Glad to see you all here looking alive. It's very nice to see somebody alive. We walk up and down the street; sometimes we see somebody alive, but not often.

I want to talk to you tonight about the connection between certainty and health, and draw some coordination between these two factors, and then, perhaps, go on to give you a few clues as to the role of communication in the role of certainty.

I'd like to call to your attention at first, here, that there are some people in the world who are not certain. These people do exist. I would go so far as to say that under careful Gallup Poll – Gallup Poll is a fast one – that you probably would discover at least one person in the United States today who had some feeling of doubt about at least some factor connected with the fu­ture. I think you'd probably discover this, but I think you would find an awful lot of people who were too dumb.

I was looking the other day in the newspaper – I occasionally look into a newspaper – my taste for blood and so forth, and that sort of thing, is… becomes acute. I start to get hungry, you know, for miswriting and bad reporting of facts, poor duplication, you know? I look at perfection all the time, and so I take a complete extreme and go over and look in a newspaper. And the first page, you know: blood, blood, smear, scandal, you know? Second page: words, words, but no news. Third page: comic strip – that's pretty good.

I go to the next page, ads of things you can buy at great expense that you don't need. And then over here some place, you find far… deep into the newspaper and so forth, you probably discover that the local high school – I'm talking now about Phoenix papers – the local high school has just had an election to find out who is going to be the monitor of room 2A. And that fills the entire fifth page. And then you turn it over and possibly that day several senators passed… or maybe the US went to war or something. But if it didn't come over the wire, they won't carry it in the Phoenix paper. It's because they don't have any reporters here.

It's a nice thing to know about a newspaper that it can run entirely without anybody connected with news. They have an advertising section and they have a teletype. And the teletype sits there and whispers sweet nothings into the ear of a Linotype operator, and that's a newspaper – except what the press agent for the third grade happened to write and send in. Now, I'm not being sarcastic; I'm just being completely factual.

Now, in this newspaper, I noticed, along with the blood and slander on the front page, a picture of the Westward Ho Hotel, which was gorgeously outlined – one might even go so far as to say carefully imprinted – upon the negative in the camera by an A-bomb – or an H-bomb or maybe Q-bomb; whatever they've decided to call it now – which was exploding in the next state.

And at 6:20 a.m. the other morning – 6:20 a.m. – there was enough light in the sky caused by an atom bomb to throw everything into clean silhouette in Phoenix. I don't know if you noticed that or not; I wasn't in bed yet at that time. But where we see that much light in the sky that far away, we can assume that several small quantities of energy have been handled in such a way as to make a light.

In fact, probably enough power went into that explosion to – oh, I don't know, build a few hundred thousand cars, to maybe run the entire US Air Force for the next year or two or… You know, there was a lot of power in the explosion to make a light flash that you could see 250 miles away. This is a lot of light.

I looked this over and I was impressed with the fact that… I knew a dynamite expert one time. He was crazy. And you have to be crazy to be a dynamite expert in the first place. That's the first requisite, just like in nuclear physics. They don't take… They look at your Johnson Temperament Analysis and if you're not psychotic you're not permitted to work on a government project, that's all. See? See, you're through.

So anyway, knew this dynamite agent – he handled dynamite for a lot of companies; he sold it and so on – and he used to go around and experiment with it. He'd throw it at rocks. You know, caps – he'd throw them at rocks. He had a slingshot of considerable velocity and he'd take bichloride of mercury caps, you know, and he'd shoot at jack rabbits with them. This was an optimist.

But he would have been refused on a government project; they wouldn't have had anything to do with him.

But he at least had sense enough not to explode atom bombs in his own front room. See, he just had sense enough not to do that.

Now, the US government has the Pacific Ocean out here. The last time I took a good look at it – I took a pretty good look at it – we were flying like mad for a number of days to get across the thing. And it's a big ocean. It's got water in it and it goes in all directions. And if you wanted to keep on exploding things, I dare say a good idea would be to go out there someplace and get lost. That would be a fine idea.

But I think the US government at this time has blown up all the islands out there. They've run out of that so they soon will run out of Nevada. And I expect at any moment to find Arizona requisitioned or something of the sort, because they've got to find out whether or not these things will explode. They don't know so they keep blowing them up. I think it's real interesting.

Well, I met a fellow the other day – the other day… quite a while ago; several weeks ago – who had been an expert… He was a kind of a clerk. He was a mathematical expert, and when people would turn in computations to him from the hot front desk of the AEC, you know, why, he'd check them all over and make sure that they had the proper number of errors in them in order to send them through. And this was exactly what his job was, and that was all he did.

And this man was a mouse. This man was an utter mouse. He even squeaked when he talked. And he said… he came to see me. He had known me in school, and so on, and he heard I was here and came to complain to me that the US population didn't have a proper respect for atom bombs, but it wouldn't be long before they did. And he was no longer a mouse. He was no longer a mouse. He was a tough man. He had a feeling of superiority about him that he had never had before. He had a big certainty.

The first certainty this little man had, that he's always been scared of the human race. He was just sure the human race some morning was go­ing to get up and forget to look and step on him, and that would be the end of it.

And then he got a job for the AEC, and this probably was held up to the point where he came by his greatest certainty. And his greatest certainty was – and he told me this – that it was time that I got wise to myself and got on the right team, because being a civilian these days didn't pay. And anybody who'd majored in physics belonged in there with the government, because it was dangerous these days to be a civilian.

And I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "Where's your post?"

"Well," he says, "we work in Las Vegas."

And I said, "Well, how does this protect you?"

"Well," he says, "I'm part of the Atomic Energy Commission! Ahem!"

Boy, he was all swelled up with the bomb, this boy was, you know. And I said, "Now, if I understand you correctly by the computation which you have just laid before me, an Atomic Energy badge held up before the face or worn, perhaps, in the breast pocket will fend off any number of gamma rays no matter how closely exploded. Is that correct?"

And he says, "You're joking." He said, "Of course it won't."

I said, "Well, all right. Now, you're a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Now, how does that protect you against the atom bomb?"

"Well," he says, "uh… we're the people who explode them!"

"Yeah, but you're not a member of the Atomic Energy Commission of Russia!"

And his mathematical brains were grinding out an equation which read this way: blast plus blast plus blast plus blast equals great certainty. Hubbard plus blast plus ten minutes' conversation equals uncertainty. Answer to equation: remove self from Hubbard's house.

It's very interesting. Here was certainty by impact. We had actually taken a little man whose… Well, a good opponent for him would have been a dust mote.

And we take this guy and we hit him; we hit him. We show him he's a part of the most powerful, forceful team in the world, you see, that can blow up the whole globe. Pardon me. I didn't mean to go into that, but that's the password today. It's how you know a member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

And I don't want to overdraw it; after all, I just did that. That is the password. Anyway… Of course, when I burlesque it that's different.

All right. And he'd heard all about putting up a couple of homes and filling them with the dummies of a couple of American families and blowing it flat, you know? And it didn't blow very flat.

By the way, that was a very bad disappointment to the AEC. Do you know that the homes weren't badly destroyed? Did you know that the bomb really didn't wreck the homes and the dummies in it were untouched? Do you remember that experiment? Well, they never let that out. They miscalculated or something.

Anyway, from this partial failure they'd worked up to bigger and bigger bombs, and the dynamite expert kept on exploding dynamite in his living room and more dynamite and more dynamite, and this guy had gotten tougher and tougher. Bang, you see. Bang – these explosions. Bang. Tough, tough, tough. And all of a sudden somebody came along and said, "Hey, you are not an atom bomb."

Now I'll give you the rest of his appearance. His hair was standing on end, bristly with a kind of a loop out this way. He was wearing a white coat, black pants. Interesting character.

And somebody had talked to him and said, "Look, it doesn't matter how many badges you carry, you're still a target. You're not the bomb, you're the target." And it shook him to pieces. I dare say he probably went back to Nevada and had a nervous breakdown and became ever more acceptable. I imagine this is what happened to him.

Personification of some forceful object. But this fellow had a certainty. Had a big certainty, didn't he? But what happened to this certainty? It was a certainty by impact, and that's one kind of certainty. Impact, impact, big force, big force, impact. And all of a sudden the fellow becomes real certain.

Actually, you could probably take some hu­man being and hit him and hit him and hit him and hit him, tell him each time that he was a goat, and hit him some more and tell him he was a goat, and hit him some more and tell him he was a goat until the highest certainty the man would have was that he was a goat. And you'd say, "Are you a goat?" And he'd say, "Baaa."

Certainty by impact. But what would happen to him? What's happened to him? You've de­stroyed his self-selection of beingness; his self-determinism has thereby disintegrated. But he's left in this fixed role – a goat. There he is. He's all set. He is a goat, but with what ease can he be disturbed from that role of a goat? And when he is disturbed from the role, somebody comes along and says, "You are not a goat."

And he said, "Baa-baa."

And you say, "Now, look. You are not a goat, and I wish you to observe this goat, and now look down and look at your right hand and see if it looks like one of…"

And the fellow, if you could have gotten him to look a little bit, would have looked at the goat. "Oh, yeah…" You would have gotten an awfully uncertain fellow right about that moment. He would have become very uncertain.

Now, if we'd carried it just a little bit further and we'd ask him to inspect the goat carefully, we'd asked him to inspect the floor and in­spect his own feet, we probably would have brought him out into a feeling of higher cer­tainty than he'd had as a goat.

It was merely my own meanness, my viciousness, which didn't carry on the process any further with this mathematician. I was being sold a new word – glory, hallelujah, gamma, gamma, gamma.

Now, he came in to sell me the new word, and he got unsold. Well, that's very well, and you vvant to be careful when you sell a new word that you can't yourself be badly unsettled about it. You've got to know enough about the new word so that it isn't unsettling.

Now, when this individual is fixed in a role like this, his self-determinism deteriorates. Now, this is a very certain man, you understand, this man that's being the goat, before you "ungoat" him. He's a very, very certain man – he's got big certainty.

You walk up to him – and if you did it with anything less than Scientology – you walk up to him and you'd say, "Now, look. Look, pal, you're really not a goat. You're really not a goat."

He'd say, "Huh! Baaa!"

And this is all you'd get out of him. And the more you tried to tell him he wasn't a goat, why – you know, you try and inform him he's not a goat, explain to him how unreasonable it is to suppose he's a goat – the more he would "baa" at you. As a matter of fact, you'd fix him into being a goat.

Now, his rationale during that period of great certainty is the rationale of a goat. We ask him with a telepathometer – which we just invented over in the laboratory… Telepathometer. The electronics men over there don't know it yet, but we invented it today. That's how to get the actual verbalized thoughts of a goat who can't talk.

And we put this telepathometer on him and we turn up its dials, its rheostats, and we get it all set here. And here he is.

And we say, "What is good to eat?"

Telepathometer says, "Tin cans." See?

We say, "What is the loveliest thing in the world?"

"Nanny goat."

"What is the most wonderful smell in the world?"

"(Censor. Censor.)"

Yet, he's a man. He's not a goat. He's giving you a goat's answers, isn't he? And he's terribly certain. He has a big feeling of certainty. He's got a feeling that, well, he's got life by the tail. We unsettle him, he isn't.

Now, what would happen to this fellow if we put a telepathometer on him – he obviously was not in good communication – and we'd said, "What is the target?"

He probably would have said, "Russia."

You'd said, "How much amperage can you generate?"

He would probably have given you the proper number, you see?

If you'd said, "What is your weight?" he'd have given you the weight of an atom bomb. Get the idea?

That's what we call psychosis: a false certainty.

Therefore, almost without exception, you can say that a certainty arrived at by impact is a false certainty.

This girl – she gets married; her husband beats her. She didn't intend to cheat on him. She didn't intend to be anything but a good wife, but he's a bum and he decides he'd better beat her around, make her a good wife. She's already a good wife so he beats her around and he says, "You (censor, censor) oughta (censor, censor) because you're (censor, censor). Yeah, and you'd better get in line and so forth and square around, and snap and pop, and all that sort of thing." And if he kept it a straight line like that he would have a bad woman on his hands, just like that.

Her biggest certainty would become that she was a bad woman, which leaves her what choice? To act like one. Get the idea?

You get how horribly idiotic this type of certainty is? Somebody beats this girl up and tells her all the time how bad she is and so she becomes just that bad. By impact, by force, she has become disabused of any self-determinism about what to be and has become the thing which was the superior force – bad.

So we have a certainty, but she's certain, isn't she?

We meet her in a bar ten years from now. She's been divorced from three guys and mar­ried to none of them and she's half hung over and so forth. And we ask her, "What are you?"

She would say, "I'm a bad girl."

That would be the biggest certainty she had. Big certainty. That's it.

"Well, how does a bad girl act?"

"Well, I act like a bad girl acts. I mean, that's how you act. That's the best way to act."

We give her certainty. We don't give her any self-determinism.

We could say, then, that there were two kinds of certainties: one arrived at through self-determinism and one arrived at through impact or abuse.

Oddly enough, when an individual can determine something of his own volition, independent of impact or without fear of impact, he has this peculiarity: he can become certain of it at will. This is the peculiarity: he can be certain at will. He can be certain of something because it's true as he observes it, or certain of something because he's made up his mind he's certain.

See what these two extremes are? Impact until one is no longer rational, arriving at a certainty of fixed identity, and the other one, the higher level, a self-determinism sufficient to determine for oneself those things of which one is certain.

Which would be the best person? Well, it's a funny thing, but there is no solution to a problem by impact – no solution. Impact is no solution because it establishes certainties which were true for the moment but which cease to be true shortly afterwards.

Let's take a little boy and let's start punishing him. Let's spank him. Let's tell him he's a bad little boy. Let's tell him he's got to mind, he's got to obey, he's a bad little boy, he's got to mind, he's got to obey. And then for variation, he's a bad little boy, and he's got to mind and he's got to obey, and he's a bad little boy, and he's got to mind, he's got to obey. And we keep this up. We keep this up all during the time he's four and five. Then he goes to live with Grandma because he keeps having hives or something.

And when he gets twenty, he's a bad little boy who's got to mind, obey. Yeah, but look, when he was four, he was a bad little boy, but when he was twenty he might be bad or good, but he's certainly a young man. And the oddity is if the punishment were sufficient it would arrest him in time of the impact. He could be arrested in the moment of the impact. He could be stuck at four or five so that he would have many characteristics. And these characteristics we could call psychosomatic illnesses.

We take some young man of twenty who cannot reproduce his own kind; he is impotent. He may only be stuck at four or five being a bad little boy, and bad little boys at four or five are impotent. It's just as simple as this. It's one of these elementary problems that is far too simple to have been grasped with great ease.

But his big certainty is that he's a bad little boy. And if you were to start asking him very closely on through the social machinery that says "hello" and "okay" and "I'm fine"-if you started asking him bluntly – "Now, what are you really? What are you being? What are you?" he'd think it over for a long time. He'd probably give you a lot of answers one way or the other. And probably one that's been sort of there all the time would suddenly become apparent to him. It's so there that he doesn't even think to mention it, but he knew it all the time. The funny sensation that he will have of suddenly recognizing that it's been there all the time – he'll tell you, "I'm a bad little boy. That's what I am."

Met a girl one time. I kept asking her, "Now, what are you? Now, what are you?"

And she'd give me various answers to the question "What are you?" And various answers. "What are you?" More answers. "What are you?"

"There's something; I have a haunted feeling here. I… I just… just… something right here. I don't quite know what…"

And I ask her again, "What are you?" and ask her again, "What are you?"

She finally says, "I am a broken windshield."

That's what she was being. And it fitted every strange characteristic that she had – and she had a lot of them.

She had gone through an automobile accident and had gone through a windshield, and had then been stood over by the police who always come for the sole and entire purpose of talking over unconscious accident victims.

And the talk had been about the broken windshield and the broken glass, and broken windshield and broken glass. And she's lying there all knocked to pieces with a skull concussion, and the next thing you know, why, she's a broken windshield, and she'd been being a broken windshield for a long time. She wasn't really crazy, she was simply a broken windshield.

Well, there was a little further computation on it: her husband, who was also in the accident and kept worrying about the broken windshield, and she'd kind of always hoped her husband would think a little bit about her. He was in the nightclub business and he didn't think much about her. And so I suppose these computations went together and that's what she was. That's what she was being.

What has impact convinced this person into being? What has impact finally convinced this person that he or she is? We've got it. They'll have some big false certainty, and every one of those false certainties that is achieved in that fashion is an aberration, a psychosis.

Now, how healthy do you think a broken windshield is? Hm? Well, the first place, it couldn't feel its bruises, could it? And yet it would act kind of cracked. It would get heartbroken very easily and numerous other computations. Actually, everything would be very clear about the situation – very clear. Anybody would be very easily seen through because to some degree other people were being broken windshields too. She was being an object because of impact.

The young man on the AEC… I have not said, by the way, that the AEC, totally, down to the last man, including all of its top board and all of its bottom board, are all cracked. I have not inferred that they are psychotic. I haven't even let it slip my lip that these boys need to be jacked up and have a new brain run into the old chassis. I haven't inferred that they feel powerful and omnipotent simply because they are atom bombs. This has not been the text of my speech tonight. We are not down on the AEC. It would be a very hard thing to get down on an atom bomb. I want that here for the record because the description is too mild – entirely too mild.

The situation is this: A group of people can be threatened with such enormous force – with such enormous force – that just the contempla­tion of this force, because of the past experience they have had, gives them a certainty that they're in danger. Just contemplating the force gives them the certainty they're in danger. And if you were to put enough force there, they would be so certain they would be in danger that they would go into the level of apathy and do nothing about that danger whatsoever.

The "black panther mechanism": One simply sits down and neglects. Everybody knows there's a black panther sitting right there, but nobody does a thing about the black panther. Why? What can you do about a black panther? Somebody'd come along and say, "Well, you shoot him, you can put him in a cage, you can do anything – he's liable to eat you up at any minute."

The fellow says, "There's nothing you can do about a black panther."

The AEC the other day said that they were carefully observing the radiation fallout across the nation. Somebody in the office drew a very clever cartoon. It showed a big tiger being released from a cage. And here's a fellow standing over there, and the tiger is jumping at him, and the fellow standing over there is being real scared, see. And the fellow who's releasing it from the cage says, "It's okay. I'm watching him."

And we can keep on throwing up big bombs and big masses and big explosions, and I seriously doubt the American public will ever protest, till one day they could blow up all of Chicago, and nobody would say a word about it.

It's too much force to go up against. You and I know that's too much force to go up against. Yet we might laugh at the black panther and the person sitting there saying, "There's nothing you can do about it." The person might even have a rifle in his hands – still, "I could do nothing about the black panther."

Force. Force is the big myth. The US government today takes this atomic bomb, and it puts billions of dollars into its manufacture and research as a weapon in the Department of Defense. And it's not a weapon of defense. There is no defense against an atomic bomb under present researches. It's a weapon of offense against which there is no known defense, and how that can become a weapon of war we do not know.

If an enemy has a similar weapon then it ceases to become a weapon of war. It's just simply a weapon – if you could call it a weapon at all – which will wipe out all those who use it and on whom it is used. Period. That's not a weapon; that's suicide!

So, I'm showing you, in magnitude, how populaces are very often handled. They are shown a great force such as the atomic bomb, and the government is somehow or other personified or backed up by this force. And then the government comes along and says to somebody, "You are goats." And the fellows look at all this force, and if that's the source of their certainty, if force is the total source of their certainty, if they themselves have no determination about what they can be, they promptly become goats.

That's what's known as a slave state. That's what's known as a complete demolishment of a civilization – when everybody in it becomes a goat because some enormous powerful force apparently is sitting there waiting to slap them. Now, you see, they've had enough experience in certainties. They've had enough experience to know that they can be punished into being something. So the government says they're goats – they're goats.

How does one end freedom and how does one end a free country's liberty? By facing it with sufficient force so that the mere statement that everybody in the country is a goat will bring about that certainty that everybody is a goat. And you could govern a country that way. You could. Now, the US government is not trying to do that today. They're not smart enough – fortunately. I don't say they wouldn't.

There's an interesting thing, that we are looking at aberration when we're looking at this false certainty of impact.

Now, let's look at the individual. It may be twenty, thirty years after he has left his boyhood that he suddenly takes a look at his old man and finds out the old boy has got arthritis and he's kind of weak, that he hasn't any real punch, that he speaks in a quavering voice and that he doesn't really remember things well anymore.

Maybe, however, the old man has been a sufficient symbol of force to the boy, so that to the end of the boy's days he does not even vaguely recognize any slightest weakening in that voice. So even when his father isn't there, his father is evidently standing over him saying, "Now, Henry…" Get the idea? His father has made him into a good boy by force, by impact. Only his father never made a good boy by force or impact.

The symbol of force that carries through fixes an identity in an individual. Maybe you could use such a force for good – maybe. But let me tell you about a better force that can be used for good because it's one that doesn't backfire. Be­lieve me, punishment backfires. Just as they keep sending criminals to the penitentiary and getting back supercriminals, so does punishment always to some degree backfire.

How would we go about, then, bringing about a discipline, a willingness and a cooperation in a society sufficient to carry that society up to higher levels of happiness and endeavor? How would we go about that?

We would have to restore to the society a great deal of its willingness to be. Unless a man is willing to be a good soldier, he will be a bad soldier. He cannot be beaten into being a good soldier. Actually, the only way you could have a good soldier would be one who, by his own consent, was a soldier and was willing to play the game called soldier. And then you'd have a good soldier. He'd be able to think; he'd be able to act; he'd look smart. It's quite interesting, quite interesting.

But a good soldier is there at his own election, and a bad soldier is there because he's been told, "Greetings, young man…"

How to get a rotten army: draft it! How would you utterly ruin the defenses of a country? Conscription! Napoleon's whole government went to pieces under this conscription. He was the first man that broadly used it.

I can talk like this because this country is here because guys like me and I did our part a few years ago. I can talk about the country a hell of a lot better than some of these characters that are around Washington now drooling into their soup plates.

And where it comes to the willingness to serve, we find none of these young men unwilling to serve their country. They merely are unwilling to be driven into a role and a being-ness about which they have not been consulted. And this makes them bad soldiers, just like that. They weren't asked. To hell with you. An interesting thing, isn't it?

We never had morale problems in the navy till we got draftees in World War II. The navy didn't get draftees till about the middle of the war. Then we'd get them aboard and they'd be in trouble across the boards. I've had to straighten out more draftees than you could shake a stick at.

They'd come aboard dirty, sullen, ready to kick the whole thing overboard. They go on liberty, they come back late. They know what they're going to get; they're going to get punishment. They're going to be stood up before a mast, and this and that is going to be done to them.

I never did that to a man. I used to get them down on deck and say, "What the hell is wrong with you letting this ship down? We maybe don't care what happens to the rest of the navy, but the guys on this ship have a vested interest in living through this war! And the only thing we expect of you is to aid and abet that endeavor, whether you wanna live or not. And we'd be very happy of your cooperation, so that when… demobilization day we'll all be demobed, not have wreaths laid on us every Armistice Day."

Well, the guy would think it over. In that crude way, he had been invited to the party for the first time. And they made good sailors. But they never afterwards considered themselves a part of the US Navy.

The admirals get mad at you for doing this. It's awful. They come aboard to inspect the ship. Everybody's doing everything snap, polish, beautiful – time of war, a dungaree navy, you know? Everybody's wearing dress… undress blues. The decks are all washed, and everything that's supposed to be clean is clean, and all the armament works and everything else.

I've seen admirals absolutely gibber. Somehow or another they knew that you were being disloyal to the navy. You were too. You'd invited them to a party called "one ship"; they could see that.

All right. Conscription. Conscription is an effort to drive men by threat of punishment into delivering punishment. Doesn't work.

Actually, five thousand trained professionals could do all the fighting that America has to do. Give them the weapons, and they could go out and do it. You get a half a dozen flyers and put someone like General Chennault at the head of them, wipe out the Russian Air Force; because they're all conscripted. It's easy. It's easy. Chennault would tell you that and the rest of them.

Where do we get this idea, then, that the short circuit is force? Well, we come to something else – a dramatization, the thing called "dramatization."

After one has been hit hard enough and long enough, and he's got punchy enough, he thereafter begins to believe that the only thing that will bring about any effect whatsoever is to get somebody else punchy enough so that they will be what you tell them to be. It's a dramatization. It's a psychotic manifestation.

And so we get this into the line. And it keeps going on and on and on, and it never remedies itself; it never gets better. The dramatization is just more and more. There's no… At last no­body is thinking at all. "We're soldiers. We're civilians. We're…" label, label, label, label. We're all set, see? Everybody's a label. Huh!

I invite you to go down sometime to a big department store and note that after the men have departed from the shipping section that the labels do everything necessary to keep the store in order. Or do they? You have to be alive and have a little inertia, a little energy, a willingness to laugh and cry a little bit before anything moves in your vicinity. In other words, you have to be certain at your own election, not certain because somebody else elected you. And that's a fact.

So what is this thing called certainty? It is the very heart of sanity, and when an individual tries to deliver to another individual certainty by impact, duress and punishment, he has delivered to him less life. And if we all handled each other with duress and punishment, we would eventually all be dead.

A nation is as alive as it has life in it. It is as alive as men are free to be. It is as alive as men freely support that nation toward its goals, and it's more alive than that.

An individual is not as alive as his heart beats. He is not as alive as his toes wiggle. No. He is as live as he can consent to play the role he is playing. If he is then playing that role by his own consent, he'll be alive to a remarkable degree.

It's a remarkable thing, isn't it? It has a lot to do with willingness to be. If you are willing to be or if you are capable of being, by your own determinism, then you can be certain of life, and you can be certain of the future, and you can be certain of what you are doing and certain of the motives, good or bad, of those around you – if you are capable of determining your own beingness.

And when you are no longer capable of determining your own beingness, then you will not be certain, because when you get down to the point where you're totally certain by impact, you're so crazy that you don't even know whether or not you're crazy anymore. You're not alive enough to know whether or not you're crazy.

Once in a while, somebody rushes up to me, and he says, "You know," he says, "it's a remarkable thing. I have just slipped my gears and I don't know but… it's just happened. I've gone nuts!"

And I congratulate him, and I say, "Brother, maybe you just found out you were sane!" Because the fellow who's nuts never knows it; he's too crazy.

The fellow who goes around and says, "You know, there's something wrong with my conduct. Every time I sit down, I say, 'Beep!' It's not right. Something wrong with my conduct."

Say, the fellow who's crazy, he sits down, he goes, "Beep, beep, beep."

Somebody comes along and says, "Whatcha going 'beep, beep, beep' for?"

He says, " 'Cause I'm going 'beep, beep, beep.' That's why I'm going 'beep, beep, beep.' Hraa!"

He'll get real mad and he'll fight because somebody has challenged his sanity. Get the idea?

Well, when we look over this problem of certainty and health, whether we view it on the individual or the group level as we would view national health, we discover that the individual is either capable of being affected by force, or immune to force and free, or the nation is similarly free. Or the individual is so affected by force, so afraid of force, so apathetic about force that anything in the guise of force can drive him into doing anything. And that individual is a slave. And that nation so threatened becomes a slave state no matter whether it is called Taoism or autocracy. That is the definition of a slave state: one so threatened by overwhelming force that it can no longer choose its own course.

Now, you must remember that sanity and health have a great deal to do with each other. Do you know that a very healthy man can get sick at will and recover from it as long as he doesn't have to hide it and kid others about why he's getting sick.

Let's take this young boy. He doesn't like his new teacher. He doesn't want to go to school, so he says, "Ma, I'm sick," and he lies in bed.

All of us have done that one time or another. "I'm sick. I don't wanna go to school. I feel bad."

"Well, what's the matter with you?"

"Oh, my uh… stomach hurts."

And Mamma says, "That's very bad. That's very bad for you to lie to me like this. Get to school."

So he does. Or he convinces her by immediately getting a stomachache.

Now, the oddity is that somebody who, under processing in Scientology, has achieved a pretty good capability of determinism and decision can actually say, "Oh, boy, does my foot hurt," and immediately have a very painful foot. You know? Boy, that's a painful foot.

The next thing that he does is forget that he does it. Get the idea? You know, he says, "That foot hurts. Now, I didn't say that foot hurts. I'm really… I really got a hurt foot. I didn't say it." No responsibility, no responsibility. "I didn't think that. I couldn't have thought that. Because everybody around me tells me that I mustn't have any pain, you know. I've got to get well every time I get sick."

That's unreasonable. There isn't any reason why everybody has to get well every time they're sick. The only thing we object to people getting sick about is getting sick without knowing that they made themselves sick. See? That's the only thing we wise a person up to, really, on this subject. We say, "Well, we're not hanging you with the responsibility, but if you will just run this little process for a while…" and the fellow all of a sudden says, "Yeah, I made myself sick." An individual can therefore affect his body in numerous ways.

Now, there are those present, I am sure, who are saying to themselves, "I never told myself to be sick in my entire life." Would you please drop a nickel in the side slot of the computing machine and remember the time in school when you did do just that – pretended you were sick in order to keep from going to school.

Now, psychosomatic illness is simply this: an individual living in a high state of certainty decided that he did not feel well in some peculiar way and has then by impact or some other means become unaware, and so says he's sick without knowing how or why.

Now, the funny part of it is, it's all very well for you to come along now and say, "Look, you, you did it yourself, for heaven's sakes." The guy won't get well. He'll even agree with you. "All right. I did it myself." He won't get well.

We wonder what on earth is this. You know? And you say, "Now look, you really haven't got cerebral palsy. You really don't have this at all. What you do have is your own thought that you shake." Fellow agrees with this because he's will­ing to agree with anything. He's just shaking so hard… Get the idea?

He'll agree with you. "Yeah, that's right. I did it. I did it."

So we say a mentally caused illness, such as a psychosomatic illness – we say this psychosomatic illness is caused by the mind in its action on the body. We do not then infer that the illness is not real. And that is the main mistake that medicos make and others make with psychosomatic ill­ness: "It's not real because it's caused by the mind." I'd like to know what illness could be real that wasn't caused by the mind.

Now, if you are over twenty, are you a different person now than you were when you were ten? It's another guy. And unless you can be ten again… All you have to be is ten in your head,see?

You have to be willing to be ten to say, "I'm not sick." Isn't that cute? That's all the trick there is to healing a psychosomatic illness: just getting somebody to change his mind about beingness – what he's willing to be.

When he was three years old, he saw a little boy on crutches, felt sorry for him, and himself got lame. He took the illness on himself, you know.

So he went around on the idea that he's on crutches, and so forth. This helped the other boy, it'd show him he was sympathetic, and so forth. He just decided to be sick for the other little boy's sake, decided to stammer; it was a good game.

Well, then we get him to school, and he's about five, and another little boy beats him up and says, "You're just a baby."

And he says, "No, I'm not a baby." "No!" he says, "I'm not a baby."

He gets to be a Cub Scout, and he disdains all those little kids in the block. And he gets to be a Boy Scout, and he disdains those Cub Scouts, see? "No, I'm no kid anymore," he says, "when I'm eighteen." You know, "I'm no kid. I'm eighteen years old. I'm grown-up. I'm a man now. I'm no child any longer." Gimp, gimp, gimp, you see?

An individual called Roger, three years old: Is he willing to be Roger anymore? No, he sure isn't willing to be three-year-old Roger anymore. He's eighteen-year-old Roger. Different guy, different time.

To get rid of something you've done, you only have to be willing to be in similar circumstances, and it's gone. That's about all there is to it.

Thank you very much.