Like to talk to you a little bit more about viewpoints. Viewpoints, of course, are basic in space and actually basic in havingness. And I hope that you have some inkling now of the fact that havingness is condensed space. And when somebody knows he can't create or look at anything easily, when you tell him to reach out into space or look at space, you uncondense his havingness.
Let's say this fellow is going along in life and he says, „Now look,“ he says, „I have a certain store of peanuts, and this is all I have. And if I do anything at all it will disturb this pile of peanuts. Now, here is this pile of peanuts and if I make some space I've got to take four peanuts and put them out in the room.“ He actually doesn't do this but - I mean, he doesn't even put out dimension points - but he thinks of this. „If I made any space, I'd have to take four of these precious peanuts and put them out in the room.“
Now, supposing you said to this person who had this pile of peanuts as his total possession, „Now, take four of those peanuts“ - see, he has a finite number of them - „take four of those peanuts and put them in the room. Now, take four of them and put them around the house, now take four of them and put them around the town, and now take two of them and put them in your childhood home. Now, put a couple in the center of the city.“ And he looks at this dwindling pile of peanuts and he says, „Oh, no, no, no, no.“ He doesn't like that.
Well, that would be the same thing as you saying to somebody, „Now spot a spot in the center of the room, now spot a spot above the building, now spot a spot outside the building.“ Or actually just this: „Reach and withdraw from your childhood home. Now reach for it, withdraw from it, reach for it, withdraw from it, reach for it.“ Of course, he's reaching and withdrawing from something illusory. He probably has a picture of the childhood home, he's not really reaching for the childhood home, you see. And the more he reaches and withdraws from the childhood home the more distance you are entering in, you see. It's just the problem of distance. Every time you enter distance in, you got space entering in. So you say „reach and withdraw,“ you're just taking his pile of peanuts to pieces.
Now, almost any process - or any process - which does introduce distance then reduces the havingness of an individual. Anything which condenses distances increases his havingness. So anything which reaches as a problem, anything which reaches, decreases his havingness. Anything that withdraws increases his havingness. You should say, reach and withdraw then balances. Well, it doesn't, mostly because he isn't withdrawing anything when he comes back. But that's just a rough rule of thumb.
Now, here we have this fellow. We should run him this way: „Now put four peanuts around the room. All right, you got them around the room?“ You know, in other words, spot some spots in the space of the room. „Okay, now let's put four peanuts around you and pull them in on you.“
„Okay.“ He'll take the peanuts quite ordinarily out of the corners of the room and pull them in on him again. Well, he's got his peanuts back. „Okay,“ he says. He got away with that.
Now, you say, „Put these four peanuts around the building.“ So he does. Now, you say, „Put four peanuts around you and pull them in on you.“ Well, he'll take those four peanuts that are around the building and pull them in on him and put them back in the pile. You know, he's conserving his havingness. Now you say, „Okay, now let's spot some spots in space.“ So he puts four peanuts floating in space, somewhere in the vicinity of the room. And then you say, „Pull four peanuts in on you.“
„Oh,“ he says, „I don't want to disturb those.“ He's getting lazy now, you see, and he'll just leave those four peanuts out there in space and he'll put up four new peanuts that he mocked up and pull them in on himself.
He's.... „What the heck is going on?“ something is liable to say in his machinery. „Look-a-here. I had just put out four peanuts and I pulled in four peanuts, but I've got as many peanuts as I had before and there are still four more than I had floating out in the middle of the room. Hey-hey-hey-hey, what's going on here?“ You know, something alerts to the fact that the truth of the matter is he can create many more piles of peanuts than he's got sitting there.
All right, so we say then to him now, „Put some four peanuts around your childhood home and put some out in space, and put some elsewhere, and put some elsewhere,“ and he's starting to watch this pile go down. Oh, he starts to get nervous. He doesn't want one of them... You see, if he didn't have any peanuts at all he would be a complete pauper and this would finish him. So you just go on. You say, „Put four peanuts somewhere else.“ Nrrrh. „Put four more peanuts out,“ you know.
„Oh, no-no-no, no, no. No, I'm sorry but peanuts have become very valuable right here at this moment.“ And he starts to get nervous, so you better give him some new peanuts. So you put up eight peanuts around him, pull them in. You tell him, „Put up eight peanuts, pull them in, eight peanuts, pull them in, eight peanuts, pull them in.“ Stack is getting bigger now. „Eight peanuts, pull them in.“
Now, maybe this time you decide to be real vicious about the whole thing and just make him do this for a while. Well, by golly he starts getting peanuts that are heaped up on the table and they're flowing over onto the floor. He'll tell you something like, „You know, I'm beginning to feel stuffed. I'm beginning to feel too full. I'm too heavy.“
„If I put in one more galaxy,“ a fellow said to me one day, „I'm going to sink straight through the crust of Earth.“ I don't think he would have although the crust is only forty miles thick and below that is nothing but molten lava. But anyway, he was getting too heavy.
You're overcargoing him. But it's better to overcargo them anytime than it is to take it all away, because if you give them enough peanuts back, pretty soon they're perfectly willing to take peanuts and fill up garbage cans with them and throw them in the river and dump them in fires and everything else. In other words, they'll be more relaxed with their havingness, more relaxed about their havingness. Which is to say, not so worried about loss.
And you get somebody and you've repaired his havingness up to one of these superabundances, and you say, „Now look out there in space and locate that spot and that spot and that spot and another spot and another spot and another spot and another spot and another spot and another spot and another spot and another spot.“
And he says, „To hell with it, I can go on locating spots.“
Well, maybe you don't achieve this for maybe ten hours of processing to a point where an individual can actually just go on locating spots in space ad infinitum without the least concern about the way this decreases his havingness. He has stumbled across the great truth that he can mock up anything he wants or needs in terms of havingness.
So in processing somebody we are going toward the goal of abundance, just like it says in the Factors - the goal of abundance. If a man cannot have abundance, he cannot have space.
If you have ever experienced a great loss, you can possibly recall the feeling that the entire environment pulled in on you at that moment. It pulled in on you from below and above and everything else. You'll occasionally track back a preclear in processing, and somebody processed him very poorly and took away far, far, far too much havingness - you know, just got in there savagely and tore up everything and chewed up everything. Of course, he'd only have done this in the old days if the guy had really been butchered, you know, as a preclear. I mean, he'd have had to have breaks in the Auditor's Code and everything else before this thing come about. And you can sometimes trace a case back who was occluded to a moment when all of a sudden it was brought to their attention by an invalidation or an evaluation or a mean auditor or something, you see, Auditor Code breaks - it was brought to their attention suddenly „Do you know that I am just losing everything there is.“ And the individual just sort of reaches out into all the environment around him, below him and above him and pulls it all in, crunch! Only what does he pull in? He doesn't pull in anything he mocked up, he pulls in a lot of electronic standing ridges he's got all over the place. Some of them belonged in Boston and some of them belonged in Florida and some of them belonged in the childhood home, and so forth; and he just pulled in Boston and Florida and the childhood home and everything else right on the top of his head. „Now,“ he says, „I've got all this havingness, but this is a rather intolerable situation so I'll paint it all black.“ He just does this, he paints everything black, and so forth. That's a sudden occlusion with regard to loss.
Now, let's say this fellow has been going along in life. He's been doing all right. He made his first million when he was twenty-two, and another million when he was twenty-six, and another million when he was twenty-seven, and eighteen or twenty million more, you know, like some guys could do once upon a time when we had a free country. And... It's against the law to make money now; you get fined for it. If you don't believe that, consult the income tax bureau.
By the way, I don't want to knock income tax. Income tax is merely a penalty for having, and a government has a right to penalize people and has a right to kill people, has a right to break the country. It owns the country after all, and the people have nothing to do with it. And so don't get mixed up politically here. The world today is gauged so that you can't have a thing. If you do have anything, you get your teeth kicked in. Anyway, I'm totally impartial politically.
And this fellow comes along. And then one day, one day, why, there was some senator who wanted a couple of constituents more than he had before so he passed a law saying „All people engaged in making money out of peanut oil will now be taxed 110 percent of their taxes that they have already paid to the government, plus 220 percent of their income.“ You know, some reasonable law. And this guy all of a sudden is presented lock, stock and barrel with a complete loss, you know, zoom! His bank balances were good, his industry has earned him some money, he got people working, everything was going along fine and then all of a sudden, zing! gone. It's the ratio. It is the speed of loss. And that is a little factor which is not terribly valuable in processing but certainly can be used to understand life. How fast did he lose it?
If you break the news of Papa's death to somebody simply by saying - you know, this person is very well attached to their father and you come up to this person - and you say to him, „Well, your father's dead.“ The speed of loss is too great. The person is liable to go completely unconscious or grief-stricken. You can really stick them hard.
But now let's say you say, „Well now, just got a telephone call from your home.“
„Yes, yes, yes.“
„And ... it's about ... your father.“
„Well, what about my father? Something wrong with my father?“
„Well, you know your father was a pretty old man.“
„He's sick.“
„Well, he's „He's dead.“ The person will orient this fact. They themselves have done the realization. You haven't poleaxed them. The same person with the news imparted in that fashion would still be standing on their feet. If the news were broken too fast, that is to say speed of loss was too brief, too much loss in too little time, why, they would go unconscious.
Now, you can stand to lose a body over a period of seventy years. You do, scrap by scrap, little by little, but when you lose one in seventy microseconds, it makes an effect. As a matter of fact, it'll put a standing ridge there that is very interesting to behold.
Well, what's the fellow do who is fined for having made five or six million dollars and put a lot of people to work in the society, who is fined his total income. At the second of loss, an enormous loss of his character... See, he could have lost a hundred thousand this month and a half a hundred thousand the next month and, you know, stretched it out and he would have made it all right. But he lost all this all at once. What's he do? The material objects go away so fast as to leave him with no actual havingness. So he reaches out into the entire environment and pulls in every standing ridge he can get his hands on. His spirit when he does this is a sort of a self-punishment. „Well, I will make a good mess out of it.“ You know, he sort of has that feeling.
Well, he will bring in every engram he's got in the bank, just whing! And you'll find him a little bit later sitting in a solid ball, and you wonder what the hell he's sitting in. Well, what he's sitting in is something very easy to recognize. At some time or another he has had too much loss in too little time under circumstances which themselves were very antagonistic. And when he recognized that he had lost this, he reached out to every part of the environment he could reach almost simultaneously and pulled the whole darn environment in on him.
Now, this left him in a state of not being able to have, because it was very uncomfortable having all this electronic material which he pulled in on himself That was very uncomfortable. So he says, „I don't want any more, believe me. Not only did I lose everything, which convinces me I can't have anything, but now that I have pulled in what I could have, which is to say engrams and ridges and things like that, they're so uncomfortable and painful that I want nothing to do with them either.“ And you find an individual negating against havingness. He doesn't want anything to do with havingness, and yet he has to have something to do with havingness.
So you tell him to locate some space. „Oh,“ he says, „that's easy, I can throw this stuff away, you know. I'll let it go, that's all right.“
„Some more space, locate some more space, locate some more space, locate some more space, locate some more space.“ He starts to get sick, because the truth of the matter is he needs a certain amount of havingness.
You know, on a sort of a self-destructive impulse he's perfectly willing to unload the whole bank. You'll find these individuals who are very heavily occluded will run out and eat up and chew up energy, and waste it and do the darnedest things with it. They know they can't have.
Well, you process this individual by locating some space and then increasing his havingness by making him mock up something acceptable. Person probably can't mock up and pull in anchor points, but he can mock up an acceptable grandmother or an acceptable body or an acceptable pair of eyes or an acceptable tooth, you know, decayed and aching. He can mock up some sort of havingness. His acceptance level is right there for you to tap, just like that. And so you repair his havingness a little bit, and you then have him spot some space and repair his havingness and have him spot some space and repair his havingness and spot some space, and all of a sudden, „Oh,“ he says, „maybe I could have something.“ He says, „It's quite amusing here. I seem to find that I could have myself in total rags and starved. I can have something. I can have myself in total rags and starved.“ The funny part of it is, is that's more than he had as he was sitting there in the chair before you gave it to him. Totally starved and in rags is in better condition, really, than he actually is in.
He's carrying along on the third dynamic, the society, you know? He's just carrying along with the society. He dresses well because he's just running on other people's postulates in the society he should dress well. On his own self-determinism, however, his level of acceptance is starved and in rags. If he could have some starvation, at least the sensation of starvation, he would have more sensation than he's capable of experiencing. You know, it would be experience. If he could have some rags, they'd really be his rags. The clothes that are sitting on him aren't his. He's a sort of a kept thing. He doesn't feel like he owns anything. He doesn't feel like any part of life belongs to him. And therefore, starved and in rags, which is acceptance level, makes him quite happy.
You wonder occasionally why somebody says, „Gee, you know, look at those crushed eyeballs. Oh boy, aren't they beautiful, you know. Sure. I can sure pull those in.“
Well, he can't have his own eyes. You're giving him the first pair of eyes that he's been able to call his own for a long time, a pair of mocked-up, crushed eyeballs. Well, you'd say, „This bird sure is poor. He's sure poor. He's a real pauper.“
Well, actually, that's what he is. He's poor. What can he have? Well, that's acceptance level. So you have to find out what he can have because his total belief - before you processed him on this - his total belief was simply this: He couldn't have a thing; he could have nothing. Well, you disabused him of this. How did you do that? You found out what was acceptable to him.
Well, the society is saying to him all the time, „Now look, you can't have crushed eyeballs. You can't have rags.“ It actually denies him these things. The various social agencies won't even permit him to starve comfortably. Somebody'd pick him up and feed him a bowl of soup. Society denies him these various things and yet they're the only things he could have. Well, he of course is caught there between the third dynamic and the first dynamic. And he, by the way, will begin to hate the third dynamic. It's denying him the only things he can have. He can't have anything that other people can have, such as a good body and a nice suit. Yes, his body isn't in bad shape. Yes, his suit is well pressed, he's okay, but it's not his. And the society says, “You couldn't have anything worse than this, we just won't permit you. Your family, name and your reputation and all that sort of thing won't permit you to have anything less than you have.“ Yet his level of havingness is filthy and ragged and diseased and sick and so forth. Well, he could have a body if it were in that shape; nobody else would want it. The society, however, on its social acceptance level, says, „No-no, you can't have the very things that you could have.“ And this catches him in between here and he's just lost. He's already practically shot, and when he comes to realize that he doesn't dare wear any old clothes, he doesn't dare go around and deny himself food. Somebody's always picking on him, saying, „Oh, you gotta eat three meals a day,“ and so forth. And when he recognizes that, he just throws in the sponge.
Now, you've repaired his havingness by giving him the things which he actually could have. Well, he can only have these in mock-up at first, and you're going to process him all the way on up through, and it processes very rapidly. So you're going to process him up to the point where he is able to have the things the society says he should have. Therefore, he can be in agreement with society, and at that moment his reality on the third dynamic will be very great. Why will it be great? Well, that's because he's reached agreement with it. A person out of agreement who is having trouble with ARC is always below the point demanded of them. You see that? An individual having trouble with the third dynamic is always below the social demands of the third dynamic. A person is not above the social demands of the third dynamic and having trouble with it.
These people who go around, you know, saying, „Well, these programs, you know, they're just made for the masses, they're just made for the mob, they're no good, and they're cheap, they're this, they're that, protest, protest, protest, protest, third dynamic, protest, third dynamic, protest, third dynamic.“ You know exactly where he's sitting. He's sitting way below the third dynamic acceptance level in terms of pictures.
What kind of pictures or what kind of books or stories would he read if given a choice? Fine, beautiful, esoteric things that he says the mob should accept. No, huh-uh. Junky, horrible mean stories about apathy, apathy, rape, murder, treachery, stuff that would not only be banned in Boston it would be banned as well in Hollywood. It'd even be banned in an executive's household in Hollywood. I mean, stuff that bad. Oh, you think I'm slamming now the motion picture industry. I'm not. They're through anyhow.
The whole woof and warp of the social structure is measured in acceptance level, a structure of the third dynamic acceptance level. The acceptance level of the third dynamic, however, is not made up of a composite of acceptance levels of its individuals. In other words, if you found out the acceptance levels of twelve individuals, to get their group acceptance level you would not add up or summate and average these twelve individuals. That's really funny, isn't it? The third dynamic is not actually composed of the individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies of its unit parts. The third dynamic is not a composite of its unit parts. This doesn't sound arithmetical, does it? But then arithmetic isn't true. If you were dealing with matchsticks, this would be true, but you happen to be dealing with living beings. And you get twelve, fifteen, twenty human beings together and they will establish a culture which is made up from their experiences on the third dynamic, and it will only be vaguely monitored by the first dynamic.
This is very, very strange. I mean, people working in social economics run up against this all the time. They just don't understand it. „A government, a people, a culture is obviously made up of its component parts. The whole is merely the sum of the parts.“ See, they've tried to reduce man to MEST, and they come a cropper this way. The whole is not, where a society is concerned, the sum of its parts.
Let's take a whole bunch of guys. Let's take fifty guys and get them together, and each one of these guys is pretty bad off and he's stumbling around and he isn't amounting to anything in life. And he's, you know, just pretty bad off, that's all - each one of them. So we say all right. Now, we average up these fifty people and each one of them is really bad off so therefore we've got a third dynamic, this group, then, is bad off and in bad shape. Oh, what a shock some people get sometimes when they figure that way because it doesn't figure that way.
Here was a third division one time on a battleship, and some officer came aboard and, I don't know, he flirted with some other officer's wife or something at a party, which had gotten to the ears of the captain who himself would liked to have flirted with the fellow's wife. And so what they did to this new reporting officer, a lieutenant senior grade, was to give him the third division and then transfer out of the third division all of the good men, and then transfer into the third division everybody who had a criminal service record - anybody with bad court-martials and so forth. And calmly - without telling this lieutenant anything about it - calmly handed over to him his division after they'd done this to it. Well, it was all the bums on the ship. Crack division. It became not only the crack division of the battleship but it became the crack division of the navy in terms of gunnery and big guns. Fascinating.
How did this come apart? How did it come about? Well, I'd heard that story when I was a kid and I fortunately had heard it, otherwise I simply would have dragged out my .45 and slid back the slide and put the muzzle of it against the roof of my mouth and pulled the trigger when I reported to Boston in the very early part of the war to take command of a corvette. They had emptied Portsmouth and that was my crew. Anybody who even vaguely could be let off from serving seven years and accessories, which is to say denial of citizenship. Anybody who had any vaguest idea that he might not immediately kill an officer, you know he might wait for a few days, why, they had scraped together and thrown together one corvette crew. Oh, dear.
It was quite amusing. I saw them come aboard and they were dirty and they were ragged and their hammocks were all muddy and, ooh boy, this was a real foul bunch. Well, I looked through their service records. Summary court-martial, court-martial, summary court-martial, general court-martial, general court-martial, summary court-martial and sentence suspended. Sentence suspended in view of the fact that he has volunteered for sea duty.
Well, you'd have thought that'd been the crummiest ship in the navy. Funny part of it was that individually these people were terrible, but collectively they presented a front which could be very dangerous to an environment. You see that? All they had to do was simply look around and recognize in themselves that we had a social group here that might, because of its numerical superiority, have a chance. They had to recognize that. When they recognized that they straightened up and you never saw such a crew in your life.
This crew, by the way, almost starved an officer to death one day. They were going out... we were going out and testing a new weapon, a new weapon against submarines, and this officer reported aboard to observe this new weapon. And I saw him a couple of times briefly and then noticed he wasn't eating in the wardroom and he wasn't eating anyplace, and Lord knows where he'd been bedded down. And I finally said to one of the boys up on the bridge, I said, „What have you done with Mr. So-and-so?“ Silence. Well, I finally sent for a bosun and had him chase... had this guy chased down. They'd bedded him down in a chain locker and... Yeah, that's right. They'd said that was the only available stateroom. It was a very wet and miserable place. And they had said, well, corvettes out at sea, didn't... they didn't serve much hot food. They generally served K rations. And the boys had stolen some off the army.
What had this guy done to deserve this horrible fate? He'd walked over the gangway, taken a look at the gangway guard - and at that time of the war it was impossible to find anybody in uniform - and he'd seen the gangway guard standing there in undress blues with a neckerchief and a nicely pipeclayed web belt and so forth. You know, kid looked like somebody who should be on guard.
That was not the characteristic of the navy in those days. He should have been standing there much otherwise. And this fellow had said to him sneeringly, he'd said, „Aw, I thought this was the dungaree navy.“ And he went up a bridge ladder and he saw that the thing was... rails were done up with Spanish lace, old White Fleet style, you know. That is to say it looked real pretty. „Huh,“ again he says, „I thought this was the dungaree navy.“
He came up on the bridge and he looked at all the things which were supposed to be polished up. They were all polished up except not to reflect so that anybody'd shoot at you, but the bridge was clean, just burnished, see. „Huh, damndest ship I ever saw.“ That's all he did. Next three days he spent in the chain locker. Nobody in the crew would talk to him. But this was all on their own morale, it was on nobody else's morale. These fellows had resurged as a group. And therefore you find groups quite commonly, quite normally, fusing together a very high-toned society, although the component parts of it are bums.
So let's take a look at that phenomena and realize that it is the numerical strength plus what these fellows feel a third dynamic should be Now, they've gone around complaining about what the third dynamic should be and they all of a sudden find themselves in possession of the ability to form something on the third dynamic. And as soon as they do this, they put together their best ideals. You know? „This is the way it ought to be.“ They fuse those together on the third dynamic and rarely has anything to do with the other.
Here it is. Now, you think I've just been on and on here reminiscing about the navy and - „as officers will do“ - and the war is all over and so forth. But here's a very interesting point. Look at this: We have no slightest mystery here and we have a point which is so valuable that you can heal a psychotic with it.
You can go into a sanitarium where somebody's utterly raving, who is locked up in a padded cell, who has to be kept naked because he'd strangle himself with his shirt; how can we make him well if we know this. What keeps anybody in the run? Responsibility. I refer you to the Handbook for Preclears. There is an article in there on responsibility, but it's about all there is about responsibility. Well, we're interested only in this fragment, and this fragment is this: An individual stays in there pitching because of other people's troubles. You, being quite able actually, being unable to exteriorize perhaps, are doing what? You're bogging down with other people's problems, but actually you're quite able. Really you all by yourself could exteriorize. You all by yourself could jettison your mother's or your father's universe, the physical universe - anything and everything - and go on your way except for one thing. You're only interested in and only have one kind of problem: other people's problems.
You can try in vain to run the concept on a preclear, „My problems.“ This is interesting. You can take any form of concept processing which has been developed and run this in an effort to get some action or change on the preclear. You get just this little tiny change, little shift, it doesn't matter to anything, you know, doesn't matter much. And here's this little tiny change, „my problem.“ Why, look, this individual came into your office talking about his problems. „Oh, I have this and I have that and I'm bogged down here and I'm bogged down there and I'm so unhappy and I lie awake all night worrying.“ And if you were to say to him, “All right, now just mock up this, the unbearable weight of your personal problems or the unbearable weight of your problems. Now, just mock that up and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it.” Why, it should produce some action. It doesn't. The case will go right on, on, on, on. He'll do all the processing on his personal problem that you could imagine.
Now, let's run the other one. Let's have him mock up and then duplicate many times this concept: „other people's problems.“ I'm not giving you an office technique; this would be a very crude and vicious thing to do to the guy. This is experimental. It's just demonstrational. You give him this concept, „other people's problems,“ and, so help me, you'll get automaticity the like of which you never saw in most of the cases you'd apply this to. Other people's problems - zing, zing, zing, zing, zing. That's all there are, are other people's problems. No preclear really has any problems of his own. Every problem he has is somebody else's problem. If there's something wrong with his body, it's somebody else's problem, isn't it? It's his body's problem that he has interested himself in.
If there is something wrong with his mother, he has interested himself in this problem. If there's something wrong with his father, he has interested himself in this problem. We get this rather interesting interwoven scheme in existence, everybody being interested in everybody else's difficulties and nobody, individually, with any slightest difficulty.
Now, we take somebody and we tell him he's a bad boy, we tell him he's no good, we tell him he can't have anything, we back him up against the wall. What are we telling him? „You can't have other people's problems because we're pushing you down to a point where you can't take care of; help or assist other people.“ We're saying that to him continually. See, „You can't have... you can't have anything to solve or help problems. You can't have anything, you can't do anything, and here you are and we just backed you up into a corner and we're not going to let you in on this at all. You can't have other people's problems.“ And he just gets sick as a pup. He gets real sick.
Now, let's take that same fellow, sick as he is, and turn him loose with fifty guys much like himself. All of them have been denied any interest in anybody else's problems. Only, individually, boy, they have plenty of problems evidently. As this composite they evidently have plenty of problems. Oh, they've been knocked around by life and they've had tremendous losses. Well, you'd think that they would simply go in and key in at the Tone Scale level of which they're the component parts.
We'd say immediately, „Well, you've got all... All these boys are in grief and... They're in apathy and grief and fear. And therefore if we added this up and divided numerically, we would find the average was somewhere between apathy and fear, and therefore they would form a third dynamic which would be between apathy and fear.“ They don't. They're just as likely to form a third dynamic which has 4.0.
All of a sudden, boy, do they have a lot of havingness in terms of people they can help. Boy, can they help people. Everybody on every hand obviously needs help. Everybody needs help. They have just been pushed into a locale where the greatest abundance there is, is complete problemification on the part of everyone. And so they simply pitch in and start to heal up each other's problems, and they make a going group the like of which you never saw.
It is a wicked and terrible thing that man would insist - if he's going to permit life to go on at all, which of course is a question: Is man going to let life go on at all? Not necessarily „Is man going to let life go on at all?“ but „Are those in charge of man at this time going to let life go on at all?“ You know, you throw enough H-bombs around you've got no air cover; let's not kid ourselves. But if life goes on at all it would be a terrible and wicked thing to continue anything like the penal system of the United States. It was invented in Philadelphia in the early part of the nineteenth century and was one of several experiments which were made concerning the handling of criminals - how you jailed them and how you treated them in jail. It was one of just several systems tried. It was the least workable system. It was abandoned by Philadelphia itself and was subsequently adopted by every city in the United States, every county and every state.
We are dealing with the least workable criminal system which is known. We just don't know of any less workable criminal systems. The penitentiary system, the penitentiary cell-type system. It results in no rehabilitation, it cracks the sanity of its inmates and turns back into the society men who are convinced that they must get revenge or die. This is the most vicious thing that could happen to a society. The criminal populace of the United States right now in penitentiaries is about nine hundred thousand men and that's an awful lot of people. Our standing army before World War II was not that big. As a matter of fact, it was only one quarter that size.
Well, here are all these men in prison. Their only chance of rehabilitation would lie in helping each other. And here's something very odd: You can't send a man to prison without him coming out afterwards and telling you how astonished he is that all those fine fellows would be in prison. This is the one thing that strikes and stuns every criminal, is all the good guys are in jail. I'm not saying now that cops are uniformly criminals, some of them have reformed.
When we have somebody sold on something, we must have had a communication line of some sort, mustn't we. So we would look inside even US penitentiaries to discover that the tone amongst the inmates was fairly good and fairly high. And it is, in spite of everything that is going on around them. Their morale stays up pretty good to the degree that they can associate with each other.
But our penitentiary system doesn't permit them to associate with each other and so they cannot have a high-toned group. So they are in a very depressed group atmosphere.
Well, I'm not wandering from the point at all. I'm showing you that here this fellow has gone to the county jail where they at least can associate with each other. They can't, you see, in the penitentiaries. They're locked up in cells. And if they work they can't talk, and if they even walk around the yard they can't communicate. But in county jails, they go out and work on the road gang and everybody's kind of careless of them and... You know how a lot of counties in the United States still get roads built: They go out and arrest a lot of people for vagrancy - the crime of not having ten dollars in your pocket - throw them in jail and make them work on the county roads. Then they pay them, oh, a dollar a week or something like that. There is no penal labor in the United States and the Bill of Rights, of course, is totally enforced.
Penal servitude then being very common, you do have groups of criminals, however, thrown together in county jails, or groups of bums or groups of people who are in pretty bad shape, and they fuse together as a fairly high-toned group. And this really is the one that you have the guy coming out of saying, „Boy, how could those... The finest men in this town are in that jail.“ They just can't understand it. You see, individually they're real bad off; collectively, they've got lots of other people's problems. And they can take responsibility for problems.
If you inhibited everybody from taking any responsibility, you would wind up by killing the whole race. That is why man instinctively detests and considers odorous beyond the ability to smell, a dictator; because he's taking responsibility for everybody's problems.
Let's get your welfare state proposition. Your welfare state works on the basis that everybody must be indigent and the boss or bosses of that state must be the only ones who hand out the favors and hire the social services and so forth to take care of you.
Do you know what happens to social service workers who are working on this welfare state idea like they have in California? Do you know what happens to a social service worker when they go around to these downtrodden and beat-up poor people who can't get along and so forth? They practically get thrown downstairs on their head. It is very astonishing how vicious poor and indigent people are to social service people. Oh, vicious. Why? That's the agency that's making it impossible for them to fuse in any way, shape or form into some kind of a group or go around and support themselves one way or another. This is the way they look at it.
The way they got poor was because they were not permitted to share the responsibilities of the society at large and were not permitted to resolve or help with the problems of others. That's how they got poor. Fellow gets real poor if he's living around a mother who says to him, „You can't wash the dishes, you can't mop the floor, you can't carry in any wood.“ Generally, a kid goes through this phase of „You can't do this for me,“ so early that we don't even notice he's gone through it because he's already passed through it by about the time he's five or six.
Little Johnny-on-the-spot when he's two. But the trouble is when he brings in the milk he occasionally drops a bottle of milk. He isn't quite up to it manually. You look at little kids. They'll mop around and sweep around; their attention span is very, very brief And in the face of this brief attention span they can't apply themselves to what we consider persistence in terms of work. And so grownups, having no patience with them, no understanding and being pretty fogged up anyway will spend all the formative years of a child's life, which is to say birth to seven, teaching the child that under no circumstances must the child aid, help or assist; and then wonders why the child is a complete bust in the family. Because the eighth year, why, the parent is saying, „Now, Johnny, you've got to help.“ And the ninth year Papa and Mama are both getting frantic about it because he won't chop wood, he won't do this, he won't do that. Why, if he's been educated to do anything, it's not help. And as the years go along, they wonder why he insists on working down at the rag-picking factory. Why didn't he take advantage of this wonderful education they worked and slaved to give him?
He can't work anyplace else because he knows by this time he can't help anybody. And being convinced he can't help anybody you've done the surest thing you could do to depress him. You've thrown him back from the third dynamic, you've collapsed him in on the first dynamic and made him stand with only those problems which he could have on the first dynamic. You've hung him with only those problems he could have on the first dynamic. You've made a scarcity of human misery, and the only human misery he can have is on the first dynamic. It's no longer abundant. He's got to take council with his own miseries, and he eventually gets down to psychosomatic illnesses because the only thing that's really in trouble that he can lay his hands on or communicate with is his body. He'll very often make his body get sick so he can make it well, so he'll help it.
It's quite often you'll find a preclear that's sitting there very earnestly trying to get well and kind of covertly sliding in a new illness to cure the body of. What are these people doing? They are providing something that they can help. They're fixing up something that they can help.
It's a strange thing but there is amongst dictators a neurosis, a destruction neurosis. They have to destroy those countries which they enter and overrun. They have to knock them apart. They have to blow up the bridges and the factories and so forth so afterwards they can build it all back up again. See, they've made enough destruction there so it's real certain they'll have something to do. People like Hitler are frantic on the subject of helping, completely frantic. They have been debarred from doing anything for everybody until they just go out the roof.
Now, you as a Scientologist have an opportunity to help many people. But very often, if you're dealing with people who are very bad off and if you're dealing with a group of people, you will find yourself; with some sort of a group that's having a hard time, non persona grata if you're trying to monopolize all the problems and solve them. See? I mean, you go into this family, you're going to solve all the problems the family has got; and they got a big scarcity of problems.
You get something like happened here, I think last night. Somebody was calling up and saying one of our boys going around trying to do something for his crippled daughter is going to be thrown out. And this person was going to call the county authorities, the state authorities and the Federal Boys Institute and everybody else, and he was just real frantic because this person had come around three times and had asked to help this crippled little girl. Of course, this person going around to help this crippled little girl could have helped her. There must have been some recognition of this on the part of this father, otherwise he wouldn't have been this frantic. His acceptance level was a very, very sick little girl. He had to have at least that desperate a problem, otherwise he would have become completely unnecessary to the family. The main trouble in that unit - if you wanted to make the little girl well, the main trouble is the father. He is the guy that needs processing. And after you processed him, then maybe you could process the little girl. Because what would he do? He'd make the little girl sick after you had made the little girl well.
Now, let's take this position in terms of psychosis. We have a bunch of psychotics around and we don't quite know what to do for them. And if we were to keep them penned up in rooms or straitjackets or something, oh, what a dreadful time we'd have. But supposing we saddled them with the responsibility of hewing wood and drawing water, just that. Saddled them with the responsibility of keeping the joint policed up. Supposing you just pointed to five or six very, very bad off ones and you said, „They're the real people that the rest of us have got to help.“ And if you were to take somebody almost as bad off as that and say, „Now look, now you have to sit by Ezekial's bed and watch that he doesn't cut his throat before dawn.“ This psycho would sit there just as dutifully and they'd be just as alert and just as sane as anybody you ever wanted to see.
Homer Lane ran into this over in Great Britain. One time he figured out that... something on this order and he went down to an insane asylum and he said, „I want to see your most violent and terrible patient.“ The authorities said, „He'll kill you.“ „Oh, no. Nope.“ They made him sign a release saying that they weren't responsible for anything that happened to Homer Lane. And he went back and they showed him into this cell, and unlocked the door. And he looked, peered in that room and it was dark and it was padded and it was all covered with excreta. And here was a naked giant of about 6' 6“ with wild black hair with a wild look in his eyes right ready to break somebody's spine. Homer Lane slipped into the cell and he said to this madman who hadn't uttered an intelligent word for many years, he said, „I hear that you can help me.“ And the madman looked at him and became very sane and said, „How did you know?“ He cured him.
Well, there's various sides to this problem, then, isn't there. When we see the third dynamic suddenly not becoming a composite of all the first dynamics involved, when we can make a regiment of heroes out of bums without much trouble, when we can cure the insane simply by letting them help each other.
TBD
Another case comes to mind. There was a girl who was practically catatonic and occasionally would go into wild spells of grief,. just varied up and down the line. One evening in emergency, this hospital - she was just kept in this sanitarium hospital - this hospital occasionally did accident work or emergency work or something like that. And one evening there'd been a bad accident and there was a young girl, who was bleeding very heavily and very badly, brought into the ward. And there was nobody there, the doctors, nobody around but just this one nurse. And the next cell down the line from the operating room and so forth - the one room down the line; not really a cell - contained this girl who was between catatonia and grief. And this nurse was just out of her mind because she just couldn't reach for too many things and do enough so she just swung open the first door that she came to and said, „Get out here and help me.“ And this girl got up off of her couch and came out and rolled up her sleeves and held this rather screaming, frantic young lady who'd been in an accident still long enough to have some arteries sutured and so forth. And went around and a lot... several other accident victims there, big hysteria; and this girl went around and calmed them down and took care of all of it. She never had another insane moment for the rest of her life as far as we know. She all of a sudden had found a role for herself; someplace she belonged, which is to say somebody she could help.
With a psychotic you could go over an E-Meter, you could look at it. „Who can you help?“ E-Meter would tick someplace on the dynamics. You could appoint them some fragment of doing just that. In other words, they could help somebody, someplace, somewhere. And their... the resolution of their own problems - the scarcity of their own problems is such they pull them all in on themselves. They can't have problems anymore. They get to the point where they can't even have problems anymore. Problems, you see, action - these things are valuable. It's only when they get scarce that they become troublesome and upsetting.
Now, what's this got to do with an auditor? Let's say an auditor doesn't know his business, and he goes out and he processes this preclear and that preclear falls on his face, you know. And he processes the next preclear and that preclear falls, don't get any better. The preclear keeps telling him, „Well, I'm not any better.“ What's the auditor facing continually? He's facing just this: the fact that he is not helping people. He shouldn't feel that this is a psychotic or an insane impulse to want to help. No, that's the sane impulse. The insane one is „I'm no longer able to.“
And this auditor whose gone on processing preclear after preclear without getting any results on the preclear, he started out in the high hopes that with Dianetics or Scientology he'd be able to help somebody. And then it turned out that his use of it certainly did not help anybody. It'll cave him in. He's found out another sphere where he can't help.
Well, today the only way, really, that you can fall down with Scientology, using Universe Processing, using these relationships of space and havingness, the only way you can really fall down with it is to be very, very incompetent with it, or to be so anxious to help that you reach for desperate tools in Scientology when you ought to be taking real mild, comfortable, easy ones. In other words, your knowledge of the subject and your ability to practice the subject is now in very, very bright, bold relief. You can either do 8-C on somebody or you can't. You can do 8-D or you can't. It's totally a method which depends upon your ability to apply it.
Here are individuals around who are difficult. So they're difficult; you can still do something to them, for them. You can change their case levels, you can change their perception levels. You can help.
But the very funny part of it is, you can only help as long as you don't have to be thanked for having helped. And the first job really of an auditor is to get his own case up to a point where the joy and effort of helping lies in simply assisting others. The pay that he gets is good enough if he enjoyed doing it. He expects nothing in return. If he expects nothing in return and experiences joy just in the doing of what he's doing, he'll be tremendously successful.
But if his case level is at a level where he has to have gratitude or a great deal of thanks or appreciation for what he's done, it's seldom that he will ever get it, because his case level will be such that he will have a tendency to rather defeat his own results in the preclear. And so he won't have helped anybody as successfully as he could have.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with an impulse to help others. As a matter of fact it's the woof and warp of all existence. If you want to see somebody bad off it is somebody who thinks he should be cruel to everyone, who thinks he should be indifferent or not care. And that person is desperately bad off; endocrine ills and all the rest of it. An individual who is in real good shape can take the whole world to his bosom and not give a damn if it bites.