Thank you. Thank you very much.
Well, this is the — should be the twenty-first lecture of the 1st Melbourne ACC, 23 November 1959. And I did have a very hot lecture to give you today but I took pity on you. No, I think I'll bawl you out anyhow.
Well, I'll give you a lecture here that's a mixture between data and that sort of thing. And the first one that I'm going to take up with you, however, I'm going to have a heart-to-heart talk with you concerning life.
You know, when you were a young boy, you should have had a father and very few of you did, and very few fathers ever do this; and you should have had a mother and very few of you did who would do this: call you in and say, "Son, or daughter, I'm going to acquaint you with the facts of life."
And then they started, of all things, to talk about sex or something of the sort and this had nothing to do with the facts of life. Because the facts of life are very, very plain and very, very simple. And nobody ever told anybody that and so we had to come along with Scientology.
Now, the basic facts of life are these: that life is life, and that's it. And it isn't good and it isn't bad. It's life! And it is very often compartmented off unnecessarily onto a few dynamics.
One, two, three dynamics are all that are left, and the person compartmented way off and backed off, and so forth, well, he's not doing an awful lot of living. And then a person backs off to just one dynamic, not necessarily the first dynamic, backs off to just one dynamic and there's darn little life there. And then this person backs off finally and goes on the "negative dynamics," which is destroy a dynamic.
The first run on this is "create" on dynamics and then this flicks over to "destroy" on dynamics. Now, there are several intermediate inversions between absolute create on the dynamics and absolute destroy. But there are people around who have no first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh but are totally devoted and dedicated to the destruction of God! And you know there are such people. He actually has gone by being able to destroy the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh dynamics. See, they're not even in view. See, they passed by long ago, long ago. He couldn't destroy any of those on a bet. But he can destroy God. Now that's getting down to the absolute, ultimate, bottom rung. A lot of psychos go around doing this.
And finally they realize that they can destroy nothing, anywhere! Now you got a real nut. You got a real nut. No hope for it. The person can destroy nothing anyplace at any time ever. They just spin from there on out. But they are the most destructive people to have around you ever heard of. Everything they touch falls to pieces. They're on automatic destruction.
Now you could say there was a cycle of action, a large graph cycle of action, create-survive-destroy, and the further a person falls back from destroy the more destroy there is on automatic. In other words, destroy is no longer under his judgment. Destroy is something that happens oddly enough, with no responsibility of his, on one or more dynamics. Well, there'd be a cycle of action for each one of these dynamics.
We can graph this out and graph these facts. But it leaves people less self-determined — much less pan-determined — about what they do. And the less judgment a person can exert over his actions, horribly enough, the more destructive he is. Destruction is something that gets more and more and more on automatic — more and more and more. In other words, the less alive a person is, the more destruction will occur in that person's vicinity. Think that over for a moment.
Now a person gets down to "do good, think good, do good, think good. Always do good. Never think anything else but good. Always do good. Always ..." You know. Man, the lightning bolts are just singing around his skull, and the typewriter falls to pieces, and the wheels go off the car, and the kids break their legs and so forth. And he says, "Think good. Think good. Think good. Think good." Total lack of responsibility for anything ever getting destroyed. And the less responsibility a person has for things being destroyed, the more gets destroyed! Because the only people operating in this universe are the people operating in the universe!
That's what the religionist lies to you about. God, to one of these super whirling dervishes, is the person who takes the full responsibility for every-thing relieving everyone else, particularly themselves, of any responsibility for anything.
And that is a sure way to build a criminal society! Now, I'm not down on Christianity. Christianity is a Johnny-come-lately. About a million, two hundred fifty thousand years ago it was a space opera stunt. You trace it back. You can trace back Christ on any — any pc you run across if he's running free on the meter at all, you'll find the first trace of Christ was one million, two hundred and fifty thousand years ago which I consider very amusing! You're liable to find an implant with automatic angels and little devils. Very interesting.
But all that is, at all, is a falling away of responsibility for the creation and destruction of things.
And the further a person falls away from responsibility for destruction, the more good they pride themselves in and the more destructive they are.
I almost jump out of my skin when I receive a letter signed something on the order of, "legally and ethically yours." Oh, man now, we don't know. And some pc who sits there and says, "Well, I've always been honest. And I've always been hon — never stolen anything and I've been honest. And it's been my whole life, has just been dedicated to being honest and never stealing anything, and I'm good and so forth." My next question is, "What bank did you rob?" And the meter will fall off of its pin.
Now, if you know these facts, you get a reality on these facts, you look around and you see these things happen, you're going to find something new. You're going to find something brand-new. That it isn't how good people are or how destructive they are, it's how responsible they are that counts. And that's all that counts.
The early Greek definition of justice was, "Methods by which the weak seek to destroy the strong." A rather cynical definition of justice. But in actual fact justice seldom has any trouble with a strong man. Justice has a great deal of trouble with very, very weak men who are trying to be very, very strong, very destructively. Now, that's a reverse look, you see.
The Sampsons that can push down temples with no reactive compulsion to go push down temples are never the people to worry about in a society. The people that people worry about in the society are normally, however, people who have the strength enough to do something, so therefore they try to cut down everybody's strength. Well, what they're doing is cutting down every-body's control over force. And control over force becomes so unbalanced, at last, that only the weak ever rise to great positions of strength. But it's only apparent strength.
You get Hitlers, Napoleons. Do you know these were very, very little men; very, very small thetans. They were small enough to fit into the total reactive force of a nation on the third dynamic. They were small enough to be the total stimulus-response of such a force. That's an interesting thing to know. Hitler was not a strong man, not even vaguely strong. He couldn't even control his own temper.
Now, you'll occasionally see somebody who's in pretty good shape get angry. Now please, let's not make the same mistake.
A person who is Clear can get angry. A person who is Clear can become angry without being made angry. Got the idea? But he can exhibit anger.
Let's not try to suppose that we're going all the way downhill into the goodness of nirvana and never-never, when we're clearing people. We are not trying to make people good! We're trying to make people responsible! And when we make them responsible, we will find out their actions are good! But if we only try to make them good, as they try to make them in these governments and beat them into line by showing them there are superior forces all around them, all you do is make them irresponsible and they become evil and very destructive. But the destruction happens apparently with no slightest responsibility on their parts. They had nothing to do with it.
I can show you people walking up and down the street that I wouldn't lean — let lean on a corner of the HASI building out here. I'd be scared stiff to let them lean on the corner of the building, I know the whole thing's liable to fall down on their heads. You see that? Coping's liable to come off. Well, this doesn't make them very strong, it makes them totally reactive. But in their vicinity, not through any strength of theirs, you have no control over any existing forces. And having no control you have chaos. They're a vacuum amongst us. Now, the psychiatrist got into psychiatry usually because he was afraid of the terrible strength of these madmen.
I remember walking into a padded cell one day along with a psychiatrist who was showing me around. Oh, they show me around. When I show up they turn out the royal guard these days. They really do! You know, they talk, talk, talk, yak, yak, yak, snicker, snicker, snicker, get the bad notices in the newspaper and so forth, and tell all their patients, "They mustn't possibly have anything to do with it."
And I show up in an institution or something like this and say, "Hello." Or, "How are things going?"
They say, "A-a-h-a-h-a, come in. Now, I have a personal problem I would like to talk to you about and I'm awfully glad you came over."
They think that insanity is strength because it is surrounded by chaos.
Now the world did not begin in chaos, it began in order and then somebody kicked it in the teeth. Now, wherever you have a person of that character, all of the forces which are, are out of control and there's nobody controlling them, and then you stand back foolishly and expect these people to control their zone of action. To control their environment. And because everybody is standing back waiting for them to do something and nobody controls that zone of environment at all, it all goes into chaos because there's nobody con-trolling anything in that zone! Do you understand that?
Audience: Yes.
All right. You watch this — this wife that's having a hard time in her family and everything seems to be chaotic. Or this husband that's having a hard time in his family and everything seems to be chaotic. Everybody, including the society at large and the law and everybody else, kind of expects one or the other of them to have a zone of control. Well, that zone of control isn't there and where a zone of control does not exist you have chaos! There isn't either — it's just that! You don't have nothing. Because you are surrounded totally by natural forces of one kind or another; natural because they're put there by us. All right.
These forces being held there are held there because we hold them there! And all of a sudden we've got Joe and he's supposed to do his share of holding them there, or Bill or Peter or Zack, and he's supposed to hold the walls up and he doesn't hold them up! And of course they fall down!
This is force, this is power? Well, this is the kind of force and power that people think exists in insanity. And it doesn't exist at all.
The psychiatrist took me into this padded cell and he said, "Be careful of this man," he says, "we've got him there in a straitjacket."
And I said, "Well, the poor fellow. Look, you've got him tied up in a straitjacket."
I turned him around and unstrapped the straitjacket, you know, to see if — how he was getting along all right. And the psychiatrist backed right on out the door.
I took the fellow's straitjacket off and handed it to him, and so forth. And I said, "Flex your arms. You must be pretty tired, huh?
"Ahhh," he says, "ahhhh."
And I said, "That's right. Flex them. Flex them."
And, "How are you making out?"
"Ahhhh. Ahhhh."
And I says, "Well, sit down there. Take a breather." Threw the strait-jacket out into the hall and so on. And I says, "Why haven't you got this place straightened out?" and walked out and shut the cell door and so forth.
The psychiatrist's "sssss" going just like that. He says, "My God. You take your life in your hands. He kills people."
And I said, "Look. If nobody has any control over him and he has no control over himself, of course he kills people. What elst would we have there? Would there be anything or anybody else present at all?"
It was too much for the psychiatrist. It was frankly too much for him. He went into a total comm lag and turned me over to the chief nurse and went back to his office. When I left about two and a half hours later he was sitting at his desk, he wasn't even thinking.
Now, these zones of apparent terrific forces, and so forth — simply where the forces that exist in life — are in a zone of no control and they'll always be chaotic.
If you think there's a paving brick where there is no paving brick, sooner or later you're going to fall in it. If you think there's a step halfway up a flight of steps and there's no step there, you're going to stumble. Is that right?
Audience: Yes.
Now, where you look at life, you find control of existing environment, forces, people, dynamics, self, so forth, or you don't find any! And where you don't find any you're going to get destruction! Because those forces that exist are suddenly operating unguided and that's destruction. Destruction, by and large, that you see in a social order such as this does not come about from some powerful thetan coming along and bopping out the street light. It comes from the man who repairs street lights here spinning one morning, "because I didn't feel too well." So, he's spinning and so forth and throws the wrong switch and it blows up the street light. Got the idea? It's a different look if you take it.
Now, where a person has been forced to have no control, where he has been forced by various opinions, fears, upsets, punishments, aberrated ideas, preachments, moral codes and God knows what else, to withhold or withdraw from his proper sphere of action, you have trouble. But the trouble is the withdrawal, not the public opinion. And the more he withdraws from his natural sphere or proper zone of action, the more chaos is in it, so the more destruction occurs. It's as simple as that.
Now, every thetan to some degree is working on an assist to make some-body else withdraw. They're supposed to withdraw to their proper perimeter, whatever that is. When every — everybody decides that other people should have some sort of a zone of action and shouldn't exceed it and they try exceeding that zone of action, why, they have a tendency to slap them back a little bit, you know.
You got a friend and you come home one night and the friend is sitting in your favorite chair eating your bonbons, and that's just going a little bit too far, and you say, "You'd better replace the bonbons or go out and buy me some bonbons. And that's my chair." Well, he says, "Well that's fine." If he's sensible, however, he wouldn't have been sitting there eating the bonbons. He would have recognized your sphere of action. Got the idea?
But there is a lot of natural knock-back with which we could not live practically. See, there's a lot of this natural knock-back, you see. Drivers driving on the right side of the road and the left side of the road and so forth, and they want the other driver to drive on the right or the left side of the road, the proper side, and they snarl a little bit, you know.
Some fellow's got his headlights on full glaring, you know, and the next guy will blink his lights down two or three times to make him put his lights down. There's — there's quite a bit of co-discipline which is not reactive discipline at all. It is the discipline subject to social co-existence and there's a lot of it and it's not bad.
You get some super virile pioneer society sometimes; they take delight in forgetting all about manners or forgetting about this or forgetting about that, you know. Letting it all go by the boards, you see, because they say, "Well, that's not necessary."
Well, the actual fact of it is, they're not really letting things go by the boards, they're so spread out that they don't particularly care if somebody else does inhabit more of a sphere, you see. And as soon as it starts to smooth out and as soon as people have various spheres of action and operation and control pointed out, why, they start enforcing manners on one another. And it's kind of mutually agreed upon codes of conduct. "I live in my house. You live in your house." You know, that sort of thing. None of which is reactive.
But if a person is made to withdraw beyond that, he is made to abandon the sphere of action he should be controlling or commanding. He begins to believe that there are certain things he has done, or might do, or would do, that are bad enough so that he had just better withhold from any zone of action having anything to do with these things. That's what he begins to believe.
And the more he withholds beyond that point, the more he destroys. What he does not control, unfortunately in the life we live, controls him. You back further out of your sphere of existence than you should and your sphere of existence controls you more than it should. A person who cannot destroy anything can be destroyed utterly.
Now, the person who has the ability to destroy, doesn't, oddly enough. The person who has no responsibility for destruction, who does; they really start chopping up everything. No responsibility for destruction and you'll find destruction is going on total automatic with the person to such a degree, this person — all this person has to do is put his key in the door and the back door blows off. He doesn't even have to think about the furnace. He thinks about the roof and the furnace blows up! It just isn't holding together, that's all — in his vicinity. He's your 10 percent on the highway that account for 90 percent of the accidents. He's your very aberrated person.
You've all heard of the word "hypocrisy." And hypocrisy works like this: a fellow censures everything his fellows do on the second dynamic, and then does everything he censures on the second dynamic. You got it?
Well, when you're looking at somebody's going around screaming saying, "It's a terrible thing, but nobody should touch a young girl! A young girl should be innocent, and should remain pure, and should know nothing whatsoever about the second dynamic."
And somebody's really insisting on this. Really pounding the table, pounding the pulpit, kicking the doors in about this subject. Man, about the first door he starts kicking in on this subject, I start thinking, "Son, what little girl did you rape!" Get the idea?
Audience: Yes.
They can get so twisted, they can get so twisted that they will only dramatize their own withholds! And that's what we call hypocrisy. And unfortunately all their advices on these withholds are destructive! They have no constructive advices on these withholds, they're all destructive. They have no real control over that zone and so they are very destructive. They have backed off the control. In such a case as this, this person has backed off any association with, or communication with young girls. So, on the subject of young girls he's on total automatic. He has no determinism over what he does on the subject of young girls. Nothing whatsoever. It's impossible for him to determine any action, he or anybody else makes, on the subject of young girls.
Now he becomes terrified of this so he tries to stop it in everybody else! Hoping, perhaps, they'd stop it in him. Hoping perhaps a guy like me will come along someday and say, "Son, who did you rape?"
And the guy says, "Ohhhhh. Well. All right if you must know. Such and such, and so-and-so, and name, rank and serial number and convent." And you've got an interesting phenomenon going on down in Australia at this moment, it's very interesting. You have a church which is hand-in-glove with the communist party. Now, how the dickens did these two outfits get hand-in-glove? I realize that early Christianity was basically communal but I didn't think they'd go that far. And you have the religious publications of the country printing the same press as the commie publications. I think this is fascinating, very fascinating. Unless both of them have something to hide which they hide mutually. I wouldn't say that they were in cahoots about any-thing, I think they just drifted together one way or the other.
This particular church organization, which is in Australia, by the way, is I — as far as I can find out is a separate organization from the one that we normally associate with those names, titles and symbols through the rest of the world. It's something worth looking into. But I wasn't even interested in looking into it until a couple of these hell-roaring, "You must not sins" were spotted by me not twelve, fourteen hours ago in a very hot cabaret. And I said, "Well, oh, ye hypocrites." Because these were the boys that were telling you, "You mustn't go around and hit the hot spots, see, and you mustn't do this and you mustn't do that." And there they were hitting the hot spots.
Now, there is simply, no more, no less, than these people have taken less and less responsibility for the actual community and dramatize more and more irresponsibility, censure, so forth. They're going to make it all good, are they? Well, how are they going to make anything good that they can't control! Now you please tell me that.
Most road safety groups throughout the world breed more accidents than they prevent. They don't take responsibility for automobile accidents! They don't at all, where they're unsuccessful. It'd only be where they're very successful that they would have taken responsibility for accidents but they really don't take responsibility for accidents. They advertise them and that's about it. They advertise, "You too can have an accident."
You know where they — in states where they put up little white crosses alongside of a road, and they put these little white crosses up to show where a person has been killed, if they put up two they'll get three; if they've got three, they'll get four; and if they've got four, they'll get five at that exact place! Ah, but nobody was ever killed there be — it's been — road's been there for years but nobody was killed there until the first accident. Years went by, nobody was killed at that particular curve or straight spot or something of the sort, but a first accident occurred. After that, that's the place to die.
The thing that gets totally reactive in a society such as we have is destruction because nobody will take any responsibility for it. You tear down a building on the sly and the next thing you know you're talking to the bulls — pardon me, the coppers. And the coppers say to you, "Did you tear down that building?" Well, you know you'd better not say that you had tore down the building, you see. The thing for you to do is to say, "No, I didn't tear down the building." Otherwise they'll put your body in the clink.
And oddly enough they are creating zones of irresponsibility and they are more responsible for the creation of the destruction and crime in the society than they prevent.
I was an officer in the Los Angeles police at one time, a special officer; just to study this one fact. And as far as I could tell Los Angeles wouldn't have had a hundredth the crime if they had had no police. Now, that sounds real funny but it's true.
These fellows would go around and find mild offenders that weren't doing much and tyrannize them and beat them! And drive them into some antisocial sphere of some kind or another and assist their withholds, you see. Drive them out of a zone of responsibility and leave a real criminal where-they only had a mild misdemeanor before.
And I watched this time and time again. They had no concept of rehabilitation of the man! All they could do was put him in a cell where he could be further withdrawn from the society than before. This was quite a mechanism. And the numbers of crimes have gone up accordingly in the United States.
It's almost as much as you're worth to hire an extra hundred police! Mm-hm. You'll get your crime rate going up. Now, your police would have to be an entirely different character than they used to have down in Los Angeles. He would have to be a fellow who kept order and who assisted the keeping of order in various zones. That would be a policeman who was doing a job of policing. He wouldn't be somebody who was driving off and never really quite doing anything.
By the way, .1 can tell you from long, long, long, long experience with police work that there are only two methods of police work that are successful. One is absolute, outright violence. You never do detective work. Detective work, you skip that. You just have enough coppers scattered around that when a crime is committed, the criminal is caught with the loot in his hand, is hung up on the nearest telegraph pole, that's it — bang! Any crime of violence that occurs in the society meets with instant and immediate execution.
It sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Well, it cuts down the criminal population until they pick up more bodies. But it does do this: it sets up examples at every side and it demonstrates immediate, thorough meaningfulness of law. Now, that's a bad one but it's a short stop sort of an action. That'd be better, probably, in a bad society than no police at all.
Or the other one is, you take the guy and you rehabilitate him! Recognizing what he is — that he's a real sick hombre. And there's nothing in between those two points, not a thing. There's no way-stop.
You grab the criminal by the nape of the neck and you give him instant and immediate rehabilitation, holding him out of the society while you rehabilitate him. That's it. That works. But who the devil could do that till we came along? Nobody could do that. So it's asking too much of man and that just left violence.
If you're going to have police work at all, then it had to be expressed totally in violence and it had to be on the spot and you didn't have courts that dragged on for a year or two, and you didn't have this, and you didn't have that. And detectives that would come around sniffing at your heels all the time, and so forth — all this namby-pamby middle ground sort of action. Man's a criminal, you hang him. Bang! Criminal population drops awfully rapidly. They emigrate. They take it on the lam.
That'd be about the only kind of police you could have. You couldn't have police who stand around nicely, as far as the public is concerned, and beat criminals up for not doing anything and tyrannize and monkey around and fool around and pick up a guy because he's standing on a street corner, take him down to the station house for interrogation and then finally bring him back four or five hours later to the street corner, you know, and you and yah-yah.
This is police work? Oh, no, no, no, no. The cop isn't really taking any course which is consistent with the requirements of public safety. And that's what police work is. You just say, "Well, police work, if it's effective, is consistent with the requirements of public safety." And you don't go around — you don't go around policing whether or not somebody paid their sales tax in the chemists or something, you know, I mean, big crimes these guys tackle.
The less responsibility police take for their zone, the city, of law and order, the more crime occurs. The less responsibility, the more crime occurs. Because all they are there as is an antagonistic point. They're something who keeps people antagonized, keeps people withheld, keeps people withdrawn, nobody can ever open up, nobody ever can reach out and take any authority over their zones of action, you see, "because somebody might find out." And you get a machine-made society after a while which is — actually goes into real chaos.
And life is life! And that's all it is! And so help me Pete, you'd better realize it. Now, I'm talking to you. Straight at you. The pc who is sitting in that chair is not bad or good. He is responsible or irresponsible. And he's irresponsible to the degree that he is withholding madly on his various areas and zones of responsibility.
And if you set yourself up as some kind of a justiciary, adjudicating along the lines of some ancient moral code as to what you should look for or shouldn't look for, what you should feel tsk-tsk-tsk about, and so forth; as an auditor you're going to fail because you will only be looking for what you consider a breach of moral codes or what you can tolerate to look at.
Now, the reason people get into the state they get into on withdrawals and so forth is there's something they can't confront, and the degree they can't confront brings about a degree of automatic destruction. Those things they cannot confront start running on automatic.
Moral codes are brought about as a single statement:
"Thou shalt not kill."
"Thou shalt not confront death."
"Thou shalt not steal."
"Thou shalt not confront goods which are procured in an irregular fashion."
"Thou shalt not commit adultery."
A very interesting point to you, by the way, because most marriages go up in smoke because people cannot confront a couple. And if you want to solve a marriage, get somebody up to a point where he can confront couples and you'll find a marriage will go — very simple. It's a one-shot panacea and a very important technical point.
But where a person cannot confront a couple, he's always obsessively being snapped into being a couple in adultery or some such way or getting married to the wrong girl or the wrong guy. You see this? That which they cannot or will not confront — wind up with those things into which they get interiorized!
Ah, then, then, wouldn't it be true that the postulates which were made by people, the postulates which were made by people to the effect that they could not or would not confront such and such an act in somebody else, or somebody else doing such and such a thing; now, did they not open up the gate on themselves to become sinners? Isn't that true?
They said, "I won't confront this!" Therefore, they said, "I won't communicate with this." Therefore, they said, "I'm not going to control this zone and area." Ah-ha!
And what do you think you're doing as an auditor when you suddenly miss some terrific overt on the part of the pc and fail to get this pc sorted out and the tone arm down where it belongs? What are you doing but refusing to confront! Crime, sin. And of course what is crime and sin but refusing to confront.
And you're going to go ahead and Q-and-A with this?
If you stayed in that state of mind and if I got a sixpence for every one you missed, I could make a mighty — mighty nice dam down here in the Yarra River. If you stay in that frame of mind.
That there are certain things which you will not tolerate, that you will not confront, that you will not look at; you in sitting in front of a preclear are going to refuse to look for them in the pc! And if you're going to refuse to look for them in the pc, you're going to miss every single overt that comes up to your notice that is on your buttons!
So, you better get rid of those buttons. I'd be ashamed if there was one student left here who hadn't been shaken down on overts. But if there is one, it's because the student has an overt which he's withholding that the auditor has totally agreed is a "he won't confront it."
The auditor says, "I'm not going to confront adultery. I just will not con-front adultery. After all, for seventeen hundred and ninety-five years I was a monk and I — here I am still with a tail. And therefore, I'm not going to con-front adultery!" So, the subject of adultery sort of comes up in this session, you know, and the auditor goes, "Tsk-tsk-tsk. Well, let's get onto something more interesting now. Have you ever punished any dogs?"
You got this? This is a total dive! This is a — an avoid!
Now, look, life is life! Life is. It is what it is! It can be a lot of phony morals, it can be a lot of phony immoralities. Where it slips is where it slips from an optimum solution: the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics. That's where life slips. Nonoptimum conduct. But you start looking at a much broader definition of optimum conduct such as the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics and you're going to get yourself into a fantastically different view on moral codes and what you shouldn't confront! You'll have an entirely different idea of it. That's why moral codes could be so slippery and change from continent to continent and city to city, all over the world.
There isn't anything on Earth, a sin in one district that cannot be found somewhere else on Earth to be a virtue. And that sounds pretty wild, and I am quoting, I think, Frazer. But where the thing is figured out on an optimum solution, whereby it's adjudicated on an optimum solution — the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics — you have a fairly reliable yardstick of conduct. But this should not prevent you from confronting departures from it.
And it certainly means that as an auditor, you'd better be in a frame of mind that you are capable of confronting any kind of sin. Otherwise, I'll let you in on something, one of these days you'll find yourself — flip! And you'll say, "Well, I don't know what got into me — fellow was standing there and I shot him. Hm! Wonder why?"
It's because you can't confront a shot man, of course. You can't confront shooting a man. And if you can't confront shooting a man to such a degree, it becomes a terrible compulsion to shoot a man.
Now, naturally, if you're very young, or very old, or in some beingness that doesn't normally command or control firearms or weapons of one kind or another, it's fairly easy to avoid shooting a man. One fine day you'll find yourself standing there with a smoking pistol in your hands and somebody's dead.
And you'd say just exactly what they all say to the police! Is, "I don't know what happened! I don't know why I did it." Only you'd be lying in your teeth. If you did something like that, you did it because you never were able to confront it. That's crime.
Crime is the unconfronted circumstances which result in violence and destruction on the dynamics. And that's crime.
Now your zones of responsibility — I'm not saying you're all festered up with tremendous oppressions and impulses that are someday going to over-master you, because you're going to get Clear.
I am saying very definitely that you can lay a terrible Kiwi egg with this one. Fantastic, you can lay a big one. And that's just this way: you can say, "Well, let's see, what crimes are they that the preclear could have committed? What withholds could there be? Well, let's see, the one I can confront is stealing toothpicks from restaurants. Let's see if he stole any toothpicks from restaurants? Ah! All right."
"Did you steal any toothpicks from restaurants?"
Needle doesn't wiggle. You could say, "I haven't — haven't a clue why the tone arm won't come down! Because all the crime that I can confront has already been exhausted on the pc." You see how that would be?
Audience: Yes.
Now, of course, we have some hardened old sinners amongst us who have done it all and been through it all, and that sort of thing, but they'll still find a few things they can't confront. And those are the exact ones they'll miss on the pc. It'll just never occur to them to run them.
Those aberrations that can react on the person are really out of sight. Man they are out of sight! They are not-ised to nowhere! And if they're that out of sight with the pc, you see, the pc doesn't know either, half the time, most of the time, he don't know what's bothering him — usually tells you the wrong thing.
As a matter of fact Scientologists have gotten this one down so well, that they all — suddenly find some Scientologist who has had something halfway run out, he knows that's what's wrong with him, and he says, "That is what's wrong with me and it was half run out."
And the fellow says, "Well, it can't be what's wrong with him because he knows about it!" Well, sure he knows about it, it's half run out.
But like Dick's bullfighter,* "Bullfighters? Take bullfighters? Leave them alone. Take bulls, leave them alone. What's a bull? What's a bull? Muuuh! Get this scratchy spot in the middle of my back here where the banderilla stick in. What's a banderilla? Wonder what this scratchy spot is."
No, he didn't know anything about bullfighters!
And as far as sin is concerned, as far as sin is concerned, the horrible truth of the matter is there isn't one in the book each and every one of you hasn't committed a thousand times!
When you ask a pc, "You stolen any toothpicks in a restaurant?" you've got your nerve saying you've exhausted your basic knowledge of sin!
And some other of you have got the idea that all sins exist on the second. Sin is something that happens on the second. Well, I'll guarantee you that people who believe exclusively that all sin is on the second don't give a damn how much havoc they commit on the third. Ever think about it from that standpoint?
Audience: No.
Very funny. Very funny, it's quite remarkable. But the thing the pc is obsessively withholding hardest, he kind of knows about and it would blow into view if he were asked about it but he has to be asked. It has to be looked over.
And if you as the auditor can't confront it, and if you as the auditor have omitted it from your roster and curricula of confrontable items, you're not going to find it in the pc. You're just not going to find it. You're just not going to get the tone arm down, that's all.
So, I'm not asking you to be wise particularly. I'm not asking you to be smart. I'm not asking you to do anything in the world but be just a little less pretending. Don't pretend so hard that you don't know all the crimes in the book because you do, you do. And you know all the good things in the book, too. And we're not specializing in the crimes of the book in auditing, we're trying to rehabilitate the responsibility for the control of the environment in the individual. We're trying to raise his ability, himself, to confront actions and reactions across the boards. And if we do that, we've got it made. Wonderful state of affairs if we can do that.
But I'm telling you that as many as you forcefully, willfully occlude; as many halos as you polish up and put on your head and say you've never done anything like that, so how could you know anything like that — don't give me that. Don't give me that. You might have them right — have them right on the tip of your tongue.
The pc is not under your trial. The pc is under your confidence. It is not up to you to knock his anchor points back and make him withhold harder. No, it's up to you to pull them out so that he himself doesn't do these things.
It's a horrible thing — it's a horrible thing to realize that most downward spirals start with the most wonderful intentions you ever heard of.
One night I stood alongside of a murderer. I was fortunately hanging around the police station. And they brought in the body of this woman and he was just standing there. The cop said to him, "Well, how did it all start?"
And the guy thought about it for a moment and he said, "Well," he said, "years and years ago," he said, "I tried to make her happy and I guess I never managed it."
His intentions were just going astray, going astray and pretty soon that much failure wound this woman up in a total automaticity which sprung in some old automaticity and one day, bang, she was dead. And he didn't know how it happened other than that. But that was his single explanation.
It's rather remarkable that it's the failure to understand the other fellow which got us all in any mess we're in right now. The failure to understand the other fellow. To really understand what he was all about. Or to have a wider, tolerant view of what he was all about or to understand what he was getting at or what he was composed of.
Now, it was that failure all by itself which wound anybody up on the line. Because if you'd understood what he was all about, you wouldn't have misestimated here and there to that degree and made yourself stack up a lot of overts and so on.
Now, I'm going to tell you later on what the primary withhold is today. Right now we're not so much interested in that.
What we are very interested in, very interested in is for you to broaden your view and your judgment of life. To broaden your tolerance and to broaden the number of things which occur in life that you can confront.
And when some pc gives you a confidence or says he has transgressed, for you to be effective not punitive. Because, just remember what I tell you, you might not be remembering it right now but somewhere back on that seventy-six trillion years, you've done it, whatever he said, you've done it.
Now, if I don't think I'm Christ, you've got no business thinking you are either.
This is basically all this amounts to.
Life is! And all we're trying to do is ask you to confront what is. And if
you look at what is and bring into existence what is, you will have a lot more is than you've ever had before, both in your preclear and yourself. Thank you.