And this is January 25th, 1954, first morning lecture. I’m going to talk this morning on the first stages of SOP 8-0, We’re on schedule with regard to this.

SOP 8-0 is not a rote technique. It can be written down and as you assimilate it or not assimilate it here in the next few weeks, it probably will get written down. But as long as I have been operating to make Operating Thetans, I have found that the problems were very obvious. And in view of the fact that you’re taking off from the level of Theta Clear or at least stable exterior, you are not confronted with one of these problems which balk you at every turn. In other words, he can always do something of this. So it’s better to state the goals of SOP 8-0 rather than to state the rote procedure by which one arrives at it.

The first and foremost goal is to be able to tolerate nothingness.

And the second goal is to be able to have or not have without consequences to memory.

And the third goal is to be in universes at will, with full perception in them.

And the fourth goal is to communicate or receive communications in all those ways used by the body. In other words, the body talks, the body listens, the body feels sensation, the body stores sensations, it does this, it does that. The Operating Thetan must be able to communicate in this fashion.

The next goal of the Operating Thetan is to take apart and put together, in working form, all automaticities. And the next goal is actually junior to these goals, but it’s to be able to handle any kind of a body. And the next goal is under study, and that goal is: how do you endow and disendow any kind of body or new kinds of bodies so as to actually create life forms? The last is-lots of evidence and so forth-you can do a lot of this as an Operating Thetan, but it’s kind of a study, like sculpting is a study. You see that? I mean, it’s an art, very much of an art. How do you make a pretty picture? Well, nobody ever went to school to learn how to make a pretty picture. All right.

Those, roughly, and some incidentals are the basics of SOP 8-0. They are not roughly done in that order; they are not done in that order. Because as an Operating Thetan level is approached, the individual becomes more and more capable all along this line and you get a sort of a gradient rise on each one of these points.

It’d be very nice if an Operating Thetan could simply take care of all of these things one at a time, but this isn’t the way it works. You take care of one a little bit and take care of another one a little bit and then you go back over and you take care of them all over again. And he rises more or less on the same level by taking care of these things.

Now, I said there were a couple of incidentals. One of those incidentals is be able to fix and unfix ideas in energy. That is to say, put him in command of his own postulates. But, of course, that’s a subgoal to automaticity, handling automaticities.

Well, by the way, there’s an amusing thing about that. An Operating Thetan ought to be able to fix into a car-the only trouble is, you see, it’s a state of mind. He gets above an anxiety level about this, so he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t have to do it, there is no protective measure involved. He should be able to fix into a car the idea that it can’t be stolen. And anybody coming along to steal the car would realize the car couldn’t be stolen and there would be terrible liabilities i£ he did or something of the sort and he just wouldn’t steal it. You see that?

Now, all of the fakir tricks, which are valid tricks, of course, come in along the line there someplace, but perhaps it has held us back a little bit that I hold the fakir in contempt; but I do hold him in complete contempt. Demonstration of prowess in order to prove is very low-toned and one of the first things I ever learned was that there were two levels of working in this field. And you could find the first one, the fakir, on any bed of spikes on any street corner in India and he (quote) “didn’t know from nothin’.” He’d learned a trick or two and there he was. Something on the same order that you would hold a carnival freak as a social equal. I mean, you just wouldn’t do that.

Well, anyway, we look at Operating Thetan and we find out that it is basically a state of mind. Quite interesting, isn’t it, that it’s merely a state of mind? But we find also that it is a contest between being an Operating Thetan and being an inmate of the MEST universe. And this is a contest.

Now I want you to pay very close attention here. This universe is an interiorizing universe, and if any sole aberration comes in upon the thetan, it is resisting interiorization. And that which one resists, one becomes. So this universe puts upon the Operating Thetan the stress of resisting interiorization, unless he customarily keeps himself entirely away from-not because it’s dangerous-but entirely away from any phobia about havingness. And so we get our first goal there as a terrifically necessary goal. A phobia to have and I mean that of obsession. You can have and own and so forth. But an obsession to own or obsession to have something follows as a direct result of the Desire-Enforce-Inhibit cycle on the Tone Scale.

The thetan actually starts at “I”, Inhibit and, from inhibiting an inflow, comes to desire one. And having desired one, the universe can then enforce an inflow upon him. And this enforcement he does not like and so he begins to inhibit the inflow of the universe upon him. And from this he desires a new desire. He inverts again and thinks he has to have this and so he turns around and he has it enforced upon him again.

And he, of course, all the way along the line is dramatizing this. He goes back and forth dramatizing this and he gets into the inhibit. Therefore, we’ve got to rm/interiorization again.

Now, when we talk about inflow from a 360-degree sphere, we’re talking about interiorization. And that is why exteriorization is itself a single top goal in processing anyone. This is very important because, you see, this is what happens: he gets the idea that his ideas must be fixed in energy. And the more an idea is fixed in energy, the less effective it is, the less pervasive it is, as a postulate. The more an idea is fixed in energy, the less pervasive it is as a postulate.

Energy does not have to accompany an idea in any way, shape or form for that idea to be effective. As a matter of fact, the idea is almost along this line-of course, this gets inverted too-the idea could be said to be as effective as it is not cloaked in energy. Anytime an idea is cloaked in energy, it gets into the fixed, stet form of a symbol, and a symbol then (quote) “has to be interpreted” (unquote).

Well now, very banally, in the line of psychotherapy we find a direct index between the sanity of an individual and the amount of energy which he has kicking around his bank. He is as sane as he doesn’t have it. It’s a direct index. The interiorization tendency of the universe itself gives the thetan the idea that all of his ideas should be cloaked in energy so that he should make symbols. And the more symbols he makes, he feels, why then, the better off he’ll be. And this is not true. Symbols, essentially, have to be tremendously simple, if they exist at all.

What is an engram? What is a facsimile? These are “ideas fixed in masses of energy.” That’s all they are. They are occasioned, their manifestation is occasioned, by the resistance of the thetan toward the environment. If you resisted that bookcase over there with a wall of energy, you would get a picture of a bookcase. Can you see that? All you’d have to do is resist it with a wall of energy and you’d get a picture of a bookcase.

It’d be a sort of a funny picture. It wouldn’t have any depth and so that is true of a facsimile. It may have three-dimension, it may have all sorts of things, but it doesn’t have a back side. While exteriorized, sometimes you should (quote) “pick up” one of these newly manufactured facsimiles that some machine is kicking out at you and turn them around and, of course, there’s nothing on the back side of them. Sometimes they’re coated in blackness, like tar, in order to make them stick together, but that’s merely the manifestation. There’s no light on the other side of the picture.

What is a facsimile? If you were to take tar and paste it over the bookcase, you’d get a picture of a bookcase. If you were to take a thetan’s energy and paste it over the bookcase, you, of course, would get a picture of the bookcase. Simple, isn’t it? That is a facsimile

The day I solved that, sometime very early last year, this problem of (quote) “psychotherapy” (unquote) got awfully ragged and it began to look less and less like a problem on the advance and more and more like a rabbit on the run. It became simplicity itself to handle facsimiles if you could make an individual make facsimiles.

Now, true enough, you can make any individual make facsimiles. As a matter of fact, there’s a technique which even an interiorized person can do with this. He can simply put out a great deal of flitter, these little gold sparks or white sparks—some individuals rather bad off make white sparks rather than gold sparks. And those that are very bad off make black sparks. And you could have him push this against some object and then pull it back.

Well, if he’s rather bad off, he’ll get an entirely different object. That’s because he’s pulling in an earlier picture or he’s making a different kind of a picture because of twisted lines in the banks. But if he’s in fairly good shape, all he’s got to do is push some energy at an object and he gets a picture. It’s the most elementary photography there is. And that is this horrible thing known as a facsimile.

Now, it contains, naturally, the pattern of all sound waves. An individual who is making facsimiles is dwelling under an obsession. Facsimiles are not necessary. They do not do anything for an individual. There is no plus value to a facsimile. It is a waste of energy, because memory itself depends upon havingness, inversely. As havingness increases, memory decreases.

The feeling that one has to ransack his facsimile bank, the feeling of a Resistive V that he must go into his engrams to discover what is there, is borne out of the fact that the universe is interiorizing his ideas continually and he feels that these ideas are interiorized. No such thing, no idea could ever be interiorized in anything except as one believed it was.

Now, let’s take the idea “I am going,” and we pound it from 360 degrees with energy. And we will have, then, a mass of energy which has about as much “I am going” in it, just about as much “I am going” in it, as the finger string which you tie on your finger (you know, to remember to get a loaf of bread) has a loaf of bread in it.

Without the assistance of the individual, there is no memory restimulation from pictures. Unless the individual himself knows what is in the picture, nothing is in the picture. It’s very curious, isn’t it? But his knowledge is compartmented off. You can consider all facsimiles as pieces of string on people’s fingers and you’ve got it. That’s all they are.

Now, they know the mass of energy is there, so they can put the mass of energy there. If they put the mass of energy there, then they know what happened. You see, you get how idiotic this is. You tie a piece of string on your finger so as to remember to get a loafofbread.

I know a young lady who continually switches one of her rings to an opposite hand when she has to remember something. And then she has a terrible time of it, you see, because she knows she has to remember something, but she doesn’t remember what she has to remember. And that is the great difficulty in the matter.

And I asked her one day why she was doing this and she said, well, she had to have something so that she would remember that there was something she had to get. And I dissuaded her from continuing the practice and her memory got much better. She didn’t have trouble remembering things thereafter. That was because she believed she had a dependency. The ring was a dependency. A note is a dependency.

The funny part of it is-I hate to say this, I really do, particularly since as an Instructor you’re perfectly entitled, operating in a MEST universe, to have a notebook to run down and to put things in order for you, in instructing. But when you put all this material down, you’ve depended upon a piece of paper. It’s going to do your recalling for you.

Actually, if you didn’t know what was there, you could never read it back. That’s hideous but true. If you didn’t know what was there in the first place, you could never get it off the page. It’s a built-in automaticity that begins with words.

All right. As we look over our problem, we find that the thetan is progressively interiorized and progressively exteriorizes. But as he coasts down the track, his spirals get shorter and shorter because he’s depending more and more and more on the mechanism of exteriorization-interiorization itself.

There’s why spirals get shorter, and why the universe is a dwindling spiral. It’s just a matter that there he is and all the energy pounds him and, the next thing you know, he’s mass. Or he puts up an idea and the energy pounds the idea and it’s a mass. But he has to resist it to get a mass. He has to start inhibiting something before he gets a mass.

Of course, the first thing he inhibits is himself and that’s the first inhibition that you’re engaged upon or that any Operating Thetan is engaged upon, he inhibits himself. He does so, so he can have a game. Actually, there’s no proof at all that a thetan needs a game. It isn’t absolutely necessary. He might be able to go up and sit on cloud nine for the next 99,000 years. If he didn’t have the obsession to have a game, maybe he’d be happy all those 99,000 years.

But he likes a game and every once in a while he loses all the rules of the games he’s playing. So he dies and grows up into a new game-same game.

What is memory and what is unreality? Memory would simply be a pervasing knowingness concerning the pattern of particles as they existed and it degrades to the degree that one substitutes his own particles for the lost particles which are no longer there. In other words, it degrades to the degree that the individual has energy to represent where the particles were. He has to know what went on there and has to be able to reinterpret it before it means anything to him at all.

His knowingness is always senior to his deposits of energy. Data is a series of symbols and, as such, is ideas and energy. Therefore, data, by that definition (having energy in it) is very junior to actual knowingness. A thetan does not need so much a method of knowingness as he needs an exteriorization from those things which inhibit his knowingness.

Now, in all of the track you will find the individual, with great care, storing up masses of energy. He thinks he wants them. His need of this energy is zero. He doesn’t need anything that he can create himself, because the more energy he has, the less he can create. Should be obvious.

You ask somebody to deal in straight lines and put up communication lines and things like that through a media which impedes the communication and, of course, it becomes more and more arduous, the more media which impedes a communication. You see that. I mean, the more mass through which he’s trying to inject energy, the less ability he has to inject energy through it.

All right. What’s reality? I wonder if any of you’ve had the experience of losing something which meant a great deal to you and feeling immediately afterwards the entire universe sort of draw in upon you and everything become unreal. Have you ever had that experience?

Audience: Yeah.

Well, that experience itself is loss of memory and why you’ve lost your former lives and former patterns of existence. This unreality is all the unreality there is. This is the cause of (quote) “unreality” (unquote). It is a diminution of havingness-a deterioration of havingness.

That’s because of the string-and-finger trick. The individual has had these deposits of energy so that he would know to remind himself that he could know. And all of a sudden, they disappear and now he doesn’t know whether it was a loaf of bread or a Ford car that he was supposed to get down at the corner.

The loss of havingness or the loss of mass, then, brings about itself this condition of unreality. One loses an enormous mass and immediately believes that his reality is gone. His reality is dependent, then, upon particles. Reality should never be dependent upon particles, but because of the inflow of the universe, the thetan makes it so.

Now, there’s two ways to remedy this. The first one I mention is very easily the slowest and most clumsy and that is to restore the individual’s havingness. When you restore his havingness, his memory comes back. And the other one is much more theoretical, spottily workable but very fast when it works, and that is to disabuse him of needing some havingness in order to have a memory.

You would get the first inhibition of inflow, in other words.

The entire track o£ a thetan could be said to be a consecutive series of apathies about what he knows. When hit hard enough, an individual forgets. When hit monotonously enough, an individual forgets. If there is anything in this universe that is consistent, it is the continual pound the thetan takes when he matches wavelengths with it.

He cannot be bogged into a large amount of energy unless he has matched wavelengths with it so that he can resist it. It can only then pile up against those things which he is matching wavelengths with. He has the ability to produce energy to resist energy. Therefore, we get into protection, we get into ownership and so forth.

Where has your memory gone for 76 trillion years? It is wrapped up in the havingness which you’ve had to tell you that you were to get a loaf of bread. It’s still there, in other words. A feeling of unreality itself, it’s just that feeling of deprived havingness.

When one loses a body, it’s quite serious. You know some of the grief which you’ve run out of preclears because they have lost an ally and how badly they felt about this ally and how occluded everything was when the ally disappeared. Consider then the intimacy of one’s own body, which is endowed with his own energy and life. The loss of that is so much greater than the actual loss of an ally that we see we have a series of, not grief charges but superapathy charges, lying on the past death track. And the loss of these havingnesses brings about a loss of memory on the line.

This, by the way, is not theoretical. This has been gone over very thoroughly by myself and it has each time proven to be the case.

The first case that I adventured on in this was to restore the havingness of a five-year-old boy who could not remember enough of anything in order to go to school. I was dealing with a punch-drunk fighter who was killed in the ring in Madison Square Garden. And he’d been hit hard enough and often enough and he couldn’t remember a thing. He was punch-drunk.

I restored his havingness on the gradient scale of punches and gave him enough, by mock-ups-he couldn’t even get mock-ups at first-gave him enough punches by mock-ups and so on, so that his life started to stretch out behind him across the bridge of the between-lives area. And as a consequence, why, our boy got his memory back in this lifetime to a level that was phenomenal.

Well, he’d just been killed with a blow and his father, unfortunately, was a handy man with his fists and this was all keyed-in. But his father didn’t hit him enough, obviously. You see, if you followed the theory of the MEST universe, that would be what you’d have to conclude: his father didn’t hit him enough. If his father had hit him enough, why, then, he would have remembered.

Well, things don’t work out in the MEST universe that way.

One of the mysteries which has consistently confronted you is why you didn’t, with entire: clarity, remember your whole track. That’s one of the mysteries. It is not one of the goals of SOP 8-0 to restore the individual’s entire memory on the track. This is not a goal. The goal instead is to restore the ability of the individual to handle energy. And just because he has not handled it adequately here and there in the past is no reason why he cannot in the future.

I call to your attention many instances where, even in the MEST universe, this has been worked out. You make an individual start handling MEST universe particles of one kind or another, even though he was terrified of them and if it is done on enough of a gradient scale and if it’s done subtly enough, the individual then overrides his experience.

In such a wise, a pilot sent up immediately after a crash will have nerve enough to fly again but a pilot who is grounded for many months after a crash, and does not take a plane up again, very often (quote) “has lost his nerve.” In other words, it becomes set.

Now, a pilot then has to be permitted to take up a plane and fly it and do things with it that he did before until he has recovered his confidence. The recovery of confidence, then, is more important than the recovery of memory And if you will recall that, you'll save yourself from getting into many pitfalls and you’ll also save yourself some thousands of hours of auditing.

Now, an Operating Thetan has to be able to exteriorize from everything, so a great deal of processing is devoted to interiorizing him into everything. Interiorize him, exteriorize him, interiorize him, exteriorize him and, just by that process alone, why, he gets up to a point where he feels pretty cocky. Resisting interiorization is his main difficulty. Now let’s take up courage. Courage could be said to be the ability to resist with aplomb. The bridge between courage and cowardice is pain. No individual anywhere on the track has failed to have the experience of fighting like a lion and dying like a coyote. It’s very important to you, recognition of this.

Courage is a sort of a persuasion. It’s a persuasion that the individual should face up to certain things. It’s a cult. It’s a philosophy. It’s balderdash.

Take a little kid and they teach him he’s got to face up to a lot of things. Nonsense. All he’s got to do is change his wavelength and they go straight through him. That’s right.

Making a little kid face up to blows, face up to resistances, be courageous. That is so filled with nobility and beauty on the whole track and is supposedly so great and so grand, that it has mislaid your Operating Thetan: mislaid all of his abilities, misplaced him in the whole universe. He started in by being courageous and he fought like a lion and died like a coyote. There isn’t any man, I don’t care of what magnitude, who doesn’t break across the bridge of pain.

A study of the records of the Inquisition, which I undertook, demonstrated rather adequately that the Catholic Church had something there. They could make a cur out of anyone. Jeanne d’Arc, for instance, after consistent and continuous torture, broke and went to the funeral pyre like a dog.

Interesting, huh? Well, courage is a sort of a lower-toned mockery of serenity. Serenity is just serenity, no further qualification. And courage is serenity in the face of something one has to resist, which is an enforced serenity. One desires to be serene and then one desires to be courageous. It sort of goes downscale like that.

Courage is, actually, for one living in this universe and in this time, almost missing. Man has dropped so far below anything that even faintly resembled courage that his ability to reach serenity, which is considerably above it, is very materially impeded.

Thus your Operating Thetan-I’m afraid your Operating Thetan sort of starts out below the level of a death of a coyote. Let’s just be terribly factual. He’s got a long way to travel to get up to a certainty of serenity. But you’re trying to put him upscale to this and it isn’t necessarily true that he can’t make this in a breath. Time is not involved when particles are not involved. Time in auditing is not involved, either. It’s when will he make the jump?

Well, to get him to make the jump is not too difficult when one has discovered for him that he can be exteriorized out of anything and that he can then exteriorize himself out of anything. Now, let’s not say “get out of anything.” Let’s say “exteriorize out of anything.” Big difference there, you see.

Now, you start in to make a Theta Clear by exteriorizing somebody stably out of a body Yeah, you just stabilized him out of a body. I would go so far as to say that Theta Clear is an unsafe condition to leave anyone in. But of course, a much more dangerous condition to leave somebody in is in a body. That’s really unsafe. You’ve at least taken the most crucial jump of exteriorization, by flipping him out of a body. But you’ve got to be able to exteriorize him out of almost anything.

Well, he learns to do this rather rapidly when he learns that he isn’t supposed to moveout of things, he is Out of things. He dematerializes where he is and rematerializes elsewhere.

Now, in view of the fact that every thetan is carrying along with himself a certain amount of garbage and bric-a-brac, he has to know how to dematerialize his garbage and bric-a-brac and rematerialize it elsewhere. He’s making it all the time anyway and this is then of the essence.

I see a couple of boys that are up on that level right now smiling all of a sudden with a sudden enlightenment. Yeah, that’s how you do it. You make the stuff disappear where it is and reappear where you are. You don’t drag it with you.

The motto "You can’t take it with you” was never truer. That’s true, you can’t take it with you-but that doesn’t say you can’t have it. You can dematerialize it and rematerialize it. And that’s why we talk about getting in control of automatic machinery. If the automatic machinery on the case is doing all the unmocking and mocking, well, then the thetan cannot unmock and mock-up at will.

Now, this is very curious, but he feels he can’t duplicate these things. They have a certain basic intrinsic value to him, you see. The value depends upon their scarcity, to some degree. He’s got a pinup girl from back in Lord knows what universe and she’s strictly gorgeous; this is nice stuff. If you looked at it yourself, you would say, “Gee whiz, that’s nice stuff.”

Well, he isn’t going to go off and leave that. He said, “My goodness, you know, I’ve had that piece of energy with me now for-oh heck, I looked all over the place for it in the first place-I guess it must have taken me years and years looking around to finally find that thing. And now I’ve got it there and so on and I’ve had it with me the last three or four million years. I don’t understand why I’ve suddenly got to chuck it overboard just because I’m going to exteriorize from something.”

Well, there’s several ways of doing this and one is to exteriorize him first and then have him exteriorize his possessions second. And the other way to go about it, which is not quite as safe, is to exteriorize the possessions first and then exteriorize him. But either way, I’m afraid you’ll have to solve this problem.

He wants to take the original with him. All right. If he wants to take the original with him, then he has to dematerialize it and rematerialize it and that’s still the original as far as he’s concerned. But if you exteriorize him and then tell him he has to duplicate all the things he has, he has the anxiety that he might have forgotten something.

So there’s a drill that goes along with this. You set him out someplace in space where it’s easy to make mock-ups-have him build some space-one of the best ways to do it. But you set him out someplace in space is the rudimentary method and have him make some mock-ups. And then have these mock-ups disappear where they are and reappear elsewhere. And do this until all he’s got to do, at a mass of energy, is say “Disappear” and indicate a place and say “Appear.”

This is teleportation and you’ve got to teach an Operating Thetan to do it. Otherwise, the damn fool will always be sticking back to save the ship or save the last guy off the ship just before it goes down. And then you have to exteriorize him out of a bunch of sea water as well as a ship. So this is a key drill.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time, but it can be done on a gradient of thoroughness. It’s one thing to just take your own possessions and dematerialize them where you are and rematerialize them someplace else- not move them, you understand. The devil with this moving them, because you’re still moving something that can be used as a target.

Do you know, I hate to tell you this, but your mock-ups are unfortunately-a shudder of terror might go through some preclear on this-but your mock-ups, unfortunately, are quite visible in certain bands of light. You can get out here with an ultraviolet camera and shoot pictures of a thetan, if you want to, because he’s always tracking around enough small-wavelength energy so he’s spottable.

Well, he wonders how he can be found. Nothing easier. He's locatable and he stays locatable as long as he tries to move things. And he becomes unlocatable as soon as he can do this weird trick of dematerializing/rematerializing. He doesn’t lose anything then, you see?

Now, you have an impulse to do this and you’ve forgotten how. You’ll be racketing down the road at a mad rate and all of a sudden a truck will come sideways. I am sure that any of you who have had an automobile accident or anything like this have done this: you actually tried to make you and everything around you disappear and reappear elsewhere and you failed, right there at that moment, boom. You just didn’t make that car that you were driving appear back home in the garage with you in it. But fellows have tried.

Therefore, staying afterwards, staying after this effort has failed, with the consequent loss of mass, brings about this failure called unreality.

Well, in all of our operation with an Operating Thetan, this one, if kept firmly in mind, will produce the best results. In other words, he has to be able to exteriorize not only himself, with all of his clanking chains and his bric-a-brac and his pinup girls from eight billion years ago and so forth.

I found an Operating Thetan one day who was having a hell of a time in life because he was trying to protect a hard mass of energy. It was the hardest mass of energy he had ever run into. It was really hard. It was quite light and it was quite thin, but it was terribly hard. And he was very fond of it. It was a terrific protective screen. And when the going would get rough, he’d throw this thing up. And then, of course, he couldn’t get it back again, so he’d stay there trying to get it back.

This is idiotic, isn’t it? He’d throw this thing up to protect himself and, then, of course, he’d have to stay there and be protected because he’s trying to get back the barricade. See that?

Well, this is the process he’s going through all the time. You understand a little bit more about this beast now and what he’s trying to do? Well, he should be able to exteriorize out of anything, that’s fine. But it’s something like making a tramp out of the fellow if you merely fix him up so he can exteriorize out of everything. You know, you teach him so he can lose everything and not care. There is that route. He can lose everything-anything he’s got anywhere-and not care. But that’s not a definition of an Operating Thetan, if you want one. It’s a fellow who can get the hell out and take it all with him too.

And he becomes, then, the most baffling individual that anybody ever heard of. You see, in order to operate, he always carries around a few tools. Do you know that he quite customarily carries around a slab of energy-you probably lost yours, but it’s parked someplace or lost someplace, something of the sort. But as you’re processed, you suddenly run into this one because it’s quite routine-not necessarily run into it, but you probably will. A slab of energy that is so thin, so light, so heavy in its own mass, you see-I mean, it’s so light in terms of how little mass there is, but is so much mass, what mass there is-that all you have to do is drop it across the front of the body and you’ll cut off its face and the entire front of the body. Neat little gimmick.

As a matter of fact, a few of you who are rather difficult to exteriorize have one rigged so that when the going gets too rough, you’ll knock the body off. An automaticity, if you please. An automatic death machine. You’ll find the thing has got a tremendous lot of energy pouring through to it.

And a lot of preclears have their prefrontal lobes completely numb. They’ve dropped the thing once and it didn’t quite work. During an operation or something, they decided the hell with it and decided to knock off the body. In other words, they use this mechanism to interrupt all current flow to the front and the back of the body, which, of course, would kill the body. So they’ve half killed the body. Now you want to know why you can’t exteriorize them easily? Well, they’re in the middle of that problem, just hung up right there, boom.

Now, an identity is about the first thing that an Operating Thetan has to be cured of. His thirst for identity is only this constant pound, pound, pound, pound, pound from all sides, which makes him obsessively desire to be a symbol. Masses of energy. And this symbol, this identity, oh, it’s balderdash.

By far, the finest identity to have is a shiftable identity. As a little proof of this, I myself have had this experience: I was very young, in this life-as a writer I used to never use my own identity, early writing. Just never. I mean, identity was cheap and easy to come by, all you did was write it down on a piece of paper. However, identities have a habit of getting away from you and one day you’re not feeling inventive and you put your own name on something. Well, you’re kind of finished.

Every time you fix a name into a category, you are to that degree immobile. And every time the society itself is able to categorize you and label you and say, “Well, you’re a doctor of medicine” or “You’re a lawyer” or “You’re a bus driver” or something of the sort, why, it gets real happy, because everybody is obsessed with this idea of interiorizing everything, because that’s the universe, that’s agreement with the MEST universe. It interiorizes everything, so everybody wants everything interiorized, so they want to make a symbol of everybody.

And if there’s anything they will fight, it’s versatility. Anybody who can do several things well becomes very suspect. But the truth of the matter is he is very able as long as he’s very able to do many things well.

A society, too, regards with great fear a person who can learn something in half an afternoon. There was a British general of considerable note (they have them over there once in a while) who went up to Russia and decided that as long as he was going to have to take charge of the Archangel area and (during the revolution, where everybody got to like strawberries so well and haven’t had any since) he just locked himself in his cabin and sat down and learned to speak the Russian language in nine days. And he learned it very fluently and colloquially and from all other sides and walked off the boat, never having spoke or connected with a Russian before-walked off his ship with a full command of the Russian language which, of course, put the kibosh on a great many interpreters who themselves were going to get a great deal of cumshaw by misinterpreting slightly here and there. And the fellow’s command of the area was very good because he was in total communication of the area. He could communicate with anything in the area.

Well, this type of an ability, however, is very suspect. They say, ‘‘Well, there’s something there, but of course, this fellow took nine days to learn Russian.” Well, what sort of suspicion immediately accrues on the part of the public to somebody who learns to speak Russian in nine minutes? takes the bank of some muzhik or something of the sort and plugs it into the lines, finds out he isn’t talking good Russian and throws that away and gets the bank of a professor and plugs it into the lines.

Why can’t you, for instance, recover all the languages which you’ve spoken on the full track with great ease? Well, that in itself is a process and it’s not a very hard process. But if you restore the body and the ridge, the language ridges which surrounded the body, if you just make them again, several times, all of a sudden the unreality of it all will go away and you’ll be able to speak the language again.

You’ve got to remedy the havingness of the ridges and symbols which were the language. The fellow has lost all those. He couldn’t exteriorize and take it with him. But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have it, because the only way that he ever had it, of course, was to know that he had it. So it becomes, in essence, very simple.

You’re going to work with some Operating Thetan sometime trying to restore, for instance, French. You’re going to have a heck of a time with it at first, perhaps, merely because he’s so convinced-that’s the main level-that he has lost everything French. He’s convinced he’s lost everything French, so therefore he doesn’t have anything French, so therefore he can’t talk French.

Well, by mocking-up the French ridges continually and by finally getting some insight into some French bodies that he had-mocking them up and bringing them together and making heavy masses of this sort of thing, why, his reality rises and he will talk French again. It isn’t necessarily true that he is dependent upon these masses to have his memory return. That’s the other method, is to get a guy over having to have this. This is the slow way I’m talking to you about, to mock-up masses of ridges and so forth, but it will return French.

Similarly, you can make a fellow throw away his English-interesting, isn’t it-by validating his loss of it. Many people have a great deal of trouble speaking a language which they have before learned and have then lost. You’ll discover in school that various students in a class, all endowed with more or less the same IQ, will have a great variability when it comes to speaking language.

A case of an inability to speak German comes to mind, where the individual just plain couldn’t talk any part of the German language, became extremely difficult, became very foggy when confronted with anything in German and was just totally unwilling to have ‘ anything to do with it and, yet, had to have German in order to get an engineering credit.

Well, an examination of this individual demonstrated that as an officer of the Roman legion, he had continually and customarily knocked apart German villages on punitive raids and considered German a barbaric tongue, which he found far beneath his dignity. To make that man speak German was like asking him to be immediately some kind of a low bug, because this was about the difference between the idea-that is, as far as ideas are concerned-the difference the Roman officer had between himself and the German and barbarians: they weren’t civilized.

And their contempt, measured in with all of this courage and measured in with all this resistance and coupled up with all these overt acts, was to make this fellow deader than a mackerel and completely disenfranchised if you made him speak German. But what do you know? In that lifetime he could speak German-with a disdain and a contempt and a studied mispronunciation, which showed any chieftain with whom he was bargaining just where they stood.

Well, you had this situation with German. Well, what do you know? Nearly everyone has this situation with some European language, because that happens to be the thetan line of which you’re coming. Why don’t you suddenly find yourself able to speak Italian and all of these languages?

You find over in Europe this condition isn’t a difficult condition. We have a great many Italians who can speak all numbers of languages. We have people there in the middle of Europe, in central Europe, who can speak the darnedest bunch of languages. But what do you know, these people have never lost their havingness. They can look up there and there’s still the Alps. There’s still the River Po. You see? They haven’t lost everything.

And quite in addition to that, they see the reality of everyone around them being able to talk everything and that’s right, so they haven’t lost their havingness. They haven’t lost their friends. Well, they know they haven’t lost their friends. Their friends must be someplace because here’s this fellow they just talked to yesterday, was talking Italian, and he was from a village that they died in. They don’t remember this vividly, but it restores their havingness to some degree.

But here you are, over on another continent. And it’s an oddity, isn’t it, that the Americans are not linguists. They’re not even vaguely linguists. They can’t even speak Spanish. And as a matter of fact, the British, with the insular attitude of the Britisher toward the Continent, he has a little difficulty with language. Not as much difficulty as in America but a difficulty with it.

Back on the track there, why, he’s still disembarking for the Battle of Hastings and that sort of thing is going on and he’s got some resistance back and forth because he’s not in a habitat which he occupied for many, many millennia. He didn’t grow up with these languages.

Your Britisher customarily on the Continent, by the way, considers that they’re all a bunch of fools if they can’t talk English and the thing to do is to raise your voice very high and shout and this inevitably will communicate.

I knew one Britisher who took a Linguaphone course in French over to France and packed it all around with him and told me very proudly that he had packed it with him around France, on and off for the last fifteen years, and never once had he put a record on the machine. He still had it there. He made them understand what he wanted; he just told them loud enough. And it was time they spoke a civilized language, anyway. Here is a forthright attitude.

Well, this is all-has to do with the study of where memory goes. You see, the Britisher sitting over there on his island, he keeps losing over on the Continent. I mean, by that, he fights a war over there and maybe he wins the war all right, but he leaves his buddies dead over there, you see, and he comes back home again. He goes over again and he takes over and nails down this post and that post and that line and this line and then he washes that all up and comes home again. Continual loss, continual loss.

And the American doesn’t even vaguely even have that experience. He’s gotten to the point of where he knows it doesn’t exist.