Okay, this is December the 10th, morning lecture. This morning, I'm going to hit very briefly at very, very definite fundamentals again.

The fundamentals involved here which most intimately concern you I just mentioned before the lecture — that is to say, knowingness. People will not-know in order to keep others from knowing. This is also "to be betrayed, so that others will be shamed by having betrayed." This is a reverse vengeance. People keep others from knowing, actually, in order to enslave others and then they eventually — eventually, themselves, believe that they cease to know. And that, brutally and horribly enough, is the history of any person in this room. He has kept others from knowing.

Now, there are many ways to keep other people from knowing. The main way is to tell them that they know wrongly. It will strike some people under training that the material being handed out is an indictment of their own knowingness and is — puts them in a secondary position because they have to be told something about knowingness. But remember, when you talk about knowingness itself, you are not evaluating. You're trying to point out a road toward knowing. Knowingness in terms of things and combination of things is obtained by observation. Knowingness in the individual is native.

The first step, actually, into action and randomity, is a step toward not-knowingness. A person has to say he doesn't know in order to have space. He just has to. Otherwise, he has no randomity whatsoever. The space is not his space.

He has to not-know in order to be surprised, in order to obtain any sensation. And this is all very well at that echelon, but as soon as it starts to move into a lower echelon, individuals begin to obscure even knowingness by observation. And it begins to be past time in every other locale than where the person is and when he is. And it begins to be past tense, so that the only present time is where the individual is, and the only data he has is past time when he was at some other place. This is a direct inability to observe.

Above observation, of course, is simply knowingness. It is possible for you to know the answer to a very complex mathematical problem simply by knowing, not by working the problem in terms of some system of mathematics.

Now let's take up another portion of this. We have in knowingness what may be called, at the same time, certainty. Certainty and knowingness are themselves synonymous. It's the same phenomenon. It's — self-confidence adds in there. People have many names for it because there are many facets to knowingness and they've never recognized too well that this knowingness was merely composed of several facets, and was these facets.

Now, the route which we follow here is a road toward knowingness — knowingness of oneself and knowingness on all the dynamics.

People have weird ideas concerning what knowledge will do. Knowledge is dangerous; that is the one message which is handed down from generation to generation.

For about fifteen hundred years, there was the most active and agreed-upon effort here on Earth to keep everyone in complete ignorance. Ignorance was the byword. And as a result, this culture has inherited a vast tradition about the dangerousness of knowledge.

We think of the dangerousness of knowledge in terms of the atom bomb. The dangerousness of knowledge in terms of the atom bomb is the failure on the part of the atomic scientist — with whom I was educated, God blast him — to recognize his own brotherhood with and responsibility for his fellow man.

A person who, for any reason or cause, would suborn his own talents and researches solely to destroy for the benefit of political advantage is beneath contempt. Because he destroys more than he can ever rebuild. And the only reason he will destroy is his failure to recognize his brotherhood with the universe. That is his first big downfall.

Oddly enough, these people pay for this in various ways. It's a singular thing that the overt act-motivator sequence is only effective when one chooses out for randomity his own salvation.

I am often asked why I do not immediately jump on a white horse and go charging down the line to butcher and slit the throat of somebody who has done something to Scientology. I'm very often asked this. Matter of fact, I had an office one time down in Arizona which was going strictly mad-dog on the subject until I suddenly and sharply cut off its outflow of entheta communication concerning an organization which had cost Dianetics and Scientology a great deal both in dignity, in finance, research and materiel. They were flabbergasted. They said, "Why shouldn't you take vengeance on these people?"

And I said, "They've taken vengeance on themselves."

Now, that sounds sweeter than light and all that sort of thing, but it happens to be the horrible truth. It isn't that that person who touches me touches death — no, no. No, that's a very childish way of looking at such a thing. What would you think would happen to somebody who chose an effort — an effort toward knowl­edge, which was really a main line effort toward knowledge — as his randomity? What would happen to him? What would happen to a person who chose the best methodology with which he was ever acquainted (just aside from the point it works or not) — the best methodology with which he was acquainted — for his randomity? Made it other than himself.

What would you think of a person who took sanity and orderliness for his randomity? Now, you know enough about background theory to know that this would be a horrible thing. And so it has been. It is uniformly a horrible thing. People make allies out of this universe very easily, if they're fairly well up the line. This universe will do more horrible things to people in less time — that can be undone easily by a lot of auditors. It's — can get pretty vicious.

And individuals who choose out various things in the society for the sake of their war, or for a war, of course have to immediately push back against anything connected with the other side, and they will eventually succumb to it — eventually. But they will succumb to it. They won't come into possession of it.

Now, this is not a very happy outlook for man or for Earth. But why one should add punishment, why one should add vengeance to an already over­burdened scene is a little bit more than I at once would be prepared to answer. It isn't that one is unwilling to answer for vengeance, it's just that — well, you look at a glass full of water and I don't think anybody has an impulse to pour more water in it. This is a love-hate universe, and the amount of hate which is generated daily is more than adequate to balance the books.

One goes on the idea that unless one immediately acts to prevent this action or that action, or immediately acts to defend himself wildly and so forth — one is sold this idea by this universe — then one is to some degree doomed.

No, I'm afraid one is doomed at the moment he begins to choose out things for vengeance, because he's immediately resisting them. The way to handle a pickpocket is to be around in back of the pickpocket and have him put his gun in his pocket and go away. But you have to be willing to be the pickpocket for a moment in order to do that. You have to have a little bit broader view than "I am just me and it's only present time here."

Now, completely aside from that rather formidable subject, we have been educated into justice in such a way as to believe that one must have, make or create justice. This is weird. Because men slaughter themselves. Because you aren't right there on the scene, you may not think somebody is caving in because of his own actions, because of his own vengeances and so forth. Well, that is a cut-down knowingness, you see, and it's one's anxiety about this that causes one to press in on the scene and try to create more furor.

It isn't that one shouldn't punish — this is beside the point, too. It's just that one who dedicates himself to punishment and vengeance dedicates himself to a resistance to evil, and if he resists evil hard enough, he'll become it. And this is just inevitable. If he goes into a consideration that this is evil and that is evil, and this is good and that is good and so on, and makes these adjudications the sole method of arbitrating his own existence, then he comes out, in the final run, the loser. He loses because he has narrowed and fixed ideas, more than anything else. He's fixed ideas and said, "This idea is that person's idea; this idea is somebody else's idea."

Now, right along in the line of justice ... I don't want to give you any idea, by the way, just in passing, before we skip over the subject, that I feel terribly "put upon" by the society or by individuals in it for Scientology and Dianetics having been knocked around. It has been knocked around much less — much less than any other newly introduced idea.

And it has been knocked around, I will point out to you, in such a way as to make people face up to it hard. And they face up and fight it hard. It's very interesting what will occur here in a few years. That's not plotted either, this just happens to be the way things work out. Nobody can get me very worried about the vast enemies that we have out there — people tell me all the time all about all these enemies and that sort of thing — it's all right. They — as I said at the congress, the only people who have actively fought us are those that we've brought up far enough on the Tone Scale to fight. It's true! God help us, it's true.

Now, getting on with justice, you'll find that the lowest ebb of any person's life is connected with an inability to punish or react against or set to rights a situation which they believe is very detrimental to their good survival. And that is very, very true. Why? There's a good — real good reason — not one of these Homo sapiens reasons, but a real good reason behind that. Justice has to do with force, and it is at that point where one permitted himself to recognize his complete lack of force.

Now, when one recognizes that he has a complete lack of force, which is an idiotic thing to (quote) "recognize" (unquote) — because one's force is never less, and no fuel is ever going to build it other than his own.

Those things which are holding apart the ideas — those bodies of energy we call ridges and so forth, which are holding apart his ideas; things like engrams, so on — are composed entirely of energy, and force is energy. And when one believes he can no longer handle force or generate force, and is not permitted — if one is not permitted to generate force, why, then of course there is nothing left to energize those things he is using to hold apart the forces of his bank. And if he can't handle force, if he says, "I can't handle force anymore, and I want nothing to do with force; I want nothing to do with energy," he is immediately running out on his entire reactive bank, just like that, bing! and it caves in.

So if you want to find the prime key-in of a person's life, you merely have to ask him the moment when he recognized that he had no force; that he was not able to bring about a condition of justice as he conceived it. Because he was playing the game mest universe very, very hard at the time, probably, a sudden recognition that he had not the power to punish at his discretion was more than he could overcome.

Now, getting people to consent to force solely in the form of police is perfectly all right so long as the police are efficient. But a friend of mine, an executive in a — probably the largest motion-picture company (he's the general manager of it, the vice-president), made a very, very, very sane observation one time to me. He was terribly interested in the effect of police on the deterioration of a social order. He had it figured out — from Dianetics, by the way — that the police, being in continual contact with the criminal, brought a contagion through into the society at large and therefore the police were a more responsible agent for the deterioration of a culture than any other single agency. Well, it's deeper than that. It's that people — actually, this has started me on a long line of thought on this direction. It was a very sane observation. It's very true.

You leave a policeman, by the way, in the detective bureau hunting criminals for six or eight months and he begins to become a savage beast. You have to take him out and put him on the traffic squad for a little while. First few days on the traffic squad, why, he's screaming and hammering at motorists, or throwing tickets around and coming down on the pedestrians like mad.

One did this outside a university some years ago. He had just been released from the criminal division. For about three days, he was giving university students tickets. He was stopping them from walking on crosswalks and he was doing all sorts of things. Oh, he was a vicious man! He was handing out more arrests per hour than any cop had ever managed to do. At the end of about three days, a couple of students took him aside and said, "What do you think we are, criminals?" And the fellow stood there, stood transfixed for a moment and thought it over, and came up to present time. And thereafter was about the nicest cop you ever wanted to meet. Until, of course, he went back to the criminal division.

Now we have a problem, you see then, in terms of force and justice and responsibility. Where a person turns his responsibility consistently over to another, he's actually turning his force over to another. Because he's consistently saying, "I can't do anything about it," "I won't do anything about it" or "I don't want to handle it." And we get back to what we were talking about yesterday: Don't want to handle it. "Don't want to handle it, therefore I don't want the responsibility for it."

Well, people pass into this almost insensibly. They first say, "I don't want to handle it because I don't have enough time to handle it, and therefore somebody else has the responsibility for it." And after a while, somebody else has it — he doesn't have the responsibility for it, he has all the responsibility. And the person has deteriorated to this degree. He's handed out this responsibility, he wasn't taking responsibility for a certain sphere anymore.

Now, a preclear can look back at a time when just out of plain, ornery cussedness he decided that somebody else was going to do some work. That's that! Well you know you can run that and regain a remarkable amount of energy in the preclear? And this is fascinating! That's where your people who won't work come out of it. Right on such an incident. They won't handle it. And they're just bound and determined somebody else is going to do some work, too. And they will go downhill on that like hitting a toboggan. And there goes their force, because work is, in essence, effort. And work, by the way, is scarce, and effort is valuable, and it is a very nice thing to be able to put out effort. Not toward the goal of not putting out effort anymore — that's the retirement scheme — but it's just the idea of putting out effort.

If you were to take a large body of people and inhibit them from putting out effort for a long time, they would deteriorate morally, physically — their social order would almost disappear. Well, one of the ways you do that is make everything automatic for them. That's one way to do it.

But a person recognizes, once in a while, that the police are not going to do anything for him — he passes immediately out of his agreement. He agreed to turn over, at one time, his own power of punishment to an organization, one kind or another, any one of which comes under the heading of police. And then he recognized a little later that the police weren't going to do anything for him. See, I mean that may be much later, but he recognized sooner or later they weren't going to do anything for him, which leaves him without justice — and that is the dwindling spiral of force and energy and responsibility. There it is, right there. That is the curve you're looking for in the case that won't take any responsibility — power to punish. Agreed somebody else had the power to punish, and that they were fairly safe in that other person having the power to punish, and then — then, no. Of course, way back, the idea that one must punish is what's responsible for this. Resist.

I'm going to talk about something now a little less theoretical, and that is the problem of the avidity of people for being betrayed, and their horror of being ridiculed. And they have a real horror of being ridiculed. Well, why should these ideas sit there like that? Well, there's a little process you can run — not a recommended process, but there's a little process that you can run that'll tell you all about this. There's what's known as the "rebound" — the "rebound hold."

A person is struck, and because some of the particles which were struck are liable to fly away, one seizes the struck area, so that he becomes horrified at the idea of things leaving him. He doesn't want things to leave him now. Why? See, he's struck, and then some of the particles which were struck may fly away in the next blow. And he just doesn't want this to occur — damaged particles — he's trying to hold on to what he has. And the other and perhaps even better reason, is because the fly-away hurts like hell.

This is dramatized by the fact that a knife, going in, seldom creates very much shock — it's merely cold and quite definite, kind of cold and icy. It isn't until the knife is pulled out, quite usually, that a person receives a severe shock. A man, theoretically, could be bayoneted through the stomach and not suffer very much because of it till somebody pulled the bayonet out. That's a rebound. He does a hold on to the bayonet. Now he tries to hold the blow incoming, and that "hold" sits there and resists any outgoing. Well, after a person's been struck too often, he gets the idea that he has to hold on to everything — and not only that, he gets the idea that he has to have things. So there is your basic clue, in terms of action and motion, to the person who has to have, has to have, has to have and can't give away anything. He wants something, he thinks.

In the Doctorate tapes there's a discussion about what you want, you can't have, and what you can't have, you want and so forth. Well, this is the basic mechanism behind it.

Now, if you will ask somebody who has been hit to go through an exercise — this is, by the way, an experimental process, is occasionally beneficial — is not a recommended process, but it's a very basic process.

You get the idea of his being struck from all sides, and then inhibiting the rebound, and then being struck and inhibiting the rebound, you have the exact pattern of effort through which he is going throughout his entire life. And that is why loss is so serious. That motion, then, makes the thetan unwilling to put out energy. It makes him unwilling to put out an aberration — and very important to you as an auditor, it makes him unwilling to give up any of his fixed ideas. Because it's going to hurt like that. And they'll sit there and look for somatics while they're trying to give up an idea. Well now, this is the silliest thing in the world and — no somatic's connected to an idea. And yet, he'll sit there and he thinks that he gives up an idea, why, he immediately is going to hurt.

Now, you just run that on such a preclear and he'll suddenly get the point. It's illustrative more than . . . Get the idea of him being hit, particularly being hit by an invisible barrier — that's the worst kind. And hit by a barrier, and then holding on so that the rebound won't take place. And then hit by another barrier and holding on so the rebound won't take place.

I don't recommend your doing this very long with the body, because that's exactly how you build a body. A person, however, who has to have and who will not give up, will be your most difficult preclear. And there is the mechanic. I mean, there's — don't have to dress this up any further — there are the mechanics of how this comes about.

He doesn't want anything in the first place, basically, as a thetan — he can create anything he wants. And yet he's been hit so often, and the body has been hit so often — he's been hit so often that the mere thought of losing something causes an enormous amount of sorrow on his part. So he loses something in life, and he starts to blow a grief charge on this. Well, this is rather silly, to blow a grief charge. What's he blowing a grief charge — what is the basic effort underlying a grief charge? Every grief charge has an effort underlying it. Well, it's just that. It's: In came the blow, and because he didn't want the rebound, why, he held it. And then in came the blow and he held it. And in came the blow and he held it. After a while, he gets a horror of ridicule, which is something being held out from him, and he gets a horror of giving up anything, and he gets a tremendous appetite.

Now, many factors will influence a person to get into this kind of a situation. The principal factor has to do with something else I'm going to tell you about now: the Factors. And I call your attention to the Factors because the Factors are right up top strata. The one thing that isn't mentioned in the Factors is attention, but it is understood between cause and effect, because obviously, you can't have cause and effect without having attention.

When you get there, the second line, "The first decision is to be." Well, there immediately you're handling "can't arrive," and there immediately you're handling energy. The basic intention of any energy is to assist a beingness. And preclears very often carry around themselves a sort of a caul, you might say, or a sort of a hood of energy, a — it's out there quite a ways on some preclears. There's a palpable somethingness around their body.

They might not even see it till you tell them to. "Now, concentrate on an invisible barrier. Now concentrate on overlooking it — look out beyond it. Now look at the barrier, now look out beyond." And the next thing you know, the fellow finds a tight band across his mouth or a tight band across his eyes, or he finds, over the top of his head and over his body in general, he finds out he has an invisible barrier all over him, which is quite peculiar.

Now, if he watches this invisible barrier, he will discover this is happening with it: Every time he sees something, the barrier echoes it. That is assisted by mirrors; the mirror gives the idea that the invisible barrier will reflect. But this mirror, really, in essence, is the thetan's effort to be. And you see how that could be? It's — you have something which makes an easy mock-up, it simply reflects some light, and there is the mock-up. Well now, he can be that image, you know, or he can have that image and see what he is being.

Well, this invisible barrier around him will actually take on the color and character of any object which he sees. Why? Because it is an effort to be. But it's a "not arrive." Now, you can tell some medical student who is going through medical school, you can say, "Now, there's this pipsalitis, which is a horrible disease, and it breaks out with small buckaroos on the end of the proboscis." And he promptly goes home and looks in the mirror and gets rather nervous about it, and what do you know? The next morning he does have a — something on the proboscis. Hm-hm! Now, this is the effort to be. He's trying to be something.

There is an interesting story told amongst the Blackfeet Indian. They have a character in the Blackfeet mythology known as "Old Man." And Old Man built everything. And Old Man had a horrible trick. He would come around to some animal and find out this animal wasn't doing this or that and he'd fix him up. And that's how the skunk got his stripe, and everything else. This was just — Indian stories.

But there's an animal out in the Rocky Mountains known as the pack rat. And this pack rat's a large rat — he's very large, he's unbelievably big. And he can carry around an enormous amount of bric-a-brac. And God help you if you ever leave a bright cartridge or a silver buckle or anything — if the magpies don't fly away with it, the pack rat will carry it away.

Well, you fortunately always know when it was a pack rat, so that you have some idea — you can go and look in the attic or someplace and get into the nest and get the stuff back. Because a pack rat could also be called a trade rat and is often called the trade rat, because he always leaves something in the place of this object which he has taken away. And you'll find a little chip of wood or a piece of a pine cone, or a little pebble sitting there where your fancy belt buckle just was, you see, or your cartridges just were. You go up into old abandoned shacks and you look around the roof and you'll find old pack rat nests, and they're full of cartridges and sardine-can tops and so on.

Well the Indian — Blackfeet Indian — tells the story of Old Man coming along, and here was this nice, self-satisfied rat sitting on the corner of a river, minding his own business, having no trouble with anybody.

And Old Man took a look at all this laziness going on, and he says, "Do you have any boojum?" And — pack rat was very upset.

He said, "What?"

"Well, I see that you don't seem to have any work to do."

And — "Oh, well I don't have any work to do. I've got all of my stores in for the winter and I've got a snug nest and everybody in the family's happy and so forth."

And, "Well," the Old Man said, "but do you have any boojum?"

And the pack rat looked very puzzled and he said, 'What's boojum?"

"Well, it's pretty important," Old Man said. Old Man said, "You know," he said, "I occasionally do horrible things to animals when I find an animal doesn't do things. You know that, don't you?"

And the pack rat thought of all the horrible things that had happened to animals and the way they'd gotten changed and everything else, and he didn't want to get changed, so he said, "Yes sir! Yes sir, I know all about that."

And Old Man said, "Well, the next time I come by, you'd better have some boojum."

And the pack rat yelled after him, "But what is it? What is it? What is it?"

But Old Man never answered.

Didn't mean to run too many Indian tales in on you this morning, but they're occasionally somewhat informative.

Your preclear is in almost a frantic state about boojum, (audience laughter) And he will rig up all kinds of things to imitate objects. And that, in essence, is a facsimile. And that's the cause back of the facsimile, you might say. And he'll carry a mass of energy around which can instantaneously become the impression of a facsimile at any moment.

You should try this on some preclear who's having a hard time — he looks into a saucepan and he goes away, and by George, he has a saucepan over his face. You tell him to look at it, he seldom has in the past — he's got a saucepan. Now he hears a sound, or something like that, and he gets a shuddering away from it, and then it'll echo ptock-ptock-ptock, afterwards. If he listens in that direction, he'd find it doing that. He goes down the street, and he sees somebody who looks extremely ugly, and he goes down the street feeling like that person. He shifts valences on sight.

But he isn't shifting. If he notices this, he can account for very many of the strange surprises he gets — momentary and often very long periods of consistent worry and concern, which immediately trace back to having observed something. And then he says, "I have a facsimile of it." Well, this is another method of having a facsimile.

The preclear is trying to be something. And he evidently can't arrive anywhere — every time he tried to arrive someplace, he became very definitely an effect. And he just decided he just didn't want to arrive anymore, and he stopped trying to be. Because in order to be something, you have to arrive.

Now, a preclear is a viewpoint of dimension, and he's a viewpoint of objects which are themselves barricades of dimension. Well, he could stand back and look at all the objects he wants to, but he only starts to get into trouble the day he flies into one of these objects and tries to be the object, because he can't ever be the object — not ever. He can be himself, but he can't be an object or a piece of energy. And so we find a preclear in his head, surrounded by an invisible barricade which will turn into almost anything.

He sees a car wheel and after that he has a funny impression on the back of his head. If he really — if you really directed his attention to it and asked him what was sitting on the back of his head, he would find out it would be this darn car wheel. He's got a duplicator; and here's where you get duplication coming in.

Now, I'm not just talking about one preclear, I'm just talking about preclears. They either duplicate in terms of facsimiles, very neatly and with big file systems and so forth, or they duplicate momentarily on a barrier sort of a mirror basis, and they get the feeling and pressure of something.

Now, you'll find preclears looking in at some kind of a machine going round and round and round, and they can sort of feel the machine churning in their heads afterwards. It's not serious, it doesn't worry them — it's just a piece of energy. They're just — there's something else they can be, or try to be.

But they hold it out away from the body and it's usually some little distance from the body — inches, inch or two — three, four, five inches, something like that. And they'll hold it away from the body because they can't arrive at it. See, they want to look at it and they want a record of it, and the thing is scarce and views are scarce and feelings are scarce and sensations are scarce, and so that's the way they go about it.

Now, your preclear who is running one of these perpetual duplicators is doing no more and no less than trying to be the right thing. Because his confidence in being able to pretend to be something — he can pretend to be something always — his confidence in pretending to be something has been shattered. And so he tries to be anything.

Well, here's where you get into names. He'll try to be symbols. Now, this is the silliest thing of all — anybody trying to be a symbol. Now, that's real, real weird.

Now, we go into a symbol, and we get into fixed ideas. Education, crusades, aberration — almost any activity of man is accompanied by a single phenomenon: the fixed idea. And if you're trying to do anything to a preclear, you're trying to unfix some of his ideas. So you'd better appreciate the value of an idea. The one single difference which is the most easily recognized difference — not the single difference, but the most easily recognized difference — between a thetan and a piece of mest is not whether he's alive or dead. No, it's ideas. The thetan gets ideas and mest doesn't.

Any machine — computer or something — can only pretend to turn out ideas; any machine, such as a brain, can only pretend to turn out ideas. It can turn out just as many ideas as a thetan is sitting back letting it turn out, and as he is furnishing it to be turned out — which I think is kind of cute. I wonder who stands in back of these big Comptometers and gives them the right answers — it's always been a puzzle to me — because their machinery doesn't account for it.

Anyway, I'm not trying to add spook stuff into you. They are — their machinery does account for it. But it sure never would have unless somebody'd worked out all possible problems in advance first, and after that the piece of mest can get answers.

But an answer is not an idea. A person who can only get answers has already gone downhill a little bit from just getting any kind of an idea. One of the fondest condemnations made in this culture is, 'You get wild ideas." That's the one thing you can condemn. And that's the way you condemn to death. You condemn a thetan to death with that.

Now, an accident resulting in an engram is, in essence, merely a fixed idea. An idea is located in time and space. And it's fixed. Now, a thetan has a lot of trouble fixing an idea — it's pretty hard to do. You know, you put an idea up in the air and it just doesn't stay there, not worth a nickel — they go whhhh! So, he invents symbols, and a symbol is something which could represent an idea. It is a piece of energy which is agreed to represent a certain idea. And we get immediately into symbols.

Now, symbols come under number VI. That's because people only succumb to them after a long time. They're pretty resistant to them. Actually, symbols are very high in terms of the creative cycle; they come very early. The idea, and then the symbol to represent the idea, are evidently both prior to large masses of relatively inactive energy; are even prior to a great deal of space.

Symbols — a symbol is an idea, fixed — to some degree — fixed in space. When an idea becomes too fixed with the individual, it is fixed in time and in space by an energy impact. And by preventing the reimpact, the rebound, he fixes the idea.

So we get the — bang! see, he gets hit. His idea is "I've been hit — I am being hit," and his next idea is not to let go. And he has then, sitting out in the middle of the plains of New Mexico or someplace, he has an idea fixed in time and space. But it's a symbol. And an engram, in essence, is a very crude symbol.

A word is a symbol. You don't think, for instance, that this printer's ink knows anything. It doesn't. Doesn't know a thing. It's only you've agreed upon that this funny-looking stuff here called letters, when added together, form a certain condensed thinkingness known as a symbol.

Well, therefore, people who make crusades in the society, and people who try to sell other people ideas, very often keep themselves pretty well down on the Tone Scale unless they know this. And that's what I meant when I said Scientology is senior to other efforts, simply because it undoes them, and it undoes them if only in this one department — the fixed idea.

So we have an individual who's trying to teach, let us say. He's trying to inform, he is trying to — much, much milder, you see, than merely trying to change ideas and so forth. He has all these students and he ... Actually, there is a skull — they're always talking about beating something into people's heads, you know? And there's a skull which is a mass of energy, and a brain which is a mass of energy, and a being who is himself a symbol called man — and we then are trying, when we teach him anything, you see, to put an idea in his head, we think.

Actually, we'll never put an idea in his head, but what we can do — can do — is offer him an idea which he can fix in the proper space. If he thinks it goes into his head, why, he'll after a while get headaches because of it, because he's not capable of doing this — he will. I mean, that is the source of migraine headaches and so on. It's just too many people have put ideas in the head. You'll find people who have migraine headaches also believe that they are very definitely inside and that they think, oh boy, real hard with their brains, and they can only believe what they have figured out. They follow a very definite pattern.

Well, when it comes to fixing an idea, the student is under the circumstance of having an idea fixed in him, and if he has the background of having had instructors who were relentless in trying to fix an idea . . . You know, they were going — the instructor was going to fix the idea just above the left ear or something, you see; the student had no placement or function for the idea — you get people who under training will be rather apathetic. They won't pick up the idea which is offered and fit it into any frame of reference or categorize it. In other words, they don't use it — just sort of sits there, you know? They're running a "I won't — I can't touch a fixed idea, and ideas which are offered to me in instruction are not for my use, they're just supposed to be there."

Now, you get the role of a teacher who is trying to teach children or grown-ups or anybody else, he is always trying to fix ideas in skulls and so forth, and he's trying to fix these ideas.

Now, anyone who starts going out on a broad crusade across the face of man, of course is in for trouble. Because he's trying to fix an idea on which there is a very low level of agreement, and he's trying to fix it "for people's own good." And he's trying to fix it in such a way that it won't become unfixed — and everybody is interested, when they're interested at all, only in unfixing it before it can be fixed. And this becomes very upsetting to a crusader.

People who have tried to do things for man and so forth, have quite uniformly gone mad or had something happen to them. Every once in a while you hear some wild story about me, by the way, now getting personal about this — that I've jumped off the dam or I've done something or other. And then somebody meets me who's been lied to like this, you see, and I seem to talk fairly rationally, and they see me interested in my kids or something like that and they — there's something wrong here. Anybody else who is on a wild crusade and so forth is in bad shape. Why? And they are, too. They get into very bad shape. But they only get into bad shape if they don't know the answer.

Now, you carrying forward Scientology to people, you're trying to fix an idea which will unfix ideas. People really object to this because they don't have the foggiest notion of what their own ideas are, and you come along and plow through all of this and they see you going through all of — everything they're doing like so much — like a big ham slicer, you know, one of those mechanical ham slicers; you're just making hash out of all this real fast, you see. And they're liable to get very upset.

But if you're working in a fair purity of technique and you're not tampering with their cherished ideas, their most cherished notions, intimately . . . You know, like — the psychoanalyst runs into something on this order, or the clergyman is always running into something on this, because they start fishing for guilt. And boy, they don't get accepted worth a nickel by the society. No, sir.

Well, you're not interested in guilt. You're not interested in what he's trying to hide or what the deeper significance of his symbols are or anything of the sort — and you can get away with it. And you can get away with it particularly if you understand very clearly what you're trying to do in terms of fixing ideas.

It's very easy to fix an idea. A thetan believes it's difficult merely because other thetans can blow them up so fast. You can fix a symbol in the sky or in a piece of space, and of course, it'll blow up. And if you say the idea is the symbol, why, it of course can be blown up. So you — first step into purgatory, you might say, is saying that a symbol is an idea. It's not. Symbols can serve and pass ideas, if people insist on having something to have or handle.

Well, drills, then, which unfix ideas are of the essence. But sooner or later you're going to have to run a drill on this preclear which permits him to fix some ideas in space. Well, he can fix ideas in space as well as he can fix anchor points, just about — so you handle it in terms of anchor points. But you'll run across preclears who are perfectly willing to make eight-pointed space out of ideas, and these ideas will stay there.

Well, you shouldn't be too content about this. It means this person has an automaticity for fixing ideas the like of which you've never run into before. You know, he can't fix eight anchor points there, but he can fix eight ideas there, and boy, do they stay there.

Well, you make him move ideas, and this is something he's never done. Ideas have always moved him. You make him move words, move ideas, and so forth. And sooner or later you're going to have to give him a drill which permits him to fix ideas, but it's a very light drill — I mean, that is inconsequential. What is important is moving the ideas. Men are consistently and continually moved by ideas. But they think that an idea is a mass of energy because they think it's a symbol, and therefore they think of themselves as an idea, and therefore they get into a body and get stuck. They've tried to fix ideas so long and so hard upon bodies, as thetans, that they will eventually stick themselves in the body because that's the only place that's sticky. "That idea must stick," they've said to the body. "Now listen here," they've said, "if you go near that stove again I'm going to whap you!"

Well, it went near the stove again, and so he just — thetan would take the facsimile and fix it up near the body so that every time the body got near the stove, it would automatically jump back from the stove, you see, because of the heat as a restimulator.

And so we had methods of saving and hoarding, and keeping from getting scarcer than they were, bodies. A thetan has no business under the sun, moon or stars worrying about the scarcity of bodies. He should be able to create them.

Single difference between the thetan and mest is the thetan gets ideas. Thetans fix ideas into heads, they are themselves ideas, so therefore they get fixed in heads. Have you got that? That's real simple. But you're right on the main track now, you see — knowingness, fixed ideas and so on.

Now, a preclear: the only thing you're trying to do with the preclear, really — there's a whole lot of sort of — a lot of things ought to sort of click into space with you on this. They — all you're trying to do with a preclear is take some ideas he's got fixed — well, you don't know where he's got them fixed. He's got them fixed out in Keokuk and down on the Rio Grande, and he's got them fixed in school and condensed spaces here and there and so on. He's got ideas fixed, he thinks, all over the place.

And SOP 8 - C shakes him out of the places where he's fixed ideas. That's why you run "where is he not," see. And he's out of present time every place but here, because he's fixed ideas all over the place. And you're trying to alter his ideas. You're not just trying to unfix them, you're trying to alter them.

Well, the only way you can alter his ideas — the only way you can really alter his ideas — is of course by demonstrating to him an ability to handle ideas, and demonstrating to him that he is not a piece of energy and that he's not a symbol. And after that, why, he's disabused of some very interesting things, and he can do what he pleases about it. But he has the idea that this or that is going to happen — he has an intimate, imminent feeling of disaster — just daa-dunnn! But — he's just about to get this feeling all the time, you see. And he can't quite have that feeling and this is very upsetting to him, and he will tell you it's in the future and the future is twenty-five feet in front of him. You know, something on that order.

Well, you just have him move the idea around, "The future is twenty-five feet in front of me," and then — then finally you move the idea out toward twenty-five feet in front of him — it's liable to do all sorts of things, including explode. And after that he'll realize the future is not twenty-five feet in front of him. Not because you told him so, but because you permitted him to handle the idea which was formerly handling and positioning him.

So you're unfixing ideas, you're permitting him to unfix ideas simply by getting him to handle ideas, and that is done in several ways. And he is as well as he can have effort, he is as well as he can generate ideas and be creative about life. And he's as well as he can dream, he's as well as he can recognize his own brotherhood with existence. Not on a low-toned "I've got to be" basis, but on a very individualistic basis. Any man should be able to answer, with some satisfaction, the following question: "Is the world or any part of it any happier because I have been through it?" And it's quite terribly interesting that that is the one which makes the preclear saddest.

If all men were evil, if all things were bad, it wouldn't produce in anybody the slightest qualm that he might answer that question. That wouldn't produce anything in anybody, it'd just pass right over. And yet it does.

Now, back along the track you'll find times when he was trying and decided that things were only worse because he was in action. And he stopped going into action, and after that said, "All things are too evil to be helped." That was his only alibi. And there's where he's stuck with his lack of trust, right there.

Men are as active, as happy, as broadly energetic and capable as they are themselves confirmed in their own belief in their own goodness, and they're just as bad as they've fallen away from it.

Way up topside there is this feeling of a brotherhood with all existence, and way down bottomside there's this feeling that "My God, we'd certainly better press together for our own protection." But the member of the last group is a member of that group solely to get protection — individual protection — from the group, and the group can go to hell. And the member of the top group is a member of the group solely because he can assist it. Big difference between the two points of view.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Book 1 and 2 and the last chapter of Book 3; Science of Survival, all; Advanced Procedure and Axioms and the Handbook for Preclears which are to be used together; Self Analysis in Scientology (parenthesis) or (quote) "in Dianetics" (unparenthesis); Scientology 8-8008, all of it; and the Journal of Scientology Issues 14-G and 16-G (now to that, will be 23-G, which will carry a rather elementary rendition of SOP 8-C and a Group Process); now your — all of these books could be said to deal with the problem of fixed ideas and technologies for remedying or unfixing them. And within this framework, we can work an enormous amount of change. And it's rather humorous that we have something here which if used for the destruction of man, would have to be released broadly enough to bring about his salvation.

If anybody is given part of this technology to work with it destructively, he is liable to be curious enough about all of it to go on through and work it out again. So if this material is ever buried, they'd better be very careful what they bury of it. They better leave nothing in sight but the prefrontal lobotomy, because out of that you couldn't work anything except the idiocy of a declining species.

Okay, you understand Scientology a little better, perhaps, may chance?

Okay.