View source for Dianetics 1955 (UC 541229)

'''Series:''' UC

'''Date:''' 29 December 1954

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

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← [[Lecture_Index_UC|Back to Series]]

Thank you.

And I'm trying to see if anyone was a casualty in the seminars.

Today we have a book to talk about: Dianetics 1955! We have summated in this book a small amount of material which was gathered at odd moments and which covers, as far as I can tell, man. This small subject and this small book very possibly will have a collision—I wouldn't doubt a bit—or if after they had read it, something happened.

Now, I want to tell you something about writing this book. Want to hear something about writing this book?

Audience: Yes.

Well, I started to write this book about twenty-so years ago. And I've been trying to write this book ever since. But a few things interfered. I see there are a couple of authors present. They can appreciate this.

People keep interrupting writers. They rush in and they say, "Where's the time payment for the furniture?" And the wife keeps coming in saying, "No shoes—none." And the federal government keeps coming in and saying, "Greetings." And a writer's studio begins to look like a couple of Grand Central Stations moving through each other.

And at last you decide you're going to work real hard and really get at this book, now. And you're really going to write it and you're really going to get there and so forth, and at that moment, why, they tell you you're bankrupt. The number of human beings that were pulled apart in order to make this book actually likens it a little bit better to a Roman circus. But it's perfectly safe to open now. No lions will jump out, but the fact of the matter is, that's only true if you don't read it.

The actual writing of this book was interrupted by such things as a publisher demanding that the text, which was the preliminary text to a good solution, be popular. Well, I don't know really how you could fail to be popular if you were showing somebody what he was all about. This is a very hard thing to do. But the first text had to be popular. If you'll notice, this book is very concise. It says what it says when it says it. And it is no masterpiece of literature. It is simply a lot of data strung together in such a way, hopefully, that when read, a minimum of catastrophe and a maximum of result will occur.

The actual writing of this particular volume, then, has quite a lot of history behind it, as I suppose you could say about any one of the volumes which have been written on Dianetics and Scientology. But this little book here had to be written fairly rapidly in order to meet the congress date. And we had quite a time getting this book out.

It was rather fabulous—rather fabulous, the speed with which the actual words were thrown together. This had nothing to do with the slowness with which the notes were gotten together so that one could throw the words together. This took a long time to get the notes and the data together. The actual writing of the book was a very rapid affair. I know I kept going into my office for two or three days after I had finished—and two or three days, wondering where I had to start to complete the book. I couldn't get any reality on having finished it.

The book was written on a tape recorder—on a little Echo tape recorder, straight onto recorder and taken off by my secretary, and she took it off onto aluminum Multilith plates, just like that. I mean, there wasn't any interim transcription. And these aluminum Multilith plates simply went onto the Multilithograph and that kept spewing out pages which kept stacking up and the Hubbard Professional College people were under the belief that they were there to study.

But a few days later they had the definite impression that they were there simply to put these book pages together. And day after day, while people were putting up new barriers in my office, as though there weren't enough, I could see—I could see the HPC people in there walking around a table. Well, now you would—the way you collate one of these books is you have each separate page laid on a table, something like that, and then you get a parade of people, and they walk around the table, each one picks up a piece of paper into little packages, see. This was Opening Procedure 1955. (laughter)

And I want to thank the people for the actual production of this book. So, thank you very much. We had one copy immediately sent to London. And this copy is to be photolithographed in London to be ready for the January 16th Congress in London. And I hope they make that dateline over there with this book.

Well, it took a long time to write the book. Fortunately, it doesn't take very long to read it or to work with it. A very funny thing, however, is that no phenomena covered in the past, has ceased to be absent just because we've written a new book. You know, the overt act-motivator sequence is still there. Black and White phenomena is still there. Just because we wrote a new book, man didn't change.

To listen to some of our critics, we would come of the opinion that we're always discarding all the old data. It's not possible to discard all of the data, because it was arrived at by observation. And it was then compiled, observation having occurred. So the data did not get thrown away. But more intimate, more applicable data did get discovered which very often explained half a hundred phenomena which had been discovered before.

You see how that would work? You have a sort of a pyramid. And when you start out on that, here is a tremendous number of phenomena all unknown. No phenomena known, except that man walks, eats and seems to get into fights. He also seems to get sick and he also seems to read things like How to Win Friends and Influence People in an apathetic effort to do so.

Now, here we have tremendous quantities of unknown data. We take a look at that—all we'd have to do to start in on that is simply to start looking around at the people with whom we were connected and write down their eccentricities, their conversation and so on. And we would really have a book about man. You see that? Just by looking around in what our own private, personal experience was about man, why, we would then have a considerable fund of information.

A fellow by the name of Charles Dickens did this. Dickens described with great accuracy what he had learned as a young man in the streets and courts of London. But that was exactly what he was doing. He was observing man and writing about him. All right.

Now we get into a more technical echelon when we say, "What factors do these men, each one, hold in common with all these other men?" Well, we could write a big book about that. What factors do they do in common? We could say, well, they eat and they do this and they do that. Each one of them does this thing. And then describe how each one of them did it, demonstrating slight differences, but the fact that they all ate. And this we could consider quite conclusive. We have discovered that they all ate.

A fellow by the name of Sigmund Freud did this, only he wasn't talking about eating. And he observed that all men were engaged, one way or the other, on the second dynamic, or were trying not to be engaged. And he wrote a book about that and demonstrated that there was a common denominator.

Now whether or not this book did anything therapeutically—he wrote several books on this subject—whether it did anything therapeutically or not, we would not be prepared to say at this moment since the mere fact of talking to somebody about his illnesses will quite often produce a marked and beneficial result.

So you see, we don't know whether that survey was actually a terrifically beneficial survey beyond this point: He pointed up to the Western world the fact that such a thing as psychotherapy could exist independent of (1) surgery and (2) demon exorcism. He pointed that up. And he gave a hope to man that we had some possibility of arriving at a conclusive answer whereby man could understand his own problems and could regain some of the vitality which he thinks he has lost somewhere. All right.

We take another such survey conducted by one of his people. Let us say Jung or Adler, the squirrels of his day. And we find out that these people departed a little bit from reality and that they didn't intimately observe man. They weren't too interested in observing man. They were much more interested in, I don't know, stringing words together. Some of their literature is very, very good as literature but not very informative. The terrific difference that we get in all such studies and works is the introduction of too much art. You know, instead of data, instead of translation, interpretation, we get art.

If you want to read art at the extreme and information at the minimum, I invite you to read—I think it's a fellow by the name of Pope—Alexander Pope. I have a little volume of his work, and somebody somewhere back on the time track (it's a very old volume) has written, "Apathy, apathy, apathy," which I occasionally quote.

But even Alexander Pope said, "The proper study of mankind is man." That may or may not be right since the solution of man did not come about by too intimate a look at man but a look at man's relationship to life in general. And we found out man was alive too.

We then go across the pages of history and philosophy and we find that a great many people have been writing on this subject. But the oddity is, is the amount of benefit the writing has had has been in direct proportion to the amount of looking that was done. Thinking about this subject has been of very little benefit. Looking and observing and applying those theories which were formulated after observation has been of considerable benefit. That is a singular difference in the work which we have at hand here. It was derived by observation, not by theory. The theory was derived after the observation had taken place—fascinating difference.

We get a slight difference between this work and the work of a fellow by the name of Zeno, who was one of the popular writers of the later Roman Empire. Zeno wrote a book called Apathia, where I think is where we get the word, or where we use it that way, and he said—he proved conclusively in this book—this book is all figure-figure. There isn't a single observation in the whole book. It's just figure, figure, figure, figure, figure. Think, think, think, think, think, bong. And he proved conclusively in this book that you can't win.

And his conclusion, and the philosophy which he gave his day, and which was bought by the Roman Empire, and which is overlooked as one of the factors by Gibbon who describes the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and attributes it to Christianity—Gibbon completely overlooked Zeno. He didn't pay any attention to Zeno. But how about a popular writer who proves conclusively that you can't win and then proves overwhelmingly that you mustn't even try, then. And that was Apathia of the later days of the Roman Empire. That's a figure-figure sort of a book.

Now, we get an observational study compared to a figure-figure study. And we'll see that the observational study has considerable benefit, and the thinkingness study, just pure ivory towers, has very little application.

Now, one Professor Wundt back in someplace in Europe, a little less than a hundred years ago, dreamed up the idea that the problems of man should have applied to them scientific methodology. And he invented a word called "psychology." That was very sound, wasn't it? He said that this is what should happen.

And then he didn't do it and no psychologist really has done it since. They've looked at rats, they've looked at college students but they've never looked at man. They live in a figure-figure of unreality. They collect statistics; they collect endless statistics. A statistic never told you anything except that some numbers were in front of you. That's about all a statistic will tell you.

Now, if I'm stepping on some toes when I say psychology has not gotten there, and when I say that psychology has not arrived simply because it didn't look, it only thought—I know I am stepping on some toes here and there across the world because there are very many sincere men have devoted a great deal of time and study in the field of psychology believing that they were resolving some of the problems of man. But psychology has been with us almost a century at this time, and the cure for psychosomatic illness, for back-wardsness in class, has yet to emerge from the field of psychology—which I think proves my point quite adequately. Having stepped on some toes, I now tromp.

Now, some people criticize us because Dianetics and Scientology have changed. They express a great deal of change. There's a great deal of vitality in them, and the factors alter from time to time and new conclusions are reached. The amount of change in a science is actually the test of the amount of life in that science, the amount of validity it has. Those things which have practically no validity never change. In this matter of change, here we have Freudian analysis released in 1894, practically completely unchanged to this day. In other words, sixty years here of an opportunity to change, and no change. That's fabulous.

Let's take a companion science to the humanities: nuclear physics. That never suffers from lack of change—never. And it's a very, very live science. The principles of physics are utilized today in almost everything that you contact.

Any piece of transportation, clothing, food and so forth—all these things have a high dependency upon man's ability to understand the material universe through or via physics. And he is learning continually. Take chemistry. That is another live, very live science. And it is in a constant state of change.

Now we can joke about these things if we want to, but the fact of the matter is that where they do not go to war, where they do not assay a widespread destruction of man, these are very beneficial things. But the moment that they start to move in on the humanities and say, "Look, man is a gimmigahoogit that goes whip-whip whenever we punch the geeter button," they're out of order, they're out of place, because they have given themselves a license to use their weapons of destruction against man as they would use it against some old cars. Get the idea? The frame of reference is wrong.

They prove that they can use desperate weapons or develop them and so forth by proving that man is just a machine after all, and this gives them ample reason and excuse to go ahead and use these weapons against man. Just like nobody needs a license to blow up a wrecked car, you know, and smash it up further, so you wouldn't need any license to smash up man. And that is the rationale behind neurosurgery, electric shock and every other barbaric and despicable practice in which various personnel in this society happen to be engaged. "We don't have to respect the individual. We don't have to respect his rights. We don't have to do anything for him because after all, we know he's just a machine."

Well, there is the science of physics moving way out of order. Let's have physics for the matter, energy, space and time of this universe and let it be very content to handle these things and leave man strictly alone. Similarly, chemistry, to use a colloquialism: More boo-boos have been pulled in the field of healing by adapting chemistry to healing, than can easily be counted. These boo-boos started way, way back when we had patent medicine. Fellow used to come around with a banjo and a wagon and a big sign on the side of the wagon, and some white man fixed up like an Indian with a headdress, and that was Chief Wamgutta, and Chief Wamgutta was the chief of the Swamese and he had a special formula for swamproot oil which he was going to purvey for the small sum of a dollar a bottle, while Mr. Jinks played on the banjo. That was chemistry invading the field of the humanities. And I don't know that even when we look at the ads of Abbott or the claims of the AMA that we have departed any distance at all. Except now they do it through Reader's Digest. They don't paint the sign on the wagon anymore; they paint it on an advertisement.

Now I wouldn't hold ourselves open to libel, here, by mentioning the names of some of these organizations like Abbott or Lilly. I wouldn't say that these chemical organizations or these insurance companies like the AMA—the AMA, by the way, is an insurance company. That really wowed us the other day. We found that out—fantastic. The American Medical Association is an insurance company. That's what it is. We've often wondered what it was. Now we know. I won't say any more about that except four or five hours toward the end of the congress.

And we find that the invasion of chemistry into the field of psychotherapy or healing is, as the cowboy said as he fell off the horse, a bum steer. Now, wherever you think that the injection of a dozen molecules will utterly cure psychotherapy, you might as well take up crystal ballizing, because it has the same degree of validity. The theory that chemistry can resolve the problems of man is a bad theory because from the days of patent medicine, from the days of herbs on forward till now, it has never been demonstrated to be true.

We read in the materia medica that cinchona bark is a cure for malaria, that it will prevent malaria—Peruvian bark. Must be: Somebody sold it to the king of France once for, I think, 250,000 louis (louis d'or). That much that formula was worth. That was in the days when they could have gold and when a louis bought something—not like now.

Now, cinchona bark, Atabrine, let down more of our troops in the last war than you could easily count in a ward. You could take this stuff and it made your ears ring, and of course if you've gotten malaria after that, it had to be classified as dengue fever because nobody can get malaria if he's full of cinchona bark. We call it quinine. That's been with us since sixteen-hundred-and-something and its curative powers have more or less run out in the race. Once upon a time, it might have been terrifically effective, but that isn't necessarily true today. And there is the liability of chemistry.

You find them doing this with penicillin. Penicillin at one time cured everything—just cured everything across the boards. All you had to do if you had hay fever was get a little shot of penicillin, your doctor told you, and you were fine. If you had a cold, if you had the flu (these, by the way, were not even evidently carried by bacteria but by virus, and penicillin was active against bacteria)—if you had the cold, if you had flu or if you had anything like that, well, all you had to do was get (shss-shss) a couple of shots of penicillin, (snap)—perfect. If you had a sore throat, why, put some penicillin in a lozenge, and suck it. But it says on all the bottles, "No topical application will prove efficacious." Those words are too large. It means don't put it on the surface of anything, it won't cure anything if you do that. So that's why they used it in lozenges to cure people's sore throats—won't work. And as the years have gone on, more and more bugs have simply crossed their arms purposefully and said, "Penicillin—ha-ha-ha!" Similarly, with sulfa.

You have a problem of life forms fighting life forms when you have the problem of fighting bacteria, and the one thing that life can do is to learn to accustom itself to and accommodate itself to any chemical. I imagine one of these days we will probably raise a race of people, if the physicist has his way of it, who are not affected at all by radioactivity. You know, go around with your ears glowing this far out. Life can accustom itself to chemistry. That's the big, big rule. It can always accustom itself, and so the fighting of one life aberration or form on the part of another life aberration or form with the weapon of molecules, molds, drugs and so on, is of course doomed.

We had a wonderful thing called DDT. And that was going to kill all the insects in the world. Before we went into Saipan we sent fighter pilots over with DDT tanks, sprayed the whole island. Nobody was going to suffer from malaria or other insect-borne diseases such as yaws and so on. Nobody, none of the ingoing troops were going to suffer from these things, so they just plastered the whole island with DDT and when the marines finally got ashore, bzzt-bang, bzzt-bang. Flies, flies, flies. And DDT today is so ineffective against insects, as far as flies and so forth are concerned, that you can just put a fly in a box of it and take him out. He feels fine! He says, "Thanks for the pick-me-up."

Any poison man has—any poison is really ineffective and will go up through the most astonishing thing you ever saw. It will come up to a point where it's a stimulant. Did you know all poisons would get into a category of merely being a stimulant? Strychnine, for instance, is—gotten to be a stimulant for many people. They take a spoonful of it a day.

Well, once upon a time the witches of Europe (an organization which was fighting the Roman Catholic Church—the witchcraft—and which lost) once took arsenic. And you know this old saw about the—you knew whether or not this fellow was a werewolf by the fact that when you opened up his grave, why, there he was evidently in the pink of health, and the only way to do for him was to drive a stake through his chest. You know that old superstition? Oh, dear, the Frankenstein-type movie should have taught you that.

Well, this old superstition was born straight out of the fact that the witches took arsenic. They'd take it in very, very small doses and they'd build up these doses and it actually made them proof against an enormous number of invading bacteria. See, it was a preventive—preventive medicine. Very many diseases, then, could be held by the public at large, but not by a witch. So they apparently lived a charmed life and of course after they died they'd been embalmed already. But a witch would get up to a point of where they could take a spoonful of arsenic, you know, "Yum-yum." Like the fly and the DDT—nothing to it, (slurp). Wonderful stuff!

Life can accustom itself to any chemical preparation or compound. So I guess that chemistry is kind of let out, sooner or later, isn't it, as a weapon? And Abbott and Lilly have to keep inventing new things in order for them to go on working. Well, if this is the case, then we would look into the field of function for any kind of an answer to illness, to misfunction, malfunction or even the combat between life form and life form. We'd look for another answer than chemistry; we'd look for another answer than physics. We'd look at life itself and try to understand something about that. And that is what we have done in Dianetics 1955!

One of the primary things that people have had difficulty accepting—oh, wait a minute, let me go back in some history. Well, if I told you the primary thing people had difficulty in accepting was a prenatal engram, we would sound right at home, wouldn't we? 1950. How often have you tried to tell somebody about a prenatal engram? Or have you quit long since?

Audience: Yes.

Yet a prenatal engram is there. There's a full recording on file of incidents which have occurred prior to birth. It's not very difficult to isolate them or demonstrate them. It's not very difficult to run them out with a considerable change in human form.

For instance, we had a fellow the other day as a preclear who was an astonishing example of somebody stuck at two months' postconception. He was right in that engram. I mean, he was in it! We didn't run it to date, but it was there. And the auditor and I had quite a talk—a research auditor—and he and I had quite a talk about this case. And we were trying to figure out exactly where this fellow was stuck on the track, just for old times' sake, not because it was any good to us in processing at all, but we were just trying to find out where he was stuck on the track. And all of a sudden it came through to us just about where he was stuck. Why? Because he had the physiological aspect of that particular form of life. He was there perfectly. All of his various functions and everything else that he was going through; they were stuck right there—bing!

Every time that we have had anything to do with cancer, for instance, we have found that the individual for one type of cancer was stuck in conception. For the other type of cancer was stuck in mitosis, which is the splitting of the cells. An individual, then, can dramatize one of these engrams. He can dramatize a prenatal, but we don't even bother to run them anymore—not because we can't run them and not because they aren't true but because we don't have to.

It's as easy as that. We don't have to run them anymore.

But this fact of the prenatal engram was tremendously unacceptable to one and all in spite of the fact that a few generations ago, it was the commonest belief imaginable that children were bad off when they had had a bad prenatal experience. This was a common belief. It is believed today by the farmer folk out from the big cities.

They say, "Well, little—little—little Tildie's not in very good shape, you know. Her Ma got an awful scare from that cow." And they believe this. And it's true. And if you as an auditor wanted to take this boy or this girl and run back down the track, all of a sudden the preclear would be telling you all about it being in the dark and being frightened because of some words, and something about a cow. You could find the incident. You could erase it—fantastic! Here was phenomena lying there waiting to be discovered, waiting to be looked for. And wherever we looked, we had no acceptance of this data.

It took a couple of years for this to leak through somebody's skull. And then we had original articles on the subject in Time magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal, Reader's Digest—from time to time have printed, without credit, anything they could think of on the subject of prenatals. This is a fascinating thing. They did accept these things eventually—mostly because they were true—long after we'd abandoned them. The conquered territory which we hold will someday be conquered even by medicine. I mean, we'll be far enough off of it and have abandoned it to that degree.

Now, wherever we have phenomena which is unacceptable, we get into a lot of argument, a lot of sputification and argumentation. And maybe this is fun in the drawing room, but if you were to get much closer to truth, theoretically, you would get into much less argument, wouldn't you? But this would only be true if your truth was agreement. In other words, if you had to do with what was agreed upon only, you'd never get in an argument, would you? Well, supposing something was once agreed upon and once true, and is still true but is no longer agreed upon? You're going to get in an argument. This is a certainty.

You once believed such and so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, but that's not believed anymore. You'll get into an argument if you voice it. Such an example as that is that—the religious causes of once upon a time. Think of the pilgrims' argument on the subject of religion over in Europe and England. Well, let's say you were there. And you certainly believed very heavily and strongly. But if you stood up today and started to voice the principles of Calvin without the slightest variation from the words of Calvin, I'm afraid you'd be in an argument. You may not remember them, but you would probably be in an argument because they're no longer agreed upon. But they once were agreed upon and that agreement alone is what made them true. So, old agreements become new disagreements. All right.

We're not even any longer interested in the prenatal engram. Yet you could probably get in less or more of an argument today than before. There are some other data of that same magnitude. But first and foremost, there's this matter of the thetan exterior. That is a subject for argument. That is a subject for argument. As far as the public at large is concerned, it must be a subject for argument. Or is it?

Let me tell you something fascinating. A door-to-door survey demonstrated that a little less than half the people asked, knew they were themselves and not a body. Oh, you didn't know it was that general. Well, neither did we. These people knew they were themselves and not a body. They knew that they were a sort of an energy production unit of some kind or another, only they didn't quite know what or how, and they thought of themselves as being a soul which was inhabiting a body. This is incredible. This is a little—almost 50 percent—if you took the same average and if it were to hold, this would be 50 percent of the population believe they are their own souls. They are the soul which inhabits a body. Well, this is fantastic. If everybody believed this strongly, why didn't they ever talk about it? Why wasn't it ever mentioned in church?

Yet the church itself couldn't believe this. You know why? Because it talks in such terms as you hear from some very spinny preclear who, when he thinks he's exteriorized, tells you,"I'm over there"You got that one?"I'm over there." Because the church says, "You have to save your soul," see. You are over there. And yet not quite 50 percent of the population, according to this survey, knew they were their own souls. And it wouldn't—couldn't possibly be a question of saving their souls. You see, it would be to them a question of saving their bodies which I think religion has specialized in for a long time. Since every punishment they level is not really in the direction of a soul but in the direction of a body. Burning at the stake, chaining in a dungeon, penance, drag yourself some sackcloth and ashes, push a peanut around the block or whatever religious punishment is assigned, is addressed to the body, not the soul. So I don't think religion has believed in the soul at all. And I don't think it knew anything about it. I've had access to a tremendous number of publications for the instruction of such things as Catholic priests, and nowhere in there did I find the words, "Be three feet back of your head."

But I found a lot about bodies, a lot about chastisement and "You've got to convince the congregation that they must save their souls." This is one of those twisted statements. It can't even be made, really. They've got to save their souls. And yet at death, they believe in the departure of a soul in some particular direction—or they used to.

Now, where and how do we have some sense out of that particular muddle? We didn't even want to go into the field of religion. We weren't even interested in going into the field of religion. What education I've had and you've had on the subject of religion was mostly bad. We have been taught to a very marked degree that religion is a mechanism by which a public can be better controlled. Haven't we?

Audience: Yes.

This we have been thoroughly educated into.

Let us take the situation in England a few years ago. We had the Roman Catholic Church lording it in all directions and being overthrown by a popular revolt just to get rid of that particular religion, and then we got the Church of England. All right.

Now as we get this new factor, it starts to collect tithes in all directions. And it didn't get overthrown by popular revolt; it got overthrown by neglect, if it's been overthrown. But it's not a popular subject anymore. It isn't anything anybody even thinks about anymore to amount to anything. "Am I going to heaven? Am I going to hell?" This is not a pressing problem to most people.

You walk down the street, you probably wouldn't get an extra heartbeat out of anybody if you suddenly stopped him and asked him, "Now, brother, are you really sure that you're going to heaven?"

He'd say, "Ha-ha-ha-ha." He's not worried about this old story.

The spiritualist, with his astral walking, his collection of spirits; his—the magician with his—and by the way, there are a very few people know very much about the basic magician. They think in terms of the stage magician.

But the actual mission of the magician is to make various circles and designs and incantations and by various practices, control and bend to his will, spirits who then go forth and do his bidding. And that is the basic practice called magic.

Nowadays, why, they take a rabbit out of the hat. They say, "See, a spirit"—put it back in. The practice of spiritualism has been almost entirely swept out of existence by charlatanism. They get somebody who's just lost the dearly beloved departed. They bring him in and for a couple of quick bucks they: "Hocus-pocus, we have a message, now, from your dear departed—says, 'Dear Maggie, I am happy here. Joe.' " And if the spiritualist is a good forger, it's even Joe's handwriting.

And by these practices, the field of spiritualism has become debased whereas maybe once upon a time, maybe in Greek times, there was something to spiritualism—might have been something to it. And so we look to find that man has abandoned the three fields, religion, spiritualism and magic, which were most closely acquainted with the idea that man was basically a spirit. See, these three fields had that very intimately. And man has now put those pretty well into the past. He's gotten them nicely forgotten. And all of a sudden, we come along and we say, "Be three feet back of your head"—the fellow is.

And we say, "Okay. What are you looking at?"

He says so and so, "It's a big black wall."

You say, "Copy. Copy it. Copy it. Copy it. Push them all together and pull them in."

The next thing you know, this fellow who was on crutches, this girl whose endocrine system was all out of balance, this person who couldn't live with his fellow man, is just doing beautifully. You know, he's just doing fine. Looks to me like the road out was booby-trapped one way or the other. Looks to me, with design or without design, that somebody had an intention that man necessarily—wasn't necessarily going to get free, if we find the three fields most intimately connected with the right answer to be entirely debased and discredited as of now. That's interesting, isn't it?

How did he ever get into a state where he completely lost his own concept of his own beingness and his ability to handle his beingness and identity and individuality? Well, it must have been too wild a game for him as long as he knew as much as he knew about himself. And so he probably managed to forget it all.

But here we have a controversial point which appears and stares at us out of Dianetics 1955! In Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, we were perfectly willing to accept the idea of a Clear and his abilities—perfectly willing to. And yet a little later on, when the actual measurement of a Clear—how many millimeters wide is a Clear—when the actual measurement of a Clear was announced, people got nervous. They didn't quite like the idea. They didn't quite mesh with this one.

And yet what had happened? All that had happened is the fact that the Clear had been dimensionalized and located and further described in Scientology. The thetan exterior and the Dianetic Clear are exactly the same thing. There is no slightest difference between the two except the thetan exterior, developed by the processes of Scientology, is achieved without erasing every facsimile and engram in the bank.

Therefore, what has occurred today? The goal which we all knew was a good goal in 1950 has been achieved without the necessity of erasing eight billion, seven hundred and sixty thousand, nine hundred and forty-three, cubed, engrams. And this is not a bad achievement—not bad.

By discovering that the individual and his individuality was that thing which produced the energy which made the facsimile—gave us, then, the working basis that it was not necessary to take this individual and erase everything which barriered him. It was only necessary to take this individual and teach him how to handle barriers. And the moment he knew how to handle barriers, the moment we have processed him in the direction of ability, as I've already talked to you about, we could then have a Clear without any further ado. Well, the longest time I know of that it has taken a good auditor with modern processes, given in detail in Dianetics 1955! has been one hundred and fifty hours with a terribly rough case. That is the longest on record.

We have made an awful lot of Clears with the material in Dianetics 1955! And the longest period of time has been a hundred and fifty hours. Wouldn't that have been a terrific thing in 1950? Think of it, 1950: We'd said it, "The maximum we could look forward to in the making of a Clear is a hundred and fifty hours." You wouldn't have believed me—no more than you do now.

We have this liability in the idea of the Clear, in the thetan exterior—we have this liability, and the only liability there is this: it makes people sick at their stomach to look at nothing and makes a certain amount of people actually violently ill to look at the idea of having nothing. And so when we say to them, "The Clear is a thetan exterior"; when we say to them, "All you have to be is three feet back of your head and run your body from behind you; all you have to do if you want energy is to make some," they say, "Bluaaahh."

Now, I'll give you a demonstration of this that you can do and that you can use that will show to you intimately and immediately why certain people object to this idea of the Clear. You take somebody who doesn't look to you like he's easily exteriorizable. You know, take somebody who looks like he'd be your kind of a rough case. You know, got a lo—lo—lot of—lot of comm lag, ga—ga—got a lot of b—b—you know, barriers. Take somebody like that and you say, "Locate a spot in the air of this room."

He'll say, "All right."

You say, "Put your finger on it."

He'll say, "All right."

"Okay. Now locate another spot in the space of this room."

"All right. I'm getting sick."

And about four spots later, he'll be sick. He'll be sick at his stomach at least, and probably in terror, if you kept up this, just, "Spot spots" without doing another thing. And that tells you immediately, if you want to conduct that experiment, you will see just exactly what I'm talking about. You make this fellow locate these spots in the space of the room, you make him do it for a while, you don't remedy any havingness, you don't do anything else with him, you see, and you will find out why he argued with you before about a thetan exterior. You've made this person visualize something sitting in thin air without any mass.

And the moment that you made him visualize a spot without mass, the thetan exterior (the Clear), he got sick when you did it on processing. Only when you didn't process it, when you were just talking about this, this guy got the queasy idea and he just started to enter into that feeling of queasiness and illness, you know, and he backed right off of it, and then he said there isn't any such thing. And he said this rapidly and he said it hard and he hoped that you would argue back real hard, so as to, by this counter of terminals, give him some more havingness quick! Because the way he could get havingness was to have a fight with you. And that's the only little barrier there is on relaying the idea of a thetan exterior.

Now, those people who do not exteriorize easily, and who when they are exteriorized a little bit, sort of yo-yo and don't stay out very much, are still having this same trouble. They've gotten completely entrapped and into the idea that it'd be impossible to have nothing.

Yet, if you just ran somebody on the concept—we don't run concepts anymore, but this is just experimental—and you said, "Get the idea that you have a perfect right to have nothing. Get the idea again. Get it again. Get it again. Get it again," he'd all of a sudden start to heave a sigh of relief.

"(sigh) You mean I don't—I don't have to work? I—I don't have to get a paycheck? You mean—you mean I wouldn't have to live up to the fact that I was supposed to be a great painter? You mean I have a perfect right to be nothing, too? You mean I don't have to amount to anything in life? How wonderful!" Because he's entirely sold in the other direction.

Now, what if a man did have the right to be nothing and to have nothing? He'd probably be a very busy and efficient person because the obsession to be, the obsession to have, are the only destructive factors there could be—the obsessive part of it. He's doing something unknowingly and unwittingly. All right.

Dianetics 1955! talks about the Clear and goes forward immediately into making one. Actually, you'd have to know more about it to make something that we call an Operating Thetan. That's another book.

But as far as making anything that we conceive to be desirable in the terms of a Clear, in 1950, the answers are in Dianetics 1955! and they work. And I leave that up to you to discover, to look over, to use and to find out. Now, I have no doubt that you will.

Many things have been discovered. Many things that are quite old to us have been rehashed and looked over again, but the main thing that has come out into the clear is the ability to make a Clear. And what Dianetics 1955! does is to clarify how one does it and makes it possible for all of these hard times we've been having with cases to be over, so we can have easy times with them now.

And that is the purpose and basic theme of this book.

Thank you.

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