How are you today?

How are you tonight?

Thank you.

Audience: Fine.

Well, today being the second day of this congress, seems to me like we'd better get down to business and stop this fooling around, this talking about religion and junk and stuff, and getting down to — well, at least solid gold tacks.

Good. Did I ruin anybody really?

Now, the essence of the situation is that a great many years ago, a caveman named Ugh decided he could do something for a caveman named Oogh. And at that time there were no laws preventing Ugh from doing anything to Oogh, and he fooled around and he said, "Be three feet back of your head." And after that the technology was lost and we've just rediscovered it.

Audience: No.

No, all fooling aside, there is a great deal to be known about processing as it exists today, and a great deal of differentiation should be made by us who are doing processing to understand rather clearly that we are not trying to find something wrong with somebody so we can make it right.

Ah well, I will. (audience laughter)

Do you know what would happen if you started to make something wrong — tried to find something wrong with somebody and then made it right? Well, I invite you to look over the axioms of life as contained in The Creation of Human Ability. That which you change persists. Now, let's look at that very clearly. That which you change persists. The only way you get a persistence, the only way you get time, is by changing MEST. By changing matter, energy and space, you get time. And if there's no change, there's no time, and it's as simple as that. So that if you try to change in any degree matter, energy, space and — you get time, you get persistence. What is time but persistence? So that which you change, if it be made of space or of energy or matter, will persist. You should see that very clearly.

Very, very fine thing today — understand we had two or three exteriorizations on that hour of processing, is that right? Could I see a hand or two if anybody got out of his head all of a sudden? One, two, three, four, five — yeah, there were a few — six, seven. Good. Eight.

We take a car and we move it around in space — and I call to your attention something that every motorist has noted and no motorist had quite understood: that when he failed to drive his car it went to pieces. Have you ever noticed that? You park it in the garage, that's that; the battery goes down, the tires go flat. Maybe it was up on blocks, maybe the battery was taken over to the service station and put on continuous charge and all of this was done. That's some small prevention of the situation. But then — then three months later you put the battery back in, you take it down off the blocks and you "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," and oil smoke goes out the rear end, won't steer. That's an oddity. The only reason it stayed there at all is because Earth is going around and it was being changed in space, at least to some degree. If it were not being changed in space at all, it would not be there; it would cease to persist. Now this is a great oddity — a great oddity. I don't call upon your superstition in this regard, I merely call upon you to observe in its crude form something else.

Now, it isn't absolutely necessary to be out of your head. But a guy that's in his head is a fool!

All right. Let's take a chronic somatic, what we know as a chronic somatic: a pain which persists. And we take this preclear with this nice pain and we say, "Move it to the right, move it to the left, move it up, move it down, move it to the right, move it to the left." Now if it weren't for the fact that life was present, that pain would go on to the end of time — if it weren't for the fact that life was present. Another factor alone occasionally lets you get away with it, and that is the factor of pan-determinism: You're exerting control over something, so you change your mind about its dangerousness. And although you might not feel the pain anymore, believe me, it still exists.

Now, I wanted to say a few words to you about exteriorization in view of the fact that it'd be very bad to process you immediately on a nice dinner. So I'm merely going to talk to you about exteriorization — what is this thing? And I'm going to give you a very fast rundown on the component parts of beingness. Like to hear that — component parts of beingness?

You could take a preclear who has had a chronic somatic treated as it is treated in the healing sciences, so-called — as this chronic somatic is treated in the healing sciences — and we know very well that little Roscoe had a bad set of tonsils. We know this. He had a very poor set of tonsils. And so they held him down, you know, kindly, and put the ether mask on his face kindly and when he tried to struggle, why, they kindly shoved his hrrm-rm-hrrm-rm-hm-rm, and they got some water and they scrubbed around like this, and worked him over this way and that, packed him off, changed his position after the operation while he was still asleep and put him in a hospital room right down the corridor. Well this, of course, cured the tonsils. See, he's cured of tonsils — that's a great certainty. Everybody would agree he no longer has tonsils, is this right?

Audience: Yeah.

Well then, how in the name of common sense can a Dianetic Auditor take this person back down the time track into the past and find tonsils and pain in an operation? How does this exist? How can this be? And yet it's done, and many, many of those present have done this. So we have this fellow going through life — (wheezing noises) he can't talk very well, you know, he has sore throats all the time, and we wonder what's wrong with him. What's wrong with him is his tonsils, but they're not there anymore! But that's what's wrong with him: the fact that his tonsils were changed. So the second we operated, we got ourselves a persistence of the condition.

Well, it all sort of begins with something that has quality and no quantity. And after that, we get quantity. Like Topsy, the universe simply grows. We start with what we originally called in Dianetics the awareness of awareness unit. And this has no mass, no wavelength, no location. But it has the capability of making postulates and doing lots of other interesting things such as drinking highballs and . . . (audience laughter)

They take somebody — I'm talking now about the healing sciences — they take somebody with arthritis. They shoot them full of gold shots and they massage them and they shake them in a bag — I don't know what they do to them — and they work him over one way or the other. And these people curl up a little more and a little more and a little more. Occasionally some terrific thing occurs and they get well — you know, bang! sort of, get well. Well, this bang-get-well idea is something that has haunted the healing sciences for many, many centuries. They felt that there must be a button — there just must be a button — if people suddenly would recover from things. It never occurred to them that they might be, all of a sudden, confronting another being who wasn't sick. Think of that for a moment. The sudden recovery might very well be another being who wasn't sick, because all a life form would have to do, or a life unit would have to do, rather, would be to change its mind about who it was and just abandon all connection with and responsibility for anything and everything it had been, which would come down toward amnesia and so forth, and say, "Well, I'm not that person anymore; I am somebody else."

But how does it do all this? How does it do all this? It does this by saying it does. That's all there is to it. And this tremendous riddle has baffled it for a long time. How could it do all these things simply by saying it does?

We see this in religion. We see somebody walk up to the front of the room to Aimee Semple McPherson or some other great spiritual leader, and we see this person walk up to the front of the room and all of a sudden he said, "Wow! I'm saved!" And Aimee or somebody says, "Roll again," and ... (audience laughter) What exactly has happened? Well, we've had a remarkable communication change but we've also had an identity change. We've had an identity change on the part of the person.

Well, it would be unwilling to believe that every postulate it made would stick. Think of that for a moment — supposing every postulate you made would stick. Supposing every time you said, "I wish I was dead," there you lay, really. Wouldn't that be wonderful? But supposing every time you said, "I can best serve this situation by being old and feeble," and you were; and supposing you said, "Oh childhood, childhood! Those were the times! Da-da-da."

Now, you could say, "I am not (my name)" — see, "I am not (your name)" — "I'm somebody else," and if you were very good at this, you could actually make it stick. You know? You could say, "I am no longer Oswald. My name is Joe and I live in Keokuk." What would happen to the chronic somatic? Well, if he did it to change the chronic somatic, he'd still have it. That's the most fascinating thing.

So one of the best things this awareness of awareness unit does is hold a gun on itself. It says, "Well, these postulates are not going to stick. I'm going on being Joe Jones. And if I had my way of it, I would be Joe Jones, Bessie Smith, P.T. Barnum, a greyhound dog, probably all in the course of half an hour. And this would be disconcerting to my friends, so I will take mercy on one and all, and just be Joe Jones." You could imagine how disconcerting it would be to have a friend like that. Makes a postulate, and there he is in full mass. That would be upsetting.

Now, we're not talking — we're talking about a chronic somatic; we're not talking about a psychosomatic illness. We've too long confused these things. A chronic somatic is simply a sensation; sex could be called a chronic somatic. The point is that to have a sensation is not necessarily to be ill. You know, a lot of people believe that's the case, you know — if they have a sensation they're sick: "Something must be wrong with me, I have some feeling in my nose!" And we say these sensations are good and we say they're bad.

So we do all sorts of devious things to keep from obeying all of our postulates at will — because we know we can't trust ourselves; of course — that's the first thing we have to know. And we do all kinds of things to make it automatic, so that we will become surprised about it.

I processed a little girl one time, and she — about halfway through the session (we weren't processing what she was worried about, we were just getting her located and so forth) — and she all of a sudden looked at me and she said, "Wow!"

One of the favorite tricks of the spirit, we think of . . . You know, it's too bad that the spirit became so thoroughly monopolized by tall spires and very, very soft carpets and crosses and so forth — it's too bad, because it seems to categorize it or put it over here, you see, in a special category as having a great deal of solemnitude. And that would mean nobody'd ever laugh. If the spirit were even a solemn thing — if it were a solemn thing all the time, if it did match this mood of incense pots and all that sort of thing — if it did match that thing, we would all go around smoking.

And I said, "What's the matter?"

Now, it's a great oddity, you see? If you wanted everyone to be serious about existence, you of course would tell them the spirit was a very sober experience and being, and that we must treat it with great reverence. And you'd have everybody real solemn, and nobody'd ever go to see the comics. Nobody'd ever read the AMA journal for a good laugh.

And she said, "Do you know, I've had a headache."

By the way, I should apologize — there are two or three medical doctors here in the crowd, and there are two or three wives of medical doctors, and actually there is no quarrel between Scientology and the medical doctor, or myself and medical doctors. I have a great many medical doctors who are very, very good friends of mine — very good friends. But there's one hell of a fight between me and the AMA, the trade union. I just wanted to get that in quietly.

"Oh?" I says.

As far as the APA is concerned, there is no fight with the APA (that's the American Psychiatric Association). There's no fight ,whatsoever, for the excellent reason that I was offered all the stock in the corporation once, and I didn't buy it. And I think they've been mad at me since. But the APA is a stock corporation and you get to be a member by buying some stock. And it's for sale down on the street. And we could right now own the APA if we wanted to, but why own it? The . . . You think I'm joking with you, but if you look this up, you'll find this to be the case.

"Yes," she said, "I've had a headache for years, only I didn't know what a headache was, and all of a sudden I haven't got a headache!" She sat there thinking about this. She said, "How am I going to get my headache back?"

Now, here we have, however, this idea of the spirit being a very solemn, solemnified — when we walk past graveyards, you know, we're supposed to — I suppose the boy is supposed to whistle, but we're supposed to say, "God rest their bones," and walk on by and so forth. And when we go into a church, the women are supposed to put their hats on, the men are supposed to take their hats off. Just why this is, I don't know. Maybe women compulsively exteriorize faster in church. But however this is, you're not supposed to laugh in the vestibule, and I suppose many a time the religious career of some young man has been utterly ruined by an inability to repress his giggles during the more sonorous moments of the sermon. And I imagine that there are even two or three people present who have thought to themselves from time to time, "My mother will smack me severely if I laugh out loud in church again," and therefore, have been solemn ever since.

Now, Lord knows — Lord knows what a headache was to her. I don't know. Maybe it was a delightful sensation! Who knows?

But if we thought of the religious solemnity to which man is prone and which has, here and there, a great deal of beauty — if we thought of the spirit as totally belonging in that category, we would make one of the wildest errors that we could make, and which man has made. The freest spirit is liable to be a child. They're not yet sharing with the body a sufficient amount of experience in common to be entirely nailed down to the body, so they exteriorize easily. As a matter of fact, there are probably very few children interiorized. They work very well — they work very easily; if an auditor knows how to work them, he can do wonderful and remarkable things with a child. Their span of attention is fairly short on almost everything but good auditing. And you know a child responds to a good auditor in a really remarkable fashion. They will simply go on for hours without breaking their span of attention. This is fantastic.

We found in reviewing, in the healing sciences, the work of Freud — we discovered something very fascinating: that he had people all categorized, and there have been lots of them ever since. And he had them all lined up and the masochist was the interesting one — he evidently enjoyed pain; he enjoyed being beaten and so forth. Freud describes him. Personally I've never met anyone who was a masochist, but I've met a lot of people who hoped they were. (audience laughter) And we have to ask of this: What is the degree of pain? What is this degree of pain? What do they call pain? It's an interesting thing. A fellow comes in and he says, "Oooh, my hip's killing me!" What is it? A little quiver or an agonizing ache? Now, every individual has his tolerance of pain but we are all too prone to assume that pain is a finite quantity which is measurable.

You know, everybody knows that a child has a very short span of attention. If the auditor's good, they'll go right on being audited just as long as you're willing to audit them. Of course, they'll turn around in the middle of the session and start auditing you. But then you turn around and start auditing them again, all right, and it's good fun. But — the child's span of attention is — doesn't break up under good auditing.

Now, we meet somebody else and he is screaming, he is writhing, he is getting down on the floor and chewing the rug because he tapped his finger lightly with a nail file. Now, you've known people that just superexaggerate any sensation.

I actually could probably grade the ability of an auditor on adults by the span of attention given him by a child preclear. You know, I could tell you how good he was with adults if I could measure the child's span of attention with him. Now, here's this child, and we don't find children very solemn, do we? It's very seldom I have found many solemn children, unless they wanted a nickel. And of course, a child can be solemn — this is a possibility. And they can cry and scream and so forth, and we just hope it isn't quite that bad.

Now, we commonly think of — again, referring to the work of Freud — we commonly think of sex, and we popularly think of it and so on, as a pleasant series of sensations. I mean, this is more or less definition: supposed to be something desirable and attainable. Maybe this sensation called sex, to a great many people, is intensely painful. And they know it's intensely painful to them and at the same time they are assuming, because everybody else knows that it's pleasurable, that it ought to be pleasant, you see. And they would get into a rather dreadful state of mind about this situation because it would mean they were different than other people, or there was something changed or altered about life — and the funny part of it is, maybe we're all under the same delusion! See? Maybe there's just a popular belief sitting out here that has nothing to do with any of us that says sex is pleasurable, and maybe it hurts everybody. You see how quickly we can go adrift when we start to classify this situation.

But here we have this problem of the freest spirit with which we have an intimate contact is the spirit of a child. And it is very happy, and there's a great deal of laughter and a great deal of motion. And yet we have the spirit categorized over here in a field which is noted for, in the Western Hemisphere, its solemnity, stillness and "don't-moveness." Now, would that itself sort of impose a problem to an individual?

Now I am fascinated with the fact that one man's experience, described, is apparently understood by another man. This is the most fabulous thing that you could possibly view. Here you have an individual, a personality, and he himself does not have inherently (except as he would make it with postulates) time or space or energy or mass. He apparently has no slightest logical method of creating those things in such a way as to go into communication with some other such unit. And these two people talk gaily together and one of them says, "I have a terrible pain." And the other one of them says, "Oh, I've had an illness similar to that." If you listen to human beings, they talk this way. They go into a hotel — the hospital room, you know, they walk into this hospital room and there's this fellow lying there and he's in a beautiful state of somnolence — he's practically in an hypnotic trance, you see. And they say, "My brother had an illness just like yours. He went on just like you are going and they told him he was getting better and he was getting better, but he died." Have you ever been in a hospital and had visitors? Well, anyway — always happens. It's quite remarkable.

Yes it would. He would say, "Now look, if I am a spirit, I have to sit still and be solemn and look up to my betters and do this and do that. If I am a body, I can be wicked. I can sin." It's fascinating. That isn't the facts at all. That isn't the facts of the case. That's a completely erroneous conclusion. If he's free, he can sin; and if he's sitting around in a body, no sin's possible — they put you in jail, they marry you off. (audience laughter)

Now, nobody would do that if he never got a kickback of what he was doing to other people. Would he? That's an interesting fact. People wouldn't go around butchering people with words or swords if there was any slightest recoil, if it could happen to them, now would they? They wouldn't do that. So obviously nothing can happen to a person as a result of having made an effect out of another person. Isn't this obvious?

So we look over this view of the Western civilization and the subject of the spirit, and we find many things which don't quite jibe. We find that an individual is not as free as he is solemn, but actually is free as he is happy. So I wouldn't say we have experienced here and there a police state in the field of religion. I wouldn't go so far as to say this. But I'd say that we've made an awfully good approach to it here and there.

Well, this is a great oddity. That must be an agreement, too. The recoil itself must be an agreement. "One of the best ways I know," somebody says, "to protect myself from damage is to enforce the agreement upon those who would attack me that they will suffer in some mystic and mysterious way because of their activities agin me." Now, that's an interesting agreement, isn't it? But what a wonderful protective mechanism! Or is it mechanically a fact? These are mysteries. These are mysteries very germane to the field of religion. Is it a mechanical fact that if you go out and cut off Gertrude's head, you'll at least have a pain in your throat? Is that a mechanical fact?

Now, religion has been used as a control device all too often. So have swords, cameras — even lollipops have been used as control devices. Almost anything can be used for control — to start, stop and change something. Almost anything. But notable amongst all these anythings and somethings is religion. When some-body is talked to about his spiritual beingness and how he must send his soul along some course, and how he must save himself and preserve himself and how he mustn't be able and how somebody's going to get him and "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take" — ai! Oh, no. You mean this — you're going to give this little kid insomnia and when he gets to be forty he's going to have to have an auditor for just hours and hours and hours? Little kids lie down after this type of control and expect some kind of an angel to swoop down and pick up "their thetan," whatever this is. They get into a terrible confusion, in other words. They don't think of themselves as a spirit, they begin to think of them-selves as a body, because they're told all the time to take care of their soul. It's an interesting control mechanism. It'll do a valence switch over to the body. Or at least make somebody rather schizzy.

Well, if you're going to be in communication with anybody anywhere, it happens to be a mechanical fact. But basically it was probably an idea of a wonderful way to restrain. But it has gone so much further than just a wonderful way to restrain that you could absolutely count on the fact, going down here to a taxi driver and start in convincing this hard-boiled fellow that he had harmed you, and he would go into apathy. You actually could do this, if you worked on it long enough.

We have a tremendous number of mechanisms of this character, and they are all control mechanisms. But this is the spirit holding a gun on other spirits; saying, "There are barriers here. Remember back there in 1006 B.C., you agreed there was a barrier here, and it's still here." And the boys say, "Okay. Okay, it's still here. All right. All right. I'll feel a wall."

One of the interesting things to do to a human being as a little test of this — an interesting test, too (how solid can an agreement be, is what I'm talking about) — is we take a dog. A dog doesn't think, he just reacts, according to one of the sciences called — hah! — psychology. And I had a dog once that could think — he had me figured out. Anyway, we take this dog, and it's a very funny thing, but these mechanisms are so exact that we can make this dog go into propitiation by screaming and running away from him. Now, the dog comes up and he nibbles at the cuff of your trousers or your wrist or something like that and you say, "Ow! Stop! Don't!" You know? He didn't hurt you at all, and you say, "Don't! Don't! Get away!" and you turn around and you start to run away and so forth. And the dog will get real brave — oh! And if he's in pretty good shape he'll just get awfully brave, and then all of a sudden he'll say, "You know, maybe I hurt him." And he'll come over and he'll lick your wrist — he'll look at you real worried.

We have an enormous number of agreements which operate to restrain and restrict the actions of one another. But where an individual becomes quite afraid and quite decayed, he is apt to use the most beautiful things he can lay his hands on for control things. Now, these things were never intended for control mechanisms. Happiness is not a good control mechanism, if you used it as a control mechanism; if you said to somebody, in just so many words, "It will be impossible for you to be happy unless you drop $82.65 in the poor box. And we're going to see to it that you're not going to be happy until you do that. As a matter of fact, we have an appointment tonight with a couple of saints that we know very well, and we're going to make sure you get zapped. Now, the happiness of your dear departed father depends once and for all and entirely upon your ability to cough up enough jack to send the old boy through Purgatory. And he's going to stay there, son, until we find the bottom of your bank account." Well, that's one way to remedy havingness.

This is the foulest trick you can play on a little kid. The cycle of action of a little kid in this regard is quite interesting. A little kid, swatting away at you, you know — normal childhood reaction — pasting you around one way or the other; you all of a sudden say, "Ow! That hurt! Don't! Stop that now, that hurt!" Kid look at you, probably come over and look at you, kiss the spot to make it well — kid's worried. You've zinged him down Tone Scale to a propitiation and concern over having injured another. Only there was no pain involved. Now do you see where we're going? You can do this. You can do this to anyone. And there's no pain involved.

Now, one of the biggest control factors there is, is mystery. Mystery is a tremendous control factor. The presentation of a mystery can operate to enslave — just as the priests of Chaldea, having made a wreck out of their own country, moved on to Babylon and made a wreck out of it. This mystery they made out of everything was their control over the society. They knew how to plot the eclipses. They knew how to forecast and predict certain heavenly activities. And they knew that this simply depended upon natural law. So how did they use this? Hah! They said, "It's a big mystery, and we're doing it, and you bow down to this mud thing over here, and you're saved. And to prove it, there's going to be an eclipse at 10:32 next Sunday. And if you have not paid all of your dues into the church by that moment, we'll keep the sun covered up." What could people do but dig?

I wonder if there's any pain involved anywhere? Well, there isn't, unless you have to convince somebody. Now let's take this mechanism — let's look this mechanism over very carefully and let's have this little kid — this is a tough little mug; he comes from Park Avenue. (audience laughter) And this very tough little mug, he comes over and he says, "Nyarrrh, you big sis," and so forth, and he hauls off and swats you one. And you say, "Ow! Don't do that! Hey you, you hurt. Don't, now!" And he says, "Ha-ha!" you know, and bang! bang! hits you some more. By the way, when they're pretty stuck and pretty aberrated, they'll keep on a persistence along this line and they'll hit you around and so forth, and you know what you'd have to do? You'd probably have to turn on a bleeding wrist to show him — say, "Look, see what you did." And the kid would say, "Gee! I really didn't mean to ruin you." See, now he's convinced.

Science is looked upon, way back on the track almost in the Dark Ages now, as a sort of a savior. Science at one time was known as a sort of a savior thing — a wonderful thing which freed man. Because it dispelled the mysteries which had been carefully built up around these agreements which we call natural phenomena. Now here was science, and it came along and said, "These eclipses happen. And no set of priests anywhere can control an eclipse."

The problem is, what degree of energy or mass is necessary to convince? How much pain does it take to convince somebody else that you have been hurt? How much pain would you have to turn on to convince some son of the devil? How many swellings and malformations would you have to turn on to convince this person that he ought to go down Tone Scale to be nice? Are we talking about the same mechanism?

And people said, "Hey, what do you know? I don't have to dig up anymore." And they were very thankful that science came along and pointed this fact out to them. Although it's just a little bit confusing to me why a couple of guys down at the crossroads, while sitting there on the store porch, didn't notice that the eclipse always "uneclipsed." That seems a little bit stretching it somewhat. Seems to me like people would have noticed this as time went on, that the exact incantation and prayer had very, very little to do with the eclipse of the sun or the moon. But they evidently didn't. A bunch of men came along as scientists and they made nothing out of these mysteries by demonstrating again that they were natural laws. This was a very; very, very fine thing. But science itself bade fair to go into the depths and darknesses of mystery as time went on.

All right, here is one of the interesting things. We have this person fighting and he's got a spear, and he lunges and we say, "Ow! Hey! That's dangerous! Don't!" and so forth. And he draws back — because he's being paid to do it by some government — he lunges again with this spear. Well, if we just let him come in close and nick us, he's liable to stop. But if that doesn't work, then the next — you see, there's no reason why we should be inaccurate at all, no reason why we shouldn't just get run through in the first place; we can be accurate that way as well as be accurate in stabbing people. All right. And the next time that he lunges, well, we have to get bunged up a little bit more. And finally when we're lying there in a mass and welter of blood and battered armor, this fellow says, "Ha-ha! Poor fellow. Well, he was a worthy fighter," and walks away. What did it take? It took almost a complete destruction of the mock-up to convince this other person that he has harmed or done wrong, and that is death.

The first vestige we had of this was the absolute necessity to be specialized before one could be called a scientist. One had to put in — I don't know, what is it now? One has to go to school until he's thirty-two before he can hold down a $200 a month government job? He has to go to school and go to school and go to school and he learns to be a specialist and a specialist and specialist and finally, an engineer is an expert on high-pressure steam. But he'd have to go to school another six years to learn about low-pressure steam.

So after a person has lived through a number of incidents of one kind or another, he comes at last to the realization that the only way he could really convince others that they had better regard him a little better — since he cannot seem to enjoin it with the sword in his own hand, he puts the sword in theirs and dies, then you have this wonderful mechanism called death. And that's how to really get even with somebody.

We take a man who goes to universities and colleges, and studies and works hard — and this is a clever man, a man with an impulse to heal — and for years and years and years he goes on studying the human body. And then he comes out and he's a specialist in a certain type of rheumatic heart. I mean, he goes all this time to learn about this and become a specialist.

Ask some little five-year-old kid sometime, "Did you ever wish you were dead? Did you ever wish you were dead?"

This is the way you build up a mystery, this: You make highly specialized categories within a science. And when a science goes in that direction, it no longer frees, but starts to enslave. And as time goes on, the biggest, largest of scientific organizations will become more and more and more mysterious until they have no communication lines at all. And then you get a sort of a priesthood of this sort of thing rising up — and back of the magic atom bomb or something of the sort, a little flag waves, and that means the populace is supposed to cough up another five bucks apiece. I mean, this is the way it goes. This is the way a priesthood starts. Natural phenomena is discovered, and then someone makes a mystery of it.

"Did I ever wish I was dead, are you crazy? Of course I've wished I was dead. That'd make them sorry!"

Right now, they are having, I am told — and I have no personal knowledge of this — that the AEC, for instance, is having a very difficult time administering its own organization. Because its security lines are so solid, its barriers are so great, that it cannot get the proper security classifications for everybody, so therefore, has crooked communication lines all over the place. And one of these fine days, this fellow will have one piece of the formula and that fellow will have another piece, and somebody else will have another part of the workability, and none of them will know where the other fellows' are. (applause) That would be good, yes — I agree with you.

Get some seven- or eight-year-old little girl sometime — and it'd be absolutely impossible, I'm sure, to find one who was in fairly good condition anywhere who would not be able to list you a dozen such incidents. There she would be lying in a coffin, flowers — that'd fix them! That'd convince them they should have been nicer to her! They all should have been nicer to her, or to him.

But what will they — what would they do then? What is the impulse which follows in after this? The impulse, unfortunately, is simply to say, "All right. Now I have the whole bomb" — big lie — "I have the whole bomb, and I've got it right here in my desk drawer. And unless you all pay for certain numbers of candles, or buy a certain number of new test tubes and present them to the laboratory, it's going to go off. And there's nothing I'll be able to do about it. Because it's controlled by a demon. Here he is. You don't believe it — we've made him solid. We call him 'H-bomb.' " This sort of thing. Mystery. Mystery, used for control and to enslave.

You could take some little kid and you can ask him to repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me." Just that, see — just ask him to repeat this over and over with no former description or comment of any kind — and what are you going to get? He'll start to cry. Just like that. He's already gotten himself two feet deep into the grave, just by repeating this thing: "They should have been nicer to me."

Anytime you start to hide knowledge, or obscure phenomena, or make a highly specialized and limited cult out of some function of life, you can expect that there's going to be more control than is good for our happiness. This is a certainty.

Now let's say that we're going to address fatally — that we were going to address a chronic somatic: some persistent ache, pain or sensation or malformation or condition, or condition of living. We were going to address any one of these — chronic condition — and we would find that if we had the person repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me," this condition will turn on more and more and more. If we're merely treating the fact that he can't earn a living or something of the sort, he'll get worse at it. You know, he'll get even poorer. If we're trying to get him over a broken leg or something of the sort, why, it will start hurting and he will develop complications. This we are sure of.

Well now, this is what the spirit has done. Spirit comes along and he says, "You know, I'm able to make ideas. A body converts food into energy and goes through motions, and that is a specialized function." Is it? Well now, how'd that body get there? Well, that body has been on the track an awful long time, as even the Darwinian boys agree that it's been on the track an awful long time. And that a lot of spirits have served this body. They've built it up into various automatic and machine patterns so that it will do those various things. But any one of them could have started from scratch and created a body whole cloth that would be just as visible as any body we have present. This is a great oddity, you see?

This is the spirit affecting the body, and the thetan running the anatomy and the machine. It's proof, conviction, convincingness. And when they fail with ideas, they make the ideas solid, and we have mass.

Now here is a spirit — an individual who is very happily engaged on occupying a body and thinking that he is dependent upon this body. Because this body knows so much, it knows how to build so well, and yet he could never build anything like this, he feels. So, therefore, he's dependent upon this. And that is not true. He is not a specialist. And that is the first thing you must learn about a thetan. He can pretend to be, but he is not a specialist, and he never will be. And his health, power, strength and ability depend upon his nonspecialization.

What's mass? Mass is an idea that has failed. And it has been changed many times, and heavens, is it persisting! And if you want it to persist some more, roll it around some more.

Now, what is specialization but identity? We say that somebody is a plumber, somebody else a carpenter, somebody else an engineer, somebody else a doctor. These are identities, aren't they? They are an identity of function. But let's go down scale from that and say, "This person's name is Joe and that one's name is Bill and the other one's name is Tom." This is interesting, isn't it? That's a highly specialized affair. You mean this is the one person who has this identity? This is the only person there is who has this identity.

Now there's really two levels on the Tone Scale. Above 2.0 is survival. Below 2.0 is succumb. In other words, above this artificial, arbitrary figure of 2.0, we have the goal of an individual is to survive. See, that's survival is there. But below that level — and please grasp this fact, please, because it makes things so much easier for the auditor — below that level, the goal is to succumb. Now, we have a percentile of goal. In other words, somebody wants to 70 percent succumb and 30 percent survive, and so we get a very conflicting state of mind, as we could call it colloquially — state of mind. (I don't know what a state of mind would be. Call it an arrangement of ideas, and you would come much closer.) All right. So this person wants to succumb some percentage and survive another percentage.

Tell me, is there anyone going to profit from individuals having only one identity from which they cannot escape? It's very easy to collect taxes. Very easy to find out "who done it." It's very easy to pin people down and locate them, as long as they have finite names.

Now we go down Tone Scale and we find out this person wants to succumb 90 percent and wants to survive 10 percent. Well, there's not much conflict there. One of the first things this fellow will think of, in terms of himself, is how he could kill himself — if he could think about himself at that level. If he thought about you, he would think kind of how he could kill you, and we get the criminal bands; quite interesting manifestation. Once a person has failed to convince the society around him of his worth, he is liable to take the course, the downward spiral, into levels of succumb which require murder or death as the only sufficient proof — criminality. He cannot have, he has to steal. It's covert havingness; stealing is just covert havingness. And he has to butcher, make nothing of, chew up, slap around anyone in his vicinity. He can't afford to be nice to them. Why can't he? Well, he knows the best thing for everybody: that's succumb.

But here's the oddity: You have as much crime as you identify. This is fantastic. That means you'll have as much FBI as you have FBI files. And the better and more complete these files are, and the better they're able to reach out into the world and find anybody in anywhere — there he is! — the more crime you're going to have.

It's just as you run on an individual some process of duplication, and have him then run this process on some body part, like an ear. You know? "Get the idea, now, of the goals of your ear." You know? "What are the goals of this ear?" you know, and you go on. The first thing you run into is — one of the first things you run into is: "Gee, let's everybody be ears!" That's what this ear thinks, you know: "Everybody's got to be an ear!" Big toe thinks, "Everybody should be a big toe." And this person thinks, "Everybody should be dead." And we get that wonderful philosophy, that glorious ornament to the thinkingness of the human race, Will and the Idea, by a guy named Schopenhauer who conceived out of the greatness of his Germanic wisdom and out of the deduction of reduction to absurdity, that the best possible thing for the human race would be for everybody and everything to quit and stop it in its tracks and that would be the end of that! And that's the best thing to do!

Possibly while running this little process in the last hour of somebody saying, "Well, we've got you spotted now," you possibly might have had a little bit of a desperate feeling for an instant, like "I ought to do something, no matter how strange. I really kind of ought to do something." Maybe some little impulse struck you. Great possibility that that happened, not necessarily true at all. But once a criminal is entirely identified, there is no hope for him at all. And there's no slightest advantage in his being a good man. There's no return, no recovery and no change. He is committed to a course. And now it doesn't matter who he robs or kills. In other words, we have made it so that his return to good order and graces cannot be rewarded. There's no possibility, then, of having a rehabilitated criminal, as long as you have him completely spotted, categorized, you know all about him. And anytime anybody robs a hotel in Schenectady, even though he's in San Francisco, somebody picks him up. This fellow after a while learns very well that there's no reason for it at all. There's no reason why he should be honest. Quite the contrary — there's every reason why he should be dishonest.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

Now, this is a great oddity. Identification. The more positively and the more easily a person can be identified, the more crime will arise. Doesn't sound possible, but it's true. It would seem the reverse, wouldn't it? It'd seem that if everybody was sort of floating around loose and not nailed down, and they could zap anybody they wanted to zap and you could kill anybody you wanted to kill and so forth, it would seem an open-and-shut case of complete and total crime. You couldn't identify people and so forth. Anybody could commit a crime and instantly get lost. You'd never be able to discover him. That would seem to just open the doors wide to a vast vista of stuff that — like you see in the Hearst papers or Time magazine or Real Detective.

But that's still higher toned than a Hitler who says, "Now, let's see, the best way for Germans to live is to kill everybody." Because the universe is so set together that an individual who goes out to kill everybody, dies himself. There is a retribution. There is a rapid and exact retribution for one's acts.

Now, the great oddity — the great oddity is it isn't true. It is not true. There is not as much peace as there is police. And anytime you think there's as much peace as you have police, you will continue to see a world — as long as the world believes this, you'll continue to see the world involved in war after war after war. I don't think any of us would disagree on this: that we certainly have enough national police in the world. Russia has millions and millions and millions of men under arms; so do we. They have air forces, they have guided missiles, they have bombs, they have the OGPU and we have the CIA, and — police, police, police. Whole armies and navies. People who are there to shoot and defend and so on — these vast armies of police. If they build them up just about one million men more, you'll have a war. Peace is not proportional to police; it's inversely proportional. Great oddity.

If a person thinks he can be happy without making those around him happy, he's crazy. Now, I beg your pardon, that's a technical term which belongs in the field of psychiatry. It is the total and sole proprietary matter of psychiatry. But this fellow is crazy anyhow.

You see, if people had a greater freedom, their want would not be as great. They would not be in a state of desperation about this and about that. They would have enough freedom so they themselves could assume some moral responsibility for the society in which they are operating. Do you know that the child labor laws which sit on the books of Washington right here, are primarily the laws responsible for juvenile delinquency, which we all admit is a pretty bad thing these days — the child labor laws. Of course, there were some capitalists. There are always some fascists around someplace that make things tough for everybody.

Now, here is a great oddity, then: that there is an interaction from human being to human being, and this interaction follows an agreed-upon pattern for there to be sustained any communication at all. If we are going to sustain any communication or concourse with our fellows, then we become liable to all of the laws, rules and offshoots of communication. And if we do not feel ourselves strong enough, wise enough, competent or able enough to support these liabilities, then we have no business whatsoever living with the human race, but should find ourselves a nice little cave someplace back of the Atlas or somewhere and sit down and live on goat milk.

They put the children to work in the factories, so we were told. And eventually there had to be child labor laws so that you couldn't work any children. You know what those laws do? They simply say to a child, "You cannot participate in this game until you reach a majority and no longer care to play. You can't participate in this game. You can't play in this game. No." And the kid says, "Nyarrh! You mean I cannot demonstrate to my fellow man that I am worth doing something for or with? You mean you have robbed me of the principal method of being of service to my race, my people, my family? You mean you are telling me that I am not necessary in this society? Well, if I am not necessary, then it must follow immediately that I am worthless."

Now, an individual could not help but come to that conclusion that hecould not sustain communication — he could not help but conclude that it would be impossible for him to go on communicating with all these people — if he himself believed that everybody, or at least a lot of bodies, should die.Now, you follow this? The individual who has to go and find himself a cage or a cave would be somebody who had already come to the conclusion that everybody else must die. Why? Because talking to people gives him a kind of dyingness, which tells you immediately what the intent of his communications must be. If by talking to people, he himself experiences dyingness, he must then intend no good for his fellows; but quite on the contrary, if turned loose and let go just a little bit, he'll get that sword nice and sharp and get to work.

And then we have, matching these child labor laws, the most onerous juvenile delinquency laws which you ever cared to inspect. They are marvelous. They are marvelous for their complexity and stupidity. We have young men, for instance, comparable to this, who have a perfect right by law to go out and get killed for their country, but not to get drunk for it.

It's that individual, and the restraint of that individual, which brings about the condition known as police — who, in a rational, sane society, are about as useful as bubonic plague. And yet we're taught that if there weren't police in the society, everybody'd get murdered. Well now, this is a great deal of confidence in our fellow man, isn't it? Whose conclusion is it? It must be the conclusion of a person whose intent and goal is to murder everybody — to show them. So therefore, the idea of restraint, the idea of restriction, barrier and breaking off, must perforce spring from people who had better be barriered.

This is an oddity, isn't it? Well, right along with that are these police laws. They've got to get them off the street at nine o'clock. They've got to do this, they've got to do that, they've got to walk this way and that. They have no legal rights.

The feeling that one is being mauled around by the society is not an unnatural feeling. It is when that feeling amounts to the conclusion that in order to survive, one has no other course but to maul around everyone, that one becomes lost to himself and to all others and had better go find that cave.

I saw a young man committed to an insane asylum the other day by a judge who merely had to convene a court by sitting down on an old set of steps someplace and saying, "Well, court's now in session. I find this child neglected, so this child is a ward of the court. Asylum."

Here are the liabilities of communication. All by himself with no space, no energy, no matter, the individual theoretically could survive in a timeless state which would persist forever. It's a paradox, isn't it? Theoretically, he could do this. Theoretically, one could be in a condition which desired no communication, which wanted no concourse, which needed none, and which wouldn't even know about any. Theoretically, that condition can exist.

The child was not present. No witnesses were present. No competent medical authority was present of any kind. No formal convention of that court was held.

But if there is communication, we have to have, first and foremost, two terminals. Even when a fellow is talking to himself, he still has to say part of himself is somebody else. So we're talking about a two-terminal condition. And the moment we have a two-terminal condition and communication, we have a universe in construction. And if that universe sweeps along in its construction to where communication seems to be unbearably painful to the majority of its inhabitants, somebody'd better as-is it.

That's child — juvenile delinquency in action. Now maybe that's a very extreme case. But it's a funny thing, it's the only one I happen to have inspected, and I inspected that by accident. I just sent somebody down to look into something like this juvenile delinquency thing — this is the first thing they ran into. So they came back and told me, you know. That was all in the course of an hour or so. I kind of was leery of sending them back to find a second one. What if they're worse than this?

Here we have a condition here of the only panacea — the only real panacea in mechanical terms — for space and energy, matter and time: communication. It is the sole curative element which can dependably change, alter and eradicate, without penalty, space, energy and matter.

So we have the young men and the young women of the country of an age capable of bearing and rearing children and holding down jobs, sitting around knowing they cannot be of any service to their fellow man.

What happens to a person who shuns it? What quality of black glass does his bank become? What happens to an individual who says — having already assumed communication and having gone into communication — now says, "Communication, that makes me feel bad. I don't like that. It's too painful to talk; it's too horrible to contemplate. I've got to draw barriers here and secretaries there and cut telephone wires over here and tom-up mail over in this corner." He's on his way. Where? Well, one thing — he's on his way to believing that everybody is going to be after him and at the same time, to the conclusion that he had better be after everybody. In other words, a Wall Street man.

Do you know how to drive somebody crazy? Just convince him he can't help anybody. Just convince him of this, and he's gone. Now we wonder why we have incidents of psychosis and neurosis and juvenile delinquency and lawbreakers, and why we have to have all these files, files, files. Every bad boy, convinced that he cannot help anybody, who gets on the police rolls is on them from there on out, and we have a real, honest-to-goodness criminal. And we're manufacturing them just as fast as we can turn the wheels of justice — huh!

Now, this condition is not particularly perilous. But we go four or five harmonics down this Tone Scale, we get into a condition which is very interesting indeed. We get to your political fascist, your criminal, the insane, the psychiatrist. We get to people who have to use mass in a violent way in order to convince any-body of anything.

We manufacture them. We spot the kid because he played hooky when he was fourteen, because he stole an apple when he was sixteen, because he stole a car when he was seventeen, because he shot a man and robbed a service station when he was eighteen . . . We're just growing a crop of criminals, of course. That's the first thing that police have to have: criminals.

The Chinese know this very well. I, once upon a time, heard a little story about the Chinese. There were two coolies, two rickshaw boys, and they had drawn up in the street and they'd dropped their rickshaws and they were going "Nee-chongy-tonky-alamonpinyon," and — at each other and screaming back and forth. And an American was standing there with a Chinese friend and he watched this conversation going on and on — on. He finally turned around to his Chinese friend and he says, "Hey," he says, "what's the matter with those guys? Why don't they fight?"

Did it ever strike you as peculiar — did it ever strike you as peculiar — that a game of cops and robbers requires robbers? And that there aren't anywhere near enough robbers in this very nicely, pleasantly civilized society at this time?

"Oh," his Chinese friend says, "the fellow who strikes first blow confess he run out of ideas!"

You know the drawer of Dick Tracy has a most marvelous time trying to find enough villains for Dick Tracy to chase: No-Face and Stone-Face and Hoe-Face and Bow-Face. And they just have a fantastic time trying to get these villains. And it really never occurs to anybody, "Gee, copping would be a lot of fun if there were that many crooks and that much chasing to be done."

So we have this interesting thing. We have an interesting thing here: We have the idea as sufficient unto itself, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with some space and some energy and some mass, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with lots of energy and lots of space and lots of mass, and then we have the idea which is so perilously and tenuously held that it has to be backed up by the consideration that space, energy and mass is bad and you're going to get it!

But do you know what a cop does? He drives around in a squad car, getting a squad-car spread. He's supposed to be alert, supposed to be on the ball. He's supposed to arrest somebody. He's a cop. They lecture him all the time: "Crime must cease!" Maybe there isn't any!

When somebody tries to tell you how bad it is over there and how you're all going to be cut up and you're going to be sliced up and it's going to be horrible things happening to you and you're going to go to jail for 126 years and the jails are terrible and so on and when they start on along this line, this fellow's just confessed to you he's run out of ideas. Certainly effective ones — certainly effective ones.

There's nothing sillier than a cop without a crook to chase or an army without a war to fight. And they make themselves look as unsilly as fast as they can.

Now, people get into this state of being quite easily. They believe that the space and the energy and the mass is the important driving force, and that there is no more important driving force in this world than space and energy and mass. And they believe these are — things are just fabulous. And they believe, at the same time, that the greatest healer is time.

Now here we have — here we have this oddity of people falling away from an understanding of themselves to such a degree, because of control — exterior control — and ardures and duress, that they begin to believe that no one can be trusted, and so there have to be that many more barriers.

Time is not the great healer; it is the great charlatan. Because time, mass, energy and space do not exist independent of the postulates of life. We're merely looking at another set of postulates represented with the urgency of conviction.

But the barriers themselves demonstrate that nobody can be trusted. So then we conclude that nobody can be trusted so we get some more barriers. So then we conclude that nobody is trustworthy, so we get some more barriers, and we've come back to a lower part of the cycle, and on down it goes.

So we have a problem here when we're looking at a human being. We have a problem. This human being has gotten into the interesting state of believing that he could convince nobody of his presence unless he hands up a body. The only way that can convince somebody you're there is to give them a body. Now, isn't that interesting? Think of it for a moment. It'll start to appear rather ridiculous to you. The only way you could convince anybody you were there, or that you were anybody, would be to present them with a body. We show them a body; that convinces them. It stands in space, it moves with energy, and it is mass — and they know you're there.

You have to accumulate barriers in order to be safe. If you're having to be safe, then there must be something dangerous around. That's the most obvious conclusion in the world.

If some of you are having a hard time trying to figure out how the devil they would know you were there unless you did present a body, be aware of this interesting thing: You must be trying to keep from being located.

For instance, if you drove up and down the streets all the time with a couple of armed guards sitting in a turret above your head in your car, armed with loaded machine guns, and you yourself were surrounded entirely by bulletproof glass, and if the whole bottom of the car was so fixed so that land mines and bombs couldn't explode under it, just drive around in that car for a few days, and you will begin to believe that people are after you.

Think it over for a moment. If you think the only way you could make anybody else aware of your presence would be to present a body, then you're presenting some kind of a substitute over here and you're saying, "Hey," you know, "tsk, tsk, tsk. That's me. Ha-ha!" Big joke! Everybody says, "How are you, Mr. Jones?" you know, and so forth. And if Jones is up here not making himself known, he still must have the conviction that he mustn't be located; that something will happen to him if he's located.

This is a certainty. "I've got this many barriers." And we get to the primary aberration that man suffers from, and one of the reasons he holds himself up all the time: "There must be a reason." See, he always says, "There must be a reason." I've run into this in some of the most remarkable things. Fellow gets up, makes a speech. He says — tells all the people that he's gotten in there that Scientology is very good. And he starts his speech out by telling them this, and before it's all over, then he says, "It's all very good, except all the people connected with it are crazy and everything."

And there we get the top peak of aberration, and that is the highest level of aberration: "There is something rather detrimental to being located. There is something slightly wrong with being located."

And the oddity is, is the auditors in the area sit around and say, "Well, there must be some good reason why these people are doing this. Yeah, there must be some reason why they do this. It must be explainable just from the behavior. And it's probably explainable from the fact that well, probably nobody in Scientology is any good. Maybe that means me, too. But there must be some good, valid reason why this is the case. Let me see. Must be, must be a reason."

"There's something slightly wrong with locating things" is your black V case. Not only slightly wrong: "I sure better locate nothing. I'd better not locate a thing. If I do any looking, I'm liable to see something, and if I see something, woooo!" But the funny part of it is, is there's no argument or reason at all that goes behind the woooo! but just that — woooo!

Yeah, there's a reason, undoubtedly a reason, if you can call insanity a reason. Or if you can call an outright desire to knock Dianetics and Scientology flat in California a reason. But they always figure there must be a better reason than that. And that probably is the finest aberration I've ever run across in somebody: "must be a better reason."

Now, you might accept this idea that fear of being located or dislike of being located or even tremendous desire to be located, such as your exhibitionist (and we've had lots of those since Freud invented them); these factors must contain in them a certain amount of truth if their use on the spirit of man and with his cooperation produces marked changes in his behavior, in his intelligence, in his ability, in his perception and his willingness to be perceived. And if we use these factors and produce marked changes in the ideas, personalities of people, and we better them and make them freer, then I feel that we must be talking somewhere close to truth. It is not necessarily true that we are speaking the truth; we are merely speaking the workability.

I've had people sit and be reasonable, and figure out all the reasons why Joe suddenly rushed in and drew his revolver and killed Bill. And there must be all kinds of reasons about this. And they will go on with these reasons just by the hour, and completely miss the fact that it might have been that he just came in, drew his revolver and shot Bill. Get the idea? There might not be any reason to it at all.

Truth is a very interesting thing, since the only way we get any persistence of any kind or any form or any energy or any mass is by changing it. Only if we alter truth do we get persistence. This is fabulous, but very true.

Now, if you drive around protected on every side by armor plate, or if you live in a society which has to be buttressed up by Lord knows how many echelons of police or armies, you may eventually get to the feeling, "You know, there must be a reason all these people are here. You know, there' must be a reason why we have cops eight deep on every corner. There just must be a reason, that's all. Somebody's more dangerous than we are, otherwise we wouldn't have to protect ourselves quite this hard."

That means some pessimist is going to come along and he's going to think to himself now — he's going to think to himself, "You mean that everything at which I look has a lie in it?" Well, if you want to state it crudely, yes. If a lie can be defined as an alteration of truth, or a departure from the truest true you know, then that's perfectly true. The floor is there because it's a damned lie.

And I have just described the thetan interior: "If I am hiding this hard," he says, "somebody must be after me. If I am trying this hard to protect this body, something must be trying to cave it in. If I have to work with all these difficulties in order to own everything, then there must be somebody trying to take them away from me." And going on up scale, "If I have to hammer and pound to assert responsibility and make other people responsible, it must follow that everybody's irresponsible, including me. And if I have to sweat and strain and groan this hard to get this body up in the morning and to get it to go to bed at night, it must be very difficult to operate bodies. And therefore control is a serious business."

But one can easily accustom himself to these lies. It's only when the individual becomes hectic and very upset about lies that stuff that is composed of lies goes out of his control.

And a little bit higher on the scale is "Everybody talks about dying; therefore, it follows that someday I'm going to die. And look at all these apathetic people; therefore, society must have something to be apathetic about. And if all these people are sitting around crying, it must be a sad world. And if everybody in my vicinity is scared to death — boy, we must be haunted! And if my parents and employer are mad at me all the time, I must be a skunk. And if everybody I know is antagonistic to each other, it must mean people are no damn good. And if everybody in New York is bored, it must be that it's a very boring place."

Nor does this give anyone like Hitler a license to deal only in lies. If he deals only in lies, he'll as-is everything, too. He will bring about a condition of such persistency of lies that he won't have any truth left. You must always have a certain amount of truth left; because it is the alteration of truth which gives us persistence, which gives us survival. We must alter or repostulate truth. And if you alter lies and continue to alter lies, you get something else entirely different because you haven't got the first postulate to be followed by the second. Some truth must always be present, and it is only when no truth is left that we get the bad end of nothing.

But fortunately, in some respects — we go in and we see a banker. He's being very conservative, so we figure there must be something there to be doubtful about. And much more happily — much more happily — we see somebody who is tremendously enthusiastic, and if we're in pretty good shape, we say, "You know, there must be something around here to be enthusiastic about." But you know what man says today if he sees somebody very enthusiastic? He says, "He's crazy!"

Therefore, the lessons which we learn in processing today in Scientology are very, very interesting lessons. They bridge upon and across some of the greatest philosophic conundrums that have ever been advanced by man. What is justice? What is right? What is wrong? What is good behavior? What is bad behavior? There's many a person going around, the only thing that's wrong with them at all, that they conceive to be wrong with them, is that they can't quite figure out how it all ought to be. They see badness and viciousness and villainy on every side succeeding. They see this consistently. They see injustice, bought courts, they see perjury and false witnesses being rewarded on every hand. And something in them says that the only thing upon which this whole universe and all of us within it can possibly depend is truth. And truth, somehow, is decency and goodness and charity and mercy and kindness. They see this, and yet all they see rewarded is viciousness. And they get this sort of a conundrum in their heads and they just say, "Vr-rr-rr-rr-rr! I don't like it!"

And if we see somebody sitting there being terribly serene — and it's apparently quite an effort to go on being serene — it must follow that it's awful hard work to be serene.

The only thing that's wrong with them is, is they have lost so much of their own basic truth that they are no longer able to combat an untruth. And the only thing you have to do with them is let them recover some of their basic truth; let them see that there is a reward for decency and kindness and justice and mercy and charity; let them see that these things are basic; let them see that communication is not bad, it's good; let them see that decency, honor are extant.

In other words, as we look at this Tone Scale from the bottom up to the top, every time we add "There must be a reason," we get some unjustified generality which leads us then to conclusions which are not always to our own best interests.

How would you let them see this? Processing. Almost any processing leads in this direction today.

I have had this odd experience: I have been on a ship which was having a very hard time struggling in high seas and high winds, which had its engines disabled. And I had a rescue party drop aboard. All the sailors were convinced that the ship was going to pound itself to pieces and go down.

An individual who has had all of his truth perverted has nothing left.

This was really not a justified conclusion, it was just that the sea was so violent that it appeared to be likely. But they had all come to the conclusion that they were going through their last days right there in those last minutes — each minute about twelve years long. And the rescue party dropped down on the deck of the ship and didn't share this conclusion. And three men in a rescue party did work which twenty-eight men on the derelict had been unable to accomplish. And the three men in the rescue party did it in about ten minutes, where the others had failed for almost ten hours.

Because the only actuality there is, must begin with a certain amount of truth. And then for the actuality to persist, it must be altered. And when we alter the alteration, and then alter that alteration, we begin to walk through a cobweb of lies which is liable to trap anyone — and has even trapped some of the best thinking minds of the last several thousand years. If you don't believe this, read some of the books of the philosophers. Read Plato's dissertation on man. If you've ever read a mad-dog piece of writing, that's one. He had departed far enough from the truth, even Plato, so that he had conceived that man himself was a pretty evil rat.

Different set of conclusions. Same situation, same ship. Of course, you could say, "Well, the crew that was already aboard were tired." So was the rescue party. They had to row across three miles of open sea to get there. They were twice as tired as the boys who were still aboard.

Now, processing today depends less upon the alteration of the moral nature of the individual than upon the rehabilitation in the individual of his ability to recognize and to be truth.

So we conclude there that you must be able to have an independent attitude toward existence, regardless of the circumstances of existence. It is obviously possible to have an independent attitude toward existence, independent of an existing attitude toward existence. And it is not necessarily certain that the independent attitude of existence is going to succumb to the general attitude of existence. This is not an absolute certainty.

Well, what is truth?

Well, we started out talking about postulates. A person can have an independent attitude toward existence, regardless of what is going on, and make things better or worse at will, to the degree that he retains his confidence and faith in himself and his ability to make postulates.

If you want to know what truth is for this universe, it's the definition of a static, and, I am afraid, a fairly close path of the fifty-one Axioms in The Creation of Human Ability. They work, because they bring an individual closer to truth and much further away from disaster and lies than anything else has brought him. So there must be an interweave of truth in these Axioms, because in their use, one recovers truth.

He can say he feels this way, and he feels this way. But he has to be able to trust himself, to say that. He should be able to say, "I can persevere; I can succeed," and then succeed. He should also be able to say, "Well, I guess I'll fail this time," and simply fail. He would have to be alike unimpressed by winning or losing. He would have to be somewhat unimpressed. But he would be able to do that.

What is the basic truth?

He could then take command of the existing situation or better any situation without being tremendously influenced by the circumstances which surround him.

The basic truth is that an individual can survive without any communication with his fellows. He can. He can persist one way or the other by his own postulates. He can. And he won't have any games — not a one. He won't have any fun — none. But maybe that's all right, too. And that every individual has within himself free choice to go where he wills, do what he would, think what he wants.

What do we call this? We call this self-determinism. An individual, then, is as capable of happiness or livingness — I would rather call it livingness — he is as capable of living as he is capable of determining the actions of himself and others by a simple postulate.

It's by the interruption of that free choice by himself and by his agreements that we get solidifies, barriers. And these barriers only become onerous and very bad to have around when the individual has more barriers than he has truth.

And an individual who can do this is a giant amongst his fellows. And an individual who can't, has been, is, and always will be a slave.

And therefore we say to the preclear who can't exteriorize well that we've got to give him some more processing. Why? We've got to change his level of truth, which is to say, we've got to give less stress to these barriers and more stress to the individual. Therefore, when we process a chronic somatic, when we process a body, when we process space, energy and mass, we're changing barriers, and they only persist by being changed. Which leaves us one whole sphere to process, which is much more important than the sphere of barriers, and that whole sphere is the processing of truth itself, which — in you and which is you, a thetan.

Thank you.

And a thetan, thereby and therefore, can be processed infinitely without bringing about a persistence of bad conditions. He can be processed without any liabilities. His problems can be addressed and changed without liability, and the only liability there could possibly be in auditing would be to address barriers, because we would make barriers persist. So therefore, we no longer process barriers of any kind. All we do, perhaps, is to get the individual habituated to the idea that there might possibly be some barriers somewhere, and that he could recognize this fact without dying. And when we've done that, we can go on and process the individual.

Therefore, we are not in the healing sciences — because there is absolutely nothing wrong of any kind whatsoever with that which we treat, which is the thetan, the spirit of man.

Thank you.