The Noble Gesture Recently I contacted some very interesting facsimiles of Captain Frank de Wolfe of the United States Army, who was wounded at Fort Donelson in 1862. You may think I am talking about a past death; I am not. I am talking about a sympathy facsimile picked up when I was about a year and a half old, evidently, on the death of my great-grandfather.

Now we will deal with the resolution of cases which have afflicted themselves in this fashion.

I almost killed myself. I started running out a lot of emotional curves and life began to look more and more interesting, and then when I went to get up out of the chair I couldn’t get up. I wondered what this was all about so I began to run some more emotional curves, and then I suddenly recalled that my great-grandfather had a black cane with a solid-gold dog’s head. It was a great little gimmick, this solid-gold dog’s head.

I am about three quarters of the way through on a new Dianetics workbook and it takes this up to some degree. It will be interesting to test it out; the preclear is going to get hold of this and work it very unsuspectingly, because it doesn’t turn out the way one might think it does. It is rigged in such a way that after he has put down all the future goals he has, all the things he is afraid of, all the present and immediate goals he has, all the things he is afraid of in the present, and all the things he has been afraid of and the goals he has had in the past, then he is going to find out that these belong to other people. And that is approximately the system by which you work this thing out.

The facsimile which I had just finished running out was the facsimile of the death of my dog when I was fourteen, which tied in to the cane with the dog’s head, which was the death of my great-grandfather that occurred while I was still sick with pneumonia when about a year and a half old. Evidently my legs from the waist down had been out of valence most of my life.

We take one individual and we find that he is being a terrible failure as a salesman. He is an awful failure as a salesman and it has caused him a great deal of concern. We look his personality over and so forth and we find out this fellow is a pretty good trumpet player.

It is very interesting that you can get such tie-ins. Of course, you know that you can have a service facsimile for practically anything under the sun that has happened to you. You undoubtedly have engrams and counterefforts that have to do with being walked over by elephants and smashed and with being caught in riots of the Republicans trying to elect Abraham Lincoln or something. In fact, as was not suspected at the beginning of Dianetics, you have an enormous number of these things. So you can always tailor one up to match your circumstances; you can always do that.

We say, “Why don’t you play a trumpet?”

Now, we are going to go over a very romantic, mean-sounding subject: dead men’s goals. It sounds like something that, when I was just out of college and scrambling around, I might have written for Adventure magazine — dead men’s goals.

“Well, that’s not steady,” and a lot of other excuses and so forth; he couldn’t get along in that. Theoretically, we would look back on the track for times when he had been discouraged as a trumpet player. And we will find those — a lot of them — but for some reason or other, he won’t go on playing the trumpet. Of course, you could become impatient with him and hit him or something, but this doesn’t produce good results either.

There isn’t a person around who isn’t living forward in his time continuum on ambitions he does not want, does not need and cannot fulfill, simply because he is finishing off the life of a dead man. It’s a grim little subject, isn’t it?

The point is that this person is being a salesman and that is why he is not being a trumpet player. Get that point. If you want to rehabilitate an artist or rehabilitate an individual in any line, don’t concentrate so much on what they had an ambition to be and try to rehabilitate that. What you want to do is try to find out why they are being what they are being that makes their ambition seem small and pale. It is very indirect.

I ran head-on into this mechanism in July of 1950 in the study of what we called “coffin cases.” Many a preclear would lie down on the couch and cross his arms on his chest, and you would say, “All right. Now, let’s run through a time when you were very excited.”

In other words, this person is being a bad salesman and he always wanted to be a trumpet player. You realize, in just looking him over, that he would be happy in being a trumpet player; he is unhappy in being a salesman.

And he would say, apathetically, “Okay.”

What is this all about? Let’s make it unnecessary for him to be a salesman before we try to make a trumpet player out of him. Take an assay of his goals, in other words, and you will find that he is being a salesman because somebody else who is still alive — but not very much so — or somebody who is dead wanted to be a salesman.

This person was lying in a coffin, obviously. Some person, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, would look like somebody of forty, fifty or sixty. This was fascinating. Why? What was the survival advantage of being dead?

Now, you will get this strange one sometimes: The individual wants to be a trumpet player and he is a trumpet player, but he doesn’t like being a trumpet player. His ambition is to be a trumpet player, but he doesn’t like being a trumpet player and he would rather do anything than be a trumpet player. Let’s just find this one. His natural talent was playing a trumpet and then he took over the ambition of some dead person to be a trumpet player, which alloyed his own ambition. (One always has a tendency to regret, sooner or later, noble gestures.)

I asked a lot of questions of myself, and as a matter of fact, through asking these questions, I ran into past deaths. This was somewhat on the order of being the engineer of a freight train going down the track minding its own business somewhere in Iowa, and all of a sudden finding himself in the Belgian Congo driving a circus wagon. My perplexity was the perplexity of an engineer who ran into that sort of a situation, because that is practically what happened.

That may seem rather complicated to you at first glance but that is because it is too simple. This is a coincidence.

The theory I started working on starts out simply with this: A child or a human being is standing around a stiff (you will forgive me that use of the word; I know the dead are “holy”and “one must never speak evil of the dead — the dogs!”) and everybody comes in and looks at the coffin; they look upon the painted face of the corpse and they say, “Poor Aunt Bessie. She was really a good woman.”

Character A has his goal, and our preclear B has his own goal. Now A comes up along the line and fails markedly or dies. Preclear B is going along just fine.By the way, this business of somebody wanting to be something or do something because they admired somebody who did something is a lot of malarkey. Little children two years of age know what they want to be; they are not emulating somebody.

Three days before her death they were saying, “Aunt Bessie! Bah! A disgrace to the family! Do you know that she once accepted a diamond ring . . . And, my dear, you know . . .” This was Aunt Bessie just before she kicked off.

Anyway, Preclear B is going along fine with his own goal. Now all of a sudden Character A dies; the preclear wants to carry this life continuum forward for A and he has to carry it forward with his own goal. After a while he will regret this. He will hate being a trumpet player.

But here is Aunt Bessie lying in the coffin and everybody says, “God bless her. I hope she goes on to the great beyond and gets her just reward. She was a noble woman; she was a good woman.” The little child hears this and he says, “How do I get sympathy? How do I get sympathy? That’s easy — I just have to be dead like Aunt Bessie” and is thereafter Aunt Bessie.

Have you ever seen anybody who was being “noble,” who was being martyred? “Life . . . I go on as I can. I do do my best. Of course, it’s hard, but somehow — somehow I manage.” Have you ever run into anybody like this? No one has a parent that does this — oh, say not so! It is an actual attitude; they are actually doing just that. It is not a pose; they are doing that.

Maybe this is the way it works. I never had a chance to find out if this was the way it worked.

So this fellow goes on as a trumpet player, and he says, “Life is hard, but I manage to play the trumpet. I manage to keep going somehow.” Whereas his attitude toward trumpet playing once was “Beat me, Daddy, eight to the bar. Hurrah, three cheers! I’m a good trumpeter — zingity- bang! I like to be with the boys in the band!” and so forth, now he has to be noble about it. It will ruin him.

In order to make a test run, then, you say to the individual, “Go back to the time you died.” (I would say to myself, “Naturally, he will find himself in the coffin with Aunt Bessie. That’s a simple way to test it.”)

I ran a writer one time who had done just fine as a writer, up to a point. I never knew, really, at the time I was working this case, how the case resolved. I ran certain grief charges off the case and it then resolved. Until recently I didn’t know why that case had resolved. He was being the life continuum, the ambition continuum, for three separate dead people who had had the ambition to be writers, plus he had his own ambition to be a writer. He was being noble three times and himself once. It finally bogged him down completely.

Then the preclear says, “I hate to tell you this, but there’s a boa constrictor chasing me!”

And the reason people bog down on talents, ambitions and abilities when they are being a life continuum of some other person is not because of the nobility involved — that would be all right — but because they are sitting on grief charges. So the grief charge gets all mixed up in what the individual is doing — the grief for A gets all mixed up in trumpet playing.

So you think, “Well, it’s wonderful, wonderful. Hallucination is just wonderful.” And you say, “Well, come back to present time.”

Therefore the rehabilitation of an individual definitely must address the goals of the dead around him.

He says, “All right,” in sort of a dazed tone of voice and gets up off the couch. And nobody can run him. His case is stopped right there! Before this he ran easily on the track.

If you are doing Dianetic personnel work it would be very much to your interest to find out whether or not the fellow you are hiring on a fairly high level of position (you know this job is going to be important; it is a junior executive job or something of the sort) is doing what he wants to do.

But you say, “Oh, well, it was a shock to him. He’s suddenly become a dub-in case. Next case! Lie down on the couch. All right.” You are going to find “Aunt Bessie” this time. So you say, “All right, go back to the last time you died.”

All you would have to ask him is “Who’s dead?”

The fellow says, “Ow!” “What’s the matter?”

He would look rather surprised and he would say, “Well, Grandfather, Aunt Bertha, Agnes, Rover, a horse I had once, Mother — yeah, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“A horse just stepped on my face!” “Well, where are you?”

“Which one of these wanted to be a junior executive?”

“Let me think for a minute. It’s the Battle of Antietam.”

The fellow would sit there blankly for a moment and say, “Well, my mother was a business- type woman.”

You say to yourself, “Well, obviously it’s hallucination.” “Come up to present time.” His case wouldn’t run either. But that’s beside the point — in research you want to find things out!

“What year did your mother die?” “Oh, Mother died in 1942.”

“Next case. Go back to the last time you died.” “Ow! “

“What was your ambition in 1938?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

His face would glow for a moment and he would say, “I wanted to play drums! Well . . . she always wanted to be a junior executive and so forth. I realize that I can do this job.” Sure he can, on a sort of a half-way basis, with a grief charge sitting in front of him.

“A Masai has just run me through with an assagai.” Three minutes before, this person hadn’t known a Masai from Pepsi-Cola.

Don’t hire him. He will be a failure. He may not be a failure right then, not right at that moment, but if you plan on a high-level job like that being filled for a few years and being filled happily, you should realize that the more he works at that job, the more he will restimulate the grief charge, until he fails. Grim, isn’t it?

It became a problem. After I had loused up ten or twelve cases I realized that we were running into the laws of engrams. You know there are laws of engrams and laws of delusion. Recently we brought in a number of psychogalvanometers. One of these days we are going to run somebody through an engram and then we are going to get a dub-in case and run it through dub-in, registering each one on the psychogalvanometer to see how excited the person gets and so forth. Then we will be able to read it by meters; it will all be on meters and it will say, “There is actuality on the recall of pain and there is a certain set of laws that delusion runs on too.” You have to have a meter in order to convince psychiatry of anything. (Actually, you have a pretty hard time trying to convince them of any reality on anything, particularly themselves.)

Sometimes you don’t have to blow a grief charge if you just ask the person to assay the ambitions of all the people he knows who have failed or who are dead. You will get the darnedest hodgepodge. The fellow will all of a sudden start integrating it into his own life — how he has behaved with regard to these various items.

Anyway, we tested out these past deaths on a psychogalvallometer. A person would run into one of these deaths and the needle would go wham! He would run into birth — wham ! He would run into the last time that somebody knifed him for sleeping with the wrong woman — wham! But when he ran into delusion the needle just bumped over a little. Another delusion, and it ticked a bit. So we said, “Well, that’s very easy. We run him into some ‘delusory experiences’ like these past deaths and so forth” — wham! Just like that!

Let’s take something which is very interesting to us. This is not a nice subject; this is a subject which is practically taboo, but a subject which is making an awful lot of men unhappy and an awful lot of girls unhappy — homosexuality. Why? Why do people get an emphasis on a shifted sex line? Let’s take Mother, who was very dominant: Why is it that we find a dominant mother or a very dominant father? When we find a dominant father for the girl or a dominant mother for the boy, what have we got? When Mama kicks off, we have a second-dynamic continuum. There is already a tendency toward a second-dynamic continuum because of the dominance of that parent, and when Mama kicks off it gets confirmed.

I didn’t catch up with four or five of those early cases. One was in the Foundation recently and I didn’t tell him so, but his case hasn’t run since. But we got the rest of them that I had run back into these deaths and we ran off the deaths. We ran them off, and they reduced like engrams — after I had made another interesting experiment.

But during his own lifetime and so forth he is living under this dominance — appointing Mother cause, being in Mother’s valence because of such dominance and so on. Mother has already failed earlier. Mama is very dominant but she has had some bad failures, such as a divorce. And a child will get a life continuum extending from a parent’s failure. Mama lived up to a certain point and got divorced, and from then on her son feels very sympathetic because of Mama’s divorce. He moves over. It is a valence problem, isn’t it? It is a standard, routine valence problem. That is the way it happens. When Mama dies, this fellow just shifts over and picks up Mama’s life.

A fellow had gotten into one of these past deaths. He was at sea; he was dying on shipboard. The whole ship was coming to pieces. The spars were all falling down. He got his foot caught in a bit alongside the deckhouse and he couldn’t get off with the rest of the sailors, and there he was. He was busy drowning and objecting to it. It wouldn’t reduce. I ran it and ran it but it wouldn’t reduce. So I said, “Go to the death necessary to resolve this case (snap!)” — not knowing a person would ever have any more than one of these things kicking around.

Now, if we have a woman who had a very dominant father, she is liable to have a similar setup. When he dies, she gets in a very, very bad way.

The fellow went sliding back down the track and hit another incident where his shipmates were so glad to get rid of him they wouldn’t throw him a box (I think it was back in Phoenicia or someplace) and he drowned in that incident. We ran that incident and then the later one reduced.

That is what I mean by goals. There is a goal on every dynamic. What do you want to be? What do you want the human race to be? What do you want children to be? What do you want your own second dynamic to be? What do you want the community to be? What do you want animals to do and be? What do you want the physical universe to amount to? How should God act? That is a goal too.

I thought, “This is very, very interesting. I wonder if they’ll reduce any faster than that.”

You just start sorting out the dead men, and down amongst the dead men you will find these goals lying. And there is your preclear, who natively at the age of two would have been very, very happy and cheerful to have been a streetcar conductor, finding out at the age of ten with the failure of Uncle Bill that he now has to be a painter and botching his life up from there on until he is eighteen. Then Papa dies and Papa was the president of a trust company, so now he has to be an office boy in the trust company. You will find this individual doing billiard shots in life — caroming here and there, changing profession, changing interest — and life itself is saying, “Hey, boy, whoa! Will you please follow along one course so we can keep track of you? And why do you keep failing all the time? What’s the idea?”

I had simply said, “Go to the death necessary to resolve the case” — bang! He ran it. He was never the same man afterwards: He was in good condition. He spoke to people when they spoke to him. He was the most normal man around the Foundation.

If a person goes into the valence of somebody who failed, he will fail. To carry out the life continuum of somebody who failed means that you fail too. You have to carry out the whole continuum. You have to like pork chops, you have to do this, that and so on. There is a special set of rules for all the things that you have to do to continue the life of somebody who is either failed or dead.

All this gave one a little bit of pause. Here was obvious phenomena.

This is very interesting. It is a bunch of nonsense, but it is an effort to keep the person alive. It may even be only based upon the aberration that an individual lives but once. Only some aberration of that magnitude could come in and land something in our laps as heavy as this life- continuum thing.

Sometimes somebody would be very skeptical and with the early techniques you couldn’t run a person into one of these things unless he was willing to move on the track. However, with Effort Processing it is not necessary to have anybody’s permission to go into any such incident. You just say, “Now, what is the effort to keep your blood circulating?” (That is a good one.)

There is a great anxiety in a person’s mind if he feels that he has reached the age, let us say, of thirty-five and has not yet “lived.” I remember when I was twenty-one I was one of the most desperate boys you ever met; life was slipping through my fingers and I couldn’t grab hold of it. And “obviously” I would never have another chance. That is what everybody said. It must be true; they couldn’t be wrong. Everybody said so.

All of a sudden the preclear is choking and gasping, and you say, “Where are you? What are you doing?” — very mystified about the whole thing.

Past deaths couldn’t come out unless we could prove them as easily as we can. But I wonder why we were ever very reticent about them? I talk to somebody about this subject once in a while, mention it casually, out of the blue — somebody who doesn’t know anything about Dianetics or something of the sort — and I get an astonishing result. I don’t get “Oh, no!” I get “Yeah?” That is very interesting. With that “Yeah?” they are saying, “You mean to say I’m going to have another chance at it?”

“I’m dying! What do you suppose?” This fellow had been very skeptical a few minutes earlier.

Now, that is an awful lot of aberration, by the way, because what is aberration? The single arbitrary in aberration is time. And if you convince an individual he is never going to go back over any kind of ground he has gone over before — he is never going to get another chance to be a young man, she is never going to get a chance to be a little girl and choose her own life, he is never going to get any other parents than he has and is never going to get anything but what he has, he has made his bed and he has to lie in it (it is a bed of roses but they are mostly thorns) — if you convince him of this, of course he will get into a state of anxiety.

Sometimes the first somatic that you will ever be able to get on a case you get just by picking a random psychosomatic and asking for the effort and counter-effort with regard to it. You find this person dancing on the side of a cliff to an ode to the moon or something of the sort, and at this point the ground slides away and he gets killed. He gets a somatic for the first time. His case runs well afterwards if you run out the past death. You desensitize the data in one of those lifetimes merely by running the death of it.

Only an untruth, by the way, can get a person into a state of anxiety. A complete untruth is necessary. People get into a state of anxiety for lack of data or for untrue data.

Why is this? I didn’t realize this until a very short time ago: It is regret. A person always regrets dying. I regret dying — don’t you? It isn’t very important anymore, but it is something that one normally regrets. One still has a bunch of coupons from the supermarket he hasn’t cashed in or something, so he has this regret.

The net result is that individuals — particularly people in their early twenties — are in a terrible furor. Their minds cannot settle to an ambition because they think they are shooting these dice just once. It is as if you were taking a fellow around a dice table and saying, “All right, now, all the dice you are ever going to play is right here. And we are going to give you one pass; you get to shoot the dice once. If you win on this one pass, you’re going to be easy and comfortable and life is going to be a song. But if you lose you’re going to be a hobo, bud, and that will be the end of you.” Do you see this gambler’s dilemma?

If you were to take a case and just take all the regret off the whole track from algae to present time, you would start blowing grief charges all over the track and you would find something very interesting: the individual’s occlusions on his past deaths would resolve.

That is most people facing life, and that very anxiety is similar to the golfer who goes out and wraps his hands around the club, and he has read all the rule books and he knows he only gets one shot and then it goes on the score card. He doesn’t get that shot again, ever. And if he is convinced enough that this game is that serious and it is that important — dub. The ball goes bounce, bounce, bounce — not 220 yards down the fairway but right there at the tee. Then, of course, because of the stress of evaluation on the thing — he sees the ball has only moved three inches — he goes into apathy and stays there.

I have made one test on this which was very peculiar, but some people have followed into this. They start working Self Analysis and they start straightwiring too far back. It says, “Do you remember a time you were glad to say good-bye to somebody?” And the fellow will slip through it and say, “Must be a movie I saw. Girl standing on this balustrade and . . . Seems kind of real! Her name’s Isabelle. Yeah, her name’s Isabelle. Yeah. Boy, I was sure glad to get rid Where am I?”

We don’t see a very clean world around, as far as this trial and error is concerned. This is the “serious” button. This is a part of the “serious” button on an educational level. Seriousness says, “Life is serious, life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is the goal.” And a fellow looks at this and says, “Gee, it’s serious. I’m never going to get a chance to be a young man again — never.” “This one love is the only love and, boy, it’s been a sloppy one.” “I’m old now; I will never have a chance to write that great American novel.” There he is, in apathy, and he kicks off.

In other words, these death experiences contain an enormous amount of regret, and a death is an invalidation of having lived. The life was not successful because the person died out of it, so he just says, “Well, the whole life isn’t successful,” and he just moves all the data aside.

I don’t know who dealt the cards this way some thousands of years ago, but they were obviously dealt this way. And here in Dianetics we have broken out a new deck. We found out that the old cards were marked. I don’t like to play with readers myself, unless I’ve got a better set.

But where does the natural-born Nimrod suddenly start out from? He walks out with a BB gun when he is ten years of age and starts knocking all the sparrows off the telephone wire, and at twelve years of age he wins a couple of trap shoots, and then he starts firing with mirrors and over his shoulders and so forth. He can’t miss targets. How did he get that way? Talent, of course — but it might be an awful lot of training too. It might be a great many generations of training. Maybe he was a dub at shooting eight generations ago, but he improved. He probably made a postulate to himself when he was lying behind a barricade stuffing the powder and ball into a flintlock and saying, “Missed again! They’re going to get me in about two minutes, but I’ll see if I can get another one. Missed again! You know, I’ve got to learn how to shoot!” So he sort of picks the tomahawk out of his skull and goes to his “great reward,” which is birth.

So, there is the “serious” button right there: they say, “Well, you live once.”

So, here are phenomena, and you can keep reproducing these phenomena just endlessly.

You don’t have to add to it “What you do in this life is going to be kept in a big book and it’s going to be written down, every single thing that you do — particularly the bad things — and we are going to burn you for eternity if the marks come up wrong.”

For a while I began to worry whether or not a person wasn’t just picking deaths out of someplace or other — whether they were his own line continuum. But they evidently are his own line continuum.

Actually, it is perfectly true that there are such “books.” Everything you do is written down in the book. You are the book. There you sit.

There is this line that you call a “theta body” — that is to say, it is just the collected memories of one individual and his individuation — and this goes along all by itself: conception, birth, growth, momentary pausing and doing something, decay, death; conception, birth, growth, off on the plane and out again; conception . . . It is a cycle.

But you get what this does to the “serious” button; this takes some of the smash out of that button. All of a sudden you can relax and roll out the typewriter and say, “Well, probably won’t be till next lifetime that I’ll ever find a publisher white enough to publish this thing, but I might as well get it started now and I’ll sort of have the idea kicking around. Maybe I ought to bury it someplace and go dig it up. I’ll have to be sure and keep these manuscript files in good order. I may get processed into remembering where I stuck ‘em.”

Then there is this unending line of protoplasm, and it runs from conception up to maturity, a sexual act and a conception, then another line up to the next conception, another line and so on. That is the protoplasmic line. It follows the generations of parents, children, then children, more children, children, more children, children, and so on down the line. And that is what gives you your structural line. But that structural line is enormously modified by this theta line.

It is very interesting that individuals occasionally turn up and tell me rather excitedly, “Hey, couldn’t we go find some buried treasure by running off a death or something — a buried treasure?”

Now, how this theta line ties in and where it chooses up is kind of beside the point. But the funny part of it is that the body itself, having once been endowed with life, hangs on to it to some degree, so there is a third line: After death, you sometimes find a person kicking around in a coffin or in his skeleton for a while. You very often get some little child who has terrific nightmares about skeletons and coffins, and he reads Edgar Allan Poe (or some of the stories I used to write!) and he gets horrors about these things.

“Sure .”

You start processing this individual and you run into some interesting phenomena. I ran into this very early in the game of investigating this life-continuum theory. I said to one fellow, “Now what are you doing?”

“Well, why don’t we?” So I say, “I did.”

“Well, I’m lying here in a farmhouse. I’m dying.”

They say, “You did? Well, wouldn’t the Foundation like to have a hundred billion dollars in doubloons or something of the sort?”

“Well, all right, let’s go to the moment you died.” “Okay.”

I say, “No. No, we’re concerned with Dianetics. We’re not much interested in money because, you see, if you’ve got money you have to spend all your time protecting the money. You know what happened the last time you had money. And you don’t get any research work done and nobody gets well. You get as much money as you need.”

“All right, now let’s go to the moment you take off.” “I don’t.”

And they say, “Well, wait a minute, you said you did this.”

“What happens to you?”

“Yeah. The only trouble is that the stuff was on a ledge of the sea floor which went out from Port Royal about a quarter of a mile, and a tidal wave came along and completely knocked the whole thing to pieces and it’s not there anymore; the charts are different.”

“Well, they put me in a box and they bury me.” “All right. Where are you now?”

“Well, how do you know they’re different?”

“Well, fingernails seem to still be growing.” “Where are you now?”

“Well, I’ll tell you why I know they’re different. I went down to the library and I took the chart I had and I compared it to the charts of Jamaica. It’s the chart of Jamaica for 1658, only the chart for Jamaica of 1949 shows that that whole point there has been wiped off by a tidal wave. So there’s nothing much we can do about it.”

“Well, I’ve kind of decayed.” “Where are you now?”

“Well, supposing you buried some treasure in this life and you could pick it up in the next life, and you could do this and you could do that . . .”

“Well, my chest bones just caved in.” “Where are you now?”

“Yes, yes.” We could be very platitudinous now and say “Yeah, there’s some treasure you can fix up in this life. You can get yourself up the tone scale so when you’re born again . . . Or you can straighten the world out so it’s a little easier to live in next time.”

“Well, I’m sort of just dust, I guess; nothing much else.” “Are you out of there yet?”

You have a vested interest in this society. Could I sell you a piece of tomorrow? You definitely do. How would you like to go through the childhood that you have just gone through? That would be a rough deal, wouldn’t it? If you don’t want to go through that childhood again, I can tell you what you can do. You can make darn sure that the public school systems for the first, second and third grade — your next parents — include a good intensive course in how to raise children by Dianetic principles. And we had better make sure that it is right.

“No. I will be, another fifty years or so.” “Well, go to the time you got out of there.” He did.

In the resolution of cases, then, you will find there is one button above all other buttons that is an interesting button; it does tricks. It is the “serious” button. When you start to consider things very, very serious, you are on your way down. An individual who considers driving a car serious business can consider it so seriously that he will have nothing but wrecks. That is where serious goes. Serious goes down into the accident band — upsets, mistakes and so forth — and it drops out of sight in that direction. How serious can you get? Dead! That is how serious you can get.

You can get off on this track. Then you say, “Now let’s go back to the death and let’s get the time when you take off.”

But that is not very serious now. So there isn’t anything terribly serious about the line.

“All right.” He runs through this physical-body continuum — in other words, a little bit of theta hanging around with the physical body for a while — and then he comes back to the moment he died and you get this thing that you normally get with almost everybody when you run a past death. They don’t realize that it is so standard. What you want to do is get somebody right off the street who doesn’t know anything about this at all; you will find that the same phenomena repeats itself consistently.

Take somebody who considers things in a very serious light: This person will take responsibility but he won’t execute it. In other words, his level of taking hold of responsibility — his ability to handle responsibility — is very poor, even when he says he is a very responsible fellow. He considers it too serious.

So, he dies and the next thing you know, he is way up someplace looking down, saying, “So what?”

The biggest gag I have ever seen pulled is a first sergeant of marines. A first sergeant is not serious, but boy, he sure gets things done. It is an act and he knows it is an act.

You say, “Well, let’s go back to the moment you start to die.”

Most anybody who is getting anything done really knows that it is not for blood — it is a game. Have you ever seen a college football team? They start hitting the line, they get broken legs and they grit their teeth and they are in there to do and die for dear old (their employers), but it is a game, and that is important. As long as life has the level of being a game, you can play it. But when it no longer has the level of being a game, it plays you. That is the difference between being the chess player and being the pawn. The difference between being the chess player and being the pawn is the player is playing a game on a relatively nonserious level and the pawn is being all the seriousness there is. The pawn is handled on the board by somebody else. The pawn is not cause; the pawn moves as it is moved by the environment, and that is all it is moved. And it is a very serious pawn.

“Oh, weep, boo-hoo. How can I leave them?” You get regret and so on, and then he is up there looking down and he says, “So what?” There is a definite tone change.

When your chances in life start to get cut down and the amount of time which you have in order to execute a certain thing gets cut down, that thing becomes serious, doesn’t it? That is this one-life span hallucination. It is a very serious thing, this one-life span hallucination. It means it is now or never, and that makes a person almost immediately into a pawn.

There are a lot of people who have been hung up in one of those “so what’s.” I know — I used to think when I was a young writer that nearly all editors were!

There are individuals in this world who are under the concept that this is one life — being completely blinked out on both ends of the track, invalidated out — who are doing things, onerous things, despicable things, unnecessary and harmful things. If they knew that it was not just one life, they could get right up there into the level of nobility: “Okay, shoot me, you mugs. So what?”

So here we have three lines of continuum. You will find the genetic line can be recovered. You can send somebody back down his family line or his genetic line and so on, but it is not an individual line. You don’t get individuality this way; you get bodies. And the preclear gets pretty confused because the theta line is where he is actually traveling, evidently.

Some fellow says, “Well, if you don’t do so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, we’re going to shoot you!” What threat have they got to offer? They are going to shoot you. Of course, they can also say they are going to shoot you painfully. But that is how serious they can be.

On this theta line, you would suffer to see how some of the boys — particularly those with an engineering background — went into action on the lines of “how do you get an individual back from a death to the moment of the continuance of the protoplasm?” That is to say, how do we get this individual coming up to the end of track and dying and then coming back and being himself as his protoplasm line?

I don’t think very many individuals would be forced into onerous and despicable courses if it weren’t for “how serious things are.”

Darwin and the rest of them introduced an arbitrary a long time ago — that they didn’t know any more about than you do — when they talked about this “unending line of protoplasm.” Of course, this has worked out very well in the field of cytology. It doesn’t happen to be very well accepted in the field of biology. But it is an arbitrary.

Now, here is this one button. If you try to run this button you are going to find out that the most serious points of a lifetime (how serious can you get? Death! ) are going to be those points which have to do with deep failure on the part of other individuals or the death of other individuals or the destruction of possessions, things — in other words, it is a very serious damage level. That is seriousness. Those are the serious points of a person’s life. And it is from those points that he considers it serious and necessary to carry on the life continuum of something or somebody else. When he starts in a life his regret for his last death is usually pretty deep. He is busy regretting while he is dying and all sorts of things, because he says, just as he dies, “Well, this is the end.” And then he is up there at thirty thousand feet looking down at his body saying, “Well, there it is. I wonder how I got mixed up about this? I’m still alive. No, I’m not, I’m dead. Let’s see, what am I supposed to do now?”

“Why do you keep working it that way?”

I don’t know. I think somebody comes along about that time and hands you a little red guidebook or something of the sort. We haven’t investigated this very thoroughly.

“Well, it’s impossible for a person who is death to procreate!”

The point is, an individual starts in fresh and he doesn’t have any commitments in the present environment. But as long as he continues in this environment he collects commitments or life continuums. He keeps collecting these things and then he keeps carrying them on. And in view of the fact that Homo Sapiens is down about one hundredth of one millimeter above “I know not,” as far as his concept of himself, his mind and how he thinks is concerned — he hasn’t ever questioned this — he is in an interesting state of mind.

You say, “Why does it have to be on a genetic line?” Then you suddenly realize what these boys are doing: They are following out the theory that all is matter — ”There is nothing but a material universe. There is only energy, space, time; that’s all.” That is a very narrow-sighted sort of a view, isn’t it? I would hate to work a problem after somebody had put down in front of me only 50 percent of the factors I needed to resolve it. They say, “Now, you’ve got to solve this problem but you can only solve it with 50 percent of its factors.”

Somebody comes along and tells a man, “You’re sick of the hives because of the allergious ramifications of platitudinous strawberries, and the correction for this is anablistomine. It’s all physical, it’s all a physical universe.” And recently, in the last few decades, they’ve started saying, “Well, it’s kind of fashionable to support the church, but actually . . .” In the modern university you run into people and you say, “Is there such a thing as a human soul?” and they answer, “Don’t be dull, bud!”

We had to go out into some very interesting mathematical lineups in Dianetics in order to get anything. I have been very interested in getting hold of a book on quantum mechanics. I want to convert all the infinities to zero and all the zeros to infinity in it and see if it won’t work for a change (quantum mechanics doesn’t work), because in Dianetics, quite as a byproduct, we have proven that zero equals infinity, not one divided by infinity. You might not care too much about that, but let me tell you that there are individuals in colleges whose whole lives are spent in the bloody battleground of whether or not the square root of one is or isn’t. They are serious.

People have gone that far. That is too far; it is about time somebody put a hydraulic jack under the whole works. They are looking at man on the “clay” basis: “There is no soul, there is no life, there is no knowledge beyond anything. You have to be taught everything you know. And it is all structurally physical. Nobility? Why, man has no nobility; he doesn’t have any interest in anybody else but himself. He runs exclusively on the first dynamic. Everybody knows that.”

Anyway, this theta line is evidently a very simple line: A fellow merely goes on living and then kicks off and he goes on living some more and kicks off and goes on living some more. It seems awfully simple. The theta line, however, gets very, very badly messed up, because a person is busy regretting his dying; he thinks it is important.

Those “everybody knows” phrases are just wonderful! “Everybody knows that everybody runs on the first dynamic. Everybody is out for himself; you know that” — until you start to process somebody and find out that he is out for everybody else but himself, and he is his own worst enemy.

It was all theoretical as far as I was concerned — it was just observed phenomena and so on — and I hadn’t realized in any attitude of my own living that anything had changed, till one day I was driving down the street and a cop came tearing up on a big motorcycle with the red lights flashing and so on — ”Pull over to the curb!”

If a person is taking himself seriously, he is solidly in the life continuum of somebody who is dead who is not himself. Swallow that one for a minute.

“Sure, I’ll pull over to the curb.” It was a funeral.

But take someone who is happy and carefree: He goes along, he falls flat on his face, he stumbles, he fails, he goes out and loses all the football games, he gets nothing but rejection slips, he lives on beans and wears rags. But he gets along fine.

Along came this big hearse with a coffin — there were silver handles on the coffin — and then cars, cars and more cars. Suddenly it occurred to me that if a Dianetic auditor could set up shop out at the cemetery, he could do a hot business just blowing grief charges, blowing off the death! (“Ten bucks, lady. Blow your grief off.”)

Somebody comes around and says, “You know, life is serious. You ought to go to work, you ought to do this, you ought . . .”

The next thought that occurred to me was “Boy, are those people being fooled — are they being fooled about this whole thing!” They are talking about this individual going to the great beyond and his great reward; they look at it as finality. This is the end.

“Why?“

And I thought, “Well, two or three years from now, someplace around Wichita, there’ll be a little kid kicking people in the shins and so forth. Everybody will shove him in the face. And he will be Joe Glutz, the great banker! “

If this happy, carefree fellow thought it was worth doing, he would pitch in and do a bang-up job on it.

By the time the second policeman came along, following the procession, I was laughing. This cop really looked at me hard. All of a sudden it occurred to me that these people were indulging in a very nice rite but they were missing the whole show.

But do you know what a person gets very early in life? He gets the deep responsibility of carrying on for somebody else who is dead and then he is serious. Then he has to take himself seriously. He isn’t himself anymore. Now he has to take this death seriously. He has to take people seriously and he has to take these problems seriously because they are not his problems. He has entrusted himself with them, and in view of the fact that he has entrusted himself with them he must of course take them seriously. And death is a serious thing; death is as serious as you can get and if death is very serious, then he has to be very serious. So of course he will fail.

I drove on down the street and the colors had turned up — way up above what they had been before — just on the realization “What do you go along through life being afraid of? You go along through life being afraid of dying. Well, why do you go along through life being afraid of dying? That’s silly.”

But the point is, he moves over there into the other person’s continuum. From that point on he takes life pretty seriously. Who is he taking seriously? He is taking that dead person seriously.

Take any person around and run a past death on them and they will say, “Oh, how did I get back here? My, I was a sweet girl. Yes, my family loved me very much.” Or “The idea of being killed in such a fashion — it’s outrageous. It’s a disgrace! Makes me feel awfully unimportant.” It sort of changes your viewpoint.

He is playing the role for its evaluation in the modern world, and the evaluation in the modern world says, “Poor old George. He only had one chance. He got born and he had a tough time and he struggled and he tried this and that and he had these few small successes. But he had these ambitions, and then one day he died. And he’ll never have another chance.”

Now, I could give you a talk on reincarnation, also on transmigration. Down through the years and in various places there have been a lot of guesses, and they were very interesting. The Egyptians thought that an individual who didn’t mind his p’s and q’s became a bug and maybe transmigrated off into some other species and finally worked back up into being a human again. (I don’t know why he wanted to work to that level, but that is what they said.) They thought this was the way life ran.

So the fellow sighs and says, “That’s rough! Well, here I go,” and he moves over on to the dead man’s life continuum.

Reincarnation is an old idea. This idea I know is at least thirty-five hundred years old. People have been talking about reincarnation for a long time. And then some people brought reincarnation into disgrace by insisting on having been Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Cicero or Bach or Mozart and so forth.

You can put it down in your little book that any time an individual takes himself very seriously he is carrying on the life continuum of another individual in this lifetime. Also, if he carries on very, very seriously, he will be sure to fail, because “serious” is way down tone.

Of course, the funny part of it is that these people are still with us someplace. But there also is a phenomenon where a big personality along the line someplace seems to shatter and get on to a lot of theta lines, or it even seems to start theta lines sometimes. Talk about unknowns!

And the way to get this individual straightened out is to take an assay of his goals, one after the other, find out what these goals amount to and then find out who had them. The individual quite often will be able to just sort himself out kind of in a blur, and be very upset for two or three days and then all of a sudden find out what his own goals are, without blowing any grief charges. That is interesting, isn’t it? It will occasionally happen like this.

So, you will run into the phenomena of reincarnation. Nobody has ever had these phenomena before. It isn’t just an idea. And you can demonstrate it to your own satisfaction. From individual to individual, it doesn’t go along as a lot of hallucination; it goes along according to a set of natural laws. It becomes very fascinating. This doesn’t mean the ancients were right, but it sure means that I was bewildered.

Set the person up on something like this: “Name five things in the past of which you were afraid. Name five goals you had in the past.” Have him write those down. “Now name five things in the present of which you’re afraid. Now name five things in the present that you’re trying to get accomplished on a goal basis that are desirable. Now name five things which you would like to accomplish in the future, and give us five fears — why you don’t think you’ll be able to accomplish them.”

When you get life laid out in such a fashion, your values have a tendency to change.

He writes all these things down and he looks over the spheres of these various things.

Now, I don’t know how much a knowledge of this would change this particular subject, dead men’s goals. But there is such a tremendous desire on the part of a living organism to keep other organisms alive, to help, to alleviate the pain in the world, to shoulder the burdens of all God’s creation, that an individual gets pretty scrambled up on his theta line. If you want to straighten this theta line out, you have to know something about these phenomena.

We have a new chart — the Chart of Attitudes. It has twelve columns, and it is the “button chart,” actually. It gives you all these buttons and all the gradations of these buttons.

A fellow dies and for some reason or other his friend goes into his valence. Don’t think for a moment that his friend does not continue to live his own life; he does. He lives his own life plus the dead man’s life, which makes his own life kind of complicated sometimes. And as far as I can tell at this time, it doesn’t do a bit of good to do this. People just do it.

But you have him look at these goals and these things he is afraid of and then you say, “Now, who else, besides yourself, might have been afraid of this? Who else might have wanted to have done this in the past?” Take the past category. “Whose ambitions were these?”

A dog dies and fifteen years later you find the dog’s mistress, now a grown young lady, being cute at parties, acting like the little dog. She is carrying that dog’s life along with her.

He will occasionally say “Mine.” Don’t challenge him, particularly. They may or may not be his.

If you ever wanted any substantiation of the validity of the concept of the eight dynamics, believe me, it is contained in this idea of dead men’s goals — this life-continuum theory, to be much more technical and proper. (Let’s make it complex so that the professors will appreciate it!)

But take up those goals and take those fears one after the other and all of a sudden he will say, “Well, it’s Grandpa Jenkins. Grandpa Jenkins wanted to sell horse liniment. That’s why I’m down here on the stand every day selling horse liniment. Well, that’s silly. And you know, I’ve had an awful time selling horse liniment. I’m not able to unload a bottle of it. But of course I’ve got to do it. But I don’t have to do it now.”

So, here we have Grandpa and Grandma and so on: When these people are alive they have a certain influence upon the preclear, but when they are dead the preclear keeps on trying to live their lives for them. We all know this phenomenon of one human being trying to live another human being’s life for him: “Now, Willie, you’ll have to go to school. You’d better do this. And I want you to get good grades. You know, I never had an opportunity like this when I was a boy. You’d better engage in this kind of a business, and you’d better do this and go here and go there.” There is that kind of living someone’s life, but there is this other fabulously noble, heroic picking-up of the theta burdens — not the responsibilities, just the theta burdens — of the dead person and going on with them. I am not quite sure that, at the basic assessment, psychosomatics are not broadly out of this mechanism.

Now, you will all of a sudden find one thing that was a goal and one thing that was a fear of his and which were another person’s too. And he will kick off the other person’s and think he has kicked off his own. He will be unhappy for two or three days and then suddenly he will revert back to his own goal.

I checked back on a few cases and I found an individual who was very, very worried that he was going to go insane. We checked out his family and we found out that his grandmother had gone insane. This would make it look, according to the present-day evaluation (“all men are dogs” is the present-day evaluation; the communists say they are slaves and then go on to prove it), as if this person were just unduly worried because he had heard of heredity. That is not the way the mechanism works. Unless you know this other mechanism, you are not going to solve that worry; you won’t take that worry away from this preclear. Why? Of his own free, open- hearted will, he is carrying on his grandmother’s worry about being insane. He just reached out and picked it up.

Who is it? This is the game of “Who is it?” “Is it me or is it A?” This is the game of “Who’s dead?” And this is the game of “Well, what was your ambition?”

It would be an awful joke on the human race to find out at this late date that it actually was that noble — that all that goes wrong with anybody is trying to make everybody go on living.

I imagine you will find individuals all broken down — people who are middle-aged today — because they can’t go on manufacturing buggy whips. They feel like life isn’t worthwhile because they can’t manufacture buggy whips. But it was Grandpa Smith who was trying to manufacture buggy whips and they can’t, of course, continue his life because his whole life, everybody said, was in buggy whips. You will find this the case on an ambition, and all that sort of thing.

A supporting fact is that we consider it quite heroic for a man to lay down his life on the third dynamic; we play that up a great deal in our stories. There is a lot of other data around.

You will also get this kind of a situation taking place: You will be able to rehabilitate somebody’s goals, somebody’s future, on a very simple assay like this and find that they go on doing what they have been doing, although it isn’t an ambition of theirs — but they do it about three times better. They don’t have the responsibility to the dead person for doing a good job. And believe me, there is nobody harder to be responsible to than somebody who has kicked the bucket. You can’t go out in the orphan asylums and keep sticking every little child and saying, “Is your name Smorgasbord?”

If you want to solve or get some sort of an investigation going in a case, you will find that practically everything that is wrong with the case or everything the person is trying to do that he really doesn’t want to do is on account of somebody who is dead or who is at least out of the running and no longer in circulation. You can assess the thing out that way.

“No.”

Yes, you can knock it out by running engrams, but the funny part of it is that you don’t find all the engrams on a case when you start in. You get all the engrams you can lay your hands on and that is all you can get. The person feels much better and life is running along fine — only you didn’t take away that one particular fear or problem. You can’t quite understand why you were never able to get the reason this person had to sit down to the dinner table and beg like a dog. There is a dead dog someplace on the case, that is all.

You can’t go down the line through all the maternity wards and say, “Does anybody here have a child who used to be Joe Smorgasbord? You see, I promised Joe — I owe him five dollars.”

An individual has a very bad back; he feels swaybacked. He will tell you that he is swaybacked and so forth. We go back and we don’t find anything one way or the other till all of a sudden we run into him in his youth standing on a street corner looking at a swaybacked horse and thinking, “Isn’t it terrible; that swaybacked horse has to carry a man and a saddle. It’s practically going to break his back.” So he picks it up and carries it for the horse. I don’t know that this does the horse any good but I do know that men do it.

I ran into a case not very long ago of a little girl — this was reported by a minister — in a small country community who had the most interesting line of chatter. She was quite rational, but every once in a while she would tell her mother very sadly (she was only about five or six), “Say, I wonder how my children are doing.”

Now, there was a polio case in at the Foundation a short time ago — a little girl from Indiana. She is standing by herself. She had been an immobile case — a bed case. It will probably take two or three months for her muscle tissue to build back to a point where she will be able to walk and be as active as a child of fourteen should be. This girl is well, through a minor miracle. What do we find at the bottom of this case? According to the auditor’s report on the thing, we find that she saw another little child and the other child had polio, and she felt sorry for the other child so she went home and got polio. That was the start of it! And there she was, bedridden for many years — sympathy for this other person and so forth.

Mother would say, “Ha-ha, you go on out and play with your dolls.”

Now, one can add it up and say, “Well, the reason human beings do this is very simple. It’s because they want sympathy. They’ll do anything to get sympathy.” I am afraid that is just somebody’s 1.5 engram talking. It is silly!

Finally this little girl became very morose. They took her to see the local minister, and the local minister took her in back and asked her what was up. She was very evasive for a while. (A child has an awful time trying to get into communication with low-tone-scale people, such as adults.) Finally she figured out that she could trust him enough, and she said her name was so- and-so, her husband’s name was so-and-so, her children’s names were so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so, her address was such-and-such and she was very worried how her husband could possibly get along with the children and so forth. She was quite concerned about it.

Of course, an individual does discover that there are times in his life when he is dependent upon other people. But one of the surest ways in the world you can get yourself in trouble is to help somebody. Just for a moment, think of somebody you have tried to help. You didn’t ask for gratitude, you didn’t ask for anything. But sooner or later you got hit.

The minister said, “What town was that?” and it was only about a hundred miles from there.

What did Shakespeare say about the “wintry winds and fangs of ingratitude” or something of the sort? According to an old Chinese proverb, that person who has mentioned twice that he has helped somebody else has been amply rewarded. And that is all the pay there is, because the individual is going to resent it.

So the little girl was let go home — instead of being locked up — and the minister got in his car and drove up to this town and made inquiries. The woman had died at the hour and minute that the little girl had said. This was her husband. The family wasn’t getting along too badly; he had gotten married again in the ensuing six or seven years. The children were doing fine;

Parental-child relationships are sour, really, only for one good reason: The child cannot contribute equally to the parental contribution. This demonstrates the child to be much less powerful than the parents; it puts him in a bad way. He goes out to build up some of his own potential; maybe that is why he carries on dead men’s goals. But he does! H-e goes out and he sees some pitiful sight in the world and he is triggered. He says, “Why, that’s too bad,” he picks it up, presses it to his bosom and he is sick. Then people come around and give him sympathy and it gets really complicated. But the purity of the nobility of that gesture is unquestioned. There is nothing but an altruistic computation behind it. You can investigate it if you want to. You won’t find the person saying “Now, let’s see, if I get sick like Bessie is, why, my parents will have to be nice to me.” However, you will find the child occasionally going around saying, “Well, when I die, boy, are they going to regret it. They’re going to feel sorry for me.” You are going to find that! But you are also going to find this child merely being spontaneous about the thing, saying, “It’s too bad. I’ll take it on.”

The minister got all of the data, including how well was her clock being taken care of, the livestock by name — everything. He took it back home and called in the little girl, feeling very, very respectful, and he said, “I wanted to tell you your children are doing fine.”

A child, evidently, or the human being, at the time he does this, feels well and strong and able to support these things. It is only later when he is staggering under his own burdens and all the other burdens of the world that he begins to fold up under this. Then he wants to get rid of some of these burdens.

She thanked him so much for all the good news and she said, “All right, then I can forget about it,” and she promptly did. From then on she went on acting as any other child and never mentioned the subject again.

But what burdens will he get rid of? He will get rid of his own! He won’t give up the other person’s. What are we, a flock of saints? That is the way it works.

The minister wrote it in to the church headquarters and it kicked around for quite a while and it finally appeared over his byline in a little booklet on curiosities of this and that.

You try to spring a chronic somatic off somebody who is carrying it for somebody else who is dead and you are going to have a little fight on your hands. You won’t solve it by fighting about it. You will solve it by getting the first time he felt sympathy for this other person or the first time he felt sympathy for the condition. You get the first time he felt sympathy for the condition and then you can unlock the chain, but not otherwise.

But I have had some correspondence with several people who have had this sort of thing turn up. There are a lot of them, but people know better than to mention them too widely.

He will hold on to his own integrity to that much more solidly than his integrity to himself. It is a very peculiar race that we live in.

What is reality? Reality is agreement. What is insanity? Insanity is not agreeing with somebody else’s reality. The commonest phrase in the language is “You’re crazy.” We have a hard enough time agreeing on the fact that every election we are supposed to elect Democrats or something; we have a hard enough time agreeing on the fact that everybody should have an electric refrigerator, that the men should wear pants and the women dresses. These are wild points of agreement, by the way, but we have managed them. Yet we still have, as one of the commonest phrases in our conversation, “You’re crazy!”

If this amount of nobility, sainthood and altruism were actually let alone, this race would probably go along at a heck of a rate. But I think people are so busy being altruistic that they raise hell with each other — ”Oh, so you won’t let me help you, huh? I’ll fix you! “ By the way, that is about the fastest way you can get into a fight.

People say this particularly to little children. They are easily sat on. They are small; they fit in the chair easily and you can sit on them quite easily. A little child starts to tell about a dream he has had and he says, “And I dreamed I was standing there in the crib and a dinosaur stuck its head over and it bit me in half! “

Go out sometime and find some marital group where the husband or the wife is fighting continually; take the most combative and punitive partner aside and have a little talk with them. You say, “Well, now, Joe, what’s wrong? What’s wrong, Joe?”

“That’s all right, dear, it’s just your imagination. (Let’s make sure you’re very sleepy and groggy so this will be hypnotic.) This is just your imagination. Now, you understand that?”

“Well, she’s — ” yakety-yakety-yak — a lot of accusations and so on. “Yeah, but when did this start?”

“But it’s so real!” “It’s just your imagination.”

“Well, it started pretty young — a long time ago, when we first got married.” “What are you trying to do for this woman, Joe?”

Now they have invented another one: dream analysis. They have said that if you only tell somebody your dreams it will expose all of your second dynamic events. So you mustn’t tell anybody your dreams because then they will find out.

“Well, that’s just it! I wanted to help her do this, I wanted to get her that, I wanted to try to get this other kind of a position so that she could do this or that, and she won’t listen to it! She doesn’t think it’s worthwhile. She doesn’t think it’s this way, and she doesn’t think it’s that way.” He will cover it up by interlarding it with “. . . and she keeps saying I’m stingy, and I’ll show her I’m not stingy!” and so on. It is all tangled up, but the middle strand of it is “She won’t let me help her; she won’t let me contribute.” Even contribution is really an improper word on it. “She won’t let me help her.”

And then people say, “Children’s imaginations have to be sat on all the time.” (You don’t let them get away with that stuff; it is too restimulative!) So they manage to turn off the spigot on this line of communication by the time a child is three, four, five — something like that. About the time he learns how to talk they manage to turn it off. All I can say is that there have been a bunch of cowards dying in the last few generations — they are scared to remember it!

You ask her and if she is in apathy she will tell you, “Well, I can’t help him. I realize that I can’t.”

This mechanism of going out of valence every time you die is fascinating. That is a nice, pat little mechanism: you die, you go out of valence. It is very interesting going back down the track flicking back into valence all the way down the line — painful too, sometimes.

You could take people who are known in their neighborhood as being the most reprehensible gadabouts, drunks, who treat their kids badly — people with a bad reputation — and get them aside and shake down the problem without any suggestion to them at all, and you would find that their basic difficulty is that they can’t help each other enough.

The point is that I am almost sure that not too many generations ago — maybe five hundred generations ago — man had a direct recall on the whole thing. Then somebody could make a quick buck by turning it off and they did. But I’m sure that that is the case.

It’s a funny race we live in, isn’t it?

I get the spooky feeling every once in a while that this used to be common computation — that we would sit around a campfire and somebody would say, “Well, I remember a caribou I shot seventy-five winters ago; it was up on that river. It was pretty hard packing him down, and I haven’t been up there this life, but you’ll find that there’s a sort of a ravine there, and if you can manage to slide him into the ravine you can bring him down the creek.”

The other hunter would say, “Thanks,” and never question it.

So it is something for you to think about. It is sort of creepy when you start thinking about it, though, because you become sure it is there.

But what would you be betraying or violating if you remembered all the way back down the track by Straightwire? What would you be violating in the terms of life continuum and living on somebody else’s death? Whose integrity would you be violating if you suddenly said there were more than one life? Whose goal was it to have only one life? That is something for you to think about. Who would you be betraying if you suddenly said “Well, I can remember all the way back down the track?”

We just had an incident of it at the Foundation. One of the auditors was processing a fellow and he found the preclear to be a wide-open case. He went back the next day, the next session, and the fellow was completely occluded. One postulate had been made. He worked the fellow for two and a half hours before he could even start to crack this case again.

All of a sudden just one proposition was going to be made. This preclear’s thing was “I’m afraid you’re going to take my blindness away from me,” so he turned off all his perceptics. And they all turned on again the moment the auditor found this postulate and ran it out.

What blindness was this man carrying forward? It was his brother’s. His brother died in an automobile accident. That one he mustn’t give up. So he turned off all of his perceptics and everything else, loused up his whole case thoroughly. But it could be loosened up in about a split second, if one found the right postulate.

That may give you a little better idea of what an occluded case is. If this individual were to give up his aberrations he would be betraying somebody else whose life he is continuing. So when somebody comes along and asks him to give up his aberrations he says, “No! “ The funny part of it is that he will give up any of his own aberrations, and those are the ones you will get. But he won’t give up somebody else’s that he is holding for them. These are granted to him in trust. Unless you can find the initial postulates on the thing you are going to have a rough time. Sympathy is one of the ways you get into it; running the emotional curve is another one — postulates turn up out of these things — and also you can get into it by running effort itself.

Maybe you know a little bit more about cases and maybe you know a little bit more about people now. These studies, particularly the last few weeks, have jelled remarkably. The amount of simplification has been quite remarkable. Also, the method of doing this has become much simplified.

I don’t want to overrate this workbook I am working on because it may take more work by the auditor than I think it will, but this workbook will make it possible for the auditor to pilot down these fifteen acts with much less ardure. Auditing will operate on more of a consulting basis. They ask you what is meant by this and how does that work. Maybe they say, “I don’t get anything about this Lock Scanning myself; I just can’t seem to get it.” You find out if they can lock-scan or not, fix them up, run a curve for them, show them what a curve is — demonstrate it.

Sitting down with a preclear and running out his case phrase by phrase hour after hour, hour after hour, is not so good. If you could be sure that you would only have to audit a case fifteen to twenty-five hours with deep, on-the-couch processing, you would be very happy to tackle any case that walked up to you. I know that. But if somebody asks you to keep on going and you look ahead down the track and see five hundred hours on this line, you have qualms. Just maybe, it is now down to a point where, if you simply advise somebody what can be done and what exists, you can give him a copy of this book and answer a few questions for him — maybe take an hour of your time — and he all of a sudden gets well. Although they will kick you in the teeth later because you tried to help them, I am sure you would like to do that! That is all we have been trying to move toward.

You might find it a little bit of fun to carry forward the process which I gave you of assaying five fears and five goals of the past, five fears and five goals of the present, five fears and five goals of the future, and then tying them up with other people who are no longer in our midst or who are in our midst and have failed badly. Why don’t you try it?

Once, a couple of years ago, I spent ten consecutive evenings in Washington, D, talking to the superstrata of the upper crust of, as they humorously called it, mental healing — the best they had. We had a crew of auditors upstairs who were instructing them and processing them after they had listened to a little introductory talk. It was sort of an easy talk, like “The goal of life is survival. Man has several dynamics; he is not just interested in himself.” I would get to that point every evening when I gave this talk — it was the same talk — and then they were supposed to go on and see how auditing was done. But they never moved out of the front room.

Every evening I had the argument “Well, how do you know that man is not only interested in himself? Now, according to Jung . . .” and I would get a bunch of unproven, unsubstantiated opinions which had nothing to do with phenomena. I would try to explain the difference between phenomena and opinion.

Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, at one of those meetings, turned around to a doctor of biology and said, “Please, Doctor, please tell me that a baby cannot hear in the womb!” So he told her and she was happy. Only he didn’t know. As a matter of fact, a doctor in practice who is on the ball knows very well that you can hear a baby cry through a stethoscope. Very often, before a baby is born, you can hear the baby cry without any stethoscope or anything else. Mothers are quite often very startled!

They never even knew of the phenomena of extended hearing. Any time an individual is very frightened, he gets extended hearing. You can take common hypnotism and you can extend a person’s hearing by hypnotic command to a point where he can hear a bus coming two or three blocks before you hear it coming — yet his hearing is normal under normal conditions.

You can check this up. You could set it up as exact experiments. This is one of the oldest tricks known to charlatans and quacks of the mind — extended hearing. But these people, the top of the field in “mental healing,” didn’t know it. So at the end of that ten days I was sorry I had come to Washington.

I converted one man, who occasionally even today sends a preclear around. He recommends Dianetics to people. It is not for him, but he and I have an understanding. I happen to know more about mysticism than his mentor, Krishnamurti, knows; I am a better mystic than Krishnamurti. But I wasted those days and ever since that time I have just said, “Well, it’s wasted time,” as far as talking to psychiatrists about Dianetics is concerned.

You know what we ought to do for a future program at the Foundation? People see in terms of black and white: yes, no; can, can’t. A person can’t see and all of a sudden he can see — they know something has happened. Aristotle laid this down and people have believed it ever since. If a person has been bedridden and all of a sudden walks, people think that is really something. So we want to carry forward an unpaid research program here. We will work as hard as we can to get people, for instance, who have been in a wheelchair with arthritis, people who are blind (but have not had their eye corneas or lenses removed) and so on, the type of case where something is a complete shut-off — and we want to turn it on.

Now, I personally do not know how many blind people will suddenly be able to see again. I don’t know whether it will be ten, twenty or fifty out of a hundred. It has not been possible for us to undertake research of this character in any broad magnitude because it is fantastically expensive. (And everybody knows research money in the United States goes to people who sit around in chairs and read papers by other people who are sitting around in chairs, who then pass the papers on to other people who are sitting around in chairs, and who all attend all the society meetings and keep their records and files straight. That is research in the United States.)

We will have this self-help book I’m working on. It will permit a research program to go forward broadly for the first time. Our techniques and understanding of this are apparently broad enough now so that they can be laid down in this form, making a minimal number of auditing hours. All we are going to try to do is turn out some miracles.

The Foundation is now specializing in miracles, and I don’t mean a person who is dying that would then keep living; that is not a miracle. The public can always say, “Well, he probably would have lived anyway.” That is not a can or can’t. But just on this basis of can or can’t, anything that comes under the heading of miracle, we can probably do it very easily.

By the way, there are a lot of physicians in this town — medical doctors — who very definitely have an eye on the Foundation. This is very interesting. Somebody goes in for a treatment or penicillin shot or something of the sort and mentions they are even vaguely connected with Dianetics, and the doctor, sort of underneath the blotter, says, “Well, you know, I’m very interested in it. I know about past lives too; I’ve seen too many of my patients do strange things. There must be some kind of an answer to this sort of thing. We had a fight about it up at the hospital yesterday. Yeah, just yesterday they were fighting about it.”

So it doesn’t matter what happens in newsprint and it doesn’t matter what the opinions of the great society are. It has occurred to me in the past that merely making a person happier was not considered of any worth in the society.

So they need some miracles. I am not saying that we will produce any of these miracles, but we will try to hand a few out. I think it will make a very marked change.

But what has been accomplished has been accomplished, and we have accomplished exactly the goals that we set out to accomplish. We wanted a twenty-five-to-fifty-hour process that would do a miracle. We have got it.