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STATE OF MAN CONGRESS - 03

OVERTS AND WITHHOLDS

Transcript of lecture by L. Ron Hubbard SMC-3 „State of Man Congress“ A lecture given on 1 January 1960 [Based on the clearsound version only]

Now tell me something now. Did anybody get restimulated in that last lecture?

Audience: Oh.

Look, I'm terribly sorry. I'm very, very sorry. I didn't really mean for you to. The kindest thing - the kindest thing to do would just be to leave the subject alone after that, wouldn't it? Huh?

Audience: No.

Male voice: Keep your process going.

I've just been accused here of a breach of the Auditor's Code unless I continue to talk about this. Want to hear some more about this?

Audience: Sure. Yes.

All right. You're for it. You're for it - overts and withholds. How does a thetan get less space? It is a very simple mechanism. He does something which he thereafter can't do again because he mustn't, so he withholds it. And once upon a time he could reach clear out to infinity, couldn't he? And then he reached clear out to infinity and decided he had done something that he shouldn't ought to do again. You know, reach for the jam pot - „Better not do that again.“ So after that he withholds reaching for the jam pot. Right?

Well now, he continues to withhold reaching for the jam pot from there on out. So then he does something else that he shouldn't have „overted,“ and when he did that he then realized that he should not have done that so he doesn't reach in that direction anymore, does he? He withholds! He not only does not reach - that's what we kind of thought, you see, that he just really didn't reach anymore in that direction. Oh no, that isn't what he does. He withholds from reaching in that direction. So then he does something else that he says, „I shouldn't have done that,“ and he withholds from reaching.

„I'm blind! Oh well, let's see, now, if I get some auditing - if I get some auditing, well, I don't necessarily have to give up any of these withholds because I'm dangerous. But I will just sit there and the auditor will audit me. And if he audits me, why, somehow or other, mysteriously... Let's see, without my ever reaching again in any of these directions, and if I continue to withhold real hard, so as not to damage the auditor, I'll get Clear. Ouch!“

Now, that's the state he's in. That is a pc. And we can laugh because we have the solution. But until this time it was „Don't cheer, boys, the poor devils are dying.“ Get the idea? Well, we can laugh because it's ridiculous.

Some of the things which people are withholding are incredibly stupid.

Now, when I made the last lecture there were several people present - some of those in the back were saved because the PA system was down slightly and they didn't hear too well. But, most of the things that went through your mind that you were withholding appeared to be pretty darned big with a kind of a reservation on the tail end of it, „Well, it's really not so big. I could probably tell an auditor. But of course, I won't have to but I've got to, but I won't have to because, of course - no, I ... There was a fellow I knew once down in Tucson that was very sympathetic. I might be able to tell him. Um, he couldn't hear good. Now, let's see, just how would I go about doing this so as not to injure my reputation?“

Well, this is how we have failed to have as much third dynamic in Scientology as we could have. Because it's that reservation of „Who could I tell?“ which withholds one's total participation. That reservation of „I mustn't tell anybody ever anything,“ of course, just eventually separated one out. That just took him out, not only of Scientology but took him out of the human race.

Now, this is not a comment upon your particular overt or withhold. I say that seriously; it's not. But the same mechanism that you looked at with regard to who you could tell what to - that same mechanism, blown up Lord knows how large - is the criminal. I'm not trying to link you on the same chain in any way, but I'm just trying to show you, you can get a subjective reality on what this boy is all about when you realize that he has totally withheld to such a degree that he isn't at all. And he has assumed a total uncontrolled valence, or a false beingness over which nobody or anything has any control of any kind whatsoever and has moved out into this, and it just fires off automatically. See? He isn't there; he's withheld himself right out of the human race, you see? But he has this valence, or this false beingness, which he says is a self - that's not your little thing of being in Mama's valence or Papa's valence or - this is really out - outside of any livingness. He's dead! But there's this animated structure that kind of fires off on a stimulus-response. See, he's withheld himself right straight out of the human race.

He has no responsibility on any dynamic for anything. Therefore it doesn't matter what he does, and any stimuli gets any response. And there's a gold fountain pen lying there and it just leaps of its own accord into his pocket. And there's a car there with a key in the ignition and obviously key in the ignition means drive the car; he just drives it.

Now look, this fellow got there from punishment. And you in Scientology have been absolutely right: Punishment never got anybody anyplace. He got there because of enforced withholds, and these enforced withholds wound up eventually into putting every action he did on total automatic, and putting every action on total automatic, then there is no such thing as right or wrong or criminal or good or anything else. He becomes an automatic mechanism which just robots through life doing criminal actions. And you're going to punish this man? You're going to punish him into being good?

Oh no. There's only one way that that could work, and there isn't a police force in the world capable of enough violence or overts to make it workable and it's not workable anyhow because we just keep picking him up in the next life. And that's „Wherever he's found, kill him!“ You see, but that's just more of this, isn't it? And that was a stopgap.

So it was either total savagery and remove it all to the next generation, or it was be effective. And as far as criminality is concerned we're in the position right today to be effective. And it's the first time anybody has been effective.

There's - nothing is going to work of any kind whatsoever with regard to this particular personality but rehabilitation as a human being and put him back in the human race because a human race can't run with a lot of nonhuman robots roving around in its midst!

Now, that is the extreme - that and of course the insane and of course the official that goes to war because his diplomacy has stunk for ages. These criminals, these insane, cannot be handled by any mechanism the society has available except what we know. And we have just gotten to a point where we can handle this.

That gives you some sort of an idea of how far man was into the dark ages with regard to justice. But it tells you that somewhere along the line, a halt has to be halted on this subject of the automatic, self-firing personality that has no responsibility or [of] any kind on any dynamic. It makes one's flesh crawl to realize that such a person might wander in toward the automatic push button which sets off all of the guided missiles. Because basically when he's gone down into a personality of this character, the only thing he can do is confuse and destroy. Those are the last abilities of a person; the last abilities are confusion and destruction. When you see a criminal, that's what's going to happen in his vicinity: confusion and destruction.

There's all kinds of interesting automatic-firing mechanisms in a criminal intelligence. Something like this: „Oh, I will be good. I have now learned my lesson. I will now be better and I will go straight.“ That's just an automatic-firing mechanism; it has nothing to do with it. See? You just push the proper button and it says, „I will now be good. I will now go straight. Oh, please do not punish me anymore because I am now going good and going straight.“ You see?

So we all say, „Well, let's give him another chance. After all, he has admitted his guilt.“

What's admitted his guilt? What has? What little robot-gimmick machinery fired off and admitted guilt? It's just another gimmick.

Now, the person, of course, will put up some kind of a semblance of being auditable. And you've run into such a case. It evidently is auditable, goes through some sort of a propitiation, gets no better; is auditable, goes through a propitiation, gets no better. Of course, it was never auditable in the first place.

Why? Because there was nothing there to be causative. You had to find that tiny entering point of the individual where the person could be cause and increase that point up to a point where you had a person there. That's a long road.

Now, you compare the things you thought about when I was giving the last lecture to that extreme case and you see you haven't gone very far down the line. Just look it over. You know what you're doing. You know right from wrong. You can still feel. You do make some progress in auditing, great or small, so you're not even in an extreme extremis of cases. All anybody here would be hanging up on would be some little gimmick like making a pass in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but... Or maybe signing more checks than one had money in the bank. Something stupid, something minor.

But minor, mind you, out in the broad perimeter of life. And don't think for a moment that I think you think it's minor. You don't think its minor. See, you say, „Oh, I don't know. Looks pretty big to me.“ Yeah, well, that's right.

You know, man is basically good. And you know that's his difficulty. That's what's wrong with him.

I followed this thing down - I followed this thing down a long distance, and almost wept when I finally discovered that the fellow was withholding himself because he didn't want to do harm to others.

Society has believed that man withheld himself because he was afraid he would be punished. But when we examine that a man can only be cause - you'll have to examine that one in your spare time. It is too incredible to be - embrace in a single gasp. Nothing can be done to you. Honest. And when we examine it in that light, we must then realize that a man is withholding himself not because of fear of what will be done to him - that he is just excusing things with. He's just paying a breath to this, he's just saying, „Well, that's the way it is. That's why I am doing this. If I steal a car I'll be punished, and therefore I won't steal any more cars.”

And the cops go on the basis that if they catch a kid early enough, why; he ceases to be a criminal and, you know, and he won't steal any more cars if he has been scared. And even some of you have gone for this philosophy. I found the kid later on, you see, and it hasn't done anything. It just made him be more vocal on the subject, you see?

Now, if he's brought to a position where he himself on his own volunteering cannot withhold anymore - you see, he - when he himself can no longer withhold, he's out of control.

Now, we get this very interesting regimen here: It's the ability to selectively and knowingly withhold that we are rehabilitating. We're not trying to shake everybody down for all of his secrets. Different look, isn't it?

When a person is no longer able to withhold he is no longer able to be good, so he just abandons himself into a total degradation, and says, „Well, I'm - I'm just no good. I'm...”

I ran into a criminal one time - I think it was in Wichita (I was processing him; he had a paralyzed left side) - he was no longer able to withhold his primary dramatization which was to beat up fellows in alleys and take their money. He'd find a fellow near an alley or in a room, he'd beat him up and take his money. He couldn't do anything else. He had even gone to a point of paralyzing one whole side of his body to keep from doing it, and it still hadn't worked! So, he'd just abandoned the whole thing, and he'd just given it all up and gone over into synthetic valences and wasn't there anymore, wasn't accountable, couldn't be responsible for it, anything of the sort; he was a criminal.

All right. So, man is basically good.

Now, somebody comes along and teaches him what being good is. That's quite a trick. The only moral codes you have in Scientology have to do with auditing, and that's a technically moral code if you want to put it that way. If you don't audit that way, auditing doesn't occur.

But please call to my attention my own words if I ever, in some lapse of God-'elp-us, write a moral code of what being good consists of: step A, B, C, D. Get the idea?

People really start skidding when they go up mounts and get the hot dope out of the lightning zoks. Because whenever you run into a moral code you run into violations of it as a code. „Honor thy father and thy mother.“ Well, that's all right. That's a nice thought. That's sweet. But unless it's accompanied with „Honor thy children,“ it's a stuck flow. Doesn't work! It's not something that can be broadly applied. That's the frailty of a moral code.

For instance, somebody says, „Thou shalt not kill.“ Great, You like steak? Well? Do you like steak?

Audience: Yes.

All right, thou shalt kill then. Oh, but they say, „Well, they didn't mean that.“ Oh yeah, that's the trouble. with these moral codes: They just didn't mean that. They didn't mean it, you know? There's differences. There's variations.

You say, „Well, thy - thou shalt not kill thy feller human beings.“

„Oh, that's what you mean? Oh, 'You shalt not kill thy fellow human beings.' All right,“

„Attention! Squads east! Squads west! To the rear hup! To the rear hup! To the rear hup! Here's a gun. Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Ready on the firing line. Fire! It's patriotic, son.“

„Yeah, but how about this thing 'Thou shalt not kill'?“

„Well, they were Japs.“

„Oh, Japs? They're not human beings then?“

„No, Yes. No. Yes.“

Now look, every time you lay down one of these broad ones whereby you have a code that says, „Thou shalt not“ and „Thou shalt“ and „Thou shalt not“ and „Thou shalt“ and „Thou shalt not“ then the shalts become shalt-nots and the shalt-nots become shalts until all of a sudden everybody goes adrift, and „being good“ is the equivalent of being, oh, I don't know, a Turk pirate, or an archbishop, or almost any pursuit of lower activities.

Now, you have a problem just in this one fact: the interpretation of what being good is. And I think it was Dianetics that first laid this down. Now, this happens to be a fairly workable one, providing you don't work at it so hard day and night that it wears your wits out. And that is: Good would be the greatest benefit for the greatest number of dynamics involved in any given situation, in other words, the optimum solution. The greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics. Now, we've known that for a very long time.

Well, you can work your way through on this sometimes and you can kind of make yourself come out right when you shouldn't occasionally, but the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.

I remember vividly hanging whirling dervishes just as fast as I could get my hands on whirling dervishes. Any time in the Middle East that you were trying to get going on some kind of a military expedition, out of the desert would come the whirling dervishes, and they would say to your troops, „Lie down. Go away. Skip it. After all you are now attacking the bloodline ruler of the prophet Buluhya,“ and so forth. And - in other words, you were just dealing with a bunch of lousy spies or something of the sort, so you'd just hang the whirling dervishes.

Well, that's an overt act, basically, unless you realize that if you let the whirling dervishes come in and disrupt your troops, then the order and discipline of the entire area and district that you were associated with would just go by the boards and some king, satrap, sultan, Lord knows what, that had usurped some power and he was busy killing people as fast as he could exercise his eunuchs and so forth, you know, just execute, execute, execute, execute, execute, you know, tax, tax, tax, tax, disrupt all the trade. Those boys used to have a wonderful idea: They thought government consisted of taxing everybody all the time of everything they had. I don't know. I don't think any governments since that time have had that idea. But they totally lost the idea of what a government was. And a government was - is simply and totally a body of men working for the public good, and serving the public. And they kind of miss that one, you know? They get elected, you know, and they think somebody elected them to be somebody. No, they elected them to serve the rest of them. They don't get that idea very well, and it kind of drops out of sight every now and then and you have to punch it back up and put it back in line again.

But all right, if you didn't kill the whirling dervishes, you didn't have any troops and the whole district was upset, and all of a sudden the men, women, children were all starving to death and the trade was stopped and everything had gone boom. So, did you kill whirling dervishes or didn't you? See, was it an overt act, or it wasn't.

Well, obviously it couldn't have been an overt act but at the same time it was an overt act. Get the idea?

But you had to figure it out on the optimum solution. Was it more harmful to the greater number of dynamics to get rid of this particular set of whirling dervishes than not to get rid of them? And you acted accordingly.

Now, every time you have done that, you've come out all right. See, you haven't had anything to worry about when you did that. So, you said, „Well, that was in the line of duty and that was the way I was supposed to do it. And I did it!“ Ah, it's the things that you did and then you said, „Oh, I didn't do that. I'm - does bad. I regret it. Wish I hadn't done that. Don't know what was the matter with me. Didn't have anything to do with the dynamics.“ Get the idea? Those things are the overt acts.

And, boy, they are so hidden! They are so hidden! A person absolutely buries some of these things so deep that although he knew about them all the time - he's walking along the street and he says, „Well, got a clean conscience. I've told all. I told my auditor about Ruth. Henry. I told the auditor about that bank thing. I told the auditor about what I did to that cat when I was a little boy. I told the auditor about, yes, stealing the apples from the old lady. You know? Yeah, should feel a lot better than I do feel but... Let's see, and I told the auditor about - oh, yes, told the auditor about being nasty to my mother, and putting the bucket of soapsuds all over the back steps so that she'd slip and fall.”

„Yeah, I'm pretty cleaned up. Scientology doesn't work very good; I just don't feel very good. Something wrong here. But I've told him everything anyhow. I've done what Ron said had to be done. And there's nothing else.”

„Oh, no! No. Oh well, that - that was just one of those things, and there wasn't anything you could do about it and... Well, I just wasn't myself. Just wasn't myself. That's what that was. No need to tell him about it because - just upset him.”

„Just upset him. That's right. Just upset him. Well, I'll just tell myself about it.”

„I'm - funny, like I - I kind of knew about that all the time, but I just never seemed to call it to mind. You know, and I wonder why I didn't call it to mind. It seems to be very peculiar.”

„Well, it's probably something that was done to me way back in the past, and therefore I did it then and it probably is so far out of my perimeter of behavior that I don't have to worry about it. God, I've got a headache!”

„Well, anyhow I've - that didn't have very much to do with me so we don't have to do anything about that one. Now, I've done everything Ron said, so now I should get Clear pretty soon. Well, maybe I'll feel better about it next session!”

„Now, how the devil did I ever get into such a thing anyhow, you know? Could that have been I? Could that have been me that did that? No, that couldn't have been me. You know, I think I'm dreaming the whole thing up! Oh, I'll tell him, Ah, that makes me feel - oh, Christ! I can't tell him!“

That's the one! That's the one that's going to get you. But just go on and ruin your reputation. Throw yourself on the pikes and skip it!

Now, what's the keynote - what's the keynote - we'll talk about this later in the congress but what's actually the keynote of such an experience?

This is badly stated because we have too many connotations for the word responsibility, and the only reason we can do this trick flow is because I finally have found out the exact anatomy of what responsibility is and we can run it in other terms, much better terms that preclears respond to very rapidly and come up the line. Because you've run responsibility on a lot of preclears and they didn't go anyplace. Well, that's just because they thought responsibility was something else. Well, I've had to be able to get exactly what definition of responsibility works as a process. That was the trick.

But it's a matter, shall we say, basically of responsibility. And the things a person couldn't take responsibility for are, of course, the things that are most alien to him. And he does something, he can't take responsibility for it and he doesn't know what the devil got into him, lie can't take responsibility for it but he did it, but he didn't do it, but he did it, but he didn't do it but he couldn't have done it! And that's inevitably an overt act. And one of the things he can't tell you is what it's an overt act against.

You say, „All right. Which one of the dynamics or which person is this thing you've done, an overt act against?“

„Oh, well, nobody really. Myself possibly. Nobody else. I'm the one that suffered for it. Nobody else.“

And that's just the whole thing. He just can't even fit these things to the dynamics. It's a missingness of responsibility. There has to be a certain amount of responsibility present to have memory.

Now, identity is one of the big clues to all of this. Responsibilities on identity is a tremendous process. This is - this is a - this is one of the great processes, if run right. But when you no longer feel responsibility for a person you have been and now are not, you of course forget him or her That person is no longer extant, even in memory, because one is no longer responsible.

The unreality one runs into on the whole track. And these people that just say, „Live before? No, I've never lived before. I can't get the slightest idea of any past lives. I never lived before. I have no reality on it. I'll tell you intellectually I have had people and even preclears that have told me that they have lived before. And for the benefit of the auditing and the case, why, I will take it for granted that they have lived before. But not for me. I mean, after all, I've just...“

You're just looking at a terrific lack of responsibility on identities. That's all. And the second you improve responsibility for identity this person's whole track memory turns on. That's what's got us into whole track in the first place, you know?

Just as a side note, I was getting - I was getting amnesia. I couldn't remember some places. You know, I'd say, „What was my house address in 1610? I'm going crazy, losing my mind. Let's see. Yeah, it was 22 Athenian Road, Athens. Yeah, that was my address in - that was my address in 351 B.C. Yeah, that's right. And my address then was so-and-so and then we moved to so-and-so and so forth. And then the next life it was so-and-so and so-and-so. I can't remember my address in 1610! I'm going mad.“

That's - I've had one goal, by the way, in processing and so forth. Just to get these amnesia spots cleaned up, you know? I know I'm nuts!

Then I run into somebody that says, „Past lives“ Or somebody that says, „I've got a pretty good reality on having lived before. I've run into a facsimile.“

You see, we just get - all we're looking at is degrees of responsibility, that's all, for identity, for beingness, for life, for time and so forth. Just degree of responsibility; that's all it amounts to. One is unwilling to take responsibility in certain zones and areas, one forgets.

A person with a bad memory has a bad level of responsibility, and that's one for you to put down in your book. Their responsibilities are poor. In other words, responsibility and memory, responsibility and identity, so forth: these things go right straight together. Irresponsibility and amnesia and so forth; these things go together. And that's what, basically, a lot of this is about.

Now, I - I have had that as an auditing goal to get a lot of these things patched up and so on. And when I get audited and so on, why, it's generally to put together things of this character and a half a dozen other things, because I'm going for OT and getting not enough auditing to get there. I'm mad, mad about it.

You're mad - you're mad because you're not getting enough processing. You ought to hear me sometimes. I frankly don't know what my address was in 1610, see? Maybe it was the county jail. Probably was.

We fool ourselves all the time. We fool ourselves continually about these things. We fool ourselves about life and fool ourselves about our motives and so forth. But every time and everywhere that we fool ourselves, we are simply being irresponsible for the dynamics one way or the other. And of course, the first dynamic is one of the dynamics.

Now, the fellow who embroiders you a fancy fabric of romanticism he isn't doing you any harm. But the fellow that says to you, „I don't have to do anything about you because I am not responsible for you. You live your life and I'll live mine“ - that fellow's doing harm. Because, basically, individuals do not live alone. They can't live alone. That's it.

You were never unhappier than the last time you flew out into the firmament and went past cloud nine and met no friends on it. Or a few hundred years ago when you, swallowed up by various propaganda systems, decided to go look for heaven and meet Saint Peter or something like that, see? You got an idea after a while you'd had it, because you didn't find him. I bet there's more thetans going around even now, you know, saying, „Gee-whiz. No gates, you know?“ I don't know what theta trap that was that had gates. And of course, the trick on - I'm sorry if I abuse your religious sensibilities. Actually, I'm not at all, but I will say that just to be polite.

If there's anything that gets my goat, it's somebody that will foul people up to such a degree that they can't find their way around. Or who put out a philosophy saying that „You can do what you want to do in this life and mess up what you want to in this life. It doesn't matter, because you will never have to pay for it. You're not ever going to live again.“

And then, by golly, you who didn't straighten out - you were - you were the head of the whole school system in the whole district, and you could have straightened out the various abuses amongst the teachers, and you had this philosophy, you know, and, „I've never lived, never going to live again. Never lived before. I'm just here, and I'm head of this. And when I die I'm dead. And when I'm gone, I go to heaven or hell or some place to my just reward, and that's all there is to it and ...“

You were head of the school system. You step under a truck or something like that, or eat some of these best-advertised products on TV, go by the hoards, pick up a body and Miss Gooch and all the Miss Gooches that you had ample opportunity to straighten up are now teaching you.

Now, that’s a very narrow, superpersonalized attitude about it. But I had a very, very well educated, apparently very learned professor of physics of Columbia University tell me that he had never worried about atomic fission particularly, because it - he'd be dead before anything happened to Earth. And didn't matter whether he was killed by the atom bomb or by some other means didn't matter because he wasn't long for this world. And he died a short time afterwards. And I imagine now here he is a kid in New York or something like that pushing up along the line and believe me somewhere back in his consciousness is some little, tickle, tickle, whir-click, you know? Every time he reads in - the bomb, „Disarmament Proposed,“ you know? Its right on his track he's just not taking responsibility for it - was his conversation with me about the subject of teaching some of his students some responsibility for their mechanical advantages and for their machinations on the subject of atomic fission. I told him he ought to teach them some responsibility in the field of the humanities if they were going to fool around in the field of the sciences. And he said, oh, pooh-pooh-pooh, he was going to be dead, you see, and all this rigmarole. And here he is. He must have some inkling of this, see?

That's all very well to sail along up the track with no responsibilities whatsoever expecting to land someplace, but nobody's going to be very happy doing it. Their responsibilities and their memory are actually not adequate to the situation - to the situation of their own livingness. That's all that it amounts to.

Now, what is an overt act? An overt act - you could classify it in various ways. You could say an overt act is something that was not for the greatest good on all of the dynamics. Something of this sort. Or something which inhibited the future survival of; or you could say an overt act was giving something an experience which it couldn't experience. There are various ways of doing this, but there's no reason to define it, because you know all about it! Now, that's the trick, that's what it's all about.

Now, the thing that was difficult to do was to define responsibility so that it couldn't miss as a process. See, that was the trick. All right. Now, we got that. Now, the other one will come out.

So, there's no sense in defining what an overt act is and therefore a moral code is just that much wasted lead pencil, stylus or wax tablet or stone or hammer or chisel or whatever it is they write them on. Because everybody knows what an overt act is or they wouldn't suffer from them. You know, an overt act is what you suffer from, and that's about as far as you could define the thing, you see?

The thing which you are suppressing and mustn't tell somebody must have been an overt act! See that? That's what an overt act is. An overt act is that thing which a person feels he'd better not do again. Simple as that.

Now, wherever you try to define it further than that you get into trouble. Man is basically good. He restrains himself; restrains himself; down to the point where he loses himself. And after that, unfortunately, the only real evil takes place. Having lost himself; there's nobody there representing him but an automaton which is consciencelessly going through a series of motions, and you get criminality.

So, a basic - a basic overt act could be said to be irresponsibility for identity. Now there - I'm afraid there isn't anybody in this room that's committed any real ones.

Female voice: I don't know about that.

But I'll make you a bet that there's nobody in this room - there's nobody here would have that much confidence in himself. In other words, I don't think you'd have that much - as much confidence in your overt act record as I have in it. Do you get the idea? That's because I have an exterior view to it. I have a pretty good idea what's been done and what hasn't been done on the whole track line.

There was probably nothing terribly wrong with somebody dreaming up the plan - the last plan that was dreamed up that had to do with ice cubes and removal of whole civilizations, and transplantations of whole peoples and handling of excess populations and so forth throughout the planets, and redistribution of skills, and body form and all of this sort of thing. One of these things that couldn't have been worked out on a UNIVAC or an ENIAC even if it was hooked up to a Remington electric shaver.

So anyhow, this plan - inevitably, men'll - and beings will work on plans - this plan happened to have the drawback that it was so good and required so much goodness and integrity on everybody's part that there weren't any people around good enough to carry out the plan so therefore the only way the plan could be carried out was with total viciousness, which made, of course, the whole plan into an overt act.

So, sometime somebody conceives something and it becomes - it becomes an overt act merely because he didn't foresee where it was going. That isn't true of all overt acts. But having done them out of regard for your fellow man, your fellow women, you busily withhold them.

And one of the reasons you don't tell anybody is because you think it'll hurt them. That's an interesting thing, isn't it? Look it over. You say it would shock or harm the auditor, or it would shock or harm somebody else if this were to become known. Now, how much evil do you suppose that continues on the track, huh? Don't you think that's more harmful? Don't you think that's more harmful than the immediate thing?

And as far as that's concerned, you actually can't harm auditors - not possible - except in one way, and that's make no progress. An auditor will stand into buzz saws and baths of liquid air as long as he thinks he's making progress and getting wins. About the only way you can harm an auditor is give him loses, loses, loses, loses.

We found that out in training classes. We found - we usually have two or three old-time auditors around that have just had too many loses, and we snap them back by giving them a few wins, and it works fine. They come right back up!

There's nothing more wonderful than watching an auditor who is absolutely convinced that he is tired to death of auditing and wants nothing more to do with auditing than to watch him get a nice, big win! And he says - he says, „Well,“ he says, „any more candidates? Any more candidates?“ promptly and immediately.

I know I'd - always have had wins of one character or another, big ones, little ones and so forth. I didn't know my enthusiasm could go up in such a steep rising climb, because I'm on a diet of them now. I mean, I'm just on a diet of them. It's just a matter of what case - what case do you want a win on. You know? You want a win on such and such a case. Well, all right. Process it, that's all.

Once in a while I find my moral purity getting in my road, even as you will, you see? You say, „Well, I don't know. I don't know. You know? She really fixed this guy up, you know? I don't know whether I ought to process her or not. You know, why should I do that?“ You know?

And inevitably, if you think it around just a little bit further, you'll find out that in 1302 when you were - when you were a ward of the court of such and such a place, you knew this guy, see? And you've got an overt act that absolutely parallels hers. And of course, you can't take responsibility for the preclear because you're not taking responsibility for the overt act that you have. You get the idea?

Well, it looks - a healthy view of this thing - that it's a fairly easy climb out of the rat hole. It is. All you've got to do is first, strip the case down of its overts and withholds, present lifetime, straighten it up, smooth it out from a standpoint of that, run Responsibility on every one of them that comes up (and I'll tell you more about how to do that later), but don't let this case come up with: „Well, lets see, I stole a car when I was twelve. Yes. Well, I'm glad to get that off my chest.“ Oh, yeah?

Not this auditing command, but you would have to do something of this sort: „What part of that incident could you be responsible for?“ And run it flat. And where do we go from there?

Well, you pick up the next one he gives you and locate that and argue him out of it, and then flatten that one and get his responsibility in that zone and area fully restored and straightened out. Get the idea?

You just don't strip a guy down of overts and motivators and withholds and just let it all go, go, go, you see? You just don't keep stripping him down of all of his data and then not running anything on it and just skip the rest of it. You get what would be wrong with that? There'd be plenty wrong with that.

Because all a confession is, is the first gradient step of taking responsibility for it. That's just the first edge in, and getting him to tell you about it is just to start the process! And you could practically kill somebody by getting him to tell you just overts and withholds endlessly, strip them all off the bank and then never run any Responsibility on it at all. You could practically kill somebody with this thing. It's the dirtiest trick that could be done to anybody - never to run any Responsibility of any character on these overts and withholds, see?

Now, I'm not saying any - any organization on Earth does that.

And the other thing you've got to rehabilitate - after you've rehabilitated responsibility, you've got to rehabilitate the ability to withhold! After you've broken him down you've got to put him back together again, see? Because it's only his ability to withhold that has kept him good. And that's very important.

If a person is still able to restrain himself from committing antisocial acts, he's in good condition. It's the person who no longer can that is the criminal.

So, it's very simple what you have to do to straighten out a case. Of course, this doesn't finish the case off; this doesn't clear the case. This merely sets the case up to be cleared.

But the steps are very simple: Break down an overt and a withhold that the individual has, run Responsibility on it; find another overt and withhold, present lifetime, run Responsibility on it; another overt-withhold, run Responsibility on it; another overt-withhold, run responsibility on it. When you've got that all set you've got him down to a point of where he's just obsessively confessing, you see - he wakes up in the middle of the night and wants you notes to confess some more - then it's time for you to get in and pitch, you see, and rehabilitate his whole ability to withhold. In other words, having poured the garbage into the ditch it's about time that you let him put up his own tailgates.

Now, that's the essence of getting a case on the road, and there's no case that can stand up against this. You've got them all now. If the case can talk, knock! you've got it. I don't even care if the case doesn't want auditing; you've still got him as a case.

Take any policeman, or take any anything anyplace and you've got him in-session before you know it. I'm taking my revenge out on all the bad press we have ever had by - I break down every newspaper reporter who comes into my hands these days and put him in-session instantly on his own overts and withholds against Dianetics and Scientology.

Now, that actually is the way you start a case. And I figure that you figured someday I'd possibly come up with some sort of a kickoff and that is the kickoff for a case. There's numerous tricks and ways and means of doing this, but actually they're just as crude as getting an overt and a withhold and running Responsibility on it, getting another overt-withhold, running Responsibility on it. You keep this up for a while, you'll have that case in-session, and the more you do it, why, the faster they move. Sooner or later you're going to have to rehabilitate their ability to withhold, even from you, and you've got it made.

Well, I have ruined you today, giving you all this data on the first day. We have nothing then for the second and third days. And I'm very sorry that your banks are so restimulated. (How insincere can a guy get, huh?)

And I'm very - I am very happy, however, to see you here. Basically I've given you now everything that I was going to give you at the congress here, and there's nothing much else to tell you, and so we needn't worry about it too much and you can go to sleep peacefully tonight and realize there are no shockers in store for you tomorrow at all.

Now, if you are too restimulated tonight to sleep, why, just be comforted by the thought that there are others in the same boat. And tomorrow, sometime tomorrow, I will try to run you a Group Process that won't take the edge off - it'll probably make it worse - but it'll make - it'll make things much clearer to you.

In the meanwhile, thank you for coming, and I think so far we've had a good first day, and I wish you a lot of luck in your seminars this evening.

Thank you very much.

[End of tape]