The Auditors Code (501122)
Date: 22 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This morning I am going to talk to you about the Auditors Code and beginnings of Standard Procedure. [drawing on blackboard] Doesn’t matter how you mark up this triangle: affinity, communication, reality. You have probably found out what happens when the Auditor Code gets broken. Very bad things happen.
The invalidation of the preclear’s data is probably the most serious breach of the Auditor’s Code.
There are two crimes in Dianetics for which people should be, by law, liable to being hanged, drawn and quartered; and the Auditor’s Code break on the invalidation of the preclear’s data is the first one. The second one of course, is failure to reduce every engram which is contacted or the basic on that chain. Those are the crimes of high treason against your preclear.
The reason the Auditor’s Code is the Auditor’s Code doesn’t have to do with whether or not it’s nice or civilized. It definitely has to do with whether or not you get processing done on your preclear. Actually, it is in the hands of an auditor to reverse the Code and considerably upset the mental health of the preclear. And incidentally, if you could upset his mental health you probably could upset his physical health too and that’s true. This is not something that should be regarded very lightly. And the invalidation of data is a very serious thing.
Now, when we start regarding our Tone Scale and affinity, communication, reality, we begin to see immediately that the invalidation of data is a reversal of reality. Now, this should tell you then, immediately of the dynamic nature of affinity and communication and reality. They are dynamics. They are vectors rather than just static lines which represent something, rather than a graph which is just motionless. They have in them force values. Now you have then a certain flow along one of these vector lines and by interruption of that flow you can actually reverse its polarity at a certain point. Now, if we knew more about the actual electromagnetic, gravitic nature of thought—that is, as opposed to energy—then we’d be able to understand immediately just what is getting reversed. But just by the fact that we can see that something is getting reversed we have approached this problem of, what are the ergs of energy and so forth, contained in thought itself. We can see that there is a flow.
Now, you take affinity. When affinity is abruptly reversed—that is to say, it’s a flowing vector there, flowing line of force; it’s suddenly reversed, it reverses the polarity and it makes an encystment, which is to say there is a sudden impulse there which makes a storage of energy. This storage of energy happens to be impossible by the way, however, in the absence of something to store it in. And also— well, it’s sort of obvious, isn’t it, but what I’m talking about is MEST. There has to have been a collision with MEST or something wrong between the thought and MEST for these lines to be severely interrupted.
Now, we know this much about it, then: we have to have, in other words, physical pain before the reversal of one of these lines becomes highly dangerous to the health of the individual.
It is the communication of thee to me via MEST that is important, you see. If we could have a communication between just thee and me without sound waves and cells and matter and so forth, we wouldn’t get this thing.
All right, in affinity we see that very easily. We see how one of these lines can be suddenly interrupted and an encystment made over an old physical pain area. You can see that in a grief charge. Grief charges when they release, they are really, many of them, very, very strong indeed. It’s hard to understand at first when one looks at them how the simple transfer of a piece of information to the effect that one has suffered a loss could encyst so much energy. So you see here we are actually dealing already with a turbulence in thought. In other words, here we have a vector of affinity (measurable force line), loss, sudden reversal of force—get an encystment of it. Now, you can understand that easily enough. But maybe you haven’t thought all the way through to the point of what happens to the force vector of reality. Now that, you see, is the same problem. Except it has to do with one’s concept of reality. Reality has a great deal to do with agreement. For instance, I was talking to you about the material world, material universe and it all boils down to a handful of nothing actually. But we have agreed that we perceive what we perceive. Now, there are many question marks that could be interposed between perceiving something and recording it and recalling it—just how all this takes place and what is actually being perceived and what is actually being recorded and what is actually being recalled. We are not in any position to say. As a matter of fact, this has been a philosophic football, oh, of duration of just ages. The last person who took a kick at this football was Bertrand Russell. Recently he wrote a long and learned tome which had to do with perception. He had some new confusion to enter into the subject.
Descartes, for instance, started this out but it was going on a long time before he came along. Now, in other words, if there is a shout in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, was there a sound? The barn is red but is the barn red unless somebody sees the red barn? Well, you see, I mean you get into this; it might be a red barn, who knows? I don’t believe it is but the perception, in other words, via sight, sound, tactile, kinesthesia and so on—we’re perceiving parts of this material universe with these perceptions. And obviously, in parapsychology you start running into communication that hasn’t anything to do with perceiving this material universe. And looking this thing over you would predict that such a thing would exist. It would seem impossible that people who were operating off the same energy bank, you might say, could not be in communication other than via the material universe. So there is an apparent communication there. Incidentally, I’ve picked up some engrams out of people that blocked telepathy and their sensory perceptions seemed to pick up. I’ve been meaning to put somebody onto this, reading cards to get a fairly accurate test of just what happens when that happens. It seems like almost anybody has some telepathy but it certainly does get closed down.
Well anyway, off the subject there a little bit but here is your factor of reality. Reality is that thing upon which thee and me agree is real. We’ve agreed it’s real and so it’s real.
Of course, somebody comes in from the outside and he comes in and he says, “Well, look at those twelve black cats up there on the stage.” And you all look at the thing and you don’t see any black cats and you turn around and look at this fellow and if he keeps screaming about these black cats or he makes any commotion about these black cats you call up the local spinbin and have him put away. He has not agreed with your reality and that is the prime insanity.
It doesn’t mean that there weren’t twelve black cats on this stage; it means that you didn’t agree that there were. We’ve got to interpose that factor because after all, we’re dealing exclusively with perception in this case. So, twelve black cats—he says they were, you say they aren’t: “They aren’t here!” If everybody tomorrow decided, for instance, that Marshall Field3 did not own Marshall Field and Company, I’m afraid he wouldn’t own it. The point being that he is suddenly insane. Everybody agrees he doesn’t own it. Now, he comes around and he says, “But I do own it” but everybody has agreed that he doesn’t own it. Well, therefore he’s an insanity because, “That’s not real. The fellow isn’t facing reality obviously.” Now, this is an interesting point about reality, that if it has so much to do with agreement, how is it that we all agree so well on reality? Well, maybe evolution isn’t the most accurate theory on which one can embark but certainly it has that factor of natural selection there. And I was wondering the other day whether or not the race hadn’t naturally selected out of itself people who disagreed with our realities. You know a fellow doesn’t have much chance to reproduce down there in the insane asylum. Somebody comes along, you know, and he says, “Twelve black cats,” and you say, “No twelve black cats,” there he goes! If he keeps insisting on things like that— don’t agree with your reality.
Now, natural selection then seems to have taken care of the fact that we all agree pretty well on what reality is. For instance, let’s take a lower grade of agreement. Somebody runs in here and he says, “You know that the communists should rule the world and democracy is a decadent imperialism and you’ve got to change your own government immediately.” And I’m afraid that not many of you people would agree with him. Well, right away, he is not agreeing with our reality.
Therefore we put him out of communication with us. Now, we also don’t feel much affinity for him. Now, you see how the thing leads in? But let’s just take reality all by itself and we’ll see it as a force flow. And here it is as a force flow and suddenly somebody says, in a moment when a person is completely disarmed, that this force flow is in error and you get a reversal of polarity on the force flow of reality—just exactly the same mechanic as in grief That’s an invalidation of the reality. Invalidation says: your reality does not agree with us. And believe me, that’s nonsurvival.
If a person’s reality continues to agree with the reality of those around him—it doesn’t even have to agree very well—if it continues to agree then he can get along fairly well in his group and so on. But if he is suddenly found to be in error as to his own reality and if he is challenged at a moment when a person is relatively disarmed or something; or if he is embarked upon a new reality for the group which he is hanging to rather tenuously but on which he is depending greatly and somebody invalidates it—boom! — the encystment there is severe. It is very severe. It is a species of grief charge but it is on the reality force line. Now, this should tell you something then about how important this reality is to us and how desperately we hang on to it.
The conservative, for instance, is doing nothing but hanging on to a sort of a reactive reality. He doesn’t want that thing changed. He may have spent all of his life trying to assemble a reality and here he’s got it and somebody walks along and he says, “That isn’t real!” He must either fight—and we go right down the emotional Tone Scale or fall into an apathy. If he says, “My reality is not real, I confess.” How wrong can you get? So it’s a very serious thing to invalidate somebody’s reality unless it’s for the better good of the reality of the group. And then one had better invalidate it rather artfully, as a matter of fact. You can invalidate reality so thoroughly, so suddenly and so well that you could kill a person. The bottom of this strata is death.
Now we’ll take a group reality, a large group, which is nevertheless small within a larger group. And we invalidate the reality of that small group, and force home through the larger group that the small group is dealing in—what has been recognized for a long while as being real was actually unreal. That small group will die. That is the way one could knock out, for instance, a minority in any government. He just invalidates it and then proves that it’s invalid. In other words, he adds a reality to his invalidation so that the invalidation becomes a reality. And it becomes a reality to more minds than the smaller group and you get an immediate sink of the thing.
We are dealing now, by the way, with what could be very, very dangerous in the hands of an agent provocateur or a propagandist. That’s the way she’s done. Where they have had successful operations they have stumbled across this one. But there is a time factor involved here: the speed with which it is done.
Now, in grief, if one could possibly space out over a time period the relay of the information that the other has suffered a loss, the encystment would not be so sudden or sharp. That is a theoretical statement. I mean it’s something that you could play with and prove or disprove by test. It is something that is predicted however. In looking back over some of the data in the past I believe this to be true. It is very true on the subject of reality. The suddenness and the forcefulness depends of course upon the thoroughness. Anything that would be tremendously thorough would probably be very sudden. Now, you’d get an encystment there, a rapid encystment. And if you could get a rapid enough encystment with enough impact in it there, you would have the person or group—they’d die, that’s all. Now, you’ve heard of people dying of a broken heart. Well, probably people could die of a broken reality.
You know one of the main things that happens between friends who become enemies is the fact that this reality line breaks down, less for instance, than an affinity separation line. They have been agreeing beautifully on all sorts of things and suddenly—how do we express a breakup between friends? We say they had a disagreement. Their reality line severed.
Now, there is a similar force vector in existence on communication. The suddenness with which a communication is shut off and the counter-force which shuts it off creates an encystment on the communication line. You have seen this happen, by the way; you may not have seen the act but you have seen the result. The psychoneurotic stutterer has had an impact shut-off of communication. If you don’t think that’s serious, try to watch some of these poor people try to talk after one of these. Sudden and sharp.
One predicts, then, that it would be possible to reverse the polarity on the force line of communication, reverse the polarity on the force line of affinity and simultaneously reverse the polarity on the force line of reality and kill somebody. Just like that. I mean, that’s the reductio,4 that’s where it goes, you look it over. And I think actually, that this has happened a few times. You’ve heard of people dying of a broken heart and so forth. Well, I don’t know in what shape their pulmonary department was at the time they died but I do know that there have been some very remarkable examples. And I think if you looked them over you would find out that at least two of these force lines were suddenly reversed against.
Gives you some sort of an idea that we’re not playing with a flock of words on a page when we talk about the Auditor’s Code. We’re talking about life and death. How wrong can you get? Dead!
Now, it’s an interesting thing about thought. That it is dealing with MEST in such a way that it doesn’t have too good a grip on it. We don’t have too good a grip on the material universe actually: space, time, elemental forces. They have a very bad impact against those things which thought has managed to assemble from the material universe. And the concern of thought is to be right. Of course to be right and to survive infinitely. You can consider these things synonymously. And infinitely right would be to infinitely survive. We look this thing over and we see right away that thought sets itself up to go on being right. Now, the analytical mind has as its first computational basic “to be right.” And you hear people going around telling other people, “You’ve got to admit that you are wrong.” Oh, no. When he starts admitting he’s wrong, you watch the curve there of the person’s mental health.
This fellow starts admitting he’s wrong. He starts admitting he’s wrong here and he’s wrong there and he’s wrong about this and he’s wrong about that and he—not a dramatization of “I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong” — this isn’t analytical but this fellow is having it proven to him continually, all the time that he’s wrong. That isn’t so bad but then he starts admitting he is wrong. In other words, he has a computational break there. He has a break on the subject of “I’ve thought these things out but they are wrong.” Actually, this sort of thing can’t happen in the absence of considerable turbulence between thought and the material universe—in other words, a series of physical pain engrams that makes these things possible. When the physical pain engram is out, the amount of this that can be done is very slight indeed and it would pass away in a few minutes. But because the thought, having captured it, is already pretty well convinced that it isn’t kingpin over this material universe, because it’s been hurt by it too often, there’s too much pain, flux and turbulence in there already. And you can start laying stuff on top of this, like convincing somebody that he is continually wrong and of course you’ll get trouble. That’s a very serious brand of trouble, because the second he starts saying, “I’m wrong,” what’s he saying? He is saying, “I’m dead.” Same thing. How wrong can you get? Dead. And he starts saying, “All right, I know it, I—I realize it, I’m proven to it, I—I’m wrong.” You take these little kids in school, poor little devils. They start handing in this and that and the teacher keeps saying, “Well, you’re wrong, and there’s an error here and this is wrong and that’s wrong” and so forth and “I have to correct you” and “You have to learn to accept criticism” and yakety-yakety-yakety-yak. How these kids have five IQ left when they get through most schools, I don’t know. Because they’re “wrong” on subjects which have not been properly taught to them. If a child is wrong on a school subject the thing which is in error is the school curriculum. The insidious thing called the examination has probably destroyed more ambition and ability than Genghis Khan, with his piles of skulls. Now, here we have this matter of an invalidated reality, you see? We’re back on the same thing again: invalidation of reality, invalidation of affinity, invalidation of communication.
The human mind is built to be right. One of the main difficulties the analytical mind has after it starts to accumulate a few engrams and they get into restimulation, is trying to keep on being right although it knows there’s an error in the computer.
Fellow goes down the street and he’s driving a car, and suddenly he climbs the curb and runs into a lamppost. Probably it was an engram saying, “You’re just wrecking yourself.” “Well, I’ve got to make a wreck of myself to convince you,” something like that—accident-prone stuff—that thing clicked in. You ask this fellow then about why he had this accident and he says, “Well, it was the sun shining in a windshield over there and besides, there was a pedestrian up on that corner and he almost stepped out into the . . .” And somebody else comes along and said, “There was no pedestrian there, and the sun is over there.” And he says, “Whooo!” because what has happened here is that he has given a justified reason for having done something he was not aware of having any reason for doing. It was inexplicable. And the analytical mind suddenly observes itself in operation, observes the vehicle in operation, observes that an accident has taken place, says, “Must have been a reason.” Can’t find one rapidly, tailor-makes one; says, “Well, there you are, I’m still right.” And then somebody comes along, as I say, and invalidates that one. And if you want to see a man spin just invalidate his justification because the justification is already so tenuous that it can’t support any challenge. The analytical mind is already aware . . .” [gap] . . . in order to justify itself for having done what it thought it did do, since it didn’t know the existence of the engram that caused it. And it can get into a mighty fine setup there on justifications.
I’ve read some of the most remarkable and wonderful justifications under the sun. Oh, my! Well, there’s all sorts of justifications. There are whole philosophies which are the justification of one man and so on. Most remarkable connotations. I think Nietzsche probably had something along in this line.
Justifications, justifications, more of them—the whole world is just filled with them. You go down to the police court sometime. You go down to the magistrate’s court, the supreme court, and listen to lawyers telling the judge back and forth, why it was their client did this, and the client standing up and saying why he did this, and why this was done by that corporation and so forth. Well, they have at least reached an honest dishonesty. They know they’re lying. But the analytical mind doesn’t know this when it starts justifying.
Now, as I say, it’s on a tenuous line. You see, if he was really right, observably right, that is to say, lots of people would agree that he was right (same thing) why, he’d have a rather calm aspect, calm attitude toward what he has just done. But if he is running on a justification, his reality force flow is already so dispersed that it can be hit rather quickly, easily and rolled up and encysted. You can implant, then, another kind of an engram in a person. And you see then that there are actually three new kinds of engrams. There is a physical pain engram; that is practically all the engram there is but there are these three others which can impinge upon it. One is the, you might say, the painful emotion engram and the other one is the encysted communication engram and the other would be the invalidated reality engram.
Now, they could all be done forcefully enough and strongly enough so that a person would practically fold up. Have you seen anybody fold up in grief? Have you picked up somebody, some preclear and put them down on the couch and run out a grief charge and seen this person look about ten years younger? You see what can happen with grief. Well, in people’s lives you will find other engrams on these two others which we hadn’t really suspected. They’ve been handled all the time, so forth; we hadn’t suspected the magnitude of the thing and how they had to be cleared up to get a case to progress.
How in the name of common sense can you turn on sonic if a communication engram is on the case? Just like a grief engram. You go find a communication engram and turn it off.
Except we’re not talking now about a physical pain engram, you see? We’re talking about a reversed communication engram, you see? It is as important as a grief engram. It’s sitting there on actual physical pain on its own vector line.
Let’s say the physical pain is a prenatal—that’s a physical painful engram—and you come up the line however and you may find at four and five years of age this communication engram which has no physical pain in it but is a reversal of a communication line.
I want you to take very, very close note of these two factors, these two new factors in Dianetics, because you are hearing about them for the first time. I’ve thought of these quite a bit and I started looking for them two or three weeks ago and I found out that people were getting them up just as a normal course of human affairs but not assigning to them the sudden and abrupted shock value they could have, that it could happen in a very short space of time.
Most psychoneurotic stutterers, for instance, get a reversal of communication on themselves, which is quite sudden and sharp and it may be along this line and usually is: the boy, let us say, is telling something which he knows to be the truth. He’s communicating in other words and he is putting forward a reality at the same time. And then somebody, to protect herself or himself, forces people to believe that the child is lying and then forces, right in the same concatenation of events, forces the child to admit that the child was lying. By this time you have the kid pretty frantic. As a matter of fact he will go, if that second step is added, he will go immediately into an apathy. It’s nice! That is a communication engram—it’s also an invalidation engram. But it shouldn’t be considered separately at this time. You could consider that all mixed up—but two engrams intermingled—they’re both engrams.
Naturally, if somebody has broken affinity with this child by forcing him to do so, affinity is broken too, so you’ve got all three of them lying in together. And this one happens to be a very severe and serious engram, the likes of which you will find every few cases. As a matter of fact I don’t think there are many cases where it hasn’t existed, that I’ve run into, that were in bad shape. Cases where the reality was low, where the person was—lot of dub-in, told you lies, didn’t believe himself, didn’t like people, so forth. You look down the line you’ll find several of these, you might say, triple engrams. You better clear them up because your case isn’t going to do much until they are cleared up. You’ll get a charge off of them, very often.
You were going to say something, Gene?
Male voice: Yeah, I was going to ask, what about the perceptics in such a situation? Would they not be associated with the perceptics, to some extent, of a physical pain engram which underlies it?
Yes, actually, context—that’s true but your context, perceptic, personnel and so forth, generally match up on one of these things.
That’s why you have a serious situation on invalidating the reality and reversing the affinity of a small child, is because it’s generally done by the same personnel in the physical pain engram. It is more than a lock though. These are highly specialized things. They are actually locks but they are of such super power that you have to call them engrams or people won’t run them. Now, you say, “Well, it’s just a high-powered lock” and a person comes along and starts running the case and he goes through this thing and says, “It’s just a lock.” Actually, you can take a grief engram or a terror engram and you can go through it just lightly and not handle it as an engram and you can spin the whole case. That is to say you can just tie it all up and stall it down so that somebody has to come along and unsnarl the thing before it’ll go forward.
Now, you understand a little bit more about the Auditor’s Code now? You as an auditor have made it your business to come into an affinity with the preclear. Otherwise, you couldn’t get anything done.
You are communicating with him and you are trying to get him to communicate, that’s a very intimate state there, communicate between himself and his own past. It’s rather difficult to do for some people. And at the same time you are trying to help him out on the subject of his reality. You know you can’t get much done unless his reality is—and these are the things that you’re trying to build. And you start building up considerable force with this preclear. There’s considerable force on the three lines of affinity, communication and reality. If you’ve built them up well or if they exist and you have worked with them, you’re going to have something pretty strong at work there. And then all of a sudden you invalidate his data. It’ll break all three, suddenly and abruptly. It’s usually done, too, to a person who is not completely analytically aware, who is a bit back down the time track, who can’t defend himself ably. He is depending much more thoroughly upon his auditor than the auditor usually suspects. An auditor is prone to overlook this. Even when he himself, on the couch, is depending upon his auditor.
A person is very badly startled, for instance, by noises and so forth which happen in his vicinity while he is in reverie. This is because he cannot marshal his forces immediately in order to combat the situation. In other words, his defenses are down at this point. He has completely taken his hair down. He is counting upon another human being to safeguard him from anything that happens in the environment so he can go back and find out what happened in his past life. And part of that trust is, of course, safeguarding the various life forces of the preclear himself and these can be interrupted.
Now, I hope you understand this more clearly. I hope you understand it clearly enough so the next invalidation or the next Auditor Code break that you run into and so forth, you just throw him down on the floor and just kick ’em and kick ’em and kick ’em and then call a couple of more auditors in and kick ’em some more. (laughter) I had a case one time—this was the maddest I’ve got, I think, in Dianetics—I had a case one time that was in the basic area and was erasing. With what horrible struggle we had gotten there and he was erasing. And somebody very close to this person waltzed in and wham! slam! invalidated all of his reality, practically all of it. This person went into a state of apathy and seven months later is not yet back into the basic area. Give you an idea? So let’s not underestimate the force of these vectors or the trouble which can be caused by opposing them.
What are you dealing with, with thought? Thought combined with MEST in an orderly and harmonic way is life. And thought communicates itself, goes into, handles, works with and around MEST along these three vectors. You’re handling a person’s life.
Of course I realize that one of these hard-boiled Anglo-Saxon civilizations—I, by the way, differentiate rather abruptly. I studied quite a few civilizations before Dianetics came into being. And I found out that this civilization probably has cards and spades over any other I ever ran into on the subject of just common, ordinary, plain, mean discourtesy where another person’s brains are concerned or where another person’s rights are concerned.
We do an awful lot of talking about rights but it’s an interesting thing that when we have so much talk about rights—I am reminded of the early days of the Puritans.
Now, did you ever bother to look up or read over the laws and codes on which those people operated? The Blue Laws, for instance, of an early Puritan town are something to behold—what they prohibit! Well, they prohibit people from rushing out naked into the middle of the street. They prohibit this, they prohibit that, they prohibit the drinking’s of—and everybody sits around and says, “My, those were certainly moral people. Yes, sir!” But you wouldn’t hold with that too far if you saw what kind of a society they were really trying to get along in.
This society was so bad that it had to have laws like this. And every time you see a stringent law code, you are normally, usually looking straight at a society which has something basically wrong with it which has to be corrected by that punitive code. Hence the Puritans. These people were trying to combat tavern brawling of the magnitude of a couple of guys getting killed every night. Hopalong Cassidy never faced anything like one of the taverns of an early Puritan town. It’s a fact.
They needed law and order and the Puritans tried to bring it into the society and they made pretty good inroads on it one way or the other. But the society in which Puritanism existed was the maddest, wildest, brawlingest society imaginable.
This was also the period when piracy was very high. Have you got any idea how bad societies have to be to support such a thing as the terrors and so forth of piracy, where suddenly a bunch of men out of a ship swarm aboard another ship and kill everybody on board? Tie the captain to a mast and string gunpowder around him, then laugh like hell and get in another ship and go off someplace? That sounds very romantic in the movies but that interrupts commerce.
Now, the society was pretty bad. Well, if you’ll notice, this society does an awful lot of talking about safeguarding human rights. You get around and look at it real close and you’ll find out that we don’t have very good rights. Because these laws have to exist to combat them and of course these rights are deteriorating like mad, at present time, from standpoint of—well, the amendments to the Constitution and all that sort of thing, the freedom of speech, freedom of press, and now we have freedom from want, freedom from—what are all those things? There’s freedom from want and freedom from liberty, (laughter) freedom from election, election-type government.
These things are very interesting. They are a complete redefinition of democracy. We had a bad time, in other words. We must have had in personal rights, in a society, to have laid so much stress on the English-American groups. And what do you hear when you’re out in the street and you’re listening to little kids? What do you hear? “You’re a liar!” “I did not!” “You did too!” Polite little devils. “That’s mine!” “Willie, you let him have that!” So on.
This society is impolite. We get around down in the longshore district, where this stuff starts to run in the raw: “Oh, you dumb fool, you’re stupid!” I mean, that’s “Good morning.” People in this society, which is a highly vital and virile society, they’re going forward on these vectors at such rapidity that they keep superimposing controls over things that shouldn’t be controlled. And part of this effort to control latches on to other people. It’s like early Christianity back in slave days. They said, “Well, the way you get lots of slaves is to take them rum and Christianity.” And they took them rum and Christianity and they managed to fix them up pretty good.
Of course, their brand of Christianity was a very, very strange brand, but it was nevertheless very much to the point of: people tried to control other people with something which was supposed to make people more or less free. So they used Christianity to try to control people. And naturally, this point in the society uses Christianity to control this point and this point and this point and this point and this point. And this will go along just so long and then these points will counteract by trying to control this point and the first thing you know the whole thing sinks down, more and more controlled. So you’ve got reactive controlling back and forth. A tries to control B. If he tries long enough, B pretty soon will try to control A, and here we go. And it sinks on down the line. It’s a dwindling spiral.
Now, this business of rights becomes a dwindling spiral. People come up and they try to defend these rights and they try to set it up so people will continue with these rights. Actually, there must be a tremendous amount of activity in the society which try to deny to people these rights, and this activity is reactive. It counters from here, A tells B he has no rights; B then begins to tell A he has no rights, and the first thing you know, you decline down and you get a police state. There’s nothing in it but force. In other words, the universe of thought is merging and becoming more and more a material universe, until at last it’s just a material universe. There’s a flock of cemeteries around and that’s all. Thought has just sort of backed out. Too much force has been added into the equation.
Now, the postulation of human rights is actually an effort to keep these three vectors from being interrupted so seriously as to undermine and cause to deteriorate an individual or a group. That is actually, fumblingly felt, the aim of laws which safeguard human rights. The protection of these three vectors. Now that they know what they are protecting, I hope they can codify it a little bit better, because a serious crime in such a society would be to walk up to somebody who has just lost a friend and say, “Bill died.” Boom!
Now, you see? Rights. Right to do what? Right to live, right to talk, right to communicate, and right to investigate—all of these things are very important. Any one of them, interrupted too badly, will leave a highly charged lock that you can call an engram, up the track.
Now, in processing you should go back and try to find these things and try to get them off of the case. In other words, unstopper each one of these three lines as nearly as you can and you are going to have a much better acting case on your hands.
You wouldn’t try, for instance, to educate a person to love children who had engrams that told him to hate children—you could probably force him into it—because he’s being forced from the other side to hate them, you see? Pain is telling him to hate children. And now you are going to educate him? No, that’s not possible, so we have to introduce more pain here than is here, and we get this kind of an equation all the time. I mean this is practically the world of law in operation.
Here is the individual, [drawing on blackboard] A, and here is his engram bank, and here is social force over here. Now the engrams, so forth, are forcing A and this communication line up in this direction, so something has to happen here to keep A from going in that direction, so more force has to be opposed over here, on social force. But of course the more social force that is applied to A, the more engrams get implanted; so the more pain is here driving A up in that direction, the more pain has to be applied in this direction, which makes more pain in this direction and more pain in that direction. And when you’re dealing with this sort of thing, you are dealing, of course, with force. And force is native only to MEST. The kind of force that’s being applied here, physical pain, that is native to MEST, so the end product is MEST—that is, matter and energy existing in time and space. But these things are antipathetic to thought. They are the things that thought’s trying to combat, so it forces thought out. That’s death, isn’t it? So you kill a man, you get executed. I mean, the society has already said it.
All right? It’s interesting that the attempt to regulate a society by infliction of pain, it goes into a dwindling spiral. And ships in the old days—Napoleon’s day was practically the last anybody saw of it to any great degree—but they had gone into a dwindling spiral of having to increase the magnitude of punishment, up to a point where you’ve got such interesting things as keelhauling, yardhauling, flogging through the fleet, the most weird inhumanities in the name of keeping things right. It was also very interesting to me as a side panel on that, they would punish a man up to a point where he would finally come out and tell the crew that he had done wrong. Yeah, they would beat him into a statement. And these fellows, just before they were hanged or something like that—oh, hanging from the yardarm, practically the second mate could order that. I mean it had gotten that bad. These fellows would come out and confess; demonstrates that they must have been pretty badly beaten down.
They must have been dwelling, in the first place, on the brink of going into a spin to be forced into one in that fashion. In other words, it didn’t take much to tumble them over. Here was a society which had gone on this basis of having more force this way, to more force that way, to more force this way, to more force that way, to more force this way, and oh, heavens.
This, by the way—the societies can be pretty well forecast as to what will happen. It will either suddenly recognize that it’s got to interrupt the whole thing and just reorganize the whole codes, everything that has to do with punishment, just throw them out the window completely or the society goes boom!
People come into a society sometime and are roundly cussed for trying to reform the society.
Up in Montana for instance, in the old days, the cowboys very badly objected to people coming in and “reforming” the area. This was because most of the people who came in to reform the area actually came in to get a little more money out of it. That is to say if you reformed it good and solid, you got rid of the boys who had a monopoly on the crime before you got there. That was the way they were doing the reforming, a lot of it. But this sort of spread around that it was a very bad thing to reform the society and so on and they invented this horrible epithet, a reformer, and so here we have terrific antipathy toward this.
Actually, that society if just left by itself would, as near as I can figure out, have just simply killed itself off and ceased to exist.
One fellow that told me about the early days of Montana said he rode over a hill and he looked at the town and it looked like a chromo from the Battle of Gettysburg. The whole point is that here was a society so thoroughly engaged upon the application of force so as to prevent force from happening on an individual level. You know? Bill says that Gus should not exert force against Bill and the final argument is a slug from a .45. I mean, there you’ve really got a society on the skids. They talk about it being young and virile and everything else—suicidal! That thing has come up to a point where the whole society is on the verge of passing out and unless somebody suddenly steps up and says, “Let’s change all this pattern,” the whole thing will pass out.
An area like Montana in the early days, for instance, had a civilized world on its borders—that is to say, the East could come in there and people from the East coming in there modified it. Nobody modified that society itself. It actually died and passed away. But it’s supplanted. I just happened to think of that.
Now, that should give you some sort of a notion of what happens in a social order by just the interruption of these three things. And believe me, it certainly happens in an individual. Because the more interruptions you get along these three lines of communication, affinity and reality, the more you inhibit thought from acting smoothly within the organism and the less thought is actually available to the organism in the business of living. And it gets to a point rather rapidly where a person grows old and looks like he is forty and feels like it and so on.
The society actually, sort of as a whole, does this. And the individual does this in the same way. He puts a forward force in order to live; he gets force back. He puts out force, he gets force back again and that is his normal business of living.
Well, it’s bad enough—it’s bad enough, actually, just in terms of wear and tear without any engrams being entered into it but you start getting engrams entered into it and it’s no wonder that in this society people of sixty-five can’t play baseball. [gap] All right, my main concern here has been to give you the picture of the seriousness of breaking affinity, communication and reality with your preclear. That’s one part of it. And the other: how to rehabilitate the affinity, communication and reality of your preclear and to show to you that there are actually three types of high-powered locks that you can call engrams, not just a painful emotion; there’s more than that.
Okay, let’s take a ten-minute break.