Thank you.

Now today we have some great lecture material for you for a change. And I brought my notes. So you now know all about it.

Okay, that was a good lecture?

Let's see, this is what? The 25th?

Audience: The 25th.

The 25th lecture, 25th of November 1959, 1st Melbourne ACC. All right.

Title of this lecture is Counter-Creation. And it's about time you learned the facts of life. I talked to you yesterday, albeit a little bit offbeatly, on the subject of thetans. But I was setting you up and giving you a gradient scale of looking at this thing called a thetan, without having to conceive a static.

The closest you come to creat — seeing a thetan, actually, because there's nothing there to stop vision, is of course, an expression in terms of matter, energy, space, time, postulates, forms. This is as close as you come to seeing a thetan.

The matter is that a thetan makes it. A thetan makes matter and makes space, energy and so forth.

Now, a thetan has something. He has himself. He has an individuality but this individuality can be suppressed by other individualities which tend to degrade or overwhelm his individuality. You get the idea?

Now, let's get technical about this thing and realize that we're talking about individuality, not individuation. Now, individuality would sim — is simply pure, unadulterated first dynamic beingness. Pure first dynamic beingness, that's all, that's what it is. That isn't a thetan's own valence, that would be something he trumped up in order to fool the audience or something of the sort, you got the idea. That is himself. And that is, this exists, believe it or not, this exists. Please bear with me, it does. There is such a thing. Please.

And the reason for all those "pleases" is everybody's got it figured out that the only way a thetan could ever possibly be creative or be a writer or an artist or anything else, is that he's crazy. There's even a book been written, Be Glad You're Neurotic. That's the title of it.

Now, as thetan (subject) starts disappearing out of view in the society and less and less is known about this item, they begin to substitute more and more things.

And in 1894 with the libido theory they'd substituted neurosis. They'd gotten down to that point. And of course, now they substitute gone and science proves to you conclusively there's no such thing as a human spirit, soul, beingness and so forth and everything is done on brains, brains, brains — fried brains, baked brains. It's all done on brains. And if you could just condition somebody's brains, you've got it made. You could shoot him into space and everything. That's why they're not going to get anybody in space. Because, you can't condition anybody's brain or educate anybody's brain or do anything else with anybody's brain except maybe spread it on toast.

It — as far as it's concerned, a brain is a shock absorber, and thetans like them because they pick up shocks — absorb them. If you'll notice the shock absorption quality of the nervous system — impede or channel incoming shocks and handle outgoing currents. If you were to hit somebody constantly and continually in the hand — the theory of evolution is — has some fact related to it — if you hit somebody in the hand and hit him in the hand and hit him in the hand, he'd eventually develop some mechanism which would absorb the shock. And that mechanism would be capable of not delivering the same immediate impact of injury to the person, you see, as before. In other words, he'd soften down this impact against himself by shock absorbers or some such things.

You'd call these things resistors and condensers and so forth, electroni­cally. You'd put them up in some kind of a circuit whereby an impact, electri­cal impact going into this end, gradually gets slowed down and filtered and channeled so that it doesn't arrive as an impact at the other end. You got the idea? Well, that's a brain. All it is is a shock absorber. And a thetan likes a body, actually, believe it or not, because it absorbs shocks.

Well, oddly enough he figures if he were just out of his head and didn't have a body, why, then he'd be all set because you see, he wouldn't have to absorb any shocks because nothing would swat him. In a pig's eye! But not in a thetan's. The truth of the matter is, is exterior he is more susceptible, in a relatively unprocessed state, to feeling than he is inside. That's something that is normally — that hasn't really been known. I mean I just give you the dope. I think it's the first time I ever said it.

You start wandering around naked (by which I mean without a body on) and you start bumping into walls and you start doing this and that, and so on; you don't like it. You think it's for the birds. That's because you're still carrying certain masses of energy which collide with matter. Thetans don't dive easily through walls.

In fact, a thetan moving in a straight line doesn't go through anything. He has to dematerialize and rematerialize. In other words, he has to postu­late himself in a new position.

Now, by departing from a position, by ceasing to be in that position, that's all, and materializing or becoming in a new position, he can appear to go through walls, you get the idea? He didn't go through any wall.

If he himself went through the wall, well, I don't know. Go over to the wall and stick your fist through the wall. There's sensation involved with pound­ing holes in the wall with your fist. Well, as a thetan, you find there's some sensation involved in running into walls and that sort of thing.

Some people, the Irish particularly, are more understanding about these things. When somebody dies they open the window and — they do, they open the window, you see — and he doesn't have to turn around and recover the facility of dematerializing and rematerializing someplace else in order to go shooting out of something. And he doesn't pass through things with attend-ant upset, and he doesn't have to not-is the whole scenery in order to pretend he's gone through it and all kinds of nonsense is done away with. Somebody simply opens a window, get the idea?

Well, I'm not trying to convince you that a thetan in his best condition is susceptible to pain and all of that sort of thing and always packs around a lot of mass with him, because he doesn't. But a thetan in any kind of a knocked-about condition has always got old tin cans and his favorite machine and junk and some chains that he picked up back in the fourteenth century, and he's just packing more junk. He looks like a kid, that you tell the kid to — "We're going away for the weekend. Pack a suitcase," you know. Little kid will pack anything you ever heard of. And that's practically what a thetan does. And he has a considerable amount of mass connected with him.

Another thing is, he keeps this mass around as a shock absorber against other thetans. In other words, he not only uses the body itself as a shock absorber but he uses (quote) mental energy (unquote) as a shock absorber so that another thetan can't come sail along into his head and take over his body. He feels this would be a bad thing to have happen. So he carries, very often, shielding of one character or another.

Now, this shielding is very often made up of engrams or is made up of engrams and other horrible circumstances. He hopes when he gets very anx­ious about being invaded or — and he feels that he is separate, very, very separate and nobody else must approach or something like this — he has a tendency to throw up these things which are an impenetrable screen. And the more horrible they are the better. See, the more horrible they are, the more they'll deter somebody from coming along and going through them. And he even­tually traps himself, of course, because this is an overt act against other thetans. And that's the most fundamental reason why you have somebody all packed up in past deaths and all of this sort of thing. It's a defense mechanism.

And so you ordinarily have a thetan in his head but kind of not in his head because it's not safe to be that much located, you see, and protected by all the absorption mechanisms of the body's nervous system and able to use the solidity of the body to reach and withdraw, move things and exert auto­matic force which is motivated by other forces such as food he eats. In other words, he's running a machine. A body is a low heat engine. It's a carbon-oxygen heat engine that runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That's its combus­tion rate. And it's just a motor machine of some kind or another — biological machine. But it does perform solid actions as far as he's concerned and he's highly in favor of that. And then he'll surround this body with some sort of an additional protective screening to prevent shock from coming in.

Now, that's why, on your E-Meter you get the tone arm going up when the thetan area and mass and number of engrams and so forth is up. Got the idea? That's — in other words, the higher the arm goes the more dense the area he has around, impinged on the body, as a protective mechanism.

Now, this is completely contrary to electronics. And I might as well tell you why. It's because it isn't the kind of — electrical mass is what it is — and it isn't that kind of electrical mass which assists conductivity. It impedes con­ductivity. And, of course, the more mass he has, of the kind he uses, the more ohms resistance he has, the higher it reads on the tone arm.

Now, if this was just ordinary mass he was using, if it was just the kind of mass you'd find in a table or an old blacksmith's bar or something of this sort, why, it of course would be more conductive, you see. And the more mass there'd be there, why, the lower the tone arm would read, so you see? But that, that's not the kind of mass it is.

It's mass which is there to resist shock and therefore is — has a very, very high absorption resistance. In other words, it reads very, very high in terms of ohms and probably goes up — I have never measured this all the way up the line, I don't even know what an E-Meter reads in terms of ohms at 6.0 — but it would go all the way up to 6.0 on the tone arm of the E-Meter, however many ohms that is.

The "M" reading (3.0 position) on the tone arm is 12,500 ohms — 2.0 is 5,000 ohms.

Now, a body itself has its own electrical field which complicates the whole picture. And the body is built as an electronic thing made out of anchor points. I refer you to other lectures and data. And this anchor point system permits the body to have an apparency. And this anchor point system can become collapsed, as well as the thetan's facsimiles can become collapsed, and actually the more collapsed the anchor points is, the more the thetan's facsimiles get collapsed, and the more the thetan's facsimiles get collapsed, the more the anchor points get collapsed. You get the idea? So, they tend to complement and aid each other in this nonsense but all it adds up to is with-hold.

Now the more separate a thetan is from the society, the more in — the more overt acts he has committed against the third dynamic. He is as sepa­rate or individuated, different than (obsessively), not himself, you see, but some tailor-made, super-nonsense difference — he's different than the society around him to the degree that he has committed overt acts against the soci­ety. Where any one person is concerned, he is different than that person to the degree that he has committed overt acts against that person.

Now, naturally, having committed lots of overt acts he feels in need of a great deal of protection. And needing a great deal of protection, a person who has committed a lot of overt acts is apparently then doing an enormous with-hold. Actually, he isn't doing an enormous withhold at all, what he's doing is shielding himself. He's doing a super protection device. But, he thinks he has to protect himself to the degree that he's committed overt acts.

You're not looking at the simple mechanism of withhold, in other words, when you read the high mass of a thetan's area. You're looking on a — there's another via there and that via is the truth, and the simple withhold isn't the truth.

He explains it to everybody by saying, "Well, I'm withholding these things because they'd punish me." No, he's saying, "I know I am guilty because I committed overt acts, therefore I am liable to be penetrated and cut to rib-bons by other thetans. I must therefore protect myself and I am therefore separate from them. So, therefore, I need all this mass around me." And that is the withhold. And that's his basic logic and reasoning with regard to that.

Now, simple withholdingness, simple withholdingness does resolve this. You — but you start talking about withholding and so on, and you get a reso­lution of the circumstance.

Now where a person has committed no overt acts, he doesn't have to do a withhold because he doesn't feel incompetent in that zone or area. It's as simple as that. And he doesn't stack up facsimiles. So, you'd say then that a person who was Clear — and this would be in an ultimate sense, a person who was Clear just all the way up — would be totally Clear on overt acts, and then you'd have no bank. So, it gives you a brand-new rationale to Clear, see? No overt acts, no bank necessary — Clear! Got the idea?

See? It isn't that the individual has had bad things happen to him, and he was — these have all become stacked up. See, it's necessary to his mecha­nism to tell everybody else that things can happen to them because then they don't invade him.

"If you invade me, then something will happen to you," you see. That is a lie! That is a lie of the first order. That can't happen, see. And that is a social truth. And that is the basic social truth that keeps everybody aberrated — that something can happen to the other fellow!

Now, thetans teach each other that something can happen to the other fellow, so the other fellow will never come in and take over their zone or area, see? It's a constant educational system which is brought about by the overt acts the person himself has done against the other person, see? Having done something to somebody it's then necessary to have a protective system.

I remember vividly thinking that I needed protection in the very, very early days of Dianetics. Actually, probably from a social standpoint you would have said this was true because a book had just been launched which had an enormous repercussion all over the place, and people were beating the front door in. And for a very short time, not more than a month or — oh, a couple of months, I think, about at the outside — why, I had the idea — no, I didn't have it for more than about fifteen or twenty days as a matter of fact. I — it grew up to a point of where I got the idea that I needed some protection somehow or another, you know. There was just too doggone much pounding in the door.

And then I stood up in front of a lot of thousands of people and almost got myself shot in an early setup. And I just handled that so easily that I decided that there was no reason to have any protection.

Now, the basic mechanism which went behind that is I had to decide, in spite of everybody screaming at me that I had, I had to decide that I had not committed an overt act against society, psychiatry, psychology, the American university, foreign universities, God, man, beast, you see, on up the dynamics. And I had to decide myself that I had not — had or had not committed an overt act. And in those early days — you're getting, even today, in some iso­lated areas of the world, where they totally lack originality, they reprint some of the early — never later than 1950 — some of the press that was launched against Dianetics in those days, you know.

Every time I see that, you know, why, I have to decide all over again whether or not I'm guilty of an overt act. See?

And when I finally get — get this thing looked at again, you know, bing, and so on, why, any mass that I have started to put up, why, I just throw away. That's as simple as that, you see.

Now, the — the only way you could — I apologize for using myself as an example in this but I'm just more familiar with me.

I very often use you but on such a point as that, that's a rather touchy point. Now, the main thing here is that a thetan has gotten the idea that something could be done to him. And therefore has gotten a series of protec­tive mechanisms of one character or another to prevent it happening. But these protective mechanisms, being based on a lie that he needs protection, which he doesn't, of course tend to multiply. And just as a lie will — a lie is a pure creation, a whole cloth, which agrees really with very little, so therefore it tends to remain hung in — on the track.

This lie going on and on, that he needs protection and so forth, causes him to assert more and more the protection until you get somebody up in the governor's palace and he has to have eight squadrons of police, you know. He has to have them all over the grounds and he has to have them here and there, and he has to have cops, cops, cops, cops, you know, making sure. The king in olden times used to have somebody used to have to sweep the handle of a broom underneath the bed before he retired as one of the actions that was undertaken by the valet de chambre, in making sure his room was ready for going to bed, you know. Had to make sure there's nobody under the bed, and so forth. Old maids today do the same thing.

Now, he's basically suffering from his own overt acts and you could gen­erally tell a monarch who — who was, well, he had the idea he wasn't doing too well, by the amount of household troops that he had to have. You get the idea?

Now, some point along the line, why, he's got to make his — to buy any leisure time, why, he's got to keep from — everything from caving in on him and he tends to build up some kind of a social mechanism or social ridge of some character or another, which again fends off but — this is simply an agreed-upon thing in the society, and so on.

If he starts believing that he dare not go around or he dare not go out-side that ridge, and so forth, right then he's been guilty of an overt act, got the idea? He did something to people! He knows he did something to the people. He knows it's an overt act.

And it's very easy to find very successful men all over the darned place or men that have fairly clean consciences all over the darned place and other people who believe implicitly that they should be protected, you know, run­ning their legs off trying to afford the necessary protection and so on.

Once in a great while, they get a president who doesn't believe he's guilty of overt acts and they have an awful time in the United States. The Secret Service darned near blows its brains out, you know, because its idea of preparing a reception is to put Secret Service men in every position where any gunman could lurk along any route of march, you know, and they've built up a system there which is really complicated.

Truth of the matter is anybody who wanted to kill the president, they wouldn't stop him. I mean, they wouldn't have a prayer of stopping him, they couldn't even discourage him. It's the truth. Because, I know I can tumble over an antelope at a mile with a high-velocity rifle, telescopic sight. Well, what's all this point of this super protection, see?

Well, similarly, no thetan could ever keep another thetan out of his skull. That's a fact, so it just couldn't be done. If any thetan thought he ought to be in somebody else's skull and he didn't consider it an overt act against the other person on the invasion of privacy, he would simply go into his skull, that's it!

For instance, I've been in more darned skulls. That's a fact. And also by looking around you can see pictures and you can do all sorts of darned fool­ishness because pictures aren't imaginary, they do have a certain radiative quality and a reflective quality and so on. There's no necromancy or non-sense hocus-pocus magic or werewolves connected with this thing. We're just dealing with matter, energy, space and time, positions in space and masses and that sort of thing.

Well, now, if you're guilty of an overt act against the other fellow, you won't get into his skull. All you have to do is intend to do him some harm and his protective mechanisms work. It's just like nobody ever gets as tied up in burglar alarms as a burglar.

For instance, I'm sure you wouldn't get tied up with burglar alarms. I know I upset a jeweler no end one time when I was studying at police methods and so on, down in Los Angeles. I was trying to find out if criminal minds were different kinds of minds, and if police minds were different kinds of minds, and I was taking a good, broad look at this sort of thing. So, I got me a post as a special officer. And I was around for quite a while. They didn't know quite what to make of me. They didn't know whether to call me "officer" or "doc" or what, see.

And I upset a jeweler considerably by finding that his transom had been sprung and so I just reached through, you might say, the grating and unlocked the door and shut off the burglar alarm and went in and closed the transom so that it wouldn't upset anybody. And at this moment, he evidently remembered there must be something wrong with the shop and he pulled up in front of the shop and he finds a police officer inside the shop but the bur­glar alarm isn't going. See, that's totally incomprehensible. How could any-body shut off the burglar alarm? Well, I frankly don't even believe it would have worked for me. I don't believe it would have gone off at all. Get the idea? Because I wasn't invading his premises. I'm giving you a wide bar here but the postulate would be necessary that the premises would have to be pro­tected against me before the premises would react against me.

Now, that appears to be slightly mystic and slightly odd but it isn't. It's quite mechanical.

Knowing the premises are protected against you about the first thing you'd do to a burglar alarm would be to fall over it or tamper with the wires or something trying to shut it off, get the idea? Only, you'd probably go about shutting it off wrong because you knew it was set for you, see?

So people trying to invade each other's skulls with bad motives don't have much luck at it. They run into everything. They have a bad time of it.

I remember trying to pick a little girl up out of a bombed carriage one time, about 1685, and I had quite a lose because I didn't succeed in making her get on her feet, she was half blown to bits. And mechanisms didn't work, and so forth, and tried to pick her up and dust her off, you know — as a thetan.

And it didn't work and it gave me a big lose and I got all confused and upset about the thing and then that was an overt not to have done it, you get the idea? But I was guilty of an overt in the first place, I eventually realized and found out, in that I was riding as the — as a bodyguard on this particular carriage, see, and I didn't do it, you know. Something bad went wrong, see, something bad happened. Well, that's guilty of an overt act right then. Don't expect to control a situation that you've caused to that degree. Got the idea?

You've caused it, you regret it, now you're going to be the effect of it, too? Oh, no you're not.

And now, you could be the cause and the effect of the same line provid­ing that you — your heart was pure, you might say. You'd be the cause and the effect at the same line, providing you weren't doing anything that you thought was wrong. But you couldn't be the cause and the effect of the same line when your effect is supposed to be harmful; when it's an overt act that you know it's an overt act, then for God's sakes don't get around on the effect's end of the line, too, because you're not likely to get out of it. You'll get all mishmashed and monkeyed up about the whole thing. Do you see how that would be?

So, you could be where you wanted to be and do what you wanted to be as long as you fell somewhere within an optimum solution. The optimum solution is the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics which would be the least overt acts necessary to the least dynamics. That would be a reverse look at it. Another definition.

Now, a thetan being a thetan, creates. And that is what's wrong with him. I observed as long ago as 1954 — 55 I think it was, about the 7th ACC, something on that order, the 8th — that everything that's wrong with a thetan is what's basically right with a thetan. The only thing that can go wrong with a thetan is what's right with a thetan.

In other words, you pick up some selected, downscale harmonic on an ability of a thetan, twist it wrong and that's wrong but it's also right.

Now, I've spoken this as the mockery end of it, you see. Perfectly all right for you to save England but some nut comes along and he hasn't a clue but he's talking about saving England. Well, you see, you can do something else besides save England, but he can't, get the idea? And furthermore, he couldn't save England. But he can talk about it, get the idea?

So, everything that is wrong with a thetan is also what is upper scale right with him! And he becomes a victim of his upper scale rightnesses. And basic, first and foremost, the thing that basically goes wrong with a thetan is creativeness. That is the thing that goes wrong with a thetan. That is the one thing he does, that he does obsessively, that he continues to do, that he never finishes doing, that he never forgets how to do but he tries to prevent himself from doing and all of this sort of thing and it's all under the heading of cre­ativeness. And that's one of his — his highest purpose and his craziest pur­pose. It's at once the highest and the lowest.

A pure Create Process run on and on and on ad nauseam, probably would get your pc into more trouble than you ever cared to get anybody out of. See? Ah, you'd probably go through it if your pc was — lasts that long but you could probably blow him through on a pure Create Process. But it'd be a rough beef because that's basically what's wrong with him, always been wrong with him, and — same thing, it's everything that's right with him. That's kind of goofy if you take a look at it.

Now, a thetan then has creativeness as his greatest game and his great­est calamity. And when creativeness becomes obsessive and a person can't do anything else than that — or super-specialized — and when versatility in cre­ativeness is lost, you get to a condition where the thetan can be said to be aberrated. Furthermore, he's unknowing and unwilling in his creativeness. He's being forced to create things he doesn't want to create.

That's basically what happens to labor and why labor goes into so many — if there is such a thing as labor — goes into so many agitated upside downs and that sort of thing and revolts against management and other things, takes up various -ologies and so on.

There's too many fellows around there who have created too much too long. If you're going to raise production at all, you've got to solve this factor. You cannot do it with social education or a new -ology, you'll have to just solve it with Scientology. There's just no other way to change this downward spiral as far as labor, production, manufacture and so forth. The solution to it is Scientology, not some new dreamed-up piece of monkey business.

Now, when his creativeness has been devoted to destructiveness, he of course is guilty of overt acts because that is what an overt act basically is: it's creativeness devoted to destructiveness. And when creativeness is too often and too long devoted to destructiveness, he goes around the bend.

The physicist, for instance, that specializes in weapons, weapons, weap­ons, weapons, weapons; the aircraft designer who builds nothing but pursuit planes, pursuit planes, pursuit planes, these boys are too close from — between the create — destroy. And you'll find they're — they're pretty batty. They're setting themselves up. One day they will find that it's an overt act that they did such a thing. They do it for quite a while without realizing it's an overt act. And then one day they unfortunately get prima facie evidence that it's a total overt act and at that moment they go flip! That's it; they've had it. They get it all at once. You call this sort of thing a nervous break-down; a sudden descent into chaos and calamity; the sudden shift from being sane to being a nervous wreck. See, that's — that all to pieces sort of a situa­tion is a slip into realization of an overt act. Creativeness which has been devoted along a certain line, we all of a sudden recognize that it's destructive. And the realization can be so long in coming and a person can have created so many destructive things over such a long period of time without any real­ization of this sort at all, you see, that he hits this and it looks very, very funny to the mental expert of the olden days, you see.

This fellow was a great, big brawny fellow and he was a warrior par excellence and he just went around cutting off heads and chopping up people and — and he just went on and on and on and one day he stumbled over a pin and went stark, staring mad. "Well, I guess stumbling over pins drives people mad, therefore, brains are very, very, very tender and brains go very bad very easily and everybody will have to be careful they don't go mad." You get the whole erroneous chain of conclusions drawn out of this!

No, all he did was fall into the realization it was an overt act. He went around — something happened, it doesn't even have to be as dramatic as this, that this big brawny fellow was going around knocking people's heads off and knocking in their breastplates and kicking them in the teeth and stamping all over the darned place, and he was just fighting, fighting and he gets along to a point one day that he's fighting away, and he knows he's fighting for the right because he's fighting for the archbishop. Eh!

And then the archbishop orders him to destroy a certain town and he finds out why the archbishop wants to destroy this certain town — because the archbishop has always been interested in a silver plate in it. He had immedi­ately made everything he ever did for the archbishop an overt act, see.

Actually, there was one single series of destructions in central France that wrecked knighthood, it just finished it, just overnight. The Church decided to get even with some heretics. And all the knights all over the place flocked in to protect the Church and they all rode up to get even with these heretics. The Church brought along a lot of mercenary troops and they raped and burned and pillaged and were much more interested in the pillaging than anything else. And then they come to find out that the people that they were killing, they weren't such bad people at all and it was a holy horror as a crusade, not a holy crusade and so on. And all these knights sat around and said boom! Spin! See? They'd all realized they'd committed tremendous overt acts. You see? They realized their cause was not worthy and so on.

And you want to watch people snooping around to tell you your cause isn't worthy, and so forth, because that is the little trick or the trigger that can throw you, get the idea? So, if it can be that deadly, don't think that man doesn't use it.

Well, here's this big, brawny fellow goes along one day, and he — just after the field of battle, and he's been fighting against townspeople of some kind or another — and it starts getting him because as he walks across the field of battle, he realizes there is nothing but old men there, and young boys, and there's nobody in mail and they're all in leather jerkins and they aren't armed with very much, you know. And this was the army he was busy fight­ing, you see. And then he sees a little kid lying there dead, you know, boom, see. And he goes stark, staring mad and joins the church or something. Total overt act! See, he just recognizes suddenly that this was a bad creation.

Well, a bad creation is a creation of something destructive that wasn't deserved — undeserved destruction and so on. It just didn't add up. So, in other words, a bum solution on the eight dynamics. And all it has to do is come home to somebody that he's been indulging in a very bad solution on the eight dynamics and he's had it.

For instance, sometime an auditor starts processing a girl or somebody's wife, something like that, and processes this person's wife because he's been totally convinced that she's crazy, you see. And as fast as he processes her up, she seems to spin in. And he listens to her, you know, and he's spent a lot of time in on it, and he's been very rough in his processing and he starts invalidating her because she says that she isn't the trouble in the family and so forth. And he finds out that all the time he's been doing this, this was just the time to give the husband freedom to go around and do anything he pleased and the husband was nuts! See?

And he was processing the wrong person, putting the wrong person under the gun and so forth. He'd been made wrong, his target is upset and so on. He'll feel kind of queasy about this, it won't spin him, but he'll say, "Rrrrr, how wrong can I get?" You know, and usually, vengefully grab ahold of the husband and do something with him one way or the other.

But this happens all too often to auditors; that they believe one or another member of a family who feed them false data and then they go in on the false data or are critical about this or that person in the family based on this false data, don't you see. Makes them guilty of an overt act along the line. Or, after they've audited somebody, then somebody else in the family comes around and tries to give them all kinds of foolish gen to the effect that they have committed an overt act. Don't you see? Men work real hard on this overt act thing. So, an auditor has to be pretty stable in that he knows he is doing as right as he can do at the moment and with the data he has. And if he knows that, why, he can never be made guilty of an overt act. Get the idea?

So, therefore, the people who get made guilty of overt acts are the people who squirrel. They really don't know their data, they really don't know what they're doing. Their own intentions are not clear-cut to them. They have vast worries about the principles or people in the organization or something like this and they get worried about it and they're shaky this way.

Well, actually, all they had to do is take the data, know it well, see what good it does, do good with the data, add it up — they could never be made possibly guilty of an overt act. Don't you see?

But, not knowing the data, and not knowing what it does, and that sort of thing, then almost anybody coming along saying, "You wrecked my sister." "Ohhh! Did I?" You know? He's falling over the pin, see. He could be made guilty of an overt act.

Basically, if your intentions are good, only a very thorough amount of ignorance can upset you on this line. You'd have to be pretty ignorant and pretty stupid to be upset and fall into this trap.

But if you know what you're doing and know that your intentions are straight and know that where you're going is right, and so forth, people come along and try to convince you you've committed an overt act against them, and you just listen to them and acknowledge. It doesn't bother you any.

See, actually, the only way you could stay in life fighting is to know what you're doing and know that your intentions are right and that you are going along and doing right and so forth. And then never really slip away from your own code or — or modus operandi. Depraving somebody would be to cause him to fall away from what — doing what he thought was right.

For instance, I had a bad moment with the United States because — I did! I was in an office in Phoenix, Arizona. A little girl came in and she wanted auditing. And at that time a lot of people were being sent in to the organization just to enturbulate it, and so forth, and were actually having processing paid for so they'd spin in and raise a fuss.

And I sat there and I looked her over, and I looked at the check she had to pay for some processing and this check was drawn out by an attorney firm that we had some idea was an attorney firm that had been financing attacks on Scientology, and I told her I wouldn't process her.

My instant — next instant comment was, "To hell with this country!" If this country can get so squirreled up and spun in that it fixes up so that you cannot help your fellow man — well that's so far from anything I'm trying to do that I'm upset. Get the idea?

Well, of course, the thing is naturally based on the fact that I must have done overt acts against it, and some years later found out that I had killed one of the famous American Revolutionary generals. Well, anyhow, that's beside the point. Yeah, that's a fact. During 1775 I went over to America for a few months. Just long enough to commit an overt act and went home.

The basis of all creativeness or creative impulses and so on, the basis of all creative intents and goals and so on, are quite subject to misalignment, misunderstanding, aberration and so forth, because everybody tries to get in on the act. And that makes a universe.

All creativeness is met by counter-creativeness of one character or another and that is the best game there is according to the thetan. And it's also the most game there is, and also it's the only game there is. Okay.

Now, let's look at this game of creation, counter-creation. You remember overt — you remember Effort Processing? Well, there was such a thing called counter-effort, wasn't there? Well, think in the same way of counter-creation.

Now, here's the thetan who is creating something and he — well, refer­ence is The Factors. He picks up somebody else's mock-ups and that some-body else picks up his mock-ups and then they mishmash them so nobody knows who owned them, or who created them and after that they've got nice, thoroughgoing matter that doesn't disintegrate, got the idea? Well, that's not counter-creation, that's co-creation — cooperative creation of something.

Well, thetans get along and they're very happy doing this but one fine day they individuate somewhat from the rest of their fellow thetans and they start creating against, against the creations of their fellows.

All destruction is, is counter-creation.

A fellow makes up — mocks up a stone image, somebody else mocks up enough force to blow apart a stone image. Now we start getting debris, chaos and a disorderly setup. Nobody is swapping mock-ups or doing anything like that. Somebody's putting up a mock-up and somebody else is trying to blow the mock-up to pieces with a counter-creation, got it? All right. Create, counter-create.

Now, after a person has done enough overt acts of blowing everybody else's mock-ups to pieces, his own mock-ups become vulnerable to being blown to pieces. Isn't that right? So, everybody that is subject to this must have made up their minds simultaneously that it was an overt act to blow the other person's mock-ups to pieces. So, you get counter-creation against counter-creation and that's war. And that is about the most pointless activity anybody heard of. There really is no creation which is the target of anything. There is simply the counter-creation flying against the counter-creation. And that builds up to be a ridge.

Now, there are two causes of the ridge, one on one side of it and one on the other side of it. There are two causes to any ridge. And any ridge that you find lingering around your pc actually has two causes — his cause and the other fellow's cause. It took two things to make a permanent ridge, two sources to make a permanent ridge.

Well, by knocking out the person you're processing's share of counter-creation in the ridge, the ridge, of course, evaporates because there's nothing going to hold up the other half, got the idea? You don't actually do anything about the other half, it just goes! See this?

Actually, it doesn't work that way. Because his creations, you see, are fundamental and his counter-creations are — are just a battle that he's engaged in of enturbulence of one kind or another which depend for their force on earlier creations. So, you never get the earlier spot by running the death spot, you might say. In other words, you don't run the counter-creations to any great success. What you do is run the creations, and you can run those to great success, or the confrontings.

Now, the reason why a person counter-creates against somebody else's mock-up is because he can't confront it. And so, the workability of the proc­esses you're running right this minute. That's all, that's all there is to it.

Now, to rehabilitate a person's confrontingness is to knock off his counter-creativeness.

The reason why you hate to hear me speak of psychiatrists — and you don't. You don't like to hear me speak of psychiatrists and communists and so forth and snarl and so forth. The only thing is, is you realize what I'm doing. I'm counter-creating. Simple. To some degree I'm counter-creating in your estimation.

The only reason I'm — I say anything about it at all is I don't really con­sider it an overt act; I'd consider it an overt act in reverse to try to kid people that we're going down the same channel because I know I'd get somebody lost up one of those bayous, you see. Somebody would be up there on the mud flats high and dry studying animal brains. You know, saying "Well, well, ani­mal brains, you know." And spinning in like mad.

Now, you notice that I give you every time I talk to you about these things, I give you as a remedy: Get them together, educate them, process them, get their wives. I've — see? You get all this stuff, see. It's — actually the counter-creations I'm handing you are all constructive. They aren't counter-creations. They're saying, "Let's get these boys out of counter-create." But you don't like to hear me counter-create. You see? Because you know basically that's a lousy thing to do. Isn't that right?

Audience: Yes.

Well, maybe you disagree with me, maybe you don't care if I counter-create or not.

You, yourself, would hate to have anybody that was a good, tough thetan around, counter-creating, because you know you couldn't put up a mock-up if your life depended on it. Get the rationale, see? If he decided to counter-create against this mock-up there wasn't anything you could do about it, your mock-up would go.

Now, what happens is, is a person who is guilty of a great deal of counter-creation which is added up to actual overt acts — counter-creations added up to overt acts. You see, a counter-creation couldn't care less unless it's an overt act. It wouldn't be anything if it weren't an overt act. So what! So you put another coat of paint on Venus de Milo, you know. That's a fact. I mean, that's — if you saw that the statue was going to pieces terribly and put some preservative on the thing it certainly wouldn't be much of anything. And yet it'd be a creation against that or a creation over that. No, that would merge around to a co-creation, wouldn't it?

So, perhaps a counter-creation only exists in the presence of an overt act and maybe your nomenclature better stay that way. You have a co-creation or a counter-creation because co-creations are possible and counter-creations are overt acts. All right.

Now, here we have a person who is guilty of a great deal of counter-creation, tremendous guilt on counter-creation. See? Just blasting up every-thing, you know, sees a mock-up, knocks its head off, you know? He just can't resist him, don't you see. All of his creative activities have entered into counter-create.

You know, a movie critic, or a — or somebody of that sort, or a book critic or somebody of that sort. He never wrote anything himself, all he does is say that everything everybody else wrote was bad! You know? Or everything everybody else painted was bad, or everything everybody else sculptured was bad and why didn't they do it in the — in the Milan tradition and so forth. It would have been much better, you know, chop-chop-chop. Well, that's just counter-creation pure and simple and does add up to an overt act. All right.

When a person is doing these overt acts, counter-creations and so on, he's in an interesting state of rendering himself very vulnerable to being destroyed and he slips at once over to the mishmash which becomes Axiom 10, communication formula and cycle of action, all super tangled.

Because if anybody else creates anything it kills him. Got the idea? Because everything he creates tries to kill something they've got. That's his overt act, so therefore he gets it back doubly. And the more he tries to knock off somebody else's mock-ups ... You know, a thetan isn't a mock-up. But a thetan puts up a mock-up and then this fellow comes along and tries to knock off this mock-up one way or the other, counter-creates against this mock-up. And the fellow who's doing the counter-creation might or might not succeed in doing anything to this mock-up but he for sure is going to succeed in believing that he is scheduled for destruction. He believes this. And after that his mock-ups can be destroyed like mad. He's already consented to the destruction of his own mock-ups; he's already consented to counter-creation, therefore cause-distance-effect becomes create-survive-destroy. All out of his own counter-creativeness.

His mock-ups could never be knocked off; they wouldn't ever do anything he didn't want them to do in any way, shape or form unless he, himself, had origi­nally intended wrong with these things and intended as an overt act and done all this sort of thing. The intentions all had to be there and after that he's going to have a hard time of it, he's going to have a bad time of it. Do you follow me?

Audience: Yes.

Well, that's how you get this cycle of action slid over there to create­survive-destroy. This person has been creating something to destroy some-thing, so that's awful close to create-survive-destroy cycle of action. So, he if — after a while he is in danger from everything. He has to protect himself from everything.

I see some poor inventor sometime or another inventing something and then running down to the patent office and hiring attorneys all over the place. I know where he's going to wind up, he's going to wind up in court. If inventors would just go on inventing they'd get off all right but they don't. Inventors invent one-hundredth of the time, and spend ninety-nine hundreds in court trying to protect their inventions in some fashion. And they all seem to snap over to the patent office and then snap into the patent courts. That's where they go.

I used to wonder why I always failed doing this. I used to get these fel­lows to stand still long enough and I'd say, "Why don't you just invent!"

And the fellow says, "Well, yeah, you couldn't get any revenues, you couldn't do any of this with it, you couldn't do any of that with it, and so forth." "You'll wind up in court." I tell them, "You'll wind up in court. Why don't you just invent? Why spend all this time and your fortune and anything you would make on lawyers and judges and all that sort of thing? Why don't you just invent and take your chances?"

"Nah, nah. I couldn't do that."

In the next breath they'll be telling you that Bill Sykes' invention of a clobovitor is a horrible invention and that's a terrible thing, that clobovitor, and somebody ought to shoot Bill Sykes for inventing the clobovitor. And then they rush to court to defend their own. They don't even need anybody attacking, they go to court to defend their own. It's kind of a game. As a matter of fact I laugh about it, I laugh about it considerably. It's a funny game, this business of patenting everything in sight.

The best way of handling this is out-creativeness. Just out-create. And that was the basic game and it's a much better game. Somebody invents a clobovitor, invent a super-clobovitor. Of course this could be a criticism but — or early it wasn't considered a criticism. You invented a super-clobovitor and you said, "Look at that." And he said, "Naaay," and he had to invent a super-super-clobovitor and this way we got all kinds of complications. But nobody was going around knocking everybody in the head.

Now, your best bet in processing, in handling this counter-creativeness and so on, easily your best bet in processing, is just to handle the process as I said, of Confronting. Now, there's various curves and significances and other things you can do with Confronting. As a matter of fact some of them are quite amusing, some of them are quite interesting, some are quite valuable.

For instance, Dick Halpern just turned one in. He says, "How about `Look around here and find an effect'?" Taken probably from the old group command. All right.

Now, "Look around here and find an effect," well, that's interesting as a process, isn't it? You'd go flickety-flacking into most of the source-points around in the bank, wouldn't you? It's quite workable as a process, very interesting process.

See, I'm trying to teach you people to think in Scientology, not parrot in it, got the idea? I'm trying to teach you to think in it.

How about, "What effect would you be willing to confront?" See, that's another version.

How about run — this one, by the way, is, this one's awful — already tested it. I never will know why it doesn't work but it just doesn't work. Is, "What source-point could you confront?" That's another breed of cat entirely.

But, anyway, here we've got confrontingness, in whatever form, simple or complicated, as being a solution for counter-creativeness because if you can learn to confront your own overt acts and confront the results of your own destructiveness, you'll eventually come to be able to confront the results of your own creativeness and your creation would be totally rehabilitated again and you would have won, and your pc would have won.

Thank you.