This is January the 27th, 1954. This morning I’m going to give you a process which you will have to run on an Operating Thetan. Just has to be run, it’s very much a part of 8-0. Every Operating Thetan who operates without knowing this goes back down Tone Scale with great rapidity.

Quite incidentally-quite incidentally, this process will change the personality of a Homo sapiens quite markedly for the better. And it quite incidentally will break up the blackness in a case. It quite incidentally will spring these Resistive V’s. That’s almost unimportant. There are too many things that will spring a Resistive V if you go to work on it.

.. is January the twenty-seventh, 1954. This morning, I'm going to give you a process which you will have to run on an operating thetan. It just has to be run, it's very much a part of 8-0.

And we’ve too long been validating how tough it was to exteriorize. Now, when you start validating how tough it is to exteriorize, why, you will see in just a moment why the Resistive V, once labeled, then doesn’t easily exteriorize. See that? He finds out he can’t exteriorize, so he doesn’t exteriorize. If you weren’t talking to him much about exteriorization, he would not be very concerned about it.

Every operating thetan who operates without knowingness goes back down tone scale with great rapidity. Quite incidentally, quite incidentally this process will change the personality of a homo sapiens, quite markedly for the better. And it quite incidentally will break up the blackness in a case, and quite incidentally will spring these resistive fives. That's almost unimportant, there are too many things that'll spring a resistive five if you go to work on it. We've too long been validating how tough it was to exteriorize.

On the other hand, if you were to describe to a Resistive V how horrible it would be for him to be outside of his head, he would probably exteriorize. That’s one for your clinical practice. You'll go around worrying about this fellow hard enough about how horrible it would be if he were outside of his head and he’ll spring. Of course, it won’t do you any good, because you haven’t removed the basic mechanism which made him spring.

Now, when you start validating how tough it is to exteriorize, why, you will see in just a moment why the resistive five once labeled then doesn't easily exteriorize. See that? He finds out he can't exteriorize so he doesn't exteriorize.

Now this mechanism also is the reason why inversion takes place and is also the reason we have an extremely sporadic technique and why it works in negative exteriorization. You know, “Don’t be” or "Try not to be three feet back of your head.” An awful lot of people immediately are three feet back of their head. See, they’re obeying a reverse command.

If you weren't talking to him much about exteriorization he would not be very concerned about it. On the other hand, if you were to describe to a resistive five how horrible it would be for him to be outside of his head, he would probably exteriorize. That's one for your clinical practice. You go around worrying about this fellow, hard enough about how horrible it would be if he were outside of his head, and he'll spring. Of course it won't do him any good because you haven't removed the basic mechanism which made him spring.

We’ll first speak of this in the framework of a Resistive V and we find out that they have not observed that this situation is taking place: that when they try to put something out in front of them, it appears inside their head. Particularly if they try to put a "no” something out in front of them, then the positive thing will appear inside their head. Do you see that?

Now this mechanism also is the reason why inversion takes place, and is also the reason we have a, an extremely sporadic technique in, and why it works, in negative exteriorization. You know, don't be, or try not to be three feet back of your head. An awful lot of people immediately are three feet back of their head. See, they're obeying a reverse command.

The test technique on this, which is a very good technique in itself, just run as itself, because it is right close to definitions-the definition: the MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. We say to an individual, "Now, give me a couple of barriers that-or give me a barrier that you’re absolutely certain isn’t in front of your face.” It’s a very good technique, by the way. "Give me a barrier that you’re absolutely certain isn’t under you.” And this reversal shows up on those cases which you are finding difficult.

We'll first speak of this in the framework of a resistive five, and we find out that they have not observed that this situation is taking place, that when they try to put something out in front of them it appears inside their head, particularly if they try to put a no-something out in front of them, then the positive thing will appear inside their head. Do you see that? The test technique on this which is a very good technique in itself, just run as itself because it is right close to definitions, the definition, the MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. We say to an individual, "Now give me a couple of barriers that, or give me a barrier that you're absolutely certain isn't in front of your face." It's a very good technique, by the way. "Give me a barrier that you're absolutely certain isn't under you." And this reversal shows up, on those cases which you are finding difficult.

They say, "Well, I am absolutely certain Earth is under me-whoops!”

They say, "Well, I'm absolutely certain Earth is under me, woops! That's funny," they've got no Earth, if they're running this with closed eyes. They have a nothingness of Earth under them. Real peculiar, huh?

That’s funny, they’ve got no Earth, if they’re running this with closed eyes. They have a nothingness of Earth under them. Real peculiar, huh?

Well, you wouldn't ordinarily ask them to look in the opposite direction, but they would find that it was all solid above their head at that moment, which gives them the idea they're backwards and upside down. "Alright, now give me a barrier you're absolutely sure is not in front of your face." The fellow says, "Well," he says, "there's no pea soup in front of my face. No, no, no." Now he might not notice this. Quite important. He probably doesn't look, what's mainly wrong with him, too much looking. And as he said "no pea soup out in front of his face," if he were to look right quick at the darkness which were inside his head, he would probably find it had turned green. No pea soup means pea soup inside of his head.

Well, you wouldn’t ordinarily ask them to look in the opposite direction, but they would find that it was all solid above their heads, at that moment, which gives them the idea they’re backwards and upside down.

"There are no feathers, there is not a wall of feathers behind me." And at the moment he declared this, if he looked inside his head he'd find out the inside of his head was, it's blackness and so forth, had converted probably into feathers inside his head. This is fairly routine manifestation you find in a case, but because you as an auditor don't look inside his head you wouldn't see that this was taking place, and he's never going to see it unless you call his attention to it. See, you say now, "Alright, now give me something that's not in front of your face." He says, "There is no pea soup in front of my face, woops! I sort of have a feeling like there might be. I'm uncertain about that." And you'll listen to this chatter about his uncertainty, and try to find something more certain rather than find out what did happen. So you say, "Alright, now you got that? There's no pea soup in front of your head?" The fellow says, "Yeah, but," and so on. You say, "Well look inside your head and look around that blackness."

"All right. Now, give me a barrier you’re absolutely sure is not in front of your face.”

Now, on the cases that are inverted into blackness it is quite common, this is not always the case, but it's quite common that the blackness would have turned green. It would have turned into pea soup. You see? You see what you've got there is somebody who has been hammered and pounded in this fashion, "Put your attention on yourself," people have said to him. He said, "Well, I don't know. I," this fellow was a man let's say, and he says, "I don't know if men are very much good." He's had somebody around him who was a, really a pretty ravey psycho, somebody that's way down the line, and this person's immediate response to any sort of a generalized statement would probably be, "Well, I don't know about other men, but about you, why don't you look at yourself when you criticize others? You're doing these very same things that you're criticizing about the person." You know? In other words, put your attention on yourself, which of course collapses his attention lines. And every time he tries to put an attention line exterior, why, somebody fixes it up so that it goes interior. See? Reversal of attention.

And the fellow says, “Well,” he says, “there’s no pea soup in front of my face. No. Nope, nope.”

Well, you can just have the fellow start working this as an automaticity, that there's no pea soup in front of his face, and then put pea soup inside his head. And there's no feathers above his head, and put feathers inside his head. And there's no feather, no nothing that's under him, and put nothingness inside his head. And he would just take this over as an automaticity. Now that's one way of running this, and a very effective way, because you're knocking out a very heavy battery of automatic machinery, which reverses the direction of his intention and attention. His intention is to go outside of his head, so he goes fixedly in his head. If there's no pea soup outside we not only get the "no" reversing to a plus pea soup, but we don't get it outside, we get it inside his head. In other words, we've got a double reversal at work here. If you didn't notice this double reversal, why, you wouldn't get this.

Now, he might not notice this-quite important-your V doesn’t look. What’s mainly wrong with him: too much looking.

I'll just give you a little example of this. Who's got a lot of blackness inside his head? You got some blackness there John? Alright, why don't you get some no-molasses out in front of you. The idea that there's no wall of molasses in front of you. Look around inside your head when you do that. Manifestation hold good on you? (Doesn't seem to.) Doesn't seem to, fine. This is quite routine, however, and gives you an idea. You probably have been audited up enough so you're not on a double reversal anymore. You say, see the fellow says, "There's no-something out there," then there's the question that there probably is something out there. And instead of out there it's in here. See, when he says it's out there it gets to be in here. Now that's a double reversal. No turns to yes, and outside turns to inside. Now those are really, if you work around with it the mechanics that you're working with, with people who don't exteriorize easily, you see? They would exteriorize if they could make their postulate, "I am now exteriorized," hold good. But they can't make that postulate hold good so, because they're on at least one of these reversals. They say, "I'm now outside," and this means of course that they're inside.

And as he said, “No pea soup” out in front of his face, if he were to look right quick at the darkness which were inside his head, he would probably find it had turned green. “No pea soup” means pea soup inside his head.

This runs on all sorts of postulates. "Everything I say, I'm wrong." All kinds of, "It doesn't matter much what I do, I'll, it's probably wrong in the long run," and various things like this. They're upside down and reversed things. But that is not what we are talking about, and is not the important thing. I'm just going over inversion a little bit there. These are not the important things.

“There are no feathers. There is not a wall of feathers behind me.” And at the moment he declared this, if he looked inside his head, he’d find out the inside of his head, as blackness and so forth, had converted, probably, into feathers inside his head. This is fairly routine manifestation you find in a case, but because you as an auditor don’t look inside his head, you wouldn’t see that this was taking place. And he’s never going to see it unless you call his attention to it.

The important thing is fixation of attention. And if you cannot correct a thetan's obsessive attention fixation, he'll get himself into more trouble than you can count. You must put an operating thetan, to get a man into an operating thetan category, it's really all other things aside, it's necessary that he be able to fix, he be able to fix and unfix his attention at will. Other things exterior to him must not fix his attention, beyond his control. He must be able to fix and unfix his attention at will.

And you say, “Now all right, now give me something that’s not in front of your face.”

Now that's only half of it. The other half is his concept of his own power depends on whether or not he can fix and unfix the attention of other livingnesses around him at will. You see, there's two sides to it.

He says, “There’s no pea soup in front of my face-whoops! I sort of have a feeling like there might be. I’m uncertain about that.”

So, that would be a very, very powerful, powerful individual. One who, one who didn't have any compulsion to fix his attention or unfix his attention beyond his own ability to regulate, and one who could fix and unfix attention of other livingnesses at will, that would be a very powerful fellow. Do you see that?

And you will listen to this chatter about his uncertainty and try to find something more certain, rather than find out what did happen.

Actually it's simply an index of what his power would be in regulating the activity of other livingnesses. It wouldn't necessarily be an index of how well he could compose MEST, or fix it in place, or endow it or something of the sort, but these two things go hand in groove. If an individual can do this it generally follows that he can also fix livingness into MEST itself. In other words, he can endow with life.

Well, you say, “All right. Now, you got that? There’s no pea soup in front of your head?” And the fellow says, “Yeah, but uh ...” and so on.

Well, as we, as we look over all cases we find out that this, to some degree or other, is in error about any one of these cases. Now let's take this resistive five and we find out that he has his attention on blackness. Now this is very peculiar, isn't it? He can't fix, unfix his attention. See? I mean, if you just wanted to describe his case you say, "Well, he can't unfix his attention, that's the trouble with him. He's looking at blackness." Well I assure you, the whole track and the whole universe isn't black. And if the individual could unfix his attention, why, he would be able to see the walls and see the rest of the universe. It's perfectly elementary. So, what's wrong with this case? He is merely an extreme case of unable to unfix attention.

You say, “Well, look inside your head and look around that blackness.”

The reason why is, is every time he tries to unfix his attention he fixes it, which is, you've got your reversal at work. When he tries to unfix his attention he fixes it. When he tries to fix his attention he unfixes it. "Now I've got to remember this," he will say. And he's got to fix his attention on this and, "What the hell was it I was trying to remember?" is his next remark. That's a reversal.

Now, on the cases that are inverted into a blackness, it is quite common-this is not always the case, but it’s quite common that the blackness would have turned green, it would have turned into pea soup.

Now how'd he get that way? Well, you wouldn't quite suspect the ease with which one gets into that one. The great ease, and that's why I'm trying to fix your attention on this subject with regard to the operating thetan. Let's not let the operating thetan get into this groove. And if the thetan has gotten into this groove to the point where he is a resistive five and cannot exteriorize at will, then let's run this so as to materially reduce its effectiveness upon his case. And the answer to that, I mentioned the other day, is courage. That's how he got there, this thing called courage. Nobility processing turned this up a long time ago. But the thing called courage is on the other side of a bridge called pain, from a place called cowardice. And cowardice is simply this, when you should stay you run. See? Reversal. When you should run, you stay. You see that? The bridge called pain.

You see, what you’ve got there is somebody who has been hammered and pounded in this fashion: “Put your attention on yourself,” people have said to him.

So we get various inverted values in livingness, all because of what? Because of this thing called courage. Now those people who have been in space opera have been implanted countless times to the effect that they must be courageous. The little boy growing up in this society is continually reminded that he must be courageous. The doctor under training at the hospital, looking into the stiff vat, you know, where the bodies float around and he's supposed to drag them out and cut them up to find out what they're made of, study dead tissue to find out what living tissue does, he is continually reminded that he must be courageous. He's got to have his nerve with him. A soldier in battle with bombs exploding all about is always being reminded by his top sergeant and and the subalterns that he must be courageous.

He said, “Well, I don’t know, I..This fellow is a man, let’s say, and he says, “I don’t know that men are very much good.”

What is courage? Why, it's facing up to a resistance, of course. It's a swindle. But of course it's the first ingredient of a game. We are taught, we see on every hand that a man without courage must not be respected, and yet the greatest respected people we know are those who are totally serene.

He’s had somebody around him who was really a pretty ravy psycho-somebody that’s way down the line. And this person’s immediate response to any sort of a generalized statement would probably be “Well, I don’t know about other men, but about you-why don’t you look at yourself when you criticize others, you’re doing these very same things that you’re criticizing about.”

A person who is totally serene doesn't have any courage. He isn't even vaguely worried about courage. It doesn't concern him. The coward worries continually throughout his entire life time about courage. This is the one thing that he must worry about. And those who are very often counted as brave men have spent their lives worrying about their courage. It is something we worry about, in other words, whether brave or cowardly.

You know, in other words, put your attention on yourself, which of course collapses his attention lines. And every time he tries to put an attention line exterior, why, somebody fixes it up so that it goes interior. See? Reversal of attention.

They go into battle like lions, and by the time they have been hit hard enough and often enough, and if they don't get killed on the field of battle or somebody drags them into the surgeon's tent, and sooner or later down the line some place they will have slid across that bridge. Well, it's the turning point in a man's life, when he slides across that bridge. Afterwards he doesn't feel like he amounts to much. And as far as a woman is concerned, she is not to that degree victimized by the society, and therefore has a little bit longevity than men. But courage is desirable in a woman, and there are various things that she has to face up to.

Well, you can just have the fellow start working this as an automaticity that there’s no pea soup in front of his face and then put pea soup inside his head. And there’s no feathers above his head and put feathers inside his head. And there’s no nothingness under him and put nothingness inside his head. And he would just take this over as an automaticity.

Her body structure however is a little more inverted than a man's already, and so people don't worry too much about getting her to face up to things. They're not trying to stop her communication, in other words.

Now, that’s one way of running this and a very effective way, because you’re knocking out a very heavy battery of automatic machinery which reverses the direction of his intention and attention. His intention is to go outside of his head, so he goes fixedly in his head. If there’s no pea soup outside, we not only get the “no” reversing to a “plus” pea soup, but we don’t get it outside, we get it inside his head. In other words, we’ve got a double reversal at work here. If you didn’t notice this double reversal, why, you wouldn’t get this.

Well, you can change the personality of any homo sapiens simply by having him manufacture this thing called courage. You get it high enough on the scale, and you keep putting it in. Where? Somewhere in the vicinity of his body. How many hours does it take? I don't know, twenty, thirty, lots of it, because it'll up and run out an awful lot of things that are standing suspended in his vicinity, and it'll run to a point where he finally; it'll run to a point where he finally has this postulate turn up: Must fix attention upon the horrible. And you'll run that until you, you see that one turn up. And that fixed attention upon the horrible is probably keeping a black ridge in front of him as a thetan, and he can't get away from it.

I’ll just give you a little example of this. Who’s got a lot of blackness inside his head?

Now how do you remedy that? You remedy that again by increasing his havingness. You don't run this out, because it won't run out. It will however run in and disappear. You just have him put this postulate, and the thing upon which his attention is fixed, into many, many things on the overt act/motivator basis. That is to say, have him put a, somebody looking at the black ridge in his, pointed toward the black ridge on his side, and then put him with him facing, have him put with him facing the black ridge, with the black ridge away from him. You understand that?

[to student] You got some blackness there, John? All right.

Well, we got a black ridge and we got a guy. Alright, now let's set it up in such a way as the fellow is nearer than the black, the guy, you see? Now I mean, we're talking about mock-up here. The individual is nearer the black ridge, well that's the, that's the the motivator basis. You know, there's a black ridge making this person fix his attention. Now we turn around the other way, and we have the black ridge closest to the preclear, and somebody looking at the black ridge, fix attention upon the horrible. That's I mean, that's just geometric arrangement, I can't draw you a picture. (You need a black board.) No we don't. These tapes are not decipherable when worked against a black board. In addition to that, pictures aren't really necessary beyond this point, you should be able to get that picture.

Why don’t you get some “no molasses” out in front of you. The idea that there’s no wall of molasses in front of you.

"Now put up some black ridge making you fix your attention upon it. Now have you putting up a black ridge so that somebody else's attention'll be fixed upon it." Now let's get some of the horrible things the preclear knows, and so forth. Well as we run this postulate back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, we certainly better remember that we're adding to his havingness. We're not trying to run it out, we're trying to run it in. So let's put up a lot of them, and let's group them all together and let's make masses out of them. And then let's go back to having him put quantities of serene, even contemptuous kind of courage around him. Lots of it. You'll find out the bank is greedy for it.

Look around inside your head when you did that.

It's a rather pathetic thing, when you begin to think about it. It is probably one of the most, was at one time before the society went to hell, one of the most valued emotions, courage. And is certainly the most dangerous, tricky emotion for an individual to assume. Too bad. But the point is that having to face up to the horrible is the keynote of every one of these cases that keeps coming around and telling you how horrible things are. And I call your attention to 16-G where it says, "It's so bad over there." Just go over into that, it's bad over there. That mechanism is "fix your attention upon the horrible."

Manifestation hold good on you?

Now sooner or later on the track and individual has come up into something that was beautiful that has turned out to be horrible, or it was beautiful and horrible at once, and this is hung up on the track. This can be true of night, night can at once be beautiful and horrible. And he will have that person in suspense. Let's say this girl, she marries a very, very beautiful man. You know, I mean he's aesthetically very, very good looking, who is just plain rotten all the way through, you know, horrible. And boy, this poor girl will have that fellow walking right around in the room with her all her waking hours, and racking up her nightmares. Person is suspended there, you see, because fix your attention on the beautiful and fix your attention upon the horrible.

Male voice: Doesn’t seem to.

Now what she wants to do is fix her attention upon the beautiful, and every time she does this person who was painful to her operates as the bridge to throw her over into fixing her attention upon the horrible. So we have what we might call the bridge personality on the case, who may not be in this life time, but it'll be in some life time. It's those things which were supposed to be beautiful but were horrible then which are in suspense.

Doesn’t seem to. Fine. This is quite routine, however. And gives you an idea you have probably been audited up enough so you’re not on a double reversal anymore.

Now the desire to fix one's attention upon the beautiful, the desire to be the effect of beautiful things is, like courage, another entrance into facing up to existence, and is the lighter, higher level of this. And when this has become obsessive, when beauty is terribly commanding upon the individual, the individual cannot free his attention. Just to that degree he is compulsively fixing his attention. So we slide in on the beautiful and we slide in on the horrible. And courage and appreciation of beauty are alike, when compulsive and obsessive, the entrance points into the dwindling spiral.

You see, the fellow says there’s “no something” out there, then there’s the question that there probably is something out there and instead of out there, it’s in here. See, when he says it’s out there, it gets to be in here. Now, that is a double reversal. “No” turns to “yes” and “outside” turns to “inside.” Now, those are really, if you work around with it, the mechanics which you’re working with, with people who don’t exteriorize easily, you see?

Now it is so common and so wide spread for you to fix your attention and have your attention fixed by the beautiful - fix your attention upon the beautiful, have your attention fixed by the beautiful - it's so, so common that you wouldn't think this, of this as a compulsion. And that's been a little sleeper, you know? I mean, it's, you know, everybody does it, and we're in such total agreement upon it that it's just about as solid as a wall. And we don't suspect a wall of being anything. But that is the upper level of how you get a wall. There's how you get these persistent solidities.

They would exteriorize if they could make their postulate, “I am now exteriorized,” hold good. But they can’t make that postulate hold good, because they’re on at least one of these reversals.

Now you would suspect from that then that MEST itself was at once beautiful and horrible. And so it is. There's something very horrible about MEST. There's also something very beautiful about MEST.

They say, “I am now outside” and this means, of course, that they’re inside. This runs on all sorts of postulates. “Everything I say, I’m wrong.” All kinds of “It doesn’t matter much what I do, I’ll-it’s probably wrong in the long run” and various things like this. They’re upside down and reversed things. But that is not what we are talking about and is not the important thing. I am just going over inversion a little bit, there. This is not the important thing.

Well, an individual who can't fix his attention self determinedly, and unfix it, gets trapped in it. Nobody's safe from a theta trap, and nobody's safe from a body, and nobody's safe from a head who cannot unfix his attention at will, who cannot turn from a beautiful scene and throw it all away. What? So it's beautiful. He should be in a situation where, when he looks at something beautiful he should say, "Now I shall find this beautiful. Now I am gratified. Fine." And everybody runs around trying to be an effect, compulsively and obsessively. An individual gets to a point finally where he is unable to differentiate between the beautiful and the horrible. And you get sadism, all kinds of weird things. You get the activities and conduct of a lot of people, a very strange sort of a mixture. And that in itself is the MEST universe. There's something beautiful and there's something horrible about MEST.

The important thing is fixation of attention. And if you cannot correct a thetan’s obsessive attention fixations, he’ll get himself into more trouble than you can count. To get a man into an Operating Thetan category is, really, all other things aside, it’s necessary that he be able to fix and unfix his attention at will. Other things exterior to him must not fix his attention beyond his control. He must be able to fix and unfix his attention at will.

The entrance point into the horrible is courage. The entrance point into the beautiful is appreciation. How do you handle these? You simply mock them up in tremendous quantity, as an emotion around the preclear. You will find, to a large degree, that it will dissolve his bank, and very certainly if run for five or ten hours on any case, will utterly alter his personality, much for the better. I don't care whether he's interiorized or exteriorized, that will take place.

Now, that’s only half of it. The other half is his concept of his own power depends on whether or not he can fix and unfix the attention of other livingnesses around him at will. You see, there’s two sides to that.

So that would be a very, very powerful individual. One who didn’t have any compulsion to fix his attention or unfix his attention beyond his own ability to regulate and one who could fix and unfix attention of other livingnesses at will. That would be a very powerful fellow. Do you see that? Actually, it’s simply an index of what his power would be in regulating the activity of other livingnesses. It wouldn’t necessarily be an index of how well he could compose MEST or fix it in place or endow it or something of this sort, but these two things go hand in groove. If an individual can do this, it generally follows that he can also fix livingness into MEST itself. In other words, he can endow with life.

And this, and this is the second half of the January twenty- seventh morning lecture. Now how does this represent itself in human behavior? It is terribly interesting to an auditor to be able, by some of the most casual statements of the people around him, to immediately categorize their case level, simply by how much they insist that he put his attention upon the horrible, and incidentally how much they insist he put his attention upon the beautiful.

Well, as we look over all cases, we find out that this, to some degree or other, is in error about any one of these cases.

People who go around insisting that you put your attention upon the beautiful are in a better state, but not much better off than people who go around insisting you put your attention upon the horrible. Now, people who go around insisting that you "put your attention upon," then, is the common denominator of these two. And if they've gotten to the extremity of putting your attention on the horrible and putting your attention upon the beautiful, that's an extremity. You say the one who insists you put your attention upon the beautiful probably has about the same sense of reality as a squirrel. Unreal. This case is groping. And the one who says you must put your attention upon the horrible probably couldn't be exteriorized short of a forty-five, unless you're willing to put some time in on the case. If you must put your attention upon the horrible, "it's bad over there."

Now, let’s take this Resistive V and we find out that he has his attention on blackness. Now, this is very peculiar, isn’t it? He can’t fix, unfix his attention. See? I mean, you just want to describe his case, you say, “Well, he can’t unfix his attention, that’s the trouble with him. He’s looking at blackness.”

Now, the supplementary reading on this are those two paragraphs regarding this in 16-G, Journal of Scientology. "Bad over there." When we add this up to fixed attention and realize that the emotion we're shooting for is courage, why, it makes good sense as a process because it does change the personality of the individual. It does shift his personality.

Well, I assure you the whole track and the whole universe isn’t black. And if the individual could unfix his attention, why, he would be able to see the walls and see the rest of the universe. It’s perfectly elementary. So what’s wrong with this case? He is merely an extreme case of unable to unfix attention. The reason why is, is every time he tries to unfix his attention, he fixes it, which is you’ve got your reversal at work. When he tries to unfix his attention, he fixes it. When he tries to fix his attention, he unfixes it. “Now, I’ve got to remember this,” he will say. And he’s got to fix his attention on this and “What the hell was it I was trying to remember?” is his next remark. That’s a reversal.

Now, there is several little packages like this. We won't bother to go over them because most of them are not important. But there are several little packages like this. There's nobility. Nobility is resistance against degradation. I'll give you an example of that. Put some nobility up above your head. Put some more up above your head. And put some more above your head. Put some more above your head. You notice what your nobility is doing? It's all these emotions sure, it's being noble in the face of.

Now, how did he get that way? Well, you wouldn’t quite suspect the ease with which one gets into that one. The great ease. And that’s why I’m trying to fix your attention on this subject with regard to the Operating Thetan. Let’s not let the Operating Thetan get into this groove.

Some of these characters who are being compulsively noble wouldn't stand a very close inspection on their private lives, because they have to put this up all the time, so they must have a terrific amount of degradation somewhere in their vicinity. See, they've got to resist it. Well, the next step is being a tramp. Now being a tramp you're; it's all very well for us to deify in song and story, to coin a cliche, the great nobility of the aristocracy of central Europe, southern Europe and northern Europe, but having associated with these characters now and then, I can tell you that their main, their main struggle is to differentiate between themselves and the canaille, the great unwashed, the thisa and the thata. It is an emotion, which when turned upon a person automatically classifies him as a degraded person. The best thing to do with somebody who has this kind of emotion is just what they did with them, off with their heads. Always will wind up.

And if the thetan has gotten into this groove to the point where he is a Resistive V and cannot exteriorize at will, then let’s run this so as to materially reduce its effectiveness upon his case. And the answer to that, I mentioned the other day, is courage. That’s how he got there. This thing called “courage.”

It is not the prime principle of aristocracy then which brings forth a decline of a nation. The prime principle that there are some brilliant or well blooded or well placed or well skilled people, who themselves have a right to direct the affairs of the nation, this is not a bad premise, you see. That actually is the way it kind of works out, if left by its own line, in a fairly ideal state. Plato's Republic and so forth give you examples of that. It's this other thing, this thing called nobility. They are there by a god given right, and their feet do not stink. And that means your feet do. And because their feet don't, yours do. And when their attitude is, "Well, my feet don't stink," as they look across the multitude which they are working or governing, they are immediately practicing an overt degradation of their fellow man, and will themselves execute themselves by becoming themselves more degraded than the cattle on which they are preying.

Nobility Processing turned this up a long time ago, but the thing called courage is on the other side of a bridge called “pain,” from a place called “cowardice.” And cowardice is simply this: “When you should stay, you run.” See? Reversal. When you should run, you stay. You see that? A bridge called pain.

And so you have the Roman aristocracy, with all their yap about the unwashed, and about this and about that. You have the Roman aristocracy finally degrading in terms of virtue, using the Roman word virtue and its meaning, to a point where I don't think the dogs would have spit on them in the forum. They became far more debased than that which they were trying to debase, because we have an overt act/motivator sequence going here.

So we get various inverted values in livingness—all because of what? Because of this thing called courage. Now, those people who have been in space opera have been implanted countless times, to the effect that they must be courageous.

You run across anybody who is trying to get anything done, he's trying to get something done, he's not trying to categorize the great difference between himself and the people he faces. See that? He's not trying to categorize this. That's a perfectly safe operating frame of mind, I mean, he's getting something done, so forth. Where you find nothing getting done is where the total fixation or nearly all of the fixation of the individual is upon how his possessions, his riches, his position differentiate him from those, and his main activity is in trying to impress this fact upon his fellows. And it's wonderful when you realize it, but the guy is digging his own grave smear by smear. Those smears he is smearing are very ill placed.

The little boy growing up in this society is continually reminded that he must be courageous. The doctor under training at the hospital, looking into the stiff vat (you know, where the bodies float around and he’s supposed to drag them out and cut them up to find what they’re made of, study dead tissue to find out what living tissue does), he is continually reminded that he must be courageous. He’s got to have his nerve with him

Actually this happens, this happens in a life time with rather great speed. It's under a life time in its length of evolution. Don't, you don't suspect that the fellow doesn't have a reason to have to insist. A fellow by the name of Shakespeare one time said, "Me thinks the lady protests too much." Well, me thinks the nobility protest too much.

A soldier in battle with bombs exploding all about is always being reminded by his top sergeant and the subalterns that he must be courageous.

All of Europe has been made into chaos century by century over this. The, take The Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the, and so on. This is the whole, the whole thing. I mean, it wasn't anybody trying to get anything done, it was somebody trying to unsmear and outsmear somebody else, in a noble way, you know? Wonderful fellows.

What is “courage”? Why, it’s facing up to a resistance, of course. It’s a swindle. But of course, it’s the first ingredient of a game. We are taught, we see on every hand, that a man without courage must not be respected. And yet, the greatest respected people we know are those who are totally serene. A person who is totally serene doesn't have any courage. He isn’t even vaguely worried about courage. Doesn’t concern him.

Now, where you, where you run into this, you run into political turmoil. Where we find this, wherever a set of individuals has set themselves up to be the thing, the social stuff and so on, we find this, because they set themselves up from a need to differentiate because they were afraid they were. You see, that's a different thing you know, than just, just being a good guy, or being an able person, or being beautiful or something of this sort, just being something. This is being something against something. You get that single difference there. So all these emotions which categorize that, of being something against something, bring a person down into the use of energy and MEST flows, and a dependency upon the MEST universe.

The coward worries continually throughout his entire lifetime about courage. This is the one thing that he must worry about. And those who are very often counted brave men have spent their lives worrying about their courage. It is something we worry about, in other words, whether brave or cowardly. They go into battle like lions and by the time they have been hit hard enough and often enough and if they don’t get killed on the field of battle, if nobody drags them into the surgeon’s tent and ... Sooner or later, down the line someplace, they will have slid across that bridge.

The stock market crash in the United States as of 19- I think it was 29, wasn't it? I wasn't in the country at the time - was itself an interesting manifestation, not of over production, but of the final collapse of capitalism. We don't have capitalism anymore. People don't even know what capitalism is in this modern decade. They don't know what a capitalism is, they go around and they talk about a capitalist and so forth. The capitalist is a breed of cat.

Well, it’s the turning point in a man’s life when he slides across that bridge. Afterwards, he doesn’t feel like he amounts to much. And as far as a woman is concerned, she is not to that degree victimized by this society and therefore has a little bit better longevity than men. But courage is desirable in a woman. And there are various things that she has to face up to. Her body structure, however, is a little more inverted than a man’s, already, and so people don’t worry too much about getting her to face up to things. They’re not trying to stop her communication, in other words.

Capitalism is a specific philosophy. It would be an amazing thing if somebody some time or another were actually to put out a book which defined these various isms in their free state of their philosophic definition, their practical activity, how they were actually conducted, and their ideological propagation use. You know, what is a capitalist, according to a communist? Well, there's a certain statement that can be made about this. What is a, what is capitalism in a philosophic sense? Another statement can be made about this. What is actually capitalism in operation? And another statement could be made about this. You see, you've got three categories there. If you did this with all these isms, the darndest amount of political fog would clear up and waft away.

Well, you can change the personality of any Homo sapiens simply by having him manufacture this thing called courage. You get it high enough on the scale and you keep putting it in.

People talk about communists, they don't know what a communist is. They don't know what a communist is dedicated to. I swear, probably, probably some large percentage of the communist party itself, the card carrying boys, they don't know what a communist is. They don't know what they're supposed to do, or what it's really dedicated to and so forth. They're just going around hoping that somebody will drop a crumb or a dog biscuit that they can pick up. And they're sort of there for the ride. They haven't any idea, of wither this goes, and that's the same way with capitalism. Capitalism is the process, of course, of loaning money, which by accruing interest will support a person in leisure. That is capitalism, it's capital, investment of. It means that the money works and the individual doesn't work, because the money's working. That's, that's the most elementary sort of a definition of capitalism.

Where? Somewhere in the vicinity of his body. How many hours does it take? I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty? Lots of it. Because it will up and run out an awful lot of things that are standing suspended in his vicinity. And it’ll run to a point where he finally has this postulate turn up: “Must fix attention upon the horrible.” And you’ll run that until you’ll see that one turn up. And that “Fix attention upon the horrible” is probably keeping a black ridge in front of him as a thetan and he can’t get away from it.

There was a; very odd, that there was a tribe of Indians in the United States, some say before the arrival of white men, but they should re-classify that and say before the arrival of Pilgrims - before 1602, or something on that order, 1608, whenever they arrived - because that whole coast was in good communication with Europe for many centuries. Fishing boats from northern Europe used to come over to the grand banks all the time. As a matter of fact, the fishermen called it America, and we read a big fog about Columbus and all the rest of it. I'm sure Columbus came over, but Columbus never got to America. But anyhow, this is all very confused, but that's history.

Now, how do you remedy that? You remedy that again by increasing his havingness. You don’t run this out, because it won’t run out. It will, however, run in and disappear.

And the Indians up there in Maine had a system of loaning capital for interest. And they charged an interest rate for loaning capital. They had that system even in operation then, but probably it was inherited from Europe and got over by contagion. It's quite a philosophy. But you follow this philosophy out and it says what? It says there must be a bunch of people present who have the ambition not to work. Ooh! Why, the common denominator of psychosis and neurosis is an inability to work. Oh, you mean a part of the society's going nuts? Well that's just about what happens. And they run their cycle, and just like psychotics will do, they die off. They've got to loan money and then live on the interest rate of the money.

You just have him put this postulate and the thing upon which his attention is fixed, into many, many things on the overt act-motivator basis. That is to say, have him put somebody looking at the black ridge in his-pointed toward-black ridge in his side. And then put him facing the black ridge, with the black ridge away from him. You understand there?

Now this is about the tamest sort of a safe activity a fellow could get into, he would suppose. And then all of a sudden crash, down goes the stock market or something of this sort. Actually a whole class of people was wiped out at that stock market crash. It was a class that has never reappeared. The United States is still trying to adjust itself to it.

Well, we got a black ridge and we got a guy. All right. Now, let’s set it up in such a way as the fellow is nearer than-the guy, you see, I mean, we’re talking about mock-up here-the individual is nearer the black ridge, well, that’s the motivator basis. You know, there’s a black ridge making this person fix his attention. Now, we turn it around the other way and we have the black ridge closest to the preclear and somebody looking at the black ridge, “Fix attention upon the horrible.” I mean, that’s just a geometric arrangement, I can’t draw you a picture.

England wiped out its capitalism a long time ago. But they've been doing it with great thoroughness laterally by the simple expedient of prohibiting income and outgo of funds. A capitalist is lost if you paralyze his dollar, because; or his pound, because that's all that works for him. The second you regulate the dollar and the pound, capitalism goes by the boards.

“Now put up some black ridge making you fix your attention upon it.”

Anyway, the government becomes the only capitalistic unit involved. And it proceeds to earn without working. And governments that earn without working, they go by the boards too. Anything that earns without working goes by the boards, because something is eschewing the use of effort. And as soon as you say, "Effort's no good and I'm not going to use it anymore," why, you're done.

“Now have you putting up a black ridge so that somebody else’s attention will be fixed upon it.”

Well how do people get sideways so they don't use this effort anymore? The only reason I brought up capitalism, I don't care about capitalism one way or the other. I'd as soon shoot capitalists as not. I mean, I could leave them alone. We have the effort band then is sort of defiled the second that we bring in these nobility against; you know, I mean an emotion where we will be noble against the possible degradation which we might suffer, if we permitted ourselves to be associated with or connected with these people, which we're in total communication with continually. I mean, you're just not going to believe, you just try to work that one out in terms of what communication is, and duplication. It just doesn't work out.

Well, let’s get some of the horrible things the preclear knows, so forth.

Alright; or another type of society, the military type of society, whereby; the only reason I mention these two things really, courage and nobility, they are the two guiding stars, you might say, of a society in any time and period. We have always the military and the business man. That, those two categories, you see? A social strata based upon control and ownership of production facilities, and the other one is ability to use the produce of a land because one is able to demonstrate more courage in the face of danger. And so we have, we have the military, more courage in the face of danger, and the social, aristocratic, capitalist, I don't care what you call it, strata, which is demonstrating a nobility against the mob. Now one way or the other these two things will get snarled up. And those two things are both parasitic upon effort.

Well, as we run this postulate back and forth, back and forth, back and forth; back and forth, back and forth, we’d certainly better remember that we’re adding to his havingness. We’re not trying to run it out, we’re trying to run it in. So let’s put up a lot of them.

Neither one of these characters actually want to put out any real effort. So these emotions then to some degree or another are blockers on the subject of effort. The deification of courage, that's the military. The deification of "my feet don't stink" as sort of an attitude is, well, any number of philosophies. And both of these, these units you might say, the capitalist unit; the communist, by the way, is a military group, a military type of group which desires to be parasitic upon the workers. The goal of both of these groups, the military, the communist, is to eat without production. In other words, that's to be parasitic. That's what a germ does. It becomes parasitic. And I don't think you will find that germs are in a very good state. The survival potential of a germ is terribly tenuous. Now look at, he overgages a little bit and knocks off his host. He undergages a little bit and gets knocked off himself. Latterly there are many diseases, for instance, which have disappeared from the knowledge of men. And there's some of these diseases have actually disappeared, they're just not heard of anymore.

And let’s group them all together and let’s make masses out of them. And then let’s go back to having him put quantities of a serene, even contemptuous, kind of courage around him. Lots of it. You’ll find out the bank is greedy for it.

Well now, there's an example. A disease disappears. What's a disease? A disease is a parasitic something which feeds off a host which produces. And we have then a condition whereby a production unit is terribly inhibited by somebody trying to feed off of it without producing anything for it. You see what the, what man is arguing about when he argues about politics? He's objecting to production being accomplished, and then feasted off of by non-producers. And he's continually in a state whereby he's trying to remedy this political situation. He's trying to prevent this. And he's having a rough time doing it. And he's always falling prey to units and groups, cliques, cartels, monopolies, regiments, which of course just say, "Well go on and produce, and we'll bleed you white."

Rather pathetic thing, when you begin to think about it. It is probably one of the most—was at one time before the society went to hell—one of the most valued emotions: courage. And is certainly the most dangerous, tricky emotion for an individual to assume. Too bad.

Now therefore, we're dealing then, with this business about courage and nobility, we're dealing then with parts of parasitic philosophy, which themselves divorce the individual from any real desire to go into the band of effort. This becomes very apparent as you run this. That's why the individual doesn't want to work, and so forth. There isn't any reason why work has to be arduous, you know, you can produce things and you don't have to sweat over it. Well then both of these philosophies are put into the breach to prevent people from producing, then they're used as preventers against production. Well an operating thetan produces. If he can't produce easily on an effort band, he's having a bad time of it. He has to be able to produce force particles, not just deliver force particles that he gets some place else. He has to be able to produce a force particle. And, if he can't produce one and handle it, he can't operate. And there is the soul of his operation.

But the point is that “having to face up to the horrible” is the keynote of every one of these cases that keeps coming around and telling you how horrible things are. And I call your attention to 16-G where it says, “It’s so bad over there.” Just go over into that “It’s bad over there.” That mechanism is “Fix your attention upon the horrible.”

Well, if he's got computations about having to be courageous, then he has computations about how force particles can be dangerous to him, and so we immediately slide him out of the effort band, and under the effort band, and make him the subject of effort. And he becomes the effect of effort.

Now, sooner or later on the track, an individual has come up into something that was beautiful that has turned out to be horrible or it was beautiful and horrible at once and this has hung up on the track. This can be true of night. Night can at once be beautiful and horrible. And he will have that person in suspense. Let’s say this girl, she marries a very beautiful man. You know, I mean, aesthetically very, very good-looking, who is just plain rotten all the way through, you know, horrible. And boy, this poor girl will have that fellow walking right around in the room with her all her waking hours and racking up her nightmares.

Now we take nobility, and if we indoctrinate him into an enormous belief that he has to hold himself loose from entities, demons, bodies, all kinds of bad situations and so forth, we've got him indoctrinated that he's better than this sort of thing, we have immediately again divorced him out of the force band. And his ability to act depends upon his ability to produce and handle force. See that?

Person is suspended there, you see, because “Fix your attention on the beautiful” and “Fix your attention upon the horrible.” Now, what she wants to do is fix her attention upon the beautiful and every time she does, this person who was painful to her operates as the bridge to throw her over into fixing her attention upon the horrible. So we have what we might call the “bridge personality” on the case. It may not be in this lifetime, but it’ll be in some lifetime.

Well how do we, how do we get an individual into a situation where he can't handle force? We teach him he has to be courageous, or we teach him that he's better than and has to be noble. Those are just two ways to go about it. There are many ways to go about it.

It’s those things which were supposed to be beautiful but were horrible, then, which are in suspense.

Now let me show you a very practical application of this sort of thing. You guys, ever since that nothingness was run on you the other night, have been having a good time with the sniffles. You've been having a real good time with the sniffles, haven't you? Coughing and snorting around. Alright, now let's, let's hit this just a little bit practically here, on the subject of courage.

Now, the desire to fix one’s attention upon the beautiful, the desire to be the effect of beautiful things is, like courage, another entrance into facing up to existence and is the lighter, higher level of this. And when this has become obsessive, when beauty is terribly commanding upon the individual, the individual cannot free his attention. Just to that degree, he is compulsively fixing his attention. So we slide in on the beautiful and we slide in on the horrible. And courage and appreciation of beauty are, alike, when compulsive and obsessive, the entrance points into the dwindling spiral.

Now put courage, mock-up some courage, now don't the rest of you do this. Just the people who have the sniffles please. The rest of you put your anchor points on the back corner of the room and don't think, or something, or just watch the observation. But let's not, let's not do this. I don't want the whole class down with colds. And put courage in the face of respiratory ills. Now mock it up, mock-up; (...) um-hm. Now mock-up masses of it, masses of courage, just the emotion. Put it up there again, put it up again. Don't pay any attention to it after you've put it up, just let it go. Let it drift into the bank, or do anything it wants to. Keep putting it up there, courage in the face of respiratory ills. Now the rest of you can put up courage in the face of coughing preclears.

Now, it is so common and so widespread for you to fix your attention and have your attention fixed by the beautiful-fix your attention upon the beautiful, have your attention fixed by the beautiful. It’s so common that you wouldn’t think of this as a compulsion. And that’s been a little sleeper, you know? I mean, it’s a ‘you know, everybody does it and we’re in such total agreement upon it” that it’s just about as solid as a wall. And we don’t suspect a wall of being anything. But that is the upper level of how you get a wall. There’s how you get these persistent solidities. Now, you would suspect from that, then, that MEST itself was at once beautiful and horrible. And so it is. There’s something very horrible about MEST. And there’s also something very beautiful about MEST.

Put it up there, masses of it. And again, and again, and again, lots of it. What's turning up? (...) All he is a ... asthma. Courage in the face of respiratory ills. Let's put them up there. Asthma itself is courage in the face of not breathingness. Courage in the face of death will come down to asthma any day of the week. See how this is going? Do you feel better? (I feel angry.) Hm? (I feel angry.) Feel angry? Well let's not worry about the anger, put up courage in the face of respiratory ills. You'll find this will inevitably drift into lower emotional bands. You have to continue to remind the preclear to put up courage.

Well, an individual who can’t fix his attention self-determinedly and unfix it gets trapped in it. Nobody is safe from a theta trap and nobody is safe from a body and nobody is safe from a head who cannot unfix his attention at will, who cannot turn from a beautiful scene and throw it all away. So what? So it’s beautiful.

It's just as though the whole bank was held together on courage, by this emotion alone, and by running this emotion alone the whole bank comes to pieces. Or, by running nobility. You'll find it's just sort of, the particles are like admiration particles. This is another manifestation not unlike admiration. It's a solvent. And one, when he's unable to produce this solvent, can't resolve effort. See it has, it has way up at the top a very practical use. Simply wipes out somebody else's illness, then we begin to categorize it as courage against, and that is immediately down one step.

He should be in a situation where when he looks at something beautiful, he should say, “Now I shall find this beautiful. Now I am gratified. Fine.” But everybody runs around trying to be an effect, compulsively and obsessively. An individual gets to a point, finally, where he is unable to differentiate between the beautiful and the horrible. And you get sadism, all kinds of weird things, you get the activities and conduct of a lot of people. Very strange sort of a mixture and that in itself is the MEST universe: there’s something beautiful and there’s something horrible about MEST.

These things are all slight corruptions of the emotion called serenity. As you run this, and as you run this on a preclear, he'll keep tapping every once in a while, serenity. Well if he can put up serenity up there it'll drift down into the rest of it. The key emotion of course is serenity. But makes sure he's putting serenity up there, not "being relaxed."

The entrance point into the horrible is courage. And the entrance point into the beautiful is appreciation. How do you handle these? You simply mock them up in tremendous quantity as an emotion around the preclear. And you will find to a large degree that it will dissolve his bank and very certainly, if run for five or ten hours on any case, will utterly alter his personality much for the better. I don’t care whether he’s interiorized or exteriorized, that will take place.

One of the ways to get him to understand serenity is have him put courage and nobility up in masses for a long time, and all of a sudden serenity'll show up, and he'll recognize it.

Now, how does this represent itself in human behavior? It is terribly interesting to an auditor to be able, by some of the most casual statements of the people around him, to immediately categorize their case level simply by how much they insist that he put his attention upon the horrible and, incidentally, how much they insist he put his attention upon the beautiful. People who go around insisting that you put your attention upon the beautiful are in a better state but not much better off than people who go around insisting you put your attention upon the horrible.

OK? Find the feet under your floor. Alright, now you see how this is run? Any question about how this is run? (You keep doing that and...) Yeah, you just keep doing that. How long do you keep doing that is the other one? Well, you could keep doing this on a preclear probably for a couple of hundred hours. And if you do it on a preclear for five hours, you'll change his personality.

Now, people who go around insisting that you “put your attention upon,” then, is the common denominator of these two. And if they’ve gotten to the extremity of putting your attention on the horrible and putting your attention upon the beautiful, that’s an extremity. You say the one who insists you put your attention upon the beautiful probably has about the same sense of reality as a squirrel. Unreal. This case is groping.

Now very often you'll find a preclear terrified of something. And that terror will vanish when you run courage in the face of it. A fellow's terrified of dental operations, you just have him put up courage, courage against various dental instruments, and it'll disappear. It's a solvent. (Do you just keep mocking it up as different things from that series against...) Um-hm. You don't have to be specific. And it's better not to be specific at all. (Very good. That's what I wanted to know. ...) First it's courage, and then it's courage with content, and then it's courage with a little fear in it, and here we go. (Where does that anger fit in?) Oh it goes right on down, but you're not ever interested in the preclear's anger, or you're not ever interested in a lower emotion than courage when you're running this. Sure, it shows up, alright. Let it show up. It shows up because it's dissolving. (Oh I see.) *... You just ignore... You just ignore them. This is one of those things that you just set out to run, and you go ahead and run it. (You do it in brackets...) Hm? (Is it done in brackets?) No. It's after all a quantity. This is a different type of thing, you see. What you're doing is injecting a particle into a bank...

And the one who says you must put your attention upon the horrible probably couldn’t be exteriorized unless you’re willing to put some time in on the case. If you must put your attention upon the horrible, “It’s bad over there.”

Now, the supplementary reading on this are those few paragraphs regarding this in 16-G Journal of Scientology: “It’s bad over there.” And when we add this up to fixed attention and realize that the emotion we’re shooting for is courage, why, it makes good sense as a process because it does change the personality of the individual. It does shift his personality.

Now, there is-several little packages like this. We won’t bother to go over them, because most of them are not important. But there are several little packages like this. There’s nobility. Nobility is resistance against degradation. I’ll give you an example of that:

Put some nobility up above your head.

Put some more up above your head.

And put some more above your head.

Put some more above your head.

You notice what your nobility is doing?

Female voice: Pushing down.

It’s all these emotions, sure-it’s being noble in the face of. Some of these characters who are being compulsively noble wouldn’t stand a very close inspection on their private lives, because they have to put this up all the time, so they must have a terrific amount of degradation somewhere in their vicinity. See, they’ve got to resist it.

Well, the next step is being a tramp. Now, being a tramp. It’s all very well for us to deify, in song and story (to coin a cliche), the great nobility of the aristocracy of central Europe, southern Europe and northern Europe, but having associated with these characters now and then, I can tell you that their main struggle is to differentiate between themselves and the canaille, the great unwashed, the thisa and the thata. It is an emotion which when turned upon a person automatically classifies him as a degraded person. Best thing to do with somebody who has this kind of emotion is just what they did with them. “Off with their heads!” Always will wind up.

It is not the prime principle of aristocracy, then, which brings forth a decline of a nation. The prime principle that there are some brilliant or well-blooded or well-placed or well-skilled people, who themselves have a right to direct the affairs of the nation, this is not a bad premise, you see. That actually is the way it kind of works out, if left by its own line, in a fairly ideal state. Plato’s Republic and so forth will give you examples of that.

It’s this other thing, this thing called “nobility.” They are there by a God-given right and their feet do not stink-and that means your feet do. And because their feet don’t, yours do. And when their attitude is “Well, my feet don’t stink,” as they look across the multitude which they are working or governing, they are immediately practicing an overt degradation of their fellow man and will, themselves, execute themselves by becoming themselves more degraded than the cattle on which they are preying.

And so you have the Roman aristocracy with all their yap about the unwashed and about this and about that. You have the Roman aristocracy finally degrading, in terms of virtue-using the Roman word “virtue” and its meaning-to a point where I don’t think the dogs would have spit on them in the Forum. They became far more debased than that which they were trying to debase, because we have an overt act-motivator sequence going here, see?

If you run across anybody who’s trying to get anything done, he’s trying to get something done, he’s not trying to categorize the great difference between himself and the people he faces. See that? He’s not trying to categorize this. That’s perfectly safe operating frame of mind. I mean, he’s getting something done and so forth.

Where you find nothing getting done is where the total fixation or nearly all of the fixation of the individual is upon how his possessions, his riches, his position, differentiate him from those and his main activity is in trying to impress this fact upon his fellows. And it’s wonderful when you realize it, but the guy is digging his own grave, sneer by sneer. Those sneers he is sneering are very ill-placed. Actually, this happens in a lifetime, with rather great speed. It’s under a lifetime in its length of evolution. Don’t suspect that the fellow doesn’t have a reason to have to insist. A fellow by the name of Shakespeare one time said, “Methinks the lady protests too much.” Well, methinks the nobility protests too much.

All of Europe has been made into chaos, century by century, over this. Take the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War and so on. This was the whole thing. I mean, it wasn’t anybody trying to get anything done, it was somebody trying to unsneer and outsneer somebody else on “how noble we were,” you know? Wonderful fellows.

Now, where you run into this, you run into political turmoil. Wherever you find this, wherever a set of individuals has set themselves up to be “the thing,” “the social stuff” and so on, we find this, because they set themselves up from a need to differentiate because they were afraid they were. You see, that’s a different thing, you know, than just being a good guy or being an able person or being beautiful or something of this sort-just being something. This is being something against something. Get that single difference there. So all these emotions which categorize that of “being something against something” bring a person down into the use of energy and MEST flows and a dependency upon the MEST universe.

The stock market crash in the United States as of 19— I think it was ’29, wasn’t it (I wasn’t in the country at the time), was itself an interesting manifestation, not of over-production but of the final collapse of capitalism. We don’t have capitalism anymore. People don’t even know what capitalism is in this modern decade. They don’t know what a capitalism is-they go around and they talk about a capitalist and so forth. A capitalist is a breed of cat. Capitalism is a specific philosophy. It would be an amazing thing if somebody sometime or another were actually to put out a book which defined these various “isms” in their three states of their philosophic definition, their practical activity (how they were actually conducted) and their ideological propagation use.

You know, what is a capitalist according to a communist? Well, there's a certain statement that can be made about this. What is capitalism in a philosophic sense? Another statement can be made about this. What is actually capitalism in operation? And then another statement could be made about this. You see, you’ve got three categories there. If you did this with all these “isms,” the darnedest amount of political fog would clear up and waft away.

People talk about communists-they don’t know what a communist is. They don’t know what a communist is dedicated to. I swear, probably some large percentage of the Communist Party itself-the card-carrying boys-they don’t know what a communist is. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do or what it’s really dedicated to or so forth. They’re just going around hoping that somebody will drop a crumb or a dog biscuit that they can pick up. And they’re sort of there for the ride. They haven’t any idea whither this goes.

Now, it’s the same way with capitalism. “Capitalism” is the process, of course, of loaning money, which, by accruing interest, will support a person in leisure. That is capitalism. It’s capital, investment of. Well, it means that the money works and the individual doesn’t work, because the money’s working. That’s the most elementary sort of a definition of capitalism.

There was a-very odd that there was a tribe of Indians in the United States, some say before the arrival of white men, but they should reclassify that and say before the arrival of Pilgrims, before 1602 or something on that order-1608, whenever they arrived. Because that whole coast was in good communication with Europe for many centuries. Fishing boats from northern Europe used to come over to the Grand Banks all the time. As a matter of fact, the fishermen called it America. And we’ll read a big fog about Columbus and all the rest of it-I’m sure Columbus came over, but Columbus never got to America. But anyhow, this is all very confused, but that’s history.

The Indians up there in Maine had a system of loaning capital for interest. They charged an interest rate for loaning capital. Had that system even in operation then, but it probably-it was inherited from Europe-got over by contagion. It’s quite a philosophy, but you follow this philosophy out and it says what? It says there must be a bunch of people present who have the ambition not to work. Oooh! Why, the common denominator of psychosis and neurosis is an inability to work. Oh, you mean a part of the society goin’ nuts?

Now, that’s just about what happens and they run their cycle and just like psychotics will do, they die off. They’ve got to loan money and then live on the interest rate of the money. This is about the tamest sort of a safe activity a fellow could get into—he would suppose. And then all of a sudden, crash, down goes the stock market or something of this sort.

Actually, a whole class of people was wiped out at that stock market crash. It was a class that has never reappeared. The United States is still trying to adjust itself to it. England wiped out its capitalism a long time ago, but they’ve been doing it with great thoroughness, latterly, by the simple expedient of prohibiting income and outgo of funds. A capitalist is lost if you paralyze his dollar or his pound, because that’s all that works for him. Second you regulate the dollar or the pound, capitalism goes by the boards. Anyway... The government becomes the only capitalistic unit involved and it proceeds to earn without working. And governments that earn without working, they go by the boards, too. Anything that earns without working goes by the boards because something is eschewing the use of effort. And as soon as you say, “Effort is no good and I’m not going to use it anymore,” why, you’re done!

Well, how do people get sideways so they don’t use this effort anymore?

(The only reason I brought up capitalism-I don’t care about capitalism one way or the other-I’d as soon “shoot” a capitalist as not, I mean, I could leave them alone.)

The effort band, then, is sort of defiled the second that we bring in these “nobility against”-you know, I mean, an emotion where “we’ll be noble against the possible degradation which we might suffer if we permitted ourselves to be associated with or connected with these people which we are in total communication with, continually.” I mean, this is not going to-you just try to work that one out, in terms of what communication is and duplication—it just doesn’t work out. All right.

Or another type of society, the military type of society, whereby-the only reason I mention these two things, really, courage and nobility, they are the two guiding stars, you might say, of a society in any time and period. We have, always, the military and the business man, those two categories, you see. A social strata based upon control and ownership of production facilities and the other one is ability to use the produce of a land because one is able to demonstrate more courage in the face of danger. And so we have the military: more courage in the face of danger. And the social, aristocratic, capitalist (I don’t care what you call it) strata which is demonstrating a nobility against the mob.

Now, one way or the other, these two things will get snarled up. And those two things are both parasitic upon effort. Neither one of these characters actually want to put out any real effort, so these emotions then, to some degree or another, are blockers on the subject of effort. The deification of courage: that’s the military. The deification of “my feet don’t stink” sort of an attitude is, well, any number of philosophies. And both of these units, you might say, the capitalist unit-the communist, by the way, is a military group, a military type of group, which desires to be parasitic upon the workers. The goal of both of these groups-the military or the communist-is to eat without production.

In other words, that’s to be parasitic. That’s what a germ does. It becomes parasitic. And I don’t think you will find that germs are in a very good state. The survival potential of a germ is terribly tenuous. He overgauges a little bit and knocks off his host. He undergauges a little bit and gets knocked off himself. Latterly, there are many diseases, for instance, which have disappeared from the knowledge of men. And there’s some of these diseases have actually disappeared, they’re just not heard of anymore.

Well now, there’s an example. A disease disappears. What’s a disease? A “disease” is a parasitic something which feeds off a host which produces. And we have, then, a condition whereby a production unit is terribly inhibited by somebody trying to feed off of it without producing anything for it.

You see what Man is arguing about when he argues about politics? He’s objecting to production being accomplished and then feasted off of by non-producers. And he’s continually in a state whereby he’s trying to remedy this political situation. He’s trying to prevent this and he’s having a rough time doing it. And he’s always falling prey to units and groups, cliques, cartels, monopolies, regiments, which of course just say, “Well, go on and produce and we’ll bleed you white.”

Now, therefore, we’re dealing then with this business about courage and nobility, we’re dealing then with parts of parasitic philosophy which themselves divorce the individual from any real desire to go into the band of effort. This becomes very apparent as you run this. It’s why the individual doesn’t want to work, so forth.

There isn’t any reason why work has to be arduous. You know, you can produce things and you don’t have to sweat over it.

Well, then, both of these philosophies axe put into the breach to prevent people from producing. Then they’re used as preventers against production.

Well, an Operating Thetan produces. If he can’t produce easily on an effort band, he’s having a bad time of it. He has to be able to produce force particles, not just deliver force particles that he gets someplace else. He has to be able to producer force particle. And if he can’t produce one and handle it, he can’t operate. And there is the soul of his operation.

Well, if he’s got computations about having to be courageous, then he has computations about how force particles could be dangerous to him and so he immediately-slide him out of the effort band and under the effort band and make him the subject of effort. And he becomes the effect of effort.

Now, we take nobility and if we indoctrinate him into an enormous belief that he has to hold himself aloof from entities, demons, bodies, all kinds of bad situations, oh, we’ve got him indoctrinated that he’s better than this sort of thing, we have immediately, again, divorced him out of the force band. And his ability to act depends upon his ability to produce and handle force. See that? So how do we get an individual into a situation where he can’t handle force? We teach him he has to be courageous or we teach him that he’s “better than” and has to be noble. Those are just two ways to go about it. There are many ways to go about it.

Now, let me show you a very practical application of this sort of thing. You guys, ever since that nothingness was run on you the other night, have been having a good time with the sniffles. You’ve been having a real good time with the sniffles, haven’t you? Coughing and snorting around. All right.

Now, let’s hit this just a little bit practically here on the subject of courage.

Now, put courage-mock-up some courage—don’t the rest of you do this, just the people who have the sniffles, please. The rest of you put your anchor points on the back corner of the room and don’t think or something or just watch the observation, but let’s not do this-I don’t want the whole class down with colds.

And put courage in the face of respiratory ills.

Mock it up.

Now mock-up masses of it, masses of courage, just the emotion.

Put it up there again.

Put it up again. Don’t pay any attention to it after you’ve put it up, just let it go. Let it drift into the bank or do anything it wants to.

Keep putting it up there. Courage in the face of respiratory ills.

Now the rest of you can put up courage in the face of coughing preclears. [laughter]

Put it up there. Masses of it.

And again and again and again. Lots of it.

What’s turning up?

Female voice: All the years with Remy's asthma.

All the years of Remy’s asthma.

Courage in the face of respiratory ill. Let’s put them up there.

Asthma itself is courage in the face of not-breathingness.

Courage in the face of death will come down to asthma any day of the week.

See how this is going?

You feel better?

Female voice: I feel angry.

Feel angry.

Female voice: Yeah.

Well, let’s not worry about the anger, put up courage in the face of respiratory ills.

You’ll find this will inevitably drift into lower emotional bands. You have to continue to remind the preclear to put up courage. It’s just as though the whole bank was held together on courage by this emotion alone and by running this emotion alone the whole bank comes to pieces or by running nobility. You’ll find that it’s just sort of-the particles are like admiration particles. This is another manifestation not unlike admiration. It’s a solvent. And one, when he’s unable to produce this solvent, can’t resolve effort. See, it has, way up at the top, a very practical use. It simply wipes out somebody else’s illness and then we begin to categorize it as “courage against” and that is immediately down one step.

These things are all slight corruptions of the emotion called serenity. As you run this and as you run this on a preclear, he’ll keep tapping, every once in a while, serenity. Well, if he can put up serenity up there, it will drift down into the rest of it. And the key emotion, of course, is serenity. But make sure he is putting serenity up there, not being relaxed.

One of the ways to get him to understand serenity is have him put courage and nobility up in masses for a long time and all of a sudden serenity will show up and he’ll recognize it. Okay?

Find the feet under your floor. [laughs] All right.

Now, you see how this is run? Any question about how this is run?

Female voice: You just keep doing that?

Yeah, you just keep doing that.

How long do you keep doing that is the other one?

Female voice: Right.

Well, you could keep doing this on a preclear probably for a couple of hundred hours and if you do it on a preclear for five hours, you’ll change his personality.

Now, very often you’ll find a preclear terrified of something. And that terror will vanish when you run courage in the face of it. Fellow is terrified of dental operations, you just have him put up courage against various dental instruments and it will disappear. It’s a solvent.

Female voice: We can just keep mocking it up with different things from that courage against?

Mm-hm.

Female voice: Right.

You don’t have to be specific ...

Female voice: You don’t?

. . . and it’s better notxcs be specific at all.

Female voice: It’s better. That’s what I wanted to know, that-just courage at the base of it all.

First it’s courage and then it’s courage with contempt and then it’s courage with a little fear in it and here we go.

Female voice: When does that anger kick in?

Oh, it goes right on down, but you’re not ever interested in the preclear’s anger or you’re not ever interested in a lower emotion than courage when you’re running this. Sure, it shows up. All right, let it show up. It shows up because it’s dissolving.

Female voice: What about somatics? If it turns on somatics, you just ignore the somatics?

You just ignore them. Well, this is one of those things that you just set out to run and you go ahead and run it.

Female voice: Is it done in brackets?

No. It’s after all a quantity. This is a different type of thing, you see. What you’re doing is injecting a particle into a bank.