Thank you.

How are you tonight?

We have today a very, very solemn and sad subject to cover — the descent of man. And in your hands at the moment, as have been passed out by the seminar leaders and others, you have slips of paper. These paper slips come from pads of such charts and these pads are so composed so that an auditor in auditing can keep a very accurate track of his preclear and make notes as to what he is doing with that preclear. The pad you have or the slip of paper you have in your hand is a new chart.* I've already discussed this chart, already talked about it, but there you see a graphic representation of the descent of man. But let's take a happier look at it and call it the ascent of man.

Audience: Fine.

Now, we'll take a look at that chart and we will see that a great many values or ideas have been fitted into their consecutive places and we have, in effect, a gradient scale of ability. Now, if you call this anything else but a scale of ability you'll be in trouble. Why? Because a person is not insane simply because he hides something. A person is not sick simply because he's trying to protect something. Now, he could get sick in trying to protect something and he could get sick in trying to hide something. But that is not our concern.

Good. Did I ruin anybody really?

That is a chart of ARC. It is the same old chart of ARC that we've been working with for five years which was originated with the writing of the first book and became ARC in July of 1950, which was a long time ago. And we have borrowed the basics of this chart from Dianetics and we are using it in Scientology. And this chart represents the degree that a person can experience — the degree that a person can experience — affinity, reality, and perform communication. Now, that's — is merely a gradient scale. And the values which are on this chart from top to bottom, from bottom to top, are simply a gradient scale of that ARC triangle.

Audience: No.

The most fundamental thing you could say about the ARC triangle is that it is impossible — impossible — to communicate in the total absence of an agreement of some kind. No communication is possible without an agreement of some kind. And no agreement is possible unless there is affinity of some kind or type. And no affinity is possible without a communication of some kind.

Ah well, I will. (audience laughter)

Now, you see how that works out? Now, did you ever try to talk to somebody that you didn't know, had never seen and didn't know where they were? Well, now that would be trying to communicate in the absence of agreement. At least we have to have an agreement on location before we can communicate.

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

• Editor's Note: A copy of this chart can be found in the appendix.

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

And now you possibly know of somebody in your past who did you in or you did in and who is out of your life and you'd just rather not think about him. Well now, think of your attitude — your communication attitude — about that person. Do you want to talk to that person? Don't want to talk to that person. That's the affinity factor — you don't like that person. That person — nah! So, you have an absence of affinity and you don't have any communication. So every time we drop out a corner of this triangle, we drop out the other two corners. It's just as nice a neat little plan as you ever saw in your life.

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

The only funny part of it is that it happens to be a very broad highway on the road back to ability. It isn't just a cute datum. It works. And as long as we pay attention to this triangle and as long as we process in connection with this triangle, we then achieve remarkable successes in enhancing and increasing the ability of Homo sapiens. And then increasing the ability of the beingness that he really is.

Audience: Yeah.

ARC: affinity, reality and communication. Great deal to be learned from that. If a person knew all the factors involved in affinity, reality and communication he could probably communicate with anything.

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

Now, there are several little maxims that jump up concerning this. One of the most notable is: When in doubt, communicate. Apparently it's always better to communicate than not to communicate. Because when you stop communicating, you acquire mass on the subject. But if you want to acquire mass, stop communicating. Do you see this? You stand up to a man and you've been discussing things with him and he's rather a violent sort of a man and you all of a sudden say, "I refuse to talk to you anymore," and then just shut up. The next thing you know, you're going to get some mass — a more violent representation.

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

But the actuality is, is you'll have a preclear who's sitting there with a huge ridge in front of his face, you know. And you say, "All right. Shut your eyes. Now, what do you see?"

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

He'll say, "Nothing."

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

You say, "What do you see?"

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

And he'll say, "Nothing. Nothing except this blackness."

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

How'd he get it? He didn't get it by starting communication, he got it by stopping it.

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

Funny part of it is, is you could originate any number of communications and if they just sort of dwindled away and so on and there was nothing much left to talk about or talk to, why, there's no liability — you mean your interest is simply off of the subject now and so on — there's no liability to this at all.

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

But you start communicating and then stop communication because you have a good reason to stop communication, and you've got a ridge. The best definition I know of for a barrier is something which stops communication. That's a definition of a barrier. A barrier is that which stops communication. Very often an individual is so anxious about communications himself that he gets into this alarming state. He starts to talk to somebody and he feels like he's being throttled or he feels a sudden mass hitting across the mouth. The body is a barrier and it will stop communication. As long as you use it to communicate with, however, it can't stop communication because something is in control of it that isn't stopping communication.

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

But we find many people in the interesting and obsessive state of having to stop communication. It wouldn't matter who was communicating or about what, they would have to stop communication. And this is simply the dramatization of a barrier. For instance, the dissemination of Scientology finds, in many places and points in the society, people who simply gibber. And they say they are angry about this or angry about that; or they say, "That's a cult, that's a religion, it's no good, and you shouldn't have anything to do with it." And they go on like this — and that's all very curious, because these people don't know anything about Scientology, you see? This is a fascinating thing. They're talking out of an enormous fund of no data. And they see these communications going out, they see people talking to people interestedly on a subject, they see written material around and they see people getting together and talking together and being friendly and so forth — and this must stop! And it wouldn't matter if it were Scientology or somebody had simply dreamed up a new way to knit — you'd always find some of these barrier people jumping up and finding something terribly wrong with this new way to knit. They simply have to stop communication.

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

Now, why do they have to stop communication? They have to stop communication because communication is in progress. Please learn that, if you learn nothing else. They stop communication because a communication is in progress. That is why they stop communication. These people have an obsessive barrier-ness and the human body, although we don't know anything about the human body and care less, the human body is apparently obsessed in some cases on this subject. It has to stop communication. It's just as though it had a great many automatic barriers that suddenly leap up in the air and get in front of a fellow. This fellow says, "Well, let's see, I think I will tell her how much I love her," and all of a sudden he can't talk. You know, he'd say, "Thh!" Now, where the dickens did that come from, you see? Now, how did that come to be? It came to be very simply, indeed. The body just suddenly said gnnk! He thinks, "Now I am going to communicate," and the body goes gnnk! and the body will shut off the communication to the degree that the person wants to — has to — communicate. It's very fascinating, you know? I mean, the fellow says — he's trying to say, "The house is on fire." You see immediately what happens.

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

One time a few years ago in a war that everybody fortunately has forgotten, a submarine appeared on my port bow — it just appeared. We'd been hanging over it for some time and it ran up its periscope. The first sign they used to make, they used to throw up a patch of oil and then run the periscope up through the oil so as not to leave any salt scum or anything like that on their periscope lens, you know. So a blob of oil appeared and the fellow who was running the engine room telegraphs on the bridge was the only fellow looking in that direction. And he saw this blob of oil appear and he thought that was strange and interesting. We were going very slowly, we were almost dead in the water, and then right up through this big blob of brown oil on a blue sea comes a periscope — swswswswhhh — and looks around in every direction but at our ship! If it had turned another ninety degrees it would have read the biggest doggone 422 that you'd ever seen, fully magnified for the skipper. But anyway, the man on the engine room telegraphs is the only person who observed this incident in its various steps. And he stood there . . . (pause) (audience laughter) The bridge was absolutely crammed with men because we were at general quarters. But nobody was looking right down there; they were looking out there, you know. And the fellow on the engine room telegraphs would say, "Thh." I finally noticed this strange performance and I was all set at this moment, you see, the second I saw this — flank speed and drop a depth charge right ... Even if it blew our own stern off — that was fine, you see — and I said, "Khh!" That was the awfulest mess of noncommunication! It finally came off all right. We dropped a depth charge and so on, but we were laughing about this for days. Nobody could talk!

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

Well, what was happening there? We were merely getting the body's — it feels a tension or an urgency and then it shuts off communication. And a person is, after all, using the body's voice, so the body is perfectly capable of doing this. Well now, we get this condition just a little more deteriorated and we get this kind of a thing: a total and continuous mask or screen of some sort and we say to this fellow, "Be three feet back of your head so we can do Route 1 and get you in good shape," and this fellow says, "What are you talking about? I — I, uh — I'm not going anyplace." Well, what's happened? The body's got a barrier here and a barrier here and it's simply shutting off communication.

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

Now, the cure for it oddly enough is communication, not not-communication. It is a condition of not-communication but if we continue to validate not-communication, we just get more not-communication. Well, the remedy for it is communication. It's an oddity — although it is not the best solution, it's just a test solution — that when these screens appear around the individual, it is an oddity that just Hellos and Okays to the screen will tear them up and do various things to them. Now, the oddity is that this will not banish the condition — it simply tears up the screen. The reason it won't banish the condition is because the screen is being manufactured by an automaticity which can manufacture more screens. And it can almost, and usually does, manufacture them as fast as the auditor is trying to tear them up. The thing to treat in this respect, if we're trying to exteriorize somebody, is the automaticity which provides the screen. Hellos and Okays to that produces some very interesting results because you're disabusing something of the idea that communication is bad.

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

Now, there are two crimes in this universe and all crime stems from these two things: to be there and to communicate. Those are the two crimes of this universe — thereness and communicatingness. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the criminality of communicating, you should realize that the law is powerless to act in the absence of a statement by the criminal. It can only punish if an utterance is made.

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

The Constitution of the United States has the Fifth Amendment and it tries to remedy this. Now, this man doesn't have to testify. But if you will look over law or if you will talk it over with a lawyer who knows his business, he will tell you that there's only one way to really incriminate anyone: He has to confess. He has to make a statement that he has done it. And as long as you do not make a statement of any kind — that is to say, you haven't prior to an interrogation written your best pal all about it in your own handwriting, you know — if you haven't put out pamphlets saying, "Now, boys, we're going to overthrow the US government by force," such as the Commies carelessly used to do . . . (That's a very fine thing for the country that they did it, but nevertheless they had a lot of literature which more or less confessed this and this literature is about all they're hung on.)

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

Now here we have this condition of punishment only when communication exists. But this can invert too, and somebody who is alive and who is demanding communication can become very furious about not-communication, you see. But punishment is, you might say on a broad line, centered on the subject of communication. If you start communicating and then stop communicating, you can be punished. Or if you communicate and say, "Well, I did that and that's it," and confess and sign it all up and so forth, you could also be punished. This universe is very, very heavy on punishment of communication. And this is an oddity, isn't it, since it's a barrier universe.

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

Why should it punish any variety or state of communication? Because communication is the only way out. To continue an entrapment it is necessary, then, to punish communication or some phase of it — to enforce or inhibit communication. In order to continue a barrier, to continue a trap in existence, you would have to debar communication. So therefore, a universe which operates all too often as a trap resolves, and escapement from that universe occurs, when communication is expertly and knowingly handled. And when it is not well handled, it's punished. Now, therefore we get a fixation in this universe.

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

Now, thereness is simply a part of communication. It is the creation of a station or a terminal from which one communicates. And that is thereness. So thereness and communicatingness are punishable things by those who desire to entrap. And they are good things to those who have some tolerance for and some desire for freedom.

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

So, we get the make and break of personality, of beings, above and below a theoretical line. And above this line a person would find nothing terribly wrong with thereness and he would certainly find nothing wrong with communicating or being communicated to. And above this line he can survive as himself in full knowingness. And below this line we would have an obsession to punish or a feeling that there should be punishment for thereness and communication.

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

And that line and from there on down is succumb. And you see this marked on those pieces of paper which you're holding in your hand — survive and succumb. What is above that line? A tolerance for thereness and communication. What is below that line? — an intolerance for thereness and communication. So you could say that to change the state of any being, whether to increase his intelligence or improve his personality, it would be necessary to improve his consideration, to improve his tolerance of the presence and existence of other things and himself, and to improve his tolerance of communication — so that we would have an improvement of consideration as the common denominator of the ascent to higher levels of ability.

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

It's quite important for an auditor, somebody studying Scientology, to recognize those fundamentals because there are no more fundamental fundamentals in terms of practice or technique than these things. There are more fundamental data, such as the exact definition and characteristics of the human spirit, the thetan. There is a more fundamental material in the Axioms which trace the exact considerations which an individual has agreed upon and by which he is living to his detriment.

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

Now, we see this as a background of agreements. But as a background of practice, as a background of application, thereness and communication are the keys. And the keys which open all doors are simply thereness and communication.

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

So we have, then, on this pyramid — we have the survival band, and we could say a person is surviving when he could tolerate thereness and communication. We could say to some degree or another he is succumbing when he can no longer tolerate thereness and communication. Now, I won't bother to go into the exact thereness and communication characteristics of control since I don't think it is necessary to. When you start to control something, you have to locate it. And to continue control of it, you have to stop to some degree its communications and yet continue your own, making an imbalance of communication — to the unhappy state — the unhappy state of a jealous man who wishes to continue to communicate with his wife and desires no other man anywhere in the world to communicate with her.

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

Looks to me like that's one channel of communication open and one billion channels closed. And eventually he will neither know, recognize, sense or experience any pleasure from his wife. She will disappear as far as he's concerned. You know people get into a state finally where people will simply occlude — they have tried to cut communication to them so many times that they'll see other people on the street and they can recognize their features very clearly, but the person that they've tried to cut communications about consistently starts to get blurry. That's seldom noticed; but you do notice it on a hearing basis. Somebody whose communications have been cut consistently — that is to say, who has had communications cut by somebody else — the somebody else will eventually not hear or pay attention to that person. You know, Mr. A has cut communications to his wife so consistently and so continually that at last he's out of communication with her, and she says, "Dear, do you want coffee or tea for dinner? Dear, do you want coffee or tea for dinner?"

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

"Nuh?"

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

Now, how does that condition come about? It comes about through Mr. A's desire to cut her communication lines, one way or the other. Either cut them with the family or ex-boyfriends or his business associates, somebody. There is cut communication going on there all the time and eventually, because the individual's trying to keep one line open and all others closed, he eventually goes deaf himself on the subject. We can notice this quite easily. It's less apparent to us that it also happens in the field of sight.

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

But it also does happen in the field of sight. His wife buys a new dress. She looks gorgeous. Everybody tells her so. Two months later her husband says to her, "Where'd you get the dress?" Now, there is control — individual trying to keep one line open and another line shut or trying to change lines.

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

And one of the more obsessive things that can happen in communication is the effort to continue to change communication. Somebody says, "Beans" to you, and you say, "Doughnuts" — that's what he said.

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

And he says, "No, beans."

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

"Oh, I've got you now — I've got you now — coffee cups."

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

What's happening here is we're getting a refusal to duplicate — a resistance towards a duplication — and we're getting an obsessive change. Now, control itself consists of start, stop and change. Start, stop and change of thereness — presence, location or even form — thereness; or start, stop and change of communication. And when you think of control, just think of start, stop and change by energy and you have the more — well, the Scientological definition of control, whatever else it might mean, because it works that way.

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

Right out of this, we get a process. We could say to somebody, "Now, what would you like to have changed?"

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

And the individual says, "Oh, my!" and maybe turns on some terrific automaticity and just sits there and says that and that and that and that and that, you know.

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

And after this is sort of run down — you've said okay to each one of these — you then say, "Well, what would you like to have remain unchanged?" "My case."

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

And we could simply ask these two questions over and over: "What would you like to have changed? What would you like to have remain unchanged?" And we would get a remarkable alteration — some old-time Dianeticist had better perk up his ears right here — in the person's position on the time track. This is the fastest method I know of to change the position of a person on a time track: "What do you want changed? What do you want unchanged? What do you want changed? What do you want unchanged?"

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

Why? Because time is change.

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

The change of position of particles in space is time and when we agree upon a uniform rate of change, we have physical universe time. And when we process directly at change and unchange, we process directly at time. It's just as easy as that.

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

So, looking at that piece of paper you have in your hands, you see there the — right there at that point we have, I think, on that piece of paper, Start, Stop and Change, don't we? Stop is the bottom, Start is the top, Change is the middle. You see where that is there, hm? Well now, those three things together mean control. And we could write superimposed over those three lines — Start, Change and Stop — we could write in lighter letters "Control," because that is the mechanism of control. It's a very important button. The reason I'm talking about that button in relationship to this chart is because the only reason people do not exteriorize is because they are upset on the subject of control. And that is the basic primary reason they don't exteriorize.

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

But let us say that they cannot face straight up to the idea of control, then we have to go south from this very important button and go on down and find out what we've got earlier than that. And we have "responsibility as blame," which is marked on your chart there simply as Responsibility. And that is a lower button. A person believes that to be responsible for anything would be to be blamed for something. If he's responsible for a communication, giving one or receiving one, or responsible for a thereness of any kind, he believes he's in for it. So therefore he wants no responsibility. Yet in an obsessive and unknowing fashion he is actually controlling this thing, and yet he's not even responsible for it; it's a fantastic condition. And yet the spirit gets into that kind of a condition with the greatest of ease! You see what happens?

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

Now that whole chart is a scale of knowingness versus unknowingness. If anybody really knew what he was doing anyplace on that chart, he would be free and clear at that level. Now, he may be doing a great many of the upper-scale things on an obsessive, compulsive or hidden basis — in other words, he's going on doing these things but he doesn't know he's doing them. So this chart also has this connotation: One has to know where he is on it. It's not what one is doing on it, it's what one knows about on it. He knows he's doing this. And when he knows that he, to a marked degree, recovers his ability to do it and so it no longer troubles him. So he could be controlling something and be down at the level of responsibility. See, he was obsessively, unknowingly controlling something. Well, his knowingness is one step below what he's doing.

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

He's merely resisting. He knows — he knows very articulately — that he doesn't want to be responsible for things. This he knows. He knows he's doing this. He knows he doesn't want to be to blame. Yet he is — you know, sort of with his left hand in back of his right hand, you know — he's sort of controlling things, somehow or another, but he's not letting himself in on it. But he is letting himself in on the fact that he doesn't like responsibility. Somebody comes along and says to him: "Well now, we're going to put you in charge of this whole service station."

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

And he says, "Nnnyyrrrow! No, I just want to stand here and put the gas in the cars. The county tax problem and the people coming up and ... No, huh-uh!"

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

"I don't want that much communication" is what he's saying. But he knows this, see. He knows he doesn't want the responsibility. What he doesn't know is that he is obsessively controlling in several directions. So, he's at a state of unknowingness about control. He won't exteriorize.

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

Now, he'd be in pretty good shape, though. He knows exactly where he stands on responsibility. He's going to be a private for the rest of his life. Or obsessively the other way, he's going to run everything for the rest of his life. Both obsessive on responsibility. He knows this, however. He knows he's doing this. He knows — this is quite articulate. But he doesn't know he's controlling things and he won't exteriorize. But that fellow's in good shape.

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

Let's go a little bit lower and let's get to a level where a great many people reside. They know they can or cannot own and they know about ownership. Their level of knowingness about ownership is very good. They know how you own things. You go down, you put some money down and somebody issues you a deed of title and you drive it off. And that's how you own something. You go down and you buy a license at the license bureau and marry the girl and you own something else — or you persuade him to go down and then you own something else. Meantime saying, of course, that you had nothing to do with it.

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

Now, this level is not a lightly unimportant level. The level of ownership as represented on that chart right there contains the clue and the key — and Dianeticists again sharpen up your ears — of engram erasure (snap) like that. It's right there on that Ownership button. Just as the analyst with his large concern about guilt lived in the band of responsibility — guilt, he had guilt feelings and so forth; that belongs in responsibility. Guilt of blame — other such things. But this "ownership" is apparently so innocent that I never suspected until I suddenly fell across it with a crash that it contains as a button and a level, the guide and key to the erasure of any and all engrams, locks, secondaries or bodies. You heard me, bodies — the erasure of. There's many a preclear who was run in Dianetics, who was not there to erase engrams but to erase his body if he could.

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

Now, what is an engram? It's a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness. And it's pretty darn hard to reach down to the large depths and the deep depths of unconsciousness that some of these pictures contain. A person has a painful experience, something takes a picture of it and then he has that picture. And Dianetics was a science devoted to the eradication of such pictures and their control, so as to bring about a better physical and mental condition. We found practically anything and everything you wanted to find in these pictures. There's only one trouble with Dianetics — it took a long time. And there was only one criticism that could have been leveled at it — it was too mechanistic!

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

All right. Here was this thing called an engram. And in the many years which have proceeded since the release of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, article after article has appeared in the more popular medical publications, such as the Reader's Digest (audience laughter), which talk about birth traumas and so on. Well now, actually this was a Freudian idea — basically a Freudian idea — but Freud never got, to be colloquial, the "put-together" of the brain, mind and picture. See, he never got this. But he did understand that there was something like a memory of the womb and of birth and although he had no method of reaching it, he said that there was some sort of an idea connected with this because he had this as an obvious observation. He'd go into asylums and things like that and he'd see patients curled up in the prenatal position, and he couldn't help but assume that they had some, at least, memory of the womb. And he talked about their desire to return to it and so forth. There was no desire connected with it. It was simply a picture appeared and says, "There you are." And the picture had greater reality than the environment and so we had an insane person suddenly curl up in a prenatal position.

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

Now actually, a Dianetic Auditor in the old days could put any preclear, no matter how sane, through the same positions and attitudes as you'd find in insane asylums. In other words, he could turn on and off insanity practically at will. This was a very interesting thing because a person stopped being afraid of these things happening to him, so he couldn't possibly go insane because of them. The only way a person could go insane is when he is assaulted by some unknown force which suddenly engulfs him to his detriment and terror. And when the force ceases to be unknown and becomes knowable and handleable by the person, well, he says, "So what? So I know about that. So my head feels like it's blowing off. Ha! Engram." This is his attitude. Very close in to truth.

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

Now, these mental image pictures and the study of these mental image pictures made up the bulk of Dianetics. Of course, there was a lot of philosophy back of Dianetics — a lot of put-together, you might say, connected with it — which was useful and beneficial. There was an organization of knowledge and philosophy back of Dianetics which made Scientology possible.

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

All right. Where we had these image pictures and wherever we had these image pictures, we had misownership. Incorrect ownership alone could throw into restimulation an engram, a secondary or a lock. You had to misown the picture before it could become solid or effective. And the moment that you correctly owned it, that you assigned its ownership to the correct thing, the thing that had made it — the moment you did this accurately, you had no picture — bang! Think of it. Nine, twenty-five, fifty hours on a birth. That's a Dianetic Auditor. He'd get rid of it — he'd grind it out, chew it up, put the preclear in control of it one way or the other. But that little button that you have there on that slip of paper — Ownership Processing — goes click, click, click, brrrrrt! That was birth running out.

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

So, we're getting someplace and I do have something to tell you, don't I? Quite an interesting thing. You know, the original thesis was written here in Washington. Don't know if you knew that or not. It was written right here in Washington. I used to live down at 1902 R Street — basement apartment. And worked quite a bit on this material. I didn't do any research as such in Washington. I had already worked on patients and people elsewhere. What I was doing here, when I got back here, was adding up and squaring around a tremendous amount of accumulated data trying to find out where it fitted. And the conclusions about engrams and dramatizations and the actions of these engrams were reached down there at 1902 R Street, Northwest.

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

Now, it was very remarkable for the object which was doing the miscommunication to be isolated. That was remarkable for that to happen — the exact thing which was enforcing these pains and ideas on the person to be isolated. That was quite something. All right. A method by which it could be erased was something else, and I knew that the picture was at fault, and what was about it, but how to handle and get rid of that picture? And we did quite a bit of work on that, an enormous percentage of it very successful work.

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

And here at a time when we don't even need the information anymore — clear up here in 1955 — we have that button on that piece of paper which you hold in your hand. And the way you use that button is simply this: "Get the idea . . . Oh, you got a picture? All right." We have several ways of getting rid of pictures, by the way. We know enough now to get rid of them and get them back. The preclear sometimes loves them. Say, "All right. You got a picture? All right. Get the idea that you own it, that your body owns it, that your body's machinery owns it, that your machinery owns it, that your mother owns it, that your father owns it, the doctor owns it, you own it, your body owns it."

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

And he says, "What picture?" Remarkable! Somewhere along the line you got the right owner!

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

Now, if you'd gotten the wrong owner too long and said, "Now listen, you understand that picture's really yours. You really made that picture." Now, what do you mean by you? You mean a spirit, that's what it means! And this is why all of this has become so pointed and so necessary to understand. When we say you, we mean a spirit, because Ownership Processing on the most casual preclear doesn't work unless you understand that a person is a thetan.

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

We say, "Oh, you — this birth. All right. Now, all right. Now, you've got birth there — doctor keeps dropping those drops in your eyes. All right. You keep seeing this all the time. Well, fine, fine. Now, you know you own that picture. Well, just get the idea now that you own the picture. That's fine. Now, all right. Now, let's get the idea that you own the picture. That you did it; that you own it." The eyedropper and the drops and the doctor and the walls of the delivery room will get solid enough to do 8-C on. It's a misownership, and we get solidity by misownership. Anything that is persisting as space and mass must therefore, perforce be misowned. If you get the right owner, it's gone. And that is the primary lie.

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

And so we take a look at this engram bank. This fellow has birth and eight accidents and the death of his father and his mother and his grandmother and his grandfather and his cousins and his aunts and all of his shipmates. And we take a look at this engram bank with its tonsillectomies and everything else in it, and we used to say, "Well, five hundred hours, I guess." You wouldn't do that today. You'd say, "All right. Now, what's happened to you in your life?"

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

The fellow says, "Well, I don't know. I had some bad times, grandfather died."

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

And you'd say, "Okay. Now, do you have a picture of that?"

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

"Well yes, as a matter of fact I have a sort of a black hazy thing out here every time I think of my grandfather."

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

"All right. Now, let's discover who owns this thing. Now, you get the idea that you own it" — you see a thetan makes pictures too; they're of a different kind. There might be eight or nine of these engrams, all made by different things. "All right. Get the idea your machines own it, your body owns it. All right, that's fine. Now, get the idea that pictures own it, the reactive bank owns it, that you own it, that your grandfather owns it, your grandmother owns it, your childhood home owns it."

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

Fellow's waiting for the fireworks. You know and I know that on grandfather's death, who was the closest ally the fellow had, there's a tremendous grief charge. Where's the grief? Pfff.' And it never affects the fellow again. Where did it go? Well, it could only affect him to the degree that it was misowned. He would only cry if he had the complete misownership of the picture of Grandfather's death. And if you kept working at him, making him misown this picture — in other words, say this: "Get the idea that you created it. All right. Get the idea you created it. Now, all right. Now get the idea your grandmother created it. Now you created it. And your grandmother created it. And..."

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

"Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff"

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

"Now, get the idea you created it."

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

"(crying) Huh, huh."

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

You see what you'd be doing? You'd be making him assign misownership to it and you would get the grief charge in full. In other words, the picture would become effective! So that Ownership Processing does the fantastic thing of just no effect, no picture. About the easiest slide-out you ever heard of.

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

Now, because an individual does not really object to thereness, he has to inject a certain amount of unknowing ownership — misownership — into his life. He has to say, "That's my car." Nah! You notice the car's still there. It's not his car either. He didn't make it.

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

Now, we have two kinds of ownership then. We have the ownership which would evolve through a lie so as to get a persistence of the object so that you could control it. We've got an object and we can control it, see. Well, there's that kind of ownership and we're accustomed to that kind of ownership. Real, actual, truthful ownership is of a different category. You only own what you make. Only the maker of the object is its proprietor and owner. If you made the engram, you own it. But if you know you own it, you haven't got it. So that's why there has to be a lie over there in that wall for that wall to continue to exist.

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

Now, we have several outfits in earlier religions which used to go around and say, "Repent, repent, repent, take the blame, take the blame, be responsible, be responsible" — look right on your chart there. What would they drive these fellows down into, huh? They would hound them and beat them and say, "Guilt, guilt, guilt, blame, blame, blame! Ask somebody's forgiveness." And the fellow would sink right down into misownership and all of his engrams would go into restimulation and they had him trapped. That kind of thing, if you wanted to call it religion, would make you sick and has made people sick. Why? Because you've told somebody to take on himself the reason for the creation of all of his difficulties. You've said to him, "Now look, you take the blame and then you'll be free." No, it didn't work that way. You take the blame and it'll all get solid, because he made some things and other things around him made some things. You see this? There were different authorships of incidents.

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

There are people right here right now that still, maybe, are grieving to some degree about some incident like a marital separation or the loss of a child or something like this, that find that persistent with them, who are saying to themselves, "If I just could admit that I really did it." Or, you know "I really realized to a large degree that it's my fault. (sigh)" And it doesn't go away. They're trying to accept the responsibility. They're trying to accept the blame for this incident and they didn't do it! Somebody else did.

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

Full responsibility contains the willingness to let somebody else be responsible, too.

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

Now, any malcondition which is persisting is being misowned. It may be that the person did it and is saying somebody else did it and has a picture, then, which is misowned. He's saying, "I didn't run the car into the tree. I didn't run the car into the tree. The actuality is she was talking so much and so hard, she distracted me so much that the car ran into the tree and I didn't do it. I didn't do that." And they've got the accident right there all the time. They ran the car into the tree and they made the picture. Just like that. And they're shoving the blame off on somebody else so it persists. But equally they have other things which they're saying, "I did it. I was a nag, I was a bum, I should have lived better. I did it." And the thing's persisting. And they didn't do it. Their wife went bad or their husband left them from other causes than their own action and behavior. And this person is accepting all of the responsibility for some other person having done something terrible or dreadful and is feeling bad about it when the actuality is they had nothing to do with it!

Thank you.

Now similarly, the spirit says, "Look at all the trouble I've gotten this body into. Daaah!" And that body's gone down a genetic line and in this Ownership Processing you get a fantastically clear disentanglement of who is what and where and you just see it — the easiest, fastest thing you ever looked at. This thetan is saying, "Well I've made a bum out of this body. That's all there is to it. I made it sick. It must be because I want it to be sick that it is sick and it goes on being sick." The thetan didn't do it. He's saying he did it and it persists. Obviously, he didn't do it. That's all the evidence you need.

You audit him on Ownership Processing and you simply ask him this:

"All right. Now, get the idea that you created all your difficulties, the body created all your difficulties, that you created all your difficulties."

And he says, "When I say I created all my difficulties, you know I get these great big heavy black masses around here."

And you say, "Well, get the idea that your body did it."

"Yeah, they're lighter."

"All right. Now get the idea your body machinery did it."

"Oh, they're much lighter!"

"All right. Now, get the idea that your body did it."

Why aren't we saying you did it anymore? Because he didn't. The most that he did would be to take a picture of the difficulty which had already been done, which would just be a light interest picture. So you'd hit it sooner or later and clear up that light interest picture. But his body was doing things without his consultation and without letting him in on any of it.

Now similarly, we have people around who are saying, "This body has just troubled me and troubled me and troubled me! I hate it! Look how sick it is! Look what it's doing to me!" It's persisting, isn't it? A condition's persisting. Nah!

You better have the thetan say, "All right. Now, get the idea your body did it. Now, get the idea you did it — that you created all this difficulty." "Oh no, it doesn't seem very acceptable to me."

"Well, get the idea."

"Oh, I can get the idea — I can just say it."

And very shortly the body is well.

It's a fantastic button, that Ownership button. It contains the answer to the riddles of Dianetics, as well as the answer to the riddles of why this universe is here. I'll talk to you about that later. But now do you think we've brought something to this congress?

Audience: Yes.