The subject here today, the third lecture of the afternoon Professional Course, is Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 2.

Now, Standard Operating Procedure, probably to you who have not tried it down the line, Issue 1, is actually much easier to do if done by its own tenets and so forth, than any other technique that has existed in Dianetics or Scientology — much less the field once upon a time, which once existed, of the psychotherapies.

You take an Aesculapian technique. Now, that really required operation. The temple, the Aesculapian cult, operated in Greece; operated somewhere around the — about 300 years, thereabouts, B.C. — and it used convulsive shock, used a drug known as hellebore. And through its patients who were there for psychotherapy — just that, psychotherapy; the Greek actually recognized that something could be wrong with the human mind — and the drug hellebore was used to produce a convulsive shock which in itself was then supposed to expel from the body unwanted demons and was supposed to, by its shock, relieve the psychic tension of the individual.

The Aesculapian techniques included also narcosynthesis, which is just a new and fancy name for a technique which is much older than the Aesculapian cult.

A man was given narcosynthesis. He was given a drug — generally just plain, routine, run-of-the-mill opium — which was exuded as smoke into a chamber into which the patient was placed. The smoke was perfumed. And he would then, of course, in his unconscious state, babble and talk, and from this babble and talk the priests would derive some idea of his character. Or from his past history — if he were a very wealthy psycho case — from his past history the priest would have gleaned, from the household slaves, from his wife and so forth, data sufficient for him to solve the case to the degree that it was possible to solve this case. That was not a very big degree.

And he would then be given assurances and be made to dream that a god had come to see him and that the god had reassured him about his state of being.

The percentage of cure was 22 percent. Oddly enough, a great deal of data is available to us on Aesculapian therapy. It has also been available very widely through the Western world because the Roman had no psychotherapy beyond a prayer to the god Febris — Febris, the god of fever. And this prayer sufficed to cure anything — schizophrenia, manic-depressive — any one of the various ills and catalepsies which the Roman saw quite easily would seize upon the mind.

The Roman, toward the second century A.D., had, of course, come into a level of identification so that he could barely differentiate between the sane and the insane. And the history of the next several centuries demonstrate to us adequately that the state of the Roman Empire was something on the order of one of our wilder sanitariums. It was terrible.

The Roman saw nothing wrong in the emperor of all Rome and all of her territories cavorting about the streets, making himself publicly ridiculous, electing his horse to a consulship — one of the highest posts in the empire. They saw nothing wrong in that same character being placated by his mother through sexual intercourse. This wild, mad and insane scene comes home to us as not a scene in which anybody really would have thought of psychotherapy as a necessary element. And what do you know, they didn't think of it as a necessary element, so they cured patients with a prayer to the god Febris and the results were about 22 percent.

It's a wonderful thing that the wealthier people still patronized the Aesculapian temples. They would actually go over to Greece; that was the thing to do — something like many, many centuries later it was the thing to do to go to some spa.

And so we came forward and we got demon exorcism as the next most significant change in psychotherapy and its processes. And demon exorcism was practiced on the theory that insanity and illness was occasioned by the inhabiting of the body by a malignant spirit and that this spirit was a minion of the devil and was there for the purpose of robbing the individual of his sanity.

This should be very interesting to you from a standpoint of responsibility. It demonstrates to you — this technique began to flourish about 700 A.D. and it went steadily up and we still find it in practice in 1700 A.D.

It's an interesting thing that that level of responsibility was so poor. You get that as an index of the responsibility of the practitioner and of the patient: that this patient had done nothing, really, that this patient needed to have nothing changed in him, that just by some unhappy mischance a demon had begun to inhabit his body and that was why he was insane. This complete departure from any responsibility on the part of the patient was indicative of the times and actually carries us through the apathy periods which are known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; because those periods for most were apathy — and for the higher level, the crudest of force, misapplied.

That brings us forward to about 1700, at which time we began to practice different and new things. Man had become a little more — come a little higher in tone and he had begun to use clubs and water cures, chains and other mild, soothing instruments upon his patients.

You have today in England an institution known as Bedlam. Bedlam is today one of the most humane and quiet sanitariums in the world, but its name sticks in the popular ken. They still use bedlam as descriptive of confusion. The techniques practiced in Bedlam two and three hundred years ago — maybe not quite that long ago — were essentially those of "If you make insanity uncomfortable enough, he'll get sane." And it was on that theory that man progressed and that was his significant development.

Coming into the Western world, then, we found such things as the Arabian Nights. We find the Arabian Nights appearing in France and being retranslated in England. With the Arabian Nights came such things as the Vedic hymns. This is about the middle of the eighteenth century. The Vedic hymns and other things began to infiltrate the Western world.

For the first time your Westerner was aware of the fact that somebody did something about the mind, that there was a mind. Up to that time the Western world considered the mind and body — well, there was a sort of a spirit and it didn't have much to do with the body. It was something you sort of held in pawn, and if you died, why, it went off to heaven or something of the sort, or it went off to hell, and that was about all he thought about it.

As far as the body itself was concerned, the customs of the time, the marital customs and so on, indicate that the human body was considered — and the human being was considered — somewhat on the order of animal husbandry, the raising of poultry, anything like that. Marital customs tell you that particularly. A woman was an owned thing, very thoroughly owned. She was so owned that just about that time she was ceasing to be sold, for instance. Anybody could have sold his wife, for instance. It's very fascinating, the customs of the times. The human being was nothing.

All right. Now, from this sudden, savage, impatient attitude on the part of the treaters or practitioners, we have walking onto the stage from the East, evidently, Anton Mesmer. And one might say that there was the first glance that the Western world took into the depths and mysteries of the mind since the last of the Aesculapian cult died away. That was the first revival. And actually one could say that it came from the East; it was almost East and I think the Aesculapian cult probably infiltrated from Persia — some evidence of this.

So it came into the Western world that a human being could be placed in a comatose state and would then utter various things.

Animal magnetism came into the knowledge of man and he began to be very excited because he knew animal magnetism could be true because it said that animal magnetism had taken place in the Bible. And if it had taken place in the Bible, then, of course, it was true. That actually — I'm not joking — that was the level of his critique. Not too bad a level of critique if you haven't any.

Now, the next step was introduced by Charcot in France. And Charcot introduced hypnotism more or less as we know it. The most astonishing — in 1832, the most astonishing variety of experiments were conducted by Charcot and in that period. Fascinating, fascinating. It is so far in advance of and so much more adventurous than 1950 hypnotism. They knew so much more about it through their experiments that one is left a little bit agape at how in the nineteenth [twentieth] century so much technology could have disappeared from the general ken of the hypnotist.

Now, we have Charcot bringing forward and wondering about many of the data which only today in Scientology can we explain. What on earth were these patients doing? Because other hypnotists in the following century could not create the same condition of this same perception — they abandoned it. Yet in the year 1898, we find in a textbook on hypnotism some of these things mentioned again. We find that they were still able to differentiate between mesmerism and hypnotism.

You as a practitioner should know the difference between mesmerism and hypnotism. It's very significant. Actually, it wouldn't do you any harm to know a great deal about hypnotism because hypnotism is the primary control tool that's been used for the last 76 trillion years. Everything is more or less hypnotism. What you're trying to do to a human being is unhypnotize him. Certain things have been implanted in him which are contrary to his best interests and he obeys them. This, you might say, is hypnotism — not necessarily contrary to his best interests, but any implant is contrary to one's best interests because it cuts down analytical awareness.

All right. We look back then across the past and we find these techniques which I have outlined to you, and we find that it was only in 1894 when man once more began to walk upward toward the Aesculapian techniques — he only then started to.

In 1942 we find man again employing narcosynthesis. A little earlier than that he began to employ convulsive shock once more, and he modified it. You see, to this day, one of the primary treatments of insanity is such a drug as Metrazol — it produces a convulsion actually in its essence — or insulin, which produces a coma.

Now, you could take an electric shock machine and produce a convulsion. And this, you will find in the early writers on electric shock, is the reason why electric shock is being employed. It produced a convulsion.

We find Reich, Wilhelm Reich; he is a fellow and he (he lives someplace or other) — this character says, "Now I have the essence of the essence of the essence." And this is what they do in his clinic. I don't care what it says in any book he ever wrote — if he could write. This is what they do in his clinic: they simply train a patient to go into a convulsive state. They give him something that is more violent than an epileptiform seizure by training, and of course the patient can't do this — he can't stop doing this most of the time after he leaves his treatment. It's an effort to give a convulsive shock without the introduction of electricity and drugs, which are themselves harmful; but we still have the central idea: convulsive shock. There is no other theory back of convulsive shock than that.

I have seen speculations on it which run clear back from the times before Christ. If you can make a man shudder and shake enough, something happens. That's about it.

Now, you can produce with any auditing technique — you can produce, if you just sit down to do just that — an epileptiform seizure, a convulsive shock, anything you want to produce. You can make this body do anything. But don't for a moment suppose — don't for a moment suppose that the treatment of mental illness and the betterment of mankind in his abilities has been other than an extremely dark and arduous track, extremely so.

The day when you confront an insane person and have to use your head and look at that insane person with a sufficient dispassion to treat and remove that insanity, you will understand in that moment why that track remained dark. Unless an individual has a technique by which he himself can regain his sanity, he has no business touching the insane. In the absence of techniques, or in the presence of techniques such as convulsive shock, it would have been far, far better for the human race just to have taken the insane and dumped them into the Hellespont.

Because the toll the insane takes of the practitioner is fantastic. You stand up against insanity day after day after day after day and you don't want to think about the insane. All you want to think is, "How can we get through to whatever is there hard enough to throw it into apathy." You'll find, because of the violence of behavior on the part of many of the insane, or the complete despair in which they exist, that your initial impulse will be to run away and leave it alone and have nothing to do with it. And your second impulse, if you start to treat it, is not to be rational at all, because aberration is contagious and insanity is contagious.

And the next instant after you start to practicing, you will probably find within yourself a small urge to just take the fellow and throttle him! Anything, just get him quiet, get him out of the road, stop that insane babble or chatter. Or if they just lie there in a catatonic state, you'll find yourself at first shaking them a little bit, and then all of a sudden you begin to wonder if you shoved a spike in them if it might not move them.

Just because insanity is a desperate situation, however, is no reason it calls for desperate measures. Man, in identifying in his thought, has, of course, assumed that was the case. Insanity is a desperate condition, therefore it requires a desperate measure. This is quite far from the truth. Insanity is such a desperate condition that it will surrender only to a featherweight. The tiniest, lightest technique you know is the only technique that will work on most of the insane.

The insane person is saying to you, "Don't kill me, because I am already beyond responsibility." And he says it in a myriad of ways, and he says it very convincingly. The only way a thetan back on the track could die was to say, "I am no longer responsible, leave me alone," because a thetan can't die. Now, that is a pitiful fact.

A thetan, actually, in many cases would — feels he would be much better off to have a body which could die. And we're living on a tacit consent today: "When the body is dead, I'm gone." And you can make a body look so dead. And once the truck has gone over or the firing squad has fired or something of the sort, or the rack ceases to clack-clack, why, there's the body. It's dead. It's observably dead. There's physical evidence that it's dead: the heart is no longer beating, the respiration no longer occurs and the body gets cool. What a relief that was.

Death is an invention. It is a last-ditch invention, and the only other remedy — the only other way to stop alien, hostile and predatory forces — if one cannot die is to say, "I'm insane." Thus you find insanity as a solution and the man has attained the solution. He is saying, "I can't die, but I am mad and therefore I'm not responsible so there's no reason to keep on punishing me."

This person has really been punished. But it comes from way back on the track. Don't look for insanity in this lifetime. It's nonsense. It's not in this lifetime. It's thousands, millions, billions, trillions of years ago that you'll find the E-Meter sparking on insanity.

Insanity says, "I have lost all my. control." And here we're getting into this — you probably think I am taking a long way around, but I'm not. Insanity is Step VII of Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 1, and insanity is protesting against having no control of any part of the physical universe. The insane is insane. He knows he's insane because he is no longer able to locate in space and time any energy or matter. He is simply triggered in this lifetime; he is not driven insane in this lifetime.

Don't think that the experience of a Japanese prison camp, don't think that Stuka dive bombers or incendiary bombs or seeing the rest of one's company go up in smoke — kapoof — is enough to drive a person insane. That's too mild entirely. And if you think that that — it should drive a person insane, then go out and take a look at the people who've been through it and you will find an astonishing lack of insanity! It's all very well to theorize that it's stress that does it. Oh, no, it isn't stress that does it. It's lack of control that does it. Lack of control, not stress. So don't look for stress, look for where control was denied and look where one had no answer left, except: "I'm no longer responsible, don't torture me further."

You see, you can torture a thetan, you can keep hitting him with electric blasts, you can keep spinning him around or dancing him up and down and doing other things to him or taking the wavelength of pain, if you please, and just playing it over him constantly; not for a year, but maybe five years or ten years or eighteen thousand years, nothing but pain. Fascinating, isn't it?

After a while, the fellow is going to start looking for somebody to say, "Look, there's no reason to keep on doing this to me because I won't ever handle anything in the physical universe again. I won't ever initiate anything, I'll just quit. I won't get — have any force. I'll just give up; I have no reason to go on and I'm insane." Because, you see, the poor fellow can't die.

Insanity, then, is deeper than death. It's much deeper than death and is so regarded by the insane, as a much more heroic remedy. But they are driven away from dying by a fear of dying, into an insanity from a fear of living. And there you have his maybe: He's afraid to die and he can't live. And there you get the solution to the maybe and that's — he's mad.

And the reason he knows he can't live and the reason he knows all these other things is a very simple reason, is he can't locate anything in space and time. So therefore he knows he's insane. He knows the time has come for him to, colloquially speaking, "spin off" or "flip his lid." And when will that time be? Well, nobody can tell if a fellow has that on his bank.

Throughout most of his lifetime this individual is very easy. Oh, you can spot a person that's going to go insane. Don't ever think about it with regard to yourself particularly, don't ever be queasy about it. If you're not crazy now, you probably never will be.

But you can tell a person who is going to go insane. You can know this. You can know this. How do you know this? It's by his inability to handle space and time. It's a direct test, and the person who is going to go insane . . . This society has such a low tolerance level — I mean, pardon me, a high tolerance level — for insanity, that a person can bumble around and run into things and all sorts of things, and people still don't recognize what he is: He's a borderline case. He'll do such things as he can't quite remember where yesterday was. And he'll mimic insane things, and he'll do various things. But this is a continual practice.

And this is the primary part of it. The old saw about the fellow being insane being the one who never knows it is too true, is too true. Because if a person knows he's insane, he's as sane as they come. Insanity in its essence is knowing one is sane, because insanity is rational conduct to the insane. It's a rational solution. Irresponsibility is a rational solution.

And sure enough, you look at a lot of these insane people, you'll find out it's a very rational solution. I know one of them, he hasn't done anything, not a tap of work — he hasn't reported to a desk, he hasn't had to answer a telephone in earnest or anything else for two years. He's an electric shock case, and so forth. But he has not had to be placed in time and space for two years. What's his solution? He's insane. It's very remarkable, he goes around saying, "The 'enthetans' are about to get me."

But a Theta Clear can feel the blast coming off of him. The glee of insanity. Insanity and irresponsibility is a sort of a glee. A Theta Clear sort of — he just can see the stuff on himself; he just peels it off. It's a horrible kind of a glee.

All right. What, then, is the predominant characteristic of the insane? One, he doesn't know it and he isn't going to do anything about it. That's characteristic one. If he knows it and he's going to do something about it, he's neurotic. He still has responsibility, don't you understand? He has responsibility for his own state of beingness. But if he has no responsibility for his own state of beingness and just merely assures you that that's all he can do about it and that's him, and life is just that way and so forth, he's nuts! You see?

The very fact that he will take enough responsibility for himself to say, "Somebody has got to help me out," — see, he says to himself, "I've got to be responsible for myself." He's not insane, because that's outside the definition of insanity which is, of course, no responsibility. And no responsibility is pretty bad. So when you get complete no responsibility you actually have insanity.

Now, there are insanities where people will go out and dance in the streets — mass insanities. They'll dance in the streets in the face of some great cataclysm. All of a sudden they recognize they can't do anything about this and so they throw masked balls and go running around in the streets and dancing, and throwing garlands of flowers over everybody's head until they all keel over dead. This was particularly popular in the days of the plague. It never occurred to any one of those nitwits that all he had to do was go around and sit down for a couple of minutes and think. Now, all he had to do was just say, "Let's see, plague. Whenever we have plague what factor changes? What factor has changed preceding the plague? What is the changed factor? There must be one factor common to every plague." That's all he had to say to himself. Any one of these dopes could have solved plague ages before Ronald Ross started nailing down this sort of thing. It was very simple.

There were always rats in plenty, and just before a plague struck you found the rats dead in the streets. They'd come out in broad daylight — rats would.

I mean, it wasn't one of these little signs that you'd look for with a microscope. It was great big wharf rats running all over the city and through the grocery shelves and past people's heads, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin just about describes the hordes of rats that immediately would precede the plague; and then you'd see them dead all over the place. You'd see them dead on your breakfast tray. You'd see them dead in the market. You'd see them dead everywhere, feet up in the air. If you'd taken any one of those rats, you simply would have looked and he would have been lousy in the very proper usage of the term, lousy. And it was the bug that was doing it. And they — it's fascinating, but they never added this up. That's how insane the period was!

So, the terrible irresponsibility of this resulted in joy. But this isn't telling you that the manifestation of joy is always irresponsibility. Joy also stems from an ability to command: the entire opposite end. Joy does not only continue from — and actually doesn't continue from at all — irresponsibility. Joy that is — derives from that is very nervous and very hectic. You think the little child who is just getting out of school for his vacation is truly joyful. He isn't. Such a terrible weight of responsibility has been lifted off of him that he gets hectic and if you watch him very carefully, he's very hectic. And it's that sort of a hectic, spinny kind of a joy that is — that is first cousin to insanity.

Actual pleasure and so forth comes from the ability to locate things in time and space, and if you locate things in time and space accurately and well — hm-hm, there's real happiness.

All right. Now, let's take a look then at this number VII, the bottom — running this thing backwards — this number VII. This is running backwards on the theory of "How bad can they get?" And then when I get up to your case it'll look so easy that before I leave you this afternoon you'll say, "Well, gee, I'll just be cleared — boom!"

Now, how do you treat this VII? How do you treat him? Well, there are several ways of treating him. But you better think — instead of treating the VII, you better think in terms of the third dynamic with regard to insanity. It sounds very inhuman where I'm concerned, perhaps, and I don't know any reason why I should sound human. I'm telling you very practically, with great practicality, that the problem of insanity is a third dynamic problem, not a first dynamic problem, because this fellow has abandoned himself utterly and completely. And by the time you have fished around into the very thorough job that's been done on him in keying it in in this lifetime and in early lifetimes, after you've fished around and fished around and fished around, you'll have a miracle to bring him up to a level of a terribly bad neurotic.

Because you're sort of doing this: You're taking something that insists it can't be there. Actually, it is easier — and get this — this might sound very wild to you, but it's actually easier for you to create a being. Because you've not only got to bring this person back to life again, you've got to find him first. He's sitting right in front of you there, but you've got to find him first. That's quite a contest because his total goal is "get lost."

He's lost someplace in time, he's generally as lost someplace in space, and even though he is apparently quite rational for hours at a stretch or days at a stretch or months at a stretch, he's just doing that because at the moment he sees no reason to be lost again. And he'll fool you, because that is the essence, that's what he's trying to do. He's playing a game with you, "I'm not there, I'm not here, I'm not anywhere. I won't be anywhere." Past, present and future: "I don't have anything, you can't take anything away from me. It's all right, go ahead and kill me — anything. And here I am, and so on, and I'll just prove to you how I am not here. I'll just show you that I couldn't even be responsible for my own life because here!" And he'll pick up a gun that he has hidden someplace and take a shot at you.

And you'll say, "Well, why did he do that? I'm just here to help." Well, he's just proving to you that he can dare anything; he's gone. That he isn't there. He can't be responsible for you or for anything else.

Third dynamic problem, not a first dynamic problem. And what is the answer, the real answer to insanity? Quarantine — quarantine. Because, you see, it isn't practical to process an insane person in this lifetime. There are too many able people whose services are desperately needed by man. It just isn't practical. And you'll find any one of these insane people has done a contagion of insanity to considerable depth in his immediate environment.

His family will just be frantic — or her family, just be frantic. Every economic tie has been seized up to a point where it can have no further notch in it. Every single social and human attribute of the family is being damaged something on the order of how a nerve would be damaged if you started to saw on it with a wood rasp. When you look at the insane, look at the group in which that person is; look at the group. This insane person is backed off to a point where he doesn't even contact anymore usually. He really isn't in contact at all. Look at that group.

And somebody asks you for an opinion on this, something of the sort, you actually don't have any right to give any opinion on this. Nobody has any right to give any opinion on this. I don't have any right to stand here and tell you this opinion, but I'm just telling you from a standpoint of a practical thing, when somebody asks you, "What am I going to do? This and that has happened," sure, take a passing glance at the case. Just take a passing glance, because every once in a while it has triggered at a specific moment, and it's a quick salvage, once in a while. You're actually dealing, though, when that happens, only with a neurotic.

You take somebody who has just had a baby and they're off their rockers. They won't take care of the child and they want to murder the husband, something like that — run out the delivery. If you can get their attention, run out the delivery, they very often snap right back.

That person will be inaccessible, but that person won't present the same manifestation that I'm talking about. They're not really insane, they're just completely unbalanced by their environment. So you see, we're on a gradient scale here. We're not talking about sharp differences; there are things classified as — and which you would classify at a glance as — insane, which could be patched up quickly.

But the fellow that's been insane for just years and years and years and he's done this and he's done that and they've had him here and they've had him there and they've wah-wah-wah-rah-rah-rah — quarantine him. And process the group in which he was.

And when he dies, very possibly the between-lives area will rip off enough facsimiles, and he might get into the environment the next time and be all right and sort of key out. It will take care of itself in the next 50 or 60 years.

The roughest thing I know for an auditor is the insane. And you can work on them, you can work on them, you can work on them, every trick, every trick you know, and they're just there to do one thing: to convince you they're not responsible. And they'll take everything you throw at them to convince you they're not responsible. And you at length will practically go by the boards. You're needed for better things. You can do it, don't doubt that for a moment. You actually can do the job. You could stay in there and slug maybe for thirty hours, maybe slug fifty hours, it's quite unpredictable — 200 hours.

But let me ask you this on VII cases. Please, please remember that if you were to save all the insane in the world today and make them all right as rain, the only thing you would have done was prevent the contagion of aberration of chronic insanity in the society. That's all you would have done. But to have accomplished that, you would have to do the job of making sane all the insane in a period of a few months around the whole world — because if you picked up one at a time, one at a time, one at a time, they're going crazier faster than that, you see? You just haven't got enough time; we don't have enough auditors and we never will have. This universe just won't have enough auditors ever to be able to take this job in that fashion. No, the job comes in another way — see, it will be answered in another way. There is an answer up the time track to this, but it just doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with auditing.

It is a big problem, it's a mass problem, it's a special project, and if you went to all the work of doing all of that and you cleaned up all the insanity, you would have bettered mankind — well, the same gradient scale is about one degree on a Fahrenheit thermometer. You wouldn't have done a thing, actually. You wouldn't have done anything.

It's not a good goal. You will not have practiced, then, an optimum solution. And the essence of definition of an optimum solution is the greatest good on all the number of dynamics. And it so happens that the treatment of three by auditing up a flock of ones is not the greatest good on all the dynamics by a long ways, because your solution as the greatest good on the greatest number of dynamics asks you to invest your time in producing the greatest good on the greatest number of dynamics. And you are an essential part of that equation in this society and world today. You are the most vital factor today in that equation.

There's another very unvital factor — it's a good dead factor. It's actually a lack of responsibility on which any thinking being could spit. That's an A-bomb — now it's an H-bomb: "Now we can kill them all a lot faster!" That's irresponsibility, international irresponsibility for the fourth dynamic.

You actually could produce enough miracles . . . You're not accustomed to thinking in terms of superlatives, of hyperbole, because in the past you haven't had that comparative viewpoint, and your own resistance to change sort of tells you it possibly couldn't happen.

Oh, yes, it could happen! The greatest empire on the face of the earth went by the boards — the greatest empire Earth had known went by the boards — because of the miracles produced by thirteen men. Now remember that. And, boy, it caved in quick. But it caved in because it was a vile and vicious empire and all it took was an injection of hope into the multitude. That's all it took. "Something can happen for us. We are not pinned here forever. We don't have to be in apathy."

And you know what they learned? They learned a very interesting fact and that interesting datum was this. They knew this inherently, and they learned this, then, by religious teaching: "We can't die. We don't die; there is life after death." That's what they learned.

And therefore, you could fly in the teeth of any unreasonable force because you couldn't be punished simply by having your body cut up to pieces. Now, we've gone on the opposite side of insanity. They had a body that could die so they were spared the other, and they learned all of a sudden that the machine guns of a large and vicious state — it wasn't machine guns in those days, they did it with arenas and crucifixes — were powerless, because all they could do was kill them. That's all that could happen to them. They could just be killed.

And, boy, that state which had reduced into slavery almost two thirds of its population — two thirds of its population was living in kennels the like of which you wouldn't keep a London pet in — and they just suddenly said, "You're through, boys," and the Roman Empire was through.

Now, I'm not saying at any moment that there's any great empire to be overthrown. At the present time, there isn't. We haven't got an empire in this world today. We just don't have one. There is an anarchy of nations. The family of nations on Earth today live in anarchy, and they go to war because the people are afraid. You can make a populace afraid so long as the populace believes it can die. And you can make it so afraid of dying that they will enter into the enterprise of killing and dying to just throw in the sponge finally and say, "Well, that's all." That's a fantastic thing, but if you took some of the pressure off, just took some of the pressure off internationally, it would be very, very difficult for anybody to get people hot enough so that we would have another war.

If just the people in this room did their job well and spotted their target where the target should be — and you don't have to go out and stand on soapboxes or anything else. All you have to do is apply some techniques, that's all, and they're easy techniques to apply. And all of a sudden a bunch of "can't" cases suddenly "can." And people say, "Hey, what's happening!" You don't have to have it in the newspapers; the devil with the newspapers. The only publicity there is that's worth anything is just word of mouth. It's Uncle Joe getting helped and Aunt Agatha hearing about it. And it looks slow at first and it creeps at first, but then it goes a little faster and a little faster and a little faster, and with Theta Clearing, they know — nobody has to tell them again — they know they can't be killed. Now, that's fascinating, isn't it?

You actually can carry a message to the people of the world to the effect that man is immortal, and that takes all the international pressure off — just that little fact all by itself.

And let's take a much more important project than insanity — infinitely more important than insanity. Let's take one, just one: criminals, criminals.

Supposing all the time in the past the psychotherapists have been putting in on insane people, they put in on criminals. The criminal is kind of bad off, but he's a criminal because he's in revolt against the society and because he is degraded. And he's easy to patch up. And the best way to patch up the criminal is to get the young criminal; and the young criminal is so easy to process, you'd be ashamed of yourself for ever thinking for two seconds that you couldn't handle these techniques.

You get ahold of some young juvenile delinquent and you say, "Just be ayard back of your head." Bang! You say, "All right, change the postulate abouthow you have to get even with everybody." Bang! "Okay, step back inside. That'sfine, Johnny. Next." You'd be ashamed of yourself. If you were to learn how easyit was to process out of existence the criminal, and you had spent a thousandhours of auditing time curing up somebody's aunt who believes that the goblinsare going to get her, and curing up Mr. Blow, the notorious alcoholic just becausehis family had money, you'd have a feeling of shame and a bad time investment.All of a sudden you walk into this big problem, which is a big problem inthe world today. You know why nations go mad? They go mad because of police.

And why do you have to have police? Because you have criminals. And why do they go mad because of police? Because the police exist as the interconnecting link between the honest, forthright and constructive citizen and the criminal element of the society. They carry plague.

You take a police sergeant who has had to be in the midst of criminals for four or five or six months and you turn him loose amongst a bunch of good citizens, and he takes days and days to reorient. He has a terrible time reorienting. Awful! Gosh! It's a very amusing thing. They've found in most police forces now that you have to take people off the criminal division and put them in the traffic division regularly every three or six months. And what do they do the first few days that they are in the traffic division? "Pull over to the curb! Where do you think you're going? A fire? Well, here's a ticket. We're going to show you!" A few weeks later the fellow said, "What's the matter, you in an awful hurry? Well, that's all right, only just don't take it so fast, don't take it so fast — other people on the road, too. Okay, next. Let's go." Fantastic.

If you don't think the criminal actually is an aberrated area! But the only reason it's terrifically aberrated, and terrifically aberrative, is because the police are applying force to it. Oh, you'd be amazed at how much force the police force exerts against the criminal. And when that much violence and when that much lawlessness can exist in a society, that society can be oppressed down the Tone Scale. The best man in it eventually is no longer free. And war results when freedom goes.

And if there are no criminals, there are no dictators. There's no Schutzstaffel. There's no German youth who are going to march! There's no Spanish revolution. They just don't happen when there's no criminal element, because these things start in the high cause of glory, glory, glory and boom, boom, boom so that we can rob a few more houses, so we can bust open the fronts of a few more Jewish stores and get a few more souvenirs to slip to the Fräulein, or the "Fräulein." That's how those things get started — as a chance for loot, loot, loot! And they think that's wonderful, so they flock to the banner of any criminal who will stand up and say, "Mein Kampf." Mein bedpan! He doesn't have any "Kampf." All he has is a chronic and terrific inability to resolve problems because he can't perceive what the problem is. No nation can do without a good leader, and no nation can afford a warlike one.

And so it fits right into Standard Operating Procedure. It says right up the Tone Scale, clear up to the top, who do you treat, what do you invest your time in? It says the criminal has much more bearing upon the world today than the problem of the insane. It says the criminal is easier to process than the insane and it says that you are doing something on the third dynamic which makes it an optimum solution. And if you don't think the ranks of the criminals are wide open to you, you're mad. The criminal forms a state within a state. Call up a couple of societies and say, "Twice a week, I will take some person who has recently been released from prison and needs rehabilitation." Oh, just that. That's a crude way to go about it because you're taking people who have already been in the big house and they're out again, and that's pretty bad. So if you were to just call up a society and say — and then they say, "Well, who are you?"

You say, "I'm a psychotherapist."

"Oh, is that so?" "Yeah."

"All right." These societies don't care. They're so burdened down with the problem, they're in complete apathy about the problem.

I walked into a medical center once and I said, "I'll take all your charity patients."

And they said, "What? Who are you?"

I said, "A psychotherapist."

Went over, they said, "Well, they go through a psychiatrist whose name is so-and-so."

I went over to see the psychiatrist. I found him in mesmeric rapport with anyone. I suddenly discovered this. I picked up a cigarette, he picked up a cigarette. I crossed my legs, he crossed his legs. I said, oh boy, this condition I have seen in the Malay states. So I began to cross my legs the other way, and put out my cigarettes in other ways, and smoke cigarettes and went into irrational actions, small ones; and I said, "You don't mind, then, if I treat all of the charity patients who are in this entire city?"

And he said, "No, I don't mind if you treat all charity patients in this entire city."

So, I said, "That's fine, you'll tell them so, when the telephone rings?"

And he said, "Of course, yes." And I left. Poor guy. He'd been trying to handle the problem of the insane for about twenty years, and they really had him. It doesn't say you have to hypnotize a psychiatrist. I do that every once in a while just for fun.

I hypnotized the entire staff one time, of one of the biggest sanitariums in the United States, talking to them. Wonderful. If you only knew what you could do. If you only knew. These people were pretty bad off.

I'll tell you how you do that. There's just a specific way you go about it. You just make them imitate your gestures. And you talk in a certain tone of voice and your voice becomes more and more soothing. The first thing you know, you watch their eyes and through the audience you see the eyes start to going like this. So you just talk more soothingly and you start to sort of swing. Make sure that you have a bright tie pin. You just sort of swing back and forth, evenly. You'll notice all of a sudden shoulders are starting to move through the audience. You've got them. Then you say, "Now, in the future you will believe that Dianetics is a wonderful thing and should not be opposed. Thank you very much." (laugh) It's simpler than trying to reach reason. (audience laughter) That's just amusement; that's just amusement only. All right.

Now, your problem as a therapist, then, has a practical aspect against all the dynamics. And your success as a therapist — or your success as a Scientologist, not just a therapist — will take place to the degree that you apply your knowledge in an optimum solution. And an optimum solution would be for the greatest good of the greatest number of dynamics. Observably, this would then result in having number one for you in good shape, and no good solution can exist without number one being in good shape. It's the best solution for three, it's the best solution for four — it's an optimum solution.

So when you're dealing with the lower ranges of Standard Procedure, when you're dealing with those lower ranges, you're dealing in every case that you treat with this equation of the optimum solution. And about as far south as you want to bother is V.

What do you do with a VI? Talked about a VII. The technique for a VII, by the way, just sandwich it in and just throw it in, you know it, it says there in the bulletin: You just get him to locate things in time and space. That's all. Locate him in present time. Get him to locate himself in present time. Locate his foot or the foot of the bed or you or just let him take one of his delusions and put it on the other side of the room. It's wonderful; it'll work. Just make him place delusions around here and there, and that's the way you do VII.

A VI — ARC Straightwire is what it says on Standard Operating Procedure, Issue 1. Well, that is not what you do with a VII — with a VI, rather. You do a near equivalent to it, but you do the lightest level of Creative Processing, which I will take up later. You do the lightest level of Creative Processing with a VI.

Now, what do you do with a V? The VI, by the way, is somebody who can't remember — the test for a VI is he can't remember something real, easily. Things that he remembers aren't real to him. All right, now — and by the way, that's still a wonderful way to solve a VI. Don't think I'm changing that. ARC Straightwire: "Remember something real," "Remember a time you were really in communication," and so forth, because he'll snap up above the line of VI very quickly on that technique; but there is an even faster technique. I don't like these twenty-minute techniques when it can be done in five minutes.

Now, you take a V, you take a V. The second we labeled a level on Standard Operating Procedure, the second we labeled a V a V, we, of course, had to have a lot of people who immediately became Vs, and hold grimly and deathly onto the category V in spite of anything you can do — just because it's a category, just because it's there. It has to be there . . . (audience laughter)

What's the matter?

Male voice: It never hit me.

Never hit you. Well, that's true. They label themselves and that makes a postulate. The auditor labels them and they say, "Yes, I'm a V, I can't immediately get out of my head," so they make a postulate that says, "I can't get out of my head." The first thing you pick up with a V is a postulate that he can't get out of his head.

Very often, very amusingly, the V isn't even in his head. You get him to scan up the time track and you'll find out for the last dozen years he's been — they've been very careful to always sit in the corner of a room as far from the body as possible.

Another thing you'll find out about a V is he thinks he's supposed to be a spot of energy, or something of this sort, and he happens to be the kind of a case that moves out whole cloth. He thinks of himself as a whole body and he moves out of the body as a whole body. There are various things happen here.

The very least that's wrong with a V is that he is stuck in some body which is no longer alive.

All right. After you've found out that he's a V and he can't get out rapidly, and after you've used Creative Processing for a while, for God's sakes, remember to do this — remember to do this: Get him to sweep out all of his processing and all the times when he's discovered he couldn't get out.

Now, if you just go over that, the fellow goes into a terrific state of relief because every time he tried to go out of the head, or every time he tried to back out, or every time he tried to locate himself anyplace, and so on, and realized that he couldn't, he hit a failure. And these are pretty heavy failures. And so you just pick these things up as a matter of course and he brightens up markedly.