Constancy of Fundamentals of Dianetics and Scientology (1MACC 591126)
Series: 1st Middle-American ACC (1MACC)
Date: 26 November 1959
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Thank you.
Well, this is the 27th lecture of the 1st Melbourne ACC, isn't it? By golly, it is! You're getting along!
Now, I haven't anything to talk to you about today at all. I've just shot my bolt, you see, in giving you all the data. You know everything there is to know. You all feel totally bright and alert, and your fundamentals are all in good place and position, everything is fine. And once in a while somebody tells me that we change things all the time in Scientology. Every time somebody tells me that, I am liable to be just nasty and mean enough to ask them the definition of a cycle of action. Of course they can't give me that, so I ask them, "What's the dynamic principle of existence out of Dianetics?" Oh, they can't give me that, so I say, "What's an engram?" And they'd say, "Well, an engram, an engram, that's a... a trace on a cell." And I say, "What do we change?" "We just change all the time, change everything, change all the time." And I say, "How the hell would you know?" Ah, that's pretty mean, isn't it?
If you are under the belief that continuous study on the subject is study of enormous changes, you had better look at your fundamentals. The old tonescale – the old tonescale. It's later version of, an additional scale, Know to Mystery Scale, The Chart of Attitudes – all these things are right there in place.
I wonder if you have realized, when I'm asking somebody, "What could you confront?", you are asking them a process which is directly and immediately and exactly the first principle of Dianetics. 1938! Oh, you didn't know it went back that far, did you?
And it did, book written by about that time that was never published and never been made available, which contains some hazards and various things, but there was no hazard about that. That was where the whole thing broke, all the mystery broke down. Because all forms, types of livingness, did have a common denominator, and that was all I was looking for. The most identified thing would be the most common denominator, wouldn't it? So we had defined a cross-point where all things, all living things could agree, and all living things do agree on that one thing, the dynamic principle of existence is survive. That's it.
So, now clear back in 1952 I was doing stuff about dichotomies, Scientology 8-80, the Black and White days, the Plus and Minus. The anatomy of mystery is contained in that. So, in 1950 we had the opposite side of survive, which was succumb – there is survive and succumb, you see, but succumb really isn't the opposite side at all. Succumb is not wanting to survive, isn't it? Well, survival is totally bound up simply in – as far as a thetan is concerned – confronting. Something survives – he can confront it. And if something doesn't survive, he can't confront it. And sometimes something survives too damned well, and he sits there confronting it for thousands of years, saying "I have a black case." Right?
Well, you're right in the middle of a cycle of action, the dynamic principle of existence of Scientology, is "create". See, since you found the thetan, found out the basic thing, the common denominator of all thetans is creation. That's the common denominator, that's something all thetans are doing, one way or the other they for sure create. And they make things that they are simply imbibing and pulling things into them and doing all that sort of thing, but I assure you they've even got to create something to pull the things in on.
So, creation is that. I take these two things together and add the factor of counter-creation, and we get destruction. A creation which is counter-created against too heavily considers itself to be destroyed, or can be considered to be destroyed.
Boy, are we in the midst of fundamentals in this 1st Melbourne ACC.
Now, a process on which we have more data than practically any other process, any other single process – aside from the old Dianetic processes of engram running, we have more data on that than anything else, of course – but the basic modern, you might say, process, on which we have the most data, is Confront. And boy, we got lots of data on Confront. The only new data there is on Confront is that I recognized that there's a similarity and that you can bring together Confront and Survive. Survive is a continuous confronting. Your licence to survive is a licence to confront. You have the right to look at the environment in which you are, and if you don't survive you don't have the right. And if somebody destroys your possessions and so forth, then you can't confront them, so that they are not surviving, you feel you're not surviving and so forth. They interlock very very smoothly.
Now, you could say, "Well, what would you mind... what wouldn't you mind surviving" or "What would you permit to survive" or something of this sort, you have a quite a model sort of a process there, "What do you want to have succumb", or something of this sort. But there's something a little bit awry in it, because basically the word "survive" cannot be translated smoothly into several languages – did you know that? So there must be... well, they're surviving alright, but they can't express it anymore. Isn't that interesting?
Russian is one of them, the most suicidal race on Earth next to the Japanese. I'm not going to hammer and pound away at the Russians here, don't worry about it – but they don't have a word for "survive". How you would put together "survive" or "survival" in Russian would have to be something on the order of "continued existence" or something like that, you have to use two words. They don't have a basic word. Japanese also has trouble with this, as you would well suspect, because the Japanese – he's over there on a compulsive duplicate, but he's nowhere else that you can find him at once and immediately on the cycle of action that he's totally recognizable – although he is surviving and so forth.
Now, the Russian and the Japanese and the South American and anybody else however do confront. And even a blind man confronts. The same order of thing – survival gives us the degree... gives us the whether or not something can be confronted. So, confronting is the action and survive is the state of mind. So the action process that processes best is Confront, not Survive. Do you follow me through?
And if the [gap in tape] suddenly change his mind on the subject of survival and simply say, "I'm not surviving", you see – there he goes. Similarly he could say, "I'm not confronting". But in any language under the sun you could express "confronting", and as a matter of fact, you can run confronting on a very small child. You say, "What would be alright to look at?", and "What wouldn't you like to look at?" And you'll get the same process you're running on your pcs, and it'll run on a little child, just a little bit after they learn the language. That's one of the earliest words they learn – look.
Matter of fact, you'll see a little baby – my kids are particularly prone to do this. They are always trying to make people confront things. That's right. Now, if they're having a bad time, they try to make people confront them in themselves. They get woes and worries and upsets and get safety pins into them and that sort of thing, but if they're in any kind of fair condition, they can... they start pointing. They show you this, and they show you that, and they show you this, and they show you that. And you walk up to little Arthur, and you just say "What can you confront", and something of that order. Why, he'd know right away practically what you were talking about, but you wouldn't say it verbally. You'd look at him questioningly and point around, you know, and then he'd point at something. In other words, you can come right down to a mimicry in language. Ah, then that lets us out of the symbol band, doesn't it? That lets us out of the never-never-land of symbols, doesn't it?
So your old Know to Mystery Scale on a complicated verbal process tends to hang up on symbols, the meanings of the words, the symbols of the words, and most processes below the level of effort are figure-figure-processes, and they're stuck right straight at symbols. They're no place else but symbols. And you can invent some very, very, very tricky processes – very tricky processes. But unless you can immediately demonstrate them in space and energy, matter and time, unless you can do that with great rapidity, unless it translates at once, unless you can draw the command, you've got it stuck in symbols. So you just might as well drop out all those complicated processes, because they stick the pc in symbols. Do you see that?
But any process which is a good process can be instantly cracked. Now, the old comm process – if your communication is a parallel process – has certain workabilities, and it's a parallel process. It's right there – it's not as good as your Confront, don't believe that it is. Because it's the communication formula, and a communication formula is very important and all that sort of thing, but it too vividly takes in to effect, cause and effect and all that sort of thing, whereas Confront doesn't take in Axiom 10, but separates out Axiom 10, and a communication formula tends to kick in Axiom 10, if you can figure that.
It's much better to run an assist with "From where could you confront"... oh, pardon me, "From where could you communicate to a (blank)?", meaning a body, if the mass is right there present in the room. "From where could you communicate to a (blank)?", if the mass is right there, see, some of the mass is there, for instance, we wouldn't say, "From where could you communicate to your arm?", you'd hang the fellow up on that arm that he had just burned, you see. And actually it doesn't heal up, because he burned it, because he is dramatizing an engram he got in the burning of Rome while playing a fiddle – it won't run. But you've got his arm there, you see, and as long as you have some of the mass present, why, it particularly helps out the havingness factor involved. So that you find tremendous workability on "From where could you communicate to a (body part)?" Utterly fabulous! Why, I couldn't overestimate it, run smoothly by an auditor on an injured person. There is one of the fastest assists you ever had anything to do with. But of course, if the injured person is too discombobulated that he can't even go that far, he can at least look at the fingers. But they're both kind of "look at" processes, having touch assist, "Look at the fingers, look at the fingers", and he's writhing around and so forth, what, he'll come out of it best. But you're asking him kind of to confront the surface of the member and the fingers at the same time, and he'll pull out of it.
But for a lasting change to occur in somebody's sciatica or lumbosis – those two very famous Scientology diseases – you see that's illegal, you know, to cure several diseases, did you know that? It's against the law in most Western countries, for instance to cure tuberculosis, cancer, venereal disease, you see, what else – there's a whole long list on this, twenty-five of them in California – there's only about twelve of them in London. Ah, they have more diseases in California, obviously. That's really against the law to cure these things, you see? If you say you can cure these things, why, you can be immediately arrested and thrown in the plank, you see, so – it's not possible, so better not try to run these on that disease that's listed as incurable, because it would clear up – that's a joke.
Now, you can do the same thing with a confrontingness process over a long line. A confrontingness process runs something out would be on something on this order: "What arm could you confront?", you see. Now if you wanted to take all the confusion that's going to come off the thing, it'd be "What arm could you confront?", plus, alternate, you see, "What arm would you dislike confronting?" or some such verbal version, see. So that's confront-not confront, that's reach-withdraw, that's make and break communication, and so forth. And it'll produce, it'll produce – oddly enough it'll produce a different engram chain than the Communicate, you know, as you get different actions on the process with more or less the same end goal as with the communication process.
That's very funny, I mean – the fellow arrives at the same place by a different route, slightly different route. They are obviously different processes, because "communicate to" bears the connotation of "reaching across the gap to", which is a communication formula which this actually intends, see – production of an effect. Communication is an effect, whereas Confront lets anything happen. And you get a different style of automaticity running off as you run the process.
Now, this is interesting to you basically because you have received recently information concerning "a victim". And you haven't heard anything for instance in this course about victims. Well, it isn't because we've dropped all the victims in the world, and there's a process that you don't have, which is an absolute killer on victims and would finish off anybody that's got victims unflat with great speed, you see, and on a different route, would simply be, "What victim could you confront?" and "What victim would you dislike confronting?"
By the way, there's a bit wrong, something a little wrong with the second command on "dislike confronting" I find, because it tends to implant the person to dislike confronting. You know, he gets into a hypnotic trance on "dislike confronting", so I have been using it, "rather not" – [speaks with a slightly British accent] "What victim would you rather not confront?" [Amusement in the audience.] It's quite British. [Laughter in the audience.] Well, it gives us a milder, broader meaning, to get into the semantics of the thing, you see. And actually I would advocate using "rather not". This factor didn't come to view, by the way, to me until, I think, the day before yesterday or something like that, when I all of a sudden said that, oh well – noticed somebody was getting, "I don't like to confront that", you know. So we just flipped it to "rather not", and the person forgot all about disliking, and I thought that was quite amusing.
Now, your basic process on a victim would be then, just that, "What victim could you confront?", or "What part of a victim could you confront?" – they are two different processes, I call to your attention – one is segmental, and therefore lower, works a little bit further South. Ah, "What victim could you confront?", "What victim would you rather not confront?", these are very, very good. And it gives you a brand new look at victims. And of course puts the fellow obsessively and continually in the winning valence the whole way. It just starts jamming him into the winning valence, and of course that's one place where, on any aberrated subject, he doesn't care to be. So when you run that, don't be surprised to find him continually out of valence. That's one of these processes that runs consistently, continually out of valence and then gradually eases into valence.
Now, "What could you confront?" runs a person rather rapidly into valence. But "What victim could you confront" runs him very rapidly out of valence – get the very slight nuance here – and then runs him back into valence again. You get different results here with almost the same processes. Quite amusing, this should be called to your attention, because you'll find other ways of varying this sort of thing around. You look this over and see what the pc is doing, there may be something that you'd care to add up about this and – there it is. And this fellow says, "Confront, confront – what is that? What's this confront mean?" And he's having trouble with the command – well, "look at", for heaven's sakes. "Observe", if you're running it at Oxford. It has innumerable synonyms. Innumerable.
They... ah, confrontingness in general has enormous, broad, wide workability. Communicatingness has a subordinate ability, it's a lesser ability. I wouldn't say which one goes the further south, I really wouldn't. But the old ARC Straight Wire process goes a long way south, and you ask somebody to simply "Recall a communication. Recall a communication. Recall a communication. Recall a communication. Recall a communication." You know, not "that you made" or "anybody else made" – you never saw anybody flip in and out and around valences so fast as he will on that particular process, he goes from cause to effect, cause – of course every time he goes to effect, he got a lost command. Every time you run a motivator, you wasted time. Got that? So every time he goes to effect is a lost command. But nevertheless, a psycho particularly who cannot regulate his behaviour in the bank at all and so forth, he's going to ram around the bank and give you too much trouble to run it the other way, so he'll run it wrong, so probably the lowest level verbal process there is – verbal process there is, or thinkingness process – and that's what you are learning in this ACC by the way, is thinkingness processes, you notice that? – ah, communication of thinkingness of one kind or another, communication rather than manual handling of or moving of objects about. Confront's awful close into handling objects, but it really isn't. It's still a think process.
You get "Recall a communication" as just about as far South as you can get, on a rough, rough case, and on a very, very, very rough case you had better run something of the order of that process, "Recall a communication" – or "Recall communicating", now that fits in, you see, over at the other side – and get your gains in that particular way, and bring him up to a point where he is really cooking on all front burners.
Of course, Scientologists' ability to estimate a cycle is probably the poorest in the world. That's right, that's right, you Scientologists can't estimate cycles, that's it. But don't feel chagrined about it, because psychiatry was never able to and never will be able to. Now, what's a cycle? I think, a cycle actually is a dirty word. Probably no more than that. As far as we're concerned, ability to handle a process would be that by which we classify the case.
And in the old "Science of Survival" chart we look over that "Ability to handle engrams" column in the old chart pair. That's very true, but a lot of other processes could be put in on that same column, I've just never done it. You could put a lot of other processes on it, and you'd find out these things get thinner and thinner and thinner and finally disappear out of the think level entirely. And it had to go into some manual operation or some vis-a-vis situation, or... and you get eventually down into the last ditch communication, which is mimicry. Psycho spinning around the cells, so you jump in the cells and spin around. Actually it's not so good however to mimic a psycho's disorderly conduct; the trick is to mimic his orderly conduct. If he's doing anything orderly at all, do it. And if he's doing something disorderly – don't do it. I mean, there's a lot of gen on this sort of thing. You could probably bust up people that are pretty far off; I don't know how far you could go breaking up a catatonic schiz, I never completed a series on this, getting somebody to lie down in exactly the same position as this person's been lying in, motionless, for a long while, you know, months or years. Getting somebody simply to lie down in the same position, almost within, well, a bit within view of such a person, if the person was looking. And get this person to lie down there for a certain period of time every day, and then get up and leave. Lie down, lie there for a quite a little while, and then get up and leave. You kind of match terminalling the thing.
A lot of experiments will have to be run along this line, but we have not been too interested in institutional activities. Now, anybody who can successfully do a thinkingness process is not psycho. He is so far out of the range and realm of the field of psychiatry – the psychiatrists wouldn't know what to do with him. That's right. And nearly everybody you find Scientologists classifying as psychos are still capable of doing a thinkingness process and handling it.
That's quite an interesting observation that they can do it. Because many people think they are totally mad, they start doing a thinkingness process of some kind or another, and they decide that they're totally mad, totally nuts, totally insane, utterly gone – look, that's the one thing a psycho never decides. When he's decided that, he's confronting the fact, so it's breaking up right in front of your face.
If he had any impulses in this direction, why, they're going, and going rapidly. A person who could do that isn't crazy. Get the idea? And that means, if all people who could run a thinkingness process are sane, that you could say would be a very relative statement, because they are not responsible. But how can a person be sane without being somewhat responsible? Well then, you'd say that a person who could be responsible for his own person and his very limited environment – he's being responsible for just his own person, limited environment – then you'd say for sure he wasn't crazy. See, he is then... but the only reason we have the word "crazy" or "psycho" is to say whether or not somebody be trusted to take care of himself. You wouldn't extend to any other dynamic. So if the person could be trusted within limits to take care of himself, not given too many exterior stimuli and shocks, then you'd say that person isn't crazy.
But a person who couldn't take care of himself in an environment in any way, in spite of the fact that it was a calm environment, well, you'd say that person was nuts. And that'd be about the make-and-break of it, that's about as close as you can come, because he would be a social liability of some magnitude. But the second we go into social liability on the upper dynamics, we get in to the most fantastic complications, because we're trying to label, label as sane people normal people. And they are not sane on all dynamics. They just aren't, that's it. There's a hardly a person alive who could be born into the world at this time outside of Scientologists who could be said to be sane on all dynamics.
In other words, able to be responsible on every dynamic – see, that's what that would mean to be saying – able to be trusted with that particular zone or sphere of action, now we're getting... this is getting pretty scarce, isn't it? Why, I don't know, there are probably a few men on Earth that could be trusted with a government. Probably be trusted all right with a government, a few men. But these same guys might have their own domestic relationships in flinders, not be at all trustworthy on the second dynamic.
See, the responsibility factor. So, if we extend the responsibility factor out through the various dynamics, we start to establish some view of what we mean by a Clear, and we start abandoning the idea of "sane". The sane are not the normal. The normal are not sane. That's it. Because if you have to select about by dynamics, what dynamic are they sane on? And as soon as you start picking over what dynamics they're sane on, it becomes painfully obvious that normal people are strictly fruitcakes on several other dynamics. You get the idea? The zones – this should all be under the heading of zone of responsibility. What zone of the dynamics could a person be responsible for and be trusted with. See, what would this be?
So, all sanity comes under the heading of our ancient, old – good heavens, goes way back when processes that have to do with full responsibility. And you never saw Dianeticists run away as fast and get themselves lost as when that first article was published in "Advanced Procedures and Axioms", entitled – a little sub-article in the book, entitled "Total Responsibility", or "Full Responsibility". And they look at that thing and practically blow up. And some of these people were quite sane, maybe on the third dynamic, but terribly bad off on maybe the first and second and so forth. And you told them, well, they had to take full responsibility, or be able to take full responsibility, and this just blew up in all directions.
And we had to look at a new fact then that was quite an accidental discovery. I wrote this book and issued it and found out that the book was terribly, terribly, terribly unpopular, and found out why: And it was just that one article. With many people it was very, very popular. Well, it was the first organized release, if you please, of axioms, and the first organized effort, as they will tell you in certain European centers, it was the first organized effort at stating the laws of the mind. And we get a lot of credit for that – just that, all by itself, but it's the old axioms of Dianetics we're talking about, which appear there in "Advanced Procedures and Axioms", and so that book should have been quite popular. But the fact that it had the idea in it of being fully responsible drove people batty.
And we found out that that thing which had the greatest public appeal was "You are not responsible". And we went back over old Book One, and we found out that Book One never tried to make anybody responsible for anything, but just said that there were nothing but victims from the word go.
So, now a person who is not responsible on a dynamic has no other choice than to be a victim on the dynamic. Now, victim is so far from being abandoned that a brand new understanding of sanity, processing, analysis, adjudication, Clear and so forth comes right straight out of it. A person who cannot take responsibility for an area has no choice but to be an effect in the area. Of course he doesn't have to be obsessive cause in the area either, you know, you get above cause, too. But there's... there's the gist of it: a person who cannot take responsibility in any dynamic area would be a victim on all dynamic areas, and that would be an absolute insanity. Absolutes are unobtainable, but that's it. That would be an absolute insanity. He'd be a victim on every dynamic. God was after him, spirits and devils were after him, ah... the MEST universe was built specially and totally to entrap him and serve as a cell for him, ah... the sea was there to drown him, all living things there were to poison him and strangle him and choke him, laws existed to trap him, time existed totally and completely to do nothing but stretch him out endlessly in his agony, ah... mankind existed as a total trap which could individuate him some way and drag him off in various directions, terrible thing, man ought to be a different species entirely, ah... third dynamic of course, why, groups were formed mainly to penalize him and enlist him in forces and to make him do things he didn't want to do, on the second dynamic – the second dynamic was there in order to destroy things and people, ah... the family existed as a total trap, and he existed himself as his own worst enemy.
Now, that person's crazy, any way you want to look at it. That'd be the works, see. And yet he can run a thinkingness process perhaps in one of those areas, which would be your road out. There's nobody that bad off that can still talk by the way. If you...if you're hearing this tape or this lecture and so forth, you can get an idea of being causative in any direction, why, you probably don't fit in that category.
But difficulties of classification were of course the difficulties of not knowing what it was all about. So we get words like "insane", "neurotic", "paranoid". Ah, it's just – they are just swear words: you might as well classify them as just swear words. Because if nobody knows, if nobody knows the anatomy of these things, then how in the name of common sense could he delineate them one way or the other. For instance, I did find in one single instance the legal definition of insanity to be superb. The legal definition of insanity is "to be able to tell right from wrong". And I ran across a psycho who knew she couldn't tell right from wrong. That's quite interesting. I don't know whether it'd been the legal definition, that'd been... she'd been instructed in it or something, but she couldn't tell right from wrong.
Now, when you start looking at what's right, then you have to say from which side of the counter-create. See? At what period of time? And when you look at wrong – well, for whom? Where? And what? And our road out of this morass was the optimum solution, and the optimum solution is covered in Book One, it's not been covered since, and it's still with us, and it's just as good as ever it was. It's the viewpoint one takes of the effect that establishes right and wrong to a very marked degree, unless one can operate or subdivide life and find out what parts are benefited and what parts are not benefited, then we can get some sort of an adjudication, because it's not Aristotelian black and white, believe me. It's not black and white logic, it's full of grays and whites and jet-blacks and foggy blacks, and they are not necessarily all in sequence either, they're just a smooth fan from black over to white, you see?
Quite amazing, I mean – we have found man out, in other words, we have found him out in his most queasy quarter. He didn't know who was capable of sound conduct, judgement or action. He hadn't a clue, and yet in democracies they're going around electing presidents and the heads of armies and all of that sort of thing and... in businesses, why, they're busy promoting this person and that person and so on, and... doing going through all of this actions, and they haven't a ruddy clue, they just – they just – put everybody's name in a jar, anybody that has a body is a person – see, that's by definition. [Laughter in audience.] And if the body was delivered in a country, he's a citizen, see. He has rights, which psychiatrists can then take away if they say he's crazy, but they have no definition for what's being crazy, you see – that's very silly. You put these people's name in a big glass jar, you put everybody's name in a big glass jar, and you have them reach in and pull them out, and if nobody says, "Well, I know something bad about him", why, they say, "Well, that's it". Well, of course, they get on a big, national election basis, and they pull this man's name – it's a bunch of guys that don't let anybody else in on it, that have a jar – and they pull that man's name out, and then they together, operating with another set of guys who pull another man's name out, and who don't let the public come anywhere near ever looking at or having anything to do with those glass jars, you see – say, "Well, these are your candidates, free election, free country, it's all free, all free, you vote for anybody else, and we'll shoot you. We'll arrest you." You say that Doakes over here – you going to put pressure on to make Doakes in charge of things around here, and that makes you pretty raw revolutionary, but we're not revolutionaries. "We've got you totally pressed down to observing the salient points that you have candidate A and candidate B, and candidate A doesn't stand for anything you know anything about, and candidate B doesn't stand for anything you know anything about. Now vote."
Why, I don't know, let's – why don't we try to run the complicated economic machinery of Earth with a pair of dice, you know, and say, "Well, if it comes up 7, we'll push lever 16". [Laughter in audience.] And then, if we hired a monkey to tell us what numbers had appeared on the dice, and another monkey, who was out of communication, to go over and pull lever 16, we'd have about the way they think things ought to run. Orderly, very orderly. [Laughter in audience.]
Now, going into this a little further, your fundamentals, your fundamentals of Dianetics had never fitted together better than they fit today. As a matter of fact there's many areas that we can look into now and... well, just dozens of phenomena. We just say "Well, that's very interesting, and we know where it fits, and it's not as important as it used to be." So the further you go along the line, the better idea you have of the relative importances of things. So, let's take a look at "Survive", and we'd have to have survive and destroy, or survive and succumb, you see, as opposite things, that would be "willing to look at", " willing not to look at", see. And then if we had a person who was willing to look at anything on all the dynamics but who could escape from looking at them if he didn't want to, we'd have a sane man.
And oddly enough, it'd have nothing to do with whether or not he was intelligent about it. See, if he could look at all of these zones all the way up from the first to the eighth dynamic, if he could look at all these zones or not look at them at will, in other words, his power of choice over his lookingness was there, you see, we'd have a sane man. And oddly enough they're only there because he's helping put them there, so of course he has a control zone over them, too. And naturally, because he's willing to look at them, he's smart. He'd be intelligent about them as well.
So we find out something else. We used to worry about what intelligence is and so on, and just the last couple of years we did find out what intelligence was. Intelligence is non-restimulated stupidity. [Laughter in the audience,] And that's what it is. I hate to have to tell you that, but that's a technical fact, it's not a joke. You can write up an IQ test, you can write up an IQ test that restimulates stupidity. I'll give you an idea. You say, "If pieces of cheese are tuppence a pound and there is no cheese, how many rats would it take to stuff a glass fruitcase?" [Laughter in the audience.] That'd be question 1. And question 2, "2 times 2 equals (blank)." Question 3, "2 times 4 equals (blank)", and question 4 would be, "How long is a piece of string?" All right, now let's reverse the order, and we get a different grade. We put the real stupid one first, and then put a couple of easy ones, and then put a fourth in, we don't care what, we'll get one grade. Now, if we start out the test with "2 times 2 equals (blank), 2 times 4 equals (blank), How long is a piece of string?" and the question 1 previous, and you've got a higher grade. Because the people who give it the way I gave it the first time will miss 2 and 3. They just go "wog!?", you know, 2 times... and then he gets to 2 times 2, and they say, "2 times 2? Choo-choo!"
Now you can restimulate this not-know or mystery sandwich any way you want to, but one of the ways to restimulate it is by educating the children only to look at things and never take their attention off them. That's going to make a lot of dumb yokels. How would this be? Because they've got an unbalanced thing, and that'd put them in a mystery. The children go around all the time wondering what everything is, you see, they've got restimulated mystery. They're always supposed to wash their hands and watch very carefully that their hands don't get dirty. And nobody ever says, "You don't have to observe your hands." And if they're going on a sort of a stimulus-response training, why, they'll wind up with a fixation on hands, wondering what is wrong with them – the opposite side of the dichotomy is never run.
Nobody ever said, "Unconfront your hands. Thank you." Somebody says, "Now, make sure your shirt is clean. Is your shirt clean? Now, you don't want to go to the party with your shirt dirty, do you? Now you don't want to do this with your shirt dirty, do you? Now, make sure your shirt's clean, and don't roll in the dirt because it gets your shirt dirty, and... keep your shirt clean. Keep your shirt clean. Keep your shirt clean." The person after a while will be wondering all the time if his shirt's clean. He won't ever know if his shirt's clean or not. Get the idea? Because... not because it isn't clean – dirty – the dichotomy, it's "Confront your shirt, confront your shirt, confront your shirt, confront your shirt", in such a way as to prevent something, and this of course locks him up in just confronting a shirt. And when you ask – come along and you ask, this fellow is a Scientologist some day, and you say, "What shirt would you rather not confront?", you know, and he says, "Wow! Any shirt, all shirts, no shirts, the devil with shirts!" . [Laughter in the audience.]
And we get the old Dianetic idea, given in the July lectures at Elizabeth, New Jersey – I think it's the only time it's ever been mentioned to amount to anything – is fixed and unfixed attention. That was covered pretty thoroughly – we've mentioned it from time to time since, but it was covered pretty thoroughly back then, fixed and unfixed attention. Well, attention and confrontingness. Ah, you'd say fixed confrontingness and unfixed confrontingness, so you'd get a process like this working quite remarkably – "What would you like to confront?" And this is always surprising to pcs. It's not as good as the process that you're running, "What would you"... ah, "What could you confront?" and "What would you rather not confront?" This is not as good, but it's amazing. It's amazing. Because it always turns out that the thing he picks out that he likes to confront, is he doesn't like to confront it. Now, you'd have to run that process, if it were totally successful on recent tests and so on, you'd have to run it with the other side of its dichotomy, otherwise he'd run out liking to confront it, and then he'd run out everything he'd like to confront, but he'd be left with a lot of things he hated to confront, and there is that particular liability to that process. It worked wonderfully however for the first week or two of an intensive. The guy can always find obsessive confrontings.
"What would you like to confront?", you know – boom. And you find people just plowing straight into their banks. What in their minds – "What's in your mind? What's in your mind? Now watch your mind. Now watch your mind." Or, "Keep your attention on what you're thinking. Now, watch what you're thinking. Now, keep your attention on your mind. You must keep your mind under control. You mustn't let your mind go out of control, you know, you must keep your attention on your mind, because if you didn't keep your attention on your mind, you're liable to go crazy! You see, your mind goes crazy if you don't keep your attention on your mind and so forth, it can go out of control, and so therefore you'd better keep your attention on your mind."
Nobody ever says, "Take your attention off your mind and look at the ruddy room." Nobody ever says that. So you get the opposite side of confrontingness and so forth as a mental bail-out. Just run alternate confront, see, the first... "What would you like to confront?", and then you could probably say, "dislike confronting", because you're running the opposite.
Now, where, where does all this end, what does this leave us with? This resumé I've just been giving you here on processes that work and what you do with them and so on. Ah, well, it leaves us with a tremendous amount of technology. And after you have satisfied yourselves of the relative workability and usability and effectiveness of some of these processes, and particularly this confront process, and particularly, selectively, being able to create back into existence, into restimulation, something to confront, as soon you have seen how this works and you're satisfied with this whole thing and... a lot of things are going to fall out of the hamper. You, you're going to see a tremendous, now, amount of things occur, mentally, and so on, that you've never seen happen before. And then'd be the time to go back over all the data again and read it. See, just read all the books you got on the subject, just up to present time. You find yourself sitting there and saying, "Yes, yes, well, oh yeah, that's obvious and so forth, and I wonder why it's so much importance being laid on that, that's relatively unimportant, and that... well I never thought that was important before, gee whiz, that was important, wasn't it?" And just shake out the relative importances.
And that's about all that ever changes in Dianetics and Scientology, is the relative importance. But the things that were considered important in 1938, 1950 – huh! – 1st Melbourne ACC, way up here, almost into 1960 – and they are obviously, obviously the most important factors! We're still dealing with the mind, which is composed of pictures, spaces, time, facsimiles, engrams, mock-ups; still dealing with body and the influences of pictures on bodies; dealing with something new that came up at the end of 1951, a thetan – he emerged into view after enough processing had been done and so forth, why, began to find out what people were, what other people were; and the anatomy of this universe has just very recently been emerging as one of these open-and-shut, my-golly-is-this-easy sort of things, you know. I still have questions about what this universe is all about – there's only about one major question left, that hasn't any open-and-shut discovery.
Now, individuation, separateness, and all of this sort of thing to the contrary; people believe that they are obsessively separate, so therefore, if they ran it all out, they would be obsessively the same person. There's obsessive togetherness. Socialists, commies, get stuck in this thing. "We're all common people." And then the commissars come along and tell them, "But some are more common than others." [Laughter in the audience.]
Ah... here is the, ah, here's the basic difficulty there, the mish-mash, the togetherness, the obsessive togetherness comes about from a terror of separateness. See, one finds himself getting more and more individuated, more and more individuated, he's moving on out of the human race, so he turns around and comes smash, crash, back in and despite ridges and everything else he's going to be part of the human race again, you see, and then he individuates out, and he comes back in, and he never gets adjusted between those two points, because he doesn't have processing or anything else to do it. He could politic on them, but he couldn't understand them.
Now... that's very common by the way. Because if everybody had understanding, you wouldn't have any politics. Where an individual, where an individual is getting more and more and more separate and feels himself slipping into an individuation, a very heavy individuation, it's because he has a lot of overts, one way or the other, and he does a flip, and if he becomes obsessively driven into the, quote, "mass", which is of course is unfortunately for him non extant, doesn't exist, and he finds himself actually driven nowhere. And he makes up this idea that there are "the masses" and he keeps talking about "the masses" and all that sort of thing. And – New Yorkers of course believe in masses, Londoners believe in masses, they believe in masses, because they get in subways and undergrounds and on trams, and they walk down streets, and they know that there are such things as masses, but you never saw such individuated people in your life.
A fellow can live in an apartment right next door – years, you don't even know the guy's name. He doesn't even know who you are. The only time I ever met my neighbours, when I had a nice place up on Riverside Drive, the only time I ever met my neighbours, very simple, I was running an electric typewriter, and they were trying to listen to all of Hitler's... all of Hitler's speeches. And they had short wave radio that was so sensitively attuned – they were refugees from Germany, and they were still fixated on Germany, they'd never arrived in the United States, see – there they were sitting on Riverside Drive in New York City, but they'd never arrived in the United States. And all they did, practically, was sit in front of their set and listen to Hitler's ravings and screamings and so forth. And... this was one of these great oddities. I ran an electric typewriter – electric typewriters create static, and the Light Company came up one day and traced the static they were complaining about, which wouldn't appear on an ordinary radio, to my typewriter, and asked me to put a static suppressor on it. So I did, and after that turned their radio off by turning on my electric shaver. [Laughter in the audience.] That was just about as close a communication as I got into on anybody on Riverside Drive. [Laughter in the audience.]
Ah, you'll find down in the Village however, that they like to put thirty, forty bodies in the same room, then they're having a good time. If they've got thirty or forty bodies – it doesn't matter what anybody is doing, you see. Nothing to do with that. And they are doing that same thing now in the London basements, they're still – they're still dramatizing air raid shelters in London. And some of the nicest bistros and so forth that you run into, you'll go down a flight of steps and get into a basement or something, and there's nothing but maybe a little rug, and then somebody's... it's all cement, no tea is served, and apparently there's nothing happening down there, everybody goes down and sits on the floor, sixteen, eighteen, twenty people in this tiny little cubicle. I was going to open up a chain of air-raid shelters and charge them... [Laughter in the audience.]
Now this obsessive individuation and obsessive togetherness are much the same thing, one caused by the other and one influencing the other, and they... the world is in this to such a degree that at this time there is no way or immediate evidence of presenting completely and conclusively the fact that everybody is separate from everybody else. That each is a separate individual. Now, there is no proof of this at all. Because there are such mechanical mish-mashes, why, it gets in the road of practically every proof that you have, and that is an unsolved question in Scientology. I mean, we have no proof of this effect at all. We don't know of this fact. We don't know whether or not everybody is all separate, or if they are all one person. Got the idea? We, we don't know this. Now, we have our suspicions, we have our ideas, and it seems to be pretty clear-cut which direction it is, but it doesn't matter to scientific demonstrable proof of the open-and-shut variety. You got the idea?
Quite interesting, quite interesting that that hole would be still left in our research work, but we've gone along far enough to know now why it's a hole. And it's a hole because obsessive separation, obsessive togetherness, together obscure any clinical experiment which would bring it about, except us people got up broadly along the line of OT, and us human beings – why, you are probably about the first people that will find this out with any subjective reality, whether you are everybody else or whether you are yourself. I'd get a little clearer however, before I try to make up my mind.
Thank you.
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THE CONSTANCY OF FUNDAMENTALS OF 1MACC-27– 26.11.59
DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY