View source for Blackness (2ACC 531202)

'''Series:''' 2nd Advanced Clinical Course (2ACC)

'''Date:''' 2 December 1953

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

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This is December the 2nd, morning lecture.

You know, it would surprise you people of the Second Unit here to know that you really do have the essentials of what you're trying to do—you really do have. And they have evidently been put to you in such a way that you're utilizing them. I can tell this: I look around, there have been several facial changes, several communication changes in this group.

The—there's a little bit of a lack of adeptness in handling these things on the part of auditors present, but you're getting better. I call to your attention, this is only two and a half weeks deep in this course. All right. Now, that is fine. That means that we're sailing along, and we have to a large degree at least indicated that we're going to be very successful in these goals, because I want to see everybody leave here an Operating Thetan. And—that's right, that's right—everybody who's completing the course, I'd like to see in that category.

That's less of a trick than you'd think. You know, you put it forward there for so long that it's become a rather unattainable something or other. Just run a little End of Cycle on it for a while and you'll find out it seems more attainable.

"Waiting for something to do it for you" is the main one that you'll fall across.

Now, there are several specific problems in a preclear which cause more trouble than anything else, and I'd just like to go over those this morning—specific difficulties that you'll run into with your pcs—in a highly generalized way. I want to go over this in such a way as not to throw pcs into various categories, but just to tell you about all pcs, and some of them are worse than others.

Nearly every pc who comes near you will have, one way or the other, an occlusion. This is the nature of the beast. Now, the occlusion is not always black, but the day you find a pc who doesn't run into some black occlusion someplace, why, you please send me a wire. But make sure you wait before you send the wire until you've run him twenty-five or thirty hours. Because there's always—there's always this black stuff around on the track. It's used. It's used for various things, it's quite useful, it's one of these handy, jim-dandy little pieces of energy—it blocks vision. And that is its main use—the blocking of vision.

Now, the worst thing that you can do to a thetan, of course, is to make him wrong, but mechanically the worst thing that you can do to a thetan is blind him.

Naturally, then, the black energy—deposits of black energy—if one feels he can't create it, are handy things to have around because they will blind an opponent. That's all you can really do to a thetan, you see, is blind him. Fix him up so he can't see. That's—mechanically that's all you can do to him. You can fool him in numbers of ways; you can pull the "God trick" on him.

And if somebody gives you too much trouble, you can always pull the God trick on him. That's the way this universe got balled up and wound up and so forth. You knock one of his mock-ups flat and then say, "You poor fellow. God—God has made nothing out of something of yours. And I'll help you out, I'll help you put up the next mock-up so that this won't happen again." And, of course, it disappears too.

And then one is really in trouble. But the ritual of the thirteen crosses or the eighteen black goats or the "I will arise" ritual or the "radiant light" ritual and so forth, are always given to the thetan immediately after this, you see, as a little present to help him out. And, of course, they spin him in. Because they set up an artificial communications system for him which is too complex to meet with his understanding. And they leave him in the horrible situation of "trying to understand."

And when one is trying to understand hard enough and long enough, he eventually gets down to the complete identification—which is complete ARC. Complete ARC is complete identification; that's bottom scale. There is such a thing. As long as there's personal relationships, there has to be something vaguely resembling ARC. But it doesn't have to be that good, you see.

And every time somebody starts into a set communication system—he starts into a set pattern of agreement in order to communicate—why, he sooner or later winds up in a little bit of trouble.

Now, the state actually can't get along in this universe without religion. Every time the state tries to get along without a religion, gets in trouble. And they always are surreptitiously closing terminals with religion just because of that. The only sure trick there is in the whole universe is the God trick—that's a real sure trick.

So this tells you that the next one out, you see, from that, is a nothingness trick. That's really your first trick, is a nothingness trick. You know, there is something where there's nothing, or there's now nothing where there should be something. And a confusion between these two things, and a big significance about these two things, then brings about a condition of confusion.

The church trying to control large masses of people down through the ages have become very expert in this. And the state trying to control large masses of people and keep law and order, generally will look very kindly upon any activity such as the church which is using this God trick. You can just call it the God trick, and it's a very easy trick to understand. And the thetan's always had this happen to him.

You needn't process it directly, as a matter of fact, you may make your boy sick if you process it very directly. You can just ignore it. But remember to examine his eighth dynamic if he's getting very resistant. So this is one characteristic you'll find in common with all cases.

Now, the blindness trick comes right in alongside of that. That's, they took some black energy—fellow puts a mock-up up, see, he's trying to support this mock-up or force it in a certain direction and trying to keep it up there and trying to keep it as pretty as he can and so forth, so that it will compel attention, and somebody else throws a big cloud of blackness at it. Generally it's some blackness—a square of blackness, a rectangle of it—something like the Lone Ranger wears, something on that order. And it'll hit the other fellow's mock-up, splat! and the mock-up, which has the thetan's viewpoints in it, of course, can't perceive, so that mock-up's no good.

Well, the fellow will start throwing away mock-ups one after the other, and throwing them away one after the other and messing other people's mock-ups up and—there's always some of this around; just like there's always the God trick is always there too. Somebody's always used some blackness at somebody else and there's someplace on the bank it'll trigger.

Now, it's nothing to be afraid of. It's too easy to solve blackness now. You start dropping blackness in domes—you know, I mean concentric spheres, each one larger than the last—over the pc's head, and if you just get him to look through the one you have just covered to the one he's just put on, you see, keep looking through these curtains of blackness at new curtains of blackness, so on, he'd probably blow a grief charge or do something of the sort. It's a symptom of loss, is what a blackness is. But it has lots of significance, because nothingness—here's where we cross with the God trick, you see—nothingness can't be established with blackness.

You know, "Is there nothing in it? Or is there something in it? What is in the blackness?" Well, when there's nothing in something, and something in something, but there's nothing in something, we get into a state of mind that leads us to happily talk about: "Now, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" This becomes the rage. This becomes the thing you talk about in all the cafes and back alleys of a whole empire: How many needles can you stick into how many angels on how many heads of how many pins. No kidding—this was one of the most important questions of a couple of millennia ago. Oh, a very, very great question.

Then also, you can get hundreds of thousands of human beings slaying and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of human beings. There is a very snide—I wouldn't dare tell you this story, but I recommend to you the Arabian Nights, which is very far from a child's book. And in a more or less—a good translation—a Burton or a Lane or a Mathers translation of it, you get some of the seamier side of life. In fact, there's some of the finest detective stories in there that modern writers have ever stolen.

And the Mohammedan religion and the Christian religion are differentiated between, there, very easily, because it is not all pro-Mohammed. You see, you stick around Mohammedanism long enough and it gets funny. Because, you see, in Mohammedanism you have the—Christ is a saint, you know, and they kind of stood by the caravan trail and rewrote it all, until finally the only difference you could tell between a Mussulman and a Christian was the method they used to go to the bathroom: one stood up and the other squatted. Now, this dissertation goes on in the Arabian Nights, it's a beautiful dissertation and it analyzes the whole thing, and draws at last this tremendous conclusion.

Well, when you get into "Is the somethingness the nothingness and is the nothingness a somethingness?" we get into what we call significance, reason and so forth. Well, you see the God trick can be used with blackness, and you'll find religions rather uniformly favoring blackness over other things. Blackness is the stuff. And a debased religion uses blackness a great deal.

Higher religions which still have power, and which thetans are still pushing around, favor gold. And when anybody gets blinded, it's with a bolt of lightning. You know, they don't do it in any mild, unspectacular fashion, they do it preferably out in the middle of a stadium or arena with a number of onlookers—let's say several thousand—and it is done so that the smell of brimstone and sulfur is very loud in the air afterwards, and several pedestrians and passersby are probably blinded too, just to make good measure on it, you know. And the people get the idea that Athena or somebody is not quite pleased with their actions.

Now, any thetan—anybody—anybody you spring out of the head is quite well aware of this, quite well aware of all these tricks, if he starts being aware again. And they occur to him as very, very useful tricks and they are. They're very, very useful tricks. And he can get himself into more trouble in less time by going on this same backtrack, because everything is all set up for it in this universe. I mean, all you've got to do is just sort of push a button and the whole thing will run off on the grand automaticity of the holy cross.

See, there have been holy crosses around for the last eight or ten billion years. Didn't have anything to do with Golgotha, that's just another piece of it. There are Christ implants on the track eight thousand years ago—that's interesting, isn't it? It's a story that is just gone over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. All right.

How do we face up to this if our pc is very upset about religion or he says he isn't very upset about religion or if he has religious differences or opinions or he belongs to another cult or church or a new igloo or something? Where do we start in then? We've got all these different pcs and so forth. Well, just as I said about the Mussulman and the Christian, there isn't any difference from pc to pc—they're loused up on the seventh and eighth dynamic. I mean, that's the end of it. I mean, you just got it. There's the "something/nothing" religious trick sitting on the bank.

There's also demonology. I don't care if he says, "I don't know what a 'demonology' is."

And you say, "A 'demonology' is a study of demons."

And he says, "Well, I've never had no truck with demons. I ain't never met no demons. All we had in our neighborhood was ghosts."

The niceness of vocabulary here: We have the ghost, the spirit, the demon, the genie, the marid … One time I was going through a list of these things, and I won't bore you with it right now, but it runs something on the order of 580 in fairly common usage in English. That was just the light list, you know, the quick passers-by. I think there's more words for a thetan than any other single object. That's right.

Nearly every tribe, nearly every group on Earth has a new fancy vocabulary to fit them. I know in some of the savage cultures I've been in, their main technology and terminology and so on, is devoted to the spirits of which they are in fear. Because for the most part, these have—some hundreds of years ago, the last ones sort of dished by. One pops up occasionally, but not very often.

Within the last couple of thousand years, there have been some very strong and powerful ones out in Polynesia, for instance. You'll see their tracks around—just literally that, you see their tracks around. And there's a place where one of them jumped off of an island to land on another island. He scooped up a child and jumped between these two islands. And he made the lava splinter both on takeoff and landing. And (the natives tell you all about this anyway) but there—his name is Tatamona and he's still around. If you were …

Now, we get to the next point, just using that a little bit cart before the horse. If you see Tatamona, you get sick. And so natives keep their houses shut tight all night long. Sweltering, hot tropic nights, houses just shut tight, barred, nailed down, and the furniture against the door. And if you see Tatamona, you get sick.

Well, so that we have—the only way you can make anybody … You can confuse his knowingness, you see, by giving him some significance which he can't fathom, and then you can turn around and put a penalty on his perception. Blackness is a penalty on perception. If you look, you'll get blackness. Medusa's head is an example of this. You turn to stone if you look at Medusa and so on. There are a lot of these all down through folklore and mythology and so on. There are lots of gimmicks.

And by the way, in passing, I might say that Freud based his activities and his beliefs and—you could hardly call them his findings because he deserted his findings. See, he had a lot of findings with Breuer, and then he came up with the libido theory in 1894 and then he gradually drifted away from findings into more and more unestablished theory. That early work is very good.

But we have a problem coming up with that repeated in his work. He keeps talking about this problem. He says that those things which have been common to all peoples at all time would more or less form the basis of aberration. So therefore, we look into folklore and mythology in order to discover the root stuff of aberration. The poor old guy, the poor old guy—he was absolutely right: You looked into the mythology to find the root stuff of human beingness. You looked into mythology to find thetans.

He was insufficiently a mathematician to realize that if he'd made that statement, he could make many parallels out of the same statement. He found that there was something about mythology in human beings. And so if he'd just drawn enough parallels and said, "What's common to all mythology?" he would have come up with one thing: spirits. He was—have been all set. All he would have had to have done then was sit down and say, "Let's see, could it be that a human being is actually a spirit?" Then said, "Well, let's see, let's try it—'Be three feet back of your head.' Well, so it is."

And instead of that he had to go into the deep significance of the Olympus complex or the Paprika complex or something. And it had to be because Papa loved daughter or daughter loved Mama. You know, there should have been more sex back in the Victorian times and he'd have been less concentrated on the subject. He grabbed that old second dynamic, you know, and left one, three to eight just sitting there unobserved.

Well, so we've got a problem when we come up against religion in the seventh and eighth dynamic, because everybody's been taught to be afraid of ghosts and spirits. And we've got a problem there in terms of perception because the superstition on the track says that if one perceives, something horrible is going to happen to him and this is in the field of taboo and spirit vengeance. And this comes under the heading of "offended deity."

Any thetan you've got, you give him that concept after he's exteriorized and so forth, he'll realize the only way he went down Tone Scale is he could not punish those who offended his deity—didn't recognize he was a god and bang! you know. They wouldn't leave his sacred places straight and wouldn't leave his things alone, that's all. And he just started on down Tone Scale. He's eventually convinced that he couldn't be a deity at all because he can't defend any of his sacred possessions or represent a nobility and so forth in general.

And it's indicative of a society when the desire for "Let's all be common as old shoes" gets into the woof and warp of the society so deeply that nobody in the society will ever try to do anything or put up any dignity. Because that merely tells you that they've run fresh out of the offended deity. You find the youth—they're on the bottom of that line. You'll find the youth of the country, although they're very easy to exteriorize, will argue with you about being a body.

You say, "Be three feet back of your head." They get a picture of it or something.

And you say, "Now, wait a minute."

If you don't ask them immediately, "Are you three feet back of your head?" and they—liable to say, "Who?"

"You, you jerk! Not your feet—you."

And they'll say, "What—what do you mean me? I'm a body!"

Boy, don't look in the alleyways of the statesmen, don't look down the side corridors of morality, don't look any place where you might see the seamier side of this society, because you might open a door that'll half-drown a populace because there is what happens.

They sell them science, and the next thing you know you've got space opera. You don't realize it, that you're several legs in this society above space opera. Space opera is very terrific, you understand, but when it comes to a state having the right to pick up, let us say, one of you, or a school kid down here, and zap him a couple of times with a paralo-ray which stands him up and gives him a nice implant, and after that he's a tubeman third class until the ship blows up … You know, no pay, no anything, no—you know, and he can't leave the confines of the vessel which are between this anchor point and that anchor point and this anchor point and that anchor point and the other two anchor points—no, you—that is one of these societies.

Can you imagine a society now which is run on this basis: There's a huge thought tower, and if anybody thinks a thought which is against the state or to its worst interests or something of this sort, he just simply goes down and turns himself in to the police station. He just goes down and says, "I thought a thought which was contrary to the best good of the state." And the cops throw him into a little electronic booth, and he goes into the booth and they go bzzzzzz and they wipe out his personality, and in the next half an hour, give him a brand-new one. This is real interesting, isn't it?

That's not an upper-grade society. That's an interesting society, but it's not top grade.

Now, the fact that these boys can go into a high and violent motion is indicative of some life in the society. But it's the life made possible by the vast distances which can be traversed. If you want to see somebody who's traveling fast, go find a Greyhound bus driver, go find a TWA plane captain; these guys are traveling pretty fast, too. And it's just within the limits of stress and strain of the materiel and machinery with which they are furnished. See? Now, just because they suddenly get something that goes three light-years is no different than a Greyhound bus. I don't mean to deglamorize space opera, but it sure can be deglamorized with great ease because there's no self-determinism left—I mean everything's done for you.

There are periods when good developments like that suddenly move sideways into the hands of a virile pioneer people and when this happens, why, God help the galaxy, you see. These fellows take that little bit of machinery and they just go out and blow holes in everything—with complete self-determinism decide to determine everything.

So your problem is a deteriorating belief in a spirit, not encroaching superstition. A society goes downhill away from superstition toward logic. Incredible statement for me to make, but it's absolutely true. It goes downhill from superstition, spirits, mumbo jumbo, into science and logic and mathematics, and it's all precise, and you're just a body—or you're just a doll or you're just a can or whatever you're supposed to be.

Now, that's pretty hard to swallow. But superstition is actually superior any day of the week to logic—where logic is being employed to predict the future. This is most apparent to a person who is familiar with such mathematics as those employed by actuaries.

We sit down and we draw up the formula of the number of factors which are going to determine 10 o'clock—it's now 8:30. We're going to draw up the number of factors which are going to determine 10 o'clock. Well, that's very interesting, but we couldn't get them into a formula. I know, you'll be in a room and you'll be auditing—or will you? How many other factors will enter into it? What is going to happen exactly at that moment of 10 o'clock? The second we begin to pinpoint an activity, and really pin it sharp, actuarial mathematics show you that the probabilities of being able to do so are practically nil—practically nil!

I mean, there's something on the order—you could hold twenty-five bridge hands of thirteen spades before you could predict where you would be next Thursday at 2:06.

You just go away from any possibility of predicting the future when you try to use logic for prediction, because that isn't the way that a thetan does it. We go above superstition and go into knowingness. And when we go from knowingness down, we go from knowingness into prediction, and then from knowingness into other people's predictions—and there is superstition, see, other people's predictions—we go from there into other things' predictions, and then we go from there into a rigorous establishment of time, on complete agreement on all sides, and we go from there way on downhill to logic.

The fellow who thinks he can sit down and think out what will occur to his best interest is a fool. He's a fool. He's been fooled by his school, he's been fooled by anybody that wants to walk along.

And the one thing that the church and state will try to do is disabuse people of the idea that they can predict instantaneously and simply know what's going to happen. They try to make them be logical. And if you can make somebody be logical enough, you'll blind him as to the future. You'll make the whole section of future blind to him. So there he goes. And that is a method of blinding somebody.

You tell him, "You have to figure what the future will be." The devil himself couldn't do it. You couldn't figure what the future will be; because that figuring means you take those factors which occur in the present and, basing your formulas on what has occurred in the past, thereby arrive at a conclusion of what will occur in the future.

Now, this is very fine where a piece of machinery is concerned, and it can only happen in a society where machinery has become all and human value zero. Because you actually can figure out right down to a pinpoint, exactly how many rpm a ship's wheel is going to turn. You see, but that is prediction into the future of a mechanical operation which man has already put together so that it would be predicted into the future; and the intention of the machine was to predict into the future, and it is only a machine which has been predicted into the future by a man already.

Now we turn around and say, "Well, the way to predict into the future is to take one of these machines and show how reliable it is, and then figure out what we'll be doing in the future"—what balderdash. You set up this machine to tell you that on next Tuesday it will be 10 o'clock and then you say this is a clever machine, because next Tuesday it says 10 o'clock. You see? It doesn't work out.

So they make a man fall a—make men fall away from the last echelon they can reach of good, clear, adequate prediction. Make them fall away from the last one they can reach; the last one they can remember as having existed.

A thousand years ago all of Europe was going mad with witch burning. Witches were still able to get other things to know. See, they'd gone down that far on this scale of knowingness, and they would cast up some knowingness this way or that, and they'd tell somebody what was going to happen to him. "Well, young man, you're going to be hanged next August." And naturally this is a swell way to control people. And that's why it deteriorated; because people mispredicted in order to control others. Well, this is an utter fact. You can do just that.

As a matter of fact, if anybody wants to cultivate it—little use it is, but if he wanted to cultivate it, he can return to himself that level of knowingness which tells him what's going to happen. Takes all the kick out of a game immediately; he likes to blind himself a little. So they look back at the latest and last thing that people knew wasn't logical and they condemn it.

In this society right now they're condemning superstition. That's the last rung of prediction of all track knowingness, see—past, present and future. Well, now, they've got and made superstition really ridiculous. They took some voodoo superstitions and ran them in, and then they say that this is superstition. They say farmers trying to—oh, the way they work at it, you just should listen to some of these people sometimes—the scathing, blasting criticisms which they'll level at some things. And they never do bother to recant when they find it is true. They just never hear that.

The funny part of it is, the Department of Agriculture recently conducted—few years ago conducted a series of experiments that had to do with planting during phases of the moon. It's true! And yet this has been condemned as a superstition. Now, the number of factors which work out about the phases of the moon and when you should plant things—oh, it's just all been worked out just for ages. And a lot of farmers plant that way, and a lot of people get real good truck gardens, and a lot of people get real lousy ones. The Department of Agriculture itself tested this.

Now, I'm not holding the fort or beating the drum for superstition. Superstition is a terrible way of knowing, believe me. Letting something else predict for you, that's real great, that's almost as good as doing it on a slide rule—that's stupid too.

What I'm showing you is that maybe things aren't quite what they seem. Maybe all of this beautiful stuff called logic, you know, that's so wonderful and pretty and laid out so lovely and so on—maybe it won't take you anyplace. There's just that possibility, you see.

Your preclear in all of his thinkingness is going to insist on being logical about it. He's going to look for "What is the significance?" Now, if you find the poor guy is real bad off, he won't be able to do anything without significance to it; and that's how you enslave a fellow: He has to do everything with a reason, he can't do things without a reason. So there's another common denominator.

All right, let's check these off again, just to show you we're not wandering too far. The first—there's God and the God trick. And then there's the blackness trick, and then there is the prediction of the future shut-off by insisting on logic, and abandoning all other methods of prediction. You'll find those in common with every preclear. And you'll find with that one, by the way, that he's so death on superstition that you have an awful time trying to get him back up to a point where he'll predict. And yet his big automaticities are based on superstition. The things which he is doing are largely based on superstition. So we have this prediction of the future.

Now, the second we get into these, we look them over and we find out that we've actually gone down scale from eight, seven, six, and it—so we only get five, four, three, two, one, as such, after an individual has completely become dependent upon the MEST universe, or number six. So we get these things going eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—we've got the dynamics. Now they invert. And the fellow becomes inverted on one, on two, on three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Now, that he's reinverted—he was inverted to that, now he inverts again: eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

So this Tone Scale that we're looking at is actually—could be counted down the line of inversions: eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; as you go on down Tone Scale, you see. Then you'd turn around again and go the first cycle like DEI, and that DEI is marked with dynamics: eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, lies below the first set I gave you. Now, we've got another set of inversions, and those are inverted inversions. So he just inverts and inverts and inverts and inverts. He becomes dependent upon something by resisting it, and then he becomes it. And that, you could say, is your first inversion.

Then you ask some preclear to get—to put some pleasure in that board up there, and he immediately gets pleasure in himself or pain in the board. See, he can invert in various fashions and directions. He just gets opposites. So most of your preclears are worried about some oppositeness in themselves. The worst ones that you have to handle are not the personal ones. The worst ones you have to handle are the eighth, the seventh and the sixth. Those are the important dynamics—the rest of them can go to hell.

Sex—it's interesting, but aberrative value of sex compared to the aberrative value of eight is zero. Of course, what happens to somebody like Freud that concentrates on sex, is he really doesn't have guts enough to just kick completely outside all agreements with his civilization. And for somebody in 1894 to have suddenly said, "God—well, I tell you about God, he's a trick!" They probably would have lynched him. They'll probably lynch me yet, but anyway … (audience laughter)

For somebody to have kicked outside the confines of the church at that time would have been too adventurous to contemplate. It almost is now.

But these tricks all bundle up in common, and we find that our pc is stuck in some of the damnedest things that unless you realize the value of this, unless you realize that there's the God trick, you see, and then the spirit trick (which is blinding each other and so forth) and the lack of prediction, and let's all be logical, and you can't predict—in other words, you don't know. And six, you must depend upon the MEST universe, this set of barriers must be invariable. Unless you realize that you're mainly concentrating on those things, you're liable to get bogged down in an awful lot of brittle-brattle and—about Mama and about Joe, and about whether or not he has—he's self-conscious or … You know, I mean, you can just bog all over the place.

What's important is that God owns all space. And the next important thing is, is spirits don't exist anymore, and they insist on not being looked at. And on the sixth dynamic, that everybody must agree—must, must, must agree. Let's all get insane and psychotic on it; let's get down on the floor and beat the floor and insist it's there. So that it eventually—because of this inversion, it ceases to be there. And an inverted six, lying below that—you won't find a psychotic that high. A guy's awful sane when he's on the first inverted six. You get about eight inversions below that—you know, eight full scales below the one I have—you get down to that inversion, this stuff's started to disappear. It's been insisted on and then not insisted on and insisted on and then not insisted on, unto a point where the fellow actually will pat it and say, "Gee, isn't that wonderful, that stuff is so solid. Gosh!" See, he'll feel good about it.

But you got to give him a barrier, you got to show him the barriers before you can invalidate the barriers. If you just invalidate the barriers, you go crazy. That accounts for the high insanity rate which is chalked up by Christian Science; it's a very, very high insanity, suicide rate. They just simply tell everybody … Yes, I looked it over in some sanitariums one time—what church denominations did the insane people belong to? It was a piece of research I engaged on, and found out that it was leading all other denominations.

And—well, it was very curious to me at the time, but I know now why, you see, and you get why it is. They simply start forcing down people's ideas—that he has to think the right idea, then they don't quite say what the right idea is, and then they tell them that they can't have doctors, and they must heal more or less on a faith healing basis, and then they say all this is illusion without showing them any method by which it can be made real. And of course that'll just crack just so many people; they'll go by the boards. All right.

As we look over, then, the problems with which we're confronted, we find that they're very simple problems. We find they've got a lot of mechanical bric-a-brac. And we find the way, however, I've laid out 8-C for you, it does solve it.

Now, let's take, for instance, this thing called an Assumption. Let's just talk about this Assumption for the next fifteen minutes, as an illustration of how it is a specialized case of these other combinations. What is the Assumption? There is the assumption and the reassumption. The reassumption is when the person is well grown or an adult, he leaves during an operation or something and then is forced to come back—that's a reassumption. What is the Assumption? The Assumption is the thing which killed Dianetics as far as I was concerned—nobody else noticed it. Oh, I mean, that's a sad, bitter statement to make, but it happens to be true, because nobody ever remarked on it to me. There's something funny about birth! They often said something's funny about birth, but they never said anything was funny about birth.

Now, the point we're making is that birth is always missing in a certain section—be a certain section of a birth missing—always—and it does a jump in a certain fashion. And why did it do this? Obviously, if everybody avoided this spot of birth, there must be something in it. They can—not everybody could possibly swerve off of it this way. And it turned out to be the Assumption. That is, when the individual whom you are processing grabbed himself a body—which you shouldn't be processing, and if you are, you'll be sorry.

And that Assumption is generally done very much according to ritual. There is such a thing as an Assumption body.

Now, when a fellow kicks off after death, he just takes off and goes up into the between-lives area, and then is immediately rerouted and collides with the first baby he meets—gets his instructions, just exactly—and comes and collides with the first baby he meets, and grabs the baby, and he's okay from there on.

Well, this sounds awful simple. It's actually quite complex. It's a complex maneuver, that if you had to process it as an engram, we wouldn't be spending the next few minutes on it, we would be just beating it to pieces. We would probably spend three or four days on this thing to give you enough sections of it to know what to run in it. But there's no sense in it since—of doing that, since the processes we have will either disclose these things or make them unnecessary. You're not even vaguely interested in the data of the Assumption—but your pc is.

The reason everybody can do everything to him, and the reason he's got to lay himself wide open to the world and let them hit him as they will, is the fact that he stole a baby. The reason Papa and Mama can do anything they want to to him is he stole a baby. He isn't the son or daughter of Father and Mother, and he knows it damned well. But he's got this buried from himself so deep—so deeply and so viciously certain that he himself mustn't know it—because, you see, if he knows it, he will think it, and if he thinks it, somebody's liable to pick it up by telepathy, he thinks. That's his reasoning, that's what he's been told too often. Like the God trick—you mustn't think anything because if you think it, we can read your thoughts. Who's "we"? Oh, any number of cults or groups.

All right. Here he is. He is a baby. But somehow or other, he isn't a baby. And this is the confusion in which he enters life, and on which he tries to plot his future. And it doesn't plot worth a nickel. It just doesn't plot well.

What's the future for such a being, who isn't who he is, but is somebody else? Well, his future's confused. And that's why the thetan is confused. That's a present time problem with him: "Who is he?"

Well, you get death—just take the death. All right. The way to be convincing and be well believed about death—the way to be convincing about death—is to, of course, be dead. And by definition, death is that thing beyond which there isn't any life. And memory itself is life, and even though a fellow slides out of a body, if the body is dead, he automatically and immediately—he's got himself all set up to immediately forget this past life. He wants it to be that way.

The most impersonal thing in the world is a spirit above a body that just died, looking it over. That's very impersonal. Well, he doesn't have any further responsibility to the relatives, and he doesn't have any further responsibility, any way, shape or form. Once in a while, the most surprised thetan you ever saw is that thetan. Real surprised!

Once in a while he packs around a visio—one of these occluded cases, particularly, will be carrying around some kind of a visio. And this visio is liable to be of a dead body. Well, beware, if that is of a dead body, that person was once blind as a body, and exteriorized with full eyesight, much to his amazement. See that? See, he's blind. He's obviously blind. He's going around with a white cane, you might say. Then the body gets blown up or shot or dies in some fashion, and he comes out of it, pop! and his visio turns on in all directions. And this is a source of great amazement and surprise to him. He'll keep the visio around—you'll play hell running it, too. You're not going to run that one—that was too good.

By the way, I fooled around with one of those visios on a preclear, just fooled around to find out if he would permit anything to happen to it. And although he was very cooperative, and we worked very hard, we processed for about five hours on this thing and we didn't even chip an edge. We found out a lot of data about his life, but we didn't chip a corner of it. Interesting.

This particular case had been blown up with a bomb in the face, after having been blind seven years from another bomb—two bombs. And the second one killed him, the first one merely blinded him. So he'd gone seven years without sight, and then got blown up again. And all of a sudden found himself staring at the body—beautiful, beautiful, snow-covered day, with gorgeous green trees and blue sky. And red berries on little bushes around, and a couple of rabbits in the far distance—and it was just real pretty, see? Gorgeous! And all of a sudden this meets his view after being blind seven years.

All the time he's blind during these seven years, of course, he doesn't let himself know he's a thetan. He's playing it the hard way and he's living it the serious direction. He wouldn't let that be tampered with. That didn't even dent. All right.

Anybody who's occluded has had trouble with eyesight. And you'll find them early in life complaining about this. And people who aren't occluded, who exteriorize and have perfect perception and so forth, are still a little bit worried that they may have some trouble with perception. Almost anybody is liable to get unperceptive; that's the one dangerous thing. So you have to handle perception regardless of the drama connected with it.

Well sir, when it comes to the Assumption, you generally have a person in a black body. That's an Assumption body, it's an old Fac One body or something of the sort, plastered onto the front of his physical body's face. And he's holding on to it with a hand back of the physical body—a facsimile body, you know? I mean, he's—an Assumption body hand in back of the physical body, and another one, the other hand, over the—across the eyes of the body. This is real cute. Now he expects to look through himself, see.

Sooner or later this thing will key in, he'll start to knock teeth out, and he'll start to go half-blind, and he'll start to mess up his features, and he'll do all sorts of weird things all on the basis " 'tisn't him." See? " Tain't me doing it." And sometimes he'll go to the point of saying, "You know, I have a demon that attacks me. I don't tell everybody this, but the point is I do have a demon that attacks me," he would say. Nonsense—that's his Fac One body, that's all.

Now, once in a while, a fellow will get a clear visio of one of these things and it's enough to turn his hair on edge. Because once in a while—the bodies vary, they're quite different in pattern. But they customarily are black, and they look like they either have hair or feathers, and they have long tails and little sharp ears. It's really—really clown stuff, see. And the guy will see one of these things, and although he may try to handle it privately, he just doesn't like to tell anybody about it—and that's why I'm telling you about it. Because you might think that somebody had something like this—he wouldn't tell you.

Now, you see that seventh there—that seventh dynamic—and its inversions is awfully important, and I hope I've driven that home somewhat. And the eighth and the seventh and the sixth, they're a terrifically important group.

Now, we get somebody who has demons in a society where everything's got to be logical. He doesn't tell anybody about this. You're going to have to ask for it. You know, the most unlikely people will suddenly let a little sigh of relief out and say, "Yes, you know, I saw it once."

You don't have to explain to them what you're asking for. You just want to say, "Do you have any idea—any spirits ever—do you ever have any trouble with any spirits?" or something of the sort. Or "How about wasting now some ghosts?" You just handle it automatically if you really suspected it. And you'll find—"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

You see, there's thousands—there's probably hundreds of thousands—of this kind of incident on the track. But don't get the idea that they're all stacked up and one will slap into the other if you cut one in, because it won't slap in on a chain. The only one that's important is the system being used at this place at this time. And if you go to some other planetary system or you go to some other galaxy or something of the sort, you want to change—well, it's just about this only—only this little piece of Scientology: "What are they doing for an Assumption?" There'll be something else. It's a standard trick that is always on the bank. There's some kind of a trick.

Oh, they fit a guy into a body like they did in Arsclycus, and take a small piece of flesh and put it in a vat. And if he isn't a good boy, why, they hurt it, or they dip it slightly in acid or something and that hurts him and he comes back that way. Or they turn him into an animal body and give him the idea that if he does anything bad with the body he's in, he will flip immediately into an animal body. Egyptian. Method used here on Earth about forty-five hundred years ago. And—oh, there's an awful lot of these combinations.

Well, you don't care anything about what combinations they are. Just remember that we've got a specific and particular problem. Along with the other highly generalized problems that I've been describing to you, we're handling this Assumption problem. And it's there—I don't care if your boy is a Step I, I don't care if your girl there just seems to be in beautiful condition. She could be Clear for three, four years and if you didn't handle the Assumption problem somewhere on the line, well, all of a sudden, spang! in it'll dive.

Because it's a real problem. There's a sort of a Fac One body, and the person's kind of got ahold of himself. Has a tendency to bring him around in front of his face when it keys in terribly badly. That's why you'll find a lot of people who are neurotic in front of their faces. They're in a Fac One body.

Is this thing visible to your naked eyes? Not unless you're cleared—becomes quite visible then.

How do you run it? Do you have to know anything about this between-lives and purple lights and how long it takes between death and all that? That's terribly interesting bric-a-brac. So's Alice in Wonderland an interesting story and so's the story of science an interesting story, and how to make an atom bomb—that's also interesting material. If you're bored someday, and you have to do it the hard way, read those things for your amusement. Same way with the consecutive lineup of—what's the consecutive lineup of an Assumption.

But a little less so with the Assumption, because once or twice or six or eight or ten times, we've given a pc, "Now, just sit there and get the idea of going through black space," and boom! his case breaks. The occlusion breaks—he runs into some kind of a space opera crash or something of the sort. He hits a between-live area sequence, runs it as an engram, full visio, gets his first Assumption here on Earth, first of the sequence, and boom! full sonic, full visio, the rest of the time.

That isn't good enough that it happens once in a while; it's not good enough for us to pay attention to it as a technique. I could just sit here literally and tell you thousands and thousands of combinations which have occasionally produced results suddenly and miraculously on somebody—we're not interested in them.

We are interested, however, in the fact that there is a method of running the Assumption. Well, I can—it's a little less so with the Assumption because the Assumption has broken on several cases like that. I wouldn't fuss with it if I were you. But if a fellow suddenly starts to run it all out with sonic and visio and so forth, well, just let him run it on out, because it will unocclude him.

What's more important is how you handle an Assumption directly. You must understand that it must be the basis of worry and emotion. Worry: The fellow has to have a body in order to be in the future, so he has to worry about keeping the body going. And the only reason he keeps hanging on to the body is because he's hanging on to the body. He does have—really have ahold of the body. He is not any longer in his Fac One body. He's in his body's head—his physical body's head. But the Fac One body is right there, and he can flip into its head with great ease and become terribly confused about which way he's facing.

Now, this isn't a direction reversal. You really know a pc that's confused by this one, because he doesn't know whether he's looking backwards or forwards. He gets upset.

Now, we run this by mocking up Assumption bodies. They're scarce, they're valuable, they're rare. They're not undesirable. We mock up Assumption bodies against the windows of houses, the radiators of cars, each time with effort at the points of contact. Black Assumption body with effort at the points of contact, and with elation or worry, either one (and certainly both, as it is run), in the car radiator or in the interior of the house.

Because the trick is that the Assumption body hits the baby, crunch! and it gives a surge of elation through the physical body. And it's very delicious, you see. And then, of course, it goes stale. And there isn't any anymore, but the thetan always hopes there might be some, so he always keeps that body there. And it's got the teeth of the body messed up and is a very prime reason why a thetan will not exteriorize, merely because it's got vacuums in it and he starts to back up away from this Assumption body, he's going the wrong way. The Assumption body keeps—it doesn't have any volition, it's just a mass of energy. But the vacuums and currents in it seem to tell him that it went thataway because it's got the anchor points of the MEST body all wrecked. It got them all pushed in and distorted. And you want to start handling this pretty well—anchor points—you just handle an Assumption.

You could look at somebody and tell whether or not he has an Assumption, or has had one in restimulation. You can put him on an E-Meter and find out. As a little boy, he was worried about ghosts and demons. As a little boy, he used to be afraid angels would come and steal him.

This chapter of life in this, a scientific society, is one which must not be opened. Well, you'd better open it as an auditor. Because "everything must be logical, and it's all done by Papa and Mama and the sperm-ovum sequence, and the baby is born and is a body—you understand, the baby's a body, we insist on that—a body! There are no spirits! There are no spirits! Now, put your five-dollar bill in the collection plate so you can worship God! Now, we've all got to be logical!"

You say after a while, "Well, now wait a minute, everybody's bodies, but you put your five-dollar bill in the collection plate because of God which means that there are spirits because Christ was a spirit, but there aren't any spirits, but you've got to be logical, but that's not logical—just whither art we going?" Well, I can tell you where you're going. Going to hell in a balloon.

So let's just try running that. How long does it take to run it on a preclear? Unfortunately—unfortunately—three, four or five hours sometimes. But actually very worthwhile, until he gets rid of all the effort and all the worry and all the elation, and he can handle all of these things and put them into things easily and well, and tailor up that body. Sometimes that many hours, but it's worth it; worth every line of it.

There's a lot of Theta Clears that pop back in only because Assumption vacuums.

Okay.

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