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

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

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

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

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

"Nuh?"

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

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

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

And he says, "No, beans."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? Because time is change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff"

"Now, get the idea you created it."

"(crying) Huh, huh."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, they're lighter."

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

"Oh, they're much lighter!"

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

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

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

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

"Well, get the idea."

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

And very shortly the body is well.

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

Audience: Yes.