View source for Essence of SOP 8-C (2ACC 531208)

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

'''Date:''' 8 December 1953

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

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And this is December the 8th, morning lecture. And this fine, crisp morning, you have in your hands the SOP 8-C brief form for student use.

Now, that's a brief form—indeed, that's a brief form. That's the one thing you can know about this form, that it's very brief. Because you can do anything to a preclear that you can do in Scientology.

Now, I occasionally throw in all kinds of odds and ends of techniques—partially on the basis of interest. Your biggest and highest levels are interest, attention, cause, effect, and their negatives.

And the most potent emotions which go along with this, of course, are—for the people, a lot of the people you'll be working on—insanity (insanity's an emotion, not a state), fear, sexual sensation, competition and superiority, and their negatives. And that's just about the prime list that I handle.

Just as an aside on this emotion called insanity, people worry about insanity and they do lots of things about insanity, but it is an emotion which is brought about by the compulsion to reach and the inhibition not to reach, or the compulsion not to reach and the inhibition to reach. And those two things together, one way or the other, bring about this emotion. You can turn this on in almost any preclear, by the way.

People going around worrying about being insane or going insane, are very amusing. They are amusing, because you can turn that emotion off just as fast as anything. It may give you a bad fifteen minutes or a bad half an hour, but you can turn it off. And the other ways to handle it, is just have them match-terminal themselves going insane and repressing all their insane motions and so forth.

Insanity is a postulate. It precedes death on the whole track. Death was an invention which came about as a self-protective mechanism.

So long as one was a being and had gotten into something he couldn't get out of, the punishment could continue against all arguments, you see. So the first invention to keep punishment from continuing was insanity. That's on the whole track. That's very early.

And it said, "I'm insane, which means I have no further responsibility, which—this and that, and to prove it, here's this emotion." And one merely did that by reaching and not reaching, and withdrawing and not withdrawing.

It said, "I can't do you any further harm because I am in this horrible state which is non compos mentis. I can't think. I can't act. I can't harm you in any way. No further menace in me, so therefore, you should leave me alone."

And that made punishment stop sometimes, so having been successful at various places on the track (audience member coughing), a pc who is inclining towards insanity … I notice this is starting some coughs, that's interesting. A pc inclining toward insanity or worried about insanity, has simply had this work too well, many times, you see. He says, "I'm nuts, you know, and therefore you've got to leave me alone"—and it's worked.

Any mechanism which the pc has, whether it's a sore knee, a sore jaw or a crossed-up postulate—anything, you know, I mean just anything—he's got it because it's worked.

It has been superior to the situation, and he's tried to make it work again and again and again. And he's always hoping it will work. But you take a sore tooth—this fellow goes around with a sore tooth—well, this sore tooth has made it work. Now, earlier we classified this as the service facsimile—call it the "service postulate" and it comes closer.

So insanity is something that's demonstrated and worried about by people and so forth, and it's just escapement from punishment. A little bit later on, individuals invented this other one. They said, "Look, I am my own mock-up, and my own mock-up is now dead." And that didn't work too well, so they said, "I'm really my own mock-up and my own mock-up is dead and I am dead too, and look, I can't remember my former life as that mock-up." And that's the condition of the track which we have here in 1953 a.d. Earth; and it's just an argument against further punishment.

Punishment is the motto, the justice, the thisa, the thata. It's very worthwhile, by the way. There's no future like a future in which you can punish people, according to the very best authorities. That's the end-all. That's the end-all of everything, is to be able to punish somebody, according to—does—at least that's the way you think that this thing operated. Just because nearly every difficulty which you find in a preclear is—stems from punishment—either his punishing others and so on. Overt act mechanism, overt act-motivator mechanism, all of these things center around punishment.

And this centers around pain, and pain is not supposed to be desirable anymore. Pain was quite—just quite a desirable emotion earlier. It's just an emotion. It says, "You're alive, fellow. Look, you can hurt." And we get earlier on the track and we find, however, that many other emotions were used in this capacity and pain became undesirable and so on.

Well now, anything which somebody didn't like was punishment, so you had to convince him there was something not to like before you could punish him. So you see how far down Tone Scale the whole thing of punishment is. You had to convince him there was something unlikable. In other words, you had to have him select out some randomity before he could be punished.

And the goal—the goal of law, justice, police, so forth, here on Earth is to find something the criminal doesn't like sufficiently to in—stop crime. That thing which causes crime is, of course, fear of punishment. In case one "haves," you see. In case one "has" something, you know, why, he'll be punished. And in case this happens, he'll be punished. In case something else happens, he'll be punished.

Now, the main thing that inhibits your pc in clearing is fear of punishment. He thinks if he gets that good, he'll be punished; so he tries to stay in a state of agreement which is lawfulness and law and order and et cetera, in some kind of an effort to keep from being punished.

Well, this is very, very funny if you look at it. This becomes very amusing, simply because you can't punish a thetan. That's impossible. And hence this goal of the impossible leads into many impossible complications. Leads into complications such as the WCTU, the—leads into complications such as the FBI. Leads into politics and war and all these various asininities.

War is asinine. It isn't necessarily bad, it's just stupid. The reason it's stupid is because you can't have a good time in a war. That's what's wrong with a war. That's all that's wrong with a war.

A bunch of guys—they've got lots of stars all over them, you know and they get all around and they say, "Go here, go there, do this, do that, jump here, jump there," so on.

And the fellow says, "Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"You're supposed to wait."

There's nothing wrong with a war where it comes to action. I mean you get an initial moment of action on the thing, why, there's action—there's something to do.

But wars are run by people who today are so low, so despicably low on the Tone Scale, that they never provide any action for anybody. And so therefore, they forfeit their right to leadership. And all they can provide is, in essence, a punishment for somebody—which is wait, or closed space.

What's wrong with war? Well, war is forcing somebody to operate in a role he doesn't care to have, under another determinism than his own, in some sort of an effort to make political issues more complicated.

The very, very best essays—paragraphs—on war were written by Bolitho in his introduction to Twelve Against the Gods. And he says very little about war, but what he says is really very good. You ought to look it up sometime. It's a fabulous piece of work, that Twelve Against the Gods, anyhow. I don't necessarily agree with what he says, it's just a marvelous piece of work.

Anyway, you're handling somebody who is afraid of being punished, and he's going to exhibit various mechanisms to persuade you not to punish him. And although he ostensibly is saying, "Well, here I am all willing and waiting to be cleared and straightened up and squared around and so on," why, he isn't, normally. He's trying to find an acceptable state. He's not trying to get Clear. He does not know that being cleared is an acceptable state.

He's been convinced all up and down the track that he needed mechanisms to avoid punishment, and these mechanisms are his service mechanisms, his service postulates, his service facsimiles. And you're just asking him to throw down his armor. You're asking him to get into a state where he professedly will be dangerous to his environment.

And he isn't going to get dangerous to his environment if he can help it. The environment's too dangerous to him. And there's about the highest order that you'll hit in a pc that can be processed before he starts to burst through and stop fooling himself, is dangerous to his environment, environment's dangerous to him.

Actually, this is a computation of a beast, not a rational being. Man reacts to this very, very well. It's very high for man. It's higher than—oh, I don't know, almost anything man has ever had in terms of a level of action—a feeling of complete dangerousness to his environment. He is dangerous to his environment.

And most men operate on this basis: "The environment is so dangerous to me that I couldn't possibly survive on one dynamic or another or maybe all dynamics."

When he can't survive on all dynamics and he's convinced that he can't, he dies. Although some will substitute the mechanism of (quote) "going insane" (unquote). These are just mechanisms all toward the same thing. Insanity is not very important, not very interesting, and not very smart. And it is just a computation of escapement. So with a service facsimile. It's not smart to use a service facsimile at all. It's very unclever. Extremely unclever. But when a fellow doesn't have any way to pick himself up, why, he uses the next tool to hand.

So you discover your preclear—with SOP 8-C, you discover your preclear in a state of a dangerous environment in which the preclear is trying to avoid or escape punishment. And that's any way that punishment could be defined.

And your fastest route up out of this is to bring about a condition where he is dangerous to his environment, rather the environment being dangerous to him. And your responsibility at that point is to push him on over the top and not leave him in that state. Because that's a very low state. That's the state of a beast, no more than that.

You see fellows—they suddenly get an edge up in processing. They suddenly get this little leg up in life, and so on, and they get to the state to where all of a sudden they conceive that they can be dangerous to some small portion of their environment. And being dangerous to that very tiny portion of their environment, they now think they have achieved "nirvana" or "vendetta" or some other wonderful state.

And the auditor is very often dismayed at what he's done. This fellow is becoming very pugnacious—doesn't process well. He's come up to the level of a lame tiger—about the same sentience. The thing to do is to give him a kick in the teeth and throw him back on the couch and push him on through. Get him to a point where he doesn't have to be dangerous to his environment, if you please.

That is idiocy. A man who has to be dangerous to his environment to live has, of course, just walked up to the point where he will have all the new resistances cave in on him, eventually, once more. See, he's just gotten up to a point where he and the environment are at war.

Well, that's like—you have to be careful with these techniques if you're going to stop a person at that state, at that level. But you'll find somebody or other will arrive at that state and he'll snarl, and he'll fuss and he'll damn Papa and Mama and he'll damn this and that, and he'll get mad about this and that. And to hell with him. It's not important.

He'll do this mainly if you as an auditor make an error, and that is, if you process him internally—while he's still interiorized. You process him very far with SOP 8-C interior, he'll get into trouble; because all you're operating with there is a beast—the body.

And you go get this thetan to restimulate all these pugnacious ideas in this body, and this body has about the same right to try to be dangerous to a MEST environment as a match has in putting out a fire. It just won't work.

The body—you take it down into the earth a mile and a half, and it's too hot. You take it up into the sky at twenty-five thousand feet or something like that, and it's pretty hard to breathe. And you take it down five miles, and you take it up eight miles, it's dead. Just can't tolerate it. It has to have one atmosphere of pressure—fifteen pounds per square inch. It's one of these more delicate machines.

Probably any Swiss watch, in essence, is less delicately built than a body. One of these shockproof watches they're turning out over in Switzerland now—it'll stand more than a body will.

So we have to recall this fact that we mustn't as auditors get completely sold on this, because we're selling our preclear on a frailty when we're heading him in toward the body. We continue to sell him on this frailty called a body and this idiocy called the human mind and we will get up to this point where he's dangerous to his environment. He's dangerous to some people—a few people in his environment, then we think we've done a good job, see? Next time he sees a doctor, he'll snarl at him. You know, big gain. Next time he sees a traffic cop, he'll tear up the ticket and throw it in the traffic cop's face.

He'll recognize somewhere up the line—not "well, this filthy thing called a body" or "what am I doing with this thing called a body" or something like that—he'll come past that point of recognition, but he'll come up to a higher point of recognition, way up from there. And that is, "Well, bodies, mock-ups—well, they exist."

Now, recognition and acceptance of existence, then, is your main goal. If you can get somebody up there, he'll go on the rest of the way up. So above this level of dangerous to the environment, we get recognition of existence, acceptance of existence. Now, people can accept existence way down there at the bottom where the environment is terribly dangerous to them. They accept this existence. They sure do. Existence says, "You'd better!"

But way up, the fellow just whhoomm, complete relaxation about it. I mean, other people can live, other people have a right to live, he has a right to live. There are mock-ups, and you can do things with them. You can have fun with them. You can get things into motion. You can see things come about and develop and materialize and so forth. You can startle people sometimes and you can surprise thetans, and you can do all sorts of weird things. But actually the most fun is at a relatively noneffort, unserious level.

Every once in a while somebody says to me, "Well, you've got all these Operating Thetans going now—now, why don't you do something about the political situation between Washington and Russia?"

And you say, "Well, you ever meet any of these boys?"

"Well no, I never had much of a chance to talk to them."

"Well, what is it you said you wanted straightened out?"

"Well, I—Russia, you know, and the United States and the 'I Will Arise Society' and other randomity, other randomity, terribly serious, terribly serious. Why doesn't somebody remedy this if you people are so good?" and so forth.

You say, "Did you—have you ever talked to one of these boys? Well, I invite you to sometime." Because you get up toward full responsibility and you don't happen to be excepting out somebody's tribal randomities.

You know, they don't do it on this basis, but I point out that the very famous explorer by the name of Cook—the early Cook—got himself into a fabulous state. He interfered between a couple of tribes and they took him apart. You know, you can't tell what beasts are going to do.

If you're going to go out and run with tigers, why—if you're going to go out and run with dogs or something of the sort, why, they expect you to make up your mind about what side you're on, you know. Which pack do you belong to? And they're liable to bite at you.

Now, if you're in a condition of beingness where you don't happen to have to be bitten just because somebody wants to bite you, you certainly don't have to go to all the trouble of accepting these tribal randomities.

You get some Operating Thetan—he's going to go over and straighten out Russia. He gets—wakes up in the morning, he's kind of down Tone Scale, and he hears something over the radio, and so he's going to do this, you see. And he—next thing you know, why, you meet him again, you say, "Hey, what did you do?"

"Say," he says, "you know, there's the strangest thing over there in the Kremlin."

And you say, "What?"

And, "You know, there's a place there where one of those czars must have hung an awful lot of women. I straightened some of them up. They were still hanging around this room."

And, "What'd you do then?"

"Well, there's this village and they were having this big—big festival of some kind or another and I sat up on the steeple and watched for a while. And there was this young fellow and he wanted to get married to this girl and so he did. Huh!"

You say, "Now—now what—what about Stalin?" Now, this is what we wanted—this was what we used to get into: "What about Stalin?"—before somebody got ambitious and bumped him off. Somebody didn't exceed these—I mean, he didn't get high enough Tone Scale evidently. Stalin, if you recall—remember, died with a—he died from what they call a stroke. And the way you do a stroke is you just electronically short out a guy's head. That's a stroke. Anyway … They don't get serious about these things.

You—somebody's going to go down to straighten out Washington, you see. And he goes down to Washington and he sits around and he listens to some of this, and he looks it over and so forth, and next time you see him he's laughing like mad. You know, he's just terribly amused. You just can't get these fellows serious.

This that we're doing is no—has no military use. It really doesn't. If you had a pilot that you brought up to Operating Thetan—good jet pilot, and you brought him up to an Operating Thetan—he would do the practical thing, one or the other. He would do the practical thing. If his emotions were involved with other pilots, he would simply keep enemy planes on the ground, see? It just—it would be no point, you see, in going through all this. Or he might just like the motion of it. And he would be rather puzzled as to why somebody was trying to cut down air fights.

"Well, there's nothing wrong with an air fight. What's wrong with an air fight?"

"Well," you say, "men get killed."

And he'd think this over for a while, and he'd say, "Yes, that's true. That's true. I guess that's right, yeah. But what's wrong with an air fight?"

See, this has no point. It's just as hard to convince somebody who's gone up Tone Scale that all of these "solutions" how to stop people from punishing you are valid. Because he knows they're not valid. There's no validity to such a solution.

Fellow says, "I'm dead. I'm dead. I've been dead for years."

And some other down—body down in the insane asylum says, "I'm insane, I'm goofy. I don't know what's happening to me. Go ahead and shock me. Cut out my brains," and all this sort of thing going on. And those are just solutions. These people …

And a guy gets up Tone Scale, he looks at this and he says, "Isn't that silly?" He doesn't say, "These poor people, maybe I am one of them."

He runs out of his likening himself to everything and every being that he meets. He has achieved an individuality. And therefore, if he's run out of this supersympathy, why, he's probably gotten into some bracket that occasionally will be compassionate. But that's an entirely different thing than "sympathetic." Compassionate—"Well, it's too bad these people are in all this trouble. Have another cup of tea." That's compassion.

Being very serious about cleaning up the affairs of the world and the affairs of the MEST universe, I have learned, exceeds the powers of an Operating Thetan.

It doesn't exceed the powers of man, Homo sapiens—no, he's got to get in there and kill somebody. But—it certainly does. It's very remarkable.

Now, this is a difficult state, maybe, to wrap your mind around if you're all bogged down in the superseriousness of things. But you can get a whiff of it the first time that you exteriorize with some degree of certainty and say, "Huh? A body?" You know, a surprising thing—"I'm not a body." Well, it goes on from any surprise about being a body to "Gee, I hope I won't get bored." And it goes on up to "Well, I can always seek confidence in furnishing randomity. I can always furnish enough randomity for myself. I won't get bored."

And certainly one doesn't "mess in"—and just because one is actually capable of destroying something, does not mean that one destroys it.

But here's an odd thing: The manager of a business who is afraid to hurt his employees—very afraid of hurting his employees—will eventually do them the most harm. And one who is simply afraid of his employees succeeds a little bit better, but succeeds in doing them considerable harm. And one who really knows what he's doing doesn't worry too much about the employees—he isn't afraid of them or otherwise—because he knows he can right, one way or another, almost anything they do. So he doesn't set himself up as a police force over the employees. But the bulk of them, all they had to do is saw a little wood, and they don't get hurt. They don't get hurt. In the first place, they don't get hurt by sudden failure of the business. They don't get hurt by sudden injustices coming up.

There's somebody will listen to reason. Somebody will change his mind about what he decided. You know, it isn't "all got to be fixed at 1.5." That's a big difference. So you take—the person who scatters the most agony around him is the weakest person. It's the weak person who causes trouble.

The—fictionized America is sold on the plot of "the girl is right." For instance, I saw a—Frederick Hazlitt Brennan wrote a play, Arizona. They—I don't know why they called it Devil's Canyon, it wasn't. It was the story of the first penitentiary and the first woman convict put in the penitentiary in Arizona. And she was a robber.

And they got this all involved one way or the other … (Easy to see lots of movies, you know—all you have to do is go down to Hollywood and fly through the cans.) And this one was remarkable, because this girl is the one who actually instigated the rebellion in the prison, was to a large degree the cause of the complete upset and decline of the villain, was a traitor for having anything to do with the hero—to anything that she represented—and was then pardoned by the state.

And she did, evidently, everything wrong, you see—but in a very sweet way. If she'd never gotten messed up in this thing, they wouldn't have had any story at all because it all would have run off like clockwork, you see.

But in fictionized America, they have assigned this tremendous value to weak flabbiness in fiction. But they have, fortunately, carried on a tradition of "only the strong could afford to be just." And that's very true.

Now, an auditor finds himself asking—if he suddenly recognizes the techniques he is using are going to produce an individual freer than himself, if he isn't up scale himself, he's liable to ask himself the sudden, fast question: "Do I want to?" Now, he doesn't ask it behind his hand, he doesn't ask it quietly, he asks it right out loud. And he'll ask himself that question: "Do I want to set another thetan free?" He'll—very often will come up against that one unless his own state of case is in good shape.

It's an important point, if you're ever training auditors. You'll be able to spot what auditors are going to do a job and what auditors aren't. Just by that—are they willing to set people free?

Well, now, in SOP 8-C we have come about as close to the inevitable on this as possible. You just go ahead and use it and it will happen. It's very hard to wreck this technique—very, very hard to. Because it'll remedy faster than it'll wreck. And that was the balance that I was trying to achieve on it.

And I don't mean by that that all auditors are upset particularly about this. But I can tell you that an auditor can be upset about it. He can be. But if he is in—up there toward Operating Thetan you probably have some sort of a situation developing where he doesn't worry about it. And you get him too high, he doesn't audit, either.

There's various things which you can do, and various things which you can't do. Somebody told me recently that three auditors over in England had been sitting around spotting each other's ridges and then cleaning them up. Well, that's very fine. What's wrong with this? Only that when you start cleaning up somebody's ridges for him, you're upsetting his self-determinism, you're putting your paws on his havingness and you're generally pushing him around like mad.

Now, there is no trick at all to reaching into somebody's head and bapping him out of it. Very long ago I knocked a guy about three hundred yards—by accident. I mean, it wasn't completely accident, but I didn't think he'd go that far. (audience laughter) And he was in a terribly discombobulated state for some little time. Some little while, he was—upset him.

And anybody whose ridges have been straightened out by somebody else and anybody who's been exteriorized in this fashion—nah, doesn't last, and doesn't do them any good. Because it doesn't increase their self-determinism.

So we get the essence of SOP 8-C, which is restore the self-determinism of the individual by demonstrating to him that he can handle his own problems. This tells you, then, that there is some stage along this line where you do an "exit auditor," and we put that stage at Theta Clear. And we make sure it happens by SOP 8-0, which is Operating Thetan. And we just clean up anything like "auditors" on the fellow, because this is an oppressive point.

Now, in the use of this, then, I've been trying to show you you're trying to overcome the fear of punishment on the part of the preclear and you will put him up through various stages such as "dangerous to his environment" and "superambitious to straighten out everything."

By the way, at the time he's superambitious to straighten out everything, it's quite amusing—he isn't able to. He doesn't have enough soup yet. And he will be the most confused person you ever saw. He'll go over and give a speech someplace or he'll try to monitor somebody into some kind of an action somewhere, and he just does not have enough certainty or positiveness to accomplish this action, and he will fail. And then he'll read avidly in the papers to see whether or not it happened, and he won't find any trace of it in the papers.

He probably set up some kind of a ridge or something and did something, and it's very upsetting to him. And he'll pitch flat on his face and you'll have to pick him up again. Because almost everybody does this—they feel big and powerful all of a sudden and real ambitious and they're going to do something terrific, and they go over and run a mock-up of a mock-up of a mock-up for a couple of minutes or something like that, and they feel they've done it and then there's no evidence that they did and this invalidates them like mad and here they go.

So the auditor must be prepared, as he pushes somebody up the line here, first to take on a great deal of responsibility for his case and then to expect the case to nose-dive and to pick it up, and the case to nose-dive and to pick it up. Because it will several times, probably, before it gets up to any degree of stability.

After you've audited somebody, and you see them staggering around or something, you ought to get hold of them and do something about it. You know, in spite of the fact that it's not a scheduled session or something of the sort, you just shouldn't leave a guy in agony because the next session is such and such a time. That's because it's very easy at this time to do something about it.

Now, let's take somebody—let's E-Meter somebody and find out why his case isn't progressing, and all of a sudden we go over these various factors which I gave you earlier in the lecture that we're hitting, such as insanity, and fear of punishment in various forms and so forth, and we hit one of these things and the E-Meter goes clong!

Well, match-terminal it for a while. That's an easy way to handle it. And then move the postulate around—postulates related to it—and he'll come right out of it. Now, he'll come out of it with the moving the postulates around; you can match-terminal it just long enough so that it doesn't appear to him to be a complete live wire which is about to explode if he touches it. And you'll find people have been sitting around worrying about going mad and people worrying about what would happen to them if society suddenly found out that their practice of yogi-ism was such and such and—it's weird. I mean, what men will design for themselves as traps for their own dolorousness is wonderful.

Now, you'll find that this—one of these things is responsible for it. There's this that you must remember about a preclear, is that he is a different combination than any other preclear, but you're no longer trying to crack a safe. This will just take him right on out of it. You don't have to particularly crack the combination.

Now, although every preclear is intensely individual and is entirely different than every other preclear that you will ever encounter, that doesn't mean that you have to vary SOP 8-C all over the place. It does mean that you will have to stress some part of it more than another.

Now, when you find yourself unwilling to process a preclear up above a certain state, do something about it yourself, because you have struck the "no-freedom" button. Now, there's one technique here that can be just self-audited till the end of time, and that's moving postulates around.

Now, you must have some postulate kicking around about freedom. If you just put up something that was a postulate about freedom, see, and move it from the table to the couch and up on the roof and down in the basement and across the street and so forth, all of a sudden something would turn up. You could dredge it up. But normally it's not that inarticulate. It'll be something like, "I'm damned if I'll give a woman a break."

Yeah, like that. And you've just come up against it and you know exactly what the postulate is. You're processing somebody along and all of a sudden you say, "All right. Now get back in your head," or you have an impulse to say this suddenly. Or you get an impulse to give them some terrific command that they just—you know will make them lose all over the place and so on.

There isn't any reason to be introspective and say, "Now, why did I did that? I wonder why I did that?"

No, no. Don't kid yourself. You know why you did that.

You'll suddenly face the fact that maybe for three or four days, you have been building up an antagonism on some line or another that's enough to fry the lid off a frying pan. Or you've got an antagonism building up of some sort or another here toward something or somebody. Handle it by shifting it around as a postulate. Don't dramatize it. Because it's not that you shouldn't dramatize such a postulate or not that you shouldn't dramatize postulates, it's not that you shouldn't have freedom of some sort or another, but there's two kinds of freedom. And maybe I should have talked very straight from that title in this lecture.

There's two kinds of freedom. There is freedom to act on compulsion, obsession and inhibition. Now, that kind of freedom is attainable only within barbwire enclosures. That's what man normally calls freedom. Freedom to act freely on compulsions, obsessions and inhibitions. You will find base and lower orders of society insisting on this kind of freedom: "I love to shoot cops, and they won't let me shoot cops and therefore my freedom is being interfered with. I'm going to join the Communist Party." See? That's it.

"Now, the management—the management's agin me and I've got an impulse to bust every machine in the place and they say they'll fire me the next machine I bust. Well, I insist on freedom." See, it's become very compulsive and obsessive.

Actually, war is an expression of this kind of freedom. War is a covert rationale by which men can murder other men without any liability to themselves. See, because the men doing the murdering are sitting in swivel chairs. They're not sitting behind machine guns. The guy sitting behind the machine gun didn't ask to be there. I know—I've gone around and asked them. I said, "By the way …" That's all that's wrong with war. He didn't ask to be there—'tisn't his fight.

And you can say, "Oh yes, it is his fight. There's such a thing as national this and national that and national something else." There's a fellow invented nationalism a relatively short time ago, and it flared up in the day of Garibaldi. Nationalism—it was a new mania. It's a new thing. You'd be surprised that before that, they supported individuals.

And then somebody made this astonishing discovery: If you could make a peasant cross-identify a flag and a piece of land—his land—and tell him he was fighting for his land and that his land was in danger, he'd go out and fight like hell.

And then, of course, as soon as he got there he'd find out it wasn't his land he was fighting for, but that was beside the point. And that was the basic impulse behind nationalism—this great unity and so forth.

Only in the United States of America has nationalism actually amounted to anything rather than just pure murder. And here, why, you have forty-eight quite different states, who—which actually, any one of them, as big as a country of Europe—which are living in peace with one another. And that is a gain not so much of unit nationalism, as a gain of a highly generalized freedom on which forty-eight states are agreed.

The day that it loses the perspective of forty-eight states—and I'm not talking like a secesh—the day that it loses the idea that it is forty-eight sovereign powers operating in unison, when it loses that completely, it will become a slavery.

The biggest danger in the world is one of these superstates. And the federal government at this time is demonstrating every impulse in that direction—"we're a superstate." Because it gets to a point where all you can attack is a paper chain. And anytime the populace can't get their pitchforks into anything more alive than a paper chain, the government goes rotten.

See, it's just a basis of size. How big a state can man govern with his present systems? And it's about the size of a state of the United States, with smoothness and ease. Nearly every social function carried on in the United States is carried on by the city, the county and the state. It's not carried on by the federal government. And yet we hear more and more and more—the prettier buildings, the nicer post office and so forth.

That doesn't mean that one is agin the federal government, it's just a fact that the federal government, in these days of fast communication and transportation, will go up into a higher and higher form of a generality and because of its power, it will crush further and further down the sovereign powers of units of people, such as a city.

You see, the optimum form of government is not even a state government, it's a city government. But there is no way, really—that's but short one point—there's no way to prevent cities from going to war with each other unless you have a slightly higher power than the cities to monitor. Otherwise you run into anarchy.

And always somewhere along the line in a family, in a state of cities, in a nation of states, or in a world of nations, you're going to find somewhere along the line an anarchy. And the next move beyond that will be to prevent the anarchy.

In other words, anarchy is independent—this isn't the political definition of it, but it's conceived to be relatively obsessive action, you see, on the part of a number of units which are not controlled by a higher unit. So man's impulse is always to find a higher unit. And then the higher unit then absorbs all the lower units and it forgets about their independence and their freedom and then goes on up.

So that we have nations in a state of anarchy; that gives us worlds—world wars. So the idea of that is a "united nations," and that would be a government all over the Earth of all nations. And you'd have the same thing as the forty-eight states being absorbed by the federal government, now you'd have the umpteen nations of Earth being absorbed by the "united nations." And each time you get a higher echelon, it gets further and further from competent to govern a people. It starts to be a paper chain—it starts to be very detached.

So if you had some method of preventing this anarchy of states, short of a superstate, why, you could arrest the dwindling spiral.

Well, it could only be arrested by a better definition of the word freedom. What is freedom? And if superstates then held within that definition, they would have prosperous states within their boundaries.

Freedom. The other definition of freedom would be freedom to play a game. Nothing more and nothing less.

Once upon a time, when it was fun to play the game of being a hussar, or fun to play the game of being a peasant, just the game of being a peasant: Go out and raise things—matter of fact, it's a wonderful lot of fun. You go out in the garden and fix things up and you have things nailed down pretty well, you don't have to go far, and things are self-sustaining.

Well, when one doesn't have a right to play a game, why, his freedom has been injured. If somebody makes it so that it isn't fun anymore, that is an incursion against freedom. See that? It's a pretty hard concept to get sometimes, but it's just about all the concept there is.

And probably the only high-level crime is the death of laughter—to kill laughter. I don't mean mockery laughter. I mean just the death of fun. That's a big crime. That's big.

You can run that on a pre-c and shed tears off of it. Because when it's no longer fun to be a peasant and when it's no longer fun to be a good officer, when it's no longer fun to be a good janitor, when one can't have his own pride and self-respect in what he's doing and so forth, his freedom has been entered upon more deeply than anyone has a right to enter upon freedom.

So, where are you trying to put your preclear under this definition of freedom? You're trying to get him out of a compulsive and obsessive dramatization of what he conceives to be "freedom," into the freedom to enjoy it.

It's quite marked. And when you've attained the upper goal, freedom to enjoy a game—not potentially enjoy a game, but he's freely enjoying a game—you have achieved a very high point on a case. And it's because of that freedom to enjoy a game, that you find your Operating Thetan is no menace. He's not a menace. As a matter of fact anything less than he is, is a menace.

The greatest menace a state can have is its most abject slave, not its most dangerous criminal. That slave, he is the menace.

And so we find that the preclear will go up through various stages of being upset with you, upset with the world, sometimes upset with me, certain that this and that and so on, and he's—quite often will kick back at you and tell you, "Well, it was a disappointing and horrible session," and so on. He'll complain to other auditors about you and that sort of thing.

Well, if you're at a point where your own effort to give him freedom is compulsive, this will hurt you. And if you're just trying to pull him on up the line, your level of understanding is quite adequate to the situation. It becomes very amusing.

We haven't covered here, as I've gone into this, very much in the line of highly technical information. This all might be filed under the heading of opinion. But I have talked to you about it perhaps as a—one tries to give a—an orienting point toward which you can go with a little less grief than otherwise.

There isn't any reason why you have to learn with pain. That's completely idiotic. Anybody who assumes that men have—can only learn with pain, of course, is assuming that man is a stimulus-response mechanism. And man is not a stimulus-response mechanism, that's the best of him.

So when you deliver freedom into the hands of the preclear by the use of SOP 8-C, you've attempted something rather adventurous. And it's liable to upset you now and then. And the way for you to do it is to get over a level of being upset. Because it's actually a lot of fun watching somebody struggle up and struggle out of it. It's a lot of fun. It's quite amusing.

Oddly enough, the most powerful technique in here was one which I confess I didn't much care to give you—makes it too easy. You find over here terminals. Change of Space. That's terminals, period. Change of Space. Have pc shift and fix ideas between various points in various universes.

And then we have Step VI: symbolization, remedy of. And at Step VI we actually are doing the same thing we did at Step V with this single difference, is we use those things which are real big symbols to the preclear. And at Step VI when we handle these things, we're going to have to do it by a gradient scale. You are going to have to work on some preclear—preclear after preclear probably—will have to have symbols shifted on a gradient scale. So that's a word of caution with that step.

You ask him to put his name up and then move his name around from place to place, and you're going to find preclear after preclear who have just one hell of a time doing it. It's because it's too big and heavy a symbol. So you give him a light symbol. You just say, "Well, all right. Put the name 'Joe' in these various places."

"Well, I never knew anybody named 'Joe.' "

And you say, "That's all right, just put that name 'Joe' around these various places. Now, put your last name and your first name and so forth, those around." In other words, just take it easy.

Now, if you find out that he can't run just bluntly, bang, "waiting for effect" as a postulate all over the universe, why, just get him to get the postulates "dogs have effects." Or you get the postulate, "effects exist," and have him move that around. That's less heavy. And symbolization and the reason for and so forth, works out that way.

Now, anytime you have made a postulate that you're having trouble with since—and you occasionally will run into those that you have, you can just handle it in this fashion.

Now, I want to give you a very fast note on that. How long does it take to work out a postulate? Well, that varies with the preclear. But you shouldn't expect it to have the effect of blowing locks and steam and all sorts of things. They just sort of go away. And you can easily sit there for a half an hour and process a postulate which evaporated twenty-five minutes ago. You can easily do this. You can easily overprocess a postulate.

And it's no error. It doesn't upset the preclear to have them underprocessed, like an engram. It isn't very upsetting to have them underprocessed. Because that can be remedied with great speed.

Now, how do you process a postulate? Let me go into that once more because you will find preclears are uniformly going to make mistakes on how you do it. And you're going to uniformly have people put them too far.

You put the postulate up. How does he put it up? Well, he puts up the idea. Now he can put that up with words, he can put it up any way he wants to, he can put it up with forms, with effort—you don't care how he puts it up; you just say, "Now you put up the idea," in back of him. You keep most of the action in back of him, not in front of him. And you find him letting the action happen in front of him, skip it.

Now, you'll find out that he'll make mistakes no matter how carefully you explain it to him. You'll run into preclears making this mistake. So just keep checking with him as to what he's doing.

You'll say, "All right. Now move that postulate to Camden."

And he'll say, "Okay."

"Now move the postulate to New York City."

And he'll say, "Okay."

And after a while—you've processed this now for about five minutes, you see, and nothing's happened very much, you know? You—so you just keep on doing it, and you can see the strain on his face and you say, "What are you doing?" He's bringing a picture of Camden back of him, and then bringing a picture of New York back of him.

That won't do him any good. He's supposed to move the postulate—not make it appear and then disappear and then appear and disappear someplace else—he's supposed to move it. Just as though he put it in a truck—and some of them will do this—and freighted it to the other place. He's supposed to move the postulate. Because the postulate's been moving him around, you just reverse it.

Now do you run a bracket on this? No. You just have him move the postulate. He got himself into all this trouble with these postulates—it wasn't put in in a bracket.

Anytime anybody was able to force one on him, it's because he had a prior postulate—his own. So we have it moved from one point to another point. Moved.

And if he's substituting pictures for cities—that is to say, bringing in pictures of cities and all that sort of thing—you don't care whether he exteriorized or not while he's doing this, that's not important; but the point is, you're asking him to move it further than he can move it. So just designate three places in the room—all behind him—and have him move it to this place and to that place and so forth. It'll evaporate just as quick on a short reach as a long reach.

He hasn't lived from New York to Camden and in that total area simultaneously for years—well, he lives in a room at a time or a car at a time or something like that, so pushing it around in small areas is very beneficial. And then later on as you process him, get him to reach further and further areas.

But take it easy, because it's a very, very, very powerful technique and it isn't going to do him any harm. And where you're going to err is you're going to try to beat them to death with an hour on one postulate. And you'll be processing it fifty-eight minutes after it evaporated. It evaporated two minutes after you started processing him.

And the errors he will make is then in—he'll have it in front of him and he—God—anytime God will give him two seconds of time, he will spend it on putting something in front of him, see? No, no. You want it in back of him. And you want it to shift in that fashion.

Okay.

ESSENCE OF SOP 8-C PAGE 2 2ACC-18A - 08.12.53

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