View source for Forgettingness (SHSBC 610808)

'''Series:''' Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC)

'''Date:''' 8 August 1961

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

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Thank you. This is August what? Eighth.

Audience: Eighth. The 8th. Very interesting, the word eight, the letter eight, the numeral 8.

You know, I've been seeing it around since Phoenician times. And they stuck – used to be two money bags. You'd set a money bag on top of a money bag.

That's right. That's where we get eight. So I hope you've made a lot of money today.

AD 11. Well, there isn't anything to talk to you about, actually. No new developments except the mind.

Now, I suppose you'd rather ask questions, wouldn't you? Female voice: No. Well, I've just made a little breakthrough that might be of great interest to you.

The reactive mind is basically that area of occlusion which the pc is unable to contact and which contains within itself a total identification of all things with all things. And until released into the realm of knowingness, continues to react upon the person, compelling him into actions, dramatizations and computations which are not optimum to his or anyone else's survival. Oh, you think I couldn't do it again, huh?

Well, I'll show you. Peter, roll back the tape. Therefore, we find in this mechanism called the reactive mind, we find that residual of unconfronted, not-as-ised material which the individual is seeking to avoid.

All the discreditable things of his existence are, of course, contained in this area, the knucklehead. And he has various mechanisms of survival connected with all this. And eventually the fox, who has run across the river and has been caught, and who has lost his tail on the chopping block to a farmer, will always come back and explain to the other foxes the great virtues of having no tail whatever.

I imagine if you painted somebody with some kind of paint which was utterly unremovable and completely eradic – uneradicable, that he would eventually find vast virtues for that coat of paint. FORGETTINGNESS 2  But one doesn't expect the indulgence in this direction that the reactive mind has received, because now we learn that the only reason anybody can do anything is because he is a reactive creature. Circa: Psychology, its definitions, early half, twentieth century.

You can't write, you can't paint (you didn't know this, did you?), you can't accomplish anything in life – none of these things – unless you're totally plowed in and have a very large reactive mind. Well, in view of the fact that Locke, Hume et/and company were unable to do anything much about it – and by the way, their early articles on it are quite interesting – the articles on the mind. you should read them sometime. The “faculty psychology,” circa 1550 A.D. on forward – a great many articles on it and they're all quite interesting. “Faculty psychology,” of course, contains the perceptions, and it's a study of the perceptions, faculties.

It doesn't mean the professors. I thought it did for a long time and then I did a double take on it one day. And they're quite interesting articles.

They actually do try to take apart the various fields and zones of perception and thinkingness and attention and feelingness and that sort of thing. And they are very innumerable, very clever analyses of this, that and the other thing. They're not applicable.

They don't go anyplace, mostly because they are directed at knowingness, and they are the psychology, you might say, of knowingness, or awareness, or the analytical sphere of existence. It's quite interesting. They had analyzed and done quite a great deal with the analytical spheres of existence.

And they kept getting thrown off their ponies as they would ride them down their pages. They would keep getting thrown by the fact that man didn't act in a rational fashion. And they would get it all stacked up very nicely how man is rational, man always reacts in a rational fashion, men are always acting for the best in this best of all possible Panglosses.

And you get a sudden departure from optimum survival. Well, in saner periods, this was harder for men to understand, and they tended to just skip it. And then all of a sudden – leave it to the German and the Austrian, and the Russian – they went off the springboard and went straight into the middle of reactivity.

And they got the ideas of stimulus-response mechanisms. And they – a new philosophy came up in Germany – Leipzig, Germany – Professor Wundt, 1879, Leipzig University. His papers are also well worth reading someday when you've got a comfortable summer afternoon with nothing else to do.

They're sort of ho-hum. But there is the cry of desperation. This is the cry of desperation.

It is the last ditch “God damn it” of philosophy. That's about all it is. It says, “Well, we will cease to consider this dirty beast, man, as a rational being, since every time we ride our ponies down our philosophic pages, we get thrown right straight into the quill pot.

Because he keeps doing things irrational, and we know very well that he should be rational. So therefore we'll abandon the idea of rationality in man entirely and completely,  FORGETTINGNESS 3  and we will label him from here on out as an animal. And he is nothing but an animal.

And we will say that he operates, not on the spirit, the soul. He has no tender responses. He has none of these things, but he operates totally and completely as a machine, a biological machine.

And he is just an animal, and anybody that tries to make him anything else is a traitor to our desperation.” And that, in essence, was precisely the point of departure of Professor Wundt. And all the psychologists of the world at that moment rose and bowed toward Leipzig because this got them off their horrible dilemma. No longer did they have to confront the idea that a rational animal was inexplicably irrational.

All they had to say is, “he is always irrational,” and they had solved the problem neatly and no longer had to be bothered with it. And that they made no progress, then, to amount to anything hasn't disturbed them at all. They have had peace of mind in their own subject.

They have not had to observe anything. They have not had to explain anything. They have not had to accomplish anything or do anything, actually, except punch buttons.

They said, “Well, you see, it's obvious that if you kick a man hard enough in the stomach, he gets a stomachache. That's all you need to know about it. If you take food away from a man, he will do anything to get food – rob, steal, burn, slay, anything.

So therefore, to handle men, you kick them in the stomach and take food away from them.” And so they have taught every government on Earth. And governments are now totally convinced that they are governing a stimulus-response mechanism which can be predicted on an unpredictable level. They think man can be predicted, if you beat him hard enough, you see.

It all works out according to the textbooks. See how simple it is? You know, you never have to be troubled thereafter.

Nor do you have to inspect the fact that there are just as many unpredictable reactions to these things as there were to the earlier one, that man is sane but is sometimes unpredictable. Now, that man is insane has just as many unpredictabilities. It is not true that if you kick men in the stomach – well, they don't even all get stomachaches.

And in addition to that, if you take the bread away from them a hundred percent, they do not necessarily at all rob, steal, burn, or anything else. Why, I know fellows that you – all you had to do was walk up to them and say, “Well, all right. Now what we want you to do is just so-and-so and so-and-so, and if you don't do that, we're going to kill off all of your family and starve you to death, and ruin your business,” and so forth.

And the fellow stands there and says, “puutt.” And they go ahead and kill off all of his family and ruin all his business, and they come back and say, “Now are you going to do it?” And he says, “puutt!” So you know what the psychologists do with that case history? They hide it. And psychology could now be called “that vast morass of hidden case histories which dispute their theories.” And you look it over, and I think you'll find out this is about  FORGETTINGNESS 4  right.

It all looks so neat, except if a datum comes up that belies their favorite theory, they put it aside. A theory. Now, up until Scientology, a theory about man was too precious, much too precious.

It was evidently very difficult to get an idea up to this last ten to twelve years. Man really considered it a tough thing. You get an idea, man, you're really doing something.

And if you get a theory about how things work, then whether that theory is true or false, whatever else you must do, you must stand there with that theory guarded on both sides by raging lions and machine guns. Nobody must assault that theory because it's precious. Ha-haha-ha.

It's precious and must never be – never be threatened. And that was true of the old faculty psychologist. Honest, men went to the stake to protect their theories.

And in the field of psychology, they will throw away all evidence to protect the theory. The theory is the thing. Theories are precious.

Now, in old Scientology 8-8008, it talks about abundance and scarcity of all things. Well, we're looking at – up to that time – at a scarcity of theories about the operation of man. And in Scientology we're looking at an abundance of theories.

We don't care grass for a theory, see. Just whether or not it works in a heuristic science. Ah, but this assaults the finest citadels of learning.

You mustn't have anything that just works. Now you're in the field of the crass artisans. You're in there with the people who eat garlic and black bread, you see.

You're not dealing there with the quill pen in the ivory tower, you know. Somebody's going to come along, you say, well, your modus operandi is always being threatened by the fact that somebody's holding grandly forth about this or that, and it's not backed up by any workability. And what you overlook is the fact that he doesn't think it has to be backed up by any workability.

It's enough that he dreamed up a theory about it, no matter how horrible this theory was, the theory is precious. He isn't interested in it's workability. And he does not think that the workability or nonworkability would prove or disprove the theory, because he doesn't think the theory is subject to proof or disproof.

And that you miss all the time. So these people appear irrational to you. They're not.

They're just protecting the scarcity of theories. You think, well, it should be workable. You should be able to do something with it.

Man has a shell pass over his head a foot away, and he goes into a state Oaf shock or paralysis. Well, you say somebody that knows anything about the mind should be able to go up to the fellow and say, “Give me that hand” a few times or something like this, and the fellow comes around. And he says, “Woooah!” He says, “That was a rough one.” And you say, “Well, that rough one was a couple of months ago now.

Let's – give me that hand.”  FORGETTINGNESS 5  And the fellow says, “Yeah, what do you know.” Comes out of it, see? You think that ought to be what you ought to be able to do. And actually, that is so reasonable that it is very difficult sometimes to conceive an idiocy such as a fellow who knows all about the mind doesn't have to be able to do anything about that.

Or help anybody or apply it fir do anything with the mind or better anybody or worsen anybody or anything. See, it's enough that he has a string of Roman candles after his name. Bee?

That's all. None of his knowledge has to be put to test. The psychiatrist, for instance, or the psychologist today explains to you very defensively that he has spent years in a schoolroom.

That's enough. You say, “Well, what can you do with the mind?” That has nothing to do with it. That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

He spent years at it. And he is now a member of the North Pole Psychological Association for Theories About Penguins. Mm.

And he's a fellow of the Let's All Get Together and Swap the Papers we Have Written Society. And that's enough, man. That's enough.

And the world at large sits there and says, “Where are the mental practitioners?” That's kind of what they keep wondering. Where are the mental practitioners? Well, they've been gone so long, the world kind of can't have them.

The last effective ones they had were witch doctors. The Zulus have still got good mental practitioners. They go around and get a shot of neoarsphenamine for their accidental acquisition of the spirochete.

And then they promptly walk around the corner and into the corner of the kraal and see the witch doctor to get the spell taken off too, so the mental side of it is cared for. The Zulu is very careful to do that. And it drives the medicos down in South Africa halfway around the bend.

Their perfectly good neoarsphenamine is apparently not enough. And it isn't either. That's true.

That would be true in any lineup. You take anybody that needs some neoarsphenamine, he probably is in such a traumatic state anyhow that you'd have to do something rather heroic to make his physical rehabilitation occur. So the Zulu's right.

Now, that's the basic history on which we're operating. Unless you under3tand some of this basic history, some of the other things about existence are a little bit hard to assimilate. For instance, why isn't the Scientology practitioner at once embraced by governments and Industry everywhere! – clang. well, they haven't had any.

And it's just been an absence for so long that their havingness is shot on it. So they hire a bunch of theorists, you know, that can't do anything. And their havingness is somebody who can't do anything, because there hasn't been anybody who could do anything, don't you see?

All you've got to do is shift this frame of mind, of course, and the Scientologist is the only one who can fill the bill. The others can't. Do you know right now that the United States has literally acquired, in a relatively short space of time, thousands of companies who are now testing people with lie detectors?

Just thousands of companies all over the country. They don't know anything about it. They  FORGETTINGNESS 6  don't know how to do it.

They haven't a clue. They're turned out by the big lie detector colleges and so forth. They know nothing about the mind. you can take these boys and put them over the jumps and – I mean the practitioners, you know – and you just leave them sitting there with their eyes as saucers because they never knew one of their machines could do this sort of thing.

You know? And you say, “What about this little fact, this one little fact here, that nine percent of your people apparently are not registrable on this machine? What about that fact?” “Well,” they say, “that's right.

It's nine percent – nine percent of the people just don't register.” You say, “Why?” “What?” “Why?” “What do you mean why? What s tha – you've Interrupted the conversation here?” You say, “No, why don't nine percent of these people register?” “Well,” he says, “It says right here in the textbook of the Keeley Institute” or at the Keeler Institute. I get them mixed up. one solves drunks, and the other solves lie detectors.

And they say, “It says right there, read that line? It says 'nine perc – nine and a half percent of the people they put on the machine . . .”' That's it, you know. And you say, “Why?” And they say, “Look, it says right here in this textbook.

It says 'nine and a half percent of the people don't register on a lie deter .' Aren't you satisfied?” You say, “No, why?” And they say, “Well, to hell with you. you must be a Scientologist.” No, people are being fired by these characters who know nothing about the mind, know nothing about their machinery. They're being fired, they're being hired. It's a rather pathetic thing.

Now, you and I know you can get a large strata of people who never register on a Security Check. They're not up to a responsibility of registering on a Security Check. You don't get a fall with the needle.

The fellow's sitting there with his hands dripping red, and you say, “Have you ever touched any red paint or blood or murdered anybody or anything?” And the fellow says, “No, no, no.” The fellow says, “No, no. Never did.” And the needle doesn't even quiver. And we know that this is an irresponsible character who can't work – we have to look sideways to find his actual identity – and he cannot work.

That's one of the main things. He  FORGETTINGNESS 7  cannot have solutions. That's another thing.

He's every reason under God's green earth why he shouldn't be in an industry, what he had forgotten. And that is the level of action. And that's the sequence of action that a thetan does on any given subject.

When you enter engineering school, you have to postulate that you know nothing about engineering. When you enter the school of arts, you are asked to postulate that you know nothing about arts. Get the idea?

Well, take that in a finite application down here on Earth, and you've just about got it. Now to some degree we do this in Scientology – to our shame – where you go to school, why you're asked not to – to not-know what you know about the mind, you see. But actually nobody has ever made that request of you.

The reverse request has been made, however: “Please look around and find something you don't know about it.” You know, actually find something you don't know, not just say you don't know – just find something you don't know about it. And of course, we've moved you off from “know” back to “not-know.” We've moved you from second postulate to first postulate. And in the field of first postulate, we can operate because we can move back rather rapidly to native state.

And the peculiarity of what we're trying to do, which is to say to a marked degree return a thetan to native state with the total ability, added, of experience. This is what we're trying to do, you see. And this, of course, parallels in training.

You have to find out what you don't know about the mind in order to find out about it. In other words, we're backing up. We're doing a reverse line.

That is to say, in engineering school, or the arts colleges or something like that, they ask you to not know and then learn a lot of nonsense, because there is an awful lot of this stuff is pure nonsense, you see. It has no workability. That's marvelous.

For instance, they've just made a breakthrough on planing hulls with liquid strips. They learned all this from this tremendous upsurge of water skiing that's been going on, you know. And then they kept looking at fellows on water skis and then kept looking at fellows on water skis, and all of a sudden it dawned on somebody that you ought to put water skis on a boat, that water skis were a better hull and had better hull performances than hulls.

And so I'll be a son of a gun if they didn't put water skis on boats. And I was almost startled out of my life on the Potomac one day. I was going down the Potomac in the Huskier and I saw this boat which was about eight to ten feet off the water, it was this twenty-four foot cruiser.

And there was some fantastic, you know, Rube Goldbergian mechanism whereby, you know, you probably pumped wheels and turned levers and ground screws; and you got these enormously hidden girders of some kind or another moved down underneath the boat, you see. And then the boat in some tippy fashion was put forward and eventually got up there. And then you rigged propellers in some fashion to get these propellers to operate down underneath the water skis ten feet below the engine.

And you  FORGETTINGNESS 8  hung it all together with baling wire and shoestrings, you know, and the mechanic's chewing gum, because he gave up long before. And that was about the first real adventure on this. And then we learn a little later that they had them up safe enough to where they let Prince Philip run one for a little while down here.

And they had – and the navy was building some, and they went way up in the air and did about – supposed to do about forty-nine miles an hour. And Prince Philip, I think, got about fifty-five out of one, but leave it to him. And they were – everybody was very upset, because this wasn't supposed to go that fast.

But – nervy guy, that fellow. Anyway, the score is that they had them all on stilts, you see, water skis. And then all of a sudden somebody got real smart and said, Lowell, a water skier, now, isn't – just because his eyes are six feet above the water skis, is no reason the bottom of the hull of the boat has to be six feet above the water skis.” See, they got real smart, and they said, “We'll put the hull of the boat in the water.

And we'll put the water skis right up against the hull.” And as soon as they did that, why, the boat in one of the roughest Nassau races – Miami-Nassau races – ever run . . . And that channel out there, that Gulf Stream off Miami, can really get rough. And a boat so equipped came in twelve hours before the nearest competitor.

And all they did was tack water skis on the bottom of a hull. They put four water skis on the side of – each side – of the hull. It was very interesting.

Well, I've got a book upstairs – Marilyn sent me – that is the technology of planing hulls. It's a very recent book. It's not an old book at all.

And it came out just before anybody made a practical breakthrough with the water ski. It's very recent, and it is old as Methuselah. Its data is all went.

It is an antique. And there it sits brassy new covers and everything else out of date. For instance, it tells you rather amazingly that you must never let the forefoot of the boat rise out of the water.

If you're going to have a planing hull, you must never let the forefoot of the boat rise out of the water. And these water ski boats do nothing else but rise out of the water, you see. And they explain to you how it's utterly impossible for a boat to be run with its forefoot out of the water.

And this is very convincing too. Nevertheless, there's a lot of good data in the thing. It proves completely that as soon as you get rid of displacement, you go faster.

That theory is very sound. But there is this oddity connected with it. you see how this data gets booby-trapped? Here we can look at the last end of the Nelsonian theory of shipbuilding, see, because he had stuff that planed too.

And it begins right there at this point of where somebody observes somebody on water skis and said, “Why don't we put boats on water skis,” and right away, all their technology goes blooey. Well, it must have been an awful lot of invented technology for it all to go blooey. For this much technology to blow up all in one package, there must have been an  FORGETTINGNESS 9  awful lot of false nonobservation connected with it, right?

And that's for sure. That's for sure. Right at the beginning of the book, it says, “Of course, it's impossible to actually model test planing hulls.” That's a wonderful assumption, since I could figure out how to water test a planing hull at fifty-five.

But they never get them at fifty-five because you can't get something to go tearing down the length of a swimming pool at fifty-five. Don't you see? You can't get anything to start and stop that fast.

And then the water, they would think, was turbulent, you see, if you poured water at fifty-five miles an hour, so they just gave it up. Well, as a matter of fact, I've seen many a smooth stream of water running at fifty- five miles an hour. If you throw enough water down a pipe, why, you'll get fifty-five miles an hour worth of water.

Which is relatively unturbulent providing the pipe is maybe seventy-five feet long About the middle of the pipe, if that's very smooth and there's enough volume of water, you can certainly get volumes of water going down a pipe which would certainly serve to test this sort of thing The theory is real wonderful, but if we look too hard, it'll blow up. And with the theory blowing up, there will go all of our MRINA buttons, and all of our importances will blow up because our importances depend totally on theory. Well, that's the first and foremost thing that we have changed in Scientology.

We mustn't neglect that point – is our importance depends totally upon our workability. That is the total dependence of Importance. It we could mate what we know work, we're important, and if we can't make it work, we're just another theorist, and the world is full of them.

There's the first time this type of thing has actually appeared. The early days of engineering have a smattering of this in it, but here is a late engineering subject called hydrostatics and hydraulics which still has a great deal of the sacredity of the theory. If anybody'd ever built a science of hydrostatics, one single discovery couldn't blow up the whole science unless the science itself was a bit of a phony.

Right? Something would have knitted together in this ancient science that went, but nothing did. And now the forefoot of the boat has to ride out of the water in order to make a boat go fast.

It has to. I mean there's nothing else to it. there's all sorts of weird things have been going on here. But if you can make something work, then any body of theorists eventually blow up.

The only thing that ever blows theories up is demonstration of a workable counter-theory. The workability of a counter-theory is what blows up a body of false theory. So if you have objection to the false theory which is being stacked up and foisted off on man in all directions, the way to blow it up is simply have a high level of workability.

FORGETTINGNESS 10  And you'll find all of the falsity and pomposity of the entire sphere and area will blow up without any further protestation from you. you just go on and do your job, and it will blow up, believe me. you don't have to pay much attention to it, any more than you've paid attention to a little thin zephyr of air blowing through the room. You can do your job, you can do your job. And therefore you'd better know how to take a reactive mind apart, ka-bango-bango.

Because there is the vagary. There is the unpredictable. There was the thing between faculty psychology and 'modern” (quote) (unquote) psychology of 1879.

There is the bone of contention, and that is all they are arguing about, that Freud called it the unconscious. We don't care what it's called. They were aware of the fact that there was a zone of unpredictable impulse.

We know more about that zone now than any other body of people on Earth. So any breakthrough that we make in that particular zone is, therefore, a very valuable breakthrough. That would come right on the center line.

How to cure arsclycus or something, that would be different. Chat would be interesting. But this other is vital.

And I found the point where this thing breaks through when I say forgettingness/confusion. What forgettingness would create a confusion? What forgettingness would cause a problem?

There is the breakthrough point, but that isn't as far as it goes. It goes further than that, and I can give you a little additional datum on that today. Man wants it to be forgotten.

He not only uses forgettingness as a continuous and continuing overt act, but he wants forgettingness to occur. He wants all of his evil deeds wrapped up in the Stygian darkness of yesteryear. Man is basically good and this is his basic impulse.

But if his Leeds are considered bad, then there's only one cure for them that he knows, and that's to forget them. So you ask this blunt question, and it can be put in these very few succinct words: “What should be forgotten?” Just that very few words. “What should be forgotten?” You just ask somebody that. “What should be forgotten?” He'll recover almost at once a screaming impulse to make something forgotten. And there is where his volition and the reactive mind cross. find they cross at exactly that precise crossroads.

Now, I was around m the vicinity of this, the way you'd spot it with a bomb salvo, but we're standing right in the middle of the X with that one, because there is where his volition desires occlusion. And sitting back of all of his confusion is actually a knowable volition. He wishes a forgettingness to occur.

And that wish for forgettingness to occur, then creates actively the reactive bank. And that is exact – the exact point between the analytical and the reactive bank. And there's where those two points coincide, with this addition: that we're ahead of the creation of the reactive bank.

That is the basic, basic impulse on the creation of the reactive bank and therefore is a very important thing to know. FORGETTINGNESS 11  One, it is reachable. That's why it's important.

It isn't a theory, it becomes workable. And it is the impulse which brings about the creation of all of this thing we call the reactive bank without any slightest anything. I mean it's all there, I mean that is the postulate just ahead of all the rest of it. “What should be forgotten?” is the question that uncovers it.

Because the statement which starts the reactive bank: “It must be forgotten,” or “They must forget,” or “He must forget,” or “She must forget,” “The other one must forget,” and there is the inception. And after that, a person can have a reactive bank. Now, when you're trying to clear people, you're trying to clear them of reactive bank.

So obviously, this is not a workable statement. The other I've just made right up to this point is a workable statement. This is not a theoretical statement.

You theoretically could sweep out the reactive bank with that piece of knowingness all by yourself. You see, theoretically. But of course, that of course, will become the most easily forgotten point of Scientology.

Isn't that interesting? So you see why I'm punching it up to you and why I'm drawing you pictures and putting red arrows in the direction of it and exclamation points behind it, and so forth, because it very easily could slide on a broad, general basis. “What should be forgotten?” And of course, the insistence that the actual postulate – “What should be forgotten” is the unraveling question – and the postulate itself is “It must be forgotten.” So if the postulate is “It must be forgotten,” what do you think amongst the human race would be the most forgotten of all postulates? It would be the postulate: “It must be forgotten,” actually.

And therefore, would be the least likely to be as-ised and so would start the concatenation of accumulation which we call the reactive bank. It's an idiot truth, you know. I mean it's idiotically observable.

It's – you know, it's one of these things that after you see it sitting out there, it looks like a red barn in the middle of a white plain, you know. you just couldn't miss it, you see. But it's been sitting there all the time, but everybody's not only been missing it, they've been walking straight through it. Interesting, huh?

Well now, this does quite a great deal as you work with this thing. There are all manner of variations, and we get another rule that goes along with it for the handling of hidden standards. This is a cousin to this.

And we get a new rule for the handling of hidden standards. If you find a hidden standard in processing a pc, he says well, his ear – his right ear burns, burns more or burns less, and therefore he knows processing is working, you should take your Security Check and move the ear into the Security Check. Now, isn't that an odd place to move this hidden standard?

But here's the rule: You move the hidden standard into the Security Check, and then you ask, what is hidden about it or what should be forgotten about it, or about ears, you got it? And there goes the hidden standard, just like that. Zoooooom.

FORGETTINGNESS 12  Then two things occur. The pc no longer has his attention bound up on this object and he knows he's getting someplace in processing. And you've at once accomplished a goal of considerable magnitude.

You'll find that is probably the most pleasant auditing you will ever do, is exactly that auditing. You get it out in goals by running in difficulties. You're running a Goals Assessment, don't you see?

And you're running on difficulties. You're doing a Goals Assessment – talking about Routine 3 now, and you'll find yourself using Routine 3 more and more and more in general – and you say, “Well, what would you – what would have to happen for you to know that Scientology works?” See, that nice one. And after you've stripped all the motion out of the needle, you're going to be sitting there with a list of hidden standards.

Well, that's great. I never told you before to do anything about them particularly. I said there were things you could do about them.

And now I'm telling you, you have to do something about them, and that is you move them all over into the Security Check as terminals. Find a terminal for each one of the hidden standards. The actual operation is this: while doing a Goals Assessment, Routine 3, ordinary run-of-the-mill Goals Assessment, introduce this question and bleed it down.

Introduce it often, every now and then, every few sessions, something like that. Get this one beaten to death again, and you will get a bunch of goals which amount to hidden standards. And the question, of course, is: “What would have to happen for you to know that Scientology works?” or “What would you have to have happen to know that you're getting better?” or “If what happened, would you know that you were getting worse?” “What would tell you, that you were getting worse?” You got the variations of this sort of thing?

In other words, you take all of that class of question which would hunt out the hidden standard. And take those and then acquire a terminal for each one. Find a terminal more or less for each one.

That's no laborious thing. The terminal's usually sitting right there. He says, “Well, I'd have to stop getting these terrified feelings in the end of my nose.” And obviously, it's the end of his nose is the hidden standard.

That is the terminal. He's told you. There's no reason to beat your brains about it because it's not all that important, don't you see.

So there's your terminal. And your next step is to move the whole thing over into the Security Check. You don't do anything about it.

You've gone this far. You've done the Goals Assessment part of it. You've wound up with the terminals.

At once that he gave you the hidden standard, you asked for the terminal. And you write that down on your Goals Assessment sheet, you see. Now, don't do anything more about it than that at that time.

But when you come to the Security Check part of Routine 3, you move that whole bunch of hidden standard terminals into the Security Check. You find out what he's trying to hide about them. you find out what shouldn't be known about them. And you find out, in particular, what should be forgotten  FORGETTINGNESS 13  about them.

And of course, that is the question that would break the back of any hidden standard. The fellow said the tip of his nose. Very good.

The tip of his nose. That's fine. So you say, “Well, what should be hidden about the tip of a nose?” “Well, what's hidden about it?

I can't see it. Obviously.” It is hidden. There isn't anything you could do about the tip of the nose because, you see, you can't see it. you get cross-eyed, you know, if you tried to look at the tip of your nose before you.

And that's pretty desperate. So obviously you can't do anything about that. Well, what should be forgotten about it?

And now this will all of a sudden emerge into pay dirt. So no matter how the question is avoided, you could walk around the question and sooner or later go home on it, you see. There'd be some variation of what you know about it.

And the formula statement – which I may or may not make with complete precision – is any psychosomatic difficulty or any livingness difficulty which an individual has, is in difficulty because he does not want it known. There's something about that that he does not want known; and something about that class of thing that he does not want known. He wishes to hide it and he wants others to forget it.

And that is the story of psychosomatic And that's all there is to psychosomatics. If you can make it work from there on, you could make it work. And that's all there is to it.

But of course, you see, obviously that it belongs in a Security Check. And this opens up a great big page. When I was very young, extremely young – it was a long time ago on the early track – I worsened the life and shortened the days of a very clever and a very, very fine old man who was a very fine variety.

You wouldn't have called him a wizard, that's kind of a low scale. But he was a wise man. He was a very, very wise man.

And he used to despair of my ever learning anything because I wasn't ever supposed to become a wise man. But he had great big books. And it used to be my lot to stagger around with these books when he let – wanted them moved and that sort of thing.

He'd put them on easels and so on. you had to put these books on an easel because they were as big as that rug. And you opened them up, you know, and the hinges of the book would groan like the doors in one of those old radio programs. And it's very interesting, the emphasis – the emphasis there in that particular library on the subject of rememberingness.

Absolutely fantastic. Rememberingness was the only thing ever taught. And you could pull one of these books out of the shelf and stagger in with it, you know, lurching from side to side and open it up on one of these easels and it would groan, you see.

And the papers would – they wouldn't whisper, they'd sort of rasp as you open them, and so on. Stuff was really locked in brass there, you see, and there was all this knowingness, and it was all knowingness, knowingness, knowingness, knowingness. How you made things sick,  FORGETTINGNESS 14  and how you made them well, and how you did this and did that, and made animals make bodies and all kinds of weird things like this, you see.

And it went on and on and on and on and on. And to the best of my recollection and belief, there wasn't a single scrap in the whole thing concerned with forgettingness. But you see that as “forget” and “remember” are opposite sides of the coin, that obsessive rememberingness would bring about, sooner or later, occludingness.

You got that? If “know” and “not-know” are the verse and obverse parts of the coin, the faces, you go in the direction of “got to remember, got to remember, got to remember, got to remember,” you have already said to yourself, “I might forget.” And in view of this, you will find that the hidden factor of forgettingness, will start showing up like a small, gray ghost. And then it will get less gray and less gray and darker and darker and bigger and bigger, and eventually you will wonder, where did all that big black mass come from?

Well, earlier than that, you had to set up a postulate “to forget,” but it was probably disrelated from the exact thing you were there. And the relationships as they came through, became accidental on your terror of forgetting. You must remember, you must remember, you must remember, don't you see.

And every time you say, “I must remember. I've just got to! If I forgot this, it would be terrible.

I've got to remember this. I've got to remember this. I've got to remember this.

I've got to remember this,” and so forth, concentrating all the time that it must be something building up there, that says, “You're Liable to forget, boy. You're liable to forget.” You see? So a fear of forgetting actually can be built up by a terrific concentration on remembering.

Very interesting. You can press on one of those buttons and net the other one. Now, the poor devil who is sitting there in the South Sea habitat.

Not Phil Hudsmith who is down there – who is – he's desperate today. I mean he's down there photographing the last of Tahiti and he can't find out from his office whether the film he has taken is any good. Imagine being in Tahiti with all the atmospheric conditions that you have to combat with color photography, and you're trying to find out desperately – you're trying to find out whether or not the – any of the film you have – of the hundreds of thousands of feet of film you have taken, if there's just one foot of it that's any good.

Or do you have to shoot it all again? And nobody will tell you. The guy gets pretty desperate, you see.

But he's in a different situation, and I don't think he will go into this one. But the standard Robert Louis Stevenson type South Sea bum, you see, was supposed to sit there and try to forget. The reason he went to the South Seas in the beginning was to try to forget.

Don't you see? So he uses drugs – no, at first it isn't drugs. It's liquor – liquor.

Probably women first – probably women. And then – at first he moves in location. That's it.

And when he gets there  FORGETTINGNESS 15  it's women and then they pall or something of the sort – or he can't get any – and – don't tell me women won't cure most anything. He goes in for liquor, you see, and then he “must forget,” you see, and then this doesn't help him forget. Well, what's he doing running out here?

You see. But he's now got to go in for liquor, you see. But right after this, you'll find him normally trying to go in for dope or something like this, and eventually death is his last remedy.

What's this? He's trying to forget, isn't he? Well, what is all this urgency about forgetting?

See. If he just relaxed, it would probably all evaporate anyhow. But I think the guy's bragging actually.

I never ran into many fellows that could be that sinful in one lifetime. But this very insistence on forgetting, of course, brings this thing up day after day after day. It's getting loomier and loomier and loomier, whatever he's done. you get the idea?

He presses on one button over here, and the other button fires off, you see. And then he requires assistance to press on this button. He goes out and buys some weights of some kind or another to sit on the button, and he does various other things, you see, trying to get this button to stay put.

And this other button, is the one that's giving him trouble, and he isn't paying any attention to it at all, see. “You're remembering. Well, you get away from here. We don't want anything to do with you.

Now, all we've got to do is forget.” So they get on opposite sides of these coins, and this develops an awful confusion. And eventually they develop this mechanism of death and occlusion and so on, and just bury the lot. And what's buried then becomes the stimulus-response mechanisms of the reactive mind.

Because, of course, his power of choice and his postulates are being overwhelmed. That they are being overwhelmed by him is no less factual that they are being overwhelmed. Because he's the only one that could overwhelm his own postulates anyhow.

You see how this cycle of nonsense goes? Well now, that opens some new doors for you. Opens some big, broad, new doors.

Now, just get inventive for a moment and think of how you might apply this principle to a general Security Check. Now, I already had some of you doing negative Security Checks, and we found out they were quite successful. Well, let's do a hide Security Check.

Let's just assume, perforce, not that the fellow has done any of these things, but let us assume accusatively that he has hidden, doing these things. And let's ask question after question, line after line, just on that basis only – we just snidely, meanly, viciously assume that he is hiding each one of these things. Now, we're not asking him if he's done them, you see.

We have already assumed that he has done them. We're just asking him how he's going about hiding them. “How are you  FORGETTINGNESS 16  hiding all these rapes?” You see? We just take the standard Form 3 Security Check, and just use the word “hide,” just as an example, you see.

And it says “Have you ever ?” I remember the original Security Check, “Have you ever cooked a company's books?” I thought that was awfully poetic. “So have you ever cooked a company's books?” Now, well, that's letting the fellow up, you see. That's letting him out. No, let's ask the question something of this order: “How would you go about hiding having cooked the company's books?” Well, that's kind of letting him off, too. you can alibi your way out of that, one way or the other.

Well, let's suppose the needle trembled on that one. Well, then let's lower the boom. Just ask, “When did you first hide cooking the company's books?” Get the idea?

That's a very, very accusative type of action. But all of the difficulty you're having with the Security Check would rather evaporate. The difficulty is trying to get the guy to remember because these things are reactive responses, don't you see?

So you just cut – undercut the reactive response and you just assume it's there. You say well, he's hiding it someplace. Of course, in a couple of hundred trillion years, he's naturally cooked an awful lot of companies' books.

That's true of anybody if you were given a whole track check, which you aren't necessarily doing. But the next thing you know, you'd find your whole track Security Check became very easy to do. If you did a Form 3 this other way, you'd find whole track.

But I was just giving you an illustrative example of the uses of these principles. And the use of this thing, well, whatever's wrong with the guy is what he's hiding, don't you see. Well now, let's go for broke on this thing. “Who should forget cooking a company's books?

Who should forget it? What should be forgotten about a company's books?” Ha-ha. That's an employment Security Check that would be an absolute killer.

I gave you a dissertation a little earlier in this lecture about the Keeler organizations. I never could quite regard them before with contempt and I have now managed that. Because there goes their nine and a half percent that I mentioned.

There goes their nine and a half percent. If you attack Security Check questions from the viewpoint of the first postulate – that is to say the commonly accepted first postulate which is the third postulate, “forget” – of course, the fellow just couldn't stay calm about it. The reason he's calm about it, even if he knows it he's – he's forgotten actually what it did.

He's forgotten the consequences that associated with it. He's carefully forgotten these things, so he can tell you, “Oh, yes, I cooked the company's books one time.” you don't even get a tremble on the needle. Why?

He's forgotten all the emotional response, the charges, the fear, the overt act of it. He's got all this stuff forgotten. The fact of cooking the company's books, he's conversant with that.

FORGETTINGNESS 17  So you very often will have a criminal sit down, tell you, “Yes, I looted, murdered, robbed, burned, did this, did that,” and after a while we get the idea we're not security checking. We're listening to somebody brag. You've heard that happen probably.

You get no real reaction on the needle for some of the darnedest things. Well, if you want to see the reaction cut into the needle, I'm pretty sure that if you asked about forgettingness, you'll see that needle start acting. And you'll see the charge come off that security question.

So there went the Keeler Company's nine and a half percent and we can now regard them with contempt. Or maybe it's the Keeley Company. I'm not quite sure which it is. one of those names there cures drunks and . . .

Now, if you were to do a company Security Check of this type, and you were just asking it just to clear each question as you went down the line, of course you wouldn't have a prayer. You just wouldn't have a prayer because this would plunge into the whole track inevitably. Because you're now undercutting and underprocessing death.

You're going right on down below death, because death is the last effort not to remember. So interrogation for companies should be short Security Checks. They must have nothing to do with anything except the person – what the person would actually be expected to do in his new employment.

You know? We don't want people around who are going to cut the staff to pieces and cause people unhappiness or try to get other good workers sacked. What they very often will do, is try to get good workers sacked.

An insecure person, that's one of his first impulses. And to protect your own people, you actually ought to check across such a line. So you'd have to have a very brief Security Check.

It couldn't consist of more than fifteen or twenty questions if you ever expected anybody to complete it. And then if you ask on a forgetting – or hiding or forgetting, you know, a general not-know pattern – if you ask these things and strip them down, and strip them of total reaction, you would actually be totally sure of the security quality or lack of it, of the person you were testing regardless of his case state. You watch.

You do a sec- some of you have already done this negative Security Check, and you've seen a little more needle reaction, haven't you? Well, of course, you're going to hop up the needle reaction again the second you start asking about hiding and forgetting and not-knowing and any one of the odd number of postulates. Any type of action of that character, you see.

Hide is about your fifth postulate, by the way. You're doing harmonies of the same thing as you go down the line. I should probably sit down and figure out the rest of them up to about twenty-five or something like that to give all harmonics on the same scale.

It would be of use in Security Checking. You see what you could do with that? FORGETTINGNESS 18  All right.

As long as you were trying, then, to do this kind of action and as long as you were trying to undercut the reactive mind, it then follows inevitably and invariably that goals would come under the same heading. And you could also do goals with this sort of thing. Your pc is just having one awwwful time trying to get a few more goals, and he is comm lagging like mad, and so forth.

Well, what's more natural than to ask him, “What goals have you had that you have forgotten?” Well, that sounds like a very mild sort of a question to produce the considerable reaction that it will produce because it'll produce considerable advance reaction to the other, you see. All right. Now, let's ask a more pertinent question. “What goal should be forgotten?” And of course, you'll get goals on all legs of all brackets. “What goal should be forgotten?” If you ask it plural, you're liable to trigger an automaticity, see. you can think of it right now.

There ought to be a lot of goals that should be forgotten, man. A lot of them. All dynamics, crisscrossed and 30 forth.

So of course, you don't, however, commit in either a Security Check or an assessment, the blunder of the Robert Louis Stevenson character in the South Seas. You don't have this thing sitting on the “I must forget,” with a total concentration on “forget.” Because it's just – you're trying to bring up this fellow's memory and ventilate and aerate the atmosphere and straighten it up, but at the same time, if you specialized on nothing but forgetting, you night run into some sort of a mess. you might get into zones of occlusion, which are absolutely overwhelming. You might get on a forgettingness stuck -low, don't you see?

I'm talking now in terms of dozens of hours of auditing, and you did nothing but talk about “forget,” you see. No, you're going to have to let him up. You're going to have to talk about “remember” too.

So in a Security Check, you would have to ask the question – maybe after we've disposed of “What company's books should be forgotten?” and so forth, we'll have to ask the question, “Have you ever cooked the company's books?” which is a direct invitation to remember. You see this? And after we've said to him, “What goals should be forgotten?” why, we'll have to take some time out and ask him what goal he has.

Not necessarily what goal should he remember. Let's not get into a one-two dichotomy here, but just ask him, just what goal he has had. Got the idea?

Which, of course, is asking him to remember one. You'll find that this at first – as in the case of all processes which have a Keep seated residence in the reactive bank – is perhaps a little bit hard to apply. Oddly enough, it sounds so simple to apply, but it might be a little hard to apply at first glance and you have to get to living with the lion a little bit, and then all of a sudden it'll get very easy.

If, however, you find yourself stammering over, “Let's see, uh, what the sell was I doing? Uh, let's see, what's the next auditing question? Model Session?

Model Session? Scientol – I don – wha – what are we doing here? Uh, well, well uh, here we are in, uh, well, is this New York or Pompeiio?”  FORGETTINGNESS 19  You know, I mean in auditing it, you're liable to feel yourself hit a little confusion here and there or something like that.

Ride it through. It'd be quite normal. That would tend to disappear in a relatively short space of time.

But the confusion – forgetting the confusion, of course, is a one-two sort of thing because a confusion is something that asks itself to be forgotten because it has never really been remembered. You don't – you very seldom see somebody remembering all parts of the confusion. Well, there was a heavy Kind earlier today.

Do you remember every rattle of the leaf on the tree? No, here were too many rattles of leaves on the tree, don't you see? So even while it's happening, a confusion tends to be forgotten.

Or much more accurately, tends to be not known because you just didn't observe it. You're not knowing it when you're looking at it, don't you see. Which is probably what makes a confusion a confusion.

You're just not knowing what you were looking at when Lou were looking at it, and so this gets difficult. Okay. Well, enough of this.

I trust that this won't upset the tenor of your prays. You are doing Routine 3 right now and heavily specializing in Routine 3. You go right ahead and specialize in Routine 3 and if you're having any difficulty whatsoever in barreling through Routine 3, keep this lecture in mind because it will help you out a great deal.

What I would actually do is get the pc's hidden standards out of the road now, using the formula which I just gave you. In doing a Goals Assessment, to know if he's getting better, to know if he's getting worse, what would have to happen? “If Scientology worked, what would have to happen?” Any type of question of this character which would reveal a hidden standard. Get the hidden standards down and get some terminals for them, and then forget them.

As far as the Goals Assessment are concerned, just go right on and run some more Goals Assessment. When it comes around to the Security Check, plow in with those hidden standards and find out what should be forgotten about the tips of noses and what should be forgotten about unkempt hair, and what should be forgotten about these various things. And the next thing you know, those hidden standards will blow up in smoke.

Why? Because you have brought knowingness into the thing. Okay?

Well, I wish you luck. I wish you luck. It isn't that you will need it.

It isn't that you will need it, but you will have, I think, a better, wider look at this. The restoration of memory on the whole track is, of course, the index by which you can measure a case gain most easily. The person who has no recall on the whole track of any kind, who doesn't think he has ever lived before, of course, just announces the fact that he has just plowed in very heavily into forgettingness.

But the fellow who has nothing but delusory recall on the whole track, of course, is doing a pretended knowingness on the whole track – a pretended knowingness on the whole track. And you'll find out that this is a games condition of magnitude. FORGETTINGNESS 20  Do you know what that's all about?

I'd better make some mention of that just while I'm on the subject. It is giving somebody some knowingness that isn't. Do you understand?

It's denying knowingness by giving him instead a false knowingness. So that one appears at the same time to be very cooperative and not playing a game at all, because he's giving you all the hot dope, don't you see. But right alongside of this thing, we of course get a pretended knowingness.

It is – and that pretended knowingness is actually denial of knowingness. He's denying you knowingness. That's all.

That's the game. See, you're not supposed to know about his whole track, so he gives you a whole bunch of stuff that hasn't anything to do with the whole track. Well, actually, it's a games condition which is all wrapped up between forgetting and remembering all at the same time, don't you see.

It's all compounded in a games condition, and it's in terrible confusion. And my, do you hate to have people talk about their life as Napoleon. Have you ever sort of listened to somebody running on like this and just flinched?

Audience member: Jesus Christ. Huh? Audience member: I've listened to about twelve Jesus Christs.

Yeah. Well now, this sort of situation – this sort of a situation is your reaction. Your reaction is not actually to whole track memory, to which you might accidentally assign it.

Your reaction is addressed to this: You realize you are listening to a games condition, and that without anybody announcing it, they're considering you a target for a game, such as to give you information that isn't giving you information, to appear to be giving you information when they are not giving you information. And that, of course, rattles you. This you don't like, because you smell a games condition here, and you aren't aware of being an opponent to this person.

So you kind of go, “Aw” and “I don't like it,” you know. Now this can build up to a fact of where, if this is played on you long enough and often enough, then your own occlusion is enormously assisted. The game also has a target which is to occlude your whole track with pretended knowingness of their whole track.

So it's quite a games condition, man. Don't think that it isn't. And don't think that it isn't a wild target.

But I've seen guys around in Scientology who've gotten to a point where they'll remember something on the whole track and then never open their fates. You know, never say a word about it because somebody else has been going on about that period or something of the sort, you know. What's happened to you then?

You've answered up to the game by permitting yourself to be put on a withhold of your own past. you see? So it must be a games condition if it results in these nonbeneficial aspects. You got the idea?

FORGETTINGNESS 21  Now, if your whole track opened up from beginning to end and you remembered everything you had ever been and everything you had ever done and everything that had ever happened to you, would that be good or bad? Would it be good or bad? Audience: Good.

Bad. Well, I'll leave you that – I'll leave you that to find out, because you're right on the verge of discovering it. Thank you.

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