[Start of Lecture]

This is the 15th of January 1957, and the tenth ACC lecture of the 16th ACC. And by the way, you know, there will be a 17th ACC following this one instantly — 18th of February.

All right. The substance of today's lecture is evil. Thundered from every pulpit and throat of every first sergeant, the subject of evil has been one which has engrossed the human race — not without reason. Because it contains within it the total of stimulus-response, overt act-motivator sequence, joining the dynamics and withdrawing, and not being able to put an effort out ten feet from you while you're standing there.

In other words, everything I've been talking to you about in this ACC to date is summed up in this lecture, „Evil.“

The one item which was in Pandora's box was the concept of evil. That is all that was in the box. The one thing which shipped anyone from any other place in the universe to here was this concept and consideration. The reason people become „only ones,“ the „reason because“ a nonfactual and nonfunctional society can exist, is all contained in this whole thing — concept of evil.

Concept of evil. Bad. Bad. You're bad. Now, I gave you some of that yesterday, but I didn't give it to you hard enough to really make you horrified. I wasn't laying it into somebody who was half knocked out. You got the idea?

I told you, you weren't doing as well as you could do. And this is early in the course, and therefore, you wouldn't be here and there wouldn't be any purpose in your being here unless you started to do a bit better. It'd be a total course failure if you didn't. It'd be a failure on our parts.

Now, that isn't the sort of evil I'm talking about. But it is a shadow of it. It says „You're bad.“ It says „You're not as good as you could be.“ It says „You could stand a little bit of bracing up and knocking around.“ And that is all just a light shadow of what I am actually talking about.

Any criticism, then, is criticism. Criticism always stems from the concept that something is bad to some degree. There is no such thing as constructive criticism; there just isn't any. The whole idea of constructive criticism is another mechanism which permits one to play the game of „you're bad.“ See?

We see this in many ways, this game called „you're bad,“ which, in essence, is „you're evil.“ We see this in many ways. And one of the more fascinating ways is already known to us: it's the hidden standard. I haven't talked too much to anyone, really, about the hidden standard; given a lecture or two which included it, but haven't hit it very hard.

The hidden standard. People, when they criticize, are talking from a hidden standard. What is this hidden standard? I think there's been a PAB about it. What is a hidden standard? Well, it is the idea that there is a perfection. You got that? You got that real good? Because this includes much more than you think. They talk critically to you on the basis that there is a perfection. But that is not then revealed to you. What is the definition of perfection?

Somebody says, „Your conduct is suboptimum,“ and doesn't tell you, then, what optimum conduct is. Somebody says, „This is a bad book.“ They do not tell you what is a good book. Got it? They say to you, „You are falling short of a good husband or a good wife.“ What is a good husband? What is a good wife?

And as you look around and listen around in this culture at this time, you will find that there are practically nothing but hidden standards. There are not actual standards.

Now, when we say „a hidden standard,“ we also could say „a nonexistent standard.“ Somebody says, „This is a bad picture,“ without telling you what a good picture is. And you, you goof, always fall for it. You always think they know.

Now, get this. You know this very well. Some psychologist, some irresponsible professor of the University of Chicago, said that he had tested all the Dianetic techniques and had found they were all unworkable and useless in the field of psychotherapy. It was an interesting statement for him to make, since he did not say when or where he had tested them, or out of what book, or using what auditor, or on whom. In other words, he was lying.

But he was lying from another basis that you immediately wouldn't notice. And this is where you're a goof, every one of you, getting caught up with this. You're supposing that this man knows something about the human mind. But you, being Dianeticists and Scientologists, aren't caught up to the degree that the public at large is caught. You've sneaked up a little bit on this hidden standard called „the psychologist.“ See, you've sneaked up on him. But I'll make you a bet that very few of you are totally disabused of this fact.

Somebody must know something in order to occupy that position. It would be unreasonable to assume that he was totally ignorant of a subject which he is represented to be an expert in. He must know something about it.

But if you still have this shadow kicking around, I invite you to go talk to some of these gents — under whatever guise, we don't care, but it'd have to be some guise or another — just to find out what his ideas are. And you would find this fellow playing. You would find this fellow playing with concepts which you long ago wrapped up as too elementary for your notice.

He isn't out of the grade of playing with the blocks of ABC. You say, „a mental image picture“ to him.

He says, „Oh, yes, I read a book on the subject.“

You say, „What book?“ And he'll tell you a book that mentions it in one paragraph in one late chapter.

You mean this man knows something about the human mind and doesn't know anything about the behavior of mental image pictures? This wraps him up. Yet, he's a professor. Yet, he must know something about it. He must carry some authority. There must be something there. The society has granted him something or other. There must be some kind of a standard from which this man is judging such a thing as Dianetics. See?

Well, where your goof is — there isn't any! Except this one thing: a pretended standard. They pretend it exists, and it doesn't exist.

Now, this fellow's an art critic. He's a very fine art critic. He's... You've really been taken in with this one. See, this guy is a fine art critic. And you say, „Well, God, there must be something to this fellow. I mean, he keeps writing chapters and books and newspaper articles, and he's on deck at the Metropolitan every time you turn around. There's some reason for this man to be an art critic.“ Yes. There is! He's critical.

But this man cannot give you an adequate definition for art. And yet he dares say that that is a good picture, but that over there is a bad picture. You see that? That's a hidden standard. It's hidden from anybody else, so they assume it exists. They build something there where there is nothing.

Every once in a while, Hollywood will hire somebody on the idea that they're an authority on some particular subject. That's enough. They just hire them, they don't expect them to do much. They give some technical advice on a picture, or something like that. Well, every once in a while they get a good man — they get a good man, once in a while, quite by accident. But I'm afraid that nine times out of ten they pick a phony. They get somebody in there who's supposed to be a technical expert on something. But who said he was a technical expert? Northwestern University or somebody said he was a technical expert on the subject.

It never occurs to them that maybe it isn't a subject in which there can be a technical expert because nothing is known about it.

So we've built all these expertnesses and all these authorities all over the world which are the purveyors of evil. They say things are bad. From what standard? From the standard of being an authority, of course.

But is there anything good known about it? Well, if there's nothing good known about it, if there's nothing really known about it... Well, if there's nothing good known about it, there could be no bad known about it, but if there's nothing known about it at all, really, there can neither be good nor bad. And thus we find the field of art. Thus we find the field of science at this particular time.

To see a bunch of goofs, down here at the FDA, passing on minerals and vitamins, who themselves do not know anything much about them — since they didn't even know that there is a resin which is digestible. They said there was no such thing. Aw, but look, it's sold in every drugstore. It's part of candy.

They are the enforcing authority. Without knowing a thing about their subject, they are an enforcing authority. So they tell you that you're issuing something evil. And sure enough, this is all they dramatize. They just run around telling: „Everything everybody manufactures is evil, and it's no good, and it's bad and it's bad and it's bad.“

I haven't yet told you why you were goofs. But can you conceive a state of affairs whereby there is only this dramatization and no factual information? Can you conceive that? See, there are no known subjects — let's just reduce it to ad absurdum — no known subjects at all; and yet there are experts in these no- knownnesses who pronounce other things bad. Could you conceive this as just existing nationwide or man-wide? Hm? Make a mighty silly-looking world, wouldn't it? Everybody would be dramatizing. What would be the initial or immediate consequence of this?

It would be that every man would feel badly about every other man. Everybody's idea concerning his fellow man would then be warped. And you would have a world in which war could take place. You'd have a war between men, inevitably. I'm afraid the subject is just that simple.

A man is an authority in a subject about which he knows nothing, and then adjudicates that somebody else is bad.

Now I'll tell you where you're goofs. Each and every one of you listened to one or more parents or relatives say you were bad — without ever really defining in your own mind what good behavior was.

What was a good girl, really? What was this standard called a good boy? What does a good boy do? What does a good girl do? What does a good boy think? What does he know? What does a good girl think? What does she know? What is her social behavior?

Ah, you think you know all these things, don't you? As I talk to you, you actually have a feeling like you actually do know, don't you? Huh? Well, I know something doggone well: That if I turned you loose on an essay on this subject and demanded that you write fifteen thousand words on what a good boy or a good girl (whichever you are) has to know, do, say and think, we'd just be stuck for the rest of the year. Because not one of these actions could be termed as wholly good.

A good boy always obeys his parents. Oh, yeah? Where the devil would this society get if everybody obeyed his parents always? Hm? Just where would he get?

Well, nobody would be, at large — this is a very sweeping statement, but it could be considered true — would ever have followed his own natural bents professionally. See, he just wouldn't have followed these. He would have become a ditch digger or something of the sort, or something.

The moment we explore the acceptance level of parents, we're flabbergasted to discover in this experiment — ask the preclear to mock up a child acceptable to his parents — he normally gets such a thing as a sick child. Boy, does he have to be sick to be acceptable — does he have to be quiet, does he have to be dead to be acceptable. We perform this experiment and we find at once, not that our parents didn't love us, but we find out that we were distinctly given the impression that the only time we were to be given a break is when we were almost dead.

A good boy is somebody who always minds their parents. That means that you wouldn't have done much moving when you were a child. You wouldn't have run around very much. You would have sat quietly in chairs. You'd be a physical wreck right now without any background of exercise as a child, let me assure you.

Well, just listen to parents, just look at them. They say, „Johnny, sit down now and be quiet.“ The last order. Don't tell them to do anything else; he's just supposed to sit there and be quiet. I've never heard parents say, „Johnny, yell.“ I've heard Scientologists say such things to their kids, but not the average parent.

„Now, Johnny, I want you to run around the house and scuff up all the rugs.“ Ever hear anybody give an order like that? No, but you've heard „Be more quiet in the house and don't track mud.“ He's supposed to walk in the air, I guess. Well, that would be being a good boy; walking in the air, having no voice, not being capable of motion. You start adding it up and you get dizzy after a while. You audit a preclear on this directly, and some of the cognitions which he gives you are appallingly funny.

What is a good boy? And we discover as we explore this that there is no such standard. But obviously, every time a parent said to you that you were a bad child, you were given the idea that there must be such a thing as a good child. You had good child defined for you occasionally. You went to the store and got a package of groceries and came home and gave them back the right change without buying chewing gum too. And that was a good child. That was a good child. That was fine; you had completed it.

But more often than not, they forgot to tell you after the third or fourth trip that that was being a good child. That was merely being an expected child. They just expected you to do that. You're supposed to get thanks for this? No.

We've gotten the idea that maybe a good child is a well- controlled child. Yes, but we know that a person who was totally controlled is a moron or an idiot or crazy — if he's totally controlled, see? — if he is capable of nothing but being controlled. You got the idea? He's in an hypnotic trance.

Of course, you've got to totally control a preclear to set him an example so he can start to totally control himself. You get the idea? That's a different equation entirely. But this equation that control is bad is what's gotten you off on a kick of being unwilling to control a preclear, because you know control is pretty lousy stuff. You know? „Go here, Joh — No, Johnny, I mean — Johnny, where are you going?“ You know, control. „Well, sit down there in that chair and be quiet.“ „What are you doing sitting in that chair without cleaning your boots?“ You know?

Yeah. Hidden standard. There is such a thing as a good child. And some of you, right here at this moment, are trying to attain in your auditing what a good child is. But you don't know.

Hideous when you begin to think about it. Somebody has been given to understand something which exists, which doesn't actually exist. And then he strives for this as a goal. Where's he going to wind up? Just exactly where the goal is: nowhere. Got this? And he couldn't wind up anyplace else, because there's no place to go!

What is this thing called a good boy? What is this thing called a good girl? If you're trying to be a good boy and a good girl, and there is no adequate definition of a good boy or a good girl or rules of conduct thereunto, you of course have no place to go. You got that?

And this is one of the reasons some people — without this getting broken up — can be audited forever. Their built-in purposes and goals are toward a hidden standard.

Somebody wants to be a good painter. Somebody wants to be a good writer. Maybe there's no such thing. Maybe. There is such a thing as being a widely accepted writer. There is such a thing as being a widely accepted painter. There is such a thing as being a painter of pictures that people like to look at; a writer of stories that people like to read. But when I look at some of the things that have been popular as pictures and some of the things that have been popular as stories, I would say that this immediately departed from any definition of good. Don't you see? I mean, they're not, then, easily categorized. So we're dealing - - what? We're dealing with public vagary. Whim. I want to be a good whim. Well, you get this hidden standard?

Your goof is in just one way: You kicked the bucket — some quietly with his boots off in a featherbed; some tumultuously, under very, very melodramatic circumstances; and some merely sordidly — and had a body laid away; some nicely and neatly; and some dispersedly; and some on a totally neglected basis. And you went and picked up another body, and you waited for that to grow up so that you could have a full-sized body. And during the first early years of this process, you were trying to straighten yourself out and go along a survival course. This was all you wanted to do. You're trying to take a survival course. You just had a lesson of not having done so, in your opinion. A body is dead. It has not survived. Something in that life was wrong. Your answer to it is to wipe out the whole cockeyed works. It is an untrustworthy existence. Something you did there was wrong, and you are not really prepared to say it was so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.

You're going on another hidden standard: That there is a way to survive. And that is a hidden standard which varies from decade to decade.

A person who survived well in the last ten years (just to give you a good view of this) probably wouldn't have survived worth a nickel in the early 1800s. Let's take a person in this last decade who has been very good with advertising. This, applied to the 1800s? People would have thought you were being very forward or something. They wouldn't have added this up. It would not have been a survival pattern. But if you were manufacturing buggy whips as a method of survival from 1800 to 1810, I'm afraid you wouldn't have lived very well manufacturing buggy whips from 1946 to 1956. Got the idea?

Things change, and yet one's opinions of what is a method of survival tend to remain fixed. The times and conditions change, and one's ideas of what is survival change.

Well, one way of handling it is just wipe out the total experience of one lifetime and not have recourse to it anymore if one can possibly help it. And in that way, one gets a new look. And he takes on the experience of a new life and adjudicates on that experience only, in order to establish a survival course. This is the method undoubtedly that you've selected.

All right. You knew what a good boy was, basically. A good boy was a boy who survived. Got that? A good boy was a boy who survived. A good girl was a girl who survived. You kind of knew that. But everything else you ran into violated it — with wildness!

It is not a survival activity to sit quietly in a chair. It's not a survival activity to be totally obedient. It's not a survival activity to sacrifice every plaything you have to every playmate. See? A good boy always lets other little boys play with his toys. Oh, yeah? It's not a survival activity. A fellow is taught that on the whole track rather easily. A good boy is one that keeps a VM pistol in its holster for his own use. He doesn't let Joe play with it.

So we had our survival activities violated — our concept of what we had to do to survive (basically, a good boy was a boy who survived) — these were violated. And we found that certain of our activities were bad. Chief amongst those (as we found in this civilization), fighting was very bad. Our parents and teachers most uniformly told us that it was a bad thing to do, to fight.

Oh, now see here! Just as no dog is any good who won't kill a chicken — that is the definition of a good hunting dog: he'll kill a chicken — the definition of a good survival boy is: one who will fight successfully, proper opponents, his size or bigger. See, that's a survival action. I assure you that is a survival action. He doesn't surrender at every whisper of the environment. It merely tells you he's willing to confront the environment, doesn't it? If he's willing to confront the environment, he will sometimes have to fight! This is for sure.

He doesn't fight all the time as an obsession. But somebody comes up and hauls off and smacks him one, he's certainly got to have enough gumption to kick that somebody else in the shins at least. Because the world of childhood rather works along in this way. And the boy who cannot fight, soon has none of the companionship and association which little boys normally have. He just loses it. He won't fight!

How about little girls? Now, little girls are taught they — it's a very unladylike thing to fight; very, very unladylike. And one day, one big boy down the block someplace that hasn't been as carefully taught comes along and knocks her silly head in. There isn't a girl here that can't remember having successfully clobbered some boy. Some of the wildest troops that have ever been launched into battles have been Amazons.

We will admit that for a few months — and perhaps a few series of a few months — in a woman's lifetime when she is bearing children, she is not in good, optimum combat condition. We will admit this. But we do not admit that this period then continues forever throughout her life. And we do admit, then, that there's a limiting factor on her combatability.

Now, we're not beating the drum for „everybody must fight everybody.“ We're just saying „How does this society in which we find ourselves actually operate?“ Well, kids fight. If you can't fight, everybody is going to ride your tricycle and ride it into the mud and ride its wheels off of it, you see? If you can't put up a formidable front in any way, actually, you're in pretty bad shape.

Now, I have just won in this particular department with a little kid... By the way, unlike most people who talk about children, I am not exactly talking without experience. My first experience with children, by the way, will amuse you. I was a schoolteacher when I was sixteen, down in the South Pacific, and had a bunch of forty little native children, all of whom talked Chamorro. And I was teaching them English, and so forth, as a paid schoolteacher. It was very wild trying to give them the idea of What is a skyscraper? They asked me about some of these wonders — they had been talked about, and they couldn't understand any of them.

They'd never seen a big building. They had never seen a train. They'd never seen any of these things. And it was actually a great contest on my part to get enough of the things they were familiar with added up in enough ways so that they could understand these other things. In other words, to get the bridging substitutes.

Finally, I drew on a blackboard fifty nipa shacks, one piled on top of another one, and they finally conceived what the Empire State Building must be like. It was just at planning stage in those days. It was very amusing.

But children are not what people have pretended they are. Children are not well-adjusted, perfect examples of what life should be. Everybody takes the idea „Well, children do so-and-so“ — I even occasionally made this error “-- therefore this is an expected pattern for life at large.” See? They do this all the time. They look back to children as the example of what life should be like.

A child has just lost a body, he doesn't have much mass, he is dispersed and he is upset. He feels terribly out of communication. The reason a baby doesn't talk is a baby doesn't have an adequate replacement for a body.

If you think a baby doesn't understand you, you've yet to experience something that many have experienced in Scientology already: They get a new little baby and start chucking it under the chin, talking to it one way or the other. If they talk to it very directly, it will, at length, understand rather completely what you're talking to it about.

I always tell my own kids „That's fine, you can have that body. We're very glad you're here. We're going to keep you.“ And I don't care whether they're six hours old or six months old, the first or twentieth time they're told this, they say, „(Sigh!)“ It's very funny to hear a little baby sigh a sigh of relief But they sigh a sigh of relief, completely out of pattern. Up to that moment they're a malefactor, you see; they've just stolen a body and... Quite wild.

Well, they will talk as well as they think they have to talk. If they're forced to talk, it's an enforced communication. And they behave exactly as a preclear who is out of communication. They behave exactly; there is no difference.

You take some preclear who's terribly out of communication, and if you try to force him to talk — he can be forced to talk, but he's liable to stammer and stutter and comm lag, and so on. And you can force a child into that pattern just by forcing communication upon him.

So there are evidences of this and other kinds which demonstrate to us that a child is somebody who is low on havingness but, having not much mass, can move it around. It is, after all, a new body. It does respond rather easily. It doesn't have much weight. And therefore, it doesn't impede his moving of it.

But his inability to coordinate that body stems, not from „new bodies are hard to coordinate,“ but from the fact that he has just failed utterly to coordinate a body, to such a degree that it died. And he's quit. You got it? He's quit.

You can coax a child to do almost anything. My own isn't here so I'll tell you this one on him. One day I asked him — he was about three years old — I said, „Can you ride a tricycle?“

And he said yes, after a while, he could ride a tricycle. He was not talking very well. He could ride a tricycle.

And I said, „Well, how do you ride a tricycle?“

„Well, you put your feet on the pedals and so forth, and we got that all set.”

I said, „Then,“ I said, „you see that speed launch down here?“

„Yeah.“

I said, „Well, that's easier to ride than a tricycle, because steering, same; and you don't have to use your feet, there's a throttle; you don't have to peddle this way while you're steering, so it must be much easier to ride the speed launch, isn't it? Drive it.“

He thought this over. He was a very philosophical child. And he thought this over. He finally agreed with me that this was the case. So I took him down, threw him into the speed launch, started up the motor, and had him doing figure eights and all kinds of evolutions out through a yacht harbor with a speedboat. He didn't think there was anything odd or peculiar about it. He was simply carrying on something that was less than what he had already done — ride a tricycle. But he was driving a speedboat all over the place.

Then somebody came along and had a fit, because children three years of age are not supposed to be able to drive speedboats. I was teaching him how to dock it. That was the main thing. We were having a little trouble with the reverse gear, if I remember. That's about all we were having any trouble with.

My father came along, and he saw this little tiny kid driving this speedboat. And... (I took my father fishing. We throttled the thing way down, and so I wanted to get in some fishing too, not just run the motor. So I put the kid up: „Oh, yes. Go on,“ I said, „drive it along,“ and so on.) And my father almost blew his stack, see? Here's this big speedboat. And I wasn't even near the cockpit; I was clear back in the back end of the speedboat. And my father got sufficiently upset about it that the kid began to believe that he wasn't doing a good job. In view of the fact that he was doing a perfect job, he had no criteria; his judgment was thrown off...

And after that I could get him to sail sailboats, even in high winds. I have a visio of him. Just a little mite o' nothin', about three and a half years old, with one foot on a sailboat's coaming — about a twenty-ton yacht — one foot over here on the coaming and one foot against the tiller, watching the luff of the sail, see, knowing when to let his foot off and on, and watching this very keenly, with white water combing up around his right foot. And never turning a hair. He could upset her just like that, see? Never bothered him. I never invited my father along.

Of course, there's every reason in the world he should have gone overboard and gotten swallowed up in the high gale, you see? But that was obviously just something you didn't do. This was what you did.

Now, why could he drive a speedboat in the first place and then sail a sailboat? Why could he do these things? Simply because he was told very carefully that there was a right way to do them. And this was explained to him in its elements, over and over, while he was put in the position of doing it.

I don't say I'm the world's best instructor. I'm not pushing that out. I'm just showing you that a little kid can be taught something rather complicated, way, way beyond what anybody would expect him to.

Why, there are men around thirty, forty who will tell you they don't know anything near like the right way to sail a sailboat. They won't tell you they're perfect about it. I read long essays... There's one by Callahan in a fine book, Learning to Sail (which is one of the finest books ever written for the beginning sailor), and in his next one, Learning to Race. He talks about the sensitivity of the hand on the tiller. And he goes on and on and on and on and on about how much judgment and sensitivity, and he compares it to riding steeplechase horses. And he goes on, and he keeps drawing these similes until we finally understand that Mr. Callahan has a hard time steering boats!

There is a right way to do it. How do you do it? You keep enough wind in the sail to keep the ship or yacht footing at the maximum speed for that wind. Now, if you heel her over too far, you reduce the sail area and she doesn't sail so fast.

You can sail a ship very desperately, by the way — it looks like the most desperate occupation you ever had anything to do with — and it's only doing about two or three knots. You heel her down so hard she just stops herself in the water, see? She's just a half-blown-over boat, that's about all. And it looks spectacular, but it isn't anything. That's not the right way to do it.

In other words, there are right ways to do things. They are usually quite simple. When somebody goes complex on it, he has specialized in how bad it is or how hard it is to do this. You got that?

Well, get it to this degree — get it, if you please, to this degree: That the whole business of living is difficult only because there are too many right ways to do it, and too few standards of how to go about it, and too little certainty on the whole thing.

Those things which are least admired tend to persist. Why? They're never looked at, for one thing, and looking at things is what as-ises them. Those things which are least admired tend to persist. So they're never looked out of existence. You get the idea?

Well, if you look at life, you can immediately select, then, the number of things which are nonsurvival or least admired. You can select them at once if you know this too: For a thetan to have a method for survival is the least admired datum in this universe. Because it's the least necessary one.

Let me go over that again a little more slowly. Those things which are least admired tend to persist. Methods of survival or methods of surviving are then, in general, the least admired things in this universe. Methods by which (I'll be more specific) a thetan can survive — any or all such methods — can be lumped under „least admired.“ Because a thetan can't do anything else.

A thetan will survive; a thetan does persist. So getting a method of persisting or a method of surviving, he then has one of the least-admired or least-important or least-paid-attention-to activities engaged upon.

Any modus operandi for survival, then, tends to persist because it's Q-and-Aed-with survival. But more important than that, it's because it isn't admired at all. It is not even necessary. And a person has to work very hard to find out that it is necessary. He has to lie to himself like mad to „find this out“ (unquote). Because it isn't true!

Therefore, methods by which people seek to survive — such as „Have a job“ (that's an interesting one), „How you gonna get income?“ (that's another one, see?) — these things are very persistent and very naggy and very unpalatable and very unadmired. Of course! Because they are methods of surviving. And a thetan can't do anything else.

Somebody went and got a pot of gilt paint and found a lily and really painted the stuff around. Now, there are ways to play games, you see, and there are games to play, and a lot of these are terribly admired. So actually, they have to be reinvented all the time; reinvented, because they go out of existence.

So a person who relaxes in life and fails to invent ways to have a game, and fails to make games to play, inevitably falls into the slump of „a method to exist.“

„I'm not going to play around any more; I'm going to get a job and settle down.“ That's the exact postulate, see? „All this running around the universe, and that sort of thing, I'll just have to stop that. And I'll have to get serious about something and actually get a body and get a family and settle down.“

He didn't even have to think to do that. It was the least-admired thing in his immediate vicinity, and he just went into it.

Now, if you look at those things, you can then isolate these as having a persistence, and therefore having trouble, and therefore being the least admired. Sex. Oddly enough, it gets almost anybody in trouble. There are people who play games connected with it which are a little bit different than this. But the actual action of sex, and the inevitable arrival of new progeny, and so forth, is a method of survival, continuance. Only on that basis alone does Freud have any validity.

A fellow can get very upset about sex. Well, that's because it's so silly. You mean a thetan has to have a body which has to have survival in order to survive? Now, let's look this over. He has a body which survives, and if the body survives, then he survives? No. No.

Now, a body is justified in games, but „a body to survive“ is not justified because it does not assist a thetan to survive. It assists him to not survive, to the degree that he can be made not to survive, because he says it's surviving and he isn't. He can do this kind of a trick with it. But do you know that one of the processes you'll have most trouble with, with preclears?... It's a very interesting process. Just mock up a man and a woman engaging in sexual intercourse. Boy, you'll go on for hours and hours and hours and hours trying to process that process.

The gum and the goo and the apathy and the upset and the persistence and everything else connected with this is so confusing. And the bank goes black, and the mock-ups get invisible and they get visible, and they get the wrong mock-ups, and the terminals collapse, and so on. I'm not trying to educate you into what difficulty to have with this. I'm just trying to tell you (running on an outside preclear), you should be able to do it rather easily.

All right. Now look, the sexual act, depended upon totally for the existence of the individual, doesn't make sense. You see? You're getting a being who can't do anything else but survive engaging in an activity which permits him to survive. And naturally, there's a tremendous amount of nonadmired material connected with it. You got it?

All right. You take a routine, mundane, workaday-world kind of a job. Same thing. He works in order to live. Oh, no! Because he does more work than he engages in sex, you could actually say that work is more aberrative than sex. In that, Freud never threw a plumb line down at all, because he didn't understand the word work, evidently.

You take a mechanic, or something like that, you could run a test on him. You could have him mock up men and women (couples), and you'd find out he didn't have too much trouble with it. But „Mock up a machine.“ See? „Mock up another machine.“ Everything starts to go whir, clank, thud; and you get this same activity. And you must suppose, then, that it is less admired to work so as to live, than to indulge in sex so as to survive, you see? Of the two, you'll find that the work has heavier weight on it, quite ordinarily.

All right. This person has a method for survival, but he can't do anything else! So you talk from a hidden standard. You say, „Young man, when you grow up you'll have to be something in order to live.“ „Miss? Now, what profession are you going to follow?“ And the kid always says, „Gzzzzzzzz... I don't know.“

Why doesn't he know? He's supposed to know. You say, „Well, if you haven't got any ambition, you never get anyplace in this world! And…”

„Oh, yeah?“

Well, it leaves the kid with a blank. He can't tell you. Oh, well, kids are very glib on this when they're four or five; they're going to be firemen or they're going to be something. They just pick out something that's got lots of motion to it, lots of adventure, lots of games connected with it; and they don't connect this with living, see, or the method of survival. Later on, they do connect this with the method of survival, and from there on it looks kind of odd to them.

Why? Work in order to live? Well, the idea itself has persisted so long that we can see that it is the least-admired thing we have anyplace. See, that must be very, very badly admired, because it's been going for a long while and fought the whole way. Naturally. Well, you work in order to eat. And you eat in order to live.

It's a funny thing that nobody, until we came along, saw there was anything odd about this. People have protested diets of one kind or another, but they've never looked at it this closely. Just how is it that eating a dead animal makes one more alive? Ask yourself that one sometime when you're gaily eating a nice, luscious chicken. Say, „How the devil can this thing add any energy to me, 'cuz it's dead!“ Well, truth of the matter is, it can't! But you can suppose that it can, and feel more alive afterwards. You've remedied your havingness on a sort of a crude basis.

But it shows you there's something wrong with it if you work in order to eat in order to live, if at the „eat“ point you consume nothing but dead things. There's something wrong there someplace.

Well, for sure there is. Because to work in order to live is folly. They do not connect. They are not data which should be connected. Because a thetan can't do anything else. Work in order to get a game going, work in order to get something done, work in order to go through some motions of one kind or another. Certainly those are all right. But to work in order to live — to have a paycheck! What do you want with a paycheck?

„Oh,“ you say, „but a paycheck's very nice. You can buy things with a paycheck, and you can do this and that with a paycheck.“ Yeah, well, that's a game. But to have to have a paycheck in order for you, a thetan, to live is something like saying „Six plus nine are one“ and trying to make it sound logical, factual. It isn't logical or factual.

You get a paycheck so that the body, which is educated into eating — it's fallen that low — can then buy food and continue to live. But I don't know that feeding a body, in the final analysis, does anything but kill it. It's Q-and-Aing all the time with dead things. I don't know but what the cells of the body didn't originally manufacture all the chemicals necessary to the continued existence of the body. And I think they've just been made dependent on food to a point where they don't manufacture them anymore. And I don't think they use them very well either.

There's something in the Rig-Veda which has always been a laugh to me. It's very funny, I mean. „The people got so bad off that they began to eat.“ The line has always hung around. There was a point on the Indian time track, in other words, where they did notice that people were starting to do this.

Quite amazing. You think this over and look at it less involvedly, less close-up, less chin-to-chin — when you get back here and take a look at this thing you think, boy, that's... There's something going on here.

Well, the reason a person has to work is because he isn't as able. He has to work because he can't mock it up anymore. If he has to work in order to live, that means that he's no longer capable of mocking up the things he needs or wants.

Something's wrong with his ability. So somewhere along the line he had to learn that he was bad. In order to now be unable, he had to learn he was bad. This he had to do. He had to learn that.

But unfortunately, he learned it usually from a hidden standard that something was good. So he's on a certainty. He knows what bad is, but he doesn't know what good is. Now you try to audit him and he'll only try to audit out how bad he is. And he'll never establish how good he is. He expects the good to take place automatically because it is a hidden standard and he's sure it exists, and even you might be fairly sure that there must be a good there. No. Look, the good is usually a hidden standard.

You cannot draw an ethical line that thinly. You cannot say, „This course of action is always bad; that course of action is always good.“ That's a very didactic thing to do, to say, „This is always bad; this is always good.“

We can tell you the basic rules of auditing. And we could say that, in auditing, to do this is bad; to do this is good. But, boy, are we talking from an exposed standard. If you haven't found it an exposed standard, you haven't been looking. Because we say continually what is good about auditing. See? What is good auditing.

Now, we punch it up to you, and you probably have a tendency to notice, more often than not, what is bad about the auditing. But that would merely be your picking up the bad point as a concentrated thing.

Now, the test of something like this is hilarious. Have a man mock up a bad woman. And mock her up again and again and again and again and again. He can do that a few times without falling in on himself, but the next thing you know, he's mocking her up here and he can't do anything else. This is one of the wildest things you ever had done to you or ever did. Mock up a bad woman.

There's stimulus-response. Now, you don't keep mocking her up here, you just try to keep putting her out there. And the next thing you know, why, a heck of a lot of odd changes take place in the person's body, and he has a person out there (well mocked up) that he says is a bad woman without any further bank action.

How many hours? Whew! Long look. Just that one action: fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five hours. Bank goes blank, invisible, black, all kinds of odd things occur. How about a bad man then, if it takes twenty-five, thirty hours? Bad man. Just mock up a bad man and a bad man. Same thing, same thing. Well, how about a bad couple? You're in for it. You can just about manage these three things, these three actions, in a seventy-five hour intensive. But your preclear will find out more than he ever dreamed of. He'll find out there's more to this than he thought. He will be certain that very complicated processes have been run on him, too.

You're just undoing this thing called „evil.“ He's sure there's something evil about him. Yes, he's tried to put evil out there, evil out there, evil out there, evil out there. It didn't work. A fight merely is the action of trying to convince somebody he's evil. Got that? Trying to convince somebody he's evil, that's all. That's all a fight is. That's all an argument is. All a criticism is. So it's something that somebody has been at for about seventy-six trillion years to some degree. But after a while, he gets totally set on it. And then he becomes hypercritical.

And of course, there's only one person who gets the recoil on it. That's himself He gets overt act-motivator phenomena. He just thinks that wall is badly done, and he doesn't notice the comm lag, but a couple of seconds later he's thinking about himself — you know, „I'm not as good-looking these days as I used to be.“ Got that? Koo-boom! Well, he gets it so fast he doesn't even know it's connected.

The assignment of evil, and running the assignment of evil, walks one straight out of all of these various nonsenses that he's had about hidden standards, and so forth. Preclear will look at you after a while and tell you, „Oh, good boy.“ I mean, you haven't been running a good boy, you've been trying to get him to mock up a bad woman. And he eventually tells you that there is no such thing as a good boy. He has learned this finally.

Now, there is this trick in all such actions: When you think a person is stripping his bank — which could actually run him down in havingness; he isn't getting, then, new mock — ups every time; he is actually picking up facsimiles and putting them out in front of him and calling them mock-ups — and when you suspect a person of doing this, or just to be safe, you have him also make it a little more solid. „Mock up a bad woman. All right, make her a little more solid.“ And if you do that, his bank doesn't strip — which opens the doors in all directions to old Creative Processing.

Creative Processing then becomes possible at any level of case, anywhere that you can get the guy into a session, the second you know this one. Creative Processes were limited to the degree that people very often stripped their banks. Took havingness out of the banks, burned it up, you see? Well, today we know all we have to do is have him make it a little more solid and he'll do that.

All right. This concept, then, of evil — the assignment of evil — is a one-datum, since it is not an opposite datum to good. If good doesn't exist, but evil is said to exist, you have a one- datum; and that doesn't go in this universe. This is a two-datum universe. You have no data of comparable magnitude. And as a result, bad persists, but evil is not offset by good. Why? The good, definition for, hasn't existed in fact or in close communication. So bad stands alone with no good behind it, the good being a hidden standard.

This'll take any preclear out of the mud, and we'll be running it before this unit is over.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]