Thank you.

Thank you.

This evening we will have some Group Processing. Right now I'd like to talk to you a little bit more, if you want.

And I'm trying to see if anyone was a casualty in the seminars.

Audience: Yes.

Today we have a book to talk about: Dianetics 1955! We have summated in this book a small amount of material which was gathered at odd moments and which covers, as far as I can tell, man. This small subject and this small book very possibly will have a collision — I wouldn't doubt a bit — or if after they had read it, something happened.

We have quite a bit of data here in Dianetics 1955! which is compressed — pretty thoroughly compressed, actually. It deals, basically and primarily, how-ever, with two things: It deals with the existence of the energy-production unit which we call life, on the one hand. And it deals as deeply into mechanics as the ARC triangle, on the other hand.

Now, I want to tell you something about writing this book. Want to hear something about writing this book?

We're looking at two things here. We are looking at the production unit of space, energy, matter, time; and we are looking at, on the other hand, the thing which produces them. And this is quite a trick. I don't know where that puts us, really, because there isn't anything else.

Audience: Yes.

We are dealing at once with quality and quantity. And the only time anybody, in studying existence, has made a serious error or has gotten into trouble, has been when he has confused quality and quantity. In the physical universe we can have things which have both quality and quantity. We see a car. That is a quantity of matter occupying a quantity of space with the quality known as car. See? So there's quality and quantity.

Well, I started to write this book about twenty-so years ago. And I've been trying to write this book ever since. But a few things interfered. I see there are a couple of authors present. They can appreciate this.

So here we have a form. We have a form and we have something here, say this piece of furniture here, and it has a quantity of space and a quantity of material and it's occupying a certain quantity of time (measurable) and it has the quality of being a piece of furniture. And it's thee and me which assign the quality to it. And it was thee and me which put the quantity into it. We made the quantity possible for it now to occur. But you've done that, and that's across a nice long period of time. So all you have to do now is assign qualities to it.

People keep interrupting writers. They rush in and they say, "Where's the time payment for the furniture?" And the wife keeps coming in saying, "No shoes — none." And the federal government keeps coming in and saying, "Greetings." And a writer's studio begins to look like a couple of Grand Central Stations moving through each other.

And we find the essential difference between life in a pure state, if you want to call it that, and life in a mechanical state. We have in life, before it has produced anything or when it's just stepped back from producing something, we have it in a state where it is totally quality. It is all quality. You see, it has abilities. It doesn't have quantities of abilities; it has just that — just abilities. It doesn't have quantity of time, it has the ability of making or experiencing time but not a quantity of time.

And at last you decide you're going to work real hard and really get at this book, now. And you're really going to write it and you're really going to get there and so forth, and at that moment, why, they tell you you're bankrupt. The number of human beings that were pulled apart in order to make this book actually likens it a little bit better to a Roman circus. But it's perfectly safe to open now. No lions will jump out, but the fact of the matter is, that's only true if you don't read it.

When the fellow comes around and he says to you, "(pant, pant) I haven't got enough time to do anything. (pant) I just don't know how I'll have any time to do it. (pant, pant)" He's being an object. And he's not being very alive.

The actual writing of this book was interrupted by such things as a publisher demanding that the text, which was the preliminary text to a good solution, be popular. Well, I don't know really how you could fail to be popular if you were showing somebody what he was all about. This is a very hard thing to do. But the first text had to be popular. If you'll notice, this book is very concise. It says what it says when it says it. And it is no masterpiece of literature. It is simply a lot of data strung together in such a way, hopefully, that when read, a minimum of catastrophe and a maximum of result will occur.

Because that individual has the potentiality, the quality, of making time. And thinking, then, that he has a quantity of time to occupy, is something like the Fleischmann yeast plant itself feeling bad because it's not a yeast cake.

The actual writing of this particular volume, then, has quite a lot of history behind it, as I suppose you could say about any one of the volumes which have been written on Dianetics and Scientology. But this little book here had to be written fairly rapidly in order to meet the congress date. And we had quite a time getting this book out.

Now, here we have something, then, that is capable, able and has quality but which does not have any quantity. And this is a very strange thing for somebody who is entirely quantity oriented, who thinks in terms of money, in terms of so many dollars. Money is a fait accompli, not something which you can make or create or become possessed more of. Money is just so much, you see? His idea of security will be "How much money do I have in the bank?" That's his idea of security. That's an awfully poor idea of security.

It was rather fabulous — rather fabulous, the speed with which the actual words were thrown together. This had nothing to do with the slowness with which the notes were gotten together so that one could throw the words together. This took a long time to get the notes and the data together. The actual writing of the book was a very rapid affair. I know I kept going into my office for two or three days after I had finished — and two or three days, wondering where I had to start to complete the book. I couldn't get any reality on having finished it.

I'll tell you how secure he is. He is secure as he can bring into existence, wealth. And when he loses the ability to bring wealth into existence, even though he has saved a great deal of money, although he has a lot of quantities of money scattered around, he's liable to find himself a pauper.

The book was written on a tape recorder — on a little Echo tape recorder, straight onto recorder and taken off by my secretary, and she took it off onto aluminum Multilith plates, just like that. I mean, there wasn't any interim transcription. And these aluminum Multilith plates simply went onto the Multilithograph and that kept spewing out pages which kept stacking up and the Hubbard Professional College people were under the belief that they were there to study.

Now, there is such a thing as a fellow who has a million dollars in the bank and who is a pauper. There's many a fellow been picked up in some old decayed house full of newspapers and bric-a-brac with a hundred thousand dollars in a tin can sitting on a shelf, dead because he hasn't eaten for three or four weeks. See? This fellow then — his security or longevity really didn't depend on that hundred thousand dollars.

But a few days later they had the definite impression that they were there simply to put these book pages together. And day after day, while people were putting up new barriers in my office, as though there weren't enough, I could see — I could see the HPC people in there walking around a table. Well, now you would — the way you collate one of these books is you have each separate page laid on a table, something like that, and then you get a parade of people, and they walk around the table, each one picks up a piece of paper into little packages, see. This was Opening Procedure 1955. (laughter)

Well now, we look at it from a highly — what we call practical, sense and we say, 'Well, that's all very well for you to talk, but it'd be awfully nice right this minute to have a couple of thousand bucks in my pocket."

And I want to thank the people for the actual production of this book. So, thank you very much. We had one copy immediately sent to London. And this copy is to be photolithographed in London to be ready for the January 16th Congress in London. And I hope they make that dateline over there with this book.

Well, why haven't you? It's because you can think in terms of "It would be awfully nice to have," saying at the same time, "I don't have," saying at the same time, "To some degree there is some obstacle between two thousand bucks and me."

Well, it took a long time to write the book. Fortunately, it doesn't take very long to read it or to work with it. A very funny thing, however, is that no phenomena covered in the past, has ceased to be absent just because we've written a new book. You know, the overt act — motivator sequence is still there. Black and White phenomena is still there. Just because we wrote a new book, man didn't change.

Now, if you think it over, you realize that money is the attention unit of the society. That's about all it is. They scatter these attention units around, and society does the astonishing, the marvelous, the fantastic trick of actually taking pieces of paper — not any longer silver and certainly not gold, (that would be too nice for everybody to have, so they don't issue that anymore) — and they take this stuff and they actually can convert it. You take a whole stack of these pieces of paper, you know, and you go bing, and you got an automobile. That's a magic of some sort or another, and it is so magicful that people become criminals and acquire the automobile without making the money go boomp. That's what's known as criminality.

To listen to some of our critics, we would come of the opinion that we're always discarding all the old data. It's not possible to discard all of the data, because it was arrived at by observation. And it was then compiled, observation having occurred. So the data did not get thrown away. But more intimate, more applicable data did get discovered which very often explained half a hundred phenomena which had been discovered before.

But on the upper band, the impossibly high band from our standpoint at this time, an individual theoretically could be sufficiently able not to make the money go boomp, but to simply say, "Automobile zing." And you'd have an automobile. See, that's an impossible height.

You see how that would work? You have a sort of a pyramid. And when you start out on that, here is a tremendous number of phenomena all unknown. No phenomena known, except that man walks, eats and seems to get into fights. He also seems to get sick and he also seems to read things like How to Win Friends and Influence People in an apathetic effort to do so.

But by the introduction of a via called money into every transaction, then a group can monitor the individual of the group by giving him, on rations, just so much of this stuff which is convertible, whoomp, into automobiles and food.

Now, here we have tremendous quantities of unknown data. We take a look at that — all we'd have to do to start in on that is simply to start looking around at the people with whom we were connected and write down their eccentricities, their conversation and so on. And we would really have a book about man. You see that? Just by looking around in what our own private, personal experience was about man, why, we would then have a considerable fund of information.

So, by introducing this via, you put in a barrier; a barrier to acquisition, a barrier to havingness. It's not a bad barrier. Did you ever play an old game, years and years and years ago, called Monopoly? That's a fantastic game. People sit up all night long, converting these little houses and little pieces of paper just as though that wasn't what they were doing all day long, too. That wasn't a game, that was a dramatization.

A fellow by the name of Charles Dickens did this. Dickens described with great accuracy what he had learned as a young man in the streets and courts of London. But that was exactly what he was doing. He was observing man and writing about him. All right.

Well, here we have — here we have, then, a game called money. And a game is something in which two or more life units — get that now — two or more life units to be a game. It becomes a stuck flow if you have less than two life units playing this game. And it becomes nothing at all if there are no life units around. But we have a game defined as an activity engaged upon by two or more life units. And that's — we just define it quickly, loosely; we could say that's a game. All right.

Now we get into a more technical echelon when we say, "What factors do these men, each one, hold in common with all these other men?" Well, we could write a big book about that. What factors do they do in common? We could say, well, they eat and they do this and they do that. Each one of them does this thing. And then describe how each one of them did it, demonstrating slight differences, but the fact that they all ate. And this we could consider quite conclusive. We have discovered that they all ate.

Now, these two or more life units, in order to have a game, also have to have some barriers. The first barrier is space. Although they might coincidentally occupy exactly the same space. And they can, you know, occupy the same space and still communicate. The perfect communication is not no-communication; that's death. The perfect communication is total communication. And this would only be achieved if you were occupying exactly the same space as somebody else. But if you have total communication, you've got no game.

A fellow by the name of Sigmund Freud did this, only he wasn't talking about eating. And he observed that all men were engaged, one way or the other, on the second dynamic, or were trying not to be engaged. And he wrote a book about that and demonstrated that there was a common denominator.

So the first step of the game is Joe and Bill occupying the same space and in good communication and good affinity and everybody all happy and cheerful, and they've got good agreement and everything's fine. They're going to have a game now.

Now whether or not this book did anything therapeutically — he wrote several books on this subject — whether it did anything therapeutically or not, we would not be prepared to say at this moment since the mere fact of talking to somebody about his illnesses will quite often produce a marked and beneficial result.

Well, Bill says to Joe or Joe says to Bill, "Hey you. You get over there. I'll stay over here. And we'll have this much space between us. And then I will say, "How are you?' And you say, "I'm fine." And I'll nod. And then you say, "How are you?' And I will say, "I'm fine.' And then you nod. Okay? Let's go."

So you see, we don't know whether that survey was actually a terrifically beneficial survey beyond this point: He pointed up to the Western world the fact that such a thing as psychotherapy could exist independent of (1) surgery and (2) demon exorcism. He pointed that up. And he gave a hope to man that we had some possibility of arriving at a conclusive answer whereby man could understand his own problems and could regain some of the vitality which he thinks he has lost somewhere. All right.

And the cycle starts. We've got a communication going. So actually the first entrance into mechanics is communication. But it's a game. And as long as a game is going to continue, and as long as you occupy a universe created for or by games, and as long as you're alive, and as long as you're part of that game in any way, shape or form, you have to go on communicating. Why? The second you do, you will continue action and life. And the second you don't, you'll be dead and you will fall out of the game.

We take another such survey conducted by one of his people. Let us say Jung or Adler, the squirrels of his day. And we find out that these people departed a little bit from reality and that they didn't intimately observe man. They weren't too interested in observing man. They were much more interested in, I don't know, stringing words together. Some of their literature is very, very good as literature but not very informative. The terrific difference that we get in all such studies and works is the introduction of too much art. You know, instead of data, instead of translation, interpretation, we get art.

But to make a more complicated game, we break or interrupt this communication. And it makes a much more complicated game as any program director knows who has just had his program cut in half to announce the fact that: "Bulletin — President Eisenhower has just sneezed." You see, this type of interruption — that makes a game. He goes around afterwards and he says, "What's the idea, coming in and interrupting my broadcast that way?"

If you want to read art at the extreme and information at the minimum, I invite you to read — I think it's a fellow by the name of Pope — Alexander Pope. I have a little volume of his work, and somebody somewhere back on the time track (it's a very old volume) has written, "Apathy, apathy, apathy," which I occasionally quote.

And the fellow says, 'Well we had to, it was an important public bulletin."

But even Alexander Pope said, "The proper study of mankind is man." That may or may not be right since the solution of man did not come about by too intimate a look at man but a look at man's relationship to life in general. And we found out man was alive too.

And he says, 'Well," he says, "you shouldn't have done it."

We then go across the pages of history and philosophy and we find that a great many people have been writing on this subject. But the oddity is, is the amount of benefit the writing has had has been in direct proportion to the amount of looking that was done. Thinking about this subject has been of very little benefit. Looking and observing and applying those theories which were formulated after observation has been of considerable benefit. That is a singular difference in the work which we have at hand here. It was derived by observation, not by theory. The theory was derived after the observation had taken place — fascinating difference.

And they, "Yow yow yow yow yow," at each other.

We get a slight difference between this work and the work of a fellow by the name of Zeno, who was one of the popular writers of the later Roman Empire. Zeno wrote a book called Apathia, where I think is where we get the word, or where we use it that way, and he said — he proved conclusively in this book — this book is all figure-figure. There isn't a single observation in the whole book. It's just figure, figure, figure, figure, figure. Think, think, think, think, think, bong. And he proved conclusively in this book that you can't win.

'Well, who's program director around here anyway?"

And his conclusion, and the philosophy which he gave his day, and which was bought by the Roman Empire, and which is overlooked as one of the factors by Gibbon who describes the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and attributes it to Christianity — Gibbon completely overlooked Zeno. He didn't pay any attention to Zeno. But how about a popular writer who proves conclusively that you can't win and then proves overwhelmingly that you mustn't even try, then. And that was Apathia of the later days of the Roman Empire. That's a figure-figure sort of a book.

"Well, whose program is it? I'm the one that's trying to sell Easy-wheezy Soap Flakes, you're not." And "I'm the fellow the sponsor pays for and you're just the mechanical gimmick around here."

Now, we get an observational study compared to a figure-figure study. And we'll see that the observational study has considerable benefit, and the thinkingness study, just pure ivory towers, has very little application.

"I am not."

Now, one Professor Wundt back in someplace in Europe, a little less than a hundred years ago, dreamed up the idea that the problems of man should have applied to them scientific methodology. And he invented a word called "psychology" That was very sound, wasn't it? He said that this is what should happen.

"Who are you talking to?" Back and forth.

And then he didn't do it and no psychologist really has done it since. They've looked at rats, they've looked at college students but they've never looked at man. They live in a figure-figure of unreality. They collect statistics; they collect endless statistics. A statistic never told you anything except that some numbers were in front of you. That's about all a statistic will tell you.

And if they keep this up very long, why, they'll get at a very tolerable sort of a game. It'll be a sort of a bicker. But if they stop talking about it, they will just get madder at each other, and madder and madder and madder and one of them will quit and that's the end of the game. You recognize that? Well, that is the evolution of games.

Now, if I'm stepping on some toes when I say psychology has not gotten there, and when I say that psychology has not arrived simply because it didn't look, it only thought — I know I am stepping on some toes here and there across the world because there are very many sincere men have devoted a great deal of time and study in the field of psychology believing that they were resolving some of the problems of man. But psychology has been with us almost a century at this time, and the cure for psychosomatic illness, for backwardsness in class, has yet to emerge from the field of psychology — which I think proves my point quite adequately. Having stepped on some toes, I now tromp.

The game goes all to pieces when you stop communicating, and you're not playing a game when you're not communicating to some degree. But the first step of any game is communication.

Now, some people criticize us because Dianetics and Scientology have changed. They express a great deal of change. There's a great deal of vitality in them, and the factors alter from time to time and new conclusions are reached. The amount of change in a science is actually the test of the amount of life in that science, the amount of validity it has. Those things which have practically no validity never change. In this matter of change, here we have Freudian analysis released in 1894, practically completely unchanged to this day. In other words, sixty years here of an opportunity to change, and no change. That's fabulous.

So therefore you could say a couple of terminals communicating are to some degree a barrier. You bet they are; they're a barrier of space. First barrier. And then they also have to have the barrier of time, they have to do this weird and impossible thing. Do you know they have to pretend the other fellow isn't talking so they can talk, and then vice versa pretend that the condition has reversed? And so we get time.

Let's take a companion science to the humanities: nuclear physics. That never suffers from lack of change — never. And it's a very, very live science. The principles of physics are utilized today in almost everything that you contact.

The Sun shines. It doesn't shine. It shines. It doesn't shine. And of course if you stand around waiting for the Sun to shine all the time and don't shine any yourself, you'll get stuck on Earth, too. That's a cinch.

Any piece of transportation, clothing, food and so forth — all these things have a high dependency upon man's ability to understand the material universe through or via physics. And he is learning continually. Take chemistry. That is another live, very live science. And it is in a constant state of change.

But where we look over games, we find out that game is essentially a communication. Well, don't let two teams play consistently against each other too long. They won't have a game there anymore, either, because they won't be antagonists; they'll be friends.

Now we can joke about these things if we want to, but the fact of the matter is that where they do not go to war, where they do not assay a widespread destruction of man, these are very beneficial things. But the moment that they start to move in on the humanities and say, "Look, man is a gimmigahoogit that goes whip-whip whenever we punch the geeter button," they're out of order, they're out of place, because they have given themselves a license to use their weapons of destruction against man as they would use it against some old cars. Get the idea? The frame of reference is wrong.

Such a thing has happened many times in wars. Some isolated sector of the line — they forget a division, you know, or a regiment or a squad or something, and they leave it out in some isolated corner of the battle and there's — the enemy leaves another squad there and they're supposed to be shooting at each other. And they'll shoot at each other for a while and they'll shoot at each other and they'll shoot at each other.

They prove that they can use desperate weapons or develop them and so forth by proving that man is just a machine after all, and this gives them ample reason and excuse to go ahead and use these weapons against man. Just like nobody needs a license to blow up a wrecked car, you know, and smash it up further, so you wouldn't need any license to smash up man. And that is the rationale behind neurosurgery, electric shock and every other barbaric and despicable practice in which various personnel in this society happen to be engaged. "We don't have to respect the individual. We don't have to respect his rights. We don't have to do anything for him because after all, we know he's just a machine."

And then one will put up some washing or something like that, a little bit, you know, and that will remind the other fellow, "Say, you know, we haven't washed our kits for a long time." So they get their long underwear and they wash that. And they go on this way and that way.

Well, there is the science of physics moving way out of order. Let's have physics for the matter, energy, space and time of this universe and let it be very content to handle these things and leave man strictly alone. Similarly, chemistry, to use a colloquialism: More boo-boos have been pulled in the field of healing by adapting chemistry to healing, than can easily be counted. These boo-boos started way, way back when we had patent medicine. Fellow used to come around with a banjo and a wagon and a big sign on the side of the wagon, and some white man fixed up like an Indian with a headdress, and that was Chief Wamgutta, and Chief Wamgutta was the chief of the Swamese and he had a special formula for swamproot oil which he was going to purvey for the small sum of a dollar a bottle, while Mr. Jinks played on the banjo. That was chemistry invading the field of the humanities. And I don't know that even when we look at the ads of Abbott or the claims of the AMA that we have departed any distance at all. Except now they do it through Reader's Digest. They don't paint the sign on the wagon anymore; they paint it on an advertisement.

And the next thing you know, my golly, the trouble some general has, he comes down here and these guys are sitting around in the same dugouts swapping lies. That is the awfullest thing a general has to put up with, by the way, is they go into communication.

Now I wouldn't hold ourselves open to libel, here, by mentioning the names of some of these organizations like Abbott or Lilly. I wouldn't say that these chemical organizations or these insurance companies like the AMA — the AMA, by the way, is an insurance company. That really wowed us the other day. We found that out — fantastic. The American Medical Association is an insurance company. That's what it is. We've often wondered what it was. Now we know. I won't say any more about that except four or five hours toward the end of the congress.

And do you know that they shoot people in time of war for going into communication with the enemy; they do. They stand up a man and shoot him because he's gone into communication with the enemy. I'd like to know what they're doing when they stand up on a parapet and fire a rifle, except communicate. Of course, it's kind of a hard crude way of communicating but it's nevertheless communication.

And we find that the invasion of chemistry into the field of psychotherapy or healing is, as the cowboy said as he fell off the horse, a bum steer. Now, wherever you think that the injection of a dozen molecules will utterly cure psychotherapy, you might as well take up crystal ballizing, because it has the same degree of validity. The theory that chemistry can resolve the problems of man is a bad theory because from the days of patent medicine, from the days of herbs on forward till now, it has never been demonstrated to be true.

It's a cinch that if you shot at a fellow long enough and he shot at you long enough, you would wind up bosom buddies. That's a cinch.

We read in the materia medica that cinchona bark is a cure for malaria, that it will prevent malaria — Peruvian bark. Must be: Somebody sold it to the king of France once for, I think, 250,000 louis (louis d'or). That much that formula was worth. That was in the days when they could have gold and when a louis bought something — not like now.

Now, the only way you could really keep a war going and keep things really hot, anywhere in the world, would be to put up a communication barrier which admits of no communication whatsoever. And that would be a perfect solution to an end of game or a continuing war.

Now, cinchona bark, Atabrine, let down more of our troops in the last war than you could easily count in a ward. You could take this stuff and it made your ears ring, and of course if you've gotten malaria after that, it had to be classified as dengue fever because nobody can get malaria if he's full of cinchona bark. We call it quinine. That's been with us since sixteen-hundredand-something and its curative powers have more or less run out in the race. Once upon a time, it might have been terrifically effective, but that isn't necessarily true today. And there is the liability of chemistry.

The war would not continue beyond a certain point because that thing which has been barriered out of communication just so long becomes unreal. It ceases to exist. So, actually, if you could hang a — it isn't a good solution but it's a partial solution. If you hung up an iron curtain here on Earth — you hung up an iron curtain and wouldn't let anybody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain — nobody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain (nobody communicates over here), one day somebody would walk up to you, say, "Say, you know about those Russians . . ."

You find them doing this with penicillin. Penicillin at one time cured everything — just cured everything across the boards. All you had to do if you had hay fever was get a little shot of penicillin, your doctor told you, and you were fine. If you had a cold, if you had the flu (these, by the way, were not even evidently carried by bacteria but by virus, and penicillin was active against bacteria) — if you had the cold, if you had flu or if you had anything like that, well, all you had to do was get (shss-shss) a couple of shots of penicillin, (snap) — perfect. If you had a sore throat, why, put some penicillin in a lozenge, and suck it. But it says on all the bottles, "No topical application will prove efficacious." Those words are too large. It means don't put it on the surface of anything, it won't cure anything if you do that. So that's why they used it in lozenges to cure people's sore throats — won't work. And as the years have gone on, more and more bugs have simply crossed their arms purposefully and said, "Penicillin — ha-ha-ha!" Similarly, with sulfa.

And you'd say, "The what?"

You have a problem of life forms fighting life forms when you have the problem of fighting bacteria, and the one thing that life can do is to learn to accustom itself to and accommodate itself to any chemical. I imagine one of these days we will probably raise a race of people, if the physicist has his way of it, who are not affected at all by radioactivity. You know, go around with your ears glowing this far out. Life can accustom itself to chemistry. That's the big, big rule. It can always accustom itself, and so the fighting of one life aberration or form on the part of another life aberration or form with the weapon of molecules, molds, drugs and so on, is of course doomed.

He'd say, "The Russians, the Russians, you know who I'm talking about." And you'd say, "No, I don't know. Where are the Russians? What are the Russians?"

We had a wonderful thing called DDT. And that was going to kill all the insects in the world. Before we went into Saipan we sent fighter pilots over with DDT tanks, sprayed the whole island. Nobody was going to suffer from malaria or other insect-borne diseases such as yaws and so on. Nobody, none of the ingoing troops were going to suffer from these things, so they just plastered the whole island with DDT and when the marines finally got ashore, bzzt-bang, bzzt-bang. Flies, flies, flies. And DDT today is so ineffective against insects, as far as flies and so forth are concerned, that you can just put a fly in a box of it and take him out. He feels fine! He says, "Thanks for the pick-me-up."

"Those people over there beyond that iron curtain."

Any poison man has — any poison is really ineffective and will go up through the most astonishing thing you ever saw. It will come up to a point where it's a stimulant. Did you know all poisons would get into a category of merely being a stimulant? Strychnine, for instance, is — gotten to be a stimulant for many people. They take a spoonful of it a day.

And you'd say, "What curtain?"

Well, once upon a time the witches of Europe (an organization which was fighting the Roman Catholic Church — the witchcraft — and which lost) once took arsenic. And you know this old saw about the — you knew whether or not this fellow was a werewolf by the fact that when you opened up his grave, why, there he was evidently in the pink of health, and the only way to do for him was to drive a stake through his chest. You know that old superstition? Oh, dear, the Frankenstein-type movie should have taught you that.

See, there'd be no reality here on the fact that Russians existed. Similarly, if somebody in Russia would come around and said, "You know all those capitalists?"

Well, this old superstition was born straight out of the fact that the witches took arsenic. They'd take it in very, very small doses and they'd build up these doses and it actually made them proof against an enormous number of invading bacteria. See, it was a preventive — preventive medicine. Very many diseases, then, could be held by the public at large, but not by a witch. So they apparently lived a charmed life and of course after they died they'd been embalmed already. But a witch would get up to a point of where they could take a spoonful of arsenic, you know, "Yum-yum" Like the fly and the DDT — nothing to it, (slurp). Wonderful stuff'.

And the Russian would say, "Capitalists? Go on! Where?"

Life can accustom itself to any chemical preparation or compound. So I guess that chemistry is kind of let out, sooner or later, isn't it, as a weapon? And Abbott and Lilly have to keep inventing new things in order for them to go on working. Well, if this is the case, then we would look into the field of function for any kind of an answer to illness, to misfunction, malfunction or even the combat between life form and life form. We'd look for another answer than chemistry; we'd look for another answer than physics. We'd look at life itself and try to understand something about that. And that is what we have done in Dianetics 1955!

"Well on the other side of the iron curtain there."

One of the primary things that people have had difficulty accepting — oh, wait a minute, let me go back in some history. Well, if I told you the primary thing people had difficulty in accepting was a prenatal engram, we would sound right at home, wouldn't we? 1950. How often have you tried to tell some-body about a prenatal engram? Or have you quit long since?

"Oh, you silly little muzhik you know that the world ends at that iron curtain. The world is totally flat, Lysenko says so. And you fall off into a nothingness and never, when you walk across that iron curtain. There's nothing over there whatsoever."

Audience: Yes.

That's right. That's what happens when you cut a communication.

Yet a prenatal engram is there. There's a full recording on file of incidents which have occurred prior to birth. It's not very difficult to isolate them or demonstrate them. It's not very difficult to run them out with a considerable change in human form.

But, of course, a total cut of communication is almost impossible in present time — a total cut. You still get things leaking through like C-A-R-E. Like the United Nations' manifestos that are issued by the Kremlin. You get all kinds of little fragmentary communications. They keep tapping the world on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, there's some Russians over there." And they keep tapping the Russians saying, "Hey, the outside world is over there some-where." You know, just a little bit of a trickle of communication. And that is absolutely dynamite. There's not enough communication to make any A or R — just enough to nudge them into an existence of something.

For instance, we had a fellow the other day as a preclear who was an astonishing example of somebody stuck at two months' postconception. He was right in that engram. I mean, he was in it! We didn't run it to date, but it was there. And the auditor and I had quite a talk — a research auditor — and he and I had quite a talk about this case. And we were trying to figure out exactly where this fellow was stuck on the track, just for old times' sake, not because it was any good to us in processing at all, but we were just trying to find out where he was stuck on the track. And all of a sudden it came through to us just about where he was stuck. Why? Because he had the physiological aspect of that particular form of life. He was there perfectly. All of his various functions and everything else that he was going through; they were stuck right there — bing!

Just like a guy with a circuit; it taps him often enough so that he knows that it isn't quite nothing there. And he'll get awful mad at that after a while; he's out of communication with it but he's not really — was in communication with it but he is in communication with it because he gets — some impulse or instinct somewhere, somehow comes through to him that he is a bum. Every once in a while he has a feeling like something is saying, "You're a bum."

Every time that we have had anything to do with cancer, for instance, we have found that the individual for one type of cancer was stuck in conception. For the other type of cancer was stuck in mitosis, which is the splitting of the cells. An individual, then, can dramatize one of these engrams. He can dramatize a prenatal, but we don't even bother to run them anymore — not because we can't run them and not because they aren't true but because we don't have to.

He's saying, "You know there's something wrong with my mind." All you have to do to solve the thing would be to either totally cut communication, you know, put him way out back, or go the other way around and put him into communication with it.

It's as easy as that. We don't have to run them anymore.

Actually, the best route is to put him out of communication with it and then put him into full communication with it, at which moment it will cease to give him any trouble whatsoever.

But this fact of the prenatal engram was tremendously unacceptable to one and all in spite of the fact that a few generations ago, it was the commonest belief imaginable that children were bad off when they had had a bad prenatal experience. This was a common belief. It is believed today by the farmer folk out from the big cities.

A fellow with a broken leg is just fooling around, you know. It's nudging him, he's nudging it. He isn't in full communication with it. The way to get him over a broken leg would be to pull him off from the broken leg so he's no longer in obsessive communication with this broken leg. And then put him into communication, full communication, with the broken leg at which moment it'd heal quite rapidly. You get the idea?

They say, 'Well, little — little — little Tildie's not in very good shape, you know. Her Ma got an awful scare from that cow." And they believe this. And it's true. And if you as an auditor wanted to take this boy or this girl and run back down the track, all of a sudden the preclear would be telling you all about it being in the dark and being frightened because of some words, and something about a cow. You could find the incident. You could erase it — fantastic! Here was phenomena lying there waiting to be discovered, waiting to be looked for. And wherever we looked, we had no acceptance of this data.

We're not interested, then, in a partially cut barrier unless it's simply to promote the game. But the game is a very, very important thing. In order to have a game, you have to have mechanics. In this universe, we have to have space, energy, matter and time. Life in any universe has to have at least some of that.

It took a couple of years for this to leak through somebody's skull. And then we had original articles on the subject in Time magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal, Reader's Digest — from time to time have printed, without credit, anything they could think of on the subject of prenatals. This is a fascinating thing. They did accept these things eventually — mostly because they were true — long after we'd abandoned them. The conquered territory which we hold will someday be conquered even by medicine. I mean, we'll be far enough off of it and have abandoned it to that degree.

So that we get the quality which says, "I can produce and play a game," and then we get the byproducts of that unit which would be the playing field, the gimmick they're playing for, the quantities of stuff they've got to cross or handle in order to have a game. So we have something that wants a game and we have the mechanics of the game. And when we go in and look over life, we find out that we shouldn't confuse these two things. We should simply say, "Well, now there's something that is capable of a game, has the quality of playing a game, originating games, continuing games, participating in games. And then there are all these byproducts over here which make games." And that would be a very marked division between two things, and we could understand things very well.

Now, wherever we have phenomena which is unacceptable, we get into a lot of argument, a lot of sputification and argumentation. And maybe this is fun in the drawing room, but if you were to get much closer to truth, theoretically, you would get into much less argument, wouldn't you? But this would only be true if your truth was agreement. In other words, if you had to do with what was agreed upon only, you'd never get in an argument, would you? Well, sup-posing something was once agreed upon and once true, and is still true but is no longer agreed upon? You're going to get in an argument. This is a certainty.

Now, this thing which can play the game or participate in a game or continue the game or originate the game, has quality only. It can, by its own consideration, be a quantity. It could say, "I am a private soldier. I don't know who else I'm fooling but I'm really fooling me," he'd say, you know, "but I am a private soldier. I am a quantity of army. I am one private soldier over army worth of army. I'm a quantity which is a part of a game."

You once believed such and so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, but that's not believed anymore. You'll get into an argument if you voice it. Such an example as that is that — the religious causes of once upon a time. Think of the pilgrims' argument on the subject of religion over in Europe and England. Well, let's say you were there. And you certainly believed very heavily and strongly. But if you stood up today and started to voice the principles of Calvin without the slightest variation from the words of Calvin, I'm afraid you'd be in an argument. You may not remember them, but you would probably be in an argument because they're no longer agreed upon. But they once were agreed upon and that agreement alone is what made them true. So, old agreements become new disagreements. All right.

And now if he were utterly and absolutely and entirely sold on the idea that this was all he was, you would find an aberrated person. He'd be an aberrated person. He would take no fun whatsoever in being part of the army or playing this game. He would not be aware of the game being in progress, the moment he is totally and only one private soldier.

We're not even any longer interested in the prenatal engram. Yet you could probably get in less or more of an argument today than before. There are some other data of that same magnitude. But first and foremost, there's this matter of the thetan exterior. That is a subject for argument. That is a subject for argument. As far as the public at large is concerned, it must be a subject for argument. Or is it?

Now, you get people in times when the civil populace has surrendered itself up to the military and a lot of civilians are walking around in uniform and getting a war fought, you get moments like this: Individuals who are supposed to be just one private soldier according to the rules will actually tell you, "Well, I'm a newspaper reporter. I was a newspaper reporter on the Clarion Bugle Gazette of Sioux Falls and that's really who I am," you know He's got a reserved identity.

Let me tell you something fascinating. A door-to-door survey demonstrated that a little less than half the people asked, knew they were themselves and not a body. Oh, you didn't know it was that general. Well, neither did we. These people knew they were themselves and not a body. They knew that they were a sort of an energy production unit of some kind or another, only they didn't quite know what or how, and they thought of themselves as being a soul which was inhabiting a body. This is incredible. This is a little — almost 50 percent — if you took the same average and if it were to hold, this would be 50 percent of the population believe they are their own souls. They are the soul which inhabits a body. Well, this is fantastic. If everybody believed this strongly, why didn't they ever talk about it? Why wasn't it ever mentioned in church?

And you go around and you try to get a reserve officer to confess the fact that he is just a lieutenant or something of the sort, he never tells you this. He says, "I am a lawyer. Before I got in the service, I made 850 dollars a month. I'm a big wheel where I came from." See, he is reserving his identity. He's not quite in the service. But you get a lot of high-toned action when this happens. You do actually get a period when in an army and a navy there are people around who do not entirely and only hold motion. (laughter)

Yet the church itself couldn't believe this. You know why? Because it talks in such terms as you hear from some very spinny preclear who, when he thinks he's exteriorized, tells you, "I'm over there." You got that one? "I'm over there." Because the church says, "You have to save your soul," see. You are over there. And yet not quite 50 percent of the population, according to this survey, knew they were their own souls. And it wouldn't — couldn't possibly be a question of saving their souls. You see, it would be to them a question of saving their bodies which I think religion has specialized in for a long time. Since every punishment they level is not really in the direction of a soul but in the direction of a body. Burning at the stake, chaining in a dungeon, penance, drag yourself some sackcloth and ashes, push a peanut around the block or whatever religious punishment is assigned, is addressed to the body, not the soul. So I don't think religion has believed in the soul at all. And I don't think it knew anything about it. I've had access to a tremendous number of publications for the instruction of such things as Catholic priests, and nowhere in there did I find the words, "Be three feet back of your head."

These people are capable to some slight degree of playing a game and they do the darnedest things. The War Department goes slowly mad trying to keep track of the darnedest things they're liable to do. You know, they'll see an enemy someplace or another and they'll figure out something or other, and the next thing you know, why, they sneak around the hill and capture the division or something — like Sergeant York.

But I found a lot about bodies, a lot about chastisement and "You've got to convince the congregation that they must save their souls." This is one of those twisted statements. It can't even be made, really. They've got to save their souls. And yet at death, they believe in the departure of a soul in some particular direction — or they used to.

They do the darnedest things. They all of a sudden discover they're out of rations, you know, or they're liable to be out of rations, and they see that they can only have rations after they've signed eighteen hundred slips of paper in quadruplicate or quintuplicate so they decide to short-cut the whole thing and they have rations. And nobody can quite explain where all these rations came from, but boy, is it "legal" — typical activity. And everything just goes to the devil. These fellows introduce more randomity than anybody can stand so they have to end the war. (laughter) And they finally get to the point and they say, 'We can tolerate any action which will put a stop to this sort of thing — even peace."

Now, where and how do we have some sense out of that particular muddle? We didn't even want to go into the field of religion. We weren't even interested in going into the field of religion. What education I've had and you've had on the subject of religion was mostly bad. We have been taught to a very marked degree that religion is a mechanism by which a public can be better controlled. Haven't we?

Well, so we get a game in which nations play, called war. And it's only when these people get completely dredged down to the idea "I am a German." "I am a Russian." "I am a private" "I am a captain." When they've got this one hundred percent fixed, and they are that thing — that we can find these wars with tremendous quantities of brutality, very little understanding, no sympathy and nothing but destruction. And when those things occur when everyone gets superfixed in his identity, "I am a duke." "I am a prince." "I am a colonel," we get something like the Hundred Years' War.

Audience: Yes.

We wonder what happened to knighthood. They got killed in the Hundred Years' War. Nobody knew how to end that one. Everybody was being himself, one hundred percent, which is to say, he thought of himself as a piece in the game called the Hundred Years' War, you know? Boy, did they have fixed titles and identities. Mmmph! They were really that.

This we have been thoroughly educated into.

There was no flexibility in which they could become responsible for any other dynamic than themselves. You see that? They'd have just the fixed responsibility and they had no further responsibility from that. So they could pick up some civilian and torture him. So they could burn a village without even thinking about what happened to the kids in it. Here is game without any responsibility.

Let us take the situation in England a few years ago. We had the Roman Catholic Church lording it in all directions and being overthrown by a popular revolt just to get rid of that particular religion, and then we got the Church of England. All right.

War fought by people who are capable of responsibility is a skylark. War fought with no responsibility for the enemy, no responsibility for any other identity, is simply a slaughterhouse madhouse.

Now as we get this new factor, it starts to collect tithes in all directions. And it didn't get overthrown by popular revolt; it got overthrown by neglect, if it's been overthrown. But it's not a popular subject anymore. It isn't anything anybody even thinks about anymore to amount to anything. "Am I going to heaven? Am I going to hell?" This is not a pressing problem to most people.

Where you have a game breaking down into brutality, where you have it breaking down into a slavery where nobody can change his identity, everybody's fixed utterly and so forth, only then do you get cruelty, brutality, criminality on the part of its participants. These things are not present in the position where individuals have still some freedom to choose that they are playing a game.

You walk down the street, you probably wouldn't get an extra heartbeat out of anybody if you suddenly stopped him and asked him, "Now, brother, are you really sure that you're going to heaven?"

Have you ever noticed some little boy in the neighborhood who couldn't play the game? Who goes into a fighting fury with other children over their toys? This person who can't play the game. They're going to play a game of marbles, so somebody breaks out some marbles and lays them in the sand and they're all set and they draw a ring, and then all of a sudden this little guy comes up and he grabs all the marbles and shoves them in his pocket and runs. And the other kids say, "No, Henry." And after they've said, "No, Henry" five or six times, they go out and get him and punch the devil out of him. And then they really fix him, they say, "You can't play with us anymore." They really fix themselves, too. Every time they try to play marbles, little Henry will be up there with a BB gun. This is the degeneration away from playing a game.

He'd say, "Ha-ha-ha-ha." He's not worried about this old story.

Now, the big difference — let's get very close to fact with this — the big difference between the preclear you had an easy time with and the preclear you had a hard time with, was the preclear you had an easy time with could play a game. He could still play a game.

The spiritualist, with his astral walking, his collection of spirits; his — the magician with his — and by the way, there are a very few people know very much about the basic magician. They think in terms of the stage magician.

And the person you were having an awfully rough time with had gotten so fixed in some kind of an identity that he says, "This is entirely, completely, real and serious, no matter how aberrated or cockeyed it appears," and "it's not a game, this is reality, this is sincerity," see? And he's fixed, and he can't change.

But the actual mission of the magician is to make various circles and designs and incantations and by various practices, control and bend to his will, spirits who then go forth and do his bidding. And that is the basic practice called magic.

And the first thing you notice about him, he has difficulty playing a game. That's the first thing you notice about him. First thing that seems out of order about him. You'll notice that by saying, "All right. Now, let's walk over and touch your finger to that wall."

Nowadays, why, they take a rabbit out of the hat. They say, "See, a spirit" — put it back in. The practice of spiritualism has been almost entirely swept out of existence by charlatanism. They get somebody who's just lost the dearly beloved departed. They bring him in and for a couple of quick bucks they: "Hocus-pocus, we have a message, now, from your dear departed — says, 'Dear Maggie, I am happy here. Joe.' " And if the spiritualist is a good forger, it's even Joe's handwriting.

So, the fellow walks over, says, "Why should I?"

And by these practices, the field of spiritualism has become debased whereas maybe once upon a time, maybe in Greek times, there was something to spiritualism — might have been something to it. And so we look to find that man has abandoned the three fields, religion, spiritualism and magic, which were most closely acquainted with the idea that man was basically a spirit. See, these three fields had that very intimately. And man has now put those pretty well into the past. He's gotten them nicely forgotten. And all of a sudden, we come along and we say, "Be three feet back of your head" — the fellow is.

You get some little kid who's totally capable of playing a game and you say, "Go over and touch the wall," so he goes over and touches the wall, bang.

And we say, "Okay. What are you looking at?"

And he says, "Now you touch a wall." He can sometimes play too much game for some auditors. All right.

He says so and so, "It's a big black wall."

We have a gradient scale of being able to play the game and that gradient scale is the gradient scale of fixed identity as a part of the game or quantity. It's a gradient scale of "How much quantity am I in this game? — identity/quantity. I am one man, you see. I am one person named Jones and that is all I am.

You say, "Copy. Copy it. Copy it. Copy it. Push them all together and pull them in."

Now, all due respects to thee and me, that's not a very good condition. A person who can't be Smith sometimes isn't really aware of playing a game. It's all for sure, for sincere, see? You know, it's brutal. It's earnest. It's real. "Tell me not, in mournful numbers . . ." (laughter)

The next thing you know, this fellow who was on crutches, this girl whose endocrine system was all out of balance, this person who couldn't live with his fellow man, is just doing beautifully. You know, he's just doing fine. Looks to me like the road out was booby-trapped one way or the other. Looks to me, with design or without design, that somebody had an intention that man necessarily — wasn't necessarily going to get free, if we find the three fields most intimately connected with the right answer to be entirely debased and discredited as of now. That's interesting, isn't it?

Now, it's an odd thing that a person only gets latitude of action when he has freedom to play. When a person feels that he chose to play this game, then it's a game. And when somebody else chose the game for him and put him in there, one way or the other, he has no freedom to play this game but is playing the game under duress. And a life unit that plays the game of having to play the game under duress will be in pretty sad shape in the auditing chair — have a rough time. You know, "I'm playing this game under duress. What wall?" Playing the game under duress.

How did he ever get into a state where he completely lost his own concept of his own beingness and his ability to handle his beingness and identity and individuality? Well, it must have been too wild a game for him as long as he knew as much as he knew about himself. And so he probably managed to forget it all.

You say, "Go on over and touch that wall."

But here we have a controversial point which appears and stares at us out of Dianetics 1955! In Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, we were perfectly willing to accept the idea of a Clear and his abilities — perfectly willing to. And yet a little later on, when the actual measurement of a Clear — how many millimeters wide is a Clear — when the actual measurement of a Clear was announced, people got nervous. They didn't quite like the idea. They didn't quite mesh with this one.

"No."

And yet what had happened? All that had happened is the fact that the Clear had been dimensionalized and located and further described in Scientology The thetan exterior and the Dianetic Clear are exactly the same thing. There is no slightest difference between the two except the thetan exterior, developed by the processes of Scientology, is achieved without erasing every facsimile and engram in the bank.

Now, the odd part of it is, this freedom of choice is so significant in auditing that we find individuals, who are brought in by Mama or Papa and given auditing with no idea of what's happening, get well much more slowly than the fellow who thought it up himself.

Therefore, what has occurred today? The goal which we all knew was a good goal in 1950 has been achieved without the necessity of erasing eight billion, seven hundred and sixty thousand, nine hundred and forty-three, cubed, engrams. And this is not a bad achievement — not bad.

He says, "You know I think I'll go get processed. I'm not so well off these days — I keep going like this . . . (laughter) and I'll go get processed." So he walks in and he sits down and he says, "Process me." And you go ahead — and so on. You see, he still has a freedom to change his role. He changes his role in life. That's why he can consent to come in and be processed.

By discovering that the individual and his individuality was that thing which produced the energy which made the facsimile — gave us, then, the working basis that it was not necessary to take this individual and erase everything which barriered him. It was only necessary to take this individual and teach him how to handle barriers. And the moment he knew how to handle barriers, the moment we have processed him in the direction of ability, as I've already talked to you about, we could then have a Clear without any further ado. Well, the longest time I know of that it has taken a good auditor with modern processes, given in detail in Dianetics 1955! has been one hundred and fifty hours with a terribly rough case. That is the longest on record.

The difference is not whether or not the fellow chose. The difference between these two people — the fellow who won't be processed even when he's sitting in the auditing chair and the fellow who just comes in and wants to be processed — the difference is actually a case level difference. It is not simply difference of attitude. It isn't that one chose to be there and the other one didn't chose to be there, (laughter) you know, that makes the difference in auditing. That's not what makes the difference in auditing. The difference in auditing is made this way: This fellow can choose to be somewhere and to change his role in the game. And this fellow, way down here, can't change his role in the game anymore. So he thinks this auditor is going to make him change his role in the game, and he knows he can't change his role in this game.

We have made an awful lot of Clears with the material in Dianetics 1955! And the longest period of time has been a hundred and fifty hours. Wouldn't that have been a terrific thing in 1950? Think of it, 1950: We'd said it, "The maximum we could look forward to in the making of a Clear is a hundred and fifty hours." You wouldn't have believed me — no more than you do now.

Now, if we were to take somebody and fix him in a chair and go "Swami, swami, hypnoanalysis, pooey, pooey," and shoot him with a little bit of narcowell, I wouldn't say what came up just that moment, but anyway .. . (laughter) — anyway, we shoot him and then we give him a slight little bit of shock, all the time saying to him, "You are a jockey. You can never be anything else but a jockey. You are a jockey." Bzz, bzz, bzz. "You are a jockey. You're nothing but a jockey. All you could do is be a jockey. You'll never be able to change being a jockey." And we just kept that up with this fellow for a few hours and repeated the treatment for a few days .. .

We have this liability in the idea of the Clear, in the thetan exterior — we have this liability, and the only liability there is this: it makes people sick at their stomach to look at nothing and makes a certain amount of people actually violently ill to look at the idea of having nothing. And so when we say to them, "The Clear is a thetan exterior"; when we say to them, "All you have to be is three feet back of your head and run your body from behind you; all you have to do if you want energy is to make some," they say, "Bluaaahh."

We bring him into an auditing session. We'd have to drag him in at the end of a leash or something. We'd have to drag him in, we'd have to force him to sit in the chair, so forth. He was unable to change his role, you see? This he's convinced of: "I can't change my role. So therefore auditing is going to do me no good. I am a quantity of game and I am not a quality of anything beyond just this one thing: The only quality I have is jockey.' The only quantity I have is this body, and this funny little silk cap." All right.

Now, I'll give you a demonstration of this that you can do and that you can use that will show to you intimately and immediately why certain people object to this idea of the Clear. You take somebody who doesn't look to you like he's easily exteriorizable. You know, take somebody who looks like he'd be your kind of a rough case. You know, got a lo — lo — lot of — lot of comm lag, gaga — got a lot of b — b — you know, barriers. Take somebody like that and you say, "Locate a spot in the air of this room."

This would make a real rough preclear — real tough preclear. Don't think that you can't break such a case, you can break such a case. You have to do all sorts of action to get into communication with him because this person won't go into communication. He's a jockey. The only way he communicates is on a horse, this way ... (laughter) And it goes round and round the track, that way.. . (laughter)

He'll say, "All right."

Psychodrama is that effort to get jockeys to be jockeys, on the theory that if you can get them to be jockeys long enough, they'll get unhorsed. But again, unless they chose to decide to be a jockey, they wouldn't become anything else but a jockey.

You say, "Put your finger on it."

Now, there is a process you could run on this fellow, if you could ever communicate it to him; that is the difficulty. You see, he's fallen out of communication. The distance they fall out of communication is the distance they fall away from the game into a fixed quantity of something.

He'll say, "All right."

And the more they go into communication, the more they're able to change the game, change the role — they don't have to necessarily, they just can, you see, quality, the ability — until they finally get up to a point and they say, "Well, hey, what do you know, hah, I can play any kind of a game I want to. Guess I'll go on playing the same kind of a game I'm playing, but that's fun." They didn't think it was fun when they started in getting audited; they didn't think so even vaguely. But now it seems to be an awfully good joke to go down to the office and write on little pieces of paper endlessly. It's very funny.

"Okay. Now locate another spot in the space of this room."

Everybody comes in, bug-eyed, how important it is, see? You say, "That's fine. Let's play this game some more." And these people become very hard on the people around them because these people think they're playing hard, you see. And this individual sees — "Gee, here's an interesting game," and he starts to play about eight times harder than anybody else in his vicinity, and everybody gets worn out. Because this guy is playing a game, and the others are there because they have to be — difference of viewpoint.

"All right. I'm getting sick."

Well, we get a fellow who is able to play the game as he can go into communication. There's nobody quite as out of communication in a football game as the water bucket. Yet all the players come around and drink out of it. But it never positions itself; it's always positioned. It's filled, it's emptied.

And about four spots later, he'll be sick. He'll be sick at his stomach at least, and probably in terror, if you kept up this, just, "Spot spots" without doing another thing. And that tells you immediately, if you want to conduct that experiment, you will see just exactly what I'm talking about. You make this fellow locate these spots in the space of the room, you make him do it for a while, you don't remedy any havingness, you don't do anything else with him, you see, and you will find out why he argued with you before about a thetan exterior. You've made this person visualize something sitting in thin air without any mass.

Now, there's an interesting kind of a water bucket that will fill itself and empty itself, but it has two legs and it's called a water carrier, to a game. And generally this is some bug-eyed kid full of hero worship, you know, "Hey, Joe, can I give you a drink now, huh?" He's playing the game. He'll be in there playing the game left and right. He hasn't yet gotten the fixed idea that all he will ever be is a water bucket.

And the moment that you made him visualize a spot without mass, the thetan exterior (the Clear), he got sick when you did it on processing. Only when you didn't process it, when you were just talking about this, this guy got the queasy idea and he just started to enter into that feeling of queasiness and illness, you know, and he backed right off of it, and then he said there isn't any such thing. And he said this rapidly and he said it hard and he hoped that you would argue back real hard, so as to, by this counter of terminals, give him some more havingness quick! Because the way he could get havingness was to have a fight with you. And that's the only little barrier there is on relaying the idea of a thetan exterior.

Now there's the ratio of age to aberration. You say people who are older are harder to process. No, they're not. That is not even vaguely a true statement. I know lots of kids that are harder to process than old people. I know lots of old people that process just like anything; just — it's nothing to it. I've never found much coordination of age. Because psychology pretended to is no reason for us to believe it's true unless we can see it and demonstrate it.

Now, those people who do not exteriorize easily, and who when they are exteriorized a little bit, sort of yo-yo and don't stay out very much, are still having this same trouble. They've gotten completely entrapped and into the idea that it'd be impossible to have nothing.

I have found people, however, who are quite old who are hard to process, just as I have found people who are quite young who are hard to process. But there is some tendency in this" direction: An individual becomes more and more fixed in his role. At twenty-one he could choose what he was still going to be and he could still get away with this swindle: He could say, "Well, I really don't want to be a bank cashier but I'll just be a bank cashier here until I learn how to play this piccolo. And then I'll be a piccolo player. And I'll become very, very famous."

Yet, if you just ran somebody on the concept — we don't run concepts anymore, but this is just experimental — and you said, "Get the idea that you have a perfect right to have nothing. Get the idea again. Get it again. Get it again. Get it again," he'd all of a sudden start to heave a sigh of relief.

Now look, we have confused goals and dreams a little bit here, and thought they were an end in themselves. When a person has goals and dreams, he's merely expressing this one fact: He can change his role in the game. He is expressing his confidence that he can change his role in the game. You see that? And the manifestation of it is goals and dreams.

"(sigh) You mean I don't — I don't have to work? I — I don't have to get a paycheck? You mean — you mean I wouldn't have to live up to the fact that I was supposed to be a great painter? You mean I have a perfect right to be nothing, too? You mean I don't have to amount to anything in life? How wonderful!" Because he's entirely sold in the other direction.

Don't ever try to process anybody in the direction of ideas alone. Because any thetan, even when bad off, can get different ideas. A life unit can do nothing if not get ideas and shift ideas around. It's how convincingly it can get ideas, that counts. If it can really get convinced of an idea — it's really fixed in some kind of a role — it has very few goals and dreams because it doesn't have to have. There isn't any reason to. It's fixed in this idea now.

Now, what if a man did have the right to be nothing and to have nothing? He'd probably be a very busy and efficient person because the obsession to be, the obsession to have, are the only destructive factors there could be — the obsessive part of it. He's doing something unknowingly and unwittingly. All right.

Now, here we are, a bank cashier. And here we're going to be forty-nine and a half years from now, a bank cashier. Of course, he doesn't recognize that till he's thirty-five. And he's noticed that the fellow who married the boss's aunt and the fellow who married the boss's daughter have both been promoted over him; although he always did all of their work because they couldn't do it. He's forgotten how to be a piccolo player because he missed out his installments on the piccolo and they took it back. And he's — recognizes at last that he is fixed into the identity of being a bank cashier. And if he sells himself on the idea "I will never be anything but a bank cashier," why then, of course, he's ended his goals, dreams, future time track and he has become a quantity of something. He's become a quantity of bank cashier — one bank cashier, you see? Not a capability of becoming a lot of things, if he really put his mind to it.

Dianetics 1955! talks about the Clear and goes forward immediately into making one. Actually, you'd have to know more about it to make something that we call an Operating Thetan. That's another book.

All a thetan has to believe is that he can do a lot of things and be a lot of things — he doesn't even have to do and be them — he's in good shape. But the second he gets the idea that he can only be one thing and he'll never be anything else but that one thing, he's dead! How dead can you get? Believing you can only lie there.

But as far as making anything that we conceive to be desirable in the terms of a Clear, in 1950, the answers are in Dianetics 1955! and they work. And I leave that up to you to discover, to look over, to use and to find out. Now, I have no doubt that you will.

When you believe at last you can only lie there and that's all this body is capable of, is simply to lie still and grow a little bit cold and worm-eaten at the edges, you shove off — so would anybody. Because that is end of game as far as you're concerned for that particular cycle, you see. It's a totally fixed identity. You're no longer even able to change the position of the body in space. It just lies there. See that?

Many things have been discovered. Many things that are quite old to us have been rehashed and looked over again, but the main thing that has come out into the clear is the ability to make a Clear. And what Dianetics 1955! does is to clarify how one does it and makes it possible for all of these hard times we've been having with cases to be over, so we can have easy times with them now.

So change comes first in the ability to change one's ideas, then in the ability to change one's location and position in space at will. That's a mechanic, you've moved into mechanics. And now at last, when one loses even that, he's dead. When he's lost the ability to change his location and position in space at will, he says, "I'm dead." There's probably nothing more to death than that.

And that is the purpose and basic theme of this book.

I imagine you could take this jockey after he had been a jockey for a while and then convince him he couldn't move and he'd know he was dead, and he'd leave and he'd be dead. You get the idea? All right.

Thank you.

We look over the anatomy of games, we look over the anatomy of communication, we find out that communications are necessary barriers in order to continue a game. In the absence of communication, you don't have any space or time. And when you get no communication at all, space and time collapse, and so you get collapsed terminals.

Have you ever had the experience of some fellow having to walk right straight up to you and talk to you, you know, "Say ya, Joe, uh, uh . . " They often enforce this by eating garlic or something first. They say, "Hiya Joe" — collapsed terminals.

Well, that fellow has a hard time. He snaps terminals. He is so close to no communication at all, he has to be that close in order to perceive that there is any. See, he has to come up real close to find out if there is some. He can only make a couple of inches of space, when he should be able to make a few yards, anyhow. All right. He snaps terminals, he has to come close.

Then there's the fellow who gets on the inversion of this who doesn't dare have anybody near him. And you walk up to this fellow and he's standing there, you know, and you walk up to him. He's on the streets, perfect stranger, you're going to ask him for a match. And you walk up to him and you say, "Say, buddy . . . Wonder where he went!"

That fellow is so certain that he can't make any space that a couple of inches be darned; he does a compulsive reversal. The second that you come up, he knows you're going to make lots of space and he can make none. So he accommodates it by creating the lots of space you would make. He has to get out there far enough to agree with his idea of how far he has to be away to answer you.

In your neighborhood you probably had some little kid that used to come around and throw sand down your neck or something of the sort. He'd run way off from you and he'd say, "Nyah, nyah, nyah," you know. And you try to close terminals with him, he just goes further away. He's separated out of the group. Henry who couldn't play marbles. He knows he can't play the game and he runs away from anytime he sees a game occurring.

There's your criminal. The criminal, I swear, is totally and entirely on the run or totally entirely fixed in one place. See, he just goes from one great extreme to the other.

He hasn't done anything criminal for five or six years, he's living in this small town, he's got a job in a garage. And one day a police car drives up to the garage and all that was wrong was he has a soft spare tire he wants pumped up. When the criminal starts breathing freely again, he has moved to Los Angeles. He went out the back door. Just the appearance of this symbol called "police car" is enough to send him hundreds of miles — immediately.

Well, this is a curious manifestation, isn't it? It all has to do with the ability to play a game. The fellow who has to talk very close to you, he has a tough time having any game at all, but remember he's still got a game of some sort. And then the fellow who's got to run like the dickens every time you start to communicate, he's getting close to not having any game at all. He's trying to preserve what game he does have because he knows you're going to eat him. Then we get down to the fellow who doesn't close terminals and doesn't run. And we have, at that moment, the catatonic, and they just lie still. And you pick up their hand, you drop it... .

Had a nurse one time in an insane asylum show me how bad off this particular catatonic was. She says, "She doesn't even respond to needle jabs."

And I said, "No?" I said, "That's very interesting." (Reverend Hubbard was talking to her.) And I said, "That's very interesting."

And she says, "Yes, look." And pulls a safety pin out of her garter belt and jabs it to the hilt in this catatonic schiz. Catatonic schiz didn't twitch. She says, "You see?"

I says, sort of green, "Yes, I see."

And she says, "She doesn't even jab [respond] when you do it here," bang!

The only thing people find wrong with those people that run away, that snap terminals, that lie still, is they're kind of hopeful there might be an opponent there and they're sort of trying to shake somebody into existence so they'll come alive enough to play, you know?

And the only thing you really feel bad about, about an ally, is the fact that he has quit when he's died. You know, he's no longer there to play the game. He ran out on you. That ended that game, woof You weren't through, there were still fifteen or twenty chips in front of your place — a broken communication.

Now, a game is only possible as long as there is communication of some sort. You will find that as you monitor the communication rather poorly — pardon me — sporadically (it's occasional, it's sometimes surprising and so forth, back and forth, it's not good you know, but it's still communication), why, you will have an antagonistic sort of a game where you've got two sides playing. They will fight. That's war. You know, surprising, occasional, unpredicted heavy masses being exchanged back and forth, one way or the other, and you have a war. All right.

A game, then, is monitored in its quality by the communication involved. Now let's see that we have not — we haven't actually excluded bullets or teapots when we've talked about this communication formula.

Now, a complete communication between two soldiers would be as follows: Bill shoots at Joe. Joe prime shoots at Bill prime. Misses all around. So Joe shoots at Bill. Bill prime shoots back at Joe prime. They both shot both ways. They both originated an attack. You watch out, they're liable to wind up as friends. It's only when Joe was careless enough to shoot Bill in such a way that Bill couldn't shoot back, that we get serious about it. And that is bad marksmanship. That ends the game, right there.

And when enough Joes and enough Bills have either failed to originate communications in return, or have failed to answer communications, we get law and order: No shooting — no shooting allowed.

We get a state of affairs, by the way, exactly in the number of years which have elapsed, which is the most curious thing. It's the number of years which have elapsed — give us the amount of law and order which will occur on the subject of who shoots or how much you're permitted to shoot, something of the sort. Let's take New York City — oh, let's get a little older than that, let's take London. I imagine the fellow who walked down the street in London with a six-gun buckled down and in plain sight would not be arrested. He would probably be taken over to Bedlam and locked up. Or the bobbies would want to know what show he was in. That would be about all there would be to it. Nobody would really take it as a crime. I'm sure that nobody would really think of it as a crime anymore.

You walk down the street with a gat buckled down in New York City, you're going to be, not credited with insanity, you're simply going to be thrown into the hoosegow unless, of course, you're a known criminal, at which time they'll just take your gun away from you and set you free. And we get the fact that, if in New York, you possessed a gun and kept it in your desk drawer, you could be arrested and sent to the pen. That's a fact. If you had a gun, you kept it in the car, you'd go to the pen. If you had a gun, if there was some gun rust around anyplace, you could still probably go to the pen.

Now we move a little further west, we get the condition of affairs in Chicago. You actually would not excite much attention in Chicago if you were to take a rifle down the street, or even a gat. You could possibly have a gat, and again, it'd be the same condition: If you were a known criminal, you'd probably get your gun back after they'd arrested you. "Tools of the trade," they call it in Chicago. All right.

And now we get Arizona. And we walk up to — in a hardware store in Arizona and we see all these gats and these revolvers and pistols and so forth, and rifles, and they're all laid out on the counter and so forth. And there's a little slip of paper up in the corner of the counter, and it said, "Anyone under eighteen years of age must have the permission of his parent or guardian in order to purchase and have firearms." And "This will not, in any way, be construed as a law demanding the licensing of firearms."

And you say to this clerk, "Well, you see that .38 Smith & Wesson there? Well, I'd like to buy it. Load it up." Then pay your money over, take the Smith & Wesson, put it in your pocket, walk down the street. Cop found you — if a cop found you with that weapon concealed, and so forth, he probably wouldn't think very much of it. He'd merely think you were being polite. You were not offending the public view — something like that. But if you had it concealed or buckled on or shoved in your car or in your pocket or anything of the sort, the police would not think very much about it.

But the very funny part of all this is, is these guys are still willing to play a game. Couple of fellow — the police are still willing to play a game. The police in each one of these places have drifted away from punitively playing a game.

We get into an interesting state of affairs whereby very little attention is paid to petty crime in Arizona. Sheriffs get interested only when it gets adventurous. They can do something that looks fairly interesting to them, they'll go ahead and do it. But the rest of it — skip it.

For instance, there were a couple of boys held up — an armed — armed robbery, it was, of a service station. And they drove down the road like mad, and it got out on the police radio in the next county and so on. Couple of deputy sheriffs jumped in a car and formed a roadblock. These two bandits saw the roadblock, turned their car around, drove it way off the road and into the brush, got out of the car and ran like the dickens across sand and rocks and so forth.

And all these deputies got together and they said, "Hm." And they carefully tracked, Indian-tracker fashion, these guys, clear across this desert. They found their car, they tracked them halfway across nowhere. And they sat down and waited until — they realized these guys were probably taking a sleep up there someplace, you know. And they sneaked in on them real carefully. And they took their guns away from them and then woke them up — good game. Wouldn't have been played that way in New York.

In the first place, you wouldn't have gotten anybody to have dashed out and formed a roadblock. That would be adventurous. That would be doing something to mess up your forthcoming pension. Furthermore, you'd have probably gotten bawled out by the commissioner for going into that much motion.

Now, when a game drops from communication, it drops into motion and it first drops into rather fast light motion and then it goes into heavier and heavier motion, until nobody can move the game around at all and it's just stopped. And that's Earth. Earth is a pretty solid game — very solid. It's a fixed identity. It's a place called Earth. The number of times this planet has changed its identity in the last twenty-four hours are very few.

The playing field in this case has gotten awfully solid. And people have started to get mad at all things, they've started to get mad at the playing field. Now, what would you think of a bunch of football players who got daffy enough to get mad at the area between the goal posts? And they stopped playing football and started to sit down and pound on the ground. What would you think of these people? Be pretty batty, wouldn't they?

What do you think the physicist has done? What has he done? He kept looking at pieces of energy and matter and so forth, and it refused to move and it refused to obey and it refused to be good and it refused to do things, you see? And it didn't give him answers. Of course, it couldn't give him answers; it isn't alive.Go into the exact sciences someday and you will find around you, guys that are pretty hectically obsessed with trying to get MEST to answer up. The physicist and the electronic engineer build things that talk, build things that think. 'We'll do anything to make this stuff answer." Their wife is standing there all the time going, "Gab, gab, gab, gab, gab, walla, walla, walla" but they know she's not there.

And the physicist gets more and more fixed. This stuff doesn't answer up. It just won't answer. It won't answer. And of course, they say, "Well it might be this theory and it might be that theory." That's their way of saying, 'Well maybe it'd answer this way, maybe it'd answer that way." They're kind of mixed up. They're using the stuff through which you communicate, to communicate to: an inanimate terminal.

Well, almost anybody has some of this inanimate-terminal fixation. You can get them over a lot of this by simply having them touch walls. And they say, "See, there is a terminal right here. What are you hanging on to that old one you've got for? What do you want that old garden wall for? You got a perfectly good building wall right here." That's what 8 -C does, Opening Procedure.

But your physicist has gone out of communication to the degree that he now believes that no communication is the best possible communication, so let's get rid of the playing field. "Everybody get rid of the playing field. We can't get it to answer. But we can get far enough to blow it up. And at least it'll say, "bang!"

Now, the only secret there is about secrets is the lack of an answer. I'm not just identifying answer with answer, this is true. The answer, when absent, makes a secret. What is a secret? A secret is an absence of an answer. How do you get into secrets? By saying, "Bow are you Bill?" (pause) (sigh) You say, "Bill, how are you?" (pause) "Bill, how are you?" And at that moment, you become absolutely certain that he is holding one of the deepest secrets you ever saw in your life. Why? Because he doesn't answer. And that's the only secret there is — no answer. That's all the secret there is — no answer.

You look that over, you'll find out it's true. The people that you will believe to be very, very secret people, simply didn't answer you very often. And if they answered you little enough, then you became convinced that they must be very wise, secretive people indeed.

And so you get the wise old owl who sits in an oak. And the less he spoke, the more you figured he had some secrets to hide. And maybe he did once, but I'll give you a tip: He's forgotten them.

All of this material sum mates into just one thing. We have been looking for answers to what? The answers to answers. What is the answer to an answer? It's an answer. That's what it is.

And we take somebody who's convinced there are tremendous secrets in everything and we simply process him by making everything he thinks is secret, answer. And the next thing you know, he knows all about it. Because he knew everything there was to know in the first place. This is very simple.

So we now, by this process alone, actually can obtain any answer we want out of anything. We can actually make anything talk, whether it's space, matter, energy, time or Mama.

We get fixed on things simply waiting for an answer and after a while, they become secret. And that's what we've been looking for in Dianetics and Scientology. And if you think it over, I think you will agree with me. We have the answer to secrets. And the answer to a secret is an answer. Supply the abundance of answers, and you don't have any secret anymore about life, or about anything.

Okay, I'll see you this evening.

Thank you.