View source for Confronting (18ACC 570808)

'''Series:''' 18th Advanced Clinical Course (18ACC)

'''Date:''' 8 August 1957

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

----

← [[Lecture_Index_18ACC|Back to Series]]

Okay. And this is the nineteenth lecture of the 18th ACC, August 8, 19-5-7, and the [[TITLE|title]] of tonight's lecture is "[[CONFRONTING|Confronting]]."

As you could suspect, anything that would trail as far through a [[TRAINING|training]] course as confronting (Training 0) would have some consequences in the field of [[PROCESSING|processing]]. And there are certain processes in that field which are quite fascinating and interesting and which we will take up, unless I forget it. Now, there is a phenomenon in which you might be very interested, having to do with enough and not enough. This adds up to one phenomenon, meaning insatiable. The [[THETAN|thetan]], you might say, is insatiable, as far as "enough" is concerned.

Just what is enough? Well, that limit has never been agreed upon. For instance, the [[GOVERNMENT|government]] has long since exceeded "enough" with [[INTERNAL_REVENUE|Internal Revenue]]. The fact of the [[MATTER|matter]] is, though, that if you [[OBJECT|object]] to taxes, it is probably because there are not enough taxes.

After all, tax collecting in the [[PAST|past]] in Egypt provided a fascinating [[GAME|game]]. As a matter of fact, the Egyptians used to fight with the tax collectors, the tax collectors fought with the Egyptians, and they finally expulsed them. And they had a Dead Sea guide with them and he knew all the tricks of crossing the Dead Sea, and when the tides came out and the tides came in. And he crossed it just before the tides came in, and the whole Egyptian army got swallowed up in it. And in the Dead Sea wilderness, why, they used to keep their water under rocks. And he'd hit one of these rock piles and by golly, there was water there just like there always was. And there's terrific games evolved out of tax [[COLLECTION|collection]].

You can just see now that these things do have no saturation [[POINT|point]] at all. Game like that goes on and on and on and keeps going for two thousand years, only they don't call it tax collection anymore.

Now, that gives you an example. And I was fascinated to study and did study with some sobriety and with no sneers and no skipping of paragraphs and very scholarly [[ATTITUDE|attitude]] – I got some glasses and punched the lenses out and – so that I'd look scholarly while I was doing the study. And I examined several hundred governments to discover what made a government persevere. What did people [[CONSIDER|consider]] a good government to be? Fascinating question, isn't it?

I [[IMAGINE|imagine]] that somebody like Swizenstein or whoever is [[PRESIDENT|president]] at the moment might very well profit from such a study, but it just never occurred to them to study what would be a government. They just take a sort of fait accompli and they say, "Well, we're riding the saddle now, we don't have to do anything about it."

[[TRUTH|Truth]] of the matter is, there are certain requisites to a good government. People only seem to buy, by these facts – they only seem to buy governments of tremendous duress. And governments which are very sweet and very polite and very constructive are all lost. But governments which call in the [[LEADING|leading]] citizens, incarcerate them in the donjon and tear off their toe-nails with pincers seem to be very well liked on the [[TRACK|track]]. They persevere, they go on for years and years. Not because the [[POLICE|police]] in those governments do a good job; probably be only because they're interesting.

This is a fascinating look. When you look at the idea of good government, then to study what people have made persevere and have never revolted against and couldn't have been more pleased with, we find it's a government like that con… misconducted by Justinian, whose wife – who used to get four or five shekels an hour. Not really upright work. Forgotten her name – I think it was Theodosius or something like that. It was Theodumpsius or something. This [[CHARACTER|character]] used to call in the foremost members of government that had happened to make her a little bit in ire and throw them in the nearest dungeon and torture them to [[DEATH|death]] and sell their wives off to the Arabs for slaves and it just was one horrible [[MESS|mess]].

The leading general of this particular nut – I mean emperor – actually was one of the great generals of all [[TIME|time]], but every time he'd win a great victory, why, the – why, Justinian would [[ISSUE|issue]] some kind of a [[CROSS|cross]]-[[MANDATE|mandate]] depriving the victory of any [[SIGNIFICANCE|significance]] at all.

The Roman Empire was all knit back together again three, four times, and each time this Justinian would issue another mandate and crumple it all up again. A fascinating fellow – and at the end of this general's career, Belisarius, why, he was rewarded by having his eyes put out. This great emperor – one of the great "Christian" emperors – this great emperor is the one who is responsible for the desolation now present on the [[SOUTH|south]] coast of the Mediterranean, which is to say, the north coast of Africa. He is directly responsible for that. And yet we still use his law [[CODE|code]].

Now, this doesn't seem very significant to you, but he made an awful splash. He just ruled for years and years and years and he finally – hand fell off or something like that, from signing silly decrees. And people for countries all around, they just subscribed to this a hundred percent.

The more people he'd illegally tax, burn and torture, why, the happier they seemed to be about the whole thing. There was no [[SMELL|smell]] of [[REVOLT|revolt]]! But in – the same people, just a few years before Justinian, and just a few years afterwards, took a perfectly good emperor who had equitable laws, equitable taxes, did things the right way, had his courts just, nobody... In Justinian's time if you had a couple of quick bucks, you could do one of two things: you could get a law changed, or... And the emperors just before that and just after that time were fairly good emperors. And they'd last something on the order of ten, twelve months, be the regime, see? Just, [[BOOM|boom]]! Revolts all over the place. Well, what is this? What is this? Well, that's certainly enough government. Get the idea? Enough government!

Well now, when people get habituated to enough government, they think, or almost enough government (it never could be enough government), some-[[BODY|body]] tries to lighten it up and the populace [[BLOWS|blows]] into revolt. Now, what we're looking at here is a close, short-[[TERM|term]] look. These good governments actually couldn't hedge themselves about with enough protection at any given time to let the populace blow. And what you had there was a sudden [[EXPLOSION|explosion]] on the part of the populace, and it merely seemed to be against a government running good 8-C. You got that?

Male voice: Yeah.

All right.

Because these good governments were weak in that they did not safeguard adequately against blows, the whole country would go to pieces, so the [[APPARENCY|apparency]] to the populace was that it required all this duress in order to make a government at all. The populace had an idea of how much government there ought to be, and if you didn't give them that much government, they exploded!

But they would have exploded to a higher [[LEVEL|level]] if somebody could have caught them. But nobody ever caught them as they came up on the up-bounce. They'd just get some new tyrant who would push them down harder. You got the idea?

Well, the only [[REASON|reason]] I'm talking about governments is I just want you to see a [[PRECLEAR|preclear]]. If I were talking about John Jones you might not get the [[PICTURE|picture]] as clearly.

Here's somebody's wife. And he's been good to her for quite a while and she explodes. Here's somebody's wife. He's mean to her, mean as the devil! And as long as he continues to be mean, she doesn't explode. The one day he decides to be kinder, she explodes.

Here's some husband. This sounds weird, but this is what makes [[LIFE|life]] so incomprehensible. Here's some girl's husband and every time he comes home he hardly gets his foot in the door, she jerks his pay envelope out of his hand, counts it very rapidly, tells him his supper is on the table – [[COLD|cold]] mutton.

And here we get a – here we get a tremendous amount of duress, duress, duress, duress, duress. And then one day she's feeling poorly and doesn't furnish this much duress and he explodes and there's – he goes haywire and so on.

What's this prove? This obviously proves that unless one applies a tremendous duress and very bad 8-C, people explode. You see this? Unless one applies very bad 8-C and terrific duress all the time, people explode, whether they're governments or individuals. Man's learned this lesson thoroughly. Well, you're looking at his first chance to unlearn it.

A preclear explodes under a mediumly mild 8-C which has regularity rather than a tremendous number of surprises and so on, and this fellow blows up. He's never been given orders he could follow before. What's this? And immediately into [[RESTIMULATION|restimulation]] goes all of his efforts to be orderly. His efforts to be orderly were manifest at those times when disorder was in his vicinity. You start to handle him well and the disorder, to his view, goes into automatic. And up he blows. This is a blowup, what you look as a blowup on the part of a preclear, [[STUDENT|student]] and so forth. [[INDIVIDUAL|Individual]] is getting a proper duress. It's very positive. The stress is considerable, but it still is a proper duress, don't you see?

Now, this restimulates his efforts to keep a chaotic duress, which he first used to – long time ago, lives and lives and lives ago – he used to have an orderly duress against such [[CHAOS|chaos]]. You actually start running out the tremendous duress which he has had to apply to keep chaos from exploding.

When that runs out, you get an explosion of the chaos he's been holding down. Do you see that? Do you see that clearly? You [[RUN_OUT|run out]], really, by command, the duress which he has applied to chaotic times of his lives. As a consequence, you get an explosion. But what it looks like is that the fellow can't possibly tolerate good order and discipline. It looks like he thrives on nothing but chaos. And that isn't true at all. He doesn't thrive on chaos. He doesn't want it and he doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

But a short period of application of very good 8-C that is very positive and that won't let him get away with a thing because – actually runs out all of these periods when he, in a very orderly fashion and with great strength and [[FORCE|force]] of character, has kept chaos from exploding under him. And the chaos, which he still has pictures of, goes whooom!

Now, whether you do that on a government level – so on. But this individual will apparently sit around in a sort of a mucky [[APATHY|apathy]] and be abused for years without anything happening. Why? The abuse he's getting is sort of running out former chaotic periods in his life. It's in restimulation. It's convincing him he can't handle them. And he actually goes into, "There is nothing you can do about the government. There is nothing you can do about the wife. There is nothing you can do about the husband." You get the idea? He's in a "nothing you can do about it."

Well, are these regimes or individuals and so on productive or [[SUCCESSFUL|successful]] in any way? No, they're not! They form the [[GARBAGE|garbage]] pits on the [[TIME_TRACK|time track]] of civilization.

An individual who is subjected to a chaotic duress year after year is not getting anyplace, he's not [[BEING|being]] productive, he isn't getting anything done. But get this! And this seems to be the criteria by which all this is judged: he didn't revolt! He didn't revolt! He didn't kick back! He was quiet! He was very quiet. And we get the same [[MOTTO|motto]] the psychiatrist uses on a [[PATIENT|patient]]. The only criteria is, "Is he quiet?" Now, you think I'm being sarcastic. That happens to be a technical fact. That's their only [[GOAL|goal]], is to make the patient quiet.

So individuals who are mishandled very often are successfully quieted down. Nothing is done for them, their life may be a complete ruin, but they aren't protesting. Then you as an [[AUDITOR|auditor]] come along and you give them positive direction.

The degree and accuracy of the direction you give them establishes the speed and finality of the blow. And if you want a slow blow, you're going to have a long [[SESSION|session]], a long [[SERIES|series]] of sessions. It's going to take a long time. And you want a fast blow, you're very didactic, very positive and totally not confused. And you get [[TONE_40_AUDITING|Tone 40 auditing]]. Nothing confused about the auditor in a Tone 40 session. The preclear pulls out blow after blow, see? He pulls out tricks. First they're just origins of one kind or another. And then they're tricks and then they're somatics and then they're stomachaches, and these things are just [[FLOATING|floating]] to the top just one right after the other, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing! None of them interrupt the [[POSITIVE_CONTROL|positive control]]. Therefore you just continue to run out all the times when he has tried to control things and has had them blow up in his face. After a while he gets the idea he can control things. This is the engramic, you might say, content of a civilization, or otherwise, that it is chaos opposed to [[GOOD_CONTROL|good control]].

If the chaos can be continued in restimulation by a government or a person, why, the individual – who couldn't [[HANDLE_IT|handle it]] anyhow – remains quiet. But the moment you no longer [[RESTIMULATE|restimulate]] this chaos, the individual kind of wogs out of it and looks around and he'll say, "Well, it's quiet enough now, maybe I'll start to handle something." And of course he misgauges the [[EFFORT|effort]] on the [[LINE|line]] completely and he goes tearing around in circles.

It's very interesting to [[WATCH|watch]] a child move up into his teens. His parents have been giving him the good 8-C, you know, of, "Go to bed." "No, don't go to bed." "Now get up." "No, don't go to bed." "Go to bed." "Now, have something to eat." "Did you [[WASH|wash]] your face?" "Well, why don't you have a [[GLASS|glass]] of milk?" "No, you – there isn't any milk." You know? He's really getting good 8-C, familial [[STYLE|style]]. And he gets up into the teens and all of a sudden his parents aren't applying very much duress at him and he revolts. Well, what's this revolt? This revolt is really not a feeling, [[SENTIENT|sentient]], knowing revolt at all. It is a restimulation of his own efforts to take care of the chaos which happened to him years ago. So actually, [[BAD_CONTROL|bad control]] breeds periods of chaos which will someday explode. And an auditor can explode these with great rapidity. So much for a [[BASIC|basic]] [[THEORY|theory]] of what goes on in this.

Now, the [[ACTUAL|actual]] [[APPEARANCES|appearances]] that come out of this are quite fascinating. One of the appearances is that an individual likes lots of drama, or [[NEEDS|needs]] lots of drama. One of the things you'd read out of this, you'd say, "Well, if a thetan would stand up to that much chaos, he must like it." That's not true. He doesn't like it, but it is at least something to do. It doesn't play too much part in it. But we get a whole side panel of rationale about which I'm going to talk to you. And that is his misconceptions – I could hardly call them conceptions – of what is worth confronting. His ideas of what should be confronted.

This fellow had a nice art collection, he lived a fairly orderly [[EXISTENCE|existence]], he was an interesting conversationalist. He lived in this Maryland village and he never had a caller. Nobody ever came to see him. Nobody ever came near him and so on. He lived a life of great idleness. And one day he died. And everybody went to his funeral. Now, what kind of a silly thing is this? Well obviously, a funeral is worth confronting, isn't it? But a live being isn't, is he?

You just add this up to what we used to have to say about [[ACCEPTANCE_LEVEL|acceptance level]]. Now we get confronting level. Got that? This fellow hardly had anybody ever talk to him in the office. He went along, he did a good job and so forth. Nobody ever talked to him in the office, particularly. One day he got sick. And everybody at the office came to see him [[CLEAR|clear]] down at the hospital. Now, if he'd gotten sick from leprosy, they all would have come in the first five minutes. People who think they need a great deal of [[ATTENTION|attention]] should learn these little rules. Maybe they subconsciously – pardon me, reconsciously practice them.

Now, an individual has a [[CONCEPT|concept]] of what is worth confronting. And all of the chaos which he has been handled has got him so joggle-pated that he doesn't understand that things don't have to be horrible, terrible, miserable or dramatic in order to be confronted. And he falls straight away from con-fronting the [[UNIVERSE|universe]] around him and he confronts only the horribleness and nastinesses and so on.

Now, for instance, there were many books written about the Civil War. Many books. Matter of fact, it was the only war American authors had to write about from about 1865 clear on through till 1917. And they wore it to pieces. That Spanish-American War, that didn't seem to bite too much. You found even after the Spanish-American they were still writing about the Civil War. Very interesting war, I am sure. But lately the reviews of books tell us that a book called Andersonville, by a McKinley Cantor, is supposed to be and is advertised as the greatest Civil War book ever written. Well, I took a look at it. Sat there with a bottle of milk of magnesia and a couple of packages of Tums and studied what America considers, at this moment, great literature to be. It's on the pocket book stands at this moment. Andersonville. It isn't about the Civil War at all – only incidentally. It's about a prison camp erected in Georgia by the Southerners, in which they incarcerated damn Yankees.

And every nasty, foul [[CONDITION|condition]] of humanity is delineated, painfully and unartfully, at exceeding length. Man doesn't even know enough to put [[QUOTATION|quotation]] marks around the statements made by his characters. They're all jambled up in the book, too. You can't tell whether somebody's talking or McKinley Cantor is talking, or it's just four or five more [[UNION|Union]] privates dying in their own excretia. This is really – really, the book runs on at that tone level. This is a "great book!" Well, this is fantastic! Obviously, however, readers (particularly literary critics) consider – they're just a level of the less intelligent reader; that's a literary critic – they think this is worth confronting. There's hardly any part of it that isn't below the belt. I'd [[HATE|hate]] to tell you where you'd exteriorize those fellows from. But a book like this gets circulation, gets popularity and so forth because people consider that it must be worth confronting. Right? Crazy business, but – it's hard to believe that it would happen, but this is what is happening to American literature these days. It's gone off; it's way below 2.0 at this time and it's going south with great rapidity. They're trying for greater and greater [[EFFECT|effect]].

If you've watched TV lately, some of the l.5ing and – a high-toned TV actor acts at 1.5. That's a high-toned one. Total [[MISEMOTIONAL|misemotional]] [[PRODUCTION|production]]. Hundred percent. Well, that's evidently worth confronting. Do you see what they're trying to do? Now, if you could just figure out what a lot of people considered to be worth confronting and then gave it to them, just total calculation on the thing, I don't know what you would come up with. You'd probably come up with much greater popularity than anything else. That is one of the reasons people look on popularity with some askance. They don't believe in popularity.

Popularity would be merely somebody having met the sum total of what people consider worth confronting. And that [[CONSIDERATION|consideration]], when it can [[DROP|drop]] as low as this book by Cantor, or when it can go as bad off as some of the TV programs that you see, with all their [[MISEMOTION|misemotion]] and so forth, and when these things really attain a tremendous [[RATING|rating]] and so on, you'll get an idea after a while that people are getting into a pretty anxious [[STATE|state]]. They must be in a pretty fantastic state of [[MIND|mind]] to – this is all they'd look at? This is pretty weird. Pretty wild. Worth confronting.

Now, a circus erred in the opposite direction. At one time circuses had five rings. Not just three rings, they had five rings, with the same [[PERFORMANCE|performance]] going on in each ring, with different troupes, and with at the same time two or three shows going on in the tracks. In other words, they would put up this tremendous [[CONFUSION|confusion]] of things to watch, and they thought that people would consider that worth confronting. The American circus went out and became much less popular solely because people don't consider that worth confronting anymore. They don't go there and pay their [[MONEY|money]]. See, circuses play short runs and they play real close to the railroad tracks and only in big cities.

Hollywood got the idea and, I imagine, laid a tremendous multibillion-dollar egg with their Vistavision and wide [[SCREEN|screen]] and all the rest of this. They were getting actors up there bigger and bigger and bigger on those bigger and bigger screens and so on. You finally sit down and – you began to feel like an ant crawling on one of the actor's knees.

Now, here we have the other side of the manifestation. We have the [[ANXIETY|anxiety]] to be confronted. See, we get two sides to this. What is worth confronting versus the anxiety to be confronted. We get these two things in conflict with each other, and those two things in their adjustment make the drama of life.

Now, where we find a preclear out of [[PRESENT_TIME|present time]], we are prone to think, in our charitable way, that he is stuck on the time track and that some other force greater than his own is sticking him on the time track. But we long since learned that there was something going on here which the preclear apparently liked.

Well, he – where do you find him stuck? You find him [[STUCK_IN|stuck in]] drama. Now, how does he ever get into this drama? Well, he gets the idea that that is something worth confronting – the drama. You know, some Indians had him tied to the stake and they were circling around him one way or the other and they chopped his scalp off and didn't even send it home to mother. This is worth confronting: picture of all of this going on.

Well, he got lured into this on the idea that if he just had more to con-front, he would be more famous, he would be more this, he would be more that. There would be more prizes offered, he could demonstrate his [[COURAGE|courage]] and gallantry and that sort of thing, and the glory would be greater and he'd face up into these things. And they go off on a [[GRADIENT_SCALE|gradient scale]] to things nobody could possibly [[CONFRONT|confront]] and which he never did confront. And that is when he goes [[ANATEN|anaten]].

First he starts facing these things which are – he considers worth con-fronting. And if he considers enormous drama to be the only thing that's worth confronting, then he easily slops over into enormous chaos. When he goes over into enormous chaos he gets caught up in the fact that nobody could possibly confront the thing. But he's already stuck on an earlier [[POSTULATE|postulate]] there was nothing worth confronting. And so he gets [[NO_HAVINGNESS|no havingness]] in the [[PHYSICAL_UNIVERSE|physical universe]]. Now, this is one of the tricks by which people run down other people's havingness. They tell him, "Nothing around here is worth looking at. Nothing around here is worth looking at, at all. Nothing. There isn't anything interesting happens in this town. This town is a dull town." I think America invented the small town just to convince people there was nothing worth confronting.

And these small communities and these small minds would work one way or the other of making nothing out of the things that a kid was willing to confront. And so they bred, as the child grew older, a contempt for any-thing in his vicinity. And the kid started looking around for something worth confronting. Well, nobody tipped him off as to what was worth confronting. See, there was never enough and so forth. And you pick him up one day, no [[SONIC|sonic]], no [[VISIO|visio]], mind all caved in. Now, what did he do? He walked up looking for something worth confronting and went over the edge and went into this chaos that I was talking about in the first part of the lecture. Now, he tried to control it, he tried to keep that from happening. He found that the most positive control that he could render would not fight back the postulate that he had to have something worth confronting. He was trying to fight against his own postulate and he didn't make it.

All right, what do we get, then? We get a chaotic condition where every time we try to make the individual confront something, he merely goes back to something that is considered to be worth confronting. Highly dramatic, chaotic, colorful in some fashion – he just merely slides back that far. That's the all further he goes. Well, if you can get him back there, that's fine, but he doesn't stick there. He goes right on up and he has to have more. The second he wants more he goes back into all of this chaos of ridges and shooting stars and [[SPACE_OPERA|space opera]] and everything else. You see, that was worth confronting. And he gets mixed up into electronic ridges and implants and stuck in again.

So if you just ran "Confront it" on somebody, you know, "Well, confront your [[BANK|bank]]. All right, that's fine. Just confront your bank," you might get somewhere. You know, just told him to do that and nothing more, you might get someplace simply by running out the fact that he was confronting the thing. But let's be a little sharper than this and let's look at anatomy – its anatomy very closely and we will discover some horrendous processes.

All right, we've got a [[PROCESS|process]] that's a little bit involved, but it runs this way – just a sample process. You say, "Mock up something that isn't worth confronting. Make it a little more [[SOLID|solid]]. Thank you." You know what the guy gets? He gets the streets in his immediate vicinity. He gets all the having-ness of the only things that he could ever get any havingness from. You got it? Here's all these things. Where is he going to get some havingness, walking back and forth and around? Havingness, barriers, so forth? And yet his total idea is that none of this is worth confronting. If none of it's worth con-fronting, he never sees it.

And you get your [[STANDARD|standard]] [[HOMO_SAPIENS|Homo sapiens]] vacant eye as he walks down the street. It's quite interesting. It was a very lovely cool day this afternoon. There were some people walking down the street, some people driving, and there was one lady who was – had a little boy in a little cart. And these people were oh, going along totally vacant-eyed, driving vacant-eyed, walking that way, they weren't seeing anything around them.

All of a sudden this woman who had the little boy on the cart, very smartly and properly, with a great feeling for weights and balances, pulled the tongue of the little cart up and catapulted the little boy out on his behind onto the pavement, with a crash. Instantly [[TRAFFIC|traffic]] jammed. The kid wasn't even hurt. He was crying a little bit. He wasn't even hurt. But all the cars that had been in [[MOTION|motion]] stopped. All their passengers were pop-eyed onto this terrifying [[SCENE|scene]]. Everybody who was walking stopped. And where there had been no crowd at all, there was instantly and immediately not only a crowd of people but automobiles too. And that's pretty hard to do.

That was worth confronting. But the streets and trees and the nice cool day was not worth seeing. You got this? The ingredient of blood-curdling drama was added. But when the little boy wasn't hurt and he shut up, looks of disappointment were on all faces, and the crowd [[DISPERSED|dispersed]] quietly to the vacancy of other blocks.

That's what you get on almost anybody if you run that process. "Mock up something that's not worth confronting. Make it a little more solid. Thank you." Fantastic process.

All right, how about another process on this line? "Mock up something that nobody could confront." And we discover at once one of the more favorite games of psychos. Something nobody could confront. Not a very productive process, oddly enough. But it produces an awful lot of effects. "Something that's not worth confronting" produces ten times the result "something nobody could confront" produces. Isn't that a great oddity? Now, let's get a process that's quite therapeutic that would take in all things. I'm just telling you the odd conditions.

By the way, when you get "something nothing could confront" you get black minds with ridges and shooting stars and bits and pieces of space opera flying through them and so forth that nobody could make head nor tail out of. Labyrinthine circumstances of one kind or another. If you just said, "Invent something to confront. Mock it up and make it a little more solid," you would probably get the best process that can be worked out of this morass.

And the individual would gradually [[CHANGE|change]] his mind concerning things there were to be confronted.

Now, we're talking about the woof and the warp, the alpha and omega of confronting when we're talking right there in that process. Worth confronting. Is there such a thing as "can't confront at all"? I'm afraid there isn't. I'm afraid there isn't. I'm afraid there are only things which are difficult to con-front. Now, I'll give you another manifestation here which turns up on another process. And that other process runs like this: "Mock up something you've got to confront." And what do we get? We get the standard, run-of-the-mill, Homo sapiens nonsense. Five-alarm fires, funerals, that sort of thing. But we also get: work. Now, only in a few nations anymore, here on Earth, is work considered to be nonharmful. In the bulk of nations and amongst the bulk of populaces, work is considered to be about the last thing that anybody should ever be expected to confront.

Here's the main thing, then. An individual who has maybe been running this – he's been running a Caterpillar tractor and it's had to confront great banks of dirt; the duress with which he throws himself into that job is a "got to confront." And one day he didn't feel well. He was getting along all right on the job and he didn't feel well and something of the sort, and he still had to confront it. And another day, why, it was bad weather and he certainly didn't want to do that job and he had to confront it. And another day he'd met a good-looking girl the night before and he certainly didn't want to come to work that morning and he had to confront it just the same. So this "Mock up something you've got to confront" returns in [[MOCK-UP|mock-up]] most of the tools of a [[TRADE|trade]] of an individual in this society at this time. That's rather unusual, by the way.

The Anglo-American view is to put a tremendous amount of kick in the pants on this thing called work. The way you work out work as something that is impossible for anybody to confront is this way: every time a child tries to perform any work, you discourage him. See, you say, "Oh, get out of my way. It's too much trouble to show you. You're in my road." And by the time he's six or seven, he's thoroughly educated that he will not be permitted to work, you see?

Then they keep him in that state with a bunch of laws of one kind or another, so that this amount of child [[LABOR|labor]] and so forth won't [[GET_IN|get in]] the road of the trade unions and Dave Becks and Hoffas and other people. And they work him on up and by the time they realize – the police have a vested interest in [[CRIME|crime]], and they have to move him up there to the good, high-[[QUALITY|quality]] status, "juvenile delinquent," you see, in his teens. So they get into a lot of trouble and nobody will permit him to work then either. By the way, if any-body is going to work in the US anymore, as a child, he actually has to get permission from his teacher and his grades have to be at a certain level and there's all kinds of complications concerning this thing. That's why you don't get your newspapers on time.

Anyway, all the ways kids had of getting jobs and getting money and getting out from underneath the tremendous dependence of family were all swept away in some [[SUPER|super]]-saccharine idiosity on the subject of "[[CHILDREN|children]] mustn't work."

All right, now we get this fellow all the way up the line, see? Get him up there at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, something on the order – I don't know when they let him out – if he goes through college, get him when he's forty or fifty or whenever they get out through college. And we insist he get married.

See? And then we show him that he's got to work. Then we have happy factories and happy plants and we never have labor troubles or anything and life goes on, [[SWEETNESS_AND_LIGHT|sweetness and light]]. And we never have economic repercussions.

I'd say it's just around the corner where somebody would have to stand with a bullwhip if they continue these particular tactics on work. To make somebody front up to a lathe or something like that, or a Caterpillar tractor, would just be a bullwhip job. This is how you make a [[FUTURE|future]] [[SLAVERY|slavery]] for a nation. But here you've got one of these superduress "got to confronts," don't you see? So work is a "got to confront" in this country. No wonder people get tired. Because every time you have put them into a "got to confront," then you run them into all the emergencies.

All right, what's an [[EMERGENCY|emergency]]? An emergency is something which requires a [[NECESSITY_LEVEL|necessity level]]. What is a necessity level? It is a heightened willingness. A sudden, heightened willingness untaps a tremendous [[ABILITY|ability]], of course. House burning down, so the fellow is perfectly able to carry the furniture out in the front yard, don't you see? He's got something to confront there, he's very willing to confront it, his moment has arrived, his willingness goes zoom!

He untaps or uncovers all of this ability (which he covers back up again rapidly at the end of the emergency) and you get these tremendous feats. But look what this does. Look what this does when work becomes a "got to confront." It takes all of these old moments of hyperaction which he can have in terms of pictures still, and it takes all these things and it works them out very nicely and he can go along for quite a while on this supersupply of old facsimiles and things. And then one day he gets to the other end of it.

You never saw anybody more tired than a soldier who has been through twenty-four hours of battle. He might have been right on the ball all the way through the twenty-four hours and never [[AWARE|aware]] of the fact that he was tired, but all during that time he was running way above any ability he had to continue. All of a sudden the battle ends, he goes thud! Thud. That's that. And boy, is he tired.

Now, this [[CYCLE|cycle]] of superenergy in application [[WINDING_UP|winding up]] with super-[[TIREDNESS|tiredness]] then gets applied to the workaday world of turning a lathe or driving a truck or keeping a set of books. And the individual – first he's got to get that work done. See, he just goes grrrrr! grrrrr! grrump! That's a day's work, you see? Just [[PRESSURE|pressure]], pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pres-sure, flop. Finally he goes into a total exhaustion. He has nothing left of all of his former emergencies but the exhaustion end. He works at a total emergency from one end to the other. Why? Because he has no [[ORIENTATION|orientation]] on what's worthwhile confronting, or he never confronts anything unless he has to, because there isn't anything that's worth confronting anyhow. And all of this [[LOGIC|logic]] of one kind or another adds up to the fact that the man goes onto an emergency level. And his lifetime is one long activity at an emergency height.

I'm well aware of this, by the way, at congresses. It's quite amazing at congresses what we – here we have a tremendous number of lectures and a tremendous number – a lot of activity. There's a lot of pre-congress [[PLANNING|planning]] and so on. And all the people come to the congress and you pour on the coal, you got the idea? Very fine, pour on the coal. Four days go by and all of a sudden there's no more coal needs to be poured on. If I didn't watch myself, I would still keep going at high C.

Day after the congress, my feet are tired, maybe, something like that, but I'm all willing to get in there and pitch and lick the other half of the world and so forth and keep on going. And the day after that, I'm perfectly willing to go on and go out rrrhhh rrrhhh rrrhhh and the next rrhhh rrrhhh rrrhhh. And I've found out if I don't get by the first three days after a congress taking myself by the scruff of the neck and throwing myself in a bunk, that all of a sudden I come up against a dead end. I get dead tired about a week after a congress. Well, that's a silly thing to have happen.

In other words, I know enough about physical anatomy to know that unless I just slow it down perforce, and then build it back up again at its ordinary peak, that I will be having a "got to confront" go right on going. Because I'm not kidding you. About the third or fourth day of a congress, walking out again in front of the audience is a "got to confront." There's a terrific amount of [[COMMUNICATION|communication]] involved in something like this. It knocks havingness to ribbons. There's a bunch of [[ENERGY|energy]] thieves always in the crowd. They just take your ridges and just tear them to bits. You look like Swiss cheese.

Now, here is a reaction, emergency level. It tells us a great deal about performance. It tells us where this hectic anxiety to get the work done, to [[GET_IT_DONE|get it done]] all at once, get it done right now, grrrrr – both where it comes from and where it'll wind up. It'll wind up with flop! Got to do it all at once, got to do it right now, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure – collapse. Now, if that's a [[CYCLE_OF_ACTION|cycle of action]], I don't want one.

Human body has certain limitations – stands up and caves in at certain stress levels, completely [[INDEPENDENT|independent]] of a thetan. That's one of the things that you very often overlook, is the fact that a body is built on a number of now-I'm-supposed-to's. And every now and then you think you've got all these now-I'm-supposed-to's [[ERASED|erased]] and you take it out on the middle of the Sahara Desert and a "now I'm supposed to have a drink of water" keys in and you haven't got it licked at all. If you had mocked them up they would be different, that I'm sure, but you probably had nothing to do with it.

Now, here we have confrontingness added into a tremendous auditing practicality. This is very [[PRACTICAL|practical]] stuff I've been talking to you about. Go over this again – just by running a process to predict exactly what will turn on in the preclear is quite interesting, just as a phenomenon. You can run "Mock up something you've got to confront." You'll get the guy's tools of the trade. Run it a little bit further in a man, you'll get women. Run it a little bit further in women, you get a man. It's a "got to confront."

All right. Now we go over this again, "Something not worth confronting," and we'll get the [[PRESENT_TIME_ENVIRONMENT|present time environment]]. Present time isn't worth con-fronting. By [[AGREEMENT|agreement]] with Father and Mother and so forth, present time is not worth confronting. Obviously at no time that he was in present time did he find anybody confronting present time, so obviously it's not worth con-fronting. That follows, doesn't it? Racial agreement, and everybody should abide by those (if he wants to go crazy).

Anyway … Now, you take this "Invent something to confront, mock it up and make it a little more solid," and you have a workable process. And you take "Something that…" – just the third predictable one – "Something that cannot be confronted," or "nobody could confront," and so forth and you normally get the more black messes that some people call minds. But the workable process on the thing is, no more, no less, "Invent something to con-front. Mock it up. Make it a little more solid." This is quite, quite reliable. Has the [[LIABILITY|liability]] of all mock-up processes, of course, in that the mock-ups behave in certain ways and so forth, and you have to pay attention to that.

Also, you have to run, sometimes, before a person can mock things up and make them a little more solid, you have to run keeping them from going away, you have to run holding mock-ups still and then make them a little more solid. It behaves exactly the same subjectively as it does objectively. This we take into consideration that you've done something about. And you solve this confrontingness material in the pc.

Now, you could ask yourself what the [[SOLUTION|solution]] of confrontingness in the pc would mean in terms of [[EXTERIORIZATION|exteriorization]]. Things that are impossible to con-front; things that have to be confronted; things that are not worth confronting – each one of them plays its [[ROLE|role]] in exteriorization. Somebody's dead in his head. Well, he's – he knows nothing else, maybe, but he knows that one cannot possibly confront a skull or a body, but one has got to confront one. See, now there's an odd frame of mind and that's what hangs people up in it.

A lot of cases can run this – pretty low-scale cases can run this sort of thing. But I would say offhand it would take a lot of preparation with the early steps of CCH before one started soaring into those rarefied realms of confrontingness. You're liable to tie into a pre-c, you know, and with great enthusiasm you're auditing and you just know you're going to get him there and so forth, and you – "Mock up something else that you've got to confront." Fine, you know, really getting there, and he – you know, he does and go ahead, and you [[AUDIT|audit]] about four or five hours on this and he turns around and he says, "What's 'confrontingness' mean?"

It's happened more than once to me. Terrific process and so on; way over the pc's head. Now, there is one process that is called a training process – or it was and it really shouldn't be – [[LOCATIONAL_PROCESSING|Locational Processing]], which works out a tremendous amount of confrontingness and controls attention at the same time. And it gives you – actually, your best confrontingness [[OBJECTIVE|Objective]] Process is simply old-time Locational. That was the best one up to a certain period. "Notice that wall. Notice the [[CEILING|ceiling]]. Notice the floor. Notice your chair. Notice the table." That sort of thing. No more than that, run with great accuracy and great precision by an auditor, actually at once controlled the attention of the preclear; and the preclear's attention was controlled all the time by fac-similes and odds and ends in the mind and it took over the control of these things and ran them out and let them explode and go to pieces and so forth.

Actually, a steady control like that runs out the preclear's attempts to control, as I told you earlier in this lecture. But we just say, "Notice the wall. Notice the ceiling. Notice the floor," with good acknowledgments and so on, particularly if run at a Tone 40 level with great precision and exactness. Not hem and haw and aw and er and "I don't know what that thing is called, but notice it anyhow I guess. Maybe. Huh?" That sort of thing won't do much. But precision control on Locational Processing gives us a tremendous objective confrontingness process, and Locational is just as good outside as inside.

There are very few of you have ever run Locational outside with malice aforethought. Just said, "Well, we got Locational a little bit [[FLAT|flat]] up close, let's take him outside and just run nothing but Locational outside." We put other significances on top of it. We ran locational type processes with other significances, but not just Locational all by itself.

Now, in view of the fact that Locational Processing, "Notice that wall. Notice that floor. Notice that chair," happens to make the thetan make the body confront the wall, the process in the training drill is not the top Locational Process. You'd have to have some sort of a command [[QUALIFICATION|qualification]] that would go somewhat like this: "Through the body's eyes, notice that wall." Now you're asking him to confront on a via, which you are declaring. And you're actually asking a thetan to confront the wall.

Early Locational, by the way, (it might interest you) and early 8-C were both designed as [[EXTERIOR|exterior]] processes, and were not designed for a body at all. Hence this [[RANDOMITY|randomity]] of commands. Never been reinspected from the earliest days.

We expected the thetan to notice the wall, move over to it and [[TOUCH|touch]] it. Those commands, the earliest time that they were used, were supposed to be on an exteriorized [[CASE|case]]. Then they were adapted to get the preclear under the auditor's control and so help me, the commands haven't been refined from that day to this. And so we found some bugs in the commands not very long ago. That's just because we never inspected them on a body basis, although that was the main use they were getting, which is quite amusing.

We could run Locational so that we're asking a thetan to confront the walls while moving a body around, we would have the attention of the thetan himself under control and he himself would not dog off very badly. So this is a tremendously valuable confronting process. And I would say as of this moment that we had two very valuable confronting processes. Locational, which works better and better the higher a case goes. That's quite weird – works better and better. But it has its limitation because if you just say, "Notice that wall," and then you expect him to turn his head over there, it might have nothing to do with his noticing the wall and you yourself have put something else into the command that would limit it. But "Through that body's eyes, notice that wall," we are actually running a process which would exteriorize somebody after not too much time. And that would be the objective confrontingness process. That's a process, you understand, not a drill.

And the other process, the [[SUBJECTIVE|subjective]] one, is something on the order of, "Invent something to confront. Mock it up. Make it a little more solid." That's the best all-around subjective confrontingness process. Now, you've been get-ting, as you – speak of confrontingness and I notice people sneezing, that's quite interesting. You've been getting a lot of "you confront it" here in this ACC, haven't you? Confront it!

Well, all right. It was intended, in the main, to desensitize the necessity to confront and I think very few of you now feel frantically on the subject of "You must confront it!" You're not gritting your teeth and spitting out the enamel and holding yourself in there and so on. If you still are, it is still a case of some more "Go ahead and confront it!" see? If you can't stand it, confront it, you know? That sort of thing. Now, that is the – training's answer to getting through confronting because it runs out the necessity to confront and brings a fellow down at last into the [[COGNITION|cognition]] that he simply can con-front it. He hasn't got to, he just can. Big difference! And the processing equivalents of confronting, I've given you tonight. And I [[HOPE|hope]] they'll be of some use to you.

Thank you very much.

CONFRONTING	 PAGE   \* MERGEFORMAT 2	18ACC-19 - 08.08.57

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures 18ACC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1957]]