Thank you.

Well, do you all feel worse?

Audience: Yes! No!

You do?

Audience: No!

You sure?

Audience: Yes!

The copies of Dianetics 1955! evidently didn't last, and there will be some more up shortly.

I want to talk to you now about an entirely different, new aspect of Dianetics and Scientology, something that may not be news to many of you but which, nevertheless, is something you could bear hearing again if you've heard it before — which is doubtful, by the way. We started in here a long time ago into a field of endeavor which had nothing to do with aberration.

The history of Dianetics is a very simple history. I started to study, along about 1932, nuclear physics. Many people ask the question every once in a while, "Is Ron really a physicist?" Well, I don't know what they mean, really, by "a physicist." Today it's quite hard to tell what a physicist is, whether he's a government prisoner (laughter) or a genius or just a plain damn fool. To have studied it, does not necessarily mean that one is. One has to subscribe to some degree to that which one studies — to some degree. And I never did subscribe to physics or the physical sciences.

When I was much younger than that, I had had quite a dose of Asia-tosis a malady known in the Orient as I-don't-knowism, I'm-not-sure-itis, the I-don't-entirely-believe-that school of thought. I had been taught long before I had much contact with physical science that man was important, and that the spirit existed, and that the human race had some life in it.

And in 1930, when I first took up the basic courses of the physical sciences, it was without benefit of very much high-schooling and I walked straight in, not warned, perfectly innocent — went in to the registrar, signed up, didn't know what I was getting into and the next thing you know, somebody was saying to me, "Mathematics are themselves and the peer of everything. And life — well, life ... But mathematics ... But life ..." Something wrong here — something wrong here. They think mathematics is a thing, not a process.

Well, we had a collision about that and after being expelled a few times and — I had the lowest grades ever registered for a student still continuing. (laughter) For me a condition was excellent. But when I got along the line to the point where they were teaching atomic and molecular phenomena, which is the proper name of nuclear physics, they no longer had a student on their hands; they had a revolutionary. Because it seemed to me, for instance, just in the field of physics, that a particle was a wave motion and not a particle, but a wave motion which had solidified into a particular form, but was still a wave motion. And I couldn't get this out of my head!

And the professors tried and the instructors tried and everybody tried. And on the final examination in one particular course they said, "Is an x-r " this is the total question: "Discuss whether an x-ray is a particle or a wave." So I wrote. And it said to discuss, so I discussed it. And I came to the conclusion that wave motion must be it! And that's wrong. Only, that was right five years afterwards. Only, three or four years after that, that was wrong. And a couple of years ago, that was right. And now it's wrong again. And so much for the exact sciences.

Well, I actually couldn't take anybody very seriously, particularly when, in chemistry, they demonstrated that you could put certain pieces of mud together and they would grow crystalline forms. Very interesting — but I kept pointing out to them they stop growing. Although they go just so far and although it looks like a life form, it stops growing. And a life form keeps on growing, and you've got one thing which is very missing here — the second dynamic — only I didn't call it that then. This thing doesn't procreate.

"Oh, no! But you see, we can demonstrate just this far that you take just so much mud and put it with just so much mud and you get something made out of mud and that's man. And he has no spirit! He has no goal! He has no purpose except to be a mathematical machine of some kind or another which, when it goes crazy, invents philosophy."

Well, this didn't make me happy. And I don't know why I would take it upon myself to go out and combat the accepted theory except that I hadn't been born into, entirely, that accepted theory. I'd had something else intervening. So in 1932 I made up my mind that there was something about energy that wasn't entirely known yet. That's a sort of an humble thing to make up your mind to.

That seems like I was about the only one that did make up his mind, at least in that atmosphere and arena, that we didn't know all there was to know about energy. And I decided that there was probably — if life was an energy, it must be a kind of energy that maybe we didn't know all there was to know about. And this sort of doubtfulness was not acceptable. When I'd put it on examination papers and things like that — answers like that, they'd flunk me.

But I decided to investigate human memory. I'd had a touch of the brush from Commander Thompson of the navy who had studied with Sigmund Freud, and who was a very swell guy, and he taught me there was something called Freudian analysis. We actually didn't get much further than that. But I find out I know more about it today than most analysts.

But anyhow, that was mostly because I didn't have much of a via there, you see. I had this one officer who had studied with one man who had originated a theory. And this officer was perfectly willing to relay that theory directly since he just went over there to pick it up so that it could be put into the United States Navy as a practice, and perhaps used in flight surgery.

Flight surgery is the practice of mental health in the navy — in the Naval Air Force and so forth. They call it flight surgery: it amputates flights from people or something.

Now — and started to investigate this solely on the line of energy. "And mental energy, so called, must be very small," I says to myself, I says. "It must be very small because we don't have any cameras or anything that will take pictures like the mind will take them."

I realize, now, I was probably the only wide-open case in the midst of a bunch of black Vs. I kept talking about these mental pictures and nobody knew what I was talking about.

Well, I got myself a Koenig photometer and a couple of other crude apparatae and started to measure the cadences and the impressions made by poetry. Why poetry? Well, I reasoned this way: These syllables seemed to produce a certain reaction upon human beings. And if it was just the syllabic action or the wave form in the air that would produce this reaction, why, then, probably, when the fellow recalled it (shades of the E-Meter) — when the fellow recalled it, you'd get the same pattern back again. But my apparatus was too crude. I couldn't prove it one way or the other. But I did find out some-thing astonishing which has come to us recently as a new theory from Austria.

William Randolph Hearst, when he used to run the American Weekly, always had a page in there devoted to things that happened in Bavaria, you know. "Woman Grows Two Heads." "Spirit Haunts Castle," and it always happens somewhere in Bavaria or Austria or someplace like that. If you look back over the files, you'll see that. There was always — these things always happened there. Well, now we find this theory happened in Austria. I wonder if it has comparable truth.

That is the theory of molecular storage of memory. If we take a molecule and consider that it has a bunch of holes in it — let's say it has a hundred holes in it, and we can put in ten memories in each one of these protein molecules — why, how many memories would that make, that the body could have? And we find there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons in the body.

And we figure it all out by our god mathematics — mathematics is some-thing that sits on a pedestal with a stuffy smell — and you figure it all out mathematically and you discover that all anybody could ever remember was three months' worth. Maybe this was acceptable to the mathematician who was dug in, Case Level XII. But I could distinctly remember enrolling in the school! So either I had more punched protein molecules in me .. .

But the long and the short of it was — is by .any known wavelength of energy, there was insufficient memory storage in the mind to bring about the phenomena of memory. By everybody's understanding of it, we were up against impossible phenomena. It couldn't occur. Memory couldn't occur.

So therefore, if life was only energy, if life only came from mud, if there was nothing else beyond life but this, we could only remember three months. To coin a metaphor taken out of Congressional Records: I smelled a mouse. I saw him floating in the air, and I determined before the hour was out to nip him in the bud. It's out of the Congressional Record. They're wonderful people.

Now, that was sort of the beginning of this sort of thing. And I didn't have anything much to do with human aberration, didn't think much about human aberration, didn't see how human aberration had much bearing on it because I couldn't find sanity in life, and that's what I was looking for! We had aberration everywhere. That was easy to come by. But what about these other commodities? Well, they must exist somewhere, somehow. And the years went by.

Very easily, I have done the crudest, most inexact, complicated and probably wrongly concluded biological experiments ever performed on this planet. In biology they teach you how to read long words, not how to culture germs. And if I'd known a little bit more about how to culture germs, this would have been a very easy thing. But I found out that any colony of cells learned, generation to generation — fabulous!

Take a colony of cells in a culture — you know, jelly, and breathe cigarette smoke on them. The nicotine in that cigarette smoke is intensely destructive to those cells. And after you've breathed the cigarette smoke on them, watched them under the microscope, and so forth, and watched them shy away and pull away from that smoke, you then put cool steam. And they go, yow. And you put more steam, and they go, yow! They don't want it.

And just about the time they're getting tolerant of the steam, you give them some more cigarette smoke. Now you can put a breeze of the same air, you know, just plain air on them, they don't shy away. Oh, this is real mysterious — you mean, cells have an intelligence of some sort. Now, take that culture and very carefully breed it long past the one lifetime of one cell, several generations down the track, and put steam on them. You know, a little cool steam in their direction, and they go, nyaa! Fantastic. You mean a cell can remember generation to generation?

And then I sat back and I said whatever was colloquial in those days for a dope, "How could cells fail to remember, because the body goes on building a body like the last body, time after time after time after time, according to the same blueprint, age after age after age, but modifies according to some experience? Of course cells have to remember. Or we have to credit something that stands around and builds something out of mass."

Well, anybody could have thought that thought, couldn't they? That we have men here, and we dig up the graveyard and find out there were men just like them a hundred years ago, so some cell is remembering something someplace, or we have a bunch of ghosts standing around with putty knives and sculpting tools. Take your choice. Science had never taken either choice, and so was very "exact."

Well, this was horrible. So I started a further investigation; discovered by 1938 that there was a dynamic common denominator to existence, and that was survival. It seems like we could talk if we wanted to, about survival of the fittest; that was the modus operandi of some sort or another, and that wasn't necessarily true. But we just talked about plain survival. The urge toward survival.

And if we looked at things, understanding that what it was doing was its aberrated idea of trying to survive, things got real plain. So then I subdivided survival and tried to find out how many alleys things were surviving in as well as how many boulevards. And I found out that we could categorize life in at least four different channels as far as man was concerned — the first, second, third and fourth dynamics. All right. Okay. We couldn't explain everything by sex though — didn't work.

It was 1938 and I'll be darned if some of my friends in Japan didn't get careless with their national sport of hari-kari and commit suicide. And their writhings around while they were still drawing the sacred design with the knife kept me busy for four more years just as it did lots of us. But it got on the track, you know — crunch!

Well, it was not without benefit. I spent a year in a hospital at the end of that and — no other reason than cussedness. By taking off one collar ornament, I found out I could very easily be mistaken for a medical doctor. I even set it up so that as I would speak to the librarian, a marine or two would come by and say, "How are you, doctor?" And that gave me access to the medical libraries of the hospital. And gave me access as well to all of their experimental data which was in progress at that time.

So I studied for a year in the field of biochemistry: antibiotics and glands of one kind or another; endocrine system, alarm reactions, testosterone, pituitary fluid, oh, all kinds of odds and ends. Messed up an awful lot of experiments for the people because I would take the guy that I had the experimental record on — look at all these men working for me. Look at the — all these laboratories and so forth — working, working away.

And I'd get one of their boys whose case I knew about, and I'd take him down on the park bench. Knowing a little bit about psychoanalysis, we would plow out a few psychic traumas — you know, Straightwire — plow them out. And then we would find out that the glandular fluids being administered to him would now bite; they would now work quite according to the records. You know, they'd test him afterwards without knowing I'd done anything.

Young doctor there saw me on a — doing this one day with an old marine and (I even got something out of this marine) — and he saw me and he said to me, "You know, that fellow is a part of our experimental series."

And I said, "No!"

And he said, "Our records have been behaving strangely lately. But," he says, "you're only doing something in the field of psychotherapy, so we needn't worry.

That was actually the first time I found out I was doing something in the field of psychotherapy. It never occurred to me before I was engaged in anything like psychotherapy. I was trying to find some life and sanity.

Well, the results of that year were extremely plain. They demonstrated that life was the servant of function. And that structure was monitored by function. And that structure, when altered, simply was altered structure, and didn't necessarily even vaguely alter function — fascinating! There's something there that is functional, that is monitoring all this mud they've been teaching me about all these years. What is it? What's its wavelength? Didn't seem to have one. Fantastic enough, it just didn't seem to want to be immediately measured.

Well, the years followed along and finally, I got to a point where, again, in trying to locate this, in trying to establish something about it, I discovered certain processes which, when applied to an individual, got him over a lot of these psychic traumas a lot faster than anybody had done. All right.

And then again we were slightly into psychotherapy but still trying to find and isolate this unit, this production of life, the thing which made the wavelength or whatever it was. All right. Fine.

It wasn't until just three months ago, since I have seen you last, those of you who are here from the last congress, that I was able to say with considerable conclusiveness, as far as I was concerned, that we had achieved something which increased the ability of life to be alive. And we moved at that moment out of the field of psychotherapy and moved into the field of human ability. We're no longer interested today in psychotherapy. And I'll tell you why.

Ability is our sole measure of livingness. And disability is our measure of death. And we are not interested so much in being dead as being alive, and therefore our accent should be and can be, today, on ability. And that is our accent.

Now, let's see what this does. Let's see what this does. Let's take the first dynamic. And let's find immediately what is wrong with an individual who cannot be a good first dynamic. Well, let's draw the first idiotic simplicity on it and say, he is unable to be himself.

Well, the direction of repair is not to find out why he's unable to be himself. The direction of repair of this, if you were in the field of repair, would simply be to make him be himself, wouldn't it? Well, let's get him up there to a point where he can be himself, you know, just bang! Well, we find out we don't have to pay any attention to the disability at all in order to attain the ability — fascinating.

Now let's take this second dynamic. Freud in 1894 stated very, very conclusively, resoundingly and repercussively, which repercussions are still reverberating slightly. Catholic church, for one thing: Index Expurgatorius (all Freudian analysis) — papal bull — have it about two years ago: "You analysts better be careful. We'll frown."

And so the second dynamic becomes less surviving or less of a survival drive in the individual. In other words, we have less ability. Let's not look for anything else. Why bother? There can be ten thousand factors involved in the disability of this individual. Why bother with all this disability, since the ability is only a small number of factors.

And if we could directly increase this ability, then any disability on the second dynamic would, of course, vanish, wouldn't it? Now we find out that an inability on the second dynamic would have to do only partially with the sexual act or sexual performance. It'd have a lot to do with the raising of children — the future generations and so forth.

Well, let's look around right now and supposing that we put down all of the reasons why the youth of the country is not in good shape. Supposing we just went on and accumulated reasons why. I don't think we've got enough sheets of paper to start writing down all these reasons why. But we have one fact there. We could be more able in handling the youth of this country today. We could be more able in this. We agree on this: that certainly we could be more able on this. All right.

How could we be more able? Well, by increasing ability. Of what? Well, of youth to be youth, for one thing. Sounds idiotically simple, doesn't it? All right.

Third dynamic — what's the matter with somebody who can't associate with his fellows in a group? What's the matter with this man? That he can't associate with his fellows in a group, that's what's the matter with this man. Well, what's the remedy of this?

Well, to fix him up so he could associate with his fellows in the group, of course. But you won't do that nearly as fast by subtracting all the reasons why, as you will by simply making him capable of associating — easy as that. Let's just go straight to the point and make him capable of associating. And we find out all this other rationale falls away.

Let's take the fourth dynamic. Do you know that we are so far, so entirely far from a fourth dynamic today, that I'll bet you there isn't anybody, really, out in the country that you would pick up at random that would think he could do a thing about the atomic bomb or the age or the destruction of continents by reason of atomic weapons. Let's just take a service station attendant. Let's say to him, "By the way, what are you doing about nuclear fissions, you know, new weapons and restraining them from being dropped?"

But do you know that there's no reason why you shouldn't ask that man that question? Fourth dynamic would immediately contain enough responsibility to knock out or inhibit or divert something which threatens the destruction of mankind's civilization. This is an incredible thing that you have a world full of people today, including the leaders of these nations, who are standing around saying, "Huh?" on the subject of the atomic bomb. Or like the Secretary for Air, Talbott, not too long ago: "We have such horrible weapons that we can wipe out a whole continent. And not even the men who invent these know anything about their destructive strength. So you better pray."

Well, where is this man's fourth dynamic? Must be fairly high — at least he's insinuated himself into the government. This is the man you'd look for to do something active and dynamic about one of the most pressing problems man faces. He doesn't face it. Where the devil is his fourth dynamic?

Well, I'll tell you where it is. It's all wrapped up in being a nationalist, something which was new on the face of Earth a couple of hundred years ago and which is still violently with us and which, in most of our memories, has brought about three wars. Just a generation ago, young Americans and young Englishmen were mucking through the mud of France, stepping over dead Germans who had Gott mit uns on their buckles.

They spent four years in some fields which I crossed rather recently, and as near as I could find out, the only things the Germans were after must have been the only things there. They must have come out of Germany into these plains across which they were fighting in order to obtain something. So I had some fast vehicles and I looked real thoroughly to find out what was there and I found some milk cows were there. And as near as I can figure out, it's sort of cattle rustling going on, but certainly not very much fourth dynamic going on.

When we look around and we see that the insect population of South America is a very, very able population: there are thousands of acres of Brazil which are utterly uninhabitable because of ants. And the last time a fly bit you, told you the fourth dynamic was not making entirely on the subject of the fifth. It said man did have some enemies who weren't men.

The Four Horsemen haunt man, and yet he goes out and makes rifles to shoot other men. For some years, some of us got bitter about this. And then most of us got over being bitter and said, "The devil with it."

But it's nevertheless not true that the fourth dynamic cannot exist. The fourth dynamic can exist. But how far are we below that existence? How able are the individuals on the fourth dynamic? How able are they? We'd have to answer, to some degree, how able could they be. And that we don't even know, bless it. We don't know how able a man could get on the fourth dynamic.

Man's usual way of handling this is some individual elects himself as Caesar or Alexander or Napoleon, and he goes charging around on a white horse doing what, we're not sure. History is called the "Mississippi of lies" by Voltaire. We know such men existed. They were trying maybe to get up to a fourth dynamic, maybe, and maybe not. We don't know.

And we find some philosopher someplace writing plaintively on the subject of the fourth dynamic, and another philosopher writing not quite plaintively, such as Schopenhauer, who said that the best solution of the whole thing is just refuse to have anything to do with life, or to let it go on living, and that solves the whole works — the creed of Schopenhauer in The Will and the Idea. The fourth dynamic. No. It becomes silly.

We say first dynamic — yes, we can survive as ourselves. We're able, you see, on the first dynamic. Second dynamic — yes, we can have children. We can raise them. We're able on the second dynamic. And yes, we have groups and we get along together all right as groups, so we're able on the third dynamic. And then all of a sudden we get entirely disabled on the fourth dynamic, and we haven't got groups, children or selves!

Somewhere along the line we could stand an increase of ability, not on the part of some individual singled out by chance or wit, but by all of us. We could stand an increase of ability on such a thing as the fourth dynamic because if we don't increase our ability on the fourth dynamic, we're not going to have the first three.

The accent is on ability. The abilities that were taught in the physics laboratories of George Washington University were absorbed differently by the several people present. Some of them absorbed the knowledge which was there and which had been developed earlier by people like Halley, Einstein — absorbed this novel information, the different purposes and usages. The bulk of my classmates today have gone into service to the government and have been excommunicated — been kicked out. They couldn't stand it either.

But they could stand it in 1932. They used to talk about blowing up the planet as something you might do at a picnic some Sunday afternoon. They could talk very easily about this because they'd had no recognition of what was happening. And then one of these gadgets developed by these same men was dropped on Hiroshima and seventy thousand men, women and children died just because these boys had applied their formula with no responsibility on the fourth dynamic! And now that they've applied that formula with no responsibility, where are going to be their third, second and first dynamics?

Well, I applied it in a different direction. I said, "Someday there's going to be a fight between humanity and science." Someday, somebody is going to have to know enough in order to stand up to and against the forces which look upon man as cheap, worthless, expendable, erroneous and unnecessary to the planet called Earth — someday.

I didn't have any responsibility on the fourth dynamic really. I was just going along the line, sort of, you know, following the chalk line of what I had been taught earlier in my life. Such men as the last magician of those brought into China by Kublai Khan, a man who had eventually become — by lineage, had been part of the Court of the Empress dowager and when that court broke up after the Boxer Rebellion, was thrown out to be a street magician — he was my friend. He had good grip on this idea.

He said, "One way or another, we're responsible for everyone and every-thing that walks, lives and breathes out there — one way or another. And the way we walk to our doom is to take our feeling for our fellow creature away from him and hold it to ourselves. And so we die." And as a boy of sixteen I wouldn't have known too much of what he was talking about but it sort of hit me, you know, as being a strange way to look at life. But maybe there was some value in it.

Yes, there is some value in it. You suffer today from the disabilities of others. You could have more to do, more games to play, if those around you were more able. That is certain, isn't it? You could look toward more security, you could look to a happier life, if you could depend better upon the reactions and actions of those around you. That's true. Well, your life doesn't depend upon their disabilities. It'll never be better because of their disabilities, ever! So why concentrate upon their disabilities? Why not try to find something about their abilities and increase them?

Here you are driving down the road, minding your own business, driving a car. Suddenly somebody drives along, moves over the white line and runs into you — thud! Routine occurrence. Nothing strange or peculiar about it. But you were driving easily, comfortably, with skill, but you didn't predict the fact that somebody was going to turn across that white line at sixty miles an hour because he's supposed to be on the other side of the line. What are you fighting there?

Let's get the things you could do. It's really not your cue to go out and legislate against drunk driving and perform tremendous penalties on people who would drive when they're drunk. Because the next time you're driving down the road and somebody steers across the white line, it's because he didn't have but one hand on the wheel and had another one on a blonde. So then you'd have to go out, in addition to being against drunk driving, you'd have to go out to driving with one hand on a blonde.

But you've got this all boxed up. You've got laws now on the subject of drunk driving and blonde driving. You're all set. So then you're driving down the road minding your own business and a car hurtles across the white line and goes into you. You're still alive by this time. Your insurance company will still issue your insurance, so you've still got a car. And you find out the reason this happened is because the left front wheel of the oncoming vehicle came off! Mmm!

So you figure and you figure and you figure. So you decide what you'd better do. What you'd better do is get legislation passed in order to make the manufacturers of automobiles inspect their left front wheels before the car is released for public use. But you discover this won't work because the reason that left front wheel came off was because of a service station attendant who didn't bolt it back on. So you decide that you will get legislation to prohibit service station attendants from touching left front wheels. You sure got lots of laws, now. Haven't we got lots of laws? All right.

So you're driving down the road and a car goes across the white line and hits your car and when you get out to protest, it's a cop. And you say, "How did this cop get here?" I'll tell you how he got here. You wanted laws against drunk driving, didn't you? You wanted laws against blondes, didn't you? — and the manufacturers of cars and the service station attendants. And there's where you got the cop, only he's after you now. And you can say then, "I have no responsibility." That's where the cop came in.

Cops, by the way, go down scale. At first they start to arrest criminals and then they wind up having only to associate with honest citizens. And today it's illegal for a cop to arrest criminals — it is, practically. We've had a couple of things with police and, each time, the only people that got questioned were the people who complained about being robbed. They didn't do anything else about it. All right.

So there's the cop. After a while, you're driving down the road, and you've got cops behind you and cops in front of you, and you've got cops all over the place. The only reason you're driving at all is just so the cop in the back seat won't have to drive.

We got a police universe. What is it? How does it get to be that? By shedding off responsibilities for the various dynamics. By backing up from them and saying, "I have nothing to do with them." By looking at disability and not looking at ability. By looking to repress, inhibit disability. By looking in the direction always of doing something about disability and never doing anything about ability. And that's how it gets that way.

What was the solution in the first place for all these accidents? You were driving down the road and a car came across the white line and hit you. Instead, then, of looking at how drunk this fellow was, if you'd gone out and established a driving school or made it necessary or invited people to drive better, or if you had put people who are issued a license into a condition that they could always drive, be able to drive, you wouldn't have had any more accidents to amount to anything.

Because a man that can drive and who is able with driving, certainly would know when the left-hand front wheel of his car was loose. And a man who could drive, could also drive dead drunk, and he could also drive with one arm around a blonde. Let's make him even able to do that. So that the road toward freedom and out of a policed universe is the road toward ability. And that road toward ability is never followed by fixating on one disability after another.

Now, does this work in processing? Have we discovered that there is something definite in these principles which apply intimately to life? And believe me, there is. Give me an auditor who will only process a chronic somatic, who will only process in the direction of bad sight or a bad leg, and I'll show you an auditor that takes a long time on a case — real long time. He'd probably make it.

But give me an auditor who will concentrate 100 percent on making the preclear more able in the level of conduct of the process, and wasn't — care anything about the disabilities, but he just goes on plugging to make this preclear more able and more able and more able to do this process, get the comm lags out of it, and I'll show you an auditor that makes people well in a hurry. Strange part of it is, is the bad leg, the bad sight, the chronic somatic, drops away in as much as one hundredth of the time. Fascinating, hm?

The evolution, then, of Dianetics was simply, at the beginning, trying to single out what was the ability, what could life do? What could it do? What was it and what could it do? How did it behave? That was the primary thing. And the next thing that followed immediately after that was an observation of life itself to find out what it was doing and then finally, way late in this research and investigation, we walked into the field of psychotherapy. What were we doing in psychotherapy? Well, it's because we could be so darned able in the field of psychotherapy; that's what we were doing in it. And because man likes to categorize everything and label everything, so he kept coming around to us and saying, "What are you doing? What are you doing?"

And we said, "Well, we're . . . Well, we're running engrams."

And he says, "What?"

"We make people feel better. That's what we're doing."

"Nobody else ever has — couldn't be true."

But yet, we were there in the field of psychotherapy for quite a while. The only processes we had, actually, were those processes which would eradicate a disability. And the eradication of a disability was not very important. And when we came all the way through this cycle, it was time to write Dianetics 1955! It has a great deal to say about accent on ability. We're almost back where we started, with the single difference: We know what we're doing. "Slight" difference!

Now, if I were to tell you that, "All research and investigation in the field of Dianetics and Scientology today has been successfully concluded," I'd be a liar. I could no more tell you that — I couldn't even tell you that with a straight face. Every time I say to myself very quietly, "Well, gee-whiz, you know, a little fit [bit] further in that direction probably wraps that up," I go a little bit further in that direction and I keep looking for the wrapping — not there.

It's because there probably is no upper ceiling on ability. Research and investigation into disability could be forever with enormous phenomena — tremendous quantities of phenomena! Catalogs. Catalogs. Catalogs. Because these are all barriers life uses in its various games. It makes itself unable, one way or the other, and then forgets why it did it and what game it's playing. It gets all mixed up. Any case that we used to call a "what wall," actually is a "what game" case — they're busy playing kindergarten games maybe. Maybe they're playing games from way back somewhere or another.

And we don't know why they're playing these games and they've forgotten, even, what games they are. If we go plumbing into it, we find out that strangely enough they're playing a game of one kind or another. A game called limp. Or a game called headache. Peculiar. It just gets snarled up, loses its direction. But we could catalog these disabilities just endlessly. In any month, in Dianetic and Scientology research, more phenomena has been cataloged than turned up in the history of almost one hundred years of psychology. Why?

I'll tell you why. Because the research and investigation started out basically to increase ability. And every time you try to increase ability some of these things which were disability would pop up and announce themselves and say, "Hey! Look how able I am. I can stop this preclear from remembering. When he tries to close his eyes and see, I can give him a black wall. When he tries to walk, I can hurt him. When he wants to hit somebody, I can make his chest hurt."

Phenomena. Phenomena. Phenomena. Phenomena. They wouldn't have turned up, don't you see, if we hadn't been going in a direction of ability. We're trying to discover ability, so naturally, disabilities continue to announce themselves and all the phenomena there is, actually, could be cataloged under disabilities. So you see the direction of research? Do you see why we got some-place in Dianetics and Scientology? We're going in the opposite direction. We just reverse things.

And instead of trying to write down, "The number of insanities are . . ." (fellow by the name of Kraepelin did this) — number of insanities are catalog, catalog, catalog, catalog, category, category, category, catalog, catalog, catalog, catalog, category, category, category and unclassified. It's real cute. That's the most enormous list you ever saw in your life.

It didn't get anybody on the road. Why? What was he doing? He was going around looking for disabilities, looking for disabilities, looking for more disabilities. And of course he'd find a disability; he'd simply fix on it because that's what a disability does — gets attention fixed or it unfixes your attention from everything. That's what a disability does. So research and investigation of disabilities would continually wind people up in trouble and with set ideas — with catalogs. It would wind them up with an enormous variety of disabilities, were they able to take their attention off the last disability they'd found. But they don't.

Let's get a case. He starts into examination of himself and he goes right straight along. He's doing fine, by the way, he's just swell. He's a hit at parties, he can play the piano with his shoes on, he can do all kinds of things. And he goes into his case on self-examination to discover what is wrong with him since the last five girls that threw him over has given him some clue there must be something wrong with him.

So he says, "Let's see, what's wrong with me?" And all of a sudden he turns his attention a little bit introverted and he hits some kind of a psychic trauma.

He wants to increase his ability, you see, and he hits this little trauma, and it says, "The thing that's wrong with you, Joe, is you're no good."

And he says, "Well, I'll look around and see what else I can find."

There goes your case, fixated on one idea. Everywhere he goes, he has that idea in front of his face. What happens, though, if you actually, actively start increasing his ability? His attention comes right off that circuit — ping! And of course, another one will pop up. You take his attention off that one, another one will pop up. Off that one — another one. Off — another one!

This is the reaction of the mind going toward freedom. Freedom lies beyond barriers. And as soon as you start to go in the direction of freedom, you'll find some barriers. And the trick is not to stand around and look at these wonderful barriers inside the head.

Let's find out how able a fellow can be and how free he can be. And if we discover this, we will discover immediately why research and investigation in the field of Dianetics and Scientology will continue to expand — because the direction toward ability is the only direction it has ever really had. The more able we can make a person, the freer he is. The more dynamics he is surviving along, the more beingness he is. And so we are able, if we pursue ability. If we pursue disability, we are disabled.

And the first and foremost of these abilities is communication. But I will tell you all about that tomorrow Thank you.