How are you?

Well now, I want to talk to you about the practicalities of a practical religion. All right.

Thank you.

How practical is this practical religion called Scientology? How practical is it? Have you ever heard of a religion getting itself down in black and white on the subject of what it can do for you? This religion doesn't promise anybody any pie in the sky, but it does demonstrate that an individual can, by increasing his spiritual beingness, have greater intelligence and greater control and command of his emotions and the situations in which he's involved.

My, it's good to see you here.

For eight months we have been racking up data, getting it down in black and white: How good is it? What can we do? And for eight months we've been teaching the same processes in the HCA school. And that is fantastic! (audience laughter) Milestone. The fellow who graduates today will be able to talk to the fellow who graduated seven months ago.

We have a very, very fine crowd here. Very fine. I was very happy at looking over the list of names, all the good people I saw coming in here. And this was a happy inspiration to hold this congress in Washington.

Well, how practical is this practical religion? Just handed to me by special delivery from the HASI Chief of Psychometry/Scientometry, is a pack of tests which have been given to a great many people before processing and then after processing. These are very standard tests. These are the most standard intelligence tests that could be given anyone, given impartially and without the least quibble, and these tests demonstrate some of the more interesting things. Now, she left me a little note on some of these, and she said, "Since you've been gone, Ron, I'm not as satisfied with the results on this week's preclears, but I'm sending them anyhow"; then we turn them over and find out they're just as good as the other tests.

The congress here in Washington is a rather special affair. One of the reasons why I came east to give this congress, and why I was very happy to be able to do so, has to do with the development of information of sufficient importance, as I believe you will see at this congress end, to warrant telling as many important people as possible about it. The things which have been happening in Scientology by reason of research and development have removed Scientology entirely from any classification as a psychotherapy. The facts behind Scientology today are that it is doing things which nothing has ever done before.

Now, let's take a look here. And here we have a preclear ("Mr. Preclear" we call them in staff auditors' conferences at the HASI), Mr. Preclear, and we discover that Mr. Preclear was tested 2-9-55 and was tested again at 4-23-55, and between the two dates he had very little processing except Group Processing, which was given every Wednesday night at HASI headquarters. And we look over here, and I just know there'll be a change. And there is a change. He just had a little Group Processing, Wednesday nights, and he got a change of from 130 to 143 in IQ. Fascinating, isn't it? This isn't even an intensive — this is just a guy, and he just walks in and he goes to some Group Processing.

One of the things which I am very pleased to announce immediately is that we have seldom failed in recent months to raise the intelligence quotient of any individual undergoing twenty-five hours of processing, at least ten points. And for those who have undergone as much as seventy-five hours of processing, we have raised it as much as thirty-five points and consider it routine twenty-five points. This is something that has never happened before, and therefore it is an important thing that we take a look at this. According to psychology, this is an impossibility — completely impossible. And therefore I want to tell you why it is impossible in the field of psychology.

All right. And here we have another preclear, tested between 4-25 and 5-14 — in other words, that's just a couple of weeks apart — and by the way, I recognize this preclear, I processed her. And we get an IQ change in — I think that's about 6 1/2 hours of processing, 5 hours. This preclear is 50 years old, never had anything happen in her whole life, and at 50 years of age she gets 5 hours of processing, and her IQ changes from 111 points to 125 points. Now, you know the only direction that IQ can go is down, and as you get old, you get dumber. Ask any kid! (audience laughter)

Dianetics, our earliest beginnings, was a mechanistic science — very mechanistic, but very precise. Without Dianetics we could not have proceeded, but we had Dianetics and we did proceed. All Dianetics was, was a very exact analytical approach to problems of the mind, and in Dianetics we were closely allied, of course, to psychotherapy. We couldn't help but be, because all of the data on which we were depending, all of the procedures through which we were going, were one way or another related to psychotherapy.

All right, I'm just taking them off the stack here. Now here we have a student who is 37 years of age, and this student got — you could hardly say he was processed at all — received student auditing. The way students audit is wonderful. One of them sits there and says, "All right, I'm the auditor," and the other one says, "Well, all right, but watch it!" And then they spend the remainder of the two hours arguing whether or not there was an Auditor Code break. (audience laughter) And yet, something happened here — not much, but it went from 100 to 108. That's hardly a tremendous change — that's students.

But when we moved out of this mechanistic approach back in 1952, it was necessary to distinguish the fact that we had moved out of a mechanical approach. We were no longer considering man a robot. We were no longer considering man something that you wound up and set him on the track of life, and he ran for a number of years and ran down. We no longer considered man was doing this thing or was this kind of thing. We graduated from that. We recognized that man was basically a machine only so far as his body went; that man, otherwise, was a spiritual entity which had no finite survival. It had, this entity, an infinite survival.

Now here we have another 5 hours of auditing. A 45-year-old lady, and — oh, by the way, this was an interesting thing. This isn't a standard processing test; this is not quite standard. I sat there and processed this lady on this line: tried to make her — to show her that these pictures she saw all the time could be made to go away just by thinking a certain thought, (snap) bing! And she'd sit there and she'd say, "Yeah, there's that automobile accident. Yeah, my two children were almost killed. Yes. Ow!"

One of the basics, you understand, of Dianetics was survival: The basic principle of existence is survival. And that is only true for the body. A spirit cannot help but survive, whether in heaven or in hell or on Earth or in a theta trap. That is the saddest thing to most people. It is so sad that they very well like to forget it. They say, "Well, I'm going to live a number of years and then I'm going to die. And that will be the end of me, and you should all feel sorry for me and send flowers." And this is an interesting game, but it is not true.

And I'd say, "All right, now think so-and-so. Now think so-and-so. Now think it again."

If he thinks of this at all in the Western Hemisphere, he ordinarily thinks of it in this wise: "I'm going to live a number of years and then I will go to my reward, and I hope it won't be what I deserve." Now, this is another game, this is another game. This is not to frown in any way upon the principles and beliefs of other religions, but it is nevertheless demonstrable, too accurately demonstrable, that an individual isn't finished with the game once his body dies.

"Huh! Black magic."

We are on a much higher level in Scientology than the Western religions have been, but we are not on a higher level in Scientology — except in our technologies, except in the exactness of our understanding — than those great religious leaders of India who kept the spirit, the spiritual side of life, alive for thousands of years against all materialistic ingression.

So I'd explain to her, "Now you see, the moment that you get the exact combination of mental image picture which is afflicting you exactly — that you get the right combination — it of course will vanish. And I'm just showing you how to do this."

And when we consider that a great deal of what we now know with great exactness was already known and lost thousands of years ago, we begin to see that we are not dealing with something new when we are dealing with Scientology. It is not something new.

We'd do this again. "Yes, there's the delivery of my first child. Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

What we are doing with this data is new. The way this material is organized is new. The technologies with which we can bring about a new state of being in man are new. But the basic idea, the basic hope of man as it appears today in Scientology is thousands of years old. If we call Scientology a religion, we are calling it a religion out of a much deeper well than the last two thousand years.

And going, "All right, think a thought (snap). This way (snap)," so on. Bang — gone!

This congress is given here to signalize an accomplishment of material studied over a long, long period of time — over a quarter of a century, which is a long time to study anything. If you ever sat and looked at anything for a quarter of a century, why, you'd know that was a long time to sit there and look.

She'd say, "What's happening here? This is black magic."

I would like to say that this congress is here to honor the great spiritual leaders of the past — not of modern times, but of the past — since these people handed along enough tradition to make us aware of the fact that there was a spiritual side to man. These great spiritual leaders have been hanged, reviled, misinterpreted, badly quoted, have not been at all comprehended, but nevertheless, they are the hands through which a torch has been handed forward through the centuries so that we could culminate with a greater ability for man and some hope for his future.

And in 9 hours of processing I couldn't ever get it through to her. Because I didn't process her — all I tried to do was teach her how to think that thought to make pictures appear and disappear. And she could eventually do it, but she still thought that we were dealing in the realm of necromancy. And who knows, perhaps we are! Because this lady is one of the wilder cases to have just been evaluated for to the degree of teaching her a process, and she got a change from 129 to 138 IQ, which is not terrific — but I'm missing here, because it's too hard to show you at this distance, the tremendous changes indicated here on personality. This red happens to be the first test, and it's just for the birds, you know — sea gull be real sane if he was across there! And here we get, after those few hours of processing, this person following very close to a proper, normal behavior curve. Few hours of processing. The person was terribly — it says here "very subjective, moody, nervous," so on.

These great religious leaders — at least those that I consider great religious leaders — begin with a monk, a legendary mythical monk whose name probably was not, but is said to be, Dharma. That word has meant "wisdom" ever since. Some many thousands of years ago in the highlands of India, he handed out, or handed on, information which was taken up and carried forward by someone who might never have existed, just as they say Christ might never have existed, and that person was Krishna.

Well, of course, you understand these are Scientometry findings, but these are psychometric tests, so they talk in terms of disturbances and so forth. We're not interested in disturbances. That's one of the first things you should learn, you know, about Scientology — that it's an entirely different method of thinking. Psychotherapy hasn't any relationship to it, because psychotherapy goes and tries like hard — to find something wrong, you see — tries hard to find something wrong with the person so they can make it right.

And we go forward from there and we get to Lao-the who in his Tao again handed on knowledge and said there was a spiritual side to life. But all these people were saying something that was much more important than "There is a spiritual side to life." They were saying, "There is hope. They can come to you and they can tell you that all is lost and that you are dead, you are trapped, and that there's no hope for you. They can come to you and say this, but this is not true. There is hope. You do go on living. This life is not all there is. There is some future life in which you can do better, succeed more worthily than you have." That is all these men said.

In Scientology we assume there must be something right about him, and we make it righter. We're only interested in his abilities, we're not interested in his illnesses. But we see these tremendous changes taking place, just on the matter of self-mastery.

Whatever trappings have been hung upon their words, we don't care. Whatever technology they had, has certainly been lost. Nevertheless, they did hand on this message to man. They said, "There is hope, you can be better. This life is not all there is, and somehow or another it is all going to come out all right in the end." And without that hope, I do not think man could have survived this far down the track.

Now, this is one of the more interesting things. We work straight at the spiritual identity of the person, you see, raising its self-determinism. And we get optimum results like this: self-mastery goes from about 52 to 68. This is fantastic! In other words, the person gets to be in control of themselves. At about 50, they're going, "Well, I wonder where my body is taking me next." Below 50 they don't even know that they're there to be taken anywhere.

Another one of these great leaders is Gautama Buddha, who, oddly enough, never pretended to be a god. Pretended to be nothing but what he was — a man inspired with the wisdom which he had gained and which he taught. And at one time, one-third of this earth's population knew of and was better for Gautama Buddha.

All right. Now here's another very, very brief intensive. And here again we get a situation where this person was 45 percent depressive, and after processing was only 10 percent depressive. Don't you think that's a little bit of a change? Over here we get this person was very subjective, you know? Figure-figure-figure-figure — 70 percent subjective. When we got through, this person was only 40 percent subjective — a drop of 70 to 40. That's changing a personality just like using paint; I mean, that's putting a new model out here, and everybody said, "Is that Grace?"

In the Western world, if you walk up to a man casually and you say, "Buddha," he'll say, "an idol." This was the furthest thing from Buddha's thoughts — to be an idol. He would have laughed — and probably did laugh after he exteriorized and came back and took a look around and saw everybody building temples, burning joss to Buddha. Nevertheless, this was not the attraction of the Buddhist. The attraction was, again, wisdom and hope.

Now it's quite peculiar. All of these factors are changed. Here's another factor: This person was only 40 percent active and after these few hours of processing (5, to be exact), this person was 90 percent active — 40 to 90 percent active. That's an awful change.

People poured out of China for centuries over torturous and dangerous mountains, snow-filled passes, to drop down into India just to come close to the area where Gautama Buddha had taught that there is hope and that the endless cycle of life and death does not have to continue, that an individual can be free even from this.

All right. Well, I see I'm running into a tremendous number of these short process runs, but that's all right. Here we have a preclear, age 65. Now, "everybody knows" you're dead at 65! You can't change an old person — that's impossible. They just get sort of set in their arthritis and there they are, that's the way it is. (audience laughter) And yet this person changed in this fashion: 104 IQ to 117 IQ. 104, that's pretty low IQ; 117's all right, that's getting up toward college. It's quite a change.

Now, that's interesting, isn't it? Yet the ignorant deified him. But, due to him, a great deal of this work was handed on and an enormous amount of what we call religion in this Western Hemisphere today was given to this Western Hemisphere directly by Gautama Buddha. It was filtered through the Middle East. "Love thy neighbor" was one of the first lessons he taught, and it is that lesson which we have received from the Middle East.

Now, we look over the personality factors of this person and we find that this person went from 5 percent critical and became sufficiently critical to 35 — 5 percent critical to 35 percent critical. This means the person became sufficiently critical to tell the difference between a good pie and a mud pie. This is a big change.

But what I am telling you is that these people handed on a torch of wisdom, of information, generation to generation. It was handed along geographical routes, and one of those geographical routes was the Middle East. And one of the people who handed it on was a man named Moses. And again it was handed on to a man named Christ. And he handed it on, and even the Arab nations benefited from this through their own prophet, Mohammed.

Now, other changes occur on this. I will leave these in somebody's charge so that you can look them over if you're particular and closely interested in them. These, you understand, are just grabbed out of the test drawer on the basis of, "My Lord, Ron wants them clear back there in Washington — how am I going to get them there?" you see? And I look at them here and they're not in bad shape, but they could be in better.

And these men I consider great spiritual leaders, because they gave to man, on down through the years, the hope that life could go on, that there was a spiritual side to existence, that the business of barter and gain was not all there was to life. And today, sitting in a materialistic society which almost vilifies anybody who speaks of the fact that you don't "die right away, and when you're dead, you're dead and you're dead, you see — you're dead!" — and right on down to this time, we are indebted to these men.

So here we have a 25-hour intensive of a person who needed — and this is something for you Scientologists — this person needed at least 75 hours. And everybody sat there and said, "Come on, get processed for 75 hours," and the person said, "I can only be processed for 25 hours." Processed him for 25 hours, and his IQ went from 169 to 156. It dropped. And his personality got a little bit better off: His self-mastery increased 15 points, and his aggressiveness, which was "Why open the door?" you know — crash! sort of an aggressiveness, dropped to something like normal. But that person needed lots of processing and wouldn't take it. A real bad case. This case, by the way, was the blackest black V that you ever classified as a black V when they should have been classified as a black XVIII, and yet we got some change on the case.

Now, the only reason we know anything about these men is the printing press. And the only reason we really know anything about what they have taught us is because here and there somebody set something down.

Now, here is a person, a 25-hour intensive which — oh my, this was an interesting case. This was the case which used to give us a terrible lot of trouble — case that had polio, was crippled, was in a wheelchair, was very much surrounded by family, you know, and the auditor brings the case up 1 inch and the family drops them 5 inches, you know, and this goes on. This person only got processed 25 hours and was standing without canes at the end of the processing, and walking somewhat around the room. Got no change of IQ — IQ remained the same — but did get rather fine changes here. In other words, was 15 percent less depressive, was — gee! 35 percent better in activity, was 15 percent less critical — and here we had a hypercriticalness of existence which was just nyarrrrrrr. Person much happier at the end of that time. I believe it says here, "polio case, physical improvements, walked alone with no support after processing" — but we didn't care about this. This is the realm of the machine. Now if we'd just concentrate on this person as a spirit, the spiritual beingness of this person, the next thing you know they'll pick up the body and carry it down the street. We don't care. Do you see? But the other side of it is, if you got in there and worked with the body and worked with the body and worked with the body — and when you finished up, you'd have a body. And if you look around, there are lots of bodies.

But today we came into possession of an enormous amount of information, magnificent information: the physical sciences. And although these ran off and pretended to be an end-all to themselves and completely divorced from all spiritual existence, they nevertheless furnished the modus operandi by which we could analyze these teachings and understand them better. And out of this analysis and understanding, we actually achieved a great deal. Don't think for a moment, when I put together Dianetics, I was not completely aware of practically everything any one of these men said in his own district and on his own home ground. If I had not had that information, we would never have had Dianetics.

All right. Say, some of these cases she did pull out here are spectacular — here is a 74-year-old man. Tissues of the body filling with fluid, terrible condition, 25-hour intensive, very great lymph trouble. Rather considerable personality changes here, and "unable to take any tests of any kind at the beginning of processing." No tests! Lord knows what condition he was in or how far he came up, but he certainly did come from being unable to take tests to being able to take tests. And we found that his IQ was 99 after he finished up with 25-hour intensive and was able to go on. But this is quite a notable change — an individual can't sit at a desk, can't write, can't control his hand enough to do so, quite depressed and so forth, and we process him for 25 hours and we discover that he is in pretty good condition and he can write and he can take tests.

But what did I, a Western engineer, do? I said, "Well, these men are too sold on the spiritual side of life. They're overboard. Nothing practical. We want everything workable. We want wheels. We want cogwheels. We want a standard procedure by which we can take a look at somebody on a couch and say, 'Zip, zip, rip.' "

Well, here is a 73-year-old man. These are all impossibles — I mean, "You know you can't do anything with a person like this. Seventy-three? Bury him, that's all." And we discover that this person's self-mastery rose from 20 points to 50 points, that this person's ability to figure-figure changed 10 points; in other words, he was 10 points less worried. And his IQ changed from 109 to 128. Seventy-three years old.

I was persuaded into this to some degree by my engineering friends — to some degree. They could not completely tolerate looking this picture in the face. And I dare say there are Scientologists who can't completely tolerate looking at this picture directly, because it's too much truth. They like a few more vias, you know? If you look at something too straight, it's liable to look back.

Now, the funny part of it is that these are staff auditor intensives, and although these people are good auditors, this work can be duplicated by careful work in Scientology. I mean, I'm not giving you stunt work. This work is duplicatable. Anybody who cares to go across this line of work and follow these steps will get the same results, which is something religion hasn't done lately.

So I said, "They're too spiritual, they're too unworkable. They themselves, the Eastern cults, religions and so forth are themselves in poverty. They cannot handle their own problems. Therefore, they do not have any answer except perhaps that there is hope." And I was wrong. I was wrong.

Now, here's a 50-hour intensive, a person aged 52. Oh my, I shouldn't mention this, because we didn't find it out, because she didn't remember it until after she had been processed; and we shouldn't have done this, because, you see, we do not work with the insane. We have no desire to work with the insane, but we are in an interesting position with regard to the insane: If we're not supposed to ask any questions of the insane, how do we ever find out if anybody's insane? And once in a while an individual comes in and they look all right and they process all right, and then after their intensive they say, "Well, I guess I can finally blow those eighteen years in the mental hospital." And we say, "Oh! We shouldn't have done this." We say, "You see the APA and so forth will be awfully angry, because they're the sole proprietor of insanity. They own all the insanity there is, and ..."

And the biggest mistake that I have made — and I've made mistakes, believe me, but the biggest mistake I was — made was the day when I said, "All right, boys, we will call this a science. All right. We will agree that the Western Hemisphere is not ready to accept anything spiritual or religious. All right. We will call it a science. And this science we will call Dianetics, which means 'through mind.' "

Scientology, you must be very careful to observe, is not interested in insanity as it is classified as insanity. An insane spirit is something we don't know anything about. A spirit is not insane. There can be an insane machine: A machine which would be insane would simply be something that was moving unpredictably and uncontrollably — that'd be an insane machine. And that is insanity according to psychiatry, as far as I know. But how would I know? Who can talk to a psychiatrist?

And that was myself approving with the society, and I never should have approved. Why? Because we went on a wide and large via. We associated ourselves with psychotherapy, and that was not good. It's not that there's anything wrong with psychotherapy; it's just that they have already a tremendous backlog of failure, and so we failed to some degree ourselves.

Every now and then some psychiatrist comes around, and after establishing firmly the fact that I am a perfectly good minister in good standing and have my union card in the right church . . . They're very sold on that, the psychiatrist and the medical doctor — you've got to have your union card, you've got to belong to the right society and so forth. So after establishing the fact that I really am in the right union, you know, they just say, "Do something for me!" Goes back to that old Roman adage: "Physician, heal thyself."

And it was only when in 1952 I recognized that we must be dealing with what we called right in Dianetics as "the awareness of awareness unit" — we must be dealing with an awareness of awareness unit which had tremendous survival power, because by various scientific, unquestionable means, I could track back the life of this awareness of awareness unit, life after life after life.

And this person had ten electric shocks and ten insulin shocks, it says up here in the corner. Remembered it after processing and didn't say it know anything about it before. And changed very remarkably — came up from 0 self-mastery to 15. (My! How can you have a 0 self-mastery?) And became from 100 percent depressive, or practically 100 percent depressive, to only 65 percent depressive. That's quite a gain, isn't it? No great change in IQ. Most of the change here was in personal ability to get along, less nervous and less depressive.

You and I or any scientist here in Washington government worthy of his name — and I mean a scientist now, not a psychotherapist. I mean a man who is educated into exact mathematics, who is educated into precise, disciplined ways of thinking. And if that — or any one such man, or any thousand of them, cared to go over the backtrack of this research, they would have to come to the same conclusions. And these conclusions are that man is actually a body run by an awareness of awareness unit which has infinite survival power even though it can get in a great deal of trouble.

But here is the spectacular thing on this JTA, as we call these graphs — I'll show you how to read one of these in a moment — the spectacular thing here is that this person was 95 percent nervous (that would mean just like, you know, all the time) down to optimum nervous (just nervous enough to dodge at the right time — 20 percent): a change of 95 percent to 20 percent on nervousness. This is fabulous. A person who had, it says here, ten electric shocks and ten insulin shocks — and this shouldn't be here at all. We should never admit that anybody ever went into an institution and then got processing. As a matter of fact, we don't process people who have been institutionalized if we can find it out. Because that would make us psychiatrists, and I'd be insulted.

And so we have today a little turbulence which stems immediately from the fact that a lot of people are saying, "Dianetics was all right, but this Scientology — we don't know. Dianetics was fine. I liked Dianetics. Dianetics had something, but Hubbard went crazy or something and he moved out of that and now we don't have anything." That's right — they've got a handful of nothing called a thetan. (audience laughter) And that nothingness contains all the life there is and all the experience there is.

Now here is an unmarried man, 44 years of age, who changed around one way or the other. Most of the change here is in, again, nervousness. This is not a good test. This just tells you how honest we are in grabbing up just a whole slew of intensives, because if you want my candid opinion, the changes here should have been greater for the same person. They are 55 critical to 65 critical — in other words, the person became a little more critical. They are 55 percent nervous to 80 percent nervous — that's not good. But super sympathetic, unable to determine things, and that changed for the better. And here we discover that this individual mostly — the big change was from 0 submissive to 18 percent submissive. In other words, this individual was almost totally driven by the environment and moved into a band where he didn't have to submit to the environment this much — in other words, changed his personality.

All right. We knew, once upon a time, that we had to raise people's self-determinism. We knew that by raising their self-determinism we would have better people. Well, let me tell you something: If we do anything else but raise their self-determinism, if we do anything else but better their control of their environment as a spirit, we fail flatly.

Now as I go over these — I don't have any intentions of beating you around about these. Here's 109 to 119 IQ, just looking at some of these rapidly (I suppose this is a longer test), 140 to 147 IQ change — big changes in other words. 109 to 121 IQ. 136 to only 138 IQ, with no processing. That's a null test, you know — you grab somebody and test them over a period of time just to find out what happened, and you get the test variation. The variation on these tests is about 4 — about 4 points is as much as they vary in the extreme. They never vary more than that, and this varied 2 points. Shows you the test is constant.

I — remember, I have watched a long, long parade of cases. Thousands and thousands and thousands of cases — more case histories than has even been examined by anyone in the field of psychotherapy because, believe me, we collect them. People are anxious to be processed; they are not anxious to be psychoanalyzed. In the few short years that Dianetics and Scientology have been alive, we have processed more people than were ever processed in the sixty years of psychoanalysis. These are exact figures. But we were not in the business of psychoanalysis.

But here's a person, 135 to 159 IQ. Oh yes, this is a very interesting fellow. We sent him back to become governor of a state. He's already a very smart chap, but he had a few little difficulties he was having. He couldn't quite get his body to run right and so forth, and we exteriorized him, and we put him in good condition, and he said, "Well now," he says, "Scientology will at least be safe in (blank)," because he's now going to run for governor.

Now, I can tell you that wherever we have neglected this factor of raising the self-determinism and ability of this awareness of awareness unit — wherever we have neglected it, wherever we have stressed machine reaction, wherever we have attempted to heal the body at the sacrifice of the man — we've gotten a leg, maybe, that worked better, we've gotten maybe a nose which twitched better, but we haven't gotten a better man.

Now here's a 50-year-old person, and just as a side comment here, not that we're interested in these things, but this person had had a brain tumor at the age of twenty-three. And he'd had so many x-ray treatments it burned off all his hair and so forth, and he got in rather foul shape. And his processing took his IQ — you see that wild series of changes there? Those graphs, how jagged they are? Well, each one of those things is a different test. Just shows you this person was changing all over the place. And his IQ went from 119 to 138. This fellow had a brain tumor and we changed his IQ. It's just about time somebody figured this out, that the brain has nothing to do with it. That's an interesting point the boys have overlooked. By the way, it's interesting that as long as they treated the brain, they never got a change in IQ. But the second you start treating the spirit, you get a change of IQ. Shows you that somebody must be arriving somewhere, and I suspicion it's us.

Now, that's interesting, isn't it? And the culmination of this material and a study by reason of intelligence testing and personality testing over the last many months — a program eight months in length which has just concluded — has brought me to the conclusion which, as far as I'm concerned, is the conclusion: that we cannot lose if we stress the spiritual side of man and that we always lose when we stress his material side.

Now here is a person who was 51. I keep running across this — these people, after they're all through processing and so forth, they come in, they're a church member, everything is fine, and you go on and you process them and so on and they suddenly wake up and say, "You know, I just spent four years in Patton," or some institution. And you say, "Well, we're not supposed to do anything with you, you realize that. You realize you're owned property." (This person had two electric shocks.) And IQ went from 104 to 129. And if you can see these tests — you see those graphs? Each one of those is a change due to processing.

Now, it's taken me twenty-five years to come to this conclusion and I give it to you just that way. Why didn't psychotherapy ever raise anyone's intelligence? Why do they cut up men in order to heal them? Well, they do that just for this reason, is they know they can get nowhere by doing it. They can get nowhere by handling this mechanical object called man. The mechanical object is not handleable by other mechanical objects.

Do you know these graphs never change? You know, if you took a fellow in August and tested him on this JTA, and you took him in September and you tested him, and you took him the next year in August and tested him, and you took him three years later and tested him, you'd just get one graph. It'd just be one graph.

Now, that's interesting, isn't it? We have the same proposition: two cars sitting down here in the garage, and one of them has a flat tire and the other car is sitting alongside it without a flat tire. And we come back three months later, those cars are still sitting there, one of them with a flat tire. Did the other car ever repair the flat tire?

This happened in a week. Look at that — wham, wham, wham, wham! See those terrific changes? Now, it means we must be doing something. It means that we must have something to do with man's betterment and his ability if this sort of thing happens. From 104 to 129 — you know, 129's getting up there.

Well, man is better than that, which is why he's baffling. He can always grow a new tire, one way or another, through the genetic line or something. He can always have a new tire. A car can't even do this. But as long as we treat man as a machine, he is capable of doing all the things a machine can do and no more. And a machine cannot change its intelligence, nor can it change its personality.

Here's 114 to 134. Who was this? Age 25 years, 25-hour intensive, and — oh, my! This person was very critical — 60 percent critical. That would mean, oh, everything is wrong in this room, everything is wrong in the hotel, everything is wrong in the congress — you know, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong — and became 20 percent critical. So, waiter would come in, fall over the rug, dump a drink in her lap, and she'd say, "That's all right, it'll be cleaned." You know, the funny part of it is, that works — the hotel would probably buy her a new dress, she was so nice about it.

This is a fantastic thing, that today in this twentieth century the thousands of years of belief in the field of religion have materialized into an actuality which can be put into an effect rather easily by the average individual. We have brought at last this material into the category of "practical." The oldest material man had — hope, the spirit — has come to a culmination of being intensely practical.

Here is another change. Here's 25 hours, with wild changes here on the personality. See, we're testing two things: We're testing personality (behavior, you know — personality, reaction to the society), and we're testing intelligence, ability to solve — pose and solve problems. And this person's IQ didn't change, but the personality changed.

Now let me say something about this word religion. You know that religion has a great many meanings — it has a great many different meanings. It could mean an enormous number of things. And where the public at large turns away from religion, they don't really know what they're turning away from. But where they turn away from it, they are turning away from its impracticality and that's all they're turning away from.

Now, here's something very funny, and something I've got to solve. And I wish — certainly wish — that I could announce to you that I had this exactly boxed and bracketed and all ready to serve up, but I haven't. We apparently have some processes which specifically change IQ and some that specifically change the personality. In other words, we can throw them at will. But we don't know which is which. You know why we don't know which is which? It's because I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to analyze some of these cases. I have exactly the report of each one of these people, exactly what was wrong with, and run on, and all the rest of it with the person, and have all their tests. And it's a simple matter of coordinating it, and all of a sudden we will discover which one it is. It's not even an intellectual problem, but I didn't get a chance to do it.

If you ask some avowed atheist, "Why are you mad-dogging on the subject of God? Why do you just talk and talk and talk and talk on the subject of God?"

So anyway, here's 116 to 136 IQ. Age 39. Here's a person 45 years of age, and they went from 97 to 108 IQ. But here's — again, is the big personality shift. If you don't have a big IQ shift, you have a big personality shift. If you don't have much personality shift, you have a big IQ shift. It's quite interesting.

This man says, "Well, it started out when I was a little boy. And I asked him for a new bicycle and he didn't give me one. And my father beat me with a Bible." He's telling you what? He's telling you it didn't work.

Here's a person 63 years of age with a big personality shift, and 90 to 98 on IQ. Here's a person 51, went from 130 to 148. You say, my goodness, don't you ever process any children? Gee, here's 118 to 149 — oh well, no wonder, he was processed 75 hours. But look at those personality changes. Fantastic.

Now, you know, I practically cleared a preclear the other day by asking him just one question. The preclear sat back — of course, this was just a freak case, but the preclear sat back (he was well educated as a Scientologist) — he sat back and he sort of did a dazed look at his past on this one question, and all of a sudden heaved a deep sigh of relief and was in beautiful condition. What was the question? "Which of your parents," said I, "would you rather have run 8-C on you?" (Now 8-C, you know, is a little process by which you have somebody go over and finish a cycle of action on one command.)

Oh! This is one — the most famous case in Scientology or Dianetics, either one. There are auditors in this room at this moment who have sat down after giving this fellow 15, 20 or 600 hours of Dianetic processing and said, "Oh, no. He couldn't possibly have gotten through all this with no change." Yeah. And this fellow — big personality changes, and 118 to 149 IQ. And we did that in 75 hours with modern processing, and in the former four years never touched his case. And — well, there are people in this room that can testify to that. This boy was solid black glass. Matter of fact, some of them would even challenge that it was glass, they'd probably say it was basalt. Here's this fantastic case, and I didn't know I had a record of him. Well, that's very interesting.

And he took a look at his father and he said, well, his father would probably be best, to himself. And then he said, "No, my mother. My mother sure would have made sure that I went over and touched that wall. No, but she wouldn't have let me touch the wall. She would have said, 'You go over there and touch that wall — no, uh — I mean the other wall. What are you doing that for?' "

Now, here's a person who was paroled so he could come out and get processing. And we brought him into a level where he knew there was somebody else alive on Earth except himself. You see, if there's nobody alive on Earth except the individual, then there's no reason to be merciful or decent or honest, is there? And if a person finds there's somebody else on Earth who is alive too, then there might be some point in being kind and honest. And the funny part of it is, you can look at any person who is being dishonest or who is upsetting his environment or who is getting people into trouble all the time — you could look at that person, and the actuality is he has no reality on his fellow man. He doesn't know they live. That's a very low-toned thing we call "only one." And when they get into that, then they're liable to do almost anything. All criminals are in this bracket.

And all of a sudden, preclear said, "About my father — he just would have said, 'What wall?' He never would have ordered me to go over and touch a wall." Preclear said, "Gee," he said, "with this kind of auditing when I was a kid, no wonder I'm in a mess," accepted it as an explanation and revived.

Now, just going over these things — not to belabor this situation any further, it's just processing results. I'll make these pieces of paper available here. 132 to 148 on a 43-year-old man. A 31-year-old man — wild changes all over the place, with 128 to 156 IQ.

Remarkable, very remarkable. But do you realize that where religion is used for the self-centered and selfish control of other human beings, that it has been defamed. When Papa was a member of the Bible Class, and he came home and he said, "If you don't be a good boy, yak, yak, yak, you're going to hell. If you don't do this, if you don't do that" — in other words, threat, threat, threat, punishment, punishment, punishment, threat, threat, threat — you know, that's awfully bad control. That's not good 8-C, is it? And where something has been used as bad 8-C, we can then expect that a great many people in the society are going to rebel against it.

Here is a 25-year-old girl, a 90 to 98 change with — you can see that clear back there, certainly — look at these personality changes. People would ask her afterwards, "What girl?" For instance, the person was 100 percent nervous and came down to 50 percent nervous. This person was 60 percent depressive and came down to 5 percent depressive — that's "Don't knock my teacup!" and "Oh, is there an earthquake going on?" This person was 100 percent aggressive. You know, that's kind of high — any small babies got in this person's road, they got trampled! And this person dropped — and I don't know, maybe this is too far, but it didn't drop completely unoptimum — dropped to 5 percent aggressive. Maybe they backed up too far. Ah well, but the person went from 35 self-mastery to 92 self-mastery. That's from the situation being in command of her to her being in command of the situation. Changes, huh? Well now, that's a 25-year-old girl, just to give you an idea that we don't just — these aren't selective on age group.

Just as they would rebel against any auditor who said, "Now look, there's a wall right there in the air. Now walk over to it and touch it. All right. Now, feel the floor two feet above where you're standing. Now, that's fine." And he closed the doors very firmly and he said, "Now, there being no doors here, walk out into the hall." Supposing he did those things to you — you would think he was a kind of a bad auditor.

Now, here's another girl, 39, and she went from 95 to 111 on IQ, and big personality changes, as you can see. And this person was 32 years of age, and you can see these personality changes — went from 114 to 147 IQ. 114 to 147 IQ. Here's a person who is 49. You can see these graph changes — went from 128 to 138 IQ. Here is a person 72 years of age — again, another very old person — and very oddly, went from 109 to 126 on IQ. Now this person, or all these people — oh, I could just give you here by the ton, there's more and more and more and more and more of them, but this is just a small number of cases. You know how many cases there are in the Testing Section's file drawers now? They're just — go right through cabinets. And those are just pulled out. Well, that kind of gives you an idea we've arrived someplace.

Supposing he did this, however: he said, "Now if you don't feel your chair at once, a lightning bolt is going to originate somewhere in the vicinity of your head, and you're going to be sorry." This sound like good 8-C?

It also should give you an idea that we don't happen to have anything to do with psychology. We couldn't possibly have anything to do with psychology, because the first premise of psychology is that IQ can't change. That's not the first premise, but it's a principal one. So if we're changing IQ, then we can't possibly be doing psychology, could we?

There are two kinds of control: There's good control and there's bad control. I could show you a process which demonstrates that a total absence of control is sickness itself. A child who has no one in his vicinity to control him as much as he's controlling things is on a stuck flow. He is incapable, then, of proceeding. He gets upset. The total absence of control is itself sickness. I could demonstrate that to you — just have to take my word for it at the moment.

Now, certainly we have nothing much to do with medicine, because the approach of medicine is entirely different than this. And these results only took place in this society when someone concentrated on and started to process the human spirit instead of just lackadaisically accepting the idea that everybody had a spirit, and they kept it in their watch pocket or something, and it had to be saved by enough nickels on a collection plate. If we accepted this at all — that man had a soul — that was the end of it. It was something into which we must not inquire. I don't know why. If we have these vast organizations of Western religion, all concentrated upon the saving of this thing, we'd better find out what we're saving! Seemed to me to be a wonderful idea.

The most aberrative person in your bank is probably the person who should have but did not control you. Now that person, if you start running on this order — "What did this person want changed? What did this person want unchanged? What did this person want changed? What did this person want unchanged?" — you'll find your preclear becoming quite ill. All of the tiredness, the upset, the confusion and the hectic necessity to make an effect upon someone will suddenly rise up and haunt him, because that person should have controlled him — his mother, his father, his grandmother — and did not, and left, then, a sort of a hole in existence which was timeless. Because time depends on change, and change is part of control. And without control, without moving particles, without being oneself moved, do you know that you would just float forever in a timeless void.

Rather than stand up on the dock as a lifeguard, you know, and say, "Well, I'll go save . . . Well, I'm a lifeguard but — I don't know what I'm supposed to save, but something. Something around here got to be saved."

So, there is something to control. But the word control — and control itself has been so badly done, that control is almost a curse word today. But there is good control. It would be a type of control where we had some agreement and knowledge of the goal to be obtained. Do you see that? Some agreement and knowledge of the goal that we were trying to reach — that would have to be there. It'd have to be knowing. At least one party would have to know it very well, and both parties would have to know it somewhat, for control to be functional. We'd have to have an agreement of goals.

We had a much more forthright approach: What is this thing called the human spirit? And we found the human being! Now, that is fantastic news for any century. Think of it for a moment. We inspect and investigate and look over this thing called the human spirit, and we don't find something that is being kept in mothballs by the individual. We don't find something that he parks alongside of him. We don't find something that is cowering there in horrible feelings of guilt. We find all there is to the thinkingness, the beingness and the livingness of a human being. And that is a spirit, and that's all the thinkingness and livingness and beingness there is to a human being. He is a spirit.

Another thing we'd have to have would be a completion of a cycle of action — completion of a cycle of action. Once a command was given, it should be completed before a second command is given. We shouldn't tell somebody, "All right. Now pick up that bunch of bo; no, leave them there."

All right, we look at this. We start to investigate it, examine it to find out what its characteristics are, and we discover, oddly enough, that it is an item of quality. It's a qualitative item. It has qualities. It can make a statement and make it stick. It can create or uncreate energy. It can change and control, it can own, it can form masses, it can communicate.

Well now, what I'm describing to you is bad control, and that is very bad because it scrambles and confuses one's time. And bad control is done where one or the other of the parties is totally unaware of control being accomplished.

But, with all this, we do not have one single quantitative item in that spirit. It isn't two feet wide and three inches thick. It isn't four quarts of spirit. It isn't one position of location — not even that. These things are quantity, and man, an engineer in particular, becomes so accustomed to dealing in quantity — ergs, dynes, volts, pounds — that he forgets that we possibly might have something around that you couldn't pour out of one jar into an ohmmeter. He might overlook this fact. And they did overlook this fact. There was something around which was purely qualitative. It established its own qualities. And its best ability was simply to think a thought and make the thought stick, or to think a thought and unstick a thought. Its best abilities were that. But that it did have native characteristics, and its native characteristics were all those things you have been led to believe were good, as represented by various religions.

Usually the person who is being controlled is unaware that he is being controlled or something of the sort, or the person who is doing the controlling does not know it but is merely acting compulsively or obsessively. And here we get a situation where cycles of action are not agreed upon, the goals are not agreed upon, the cycles of action are not completed, and we get chaos and we get bad control. And where something has been used for bad control, it itself becomes infamous by the mere association with the confusion of bad control.

But it also, horribly enough, had bad characteristics. It could be awfully mean. It could feel very degraded. It could feel that it was being chased so thoroughly that it got a complete obsession to hide forevermore — a point of hiding which simply says, "I'm not a spirit. I'm a body. See? Here's a body. Hey, you guys, here's a body. That's me. Here's a body." And it could do that so long it would even forget it was doing it. You know? Offer this body out here and say, "Well, I'm it, I'm it, I'm it. And I'm not me at all, I don't exist." What a wonderful puzzle! Something which had no quantity, which had quality. And you expect to isolate this thing and describe it? How could you possibly isolate something that had only quality? How could you possibly take this thing apart and look at its component parts if it doesn't have parts?

We could say, then, that if all of the — well, the auto-license bureaus in the country were to get even worse than they are and were to get into a situation where, when they issued you a car license and you put it on your car, they would then write you a letter and tell you that it was the wrong license and you should therefore return it, otherwise you would be arrested. And when you had returned it, you were arrested for not having a license. When you sent them two hundred dollars — which I think is the usual tax on a 1930 Model A car today — when you sent them two hundred dollars for your taxes and license fee, they then lost all the records and then had you arrested for not applying. Now, this would be interesting, wouldn't it?

And here's what's fantastic: This thing we have done in Scientology. It is an accomplished fact.

The first thing you know, every auto-license office would have a very bad name. And we would say, "Auto licensing is bad," wouldn't we? "That's bad. Let's just dispense with the whole thing. It's impractical, it gets us nowhere, we have enormous confusion, and that is the end of it."

Now, somebody wrote me from Pennsylvania the other day, and they (I don't know where they'd been in Pennsylvania, not in Lancaster), but they wrote me and said, "I know Scientology" — this is a complete misnomer — "I know Scientology is a good psychotherapy ..." That's an insult! There is no such thing as a good psychotherapy. And Scientology is not a psychotherapy. But said, "I would like to see more of the spiritual side of Scientology. And I would like to meet somebody, if there is anyone at the congress, who has had some experience with this spiritual side of Scientology."

And do you know that in this Western world, to a large degree, that has happened to religion. We look at the spectacular, unreasonable stunts. We look at some young man saying, "Oh, I could run this country much better than anybody else. All I'd do is tell everybody to believe in God and therefore the whole country would run well." He gets up here on the Capitol steps right here in Washington, DC, and forty-five thousand people come out to hear him say that. And he says, "Now," he says, "that's all we need and that solves all of our problems. And be good or you'll all go to hell."

And so, for that person's benefit, and maybe the benefit of a few others, I would like anyone to stand, when I ask you to, who has been exteriorized enough to know that they were a spirit and not a body — whether it was stable or not — but came into a certainty of the fact that they were not this body, or who has exteriorized another person to that person's great betterment and had the other person know that they were a spirit and not a body. Anybody who's done either of those two things, would you please stand. (pause; sound of people standing up) And there is the spiritual evidence of Scientology. Thank you.

And we look at a stunt like this and we say to ourselves, "Tsk, tsk. Religion." But when we're saying religion that way, we're talking about the spiritual side of existence, and we're talking about this strange fact: that if the awareness of awareness unit is not in itself in control of the body, the body is sick. In other words, if we neglect the spiritual side of existence and we do not recognize the existence of a spirit — we don't recognize the part which this plays in life — we are making an open-armed bid for all the evils which escape from Pandora's box. We're just asking for it.

All right. Just because something is logical, and just because you can experience it, doesn't mean that it is usual and mundane. This is an extraordinary thing that's happened here in this twentieth century. And nobody is even as vaguely startled by all this as myself.

Little child goes to school and they say, "Be careful now, blow your nose, eat your vitamins, be careful how you walk across the street, wear your coat, wear your rubbers, don't play in those mud puddles," on and on and on and on and on. Constant tirade of what he's not or supposed to do with his body one way or the other — reasonable or not.

You take a fellow who dabbled around in the Orient, who worked, who knew many people who were wise men, who were men of God, who were very experienced people, who could lie on beds of spikes if they wanted to, and other people who sat on mountaintops, and whirling dervishes, and magicians who came directly from the line of Kublai Khan's magician — you take somebody who's dabbled with these people, who — he isn't believing them, he's listening to them. He's listening to evidences. He's a kid, he's very forthright, very aggressive, he doesn't have any patience at all if you can't taste, feel, handle it, but nevertheless, talking to these people.

And nobody ever says to him, "Son, your self-determinism depends upon your ability to tolerate the actions of others or to direct them at will, depends upon your ability to have charity towards your fellow man, depends upon your ability when in a position of trust to demonstrate mercy, it depends upon your ability to make a postulate stick on that body — that when you tell it to walk, it walks." Nobody tells him that.

And I came back to this very city in which we're giving this congress, and I took engineering, which is about as godless a subject as anyone would ever care to meet. And majored, in that engineering, in finite energies, and thought of the finest energy I could think of — it must be the human mind. Did a computation which twenty years later came back to us as having been originated in Austria, about the molecular storage of thoughts. And I did that right here in this city, just really not more than a mile from the place we're talking right now. Experimented to discover how memory was stored, and found by no computation I could ever compute, that it — a man couldn't remember, certainly by this computation, more than three months' worth. Because there wasn't that much storage space because energies weren't that small. And I was proposed, as a young engineer, a conundrum of such magnitude that I went over to my very good friend, the head of Saint. Elizabeth's Hospital (which is also the big government hospital also in this city), Dr. William Alan White. And I said to him, "Dr. White, what have I done now?" Expected him to tell me all about it. I was all set to have him tell me about this. I was very pleased, I was hopeful, I knew he would. And he sat there and he said, "Ron, what the hell have you done? This upsets one of the most cherished ideas of psychiatry." He said, "It's nothing to do with psychiatry." He said, "If you pursue along this line" (you see, he was a golf friend — he was a golf friend of mine) — and "if you pursue along this line," he said, "you tell me about it from time to time," he says, "because I'll be watching." I hope he is, he's dead now, but I did talk to him, long before he died, about it, and he never forgot this fact, he never forgot this interesting thing: that a human mind, if it remembers with energy, and if it stores those memories as energy, therefore cannot remember more than three months. And that's fabulous. Do you know that at that time he was the leading psychiatrist in the United States.

And by not telling him, we have forecast for him a life of turmoil, confusion and sickness. And I would say that was a dirty trick to play on any kid. If the awareness of awareness unit is in control of the organism — the body knowingly, we can expect a healthy body and a successful life. And if a machine is thought to be in control of the awareness of awareness unit, if it's all just figure-figure and "you are what your body is and no more," and everything runs for the body exclusively, we have sickness.

Now, another fellow who had been more or less my mentor when I was a little kid — as a matter of fact, I followed in the footsteps of this man — Commander Thompson, who brought psychoanalysis straight from Vienna to the US Navy, and introduced psychoanalysis into the Navy and was the US Navy's authority on this in an effort to help the mentally disturbed in the Navy. This man was very much a mentor of mine. He was a good friend in need at all times. It's an odd thing that I've touched the very points of the world where this man has touched, subsequently, and I thought of it one day and wondered if there weren't some small lack of coincidence here. There was some unknowingness going on. I'd gone to the same places in the world as I grew older that he had already gone to when I knew him as a boy. I told Commander Thompson about this work, I tried to get more information, and when I had turned to Commander Thompson and Dr. William Alan White, I had turned to the only two probables in the country who could have shed any light on this subject at all. And believe me, I was through turning, because there was no place else to go. Now that was a great oddity — here were two of the most brilliant men in the field of mind research in the country, and both of them were standing there with their eyes popped.

Scientology is knowledge. That's all Scientology is. The word Scientology means knowledge. That's all it means. Scio means knowing in the fullest sense of the word. Many people believe this is named after "science." No, it's scio: knowing in the fullest sense of the word; studying how to know in the fullest sense of the word. But this is the same word as Dharma, which means "knowledge"; Tao, which means "the way to knowledge"; Buddhism, which "means "the way to spiritual knowledge." It's an old word, a very old word. It happens to contain within it today possibly the bulk of what is knowable in terms of theory that is immediately knowable to anyone anywhere.

So I went on from there, from 1932 and down through these many years, and during the last five, with the continuous correspondence, communication with and practice with and fellowship of those people in Dianetics and Scientology, we have been able to crack this problem. The human mind does not remember in energy. It makes memories out of energy and throws them away. All you have to do is get somebody over the obsession of making engrams and you've gotten rid of all of his engrams. That's all there is to it. Get him over, or those things in his vicinity over, the obsession for manufacturing an engram or a memory picture for every occasion, and you've gotten him over being upset. You've gotten him over his entire engram bank. There's how you would make a Clear. You would merely get the fellow unobsessed on this subject of making all these energy pictures. He doesn't ever store them. Now isn't that odd? There is no memory bank.

But it contains in itself something else: It contains a positive direction, a positive goal, and is itself committed along a certain path. And this is the first time that this has ever been committed along this path and is the principal thing I wish to announce to this congress.

And so, with the fellowship, the good feeling, the support, the communication and the privilege of working with all these people in Dianetics and Scientology, we have solved this problem. We have found where this material belongs, and we have found with it that man is perfectly justified in believing that there is a greater, wider life to be lived by him. That man can be better, and for the first time in the history of science we are able to change the personality and the IQ of the individual at will, but much more importantly, we can point to a far, far more hopeful future for man. And I owe a great debt of gratitude to you in Dianetics and Scientology for having you to work with.

There is no doubt any longer in my mind that a postulate made by an awareness of awareness unit is a higher manifestation than any energy-space manifestation, and that the postulate is totally and entirely in control of space and energy manifestations — a thing which would be news to a nuclear physicist but which could be proven to him. It'd probably make a very old man out of him.

Thank you.

Now, we have that fact: that a postulate, a thought, is the most senior thing there is. It is senior to any and all masses, because thoughts can handle masses as I hope you will see in Group Processing to your abundant knowledge.

Now, thought handles mass. Of course, they've been saying this for years — they couldn't prove it. Fellow says, "Now, all right. There's that big truck running right down on me, and all I have to say is, 'No truck,' huh? Is that the way I do this? And right away that handles the whole situation?"

Now, what are you doing there in a mass that can be run over? That's where you enter that problem. What are you doing there in a mass that can be run over?

Since you could be there just as easily in no mass at all. And that is what is startling and what is new.

Now, Scientology contains, then, a direction and it contains a goal. And the goal is simply a greater freedom for the individual.

And when we say an individual, we're talking about something as precise as an apple. We're not talking about a collection of behavior patterns which we all learned about from studying rats. We're talking about something that is finite. We're talking about somebody, the somethingness that you are and the capabilities that you can be. And this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about the color of your hair or the length of your feet. We're talking about you, and we know what we're talking about when we talk about you. And therefore, a greater freedom is indicated for this individual you.

Why? Because this individual you is today threatened by one of the greater cataclysms man has been called upon to face. He is threatened by a lot of bodies running around, evidently on total automatic, doing and planning interesting things for the demise of the race. And the next few years — since this kind of an attack will not occur for a long time — the next few years are going to be nerve-racking years.

If we understand what we know — you know, that's an interesting thing; you have to understand what you know — if we understand what we know, we can go a long way in assisting or mitigating the effect and onslaught on a society of weapons which exceed the imagination of any of us in their destructive power, and which are going to cause on every hand a decline of the state of man unless some of us know what we are talking about. And fortunately, right now, we do know what we're talking about.

It will depend upon us to a very large degree whether man will become an animal in earnest or will continue to be a spiritual being. Because man is today threatened by men who have become animals and who have no thought of any other thing than this.

This work does not represent a revolt. It doesn't even vaguely represent a desire for the demise of any of these things. All it represents is the hope that man again can find his own feet, can find himself in a very confused, mechanistic society, and can recover to himself some of the happiness, some of the sincerity and some of the love and kindness with which he was created. And if man can do this, and if we can help in any way to accomplish this, then all the years of my life and all the years of yours will have been well paid for, and none of us will have lived in vain.

I'm very, very happy to see you here. I have a great deal to tell you that is technical. I want to tell you first that we have a practical religion. And before you say, "Religion — grrr," think of that: It's a practical religion. And religion is the oldest heritage man has. Many, many of those present are ministers. The fact is that we do not fit at all or influence or have any real contact with medicine, certainly not with psychiatry. We do not exist in the tradition of psychology. We could only exist in the field of religion.

Of course, it would be up to us to make religion a much better thing than it has been and to use it to run much better 8-C on our fellow man.

Thank you.