View source for Anatomy Of Games Part I (9ACC 541221)

'''Series:''' 9th Advanced Clinical Course (9ACC)

'''Date:''' 21 December 1954

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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The talk yesterday on the subject of games was not completed. There's too much to say on this subject. I digressed too far, so I would like to say a few more things about games. Maybe it will make them a little clearer.

We covered the idea that the basic idea was to have some action, some games, and we should take a very close look at the anatomy of a game and find out who, what and how is the exact anatomy of a game. Now, I haven't written this down anyplace. I actually hadn't thought about it very much. But I think it might be amusing to take this apart, and let's us just figure out, now, how many parts there are to a game.

Well, first and foremost we'd have our communication formula of the two horseshoes. Must be a two-way cycle of communication, one way or the other, or we find the game doing some strange change of character. We find it changing in its ethic level or something of the sort, unless there is a two-way cycle of communication.

Talked to you yesterday and didn't say all there was to say about it by a long ways, about the problem between the known and the unknown terminal, as the two terminals of the game. You got that? I mean, the known and the unknown terminal.

Naturally, if one of the terminals of the game is unknown and the other terminal of the game is known, such as in the game which is played in every city hall in the world, called cops and robbers - they've never quite grown up. And they are - they are terribly afraid of ending this game by the way. If you gave any real good solution to crime, it would be - the police forces of the world would be on the back of your neck. They would be as mad at you for doing this as a preclear is mad at you when you've taken away his last game.

So, we look at this, we find this two-way cycle of communication. And this two-way cycle of communication balances in such a way as to continue a communication.

And we find the game is only this: The introduction of a necessity for a communication. You see, that adds the reason why; the reason why.

And when we make it necessary to communicate, of course, we make it necessary to have a game. And if communication is not necessary then no game is in progress, or it is just one team resting. You get the idea?

All right. So we have this problem of communication very intimately associated with games and we discover quite easily that the need to have a communication in the first place would result from the need to have barriers.

Now, to any group or any civilization that is extremely well equipped, you might say, with barriers, it's a fallacy of that communication to believe that barriers are bad. You see, it's got too many barriers and not enough action in the game, then it is liable to say, well, barriers are bad.

Well, this would lead them to believe that entire and full, complete and utter communication is desirable. Well, now, if we take it reductio ad absurdum and simply get full, entire and complete communication, we're in a realm of theory which tells us at once that we wouldn't have a barrier. There wouldn't be any barriers around.

So that affinity would emerge in its truest definition, which is coincidence of location and beingness. That is the ultimate in affinity: Coincidence of location and beingness.

If Joe and Bill could occupy exactly the same location, and if they considered themselves the same person, why, the affinity would be very high, providing you had not entered in any identity at all. No identity existed there at all, you would have, of course, just a thetan occupying the same area as another thetan. And you would have the theoretical height of affinity, which, of course, is not obtainable.

It actually is not obtainable. It's an absolute. And there would be an inaction resulting from a complete affinity.

Now, anything that we would discover to be a partial affinity would not be enough to bother with in terms of this complete affinity, you see. I mean, we think of affinity and we think, well, there might be something approaching this. But actually, if you got real busy and looked it over real hard and examined it with all the imagination of which you were capable, you would just begin to get the idea how far a high level ARC would be from this ultimate - this absolute affinity. It will be a long way - long way to go.

All right. When we look over the idea of barriers we discover that everybody present and in this civilization at this time undoubtedly has too many. And so he's liable to think in terms of an absolute communication. See, an absolute affinity, an absolute communication, so forth.

Naturally you wouldn't have any barriers if this took place at all, and at the same time you wouldn't have any game. Now, we have talked and condemned, talked about and condemned this idea of a one-way flow. Well, it's all very well to talk about a one-way flow, but the truth of the matter is a stuck flow is not necessarily bad. It's simply a flow that's going to keep running that way, isn't it?

So let's get real practical now and let's tackle the whole problem from another angle entirely. We find that a game has to have opponents, it has to have players, has to have some rationale of some sort or another. It should have somebody for an umpire. It should have some mass. There should be some mass in both of the units that are contesting one against the other, and there is some sort of a mass or particle to be contested about, see. Actually what is best is an idea. That is the most elusive of all weenies. Now the - you can never find it. Just utterly impossible to find an idea.

If you tried to root out the idea of communism out of the world, or the idea of democracy - by the way, these are not opposites.

A democracy is a method of operation of government and communism is a method of operation of - well, it's a method of operation. No, all joking aside, communism is a method. It's a methodology by which people cut down the amount of currency and so forth - what they consider barriers and blocks in the society - for a freer distribution of goods and work; and a breakdown of the bigger massive terminals. They break down the more massive individual terminals inside the society by trying to make the whole society a terminal.

And you get good - pretty good flow, pretty good interchange. But in view of the fact that everybody is so interested in playing a game in order to really make communism work you'd have to have a completely sane, utterly rational population - each and every individual in it. It's this - has the same foolish arbitrary - it's got an absolute in it, the same one that anarchy has. The anarchist and the communist are always hand in glove in various revolutions, and so forth.

Of course, what is meant today by anarchy isn't what it says in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Lord knows what they mean today by communism, by anarchy, by democracy and so forth. Lord knows. Nobody has defined these things for so long that they're just words. And communism, from being an idea which nobody could find, is now a symbol which goes around and it has some mass. It has some mass. People can chase after the symbol itself.

I think that if you walked up to McCarthy and said to him, suddenly "Senator, would you mind giving me a precision definition of ideal communism, practical communism and the modus operandi of communism itself as a government?"

Actually it can be stated in five or six paragraphs. I mean, it's very, very - a very brief statement can be made on each one of these points. That boy would stand there with his mouth open. He does not know any one of these things. What is communism as an ideal, what is it in its practical application, and what is its modus operandi in a state.

He looks at it as its modus operandi in invading another state, which is not the modus operandi of communism, you see? Another thing.

Fascism, same way. I didn't know until recently, though, in my innocence, that actual fascists - that there is a state of mind known as fascism which is a state of mind. We have described it utterly on the Tone Scale, just as gorgeously as it ever got described. It's sitting there right at 1.5, just as neat as you please.

But I never knew that a pure, absolute state of beingness known as a fascist could exist until I ran into a couple of them. Perfect. I mean, they were right out of Mein Kampf They were American. One was an American industrialist and the other was an American military man. The ideas these people had, the - the operation in which they were willing to engage, what they thought was right was so confoundedly aberrated that a fellow had to - had to look awfully close at them to make sure they weren't joking. You know, it was real silly.

For instance, they believed in an insulated state of beingness, unless you could overflow with force and force your ideals onto somebody else. I never quite found out how you could force your ideals or ideas on anybody. But I suppose it's possible. Fascists keep trying to do it.

That they are better than anybody else as individuals and as this political unity and so forth. I suppose I wouldn't have been amazed a bit about it if I had been in Germany during 1934-35-36. I imagine that people were talking about this quite a bit. And other people like myself were being very amazed that such individuals could exist. It's impossible, but there they were.

Well, here is your - just no divergency on this to amount to anything - here are your various compartments of a game. You have the terminals, you have the weenie, you have the communication barriers.

And these barriers, of course, categorize into matter, energy, space and time. All of these are barriers. And with all this, of course, we get a reason why.

And what is that reason why? It is a reason why we must interrupt or crash through communications. See, it'd be just all built around this same thing - reason why.

So what factors here in - are there in communication that are also employed in a game? Well, the stuck flow, the - is a very definite used factor in a game. You get something discharging in some direction and it keeps on discharging in that direction. You got a rocket ship. You see that? It is a stuck flow and it's no more than a stuck flow - a reaction engine drive. And it just keeps on pouring fire out the rear end, that's all. That's a stuck flow. And they work in a direction to make it a real stuck flow. And how does it get to be a stuck flow? It's because the reaction engine is jetting flame in or radioactive material into space. No terminal.

Now, if you just worked with this principle of communication a little bit you could probably evolve the - a basic reaction engine which would be very, very close to a perpetual motion machine. The mass ratios, and so forth, go completely haywire. Elementary physics as taught in high schools has never really been disobeyed. But the moment that you start throwing the time factor around, you start to get up to the speed of particles and that sort of thing, why, elementary physics goes by the boards - just sswamm.

You're, of course, you're getting up toward instantaneousness, and the closer you approach instantaneousness the closer you approach life in its functions.

Well, anyhow, here we have these various components of the game. Let's go over them again. It would be the two-way communication; it would be any frailty of communication; it would be the terminals - two or more terminals; it would be the thing that everybody is after and it would be all these communication barriers.

Now, nobody has ever - that you have ever seen in a football game - has ever pitched a football straight down. And the reason for that is, is ground under him. If it's used in a game, a football has to rest someplace or another. And it rests on the ground. Ground. This sounds awfully silly, but unless you break down some of these problems you really don't see much application to them. Ground is a necessary part of a football game. No reason to go on ignoring this.

Well, what is ground but the doggonedest, solidest communication barrier you ever ran into? The next time you want to communicate with China, don't stamp your foot. Your message will not be received.

And now, they go worse than this. They put up - they put up ends to the playing field in the form of goal posts. And in almost any game, if there is a ball in use, they will put up backdrops to keep the ball from going further away, you see, than in the playing field itself.

And you get looking at any kind of a playing field, you will be amazed, utterly amazed, when you start to count up the intricacy of barriers, the number of barriers actually employed in this game.

There is also the matter of too much space. You see, too much space is definitely a barrier. And that's a beautiful trap - too much space.

So, we get this idea of a communication barrier can exist of too much of something. Too much space.

All right. And we find out that home runs are quite easy in some ballparks, but they are not in others. And they play the big-league games in the big ballparks that have too much space to make a home run, you see. So that ball can go back there and at least somebody in the outfield can pick up the ball and pitch it in.

But where you have - you - where you have limited your space, why, the ball can then fly over the fence. And it's gone and nobody can pick it up because they don't provide ladders and parachutes for the outfield.

You see, actually in an anxiety to play a game, if barriers were uniformly bad in all directions, you would naturally concentrate mainly upon equipping your people with materiel which would uniformly and most efficiently overcome any barrier met.

So that in a football game the first action of anybody's part would be to shoot the timekeeper, wouldn't it? To provide the outfield with ladders and parachutes. To make the baseball much lighter, and much springier so that it could be thrown - well, I say much lighter, it should be given a better mass so as to be able to assume more velocity and more bounce. And yet they don't do that. They get a - get a good dead ball, you know. They do all sorts of things in order to limit this.

By the way, did you ever hit a golf ball with a baseball bat, or a cricket bat? They go wham! Man, do they travel. They travel most alarmingly. So that if in playing games people were actually even vaguely concentrated on eliminating barriers, they would play baseball with a golf ball, and so forth.

But they're not. They're not. They're concentrated in an entirely different direction. Put up those barriers, keep them there, and keep them functioning. If a set of goal posts - the one thing that could really end and bring to nothing a football game, would be if its goal posts fell down.

They'd "time out," and you would see whistles blowing and people running around trying to find carpenters, and so forth.

Now, the head of one of the teams could drop dead and the game would go on. See, they'd just throw in a substitute or something. Or play without him. But a goal post - oh, no. No, the game would stop right there while they patched it all up again.

You could say that the barrier is far more important than the player in most games. If you have ever tried to play tennis on a court that had no backdrop - have you ever had this unpleasant experience? Why, you spend all of your time going out to get those balls back. You get what I mean. Well, looking over then the problem of communication in games we find out that barriers are desirable in more than one field. You could look it over, you'd find thousands and thousands of fields in which a one-way flow was desirable, where you get a stuck flow.

Of course, the way you get a stuck flow would just be to eliminate the answer part of it, or eliminate the terminal entirely that the communication was going toward.

And any time you do something like this, why, you are liable to get yourself a nice, even outflow of one kind or another which will just go on and on and on, you see.

So, even the stuck flow is used. We start eliminating other parts of the communication formula and we get other manifestations. We get the manifestation called gravity. Now, gravity is used in a football game. Once more, it's a very effective barrier.

In the absence of gravity you would be able to kick a football so far and so high that there would be no point in it at all. The ball would simply not come back. And it'd cost everybody a fortune buying new footballs.

But on the moon - I well cognizate this particular datum: Football isn't played. It isn't. There is no atmosphere to restrain the flight of a ball, and the gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth, so that if you gave the ball a good, sharp kick it would go on and on and on. Might even escape the gravity of the moon. I mean, they maybe never come down.

So, oh, by the way, every once in a while - here's a little trick for you just in passing on that particular point of gravity - once in a while you'll send a preclear up to the moon, and Earth and sun, you know, doing a Grand Tour, and you get - you get a fascinating reaction from him if he is really on the ball.

There's a space station on the back of the moon-that's space station thirty-three - and it has corridors and observatory domes and a lot of other things, a lot of odds and ends. But these corridors are on different levels. So that we have a hallway, you see, a corridor, and then we have one which is maybe twelve or fifteen feet above the level. You see, the next level.

So we'd go down this corridor, and then we'd have to go up twelve or fifteen feet to go down to the next corridor. And they'll take a look at this and they will see that there is nothing but sheer wall face between this lower corridor and the upper corridor floor - fifteen foot sheer drop between these two corridors.

And they will say, "Something is wrong here. There are no stairs. I don't know what I'm doing here, or what's going on, but this place is kind of funny. There are no stairs here." Why should there be any stairs where gravity is so slight? And where the animated doll - they, by the way, get a very disproportionate picture of the size of space station thirty-three. It's quite amusing. It's a doll's-house, really. They get quite a disproportionate picture because they look at an animated doll or something like that and the height of it is usually a meter or less. Seldom more - just about thirty-nine inches tall, something on this order - thirty-six, thirty-seven and a half inches. Something on that order.

Well, that's real short, isn't it? But we have this ten or fifteen foot apparently - they aren't that high, you see, because it's a doll's-house size jump that a person would have to make if he wanted to walk on down the hall. Naturally it could be made with great ease.

A man, as heavy and as massive as a man is - man is five-foot-ten, something like that, six feet, whatever, what's the average height? Five-foot-nine, five-foot-eight? - he would be able to jump straight up in the air thirty-six feet on the moon. That's a big, big jump from start. That is to say, if he could jump six feet on earth.

And you get a running start on the thing. Well, we are not talking about - I guess we are not talking about the average businessman. The average high school athlete finds no great difficulty in jumping his own height. Matter of fact, this used to be one of the ways they told whether or not troops were disabled. You know, the fellow is all shot to pieces. He can't even jump his own height anymore. That was in the Greek army.

Anyhow, here we have an absence of steps, and this is the obvious thing that should be part of the game called a house or a base. And the preclear will immediately notice this absence of mass.

He may not comment on it at all. It may never strike him at all. He may be a rather dull fellow. But there are many other things which are similar to this in various parts of this universe. He notices these barriers or absences of barriers or something of the sort.

Now, wherever you have a game being played, you have communications being cut. And that is why you will never get an answer out of a general of armies. If he is interested or used to the game called war, then he is better at cutting communications than he is at doing anything else. They are wonderful at it. And they dead-end communications most gorgeously.

Now, of course, by the very nature of the position of command in an organization, we discover a fascinating upset of communication in an organization itself, which, of course, makes for a stuck flow.

Let's take an army regiment, something like that, has a colonel and - or colonel's command squads, or I don't know how they do it these days since the navy got in there. The army and the navy, you know, are all the same organization. The day - I walked up to a naval officer the other day and I was about to say something pleasant. I all of a sudden noticed he was wearing his bars exactly like they wear them in the army on his raincoat.

The one saving grace of the navy in the old days was that you - all you had to do was put on a raincoat and nobody knew what rank you were or anything of the sort. And you could act as nasty as you pleased. You might even get to be able so you could act as nasty as an admiral. But in that case you would have to leave your hat - I mean, as - pardon me, as fatuous as an admiral if you - you'd have to leave your hat home because they still left the scrambled eggs on.

But they - I saw a couple of seamen the other day and my God, they were wearing first-class private stripes. And I suppose the army these days sleeps on the deck and goes topside. I don't know.

I - what I - really looking forward to a belly laugh in this next war when they start putting generals on battleships. A general is always good for a complete bellyache of a laugh - in his own position. This ought to be a real, real fine thing.

I have seen admirals in command of troops, and that is an interesting situation to be in, too. They keep telling the troops to go topside or something of the sort and nobody understands their language. Squad starboard, indeed.

Anyway, you see that an up flowing communication up the line of command - I don't know why it's up, it really ought to be reversed. They ought to show command on the bottom. But you see this up flowing line of communication.

Let's say we have a thousand troops. And here we've got this colonel up there and everyone of these troops undoubtedly has something to say about the running of this army or this regiment, you see? Everybody's got a beef.

And they would like to enter into communication on the thing. So the army has to go in for a series of interruptions. And we have what's laughingly called a command flow plan. If they called it a command stop plan, they'd have a much better look at it.

All right. So the privates have to get the permission of the corporals -I mean, in a very well-regulated army - in order to speak to the sergeants. United States army - you don't have to have permission to speak to anybody below the rank of- what is it? Lieutenant colonel - something like that.

Well, anyhow, they go on up the line and in a well-regulated army it would be planned this way: The corporal, who is in charge of eight or ten men, would see, it's eight men in the modern army. That's right. The corporals aren't as able. In Roman times they could handle ten men, now they can only handle eight.

So that we get to the next level up and that would be a buck sergeant and then we get our sergeants of oh, specialists, and command line sergeants and so forth. Then it's stopped there again. And then theoretically it would be stopped at your platoon officer and that would be a second lieutenant and then the - or first lieutenant. And then it would be stopped again at the captain and then it would be stopped again at battalion by the sergeant-major of battalion. And stopped again by the adjutant and stopped again - they really - they really get to work there at the level of battalion. And they - stopped again by the major. And then it would be from there on, of course, if you considered any flow possible, the major occasionally over a glass of beer or a glass of wine or something of the sort, happens to mention incidentally that morale is mighty bad these days. And this summates the tremendous effort of some nine hundred men to make their communication felt at the top line.

But look what would happen if this were a wide-open chart. There is only one set of ears, by definition and by postulate, upon this colonel's head. And if he listened to everything that was incoming - all originated despatches - he would get nothing else done. And if he listened to them and acknowledged them, again, he would get certainly nothing else done, no mistresses, no rake-off from the supply department - nothing. And he wouldn't get any of the real business of a colonel in there.

And, so now he goes back down the other way and nobody permits this communication to stop anyplace. It's as much as your life's worth in battle to stop a communication from a field rank or even a colonel. You wouldn't stop the communication. Somebody comes up to you and says that Robert E. Lee has just uttered the statement that "you is to fall back." And this fellow says, "Who the hell is he?" Why, they just shoot him and go on with the war, you see? No barrier must exist from the top down.

Well, would you look at this as a loused-up communication system? Isn't that gorgeous? If it wouldn't be designed to make solid mass out of everybody involved after a short space of time, why, we don't understand this system at all.

But you see what would happen? Back flow entirely stopped. Down flow must go through. Now, the colonel never really ever gets an acknowledgment. He never really gets an acknowledgment. The privates to whom he is really addressing his communication, and so forth, they never sing out over the telephone line. They never walk up to a telephone, one after the other, and say, "Okay colonel. Okay colonel. Okay colonel." See?

So, this really gives this boy a stuck flow. It gives him the idea after a while that anything he says will go through. Nothing sillier ever occurred in a commanding officer's mind. See, he gets totally formed on the idea of a stuck flow. He knows that communication is going through, if he knows anything. He is convinced. That's because he never gets any acknowledgment on the other end.

So he gets acknowledgment hungry once in a while and court-martials somebody just for the hell of it. Because there weren't enough dead men on Hill 101, or something. You know, it couldn't have been held, possibly, and so on.

So, he'll get frantic. Well, now what do you think the affinity level is for this kind of an operating system, huh? Is it good? No, sir. But of course it was used in the Roman legions. It was used with malice aforethought.

The way this was done - the legionnaire who did not feel actual terror about his officers, not just fear but terror on the subject of his own officers, wasn't considered a good legionnaire at all. He had to feel very brave in the face of the enemy and he had to be very afraid of his own officers. And this was the way they had it rigged, good and solid. Of course, his officers took extraordinarily long lengths to make sure that they were feared. We still have survivals of it mentioned. Oh, I don't know if any of the European armies still use what they call field punishment or not. But they might, they did in World War I. I heard of a few examples of it in World War II. But it was just nothing to stake somebody out on a wheel and other niceties that they used to practice.

An officer would suddenly see a spot of rust on a legionnaire's armor, or something like that, he'd have him flogged. He'd have him flogged dead. You know, I mean they just - . But look at how long Rome was in action as a military force.

Therefore, look how stuck that flow must be - the command flow must get - under that kind of a condition of hundreds and hundreds of years. You see, Rome was a highly successful military organization for, oh, I don't know, seven or eight hundred years before Christ. And that's already several times as long as we are old as the United States. And it's longer than Great Britain has been a united nation, certainly.

They held together to this degree and it got to this terrific point where an officer was so certain of no acknowledgment at all from a private, you see, that he would have to make that private pay one way or the other with pain, agony, something, you see. It was the only satisfactory acknowledgment - was the guy screaming? You get the idea?

See how stuck one of these military organizational plans will get after a while when we look at it in progress for a few hundred years in Rome.

Now, it breaks down every once in a while when the purpose and reason for having an army goes by the boards. You know, like now. Now we're talking now about the "big brother" policy. Right after the atom bomb, why, the army started talking about the sergeants should be big brothers to the privates, and the colonel is just your father, after all. This is in their regulation books.

So that this communication setup does result in a solider mass and a stucker flow, and it is used in games. And it makes quite a game. The game called Roman legion was quite a game. It was a real rough one. They marched at 120 paces to the minute, if I remember rightly, or 130 30-inch paces to the minute. They camped - they would immediately, if one didn't exist already on a standard line of march, they would immediately build a small town before they went to bed that night. A legion camp was something to behold. They just were right on the ball. They were fantastic in the amount of discipline.

Of course, after a few hundred years of Christianity we find out a whole Roman legion just standing still and letting itself be slaughtered because it was too exhausting to wear armor.

But in the early days before all of this communication line simply went into an utter explosion or dispersal, you got a situation there where they exercised in armor which was - I've forgotten the factor - maybe twice as heavy as their battle armor. Maybe two and a half times. All their exercises, marches, everything else, they would just heap the weight on these boys and make them operate in mock fights, you see. And then they would give them this light armor and these boys would feel like birds - actual battle armor.

Well, as we look over the game, we find the game then - let's look at it - gets more and more interrupted communications from the players to the - pardon me, from the pawns - the broken pawns - the pawns to the player. You see this? We find out there's less and less acknowledgment on the part of the player, the mover of pieces of the game. Less and less acknowledgment is received by him. And we get more and more of a broken communication line in that direction; but we get more and more of a stuck flow from the player to the pawns. See this as a game?

Now, we get that stuck flow so thorough that an automaticity or something like that sets up on the part of a player. He actually - eventually there's just too much mass between himself and the pawns. And as a result, he simply does not move any pawns anymore. It just gets up to this stuck flow which is stuck, stuck, stuck - glue.

And we get this game called God and religion. It's very possible that over a long period of time there actually was, at one time or another, somebody who was manipulating a great many thetans plus body on a very intimate line. And maybe you could go out and pray and say "Who do I attack next, boss?" You know, that kind of thing. And you might have gotten some sort of an acknowledgment. See, you might have. Very possible that there's somebody playing, and along this line.

Well, the tradition of it continues to exist. But that line got awfully stuck not too long ago. Oh, man, did that line get stuck. Boy, you obeyed the commandments and mandates of God or else. You know, hellfire, damnation. You'd be amazed, but England, by the way, got so tired of this that practically nobody goes to church anymore. They just - they got real bored with this whole thing.

The US still has convulsions on this - you occasionally find something like this. Somebody evangelist is coming around with the word of God and telling you you're going to heaven or hell or something of the sort.

But it gets to be more and more hell and less and less heaven, and then everybody skips it. The communication line is almost entirely interrupted between these two things. And then, at that moment nobody credits the existence of the terminal. You see how this goes?

Now, therefore, therefore after a while you undoubtedly somewhere in Roman history, just by theory here, would have found a condition where troops did not believe there was a commanding officer. See that?

Well, all right. Now, then these other things add up one way or the other, and we get actually what we could plot out under its various conditions. I've given you a highly specialized thing, an army, players, and so forth. This is kind of general, but it is nevertheless a specialized thing.

And we've gotten - we see then that there's a sort of a cycle of games. The game cycle, which is another thing which derives immediately from the communication cycle - a two-way cycle.

So we get a game cycle. And we could plot out this game cycle as existing where there was a good, free communication amongst everybody on a team. And this was a good, free communication. They all felt like each one was certainly as important as every other one, that the fellow who was in command was simply the guy who had more ideas than the rest of them. And they obeyed him because they liked him, they felt like walking into his tent at any time. You had militia, for instance, as an example of this - militia during its first formative stages is doing this.

Everybody is perfectly willing to attack that hill or sweep off the Hessians, or do something of the sort. Everybody is perfectly willing to go through the doggonedest things, but they are all buddies and they elect their officers and they diselect them if the guy cancels their leave, or something like this.

And they all feel very friendly and fine. And usually the officer who is in best communication with the men is the leader. They can say anything they want to, to him, and he'll give them an answer one way or the other. And this line continues. And then we get the thing more rigorously formed.

Somebody thinks it's much better to have a highly regimented organization. For instance, the theory existed here during the American revolution which would fascinate you, that we had to have a continental line. That is, we had to have a - an army of the confederated states. There had to be a Regular Army. Washington was certainly sold on this. And every European officer that was hired was sold on this. And they had the example of those they were fighting, who were certainly sold on this.

And they never won a battle with this Regular Army. Not one. They didn't win any battles with this Regular Army. They lost, you might say, every major pitched battle. That is to say, in which Regular Armies - they lost every single one of those, and yet, although militia would scatter in all directions and be seized with whims and so forth, it was militia at Bennington that stopped gentleman Johnny Burgoyne in his tracks. Crash. Just militia.

And it was an officer who wasn't even appointed to the post, Benedict Arnold, who won Saratoga. And who was being chased all through the battle by, I think, Greene's or Gates' aide, who was to put him under arrest. And nobody would follow anybody but him, so they went ahead and won a battle.

But here's a very loose state of affairs. And they wouldn't - you see, there's no rationale actually exercised about this. Never has been. Look at the hole here.

We keep getting and recruiting and arming and holding together this Regular Army. And the only thing that is making mincemeat out of anybody is loosely-organized fallen-apart militia.

There are other factors enter in which tend to disprove this sort of thing - many other factors such as food supplies and things like this. You get a Regular Army that's doing nothing but fighting, you still leave some guys at home who are still doing nothing but hoeing. And so you continue to get an army fed. There's better order existing.

So that very often a militia force will be licked by lack of supply. It's not organized or something of the sort. But the Civil War, I think the Union - take the Civil War just as wars. Wars are interesting things to look at because they are sort of life speeded up. It's more clearly seen. There's more action involved and there's certainly more game being played. And the teams align much more sharply, one with another.

And during the Civil War, I don't know, let's see, some of the Southern propaganda went this way. They had to keep importing people from Europe in order to join the Federal Army, and they opened the gates of immigration in order to get troops. And here were all these factories up north, just grinding away at a mad rate and turning out troops and supplies and they were training men and arming men and putting men into the field, and there was 150,000 there and 200,000 someplace else, and men - men in all directions, equipment - equipment. And a half a dozen irregular Southern cavalry on the way to the Battle of Gettysburg captured one of these units fifteen hundred Pennsylvania regulars, and all their arms and ammunition.

These irregular cavalry - irregular cavalry just rode over the top of the hill and saw all these men, and simply kept riding very hard, right straight at them, and called on them to surrender immediately and lay down their arms, and everybody did. They followed orders well, didn't they?

Now, the best-trained militarily - best-trained army on the face of the Earth of which we have any modern record at all is the German army. Most fabulously trained army anybody ever wanted to run into. And it keeps getting licked. Something wrong here, isn't there? Something wrong with this theory, that the way to have a regular force is to have a flock of stuck flows. What we can do is overdo the game, communication break within our own forces and own team.

The communication breaks and difficulties should be with the opposing team. And people get confused by this, and an army is apt to break to pieces because its communications break down internally.

The German army, for instance, went straight into communism. We are very proud of believing that we licked the German army to a standstill - 1918. That had a lot to do with it. But the funny part of it was that the German army was still going to fight, except that it was in mutiny. It was in mutiny against the Kaiser.

When the Kaiser finally heard that his grand fleet was in mutiny and that the army itself was in mutiny and that red flags were appearing everywhere, that communism had sprung up all over the place, the Kaiser shoved off. He quit.

The German navy had an awful time - all of its battleships were flying the Red flag. They'd put their officers under arrest and had taken over as communists. Look at that stuck flow. Look at it break down, see. We are all going back to the "We're blood brothers again," see. And the command can get so rigorous that it is no longer real to the troops. Your reality breaks down.

So, the cycle of games is this one: We get perfect communication between two terminals breaking down to a point where these two terminals can play some sort of a game. They will have mass, playing field, weenie, reasons why, and so forth, see. These two terminals begin to play the game.

Now, one of these terminals allies itself with many other terminals to all be on the same side. And this similarly happens with the other terminal. And it breaks down. It individuates, you might say.

And it is all on its side, and so we have two teams, which were - each team was basically a terminal, and this terminal became or was - or was recruited up to a team. So we have these two teams facing each other. Now, up to this time, up to this time we have the broken communication being between these two terminals. Right? But how did this individuation take place with this terminal?

It was by good communication. Good communication actually produces individuation. It - individuation is not produced by shocks, blows and so forth to any degree like it is produced by good communication.

Well, this sounds real weird. But if you look it over for a moment I think you will agree with me. These two fellows are held together under some kind of an arduous bond of enlistment, or something of the sort, and then they start to talk to each other. And they find out that they are not just figures in uniform. They are individuals.

Let's see what happened one Christmas when in World War I when the armies were - I imagine every command post and certainly every governmental post was in a high state of hysteria. The exchange of Christmas carols across the battlefield was enough to break down the war. And if there hadn't been immediate intervention and the ordering of a sufficient number of artillery barrages, the war would have quit right there.

They were recognizing their individuality to a large degree as men, but that they had something in common. In other words, something to communicate about. And they ceased being these bestial masses and became individual people. Get the idea? Just the right communication. So we must differentiate between an unknowing being crowded together and a knowing separating apart.

Now, you can be crowded together into individuality, too. And we get the manifestation called the "only one." You know, everybody is forced to be like everybody else, and finally to assert any kind of individuality the individual himself has to pick up peculiarities, he has to insist upon it, he has to have certain rights, he - and so on. In other words, he just - he's making it the hard way, you know.

Actually, his individuality goes up and starts to soar the immediate he starts to communicate. Isn't this a particularly strange thing. You start to communicate- here's a test in therapy - you start to communicate with anything bad, really communicate with anything bad, and it ceases to be able to hurt you if you can really communicate with it.

This is quite curious that individuation takes place on communication. Because communication itself basically makes space. John put it - the other day when he said, "Well, communication is this way. One fellow makes some space and the other guy says he did it."

So actually, on communication we get greater cooperation. But greater cooperation does not occur simply because people are forced to cooperate. It occurs because they want to cooperate, because they can still conceive themselves to be individuals, and yet work with.

So, we find out that communication barriers, as such, are very germane to - are very necessary to - a game. That you have to keep them cut one direction or another to have a game. But we discover at the same time that to recover one's individuality all one has to do is to go into communication.

The way to stop any mutiny is the traditional way to stop it. This is the traditional way. And that's simply have her come in - everybody come in and say what he's mad about. Listen to him, and give him an answer of one kind or another. People won't mutiny.

They went into communication. Now, we call this blowing the engram, or doing almost anything. We could call it a lot of things. But the truth of the matter is that the barriers are built up by various cuts of communication. And they are destroyed by the setup of communication lines. Barriers cease to exist the moment you set it up.

But oddly enough, the oneness of an individual - his individuality, you might say, his actual individuality - depends upon his going into communication. So let's make sure we don't have a backwards look at how people become individuals. And let's also realize that some barriers are necessary. In other words, it isn't bad experience, continuously and forever, which finally drives an individual to being different than or separate from his fellows. This is a low-toned look at it.

It's bad experience that makes an individual insist upon his individuality. There's a funny principle involved here all the way through. The only thing that ever gets aberrated is what's true. And it only gets aberrated by enforcing the truth. And any aberration is an enforced or inhibited truth. Any aberration is an enforced or inhibited truth.

That's a funny little rule. It's one of these rough rule of thumbs. It isn't an axiom or anything of the sort. Just something that one continually observes in working with the mind. The individual is too free. He is being driven out.

Well, actually he actually is not a part of the organization that he is being driven out from. You understand that? He really isn't. And somebody is trying to enforce freedom upon him. You see this? Somebody is forcing freedom upon him. He doesn't want it. But his aberration would become enforced freedom. But freedom is truth.

You got a lot of cases walking around who are cases of enforced freedom. I ran into one the other day. The button on the case - there was a button on the case was "I am a stranger everywhere. Everywhere I go, I am a stranger. I belong nowhere. I belong no place." This sort of a feeling, you know? Constant feeling.

That's the truth! Nobody belongs anyplace. You get the idea? Yet this person was very, very upset because this person belonged no place.

So the things people really talk about and that they say is wrong with them, are some aberration of the truth, which is making it more solid or making it more barriered, you might say; making it enforced and inhibited.

If you were to take some little boy, and you were to bring him in - of course it's true he's a little boy, see. And we started insisting he was a boy. And everyone of us started walking around him looking at him critically and saying, "He's a boy. Rrrr. Boy. Well, what do you know about that. A boy. Don't you know any better than that? Look at him. He's a boy."

If we kept this up on him, we would drive him through various cycles of being a boy. But what would be wrong with him? He's a boy. You get the idea? But he is a boy. But that's what's wrong with him. You get the idea there, see?

The most horrible things wrong with anyone - most horrible things wrong with anyone, are simply the truth. You know, some fellow goes around all the time and he's mad as hell because everybody says he's stupid. He is stupid. It's a fact. But this is what he's upset about. And one can say the only thing anybody can get upset about is the truth. Somebody told him that he was brilliant and this was what was wrong with him, he'd know that was a lie and he wouldn't pay any attention to it.

Now, you tell some thetan that he is free and that he should be outside the body and he should be able to run things from there, this is the truth. And if you raise the devil with him on this subject, he'll get real upset about it. Exteriorization is not popular at all. It's not popular because it's evidently some kind of an enforcement of the truth. If you want to really, really make people relax, tell them a flock of lies. Won't bother them a bit.

You want to tell a little kid stories and get him in a fine state of mind and so forth? One of the big traps in the writing business is you must - you know, kind of agree with the society and write about the average man, and so forth. Who the hell wants to hear about the average man? That's the truth. He's there, he's average. So what?

Get a bunch of little kids and tell them about animals that have various adventures and talk various languages and wear various kinds of clothes. They know this is not true at all, and so it's very safe to laugh about, and so forth. You are not aberrating them in any degree.

Curious thing. Something I've subjected to statement several times. So somebody come out and sell - can sell "Hadocol." Everybody knows this is probably a pack of lies. So it's perfectly safe to go and buy "Hadocol." Don't buy any truth. That stuff's dangerous.

Now, wherever you work with a preclear, you will discover that he has forcefully and basically followed the whole pattern and cycle of a game. He's followed it over and over and over. Heavy enforcement, relaxation of the enforcement, falling apart, gathering together his militia again, getting more trained, you know. Finding various enemies, breaking down the communication with the enemy, you see, thoroughly, so that you'd have good solid barriers in all directions in order to have this game.

And then making the barriers solider and solider until at last you don't believe your own officers exist, or your own command exists or that you are in command of anything, or that there is an enemy. See? The unreality goes out on the enemy first.

I dare say if some war continued long enough you'd have a bunch of people around standing around arguing on both sides whether or not the other side was really there - if a war went on long enough. You'll see that condition exist in this society, sooner or later the Russians will not believe the US is here; and we won't believe the Russians are here. We don't believe they exist. Be the only saving grace of the atom bomb, would be to have a tougher, rougher, more convincing Iron Curtain. See how you could work it the other way? So you could make this formula work both ways.

Now, the real way never to have an atom bomb, the safe way never to have an atomic war of any kind would be go into thorough communication with the enemy. Couldn't fight. See this? Thorough communication. Now, this would last for quite a while. Because it could always be built back again. The other communication whereby you just get a more and more and more and more and more rigid set of barriers, gradually falls apart on the reality factor.

First it falls apart on the affinity factor, and then goes down Tone Scale through hate, fear, grief, apathy, and then gets into utter unreality.

For instance, you will find the people of Earth don't have any conviction at all on the military forces of Mars. But you are liable sometime or another, since Mars and Earth have been at war, to announce it over the radio or something and have people reactively stampede on this basis. You see, it was an existing truth which had fallen apart into a reality level.

Similarly you are liable to have people getting upset with each other as they start up communication. But the funny part of it is the liability of that is nowhere near as great as it is believed. Communication works fast. It works very fast.

It tears down barriers faster than anybody can recognize there was a barrier there. It rips down barriers with great speed. It's one of the more fabulous phenomena.

Now, what about a practical process? We've been talking about theory here for quite a while. What about a practical process? Yeah. Well, we'll discover that this fellow has a bad leg. This is not an advised process. It's just a practical process. A person has a bad leg, so we have his leg sit there and say "hello." Will it work? Yes. It will work perfectly, without liabilities. We just ask him to get into what he's chosen out as his enemy. We put him into communication with what he'd chosen out for his randomity and it goes into action by having it say "hello."

You can take any old energy mass that an individual has floating around him, whether it is a facsimile, a black mass or otherwise, and have the various particles in it tell him "hello" over and over. The energy mass will disappear.

(end of lecture)

[[Category:Lectures 9ACC]]