[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

This is the seventeenth lecture of the 16th ACC, January the 25th, 1957, by popular rumor. I want to talk to you some more about techniques. Techniques. Techniques. Techniques.

The only reason I'm talking to you about techniques is to straighten techniques out with you. It's not that you don't know techniques. You know them by the carload lot. Let's line them up, huh? Let's line them up. Instead of knowing this little technique and that little technique and something else and a dab and a brush and so forth, why, let's line them up.

Now, all right. The only wildcat technique that I haven't totally explained to my satisfaction, or a prediction on what it does to cases, is a strange technique called „This means go to _______“ put into the walls. „This means go to _______. This means don't go to _______. This means stay in _______. Don't stay in _______.“ These in sequence, six times around each one, put into the walls, cures a terror stomach. And I know nothing else that cures a terror stomach. So it's evidently a technique which sits very well and fits very well with the GE stomach. And I have seen it run on almost any level of case, almost any level of case.

I will tell you how that is run because you will often encounter these terror stomachs. They are particularly prevalent amongst criminals. Yes, that's an occupational disease amongst criminals — terror stomach.

You have the preclear sit down in the room, and point out the fact to him that there are six sides to this room: four walls and a ceiling and a floor. And then you have him put into the six walls, all the way around, very neatly and nicely, each time, regardless of his ability to do so, the statement „This means go to _______,“ and he furnishes the place. „This means go to _______.“ And then you point to another wall and say, „All right, have that one say 'This means go to _______,’ and you furnish the name,“ which is the auditing command — „'This means go to _______,' and you furnish the place“ („You furnish the name“/“You furnish the place“) all the way around the six times.

And then you go on to „This means don't go to _______.“ And then you go the six times around, and he furnishes the place in each case. Now we go back to the first one, „This means go to _______,“ six times around, then the second one six times around — „This means don't go to _______.“

Well, when we have that pair rather flat and he's doing all right on them... It takes a long time to flatten them on a rather low- level case with a real terror stomach in agitation at that time....

These terror stomachs, by the way, are pretty bad. I mean, it's a sort of a thing that if there was any way to die at all, no matter how painful it was, it would be desirable to terror stomach — having a terror stomach. I mean, anything a fellow could think of would be more desirable than a terror stomach. It's probably the cause of a great many suicides.

When we have that pair flat, we then change the auditing command to „This means stay in _______,“ and that goes six times around. Now, you say to the preclear, „Now, see that wall? Well, put 'This means stay in _______' (you furnish the place) in that wall.“ And that goes the six times around and then „This means don't stay in _______.“ Now, you can simply put „Stay in _______“ or „Don't stay in _______“ or „This means stay in _______“ or „This means don't stay in _______,“ but you mean „This means go to _______; This means don't go to _______.“ That is part of the auditing command. I'm just reviewing this — the number of times I run it.

And the safest way to play it is to play it: „This means go to _______“ and „This means don't go to _______.“ That's a good, safe, broad way.

Now, that is a terrifically tested process. That's cleared up any terror stomach to which it's been addressed. And no other process of any kind, including Havingness, have [has] affected these stomachs.

That's because a person is in a confusion of indecision about placement — confusion of indecision. He doesn't know whether to go or come. He's been driven out and driven out of the game and knocked out of the game so often, he doesn't know where to go or what to do, where to stay or anything else. And all this does is just sort of boil down all of these confusions. It as-ises them quite markedly because walls and signposts and other things in the physical universe always tell him where to go — where he is (much more important).

A technique that has never been run is „Have this wall say this is _______,“ and he furnishes the place, you know? But never been run, never been tested. It's just one of these things that you possibly could run. Good probability.

The confusion of going and coming, and here and there, and he doesn't know, and he can't be anyplace, and he must be every place else, and so on, all gets into a wonderful, drastic snarl. And that evidently is the terror stomach. It is a bundle of these cross-counter commands. It means „get out,“ but there's no place to get out to.

Now, I tell you that quite notably, because as time goes on and as radiation gets worse, and the government gets, if anything, more stupid concerning its propaganda methodology — which is already sufficiently bad to cause anybody studying it to wonder whether or not they didn't have to search through asylum after asylum to find a sufficiently idiotic illiterate in order to execute that literature. I mean, it's that bad. It's got cartoons — page after page of cartoons — of silly-looking people being upset or something about radiation. And it tells you all the way through there this can kill you, and so forth; but these are cartoons, and it's evidently a hilarious fact to them. It's the glee of insanity if I've ever heard of it. And this is the official government pamphlet. I just inspected it yesterday.

The government, from the beginning, has gone out on a program of convincing the public that it is going to hurt them and means to! It has started this very early when it first set up typical American homes and families under an A-bomb blast in Nevada some years ago. Do you remember that? Well, from that point forward they are playing a viciously threatening game with the populace at large.

Now, the populace is going to go two ways about it: One of those ways is revolt, pure and simple. Sooner or later they will revolt. Somebody in this government is absolutely certain that the best thing you could possibly do for a population is to bring it up to a state of civil commotion and riot, as witness the forced, ill-conceived, stupid methods that they have used so far in their segregation and antisegregation.

For instance, there wasn't any reason for any of this, any of this at all. There is no argument about the quality of schooling or the rights to go to school of children. There's no arguing about this. But there are certain things that had to be settled and established first — some decent way of going about it.

But they didn't go about it this way. They ran out the machine guns. And the way they're doing it, they're going to get an awful lot of good colored people killed before they're through. And they're going to get an awful lot of good white people killed before they're through, because they're causing an antagonism they need never have caused!

A simple educational campaign would easily have overridden a great deal of the prejudice which they were trying to overcome. But they never took that route. That route was so wide open that they avoided it exclusively. And they attempted, evidently, to create civil commotion and riot.

The colored people of the South are not well defended. They are rather defenseless people, because law has already argued them out of franchise in various ways. And now to turn loose this amount of hatred and prejudice against them is one of the dirtier tricks that anybody would pull.

Why did the government do this? It is in an obsessive, unknowing games condition, and it is not consciously acting at all. Got that? It isn't consciously acting. It's acting on an unknowing basis.

Now, to whip open, wide open, a racial issue at this time does not only show bad taste, it shows a complete lack of comprehension that it took a lot of doing to open up a racial issue in these advanced and rather enlightened times. The amount of toleration and tolerance which had been achieved along these lines was progressing. And it needed help, this progress, but nobody helped it. Nobody helped it out. They just ripped the whole subject open, and we had machine — gun jeeps running around Clinton, Kentucky, and a disgraceful scene of affairs, martial law declared in various places and so on. Quite interesting. Quite interesting.

The only reason I'm telling about that is not interest or even my interest in segregation or antisegregation. By the way, there are quite a few very, very fine colored auditors in the South already. And such organizations make progress in this direction, and such activities tend to cancel that progress.

Well, in that violence always seems to be able to cancel out much more rapidly — it's the fast thing to do — those slower progressive actions which other people take, we ourselves have a perfect right to be rather antagonistic concerning this.

But, if the government's gone off on this kick, if it's an unknowing games condition, there's a certain segment of the populace will revolt in the face of radiation, and a certain segment of the populace will become stricken with terror beyond an ability to act, and not because they have been even vaguely touched or. affected beyond the usual by radiation. See, they're not really sick; they're merely terrified. Why? Because of propaganda. Somebody sooner or later is going to start cutting loose on nationwide TV programs, trying to scare everybody stiff. Their pamphlet says, „You can't hear it. You can't see it. You can't feel it. You don't know it's there. You don't know what it is. You can't sense it in any way.“

Who can't? I can! I should hope most any of you, when you are in fairly good condition, would be able to look across a room and find some particles. If you can't see air particles and particles of one kind or another, you ought to quit! — when you're exteriorized. It'd merely be the fact that you didn't care to be aware of them, and so they have just mushed out. Do you get the idea?

But here's bold, blunt statements driven home (with very out-of- taste cartoons) that you can't see, feel or hear this stuff. All right, if that is the popular booklet that is being issued, the pamphlet that is being issued on every hand — „You can't see it. You can't feel it. You can't...“ These are the engramic phrases behind the whole effect of radiation.

It is only because a person is afraid of it that he's afraid of it, if you get the idea. And now they tell them they can't confront it in any way. And they are advertising the fact that it cannot be confronted! As a result they will make people sick of radiation, which sickness will take place in the almost total absence of radiation. All they will do is restimulate them. You see?

Now, whoever is doing this, we don't care. We really don't care. We have a very large number of people. The aggregate thought of these people has formed up into an unconscious games condition, and this is now being exerted. It actually isn't an individualized state of affairs.

We could counter it, however, by always pointing out that it's an individual state of affairs. A government is composed of a number of individuals. As soon as you know that, the government falls apart. You could point such things out as that.

But the truth of the matter is that these opinions have a tendency to grow just like Topsy. And these actions then multiply because of the avidity for this particular government and country to follow a precedent. Law and justice always love to follow precedents, which is only a confession that the fellow who did some thinking last year is smarter than you are. That's not true at all. You see?

In command of more MEST and authority and knowledge and with better communication lines, and that sort of thing, you know more this year than you did last year. But precedent says that you knew more last year than you do this year. It says, „The Dred Scott case will be used at all times as the basis of our future decisions.“ Oh, now. That doesn't seem reasonable, does it? Because that case occurred at an earlier time. Much more enlightened decisions could undoubtedly be rendered.

Now, we get this concatenation of precedent. Therefore, we've got a precedent coming forward now at this time that the public is to be knocked about on the subject of radiation, and it's multiplying.

Now, what's going to happen here? You're going to need a technique that you can run on a group that will knock out terror. Now, they will not be in a frantic state of terror; they will merely be in a terror-stomach sort of thing. You see? They won't really know what's wrong with their stomachs; they just feel terrible, as though something awful is going to happen. You see? They'll still sit still; they'll be audited if they cannot be completely shaken up. Hmm? They could still be audited. You're not looking at riots, you see, you're just looking at terror.

Now, how you audit a bunch of revolutionaries with guns in their hands, no longer differentiating law from order: that is again not a subject of guns, and is indeed possibly a subject of Scientology. It hasn't been one that we've studied any.

We have studied this other one. And you can audit this on a group, so it becomes a rather isolated and interesting technique. Just why it works, I would not bother to take apart. I just tell you that it works.

Now, I know a parallel technique which showed up just recently which seems to explain the workability of this technique. But remember, it simply exists now as a technique, and with great probability, is better than the one I just gave you. And we understand more about it, and so forth, but this other one, „This means go to _______,“ has been tested across the boards. It evidently doesn't chew up havingness. It evidently doesn't stick people on tracks. Almost any level of case can do it. And it's apparently quite a technique.

Now, it very well may be that this technique simply orients a person in his vicinity and environment, merely orients him, merely puts him there. But this technique does work.

Now, why it works is less important than the fact that it does work. It was conceived, oddly enough, before any theory about placement came into existence — before any real theory about this came into existence. Now, since that time, not really because it came into existence at all — it's an isolated pill, you see; it's sitting all by itself — there's another technique over here which we can fit in rather easily as the end product of a locational process which apparently has a lot of explanation to this other. But I don't know that this new technique would interest a group long enough, or would run well enough on a group or would reach low enough on the scale to actually knock out terror. So I'm giving you a little bit of riches. See, this technique: it can be run on a group, it can be run on an individual, and it is a specific: it does clear up a terror stomach. Years to come, you'll need it. So don't just stash it somewhere in your notes; know this technique. Know this technique.

Somebody someday is going to show up, and he says, „I'm fine.“ And he's kind of nervous and so on, and he's fine, and you just ask him, and so on. And he says, „Well, of course, I always get this feeling in the pit of my stomach.“

„Well, what feeling in the pit of your stomach?“

He's maybe liable to describe it in a dozen different ways: It isn't a nausea, but it almost is. It isn't a bursting, but it almost is. It's just horribly sensational. It sort of carries with it (and you might even have to suggest this to him before he'd really cognite on it) that something is going to happen. It's the most painful condition that a preclear can get into without being physically ill. And that condition is, then, definitely the business of an auditor, because he can't get a fellow to sit still unless he can do something about the condition.

Now, I've tried many other techniques on this; almost anything we have has been tested on this except this other one I'm going to tell you about. And nothing has worked except just that technique run just that way, and no alterations of it seem to function either. It's right there on center.

This was, you might call, intuition on my part. I picked it out of the air one day when I was running somebody with a terror stomach. And I just thought, „Well, this person doesn't know whether to go or come, you know. Let's put it into a dramatized form in a process so that he says he knows where to go or come or how.“ So that's very valuable. That's very valuable. Don't lose that one, because it actually doesn't stand along any scale of processes. It's simply itself

All right. Now, there's another technique which seems to explain this. But it explains so many more things, and it has been so poorly tested that it has not been run on any terror stomachs. We don't know whether it'd do anything to terror stomachs or not. But it is more of an intellectual technique. It's a terrific amount of explanation all in itself. And it's a cousin to this other technique, or is its monitor, or is the thing which stands above the other technique. We don't care. It is itself too.

And that is „no place to light.“ Now, a no-place-to-light case doesn't have a terror stomach necessarily, or he might have. That's not the point. The point is that he can do nothing thoroughly and can complete nothing, because he couldn't possibly sit still long enough or apply himself long enough without interruption to complete any given action, and so his pattern of life is a lick and a promise. He skips. He skips; doesn't walk. You get the idea? He's above it.

Now, we see this manifestation all the time in business and in life. An individual works for a few minutes and can't get the top off of a can and blows up. Working fast, you know? And if working at that rather hectic speed doesn't accomplish the action, it can't be accomplished. You got the idea?

So we have somebody come in and offer us a plan. And the plan is well thought out in all departments except half of them. It's apparently well thought out. But it isn't thorough, see? Nobody considered all angles. It skips, you know? And somebody else has to go over this thing or it's put into practice. And man, the holes that are discovered in this organizational plan!

Now, how'd the holes get there? It's because nobody could sit down and actually spend the time necessary in order to conceive all these points and assemble them, so they skip.

The workman who should put a bracket up with screws, but doesn't put it up with screws — you'd have to bore a hole, you see; you'd have a little more work involved — he takes a flat-headed nail and puts it up with a flat-headed nail. And of course, in a couple of days it pulls out. He doesn't put it in with a screw. It'd take a little too much time, see? He can't linger on the job that long.

And this is the heart and soul of it. It isn't an inability to work, which is what we've thought it was. It's an inability to be in a place long enough to do it.

He knows that life will not permit him to remain long enough to accomplish the task well. So he's all ready to cut and run; does it, with a rather desperate show of daring. See, it's a little bit of a desperation. He does it and he's saying, „Now look, I actually did stand still here a minute and a half pounding this nail in, see?“ He goes off and he has to have a smoke then. That's just too brave, see? Got the idea? He does something, he considers himself terribly brave.

He actually sits down, and he looks at this plan. And just about the time he starts to look over the plan, he realizes he'd better not be there, you see? And his courage is then called upon and he actually confronts this plan for three whole minutes. See? And then he thinks, „Oh boy, I'm really overdue. They know where I am now,“ and he has to pull out of it and go in the other room. See? But he did the plan. He got three minutes' worth of it. Do you get that feeling or sensation about it, see? That's „no place to light“ and a tremendous courage demanded of one if he does light.

How can the same person sit idly doing nothing hour after hour after hour? Because he's being sat there, to some degree, and he isn't committing any overt acts. He is merely sitting there. So he can sit still. He's not doing anything. The keynote of doingness is outflow, and he's not guilty of any outflow. He can sit there as long as he's not guilty of any outflow.

This comes definitely from the earliest manifestations of a thetan. Which is, that unless he radiates he's invisible. So if he does anything, he thinks he's visible. The person making the program or plan, the person putting the nails in instead of the screws, thinks of himself as being visible only so long as he works. Now, he can sit still and read a book; he knows he's not visible. Why? He's not doing anything; it's flowing at him. It's probably the earliest agreement on „When am I visible?“

Little babies will dramatize much more markedly than when they get better sense. They'll shut their eyes and become invisible.

Well, this is just another one: „When I do, I become invisible [visible], therefore I am positioned. I am not positioned unless I am concentrated in doing. I'm not visibly positioned unless I'm concentrated in doing.“ You see that?

So we run a technique like this — and this is the no-place-to- light case — and the thing is simply „a place to light“: „Look around and find a place you wouldn't mind lighting.“ Use that word advisedly — lighting: meaning „sit down,“ „remain,“ „stay in,“ but also „glitter.“ Also means „glitter,“ which means „do.“ And just use the identification of the word. „Look around and find a place you wouldn't mind lighting. All right. Good. Now, invent a consequence for having lighted.“

That technique, not just „Find a place you wouldn't mind lighting,“ is workable. People get headaches and go out the bottom and everything else. You're just taking a game condition away from them at a mad rate, evidently, when you run [it], according to some tests that have been made recently. This is kind of a new one. It's been tested, but it isn't too well known yet.

If you have him find a place to light, and then just find another place to light, and find another place to light, and find another place to light, he goes by the boards. You have to invent the game condition. You have to have him invent the consequence, which again is this other technique to some slight degree. „This means go to _______,“ you know? Well, that's sort of the consequence sort of a flow that you're running on that. We say these techniques are cousins. The one I just gave you might be much more powerful, much more powerful as a technique, but hasn't ever been applied to terror stomachs. And in view of the fact that it took over a year to finally apply and understand „This means go to _______“ that well, it's not something we're easily going to give up. Because it's going to take another year or two to accumulate enough data on this one that I just talked about (no-place-to-light case), to know whether or not these are comparable processes. I wouldn't be able to tell you that data. I'll just tell you that this one is a bit of a killer; it's a good process: „Invent a consequence for having lighted there.“

This always startles the preclear, by the way, about half out of his wits the first time you ever ask a fresh preclear this. „A place to light?“ — and he'll probably go into the light bulb or something, you know. And you say, „All right, now invent a consequence for having lighted there.“ And he nearly always laughs; he always gets upset; he's a little bit nervous about the thing, because it's so dead center on the consideration which he had at the instant he decided, that it's almost as if his own circuitry is speaking to him. See? It's the consideration he had: „Is that really safe?“ In other words, „Are there any real consequences to choosing that as a place to light?“ And it kicks him over. You ask him the same question. You say, „What are the consequences of lighting there?“

Now, those are the two commands, and if you look this over you'll find that the tolerance level must therefore include this placement idea. The idea of placement belongs in Tolerances and belongs somewhere in the vicinity of Havingness, and so on — belongs in that same group of processes.

Now, we can group that one. We can say it belongs in the Tolerances, this „Look around and find a place you wouldn't mind lighting.“ See, that's easy. Tolerance: He has to select it. He has to decide his willingness. He has to then invent a consequence for it, and how much consequence would he be willing to experience kind of adds up in a computation. But that actually is not this other technique. Don't group them together yet — „This means go to _______,“ and so on.

„This means go to _______,“ by the way, doesn't necessarily straighten out a person's ability to work. See, there's something different about these things. Till we know completely what's different about it, let's not be guilty of the only crime of which science is guilty: saying we're sure before we are.

I love these new miracle cures. In 1950, psychiatry and psychology and phrenology and malnutrition and other sciences were making all manner of sport of us because we kept saying that we knew a mechanism and we knew that the handling of the mechanism worked. And we know that today just as well as we knew it in 1950: Running an engram works. The trouble of it is that you can't run engrams on everybody. The trouble of it is apparently there's a limitation on the process, and there are some other things. But we know it works!

We can change a physiological type by running engrams. We knew this worked, and practically the sole criticism leveled at Dianetics is just the fact that it said it knew it worked, see.

And these wild statements made in paid advertisements by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have been a belly laugh to me every since. I've just enjoyed these enormously. „Miracle cure!“ see? „Miracle poison cures everybody in a whole sanitarium cell!“ — one person, see - - „Miracle cures!“ They even put into the legislation of the United States government the fact that they were curing 75 percent, and thereby something which we will never follow up.

It tell you why we will never follow that one up. We could send anybody connected with that bill to the local federal pen. They said that 774,000 Americans were being newly admitted in any given day to the institutions of the country. And they said that „in that the better institutions were curing 75 percent of the people who came to them,“ they were appropriating $1,500,000 just to study how much they had to appropriate! And they made it necessary that only members of the American Medical Association would be permitted to have any part of that money. They appropriated it directly to a private institution, in other words, for its own uses and purposes.

I can prove further that the money is used — that is so appropriated — for propaganda and for maintaining a monopoly. But that is perjury of an interesting kind, because it becomes the business of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. And if someone has submitted to them false data to solicit the appropriation of funds, that person is guilty of misappropriation of funds, fraudulent statements to obtain funds and other interesting things, which sends them to jail, just... They don't even bother to throw the key away, because they just plug up the keyhole. They just go to jail for years. The fellow who introduced the bill, the fellow who offered the data and so on.

There's a little committee that sits between the House and Senate which is composed of doctors and psychiatrists up here (which is one of the more fascinating things), that has woven itself into part and parcel of federal legislation. And I don't know if that committee or members thereof submitted these statements, but these statements had to have been made by somebody.

Now, whoever made those statements, if he was connected with the recipient of the bill — which he is; the American Medical Association — of course, is guilty of fraudulent statement for the purposes of falsely obtaining appropriations. The person who accepted them without further check, even though he is a Senator or a Congressman, cannot be safeguarded by his immunity.

The U.S. government is real mean about stealing money. And you know why we don't take that up? We've got the copy of the bill; we know all about it; we could serve a warrant tomorrow. You know why we don't take it up? Because we don't want to cure the legislatures of the country from appropriating money for mental purposes. Because one fine day we'll be all set to clear all pilots of the „U.S. Army Air Farces,“ see? We'll be all set to clear everybody, see? And they'll go over to Congress and some piece of this rebuttal will have remained in the cogwheels. And they'll have said, „Let's see, now I'm not supposed to appropriate money for mental studies or surveys. My vote, gentlemen, is No.“ And we wouldn't ever be able to obtain enough money. Such a body of men is mainly reactive, and we'd never be able to obtain appropriations.

We could knock the APA and the AMA totally out of circulation on the grounds of misappropriation. But if we did, we would always have to privately finance anything we ever did for the U.S. government. Do you want to privately finance clearing the president? I don't. He's going to pay.

We evidently put one president in pretty good shape. He's been making sense ever since — totally unacceptable to his party: Harry Truman.

All right. Now, I'm not talking through my hat on this sort of thing. Any action of this character has a carry-over, don't you see? It carries over. And you get an engramic condition; it continues. An engram goes on and on and on unless somebody runs it as an engram. Someday, I can see it now, we'll have to run out the Church of American Science-Siberia Bill protest out of them. I imagine Alaska will never again get any legislation passed to give its insane any help at all.

All right. We fit this up along the lines of techniques: We find out that the techniques themselves will persist. Give you a moment to look that over. Not only does the illness persist but the technique always persists.

Now, if the technique cured the illness, now only the technique persists. But when you undo the technique, the illness revives, unless certain definite conditions exist. Curing things (as I have told you earlier), running techniques (same thing), quite ordinarily in the history of man have supplanted the cure for the disease, and the cure always later on becomes a disease, according to man's history.

They used to drink rum for everything. Now we have a thing called alcoholism which was never heard of previously. Got this? See, that was a cure; now it's a disease.

The Indians used to smoke tobacco and chew tobacco for tiredness; it had quite an effect upon it. Now, you smoke tobacco and chew tobacco, you get tired. It was a cure for tiredness.

A dope fiend who tries to cure lethargy by the application of heroin, cocaine (in a pure state), finally has the cocaine or the heroin producing the effect of lethargy.

The whole subject of curing is based upon the fact that there must be something to cure. Where did it come from? Well, it was invented as a cure for something else. Every disease is a cure gone bad. So we get a condition in medicine of curing cures. Everybody's involved in curing cures. Therefore it's quite important to us, in handling techniques, that we handle only techniques which cure techniques. And if you get a technique which runs out all earlier techniques run on a case — wow! — you must have picked up an earlier illness to run as a technique and ran it out!

„I agree that men are alive but can be killed“: That is a cure. A cure for what? Oh, lack of game, lack of corpses, lack of a lot of things. Men can be killed. It's a cure for owing money forever, for one thing; one thing it's a cure for. There's terrific numbers of things cured by death. Death is a cure. For what? Life.

Now, oddly enough, to run out death, you have to run life. So we always have a first-and-second-postulate condition wherever we encounter — whenever we encounter — an illness and a cure.

The illness can always be considered, in any given instance, the first postulate, and the cure can be considered the second postulate. The cure therefore is a lie. It persists!

It's very interesting. Very interesting. Oh, when you look at me and you say, „Well, I don't know. My goodness. That isn't a very important technique. It's too simple. 'Look around and find someplace you wouldn't mind lighting. Tell me the consequences of lighting there.' Well, that certainly couldn't cure my 'motheraphobia.' Couldn't! Because it's been with me all my life, and it's too upsetting and so on.“ By golly, you better run as simply as you possibly can on a preclear and as early-track and as high-level as you can, see? You'd better run it as early, in other words, as simple, as high-level as you can, in order to run out all the remaining consequences of some condition. So you find a central line of illnesses and cures, and you've got it.

Now, I don't say that „Find a place to light and then tell me the consequences of lighting it [there]“ has ever existed as an illness or a cure. I don't say that it has. But it apparently runs out something terribly basic in games called placement — „Where am I?“ Well, placing somebody is a cure for no communication. Placing yourself cures lack of communication. Don't you see?

Oddly enough, communication itself, then, would be slightly senior to the technique I have just given you, called „placement.“ So we have to run it on a communicational basis. A place to light and the consequences of lighting there, see: A communication, sort of, is going on there. „Going to light in the lamp and have the wall attack me.“ See? Going to be — some kind of an interchange is going to have to take place.

Curing cures. All these pills, by the way — don't get a big reliance on pills. MEST doesn't cure anything. Doesn't cure a thing, except having none.

Cures that. And giving a person pills is an action designed to give him some MEST he can have or tolerate which has force or power.

And everyone has known (this is not an „everybody knows“; this happens to be the truth) that the more violent a medicine was, the more people would buy it. If a medicine doesn't burn or bite, people don't believe in it. For instance, I have known more things advanced as no-sting iodine — antiseptic preparations. Since the first days of Pasteur and Lister, these things have been coming out. Why do people keep buying iodine? Interesting, isn't it? Probably a lot of these other antiseptics kill bugs better, if there are any bugs to kill. If a lot of other things, if a lot of other things, they're probably better. Why do they buy iodine? Well, they sure know it's there. They know it's there. It obviously has power!

This isn't why nicotinic does this, but you could shove somebody full of nicotinic acid and turn on mad flushes and then shovel him full of niacinamide, which wouldn't turn on a flush, but did the same thing.... Let's say they both did the same thing — this isn't true; they don't — but if niacinamide would painlessly produce the same result that nicotinic acid produces, people would take nicotinic acid!

I have heard barbarians say — not European/American barbarians, but what Europeans and Americans call barbarians — I mean, civilized peoples have said something like „Whuf! I'm certainly sick. I'm awful sick. Oh, what horribly powerful medicine it's going to take to get me well!“ A comment. A guy trying to imagine how powerful a medicine would have to be to overcome and knock out this horrible sickness he's got, see. And he thinks in terms of counter effect. So he takes something to have an effect on the illness, and he knows it'll have an effect on the illness because it has such a fantastic effect on himself. You got the idea? Big effect on self, therefore, it just must be raising hell with the sickness. He becomes convinced that it's raised hell with the sickness and he's cured. Got the idea?

I'm sure you could sell small gunpowder pellets if you could safely explode them in the stomach without knocking the stomach wall apart, and it'd be very, very successful. Take them, and a minute later they exploded in the stomach or something like that.

One time I was temporarily adrift one way or the other. I had a fire extinguisher — first time I ever had one of these CO2 extinguishers. They had CO2 extinguishers around for a long time, but they didn't become popular right away. CO2 — quite common. I had one of these CO2 extinguishers, and I just didn't have any entertainment for a bunch of Alaskans as guests. I was slipping, you know. Didn't have any ammunition, didn't have anything. They were all coming over, aboard for a party.

So I got ahold of some cayenne pepper and some tobacco juice — made some tobacco juice. Mixing these together — I was very short of liquor, by the way — added them to some alcohol, and added this to a concoction which contained a little bit of sugar or something of the sort, you know? And I served them: took the CO2 extinguisher, you see, and put a slug into the bottom of each big mug, see?

What do you suppose that drink did? It was on fire! See, it burned and you could see the gas coming off of it — flames! Real wild, see, violent drink!

As each one of these guys arrived I said, „Drink it while it's foaming! Drink it while it's foaming.“ You know, and put it in the gullet. CO2 wreathing around his head, you know. Wow! Guy after guy'd say, „Boy, this'd cure a broken leg, you know!“ You could see their heads snap as they did it.

And they got drunker faster than I've ever seen Alaskans get drunk. And there was less liquor — actual liquor — present. But — whuf! — that sure had an effect.

Well, they weren't anywhere near as friendly to 135-proof Hudson's Bay rum after that. They'd had a drink!

But wherever we get an explosive effect, the person is saying — knowing he can't have much of an effect, you see — „If it has this much effect on me at this moment, it must be having a fantastic effect on anything that's wrong with me!“ And we get the history of curative medicine as the history of explosions of one kind or another. The history of violent effects is what it becomes in the long run. And the thing that's wrong with your preclear is, of course, violent effects. He's had too many violent effects. He has now acquired a thirst for them.

Now, you take almost any medicine: somebody is liable to acquire a thirst for it. Medicines vary by the square root of somebody's opinion. For instance, I never had anything wake me up as much as a couple of pellets of opium that somebody slipped me one time that I wasn't aware of. A very interesting and pleasant Chinese host merely was being polite and courteous. You get the idea?

And over in the Orient they take this stuff down the gullet. You know, they don't burn it — they do burn it, but I mean when they really want a jolt from this stuff they simply swallow it. Bang! It is supposed to be deadly poison. It's supposed to kill you deader than a doornail. The least it's supposed to do is knock you out and put you to sleep, you see. It's an opiate. The word „opium“ means you go to sleep and so on. You're not supposed to wake up when you take opium.

Evidently didn't have any opium on the genetic line. It woke me up. See? The original reason people took opium, probably, was to wake up. Now you take caffeine to wake you up. Another half of a generation, coffee will put everybody to sleep.

The cure begins to produce the sickness. Any time you get a cure, it produces the sickness. After a while the two things identify. Just seeing the cure makes you sick. And you've got a new illness. Got that?

Now let's explain it in terms of engrams. A person has just been hit and half crushed in an accident, and he is given a big slug of whiskey. Now, one of the perceptions of the engram is whiskey. Although the whiskey did him good at the time, later on, when he has merely an engram which contains energy and whiskey, he will eventually identify these two things. You give him whiskey and he feels half crushed by just the restimulation of the engram. Simple mechanical action.

Well, this is true of all cures. It's true of all cures, so long as you only attempt to cure one specific condition. Any time you try to cure one specific condition and get it locked up in a whole series of engrams, then the cure is apt to produce the condition — not cure, but really reproduce the condition.

So that the only safe techniques to use are those which are based on the early agreements and behaviors of a thetan. And this undoes that cause-and-effect situation from there right on down the line. See?

It becomes horribly true that a bad psychotherapy will eventually produce insanity when it is used. Let us say we were psychoanalysts or something like that. And we believed in the libido gets crossed up with the Oedipus. And this all gets entangled with the cross-limbed psychosis. And then you do this all on an abacus, and you find out that it was because some man scared a little boy when he was two, you see, that has made him this way. And we are trying to explain everything this way in some devious fashion. And then we had a certain patter which picked up this two-year-old condition.

By the way, psychoanalysis at large has just disavowed completely „a psychic trauma“ — pain and injury. A bulletin came out not very long ago concerning this, and they — psychology has discounted that pain and injury has any faintest connection with mental derangement or illness of any kind. In other words, somebody is on a total revolt against Dianetics. And all he knows how to do is revolt, so he doesn't revolt in a productive or constructive direction; he merely revolts.

All right. And supposing we knew that by picking up a two-year- old trauma or a three-year-old trauma that had to do with sex — and maybe this did have some limited workability in one suburb of Vienna sometime or another. Maybe there was one patient in one suburb of Vienna who did respond to this and we've been hearing about him ever since. Could be. What would be the effect of our using this technique every time we met a psychotic person? And let's suppose we were in charge of all the psychotic people in the United States and we used only this technique on all those psychotic people.

I tell you, it wouldn't take two generations to have the use of the technique produce psychosis. You come along one fine day and there's a fellow sitting there. He's perfectly sane, and you say, „Can you remember any sexual experience when you were two or three or four years of age?“ And the fellow all of a sudden screams, turns white, dives out the window, has to be put in a straitjacket and locked up. See, the cure has become so thoroughly identified with the sickness that the cure produces the sickness.

Why? Because it's a very low-order truth. I imagine it'd be very upsetting to somebody to have some sexual experience when you're two or three or four years of age. I imagine this would be upsetting one way or the other; I imagine it would be. If it contained a beating and a few other things it undoubtedly would. And a suppression of communication and so forth, a lot of other combinations — possibly could do this. And it is true that if this has happened and then you do straightwire it out — flick! - - that you do get a change in the individual's response. This is all true, I mean... Of course, I don't know how they knew this, because nobody could do it till Dianetics. Nobody was able to recall back to the time they were two, and we came along and ran engrams so they could recall them. But this was all supposed to be.

Now, you see, that is a very low-order thing devoted to just one dynamic, one situation — monomaniac to that degree. You see? Very low order.

Here's all the techniques I've been telling you about for years, see? Here, the whole rack of them extending clear up there, and if we go five feet further down, we can graph the one I just told you about. Do you get the idea?

In other words, its time position is very late. Its causation is subordinate to all these other conditions. Now, it might have a workability. But it is subordinate to all the other conditions in terms of time position, see?

So now, if you started with that situation and then graduated upstairs into all these other things, you'd be going a long way, because I've told you about an awful lot of mental conditions. That right? There's plenty of them over the past six years. I don't know how many phenomena. Somebody would actually have to go through all of the taped lectures (because they don't appear in books or PABs) — all of the taped lectures ever given — and list every phenomenon picked up. Because I usually have mentioned one in a lecture when I've picked it up. And so we've got about half of them. And I would say that would amount to maybe fifteen or twenty thousand separate phenomena — any one of which are senior to this one I just told you about of relieve the psychic trauma by Straightwire — any one of which.

Your psychoanalyst doesn't even relieve it by Straightwire. He just sits down and he says, „You know that didn't have any effect on you, don't you? You know that was an evil thing to do, don't you? Now, you know better than to do that! You know the other person was a bad — assign him cause now.“ You know? They don't even do it.

It's no wonder they drive people potty. It's, by the way, true that I don't know what percentage of neurosis is produced by them, but evidently this old saw has been around before, because it does produce neurosis when used on somebody.

All right. We look up this whole span of techniques, we have to find out which one of these techniques takes apart all the other techniques. If we know that, why, we got it made because then we only have one illness left: the technique. Got it?

Don't think a technique can't create an illness too. This one I have been telling you about, about telling a guy „All right, now decide to put up a picture the size of the wall there. That's good. Now, decide that by doing so you'd spoil the game. Change your mind and don't do it.“ Dong! You run this over a few times, the guy does it perfectly innocently, and all of a sudden he's got a three-dimensional picture, solid as a rock, standing over there at the wall! See, dzzzz! He knows if he kept this up very long the picture would be visible to one and all. You've overwhelmed him.

He goes away and, actually, that thing you have run on him, to some vague, tiny degree, not very forcefully, is a kind of an illness with him, see. He says, „Boy, that auditor certainly produced an effect on me — zzzz! Now, think of seeing all of my mock-ups in that color. Think of seeing my mother and my father and my aunts and cousins and sisters and every — the bad things they all do. Think of seeing them, all with that degree of... Think of being right in the room again! I don't like it.“ It'd worry him.

Now, I'm sure at one time or another a thetan delivering an electric shock to a body could have cured it of something. I'm sure of this! But today, it would startle somebody to such a degree that he would go around with the trauma for years. And I've met people who have done that. Some thetan has come along in this lifetime and nipped them. And they have the experience of having been blanketed in this lifetime. And that experience all by itself has absolutely ruined their life from that point on. (As a matter of fact, we've rescued a few people.) But that was a technique which cured something at one time or another, but now it louses somebody up.

Well, you have to know this about techniques. And you take something as simple as Placement itself, which is part and parcel of communication, which technique can be undone by communication and which — it itself — undoes all these other techniques: you've really got a powerhouse. And this Placement technique, given certain other factors such as a session, rudiments established and so forth, is a powerhouse.

You understand techniques a little better now?

Audience voices: Yes.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you!

[End of Lecture]