could have confidence in looking at the picture, you see, and we'd take bits and pieces of this painful experience and one moment, why, he'd be feeling the whole injury again and then we'd get him to look this over. Now, I wasn't ever restraining him from feeling the injury. All I was trying to do was get him to look at the incident, totally. And we would again develop sonic and visio, and boy that took auditing. You practically had to stay in there with one knee on his chest right about that minute. And it was probably - I got away with it because I was just bigger than my preclears. One answer to smooth auditing. Anyway, didn't occur to them to get out of the chair. | But I will tell you today that we can, individual by individual achieve this goal of Clear. And I can tell you that it's well worth achieving. And it can be achieved broadly. And man can achieve these goals today of freedom for himself and his people through Scientology, providing he works hard, providing he works sincerely and providing he keeps the show on the road. |
Because you start developing sonic, hearing the sound again of an incident of the past in an area where a fellow has had his silly head caved in and he will of course start picking up the full somatic of having had his head kicked in. And you just have to keep that knee on his chest and let him get a head kicked in. that's all. That's it. And you'd eventually get him to a point where he could confront various parts of getting his head fractured. And then confront being unconscious, and he'd finally come up with some big cognition like „You know the reason I went unconscious?“ | Thank you. |
„What's that?“ | |
„Well, I just couldn't look at it anymore. I just quit; I just backed out on the whole thing.“ And of course I would accommodatingly say, „No?“ you know. | |
Truth of the matter was that the more he could confront, the more he was able to confront. But something happened in 1947 that I couldn't explain for ten years: what happened to the rest of the bank? Once I'd done this, fixed him up so he could confront a lock, fixed him up so that he could confront charges of grief and misemotion and anger and things like this; after he was in a state where he could confront a painful picture with full sonic and visio and tactile and effort and everything else that was in the picture, bank disappeared. I had a Clear! Perfectly stable Clears. But I thought that was all there was to the bank. Hence, my later discoveries of the birth engram, of prenatals, of all sorts of incomprehensible things, of past lives. I was perfectly willing to discover these things. I was very interested in them. But where did it go, where did it end, how many pictures were there? And I got totally befuddled by the whole thing, because it was just so much. I got trapped into the idea of quantity. | |
But about that time I said, „Well, no matter how long it takes, I just better settle down and map the whole track from one end to the other and find everything there is in the mind - circuits and machinery and valences and anything else that might be in the mind”. Get the definitions of the physical universe, work this thing out. Get an actual working definition of life and, you know, went on and on and on. If we'd quit right there, actually, we wouldn't have been - ever been able to have understood it. And we would've been in the position of the fellow, the mystic he was a great master, who was teaching a neophyte, and the position of the neophyte is the one we're interested in. And he used to - the master used to teach this neophyte all about mysticism and demons and devils and everything. But when he would come in the room to teach his class, why, he would tie a cat to the bedpost. He'd tie the cat to the bedpost and he'd sit down and he'd teach this neophyte about mysticism, demons, devils and so forth. | |
So, the years went along and the neophyte decided that he was now a master and he decided to teach a new neophyte mysticism and demons and devils and everything. So, he says, „Now, the first thing we do is tie a cat to the bedpost.“ But we would've been in that position. In other words, any deviation from this would've brought about a flop. Why? Because we didn't have a total understanding. I didn't have a total understanding of what was happening. I thought that was all the bank there was! I made Clears, but I didn't understand why people got Clear. | |
& They didn't, they had proven to me and to them that they were able, we can say today, to confront mental image pictures, so they didn't have to have any more unless they put them there, you see? And they had no more reactive pictures because they could confront them all. And they didn't any longer have any need to confront them. There was no necessity to confront them. And if they felt like confronting them they could still put them back there again, you get the idea? | |
& You only had to get them able to confront the worst varieties, the worst things that they could imagine in the current lifetime, and they said, „Well what the dickens. We could put these back, or have them or not have them as the case may be, we don't have to worry about it anymore.“ So they were clear. Get the idea? | |
All right, I tried to teach somebody else about this and I don't know the mainspring, see? I don't know exactly what the combination is. If that spotlight were to turn red at this moment, it could show that my face got red at that time. I was rather red-faced last year to find out that I hadn't known exactly what I was doing in 1947 when I made Clears. The remarkable thing about it is, in some unknowing, blundering way, I did know, but I couldn't phrase it. I couldn't describe it. And the more auditors I tried to teach in those earlier days - the more auditors I tried to teach, well, the more I fumbled it because I'd Q-and-A with them. See, they'd say, „Well, I did just what you said and nothing happened.“ | |
I wasn't smart in those days. Boy, I got - they smartened me up. Some of them are here right now that helped smarten me up, too, And this was the case, however. I would say, „You do so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so,“ and they would come back and they say, „I did so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, but nothing happened.“ And I'd groan, and I'd say, „Well, we have to figure something else out.“ | |
So I would give them a newer and a better one, got it? A newer and better one. Well, within the last year I've gotten smarter. I don't give them a newer and better one these days. They come back and they say after I gave them this, and they say, „Well, I did it. It doesn't work.“ | |
I say, „What didn't work?“ | |
„Oh, what you told me.“ | |
„What did I tell you?“ | |
„Well... well, you said, you said - um - you said you'd got the person to get a lock and then you'd fit it in a keyhole, see, and then - I don't know. What did you say?“ | |
And that's what I should’ve said eleven years ago. „What did I tell you?“ See? Because when it didn't work, they didn't hear. And we've got an awful case of deafness that's been going on. | |
Well, you cure a case of deafness in various ways, and the first way is to find out yourself what you're doing. It took me a very long to time to find that out. | |
You know, it's one thing to feel something is true and quite another thing to phrase it, to express it. Have you ever had that? Well, when you move out of feelingness into articulateness, you make a big gain. And it - really - if somebody had been doing this job other than myself who was much smarter than I was, it'd been more desirable because it wouldn't have taken him ten years to find out what to say in order to make people understand, see? And if I was a little brighter, why, we could've done it a lot faster, but you're hung with the fact that I'm just stupid. Get the idea? That's about what it amounts to. | |
Now, the funny part of it is that in the process of cooking up these new things all the time, oh, we just found out about all kinds of things. We found out about lots of things, you see? And we got what appears to be almost the total scope of beingness, at least for this universe and beings in it. Boy, what we don't know about the mind and its anatomy and that so - it isn't worth writing down. There's a big chest down to the HASI - there's a big chest, there used to be, anyway. Hardly anybody ever opened it, but it was a sort of a magic chest. Actually it contained nothing but lecture tapes by me that had been made to this class or the other class and so forth. And actually, that chest contains the best, most reliable research record of Dianetics and Scientology that is in Great Britain. Hardly anybody pays any attention to it. Some of the recordings are bad and that sort of thing. They get scattered around from time to time and recollected. But that's actually what they are. | |
Boy, if there are any phenomena about the mind that you can't find in that chest, I would certainly like to know about it. And I really would like to know about it. You get the idea? We have just covered this universe. Now, this is me and thee, too, see? We have covered this universe. It's just some fantastic amount of bric-a-brac when you add it all up. Wow! Boy, what a thetan can't dream up isn't worth imagining. But actually, there are only five basic things that form this thing we call the mind. And those five basic things are simply these: | |
These locks, which are analytically aware mental pictures, and the thoughts associated with them - this is a mind. | |
Secondaries, which are moments of misemotion: grief, apathy, so forth, and the thoughts connected with them. Mental image pictures containing misemotion and the thoughts connected therewith. | |
Engrams, which is moments of pain and unconsciousness, and the thoughts connected therewith. | |
Circuits, which are really old valences of one kind or another, which inform and talk and which apparently put out thought. They're really parasitic circuits. You're talking into one phone booth and phoning it down to - up to Birmingham - let's say down to Birmingham and be different, shall we? And then you're getting them back in the next phone booth and you think they're brand new, only you just said them, you see. But this is a circuit. And there's these circuits and they apparently - they go off into various things: valences and demons and devils and all kinds of things, see that? | |
And then this additional thing incredibly enough, called machinery. Every once in awhile a student of Scientology will say; „Well, when you mean machinery, you know, you just got the idea of the bric-a-brac of the mind,“ you know. And one day he's sitting down in the chair and he's being audited, and all is going along very well, and all of a sudden he looks up and there's a big steam engine, you know; with wheels. And it's doing something, and it puts out thoughts this way and it shuttles pictures that way and it - you know? And he says, „When Ron says 'machinery,' he means 'machinery'.“ - It's a big shock to him that I mean what I say. | |
Well, anyhow, that's right, though. Anybody here ever seen one of these things suddenly, you know? Look up and find things going? Once in a while, you find something that'll look like a clam bucket. It's going clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp. Every time you make up a picture, why, the clam bucket disposes of the picture, because the picture's liable to be harmful, and if - the way - best way to get the picture out of the road is to have a clam bucket arrangement which eats up and devours all the pictures. But then, of course, that makes a scarcity of pictures so you put another machine up over here which makes a lot of pictures, which feeds the clam bucket, which makes a lot of pictures. The mind's a wonderful thing. | |
And that's all there is in a mind. Well, if you call it a mind. A mind is a thing, you see. Now, to this you have to add the thing we call - which you call a thetan - which you call a „thetan“ and I call a „thetan.“ That's because we speak different brands of Greek. | |
Now, here's this source-point; this source-point. And we found out eventually that was the person and that was all there was to him. He was a source-point for various things, thoughts, and he could generate things and he could consume things, so on. We thought - we found out that this was to whom we were speaking when we spoke to him. You get the idea? And we found that out and then we dissected and bisected this thing called life and found out that form carries on with the uniting of life and the physical universe. These two things unite in a certain form, and we get living objects. We get living, oh, insects and politicians and all kinds of things. Anyway... | |
And then we had this thing called the physical universe, and that's simply composed of matter, energy, space and time. And there, evidently, there - beyond the various combinations of this, there isn't anything else in it than that. And we got this thing knocked apart into these four broad categories for this universe and there're only five things in the mind - no wonder you have trouble finding things to confront! See? Now, the truth of the matter is it's very easy to confront these things. | |
But it isn't easy to confront something that you don't know whether you're confronting it or it's not confronting or it might not be there to confront, but you don't know what it is, and how you confront it you're not sure about and huhh! And that's the state of mind most aberrated people are in. In the first place, they don't know the anatomy of existence. They don't know the anatomy of people and minds, so how they - can they confront them? They don't even know they exist. | |
You stop a fellow out in the street, and you say, „Have you got a mind?“ and he'll say, „Huh?“ We don't even get that far, you see? He'll say, „Well. what about a mind? What's this, a mind? I used to mind my father.“ | |
„No, no. We mean a mind, you know?“ | |
„Well,“ he says, „sure I've got brains. What's the matter with you?“ | |
Most people begin to think of their minds as brains. I've been trying and trying and trying to find a use for two things: my brain and my eyeballs. I could see so much better through the back of my head if I just didn't have eyeballs blocking these two holes. And it would be so much easier to sit in the middle of this skull here if there wasn't something around to confuse me about which was the middle of it. We're going to have to put together a Society for Empty Skulls and Eye Sockets, but then we'll have sculptors and aestheticists and - forming other societies, Societies for the Suppression of People who Suppress Eyeballs, you know, that sort of thing. It'd get pretty confusing. So I put up with it - I put up with it. People expect you to have eyeballs and brains, so that's that. | |
But I have yet to find out what they're for, you know, except something to prevent you from confronting skulls. I should have brought along one of our skulls. We have lots of skulls down in the HASI. We used to use them for a change of space. We used to exteriorize somebody and we'd have him appear in skull A and then appear in skull B and then appear in skull A and skull B, and after a while he gets so used to being in skulls, why, he really exteriorized in a hurry. And once in a while he found himself on the stage playing „Alas, poor Yorick.“ | |
But anyway, it wasn't enough to know this clearing process of 1947 that I have just given you if you still didn't know what to confront, and if you still couldn't say; „All you have to do is get the preclear to have confidence that he can confront things.“ See, you could've told an auditor that and he'd say, „Oh fine. Cheery, cheery; aye, aye.“ And then he would've found preclears whose clam buckets were inverted, you see, and actually, after they had chewed up the pictures, turned out another type of picture. And he would've said, „This is something new,“ and we would have had all this tremendous randomness, you know, and various types. And I can imagine now an auditor today, if we'd pursued this course, having to memorize one thousand, six hundred and seventy-two various objects that occur in the mind, see? All different and no common denominator amongst them, you see? And all we would have been classifying is just machinery, types of. Then somebody would come along and make a tremendous discovery of another type of machine. Duh, we would've had it. | |
The truth of the matter is, it took ten years to find out what there was to confront. Is there more than this to confront? Well, you're at liberty to find out, but we at least know that you're not going to get any - any difficulty confronting any of this. And one of the reasons a thetan gets stuck in a theta trap is very, very simple: he just can't confront a theta trap. Why can't he confront one? Well, it's so bad. You see, it's very evil. It traps thetans and therefore it is very evil and you shouldn't have anything to do with it. And if you see a theta trap, you should go like that, you see, and look the other way. Well, the second that he won't confront it, he goes snap! Because what is space but confrontingness? Space is simply the dimension which occurs when you view something. So if there's no space, he's in it! Do you see that? So if he looks at something but is unwilling to make space, he's it! Simple. I'm afraid it's so idiotically simple you've been falling for it for 76 trillion years. And if you think that's awfully stupid of you, let me reassure you by saying you've got lots of company. | |
Now, there's the long and short of this thing called confrontingness. There's actually all it is, all it amounts to. If you can't look at something, there's no space between you and it and you've had it! Get the idea? | |
Now, there are nonconfront merchants running around the world. They sell as their one product „You must not confront.“ And all of a sudden, we know what some of these merciful societies do to people. | |
& See, they say, „Tea. Do not drink tea. It rots the brain. The downfall of the Empire is totally based upon the fact that people began to drink tea.“ You know, there is such a society here in London. Oh, you didn't think there was. Well, I know more about this town than you do. | |
& All right. Anyhow-more than a student at Oxford, anyway. | |
Anyway, here is the main thing about confrontingness. This outfit says, „No more tea. You mustn't confront tea. You can't have tea.“ And the next thing you know; their president starts going gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp. See, he can't leave tea alone now. He's told everybody, „You mustn't confront tea,“ so all he does is see tea and he's tea! Boom What do you think alcoholism is? | |
Did you ever try to look at a fume? Well, I ask you, did you ever try to look at a fume? | |
Audience: Yes. | |
Well, that fellow down at the bar who can't see a fume has no space between himself and the alcohol. And he's been carefully taught that he mustn't drink, that drinking is very harmful, that he mustn't look at drink, that he mustn't have anything to do with drink, that drinking is very evil, that it degrades him, that he had better lay off the drink or it'll finish him. You get the idea? And the more he's taught, the more he goes splash every time he sees a pint. And he becomes an alcohol diver. | |
The one thing a person who is suffering from alcoholism cannot do is have a full glass in front of him. But because he can't come out of his head and drown himself in it properly, he puts it in - around him. So you fill his glass, he empties it; fill his glass, he empties it; fill his glass, he empties - he can't confront the fumes so he goes doggo in the process. I don't even think alcohol would make you drunk. I don't know how it makes anybody drunk. I was looking - I was looking at some alcohol the other day, and I was amazed - amazed at the fact that it could do anything to anybody. It didn't seem possible that it could cause a sensation. I experimented and found out I had to postulate the sensation that I was drunk, and in view of the fact that I was on a ship, I could then use the motion of the ship to postulate the idea that I was drunk. And before I caught myself; I was saying, „Oh, give me a little drink, huh?“ So I just unpostulated and that was that. | |
You get the idea how far this confrontingness goes? If you can't confront broken legs, you're liable to get one someday, that's all. Get an opportunity to break a leg, you will. So it even goes further than just confronting with a body, as bad. It might be that because you know it is bad to confront with a body, it is bad to confront with a body, don't you see? Could go that far. | |
Well, we knew all about clearing somebody in 1947. We could do it in 1947, clear back then, except we couldn't explain it, couldn't train anybody in it, didn't know how it happened and thought that there wasn't very much in the mind beyond maybe a few engrams. And all of a sudden when former beheadings and being put down here in the Tower and being drowned up there and being in space opera and - other things began to show up. I think there's a person or two here who has run into a picture of space opera or something of the sort in the past. | |
And these various incomprehensibles started to happen, we didn't know what the devil we were confronting and it took us years to find out. Well, now that we've found out again, we can go back to battery and start clearing people again. So I wish to express my thanks to those of you who have walked along this track with me of finding out what was there to be confronted. And how you audit a preclear with confrontingness, which I haven't told you at all. | |
Thank you | |