Now, the material which I’m giving you – this is the sixth lecture, Washington, January 1960 – the material which I’m giving you is very easy to mis-understand, very easy to manhandle. If you think you know all about it, think you got it all taped, you better study it. Your instructors will make out a quiz sheet on these various steps and things. You can study it up again, you’ll get quizes on it.

The only step that’s omitted up to this point – it’s actually not omitted, but the second time you go looking for overts there and withholds that I talk about there, is to clean up the social and familial environment of the preclear, his second and third dynamics as they exist in the society at this time, and of course you get off the overts and withholds on people like boss, fellow workers, wife, his kids, stuff like this. If you do that right about there, why, you’ll really have a tremendous resurgence as far as the fellow is concerned. Tremendous. Naturally, when you get overts and withholds on some big thing, you always run responsibility on it. I keep nailing that one home. Just because the guy’s passed up to it is no reason he’s comfortable about it. The only other datum that goes along with that – and goes along with it very thoroughly – is the rehabilitation of the ability to withhold. And that has to come out somewhere along the line; not necessarily in those first stages, but certainly if you’re going to wrap up the case about that point, not tackle the case any further and so on, don’t let the case go without rehabilitating his ability to withhold.

I could tell you a lot of funny stories about the ability to withhold. First thing I’ll do is give you a slight demonstration of it, slight demonstration of it: I want you to look around, right where you’re sitting right this moment, and get the idea of withholding a lightning bolt from these people. Do it. Now let’s do it a little more thoroughly. Let’s get the idea of withholding a lightning bolt from these people now, you know, a real zap. You’re making it now? Get the idea of withholding a lightning bolt from them? Well let’s do it again. Let’s look around and get the idea of really withholding a lightning bolt from this people now. Any feeling like you really ought not to do this exercise any further? Well if you didn’t get any idea of it then you’re not stuck in that part of the track – not fluid enough actually to move on to that part of the track – but that’s... that’s a good idea for a demonstration, because that’s the earliest part of the track of course. So come up to PT.

The reason you can’t do it anymore is because you can’t withhold it. All of your withholds on it have been moved over to automatic, denied and utterly crushed. Your considerations have been shifted around in such a way that it won’t happen, but you yourself on your own say-so undoubtedly doubt your ability to withhold a lightning bolt; and if you, actually, still had the ability (you think) to kick out a lightning bolt, you wouldn’t be able to withhold a lightning bolt, so therefore you better not have the ability to throw out a lightning bolt. But of course you have the ability to throw out a lightning, frightening bolt. You’re merely not willing to do so. Too much overts, you got the idea? Too damaging.

Any time a thetan has found out that he was doing something too damaging, he used various mechanisms to cut back not doing – his doing it; he pretended he no longer had the ability to do it, he pretended it was an environment that he couldn’t do it anymore. But basically he set up withholds, and part of a withhold is „loss of ability“. And that is the whole story of the track, that’s the whole thing. Declining ability, declining reach, increasing withhold, increasing automaticity of withhold. There are some people that’ll stay around as long as you beat them up. Factually! You have to beat them up regularly and routinely, one way or the other, for them to stay around. And when you stop beating them up, they leave. You say, „this in total disagreement with man’s dislike of punishment; man dislikes punishment.“ Well, man doesn’t either like or dislike punishment, he has various ideas with regard to punishment; but anybody that will beat him up is adding withholds, he hopes, and it helps him withhold things. He no longer has the great ability to do it so he’s depending on somebody else to do it for him.

You get such a thing as a very tough sergeant in an army, or a very tough officer. And you could say this officer is not liked by his men. Why do they all go to pieces when he leaves? This whole idea of „having to be liked“ is a nasty way of denying people withholds. What communism is all about is breaking down all withholds, so communism of course goes hand in glove with crime. It’s the people – the people that go for this – the people who can’t withhold anything anymore, so they pass all responsibility over to the state hoping it can withhold something. The modus operandi – I’m not riding any hobbyhorse about communism; it just happens to be a current… a current „ism“, or a current philosophy that people know vaguely something about. Know damn little about, as a matter of fact.

The people on this earth are the most politically illiterate people on any planet I’ve been on for ages. Actually they don’t know the difference between a fascism and a capitalism and – years ago I was going to write a book about this subject. I saw one was very, very necessary; I never got around to it. Overt act by omission. But actually their literacy on politics is very poor, and you think I ride hobbyhorses on that sort of thing, or are unnecessarily cruel to something. Well communisms always turn out to be slave-isms, because they break down all the ability of the individual to be a private individual. He becomes a public individual, therefore they’ve broken down his ability to withhold, so then the state has to take over and withhold with great violence. For the Stalin gets in and kills ten million muzhiks or peasants or serfs, or whatever a communism is called in Russia today. The state has to furnish the total withhold for everybody. Naturally they have a lot of crime, depravity, breakage, all that sort of thing. You look down, look around at what they’re doing and just on your own see if what I’m saying is not true. They’re breaking down withholds, breaking down the ability of the individual to withhold. That, they’re breaking down with great thoroughness.

Now, everything you’ve done on this list so far is a breakdown on withhold, but understand it’s a breakdown of automatic withholds that goes along with responsibility. So when you break down a withhold, you add the responsibility. If you break down the withhold without adding the responsibility, you’re doing the same damn thing the communist, the catholic church and a whole lot of other communal organizations have been doing here to the great detriment of man for the last two or three thousand years. Lycurgus was the first boy that started churning up communism on this planet in Sparta, and it was just break down all of the entity of the Spartan family, break down the identity, the private identity of the individual, the Spartan soldier and so forth; and actually the Spartans were at last looked upon, you see, as being the most knuckleheaded knuckleheads in Greece. And even after Lycurgus passed away and so forth, the Spartans went on being knuckleheaded They just never recovered from Lycurgus, never did. That’s the inventor of communism, pre-Carl Marx. Plutarch’s Lives, reference.

Now, that’s just no good, see, breaking down withholds just endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. You have to break down compulsive, obsessive, withholds and overts; you have to break down this automatic structure to clear a case all the way and make an OT. You have to take those overts and withholds which are out of the control of the individual and put them back in to the control of the individual. You’re breaking down overts and withholds to re-establish responsibility and the ability to do and to withhold. These are abilities, and if you just broke them down endlessly and never put them back again, never restored the individual’s ability to withhold, you of course would have just an irresponsible mass of junk.

Scientology and Scientologists would not be a 3D Dynamic; they’d be a mob, you understand that? Now a man who is withholding „because“, and a man who has got to do overts „because“, is not safe. A man or a woman, you see, has to withhold „because yap, yap, yap, yap,“ who must do and overt „because yap, yap, yap, yap, yap,“ see, he’s not safe. Most police chiefs in the country are on a compulsive punishment of criminals, and they are not even vaguely safe to have in their jobs. Most judges sitting on benches are just on this kick, „Got to punish the criminal! Got to punish the criminal! Got to punish criminals! Got to punish criminals!“ First place, you’re never going to punish criminals from a judge’s bench into an orderly society. As I’ve said before, and I’m sure I’m misunderstood every time I say it, if you’re going to handle a society with punishment, you will have to handle it with unlimited savagery. There is nothing short of that works. Wherever you find a crime being committed, you must string the man up and let him rot, that is it. It’s an old thing; it has worked, it has worked. Absolutely unlimited savagery. Well who the devil wants to go in for unlimited savagery?

Half-way savagery doesn’t work, see, it does not impact the society enough to stop crime. If you’re just trying to stop crime then you just have to – well, you wouldn’t have your criminals „bugging out“ as the cops were telling me. You wouldn’t have all mish-mashy, „well, he meant to do well and so forth.“ No, you just hang him up let him rot, that’s it; in public view. Heads on the pikes, you know, that sort of thing. You’d have to have a lot of police; they’d have to be around where the crimes are being committed, and after a while you’d have a virgin with a sack of gold could walk from one corner of the world to the other without being molested or robbed. But you’d sure have an awful lot of unhappy thetans!

So you could have law and order along this line, but you can’t have it quasily. It’s not – that’s just barely workable, barely workable from a third dynamic viewpoint only. Now that isn’t from a first dynamic viewpoint, is it? It doesn’t do the first dynamic very much good. Every first dynamic that goes in for this unlimited savagery of course winds the fellow up in the soup. The cop that has to grab the criminal and hang him up on the gallows, that’s an overt on the – see, his overt, first dynamic, that’s no good, is it? That’s sowing aberration into the society for a stopgap public safety. Where the other answer is rehabilitation, and that of course turns out to be the only answer.

The only thing you can do people is rehabilitate them, you can’t kill them, they don’t die. You can’t punish them, you’ve just added another automatic withhold. The only thing you can do with them is rehabilitate them. Fortunately we can do this with great rapidity compared to other things. We could actually take a criminal who just hated women like mad and just had to kill women wherever found, you see, and it actually wouldn’t take us too long to get that aberration off of him. You get his overts and withholds against women and run responsibility on this confounded thing, see?

You could do this with alcoholism, you could do it with any specialized type of crime that has gone totally out of the individual’s command. Now, all crime is an automaticity. No thetan ever commits a crime. Isn’t that wonderful? THE ONLY THING THAT COMMITS A CRIME IS THE AUTOMATICITY HE HAS ERRONEOUSLY HAD TO SET UP BECAUSE HE COULDN’T BE THERE ANYMORE. So you get false selves committing crimes. No police officer ever arrests a person, the only thing he ever arrests is a valence. There isn’t a person there and it’s something to think about if you’re handling people who have criminal impulses; you’re not handling a person. The person is out in left field someplace unable to handle the situation, and it’s just kind of deserted. You got this walking Frankenstein’s monster automaticity, the individual isn’t taking any responsibility for it and it’s not under control by anybody or anything. So in view of that you have crime, and that’s what a criminal is, and if you think you can punish this fellow, why, you think that sanity could be cured by giving somebody the overt-withhold of an electric shock, you see? That’s just adding – that’s adding automatic withholds.

That is why psychiatry’s electric shock has a slight apparency of working. Actually it worsens every single case that’s applied to in the long look. It’s a short order look, see? The fellow apparently recovers, you see, apparently gets all right sometimes, you know, may go along for months, may go along for two or three years, six, eight years, you see, and all of sudden, doom! Goes in. And then you pick him up a couple of lifetimes later with a lot of electric shocks not run out, see? Adding the withhold, adding to the ability of the person to withhold on another-determined basis doesn’t work, but you will get people standing around asking you to add withholds. I know several people, several people that I see rather consistently over the years, that are in this category; and they’re just always begging me to take another swat at them. It’s a big joke with me, I very often do, you know? „You want a withhold? OK. There’s a withhold.“ That’s kind of the way it works, see, Boom! You know? Very interesting.

There are people around that beg you to degrade them, which is to say reduce their ability, because they’re afraid of what they’ll do. Just beg you to degrade them, „walk on me!“ There was a guy in San Francisco for instance, used to let himself be beat up with a baseball bat; twenty-five cents, you could hit him with a baseball bat, so forth. Well that’s the withhold; how about some other practices that have less violence attached to them but are ten times as degrading? Why do you suppose anybody ever goes in for one of those? Well don’t say, „it’s because the individual is not able to anymore to make his way or her way or something of the sort, she then does so and so...“ No, no, no. She’s asking – she knows she’s dangerous and that’s the thing she wants to be cured of, or that’s the thing he wants to be cured of, and the only way to be cured of it is to be degraded, lose the ability. Now here is – an outside determinism is being required, because the self-determinism is inadequate; and they go into all kinds of degrading practices and all this sort of thing, you see a whole society do this. It’s the most amazing thing you ever saw; everybody begging everybody else to degrade them. And after a while, boy, they’re really degraded all right! They’re sure making it! But they’re asking – they have no other remedy than to have their ability reduced or their withholds added to from other-determinism, got the idea? That’s the only remedy they have to keep themselves good, and so of course they go out the bottom. And that is the dwindling spiral that you’re looking at right there.

Now, withholds then, are either other-determined or self-determined; they fall into these two categories, and withholds which are other-determined and degradations which are other-determined, you see, of course just stack the case up to be worse. The case just gets worse and worse, and more and more automatic because, why? He has no control of the withholds and the withholds are usually – will add up to something more evil even; make something more evil out of him. Why, I’m sure that there’re people that are treated by psychiatrists that wind up as psychiatrists! I mean how low can you get? Got the idea? Now they switch valences; they go into total artificialities and so on.

Well now you don’t want to have to reduce your ability to send out a lightning bolt, is what we’re getting down to here, reducing your ability to send out a lightning bolt. Not necessary if you yourself on your own determinism can select freely any time you want. One: can withhold any lightning bolt, and two: not have to give any lightning bolts. And when you don’t have to hit anybody with a lightning bolt and you can withhold any lightning bolt, you will then permit yourself to fire lightning bolts. It amuses the hell out of the kids. You don’t have to go around killing people with lightning bolts and you’re not going around afraid to hit people with lightning bolts, or afraid that you’ll slip, you know, and one will start a fire or something of the sort. Well, you’ve let yourself have the ability to fire lightning bolts, that’s all there is to it, you see? You have confidence in yourself. You know that this abilities exist so you’re willing to have the ability.

Now when you find this on the track and it’s all aberrated, you get a halfway between look. You look back at the time when you were firing lightning bolts, you see, and you see yourself in facsimile form bumping off this and that or knocking apart this form or that form, and getting involved in glare fights and wars and sort of thing, and you say, „that’s not for me,“ and you shut off even further your ability to fire lightning bolts. Well actually you didn’t look quite far back enough on the track; earlier than that you had the ability to generate lightning bolts or not generate lightning bolts as the case may be. After that somebody came along and forgot to end – you forgot to operate sensibly. Now the way you forgot to operate sensibly was to fail to take responsibility for the lightning bolts you fired or withheld. You fired lightning bolts for the state, or not as yourself, you set up a mass here so that you could be identified and said, „that mass just fired the lightning bolt,“ well, that’s not admitting cause. You didn’t say, „I’m me,“ you said, „I’m that mass,“ now that’s honest compared to what happens after that...

Now here is a denial of responsibility: The cop on the beat down here who does not have in his possession the authority to handle crime, and that is, from Abbot straight to Ziggy, is being degraded by the society. This cop on the beat should actually have the right to apprehend – to detect, apprehend, fine or dismiss as his own action at the scene any criminal he apprehends, because he’ll stay in good shape if he does that. He’ll remain an honest cop, he’ll remain somebody who’s competent, he’ll remain a decent person, because he’s taking full responsibility for the matter, he says, „I’m doing it,“ he says, I’m not – he’s not saying, „I’m doing this because I’m officer 666,“ see, he says, „I’m doing it.“ He could say, „I’m a cop and I’m paid by the state and I arrest you.“ Nothing would happen to him. Overts by the ton, as long as they did not offend against the optimum solution too grossly, he could just do overts by the ton, and he would not become vicious or anything else, no mechanics would get in his road at all, as long as his intention was to be just and keep order in the society, as long as he said, „I’m doing it.“ Why, he’d have it made.

But you didn’t do that on the back track. You slaughtered enemy armies „in the name of the sultan“; you’ve saved people „in the name of the messiah“, get the idea? YOU didn’t do it. And yet you did it, who else was there? Was anybody else there? Kind of on your track, look around see if anybody else was present when you dropped that lance and made an attack on the enemy lines. The French army then attacked and of course, „I just did, I just did what the prince said, you know, and naturally some people got hurt and I did what the prince said and I got run through a couple of times and, you know, it wasn’t very much, and did my duty to my country, you see, and – in the name of the prince, of course, and – can’t understand why this wounds don’t heal!“ Well I think it’s simpler. You didn’t strike anybody in your own name!

You see how degraded a society gets when a soldier can stand on a parapet, „dog tag number umpty-ump-dash-ump-ump-ump-ump-ump,“ with the identity ‘John Jones’ given to him by his parents, with the identity of ‘soldier’ given to him, or a national identity given to him by the accident of his birth, by reason of the uniform, pulls the trigger and kills a man and blames Mr. Lee Enfield, or Mr. Springfield – note for gun connoisseurs; I know those aren’t men – every once in a while I get criticisms like this. Then I always ask them, „How come you have to lessen your overts?“ Now lets look at that: Taking responsibility; taking responsibility. One of the reasons why nobody’s ever been able to pull off the trick of Dianetics and Scientology is nobody takes responsibility for all of it. „The Ford Foundation found out...“ „The Glemco chemical company knows...“ This is pure corn, see, this is silly. You couldn’t pull this much off against human minds and be in a fog about who is doing it without spinning in about three months before Book One, got the idea?

Now people say Ron is very, very forward about this thing; he opens his mouth too wide and he’s always saying „I’ve done it“, and I’m sure no one else calling attention to this. Boy, I know better than not to, let me tell you. When I dream something up and say something, I know damn well who is saying it: me, see? ME. That’s just me, you see, that’s not ‘L. Ron Hubbard’, you know, that’s ME, and I just go along and just do fine, thank you, and somebody wires me in, says, „Well, we used your processes on my brother and he’s now in Tehachopee (or some such place).“ They never seem to realize that two things go hand in glove: You’re going to use Scientology, perfectly all right to say that Ron – as good a name as any other – wetted in on the track, see, at this point, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re causing it. When you do it, do it. Don’t do it ‘in the name of...’.

Staff auditors get this every once in a while, they do it ‘in the name of the HGC’ or they do it ‘in the name of the D of P’ and so forth. That’s for the birds! If you’re auditing somebody, you’re auditing somebody, that’s it! The instructor comes along and says do otherwise, and you sort of lean back and say, „well all right. I’m doing otherwise. The instructor is doing otherwise, the instructor’s instruction... The instructor’s sort of auditing the pc now.“ Don’t be upset if you get restimulated, because you’re telling a lie! The instructor can give you a new idea which then you buying it, becomes your idea, but then you’re the one who is applying it and nobody else is. Now look, I hate to hang you with that much responsibility for what you’re doing; it’s so easy and comfortable to drift, but when I know something I tell you, right? And I sure know that one now. I sure know that one. That is the road down. It’s perfectly all right to get ideas, it’s perfectly all right to get ideas and know that I said them to you, but when you agree with them, when you know they’re right, they’re your ideas; and if you don’t know they’re right and you just go on and use them, that’s no good. Scientology is correct if it’s correct for you, and if it’s correct for you, then you’re doing it. And I’m perfectly willing to admit the cause of having given you the idea which then permits you to do it, and even go around and admit cause of you doing it; but that hasn’t anything to do with you!

Now you’ll only get to be a free people and you only make a free people if you yourself cause what you are doing. If you yourself are perfectly willing to come upscale, not stay degraded on other overts against you, counter-creates of one kind or another; not expecting everybody to withhold everything for you. But if you yourself can withhold and if you yourself can do, then you yourself can cause and you come up the line the whole way. You can’t come up on a via, you get the idea? YOU are YOU, and I don’t care what the instructor tells you that you’re doing wrong, I would take much less of you if you didn’t say you thought you were doing right and go on and do it. Now that makes a tough job for the instructor sometimes, because the student can be pretty knuckleheaded, but I won’t have one if you’re doing something you don’t understand. Now I won’t have you doing something less than well, caused by YOU. You do what you understand, you do what YOU can do, you understand? Nothing wrong with you listening to me, but you have all these ideas basically or we couldn’t even communicate about them, got the idea?

Now this has a lot to do with the next stage of case. This has everything to do with the next thing in case, because if this make-break point is getting the individual to decide whether or not he wants to get well or what’s holding him down, you’re now from there on going to make it your business to disassociate him from identities, because every identity he’s hung up in is that much less responsibility as himself. Now there’s no question in my mind as to what I’ve done on the track, but I can object like the devil to have somebody shove it down my throat under another name. I do, I’d buck like a – it’s made me mad on this planet for – about the last twenty-three hundred years. I’ve been red-headed about – I knew what I was doing, but in a lifetime I dropped this factor of responsibility to some degree and did it ‘in the name of’ and that name got a little too famous, and here and there I’ve had a name that was just a little bit too famous, just a little bit, none of these very resounding names for this planet; all of them very consistent in effort and approach, basic purpose goes a long way further back than that, and it’s been consistent. All of a sudden you get hung up in one of these identities, you know, and maybe I have to study it as a school kid or something, you know? Oh, pow! No! The Red Comet, you know, that sort of thing. Repeating identities.

Well, in the first place, one isn’t the Red Comet ever, even though he’s been the Red Comet, one isn’t the Red Comet, let’s get down to cases here. It’s all right for you to call yourself ‘John Jones’ or ‘May Smith’; that’s a good identification, but it’s a syllabic representation of you, and it’s not you. You are simply you. There’s a fellow that has quite – had had quite a little bit of trouble with a case who was a very famous figure that died in the Alamo. Been around for some time and he died in the Alamo, having awful lot of trouble, why? He was so much that person in that life and so little himself, and that name has lived on on the track of textbooks and romantic stories, and he’s gone lived on and been something else. He got all mixed up with identity.

The primary button, aberrative button on the track is identity, which you can call mis-identification of the individual. Any name is a mis-identification of the individual, any name, the name you wear right this minute, the name I wear right this minute is a mis-identification of me. It’s merely handy. So you say, „I did it, my name is John Jones.“ Perfectly accurate. You say, „John Jones did it and I am John Jones. I’m the shoot.“*Editor’s remark: shoot – probably should read “chute” as short form of “parachute” You’ll need one; when you start going down that past without a shoot, you tend to melt in the atmosphere, get the difference? „I did it. People call me John Jones.“ That’s perfectly all right, ‘cause you caused it. That’s the primary bug you’ve got to get off cases. Now people can get so loopy about this and get so incapable of we – they can get so incapable, factually get so incapable of withholding – here, somebody give me a match; let me have a cigarette. You can smoke if you want to – the individual is so incapable of withholding that he goes in for the mechanism of life and death, and this is a very corny mechanism.

And going in for the mechanism of life and death, he goes in for the mechanism of identity and having been Schubert is nothing to brag about if you cannot now tickle the ivories or play a violin or do whatever he did; that’s nothing to brag about. What are you going to do, ride on the track? I can out-create you any day of the week on this, or go into a contest on I’ve been Schubert and who’s been Flubert, what you’re trying to do, go nuts? You’ve never been Schubert. Course somebody some day sooner or later is going to hear this tape and the fellow’s been Schubert. No, you’ve been you and what you as an auditor got to get the individual over is the idea that he’s been Schubert, catch the idea? Catch? You like that? Now some people’s ability to withhold deteriorates to a point where they snap into identities with great ease, and it’s enough to have lived in the lifetime of Schubert to now be Schubert, you get how the mechanism is? It’s not a discreditable mechanism; that’s how you’re going to find 865 Schuberts. They couldn’t withhold in that lifetime, particularly in that lifetime they couldn’t withhold; their ability was very poor for some reason or other at that time and there was this famous fellow around ‘Schubert’.

Well, if they did anything even vaguely resembling the activities of Schubert, they go whirr-snap! Because Schubert lives on out of that lifetime and they didn’t, see, and they get the persistent identity of that period, you got it? And they’ll pick up the persistent identity, the most persistent of identity of any given period is going to be perpetuated by individuals who have particularly lost their way. One of them is Schubert, but brother, you’re going to be an awful damn clever auditor to get it out of him, because that life is buried with spades, oil well drills, that life is overlaid with blankets, tarps, tarpaulins, that’s really padded in the face, because, you see, he was the one that was guilty of the overt act in that lifetime; he killed Schubert.

Any thetan caused his own death; he didn’t have to commit suicide the way you’ve done sometimes – and the way I did once – you don’t have to commit suicide against a famous individual as an actual fact of sucking the pen, or stabbing with the dagger, of pulling the trigger of a blast gun, you see, you didn’t have to do that, you see, to have killed him. You killed him with your own postulates. Somewhere you decided that this guy was for nowhere; that you should be went; that your friends were now departing, that fortune was creaking, that it was just too much damn trouble or it was too boring, or it was too upsetting, or it was too something. And hiding it nicely and smoothly and carefully from yourself, you went about killing Schubert. You just did, just like that; only the last person to find out about it will be you; the auditor will find out before you do. Even though I’ve told you this, you’ll still be digging for this one, see, you say, „well I don’t know; he was run over by a chariot. I remember it distinctly; a friend had gotten him drunk, you know and he walked out into the street and a slave lurched into him that didn’t like him, and down he went down underneath two horses and the chariot and that was the end of him.“ Knock it off! That ain’t what happened. The individual went in, got his friend to get him drunk, and got a slave to push him, and fell – and got the horses to run over him and got the body to show the bruises and died, get the idea? Till he finds that out, it doesn’t clear very well if at all. You get what goes on here, see?

So any famous identity committed suicide, and if that identity rides on up the track, what you’re looking for is that person’s murderer. It wasn’t the senators who killed Caesar. You mean a battle-wise, trained combat veteran of Roman legions, for god’s sakes, couldn’t defend himself against some paunch-bellied men waddling in togas?? Oh, for god’s sakes! That must have taken some doing, you know? As a thetan he must have sat up all night long figuring out just who was going to stab him, and you read over the history leading up to the event, I don’t think a man could have more thoroughly antagonized or upset the immediate body which was to execute him! Total knuckleheadedness! You find out that the end of every life winds up in some total knuckleheadedness; just can’t quite figure out how it got that knuckleheaded.

People have ideas of aesthetics with regard to this, „you should never go out as a wading star, always go out at the zenith!“ You know, postulates like this sort, so every time you’ve been anybody whose name was anything, and you had any importance whatsoever, why, you’d catch it up to what you’d consider would be anything that was a dramatic high point of a career, you know, at that moment get yourself knocked off. Thorn Smith, see, there’s a man with a great flare for dramatics. He was busy writing a dialog and he probably would have written some of the sexiest movies you ever wanted to see. The talkies were just in, the whole world would look at his stuff, he had it made, made, made, man! That was the time to go out. He (quote) „aesthetically and dramatically“, as Shakespeare would say, he knew when to exit. Do you follow this?

But this other mechanism is the one you’re going to have to wade through more often than not, and is going to cause you more puzzle, and cause your pc more upset, is „was he or wasn’t he?“ sort of doggone thing. Get hung up in one of this damn identities, was he or wasn’t he? Well, there’s several tests of this; if by running the identity, did you get an actual tremendous change in the case? And if you didn’t get an immediate wonderful change in the case, you better figure out he was the pallbearer or something, get the idea? But it’s not up to you to decide whether he was or he wasn’t. When an individual is run into that particular area of a lifetime where he didn’t have enough withhold not to be Catherine of Russia – who was a pretty hard person to withhold from, by the way – you find more girls are Catherine, mmh, you’re actually operating with a lifetime which had a low withhold, and having a low withhold you get a high snap-in. Of course it particularly doesn’t cure up in that lifetime until you rehabilitate the withhold. So, „what have you done to, what have you withheld from“ Julius Caesar, Schubert or anything else, brings the thing out into the open.

I have a subjective reality on this. I hate to bring up my own track particularly, but I have subjective reality on this. I had one in 1605, a death in 1605 that had me going around in circles as a pc, oh, a long, long time ago but really had me going in circles on this. It wasn’t a particularly famous identity, it was the granddaughter of King Charles V – something on that order – the old man had more or less kicked the bucket and this was the last of the line and that sort of thing, I couldn’t find out who the hell I was! I had an exterior view on this thing, you know, and I said, „well, I must be the girl but I can’t be the girl, and I wasn’t a girl in that particular life, and this doesn’t make sense, none of the somatics add up to this thing; this is a piece of nonsense.“ And the only thing that made it real sticky was the violence of the death. And she was murdered by a squad of marines from a French battleship; a cannonade and a boatload of sailors armed with boarding pikes. All this is launched, you see, at the head of a girl who, by that time I don’t know how old she was – let’s see, she must have been in her twenties, something like this; she was pretty loopy because she had been very badly handled during that lifetime, really chopped up, you know? And this much violence against this person, you see, had tended to snap the whole thing up and I had simply been the captain of her guard, see?

But let down that much responsibility, you see, and then to work it out as to what was really happening, because of course she was murdered because she could have succeeded to the succession, and she never occupied the throne or post or anything else. They were trying to get rid of her. And all during that lifetime, well, there for about twenty years or something of the sort, one of the jobs I had while doing something else more important, was acting as a captain of guard in this particular essence. I never could get it through my head – I’ve been real knuckleheaded that lifetime, see – you only get loused up in those lifetimes when you’re being a total knucklehead – and I just couldn’t couldn’t make it out! Just hours – I think about three sessions there, you know, „Was I? Wasn’t I? Who, what, where, why, who, what?“ You know, and „I am – I’m not – no, I am – I’m not...“ And finally this thing gets straightened out and the thing goes. I didn’t know whose somatics to run, you see? This was a sort of an adventurous kind of an auditing session, this – there were years ago, but we were blowing engrams by inspection, see – that’s a lousy process – if you don’t understand them, they don’t blow, let me tell you. And this one really was involved. So I got a good reality on how identities can get mish-mashed. That isn’t even a historical personage, you see, you probably don’t even know the girl ever existed. She was totally hidden by the French and so forth.

Of course, being totally knuckleheaded, I never could understand why they’d only give me something like four or five soldiers and why they’d always insist that she’d be in an open area, not up in the Alps in a castle or something like that, you see, but always in something like a Manor house or something like this. No way to defend it at all, ‘cause sooner or later of course they were going to kill her. I knew this. Political situation got too rough, they were going to knock her off. So a subjective reality on this thing, as soon as I saw that, I – way back when I started understanding the snap-around, you know. What had actually happened, she been blown up in a carriage with her mother, and her mother killed in 1685, and I was mounted on a horse to the rear of the carriage and they’d just come out of an inn, mounted the solo ladies into the carriage, got onto the horse; a couple of assassins had grabbed the livery of the driver and footman on the box. They turned around, one of them fired a pistol at me, the other dropped the bomb into the hatch of the carriage, you see? The kid lived through this, the little girl lived through this and I tried to pick her up off the pavement, you know, me. I went up, my horse crashed, but I wasn’t worried about me or horses; and I got in her head and tried to pick her off the pavement, you see, so I didn’t make it and got around picked my own body up, thought she was dead. And that was enough, that was enough to make a total mish-mash, get how this is?

Well you don’t have to even get into their heads to get this goofy. You can have mish-mashes without that. You got to pull the identities off because the identities are surviving, and they’re apparently alter-egos of the pc right in present time, you see? You know, there’re people – there’re people around whose music is being played in the juke boxes? There are people around who built the buildings that you walk in and out of, there are people around whose books are out here on the newsstands as repents.*Editor’s remark: repents – should probably read “reprints” which would fit well with the context. Also possible “threepence” meaning a cheap paperback novel or “as a penance”. And when one of these things happens close to present time, man, you’ve just about had it. That’s why thetan’s try to – when they – just been French, why, they skip over to the Germans, completely aside from the overt acts, you see, they’ve committed against the Germans as French and so on. They get out of that environment, and when they’re too knuckleheaded to do so, they’ve had it, they’ve had it right there. They find themselves going to the same school, for god sakes; maybe studying under the same teacher, joining the same clubs, doing all kinds of the same thing, you see. And therefore, I call to your attention that famous identities are very few in actuality, but the recent identities are fantastic louse-ups, whether they’re famous or infamous.

I ran into a fellow one day who was still wanted in Chicago, actively still wanted in Chicago for a bank robbery in his last life. He was being a perfectly incomprehensible case! He had no criminal background, he was trying to do it well, he was came to a fairly good family. There was everything there to tell him he should have a good life, you see, and he was just going spin! He couldn’t look at a cop on a beach, you know, without practically going through the sewer covers! Fantastic, fantastic state of mind!

So therefore, I call to your attention that getting a case computation has these two steps: Getting off the identity most in restimulation on the whole track as well as you can, and then researching the living daylights out of about the last two or three lives. You’ve got to take those two steps and get them straightened out, and get responsibility and overts and so forth, run on them. Get them straightened out. Particularly the ability to withhold rehabilitated with regard to that person. Those two steps have got to be taken. Then you take the third step of clearing up the whole ruddy works. Just doing scouts and running responsibility, and doing scouts and running responsibility, and doing scouts and running responsibility.

So on this – under this case computation deal, the case computation is totally centered around identities, because identity is the most irresponsible mechanism a thetan has, therefore it has to be resolved. Now you’re going to find somebody who is stuck in 1700, and was busy living as somebody in 1700, which has just ridden forward to present time. And until you get off the 1700 – if it exists as a stuck area – this black case, by the way, that you turn on the pictures of, you’re going to have to, sooner or later, come take it back to that picture date and do the rest of that, you got the idea? It’s all right to bring him up to present time in the first step, see, but you’re going to have to examine that in this second phase. Don’t necessarily charge him back on the track to that point and sort the thing all out as the first thing, but look it over and see if he isn’t stuck around on something, about something and so on, just on a whole track basis. Maybe he’s busy being a police robot or something of the sort eight billion years ago or something of the sort. Study the case; study the case’s mannerisms, find out what the case avoids and try to figure out what the case is, that’s the smartest way to go about this. Get that one solved if it has to be solved, it might not have to be solved right away.

Then certainly go in to the last two or three lives, and just sort them out, bang, bang, bang. Plenty of responsibility; get particularly the shifts from one life to the other. Those are very important, those last two or three lives. The life just before this one is the most important, but you’ll find that importance will carry back sometimes two or three lives. Terribly important to the case. When you get that off, I haven’t done a case yet that sprang up full armed, you know, that didn’t have this done to them. I mean, it’s a necessary step. And then just start getting a hold of the whole track and run responsibility on any identity you can get your hands on, and get those identities all whipped out and straightened out and the whole track will straighten out. And now you’ve only got 152 trillion years worth.

But if you’ve done everything you’ve done well, and if you’ve done it all extremely well, the cumulative effect of well doingness on each thing that you’ve touched in the case will get this last step to a point of where it’s just blowing at a glance. Engrams just blowing at a glance, understanding of the thing, blowing at a glance. You can get a case up to it’s rolling at this point. It has to be by good auditing, it has to be by thorough auditing and an increasing confidence of the pc that he can get some place; because what you’re basically working on and improving is the confidence of the individual himself.

Got it? Thank you.