The country has become very involved with radiation in the past year or so and as we in Scientology have achieved a much clearer understanding of this I think I owe you a rundown on Scientology and radiation.

At the outset let me assure you that our total interests in radiation at this time are two only: that radiation can create hysteria, and Scientology handles hysteria, and secondly that hysteria, because of radiation, puts people in rather poor condition and Scientology can rehabilitate them. We have no political or international interest in radiation.

It is interesting to know that a thetan doesn’t look through his eyeballs. He has two little gold discs, one in front of each eye lens. These are not the lenses of the eyes, but, as you might say, mocked-up energy. They are little gold discs that are superimposed over the eye and he looks through these. The eyeballs merely serve to locate these discs.

As you can remember, the HASI in Phoenix, Arizona, was there at the time when a great deal of bomb testing was being done in Nevada only 250 miles away. At that time we had some vague interest in radiation, but it was more in the direction of locating any deposits of uranium which might have escaped notice. Being in possession of instruments which could measure radiation, we were quite shocked to discover that the atmosphere and the grand pianos began to count somewhat alarmingly. This was immediately after an H-bomb had been buried under nine feet of dirt and had been exploded. These radioactive dust particles swirled around the Southwest for quite a while before they separated themselves out.

An eyeball isn’t even a good camera. Some people, dissecting eyeballs to find out how people looked with them, have been totally baffled since the first time this was done because it is about the worst camera that anybody ever had anything to do with.

We were worried. We were worried because the amount of radiation was obviously alarmingly great and I was as worried as the rest, perhaps even more so because of my responsibility for our people in the Phoenix area. I felt that we could not go on in the immediate vicinity of a great deal of testing and so I came East to give a Congress and establish offices somewhere away from that area. There were other local reasons but this radiation reason was more or less primary.

What the ophthalmologist doesn’t know is that the individual looks through these little discs — the ones in front of each eye — and when things begin to deteriorate, or when the anchor points of the body deteriorate, they are liable to follow suit. They become distorted one way or another.

Back East we made no further tests but we continued to be impressed. We read about radiation in the public press, we read how the government was saying how it was not dangerous, and we read apparently responsible scientists on the subject saying that it was very dangerous. But because we had seen grand pianos counting like uranium mines, we were, of course, of the opinion that radiation was an extremely dangerous thing.

They begin to Q-and-A with the distortions of the eye themselves — the eye reacts to light, so these little golden shields react to light. After a while the little gold shield becomes black or corrodes in some fashion which makes it very difficult to look through.

Without further examination of this subject and paying attention only to what was printed in the public presses, we saw no reason to change our attitude concerning radiation. But some things have happened recently which have brought about a considerable change.

Of course, we don’t know why he is looking through them in the first place. When they do deteriorate the individual starts wearing glasses. The person thinks this is necessary. The next thing he does is to make the lenses of the glasses stronger.

I have just completed a Congress in London and was in communication with Members of Parliament through a HASI representative on the subject of radiation. It was clearly and cleanly stated by an authoritative Member of the British Government that Russia was making full use of the hysteria factors inherent in radiation in order to stop England from constructing H-bombs and to impede her defenses in other ways. He had incontrovertible proof that the hysteria campaign being conducted by Russia inside England and the United States was totally an effort to impede their national defense.

He puts on a pair of glasses. This is a big shield — a big disc. This disc also goes in front of the eyeball and he knows this and he cannot see things unless he looks through one. The reason why glasses become very difficult in an auditing problem is that one is not auditing glasses.

Russian campaigns you must understand are of the mental, brainwashing type.

I have audited glasses, just as an experiment, for a long time. Havingness in terms of glasses, or in terms of eyeballs, does produce some sort of change, but havingness in terms of little golden discs produces an awful alteration in terms of eyesight, sometimes faster than is comfortable.

Radiation is tailor-made to their agent provocateur tactics.

You can take this old-time effort processing and produce a change of vision with everybody with no permanence, but a fantastic alteration of vision can occur, making somebody very uncomfortable.

When I returned to America two things became very obvious. The first of these was that only the press of Russia and the United States did not report my remarks made at the Nuclear Radiation and Health Congress at the Royal Empire Society Hall in London. Other newspapers the world around carried the remarks as headline news. These remarks were to the effect that the greatest danger of radiation was hysteria. At the Congress I said that the H-bomb was not a weapon because it was far too powerful, it would not coerce obedience but only terror. These remarks are more or less complete in a book now being published called All About Radiation, for the British market only.

Copyright (©) 1957 by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved.

Another thing that happened is that I remembered why I left the Author’s League of America some years ago. Its Board had begun to offer prizes to deify minorities and it was taking other party-line data and trying to foist it off on American writers. The Newspaper Guild, so far as I know, is not entirely clear of this influence.

Have the preclear get the effort to see, followed by the effort not to see, followed by the effort to see, one after the other. The next thing you know is that all the little muscles in the eyes will start to Q-and-A with the little golden lenses in front of the eyeballs, which are changing under all this processing, and the next thing you know is that he is seeing double, cross-eyed, or something like that.

The other thing I did was to take a Geiger counter and make a test of Washington. A little earlier this Geiger counter had been giving false evidence because the stick used with the counter, as will happen, evidently had some uranium stuck to it. But with the counter in good operating order and clean, it was discovered that the background count of Washington, D.C., was the same as it was in 1932 when I was going to George Washington University and studying radiation. In other words, there has apparently been no general increase of count in London or Washington because of bomb testing. I did more than this. I made a calculation of the amount of gamma and cosmic rays which fall on Earth’s surface daily and compared this to the amount of test radiation waste which would be thrown into the atmosphere yearly. The figures do not compare. The added man-made radiation will probably never add up to your luminous dial watch.

Things will turn on with tremendous brilliance as though somebody swung a rheostat-and he will turn it down quickly because that would mean that he would be confronting too much. You should thus change his idea of what he should be able to confront. If you change that idea, he will then adjust the machinery of sight. But if you attack the machinery of sight directly, you are just forcing him to confront and you get this phenomenon of a person turning up his vision and turning it down again at once.

On the whole track, radiation was dangerous for the good reason that there was more radiation in those times that could be exploded. However, radiation is a half-life matter and the older the universe gets the less radiation there is available to throw at people. And a good thing, too.

You get the person capable of being able to get beautiful scenes and visio in the bank and then going totally black. You get a person cleared up tonight and tomorrow morning he is a psychotic wreck. That is all under the heading of HAVINGNESS and CONFRONTINGNESS. When you remedy havingness and confrontingness, he will remedy the rest of it.

While we have no doubt whatsoever of the actual dangers of a bomb dropping on a city, we are now in a position to doubt rather thoroughly the vaunted harm from test bombing which is being sold the populations of Earth, evidently by the Communist propagandists.

There is no reason why a thetan couldn’t stand in the middle of the room and look at everything just as clear and flat and hard as it ever was. He doesn’t need any mechanics. He certainly has to be able to be it, and have it. In other words, he has to be able to occupy the middle of something, and he has to be able to do a lot of things before he can even see something. But all of these things adjust on straight havingness.

The U.S. population is being stampeded by Russia toward leaving the U.S. defenseless. Already this has accomplished a defective U.S. civil defense and is gaining momentum toward a public demand for no bombs. This is how Russia works. Russia works on the population imagination. Russia uses any knowledge of the mind she has to instill fear and bring about destruction. She is an unworthy purveyor of scientific information.

Havingness will change vision and special perception. That is something nobody can argue with, but the whole problem of glasses is the problem of confronting.

Russia has already succeeded rather well in this field of seizing control of the mind. There is no essential difference between dialectic materialism and Wundtian psychology. Yet, Wundtian psychology is taught in all the universities of the United States. England, being an older and more mature government than the United States Government, has already awakened to this and is taking active government steps to halt this matter of public panic. England, for instance, is not buying Wundtian psychology. England is buying Scientology in rather large amounts. But this is not yet true of the United States. That it will come about in the future is more or less a certain thing, but that it does not exist at the time is a fact. Only the better IQs of the U.S. as yet buy Scientology.

I once had a bomb go off in my face with some authority some time or another, because I was standing in a place where I shouldn’t have been standing at all, a total miscalculation on my part. The startlement that I could miscalculate to this degree did me in. After that I couldn’t see. Finally my eyesight turned on a bit and got way up to 3120, 4/20 — that in the Service is “what wall?” I was doing combat service and navigation and every other thing I was supposed to do, with that kind of eyesight, clear through until 1946. After the war was over I was still wearing black glasses. I was trying to write books, and “what piece of paper” in “what typewriter.”

We can be assured on the score of fallout — it isn’t dangerous at this time. It does not compare to the amount of “natural radiation” with which we are being bombarded. If you went down to Florida to live you would increase your radiation count much more than it would be increased if you stayed well North and the government blew off ten thousand more test bombs. In other words, just exposure to a clearer view of the sun will give you more radiation than you could be hit with in the near future because of test bombs. It’s just a fact that there isn’t enough uranium around to actually thoroughly contaminate the atmosphere at this time. I know that this is in controversy to my own statements on the subject — which is very interesting. My own statements were made in the light of our earlier experience. We had experienced test fallout in Phoenix and I had not made further tests or calculations. In other words, I myself had been swept up in this campaign to frighten the populace half to death.

My instincts are very good and I was perceptive enough and wasn’t unwilling to confront things to such a degree that I ran into doors or did embarrassing things, but I was rather upset because my marksmanship was way off. I shot too many bullets into too many forbidden directions, I guess, or something of the sort — that used to be a great hobby of mine.

The reaction to radiation is thus entirely, completely, and wholly mental! Dianazene depends for its reaction upon whole-track radiation incidents, and x-ray and sunburn in the current life. By taking away the engram which can react to the worry about radiation, worry about radiation is then made non-painful.

So I wore glasses, contact lenses, trying to increase my vision. I found out that vision increased only when you diminutivized the subjects you were looking at. In other words, the more powerful the glasses become, the smaller they make the objects you look at appear. Think that over for a moment in terms of confrontingness and it will amuse you. Of course, the world isn’t quite as formidable if it gets that small.

If you add all this up you will clearly see that scare talk about radiation is the source of radiation sickness in our present world. The Atom Bomb is too powerful a weapon to be used for control of human beings and is therefore not a weapon. But it does promise the population no future, and so promising, it damps out efforts toward survival. This itself can bring on sickness.

A very high-powered pair of glasses reduces the size of the face you are looking at by about half. People who are wearing glasses are very often not aware of this. But if you put a new pair of glasses on somebody’s nose and put him in a car and tell him to drive, he does some of the most fantastic things. In other words, confrontingness is altered by glasses. I don’t know that sight or lines or clarity of vision is altered, but certainly confrontingness is altered by a pair of lenses.

But we should not delude ourselves in thinking that actual radiation in dangerous quantities is adrift in this atmosphere at this time. It is not. All I invite you to do is to get a Scintillometer or Geiger counter and test around.

The moment I found that out, I was vastly amused because I didn’t want things to be that small, and my eyes were simply recovering from having been torn up, which was an interesting state of affairs. I got some processing, ran out a lot of these things, and my eyes came back up and flickered all over the place — they got anywhere from 15/20 to 25/20, which means they were above normal sometimes and way below normal at other intervals. I found one day whilst reading a report that I couldn’t make out anything. The printing was all blurry and going askew. There were ghost letters riding above every line and I just couldn’t make head or tail of the report. I was thinking that I’d better use a monocle or a magnifying glass. I suddenly realized that I was reading an AMA report with a total unwillingness to confront it. I threw it aside, picked up a novel and the print was perfect.

There is probably an ionospheric flash which gives a tiny sudden shock of radiation for the briefest instant of time — less than the amount you would get from a simple x-ray — and this acts as a restimulator to whole-track incidents. But it isn’t true that radiation is drifting around biting you at this time.

So I can sympathize with those who wear glasses because I have been over the jumps. I have been all the way at the bottom of not even being able to find the door, to almost being able to find the door, on up to being able to find two doors.

On the subject of strontium-90 it is interesting to note that a sufficient intake of calcium renders a person completely immuned to any effects of strontium-90. A child should be made to drink more milk and probably should have his diet fortified a little bit with calcium if anybody is truly worried about it.

Where is the havingness of the person located in terms of the body? A scholar has a fixed vision point at a certain distance from his eyes. He has had havingness in that point and then he hasn’t had havingness. If you make somebody “keep a book from going away” at that distance his eyesight will change all over the place. Just have him “open a book and keep it from going away,” “Now leave it uncontrolled,” “Now keep it from going away.” He gets headaches, eyeburn, his eyes practically bleed before you get through because you are restoring the havingness at the exact distance where it was fixed and lost.

This fight, then, is in the propaganda field. It is not in the field of actual science. I am extremely surprised at some of the scientists who are saying that radiation is dangerous. These men professionally should know their business and they are not expressing the true data. On the other hand, neither is the government making actual data available. The government is seeking to convince the public on the score of opinion. Opinion has no validity in science. If you want to know about radiation, why, go and look for some radiation in the atmosphere and if you cannot find more than the usual background count then you must assume that there isn’t any extra radiation in the atmosphere. I am not saying that the scientists who have been beating the drum on the dangers of radiation are Communist-inspired. I am not saying that these men are Communists. I am merely saying that they are aiding and assisting a Communist campaign.

You get all sorts of phenomena of this character, but it isn’t really a problem of how good are the optic nerves. Of course, you shove an icepick through a person’s eyes like the psychiatrists do — he is not going to be able to see well because he has already got “now I am not supposed to see with the thing.”

We will not assist Commie propaganda aimed at stampeding the U.S. public into revolt against U.S. defense. The U.S. can bargain her way out of this. I am very hopeful that a general control of radiation the world around will be achieved and I am sure that if it is not achieved, national governments are dead. I am also fairly sure that there will never be such a thing as an atomic war. I have looked this over rather carefully and I personally don’t believe that national governments will last long enough at their present rate of non-survival activity.

I have an awfully hard time with blind people on this “Now I am supposed to.” I can get them to see, get them to do everything. Then they suddenly realize that they were not supposed to be able to see — and they shut off their sight again, but you process some more, and so on. But any time you have a vagary in the adjustment of sight, it is a vagary in the adjustment of havingness.

Our cue is to make nothing out of radiation, if we mention it at all. People who are worried about radiation are worried because enough talk about it has thrown enough engrams into restimulation to make them actually quite ill. We can do something about restimulation. But we have no business aiding this public hysteria in any way. We are the people who take care of hysteria and not the people who stir it up. What we are doing is a bit bigger than one of Man’s new destructive toys.

There must be something there to observe. The havingness goes by quantity. Don’t get the idea that people are afraid of seeing anything. You’re figuring right along with the type of figure-figure that has never worked for anybody in any time or place. He is just afraid to look at things, so we will take him out and make him confront things. If, by some necromancy, he is able to have that thing or some part of it, then he will be able to see it and will not be afraid of it. If we can get him to confront, then his fears will change. People know this. But this other thing, that people are afraid of things, that they have irrational terrors and all that, is all pretty well resolved on just this one basis. There is something there to confront, then there isn’t anything there to confront. This is a loss of havingness. If their havingness goes down far enough, i.e. their idea of quantity falls far enough out of adjustment, they will begin to detest seeing it. They won’t quite like to see it. Now there can be too much of it or too little of it. In either case the scarcity or importance or responsibility factors alter and they get so that they cannot confront it. They are perfectly willing to listen to a radio, but are they willing to listen to a radio 24 hours a day? They finally say, “This is too much, I cannot confront it,” and they turn off their hearing in some fashion.

Our campaign is to sell Scientology. If we sell it well, psychiatry and psychology will collapse. For instance, one of the most unfortunate things that psychiatry and psychology have ever engaged upon has been this mental health campaign of this spring. These people are not capable of withstanding public scrutiny. Their general activities are sufficiently harmful to their patients that if they stick their head up just a little bit further, even people in the government will be able to see that there is a swindle involved there. I expect within the next two or three years to see a complete and thorough congressional investigation of “charity rackets” and would expect to see psychiatry and psychology leading the van in those who are being investigated. Before you begin to advertise that you can do something, you should be able to do it. We ourselves are suffering from a comm lag of seven years. Not for seven years were we able to train auditors uniformly up to a level to get the maximum possible results out of Dianetics and Scientology. We, accordingly, experienced a considerable public kickback. Now we are making our promises good. It is possible for us to withstand the most minute and searching scrutiny on the subject of what we are doing and how we are doing it. The Validation Program of all Certificates which we are now entered upon is a very worthwhile step in this direction. We can today train an auditor. We can train him very very well. We have the processes which make an auditor able to audit. And this will accrue into our attaining dominance in the field of the human mind rather easily. All psychiatry and psychology need to do is to fight us a little harder, to advertise themselves a little more strongly, and the public and the government will see to it that they collapse. Furthermore, psychiatry and psychology are playing it too close to the government. And if people begin to turn away from the government because of the government’s promise to extinguish them with an H-bomb, they will also turn away from anybody who supported the government in the field of brainwashing.

You can actually fool your considerations to this degree. You say, “Look at all the books I’ve got to write or read. Look at that — a tremendous number of them there.” You got one little book which is not going to last you two hours. Actually, you can have much too little to read. It is quite fascinating. The variations in confronting are a tremendous study.

We have gone a little off track here with radiation, danger of; with politics, the need to do something about; and we are not off track any more. We are in the business of Scientology. And Scientology rises considerably above the tinkerings of a few somewhat deranged scientists and the bickerings of a few misanthropic men wearing political crowns for the moment.

Astigmatism, a distortion of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image. You get an astigmatic condition when a person is trying to work it over into a substitute, if he possibly can. Here again it is a case of not enough — he didn’t have enough.

We have today very easily the most powerful “weapon” extant in the fourth dynamic. That weapon is Scientology. We are not using it for evil, we are using it for good. Therefore, we will win with it.

Some men’s wives just disappear right in front of their faces. Just a black statue will be standing there. That’s visual occlusion, or the woman will disappear entirely. She will have no midriff or something like that. Only they don’t tell anybody about it, for this means, of course, that they are mad — or something wrong there with his havingness of his wife and his willingness to confront or not to confront that girl.

The answer to all this is to sell Scientology to individuals. Don’t try to sell it to groups. One doesn’t easily talk to a group. One should sell it to individuals and he should use the skills of Scientology to bring about a better understanding on the part of individuals of themselves and of himself.

There is another factor that enters in. He would actually be in love with Martha but be married to Jane. So Jane gets blurry because he is trying to see Martha and he will do it on an axis. He will twist all things over.

I am not saying that the various governments might not do something dangerous with testing. I am not saying that H-bombs are good weapons. I am only saying we can survive it. I am only saying that we have one case — me — who has had 502 times the “allowed” amount and is surviving nicely, thank you, and other cases that are in like condition because of good processing. I am saying that with good, modern auditing a Scientologist can survive it — so why worry about it. As an organization and as individuals we’re going up-tone faster than others are going down. And Man faces many enemies more dangerous than Radiation.

There is another whole class of sight disabilities which are not allowed by or listed by the bulk of ophthalmologists. These people do not really go in for these things. They say these are bizarre effects and they doubt that anybody really sees them, which is a fascinating way of dodging out from presented phenomena.

I am giving you all this in explanation of what you will now begin to see come from the central organization and that will be Scientology — good auditors — validation of old certificates — good processing — bona fide clears — other things which we have waited to see all these years. We are making the grade now rather easily. We are doing things that we never thought were possible before. We are living up to any optimism which I ever gave out. I knew I could do it. I am afraid that I was over-confident in some other directions, but there is one thing that I have never done. I have never told you other than what I believed implicitly and completely. I have been as honest with you as I knew how to be and I have been as honest about my shortcomings as I have been about my victories. You can count on that, you know you can — for you always I invite your cooperation in this new campaign of ours — a brand-new campaign: To sell Scientology, Sanity and Survival to the individuals alive on Earth today.

A thetan with a buffer in front of him feels that he cannot receive various wavelengths and he knows there are some dangerous ones. He thinks they are dangerous to him and he has a tremendous number of considerations about this.

Thank you.

The considerations are utterly fabulous in quantity concerning the amount of protection one has to have, the conditions under which one can do things. This degenerates to a point where a man can only see well when he is wearing a certain pair of carpet slippers. It can get this far removed — I got this from a writer once — he could only write when he was wearing a certain pair of carpet slippers. I talked this over with him and all of a sudden discovered that he could only see when he was wearing that pair of carpet slippers.