View source for Group Dianetics - Part I (501109)

'''Date:''' 9 November 1950

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

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Something in which you may be very interested is today Group Dianetics. The material I am giving you this morning is a human process of evolution. I’ve only been working on it about a month, hammer and tongs, getting it straightened out.

The former name for Group Dianetics was Political Dianetics. Actually the word political has too many connotations and is too poorly understood to be used. Political Dianetics: immediately you go into theologies, idiosyncrasies and asininities.

However in Group Dianetics we develop the fundamental laws of groups, that is, the natural laws of groups, not the arbitrary man-made laws. And in developing these I’ve already discovered a great many things that I didn’t know before. Working in the field of prediction—that is to say, you set up what is probably a lowest common denominator or at least a low common denominator of the subject, and then you carry along and see what data this common denominator predicts. If the common denominator explains existing data satisfactorily and if it predicts that new data will be found, and when one looks the new data is there, one can consider the lowest or low common denominator to be a very apt postulate—one which is at least useful and workable.

As you know, in Dianetics we have very little to do with capital “T” Truth. I personally don’t know what truth is, because the word has been so very thoroughly abused, misapplied and so on. As a matter of fact science as a word has as its sole definition “truth.” I think it would be much more apt if one said that a postulate which had the highest level of workability was as close as you could get at that moment to the existing truth. Working with this and working honestly with this, one can find out a great many things which one didn’t know before. And so it is with groups.

I’m going to take you along the route of the thinking process which went into the development of Group Dianetics, and perhaps we will even discover a new one this morning.

Now, the first thing that we must know about a group is whether or not it is a body of human beings—that is, a body of organisms—or whether or not it itself is an organism. We must know immediately whether the body of the group actually stands as itself.

Now, we would have to know additionally the answer to this: Is the aggregate individual aberration— is the sum of that the sum of the aberration of the group? If it were, it would postulate that one would have to clear everybody in the group before he could have a cleared or at least a good group. That would be a very sad thing if this were true. And it’s not just out of hopefulness but if—we look at it solidly and find out that that doesn’t happen to be true.

Actually a group is a body of perpetuated and perpetuating ideas which goes along toward a group goal. And the engrams of the group turn out to be the impact which exterior forces have had against the ideas of the group and its goal. And they don’t exist within the minds of men, they exist within the group.

It sounds strange to you perhaps, but this one works and the other one doesn’t. That’s our only test.

Now, we have to consider in the beginning here, thought again— what thought is. I wish I had a much finer definition and understanding of this thing, thought. I have actually worked toward a better understanding of thought now much longer than I have worked on processing and the human mind.

I first became very interested in the subject of thought while I was taking atomic and molecular phenomena at George Washington University. A class there was organized under Professor Brown. It was, as far as I know, the first class on atomic and molecular phenomena which was formally taught in the United States.

We had no textbooks, we only had a few papers of people who had written in the past. The whole subject was very nebulous. We had such conflicts as: is an x-ray a wave or is it a ray? And things were so crude at the time that you could have answered it either way and have been right.

There is an enormous body of knowledge surrounding atomic and molecular phenomena, tremendous amount of observation has been done and the subject at this time, as taught in the universities today, is not considered this nebulous. It has been refined down. There are textbooks. They have a mathematics now, quantum mechanics. They have all sorts of things and it has become very stylized. But I will give you this little suspicion on my part; the knowledge on it is not very greatly advanced.

In the early days for instance of flying, the early birdmen who were working there, right after the Wrights were working, knew of eighteen ways to make a heavier-than-air object stay in the air; eighteen ways. Finally it boiled down to where we were using two of them. First the tractor-propeller plane wing, and after that the helicopter.

We’ve only used those two; there are eighteen. And how many people associated with aviation know anything about the other sixteen? There is a matter of a rotating blade, it works beautifully. You rotate this blade, and a heavier-than-air craft will go aloft. There are a great many of these things.

Now, in other words, everything that was considered relatively unworkable has been stripped off the field of aviation and not further investigated; just relatively unworkable. The ornithopter was once upon a time looked upon with great hope, but who has heard of an ornithopter for many, many years? That is a plane which flaps its wings to fly.

Well, these early birdmen were working with ornithopters, they were working with rotor suspension and with all the rest of this array. So it was in the early days of atomic and molecular phenomena. Today they talk about fission and they talk about several other subjects, and they’re very highly stylized on these subjects. But back of this, man’s investigation down through the years has brought him up where, again—more puzzles and more strange manifestations on the part of nature than he could possibly explain. Now, today the nuclear physicists can pick these things up and put them aside very handily into a nice box and close the lid on it rather hastily and say, “Now we are physicists”; push this thing away, because it’s embarrassing, because there’s data in this box which contradicts the data with which he’s working. But this data with which he’s working happens to be very workable so he goes ahead and works with this data.

Now, I bring this in just as an example of thought. Any time one becomes very stylized and highly concentrated on a factor of existence or a body of facts about existence which he finds workable, he’s liable to put all the rest of the data he knows in this box and push it aside and not have anything more to do with that. Because that upsets this. In such a way a man researching in the field wears blinders.

You know it’s totally unproven that you live this life as this life. It is equally unproven that you have a soul. That’s not proven, not in a scientific methodology. But it sounds good, and it may have some truth behind it, and it seems to have been acceptable for a long time. So they took this postulate of the human soul and they said that when you live this life you have lived your only life and they set those things up here and they said, “That’s what we’re going to work with.” And man’s been working with that now for a couple of thousand years.

The amount of stuff that’s been put in this box over here and the lid closed on it, that’s been pushed aside, is absolutely fantastic. There’s more data, much more data that never comes to light in the field of life than there is in the light at the present moment.

You start reaching into these things, you start looking in this box over here of stuff that’s been abandoned, and you’ll find some very interesting things. Amongst them you’ll find the distinct possibility that man as an individual does not go along a genetic protoplasmic chain. There’s a possibility that he does not.

In other words, that a man is not the product, as far as his personality is concerned, of his father and his mother and his grandparents and so forth. That’s the genealogical chain. That’s the genetic chain. This in the field of cytology is called “that unending stream of protoplasm which reaches back to the beginning of time.” Well, that’s nice phraseology—beginning of time—but I would rather have had it modified that “when life first began,” if there was any period when life first began. If there was. Just postulate back there a starting point. We don’t even know there was one of those. The whole thing might be a circle.

Now, when you get back here and you look over this unending stream of protoplasm, cytology says—and here are two big fields and they’re in exact contradiction—cytology says that the protoplasm contains within it all the potentialities of all of its future forms. And the process of evolution, that largely accepted but rather odd theory—by the way it doesn’t check, evolution doesn’t check against paleontology—but everybody knows that Darwin, and so forth, did a good job on this so that we look at evolution coming along and we look over natural selection, we find out that evidently the environment keeps on molding this organism to some degree. Ah, but this doesn’t check back against cytology. And cytology is the backbone of biology. So now we look over here into paleontology and we find out that the early rhinoceros was going along just fine without any horn. And then one generation, he had had a little tiny nub on the end of his nose. The whole generation had this little tiny nub. And then another generation the nub was a little bit bigger. And we go along a whole stream of generations, all of a sudden he’s got a horn. Nothing in the environment was demanding this horn. As far as anybody can tell he sort of spontaneously combusted a horn. Well, so—here’s more data.

Now, none of this stuff is cross-checked. So that you can get a biologist of one school violently arguing with a biologist of another school. You can get an evolutionist arguing over here, an anthropologist over here, and all of these people are in a terrific argument. This argument only says one thing to me: they don’t know.

Well, I start looking a little further along this line and I find out that there is a distinct possibility that the cellular being isn’t all there is. Now, that’s a wild departure from the accepted, today.

The biologist has determined authoritarianly that the human being is a cellular being made out of cells. Now, I was willing to go along with that, just that far along the track, at least take a look at it. But the longer I look at this thing, the less evidence I find. I find lots of contradictory evidence but I find practically no evidence which says that the human being has all of his recordings on a cellular level.

On the other hand I find quite a bit of evidence that supports the fact that the individual, as an individual, may have existed from the beginning of time.

Female voice: Say that again.

The individual, as an individual, may have existed from the beginning of time, as an individual independent of the genealogical line.

Ever hear of early lives? Well, of course you can’t—I’m talking to you now about the highly speculative advanced field in Dianetics. You can’t just say people have early lives. And if you spread it out to the public that Dianetics dealt a lot with early lives, they would start questioning everything else along the line and we would lose a great deal of ground. But that’s a very interesting thing. I’m going to find one of these days—I’ve got the people to do this now and we’re about to fire on this one subject. We’re going to pick up enough early lives, the last early life that we can get out of a number of people—and you can find these things in practically everybody—enough early lives out of these people, going to take the record on the thing, get a very, very thorough recording on it. And then we’re going to write to the places and people that came up in that last early life and we’re going to get a stack of evidence about that high, if it can be procured. If it can’t be procured, that’s tough—early lives are out. But if it can be procured, there’ll be a nice stack of evidence there. I’ll put it in a book. And believe me, you think Dianetics was a bowl of lightning at one time!

I’m telling you this not so much to tell you about early lives—I should annotate that to this degree—we find out that you can go on and clear up an individual without paying much attention to this early life material. And if you do hit any of the early life material, it’s enough to knock out that (quote) life (unquote) or life without quotes—whichever it is. You can actually clear up the material there merely by running the death out.

If you can’t get that death, ask the file clerk for the death necessary to resolve this case. And you get that death and then knock out this death and reduce or erase those deaths and those lives will cancel out as far as their aberrative effect upon this life. But don’t take somebody back to the year 35,000 B.C. and run him halfway into a hunting accident or a death and then bring him up to present time. That’s bad. Because he’ll bring the somatic with him.

Now, just how this appends onto and depends upon somatics on incidents and injuries which a person has attained in this life, I don’t know. We’re in a speculative field. We instantly go very speculative, we start looking around and we find that this little box over here is just crammed full of stuff. And that these nice smooth streamlined postulates that people have been dealing with are about as proven as the existence of Eden.

No real evidence goes along with the concept that society or past societies had with regard to this. There are broader and fuller concepts which explain more than these concepts.

Now, one of the concepts which is very interesting swings completely out of the field of materialism and goes straight into a sort of a deism, if you want to call it that. And that is when we first begin to try to explain what thought is.

We start to look this thing over closely, we find that thought is least well explained when it is talked about on an individual basis. In other words, that an individual has within himself the sole motor of an individual thought, that postulate is shaky, it has holes. But when we start looking at thought as an overall energy, things begin to clarify. And in order to go into the field of groups at all, in order to make any advance into the field of groups, this whole field had to be inspected again.

Now, in the study of atomic and molecular phenomena, one expected of course to run into something which might possibly approximate thought. I looked. That was the reason actually why I was studying atomic and molecular phenomena—I wanted to find thought. Good. Wanted to find life. I had no differentiation between these two. And it seemed to me a very logical rational thing that if there were various kinds of magnetism, electricity and other things, that one would find life mixed up in there if life was that energy.

Well, I looked awfully hard and although this is very far from conclusive, I found absolutely nothing which responded in this finite universe like life itself does except just thought. It is unique. It may approximate vaguely, here and there, electromagnetic laws. But it is definitely itself. It is itself, much more than that electricity is itself.

Because that electricity is part of the building blocks of the finite universe. That chains right up. You’ve got electrons and electromagnet-ism. You’ve got atoms and you’ve got molecules and the next thing you know you have matter. And you can break these things back down again and you have electricity.

Oh, it’s beautiful stuff, I mean it goes up and down the scale, it all handles so easily, and then we move over it and we say, “Well, thought, belongs—thought?” It just doesn’t fit anyplace in this scheme of things. It doesn’t behave that way. In the first place it doesn’t obey time, the laws of time.

Immediately something’s wrong with this. In the next place it doesn’t obey the laws of space. It doesn’t obey time. It doesn’t go in with space. Furthermore, it seems to be an energy which doesn’t dissipate. There’s something wrong with thought in that it seems to have contradictions with the laws of the conservation of energy.

There seem to be such things as the inertia of thought, the volume of thought, but they have no concordance with time, space, energy and matter as we know them. Now, where they come from, where thought comes from, what its emanation point is, I don’t know. But I know pretty well this, after all these years: that it hasn’t anything in common with the finite universe.

Male voice: Can you elaborate a little bit on the time, energy, space and matter?

Well, thought is instantaneous. For instance, radio waves—a radio wave takes a certain amount of time to travel. A thought will lay itself along forty years and go along forty years and just continue. Furthermore—you get the idea.

Now, I don’t want to go into the supertechnical aspects of this because you actually start laying this out and it becomes imponderable. We start to regard thought as an energy which is like the energy of electricity and immediately, boom, it’s all wrong. Because it doesn’t compute that.

So, what is thought? Well now, I talked to you in an earlier lecture concerning big theta and little theta. As far as I can tell at this time this is a workable analogy.

We consider thought as—whether you call this deism or whatever you want—is something which is exterior to the finite universe. It doesn’t occupy the same time, space, energy, matter, area, but it’s procreating. But it’s evidently all from a fairly identical source, probably an identical source, it’s evidently a unity.

Now, individuals along the line sort of take off pieces off this unity. And yet there’s still a unity. You follow me. An individual, in other words, was part of the central unity once upon a time and then in some sort of a—whether in one life or many or something of the sort—he becomes himself, which is nevertheless a portion of this other unity.

We look at it this way and immediately we begin to understand some of this strange—believe me, it is strange—phenomena about groups, about affinity. And we start to begin to get an understandable explanation of why people can audit people.

Did it ever occur to you that that is quite a worry to a fellow who is looking at a theoretical field? Why is one person necessary to audit another person? Well, we can get some mechanical explanations but they’re not satisfactory.

We go into the field of parapsychology, we find enough evidence to throw overboard the rest of the energy, matter, space, time, idea that thought is just another energy and we’re all pieces of earth. We’re not. As near as I can find out, we belong to a central raiding body which is taking over the finite universe.

The main goal, of course, is an identical goal with that of the finite universe which is survive. We’re still working on survive—survive and succumb, those two central pivots. They work in the field of thought. They also work over here in the field of the finite universe. This does not mean that they’re the same, just because they’re working on more or less the same thing. So thought seems to be taking over the finite universe. The main goal of it is the overriding of the laws of conservation of energy. Thought, all of thought’s total concern seems to be the handling of matter, energy, space and time—it’s at war with each one of these things—it’s trying to upset each other, to its own purposes. And more and more it gets pieces of the finite universe to work for it. At first, when thought and so forth came in, maybe it didn’t have as many allies. But gradually thought turns over natural laws of the finite universe in order to further the aims of thought.

The first thing you know, when enough enemies are made into allies, a concatenation, a geometric progression, will begin there and thought will definitely take it over. If you want an analogy for this, it’s very interesting that man becomes terribly concerned about land. An individual man will take over a large piece of land. Well, he’s got space there and he’s got matter. In addition to that, he strives to live as long as he can. Well, that’s an interesting thing that he would strive to live as long as he can; he’s trying to lick time. He wants to go places as fast as he can get there. Thus he’s trying to overcome space. And his efforts are of course—even now there’re large fields of study, would you believe this, in the field of physics in an effort to condense space. Einstein’s latest work here. In other words, his continual effort is to beat these things at their own games and make allies out of every single piece of the finite universe that he can in order to take over the rest of it.

Now, would you believe it, there are people who are thinking in terms of conquering the moon and Mars. Man is actually, so far as we know, the only creature at this time (certainly the only one on Earth) who could possibly conquer space in that magnitude, or time in that magnitude. Physicists are now sitting around worrying about time. It seems that if one went up to the acceleration point there where he was nearly up to the speed of light, time starts to come back to zero, according to Einstein’s equation. And this is very interesting; it means that a fellow could get out because he’s upset his time equation. So the physicists are sitting around trying to figure out how you manhandle time some more. And manhandle space a little bit more. But potentially man could take off and create—he’s the only thing that could—actually create matter out of existing energy or manufacture energy out of which to create matter. He could get out and take over this whole universe, potentially. Of course the second he starts doing it he’ll probably find out that there’re other entities on other planets not unlike men who are trying to do the same thing. There’s a possibility.

Now we’re talking about space opera, sure. But it’s interesting that there’s so much interest in this and that the brains that whipped up a little bit of hellbroth and dumped it on Hiroshima were primarily interested in conquering time and space and getting to Mars.

The only reason these people ever entered this field was to conquer energy. Now they have worked it out so that energy is likely to conquer man. But you see what the battle is? We have this cohesive, this cohesive entity, thought. I don’t care whether you call it God or collective consciousness or what you call it.

The second we begin to postulate its existence and look over the field, the problem of interrelationships with human beings starts to fall apart and ceases to be a problem. There’s probably a great deal of complexity. How the individual broke off, or how closely he is still appended to, or how much he is still a part of the central unity, I don’t know.

The unity probably, on closer inspection, will turn out to be a duality—nearly everything else does. The basic number of the universe, by the way, seems to be two. A universal unity is two, not one. This is one of the reasons why every datum is as valuable as it evaluates other data.

In other words, you get a high echelon equation here and that’s valuable as to how much data it takes in. But that thing is not comprehensible until it is compared to a datum of comparable magnitude.

In other words, it doesn’t exist up here all by itself—there’s another one sitting up here. And these two, neither one of these are understood till we look at the other one. Just like we say “survive.” Now, it’s all very well to say survive; we can derive an awful lot of stuff away from the word survive. But there was another one standing there all the time, right alongside of it. It was understood. We understood that it was there—survive/succumb. Succumb was the other half of it. So survive is evaluated in terms of succumb. Succumb is evaluated in terms of survive.

The basic unit of the finite universe, if you look it over very closely, is two. One of the primary factors is if you started building this universe, you’d have to start with a particle of matter and it would have an outside and an inside to the particle. That’s two. If you got it down to a point where it was single, all by itself, it whoosh—it wouldn’t be there, so you wouldn’t have started building a universe.

The next figure, by the way, on this is the tetrahedron. A tetrahedron is four—four triangles put together in such a way that it makes a solid figure. The universe can be filled up with—and this is dymaxion geometry, by the way, which has a philosophic use.

The basic unit is two and then we take tetrahedrons and octahedrons and we can fill the whole universe and those are the only figures with which we could fill the whole universe as far as we can find out today Well, it’s an interesting thing that dymaxion geometry would follow along these postulates so very neatly So that when we start to put together the finite universe, we find this sort of a condition is made. We find up here survive [drawing on blackboard], and up here we find succumb. And we have these two, they come down here, and they make up derivationally, the field of energy, matter, space and time—I’m not going to derive this whole thing because it is tedious. We get thought over here and we have again survive, succumb and thought. And over here this is a finite universe. Over here, we’ll have these come down to a box, things that approximate thought. And we find out something immediately that we can fill in these boxes. Here’s energy—well, thought has an energy flow, sort of an arrangement, not dependent on space or time though. It depends on its own space and time. So we find that thought has an energy, and then we look around and find out what is matter in thought. It’s just energy which is congealed into an idea; thus ideas are the same as matter. And over here we get in thought the space it occupies—whatever thought would be and time would be, whatever thought-time is.

We start working this thing out and we find these two are parallel; the second we start to look at them as being parallels, we begin to understand what holds groups together. The group is the combined effort of this taking over this. And when the group finally perishes and succumbs this has taken over this. You’ve got a battle, in other words. There is your interconflict: they’re both trying to survive and succumb. And they interweave and come a cropper, one or the other does. There’s a continuing battle and it makes a cycle, whereas races rise and races fall.

A race carries along a certain impetus, goes along a certain line, finally gets enmeshed too deeply with mass (matter) in space and time and is no longer able to move. In other words, it gets driven too solidly into it and there’s too much turbulence there and the first thing you know, the race itself perishes as a race.

Yes?

Male voice: I was going to ask you what you meant by “finite universe,” since time, energy, space and matter are infinite in the universe, no beginning or end.

Well, there’s two schools of thought on that. I didn’t want to get into it too much. But the reason I called it “finite universe’ is actually another distinguishing point—the mystic, when he starts to talk about “infinite universe” runs in thought into the thing and gets beautifully snarled up.

Male voice: But is he—that the two things are both infinite?

Oh, sure.

Male voice: But they’re parallel?

Oh sure, probably are. But this is what I’m talking about here, is the universe which can be sensed, measured or experienced, which is another way of saying finite.

Male voice: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Oh, you can get into some beautiful arguments.

Anyway, when the group, in other words, first begins, you’re getting a beginning raid or a procreation on this first beginning, and its goal is very high. It hasn’t tangled too much with it.

It’s got a high goal, it’s going to survive and it’s going to upset the laws of the conservation of energy or know the reason why. It’s going to take over and conquer time, space, energy, matter. And does pretty well at it usually, at first. It goes up and it conquers more and more of it, and more and more. But with every conquest and each new step, there has been a kickback of the finite universe against thought, and areas of turbulence have been set up. Now they’re set up in the individuals themselves, which is one significant factor. But they’ll also set up in the group.

Now and then the group loses a war, or it loses this, or a great storm comes up and knocks out a town. And these things are remembered. The finite universe kicks back. Mount Pelée blows its top off. Something happens in this universe, and it lays back against the group.

As a matter of fact, there is a large section of the country right now . . . I should put this amendation in: that thought in trying to take it over will also assign to this, other groups and bodies. They don’t recognize those as thought units, they recognize them as matter-force units. See what I mean.

In other words, for a long time it was a smart argument with white men as to whether or not Negroes were human. You see, Negroes belonged to energy, matter, space and time, not to the field of thought-live entities, in other words. Any race starting out looks over and sees other races and doesn’t evaluate itself in terms of them but just considers them as part of the enemy. So it attacks them. They’re just matter as far as they’re concerned and they’re energy and so forth and they aren’t part of them anyway. This insularity is being practiced at this point.

Well, there’s a large section in the United States right now that got a beautiful big engram back around 1865. I needn’t elaborate on that too much, but you realize that there is an engram, a group engram, in the South at this time of such magnitude that the South actually has a very, very difficult time advancing. It is a tough one.

One starts in there and he wonders why the group isn’t functioning as smoothly as it might. They do all right but they have their limitations. They put them—haven’t put their limitations on themselves—they got a nice big engram back in 1865. It says, “You’re licked.” They never considered themselves as part of this group in the North. But this group in the North belonged to the enemy. It was part of the universe. All right. They collided with it, were defeated. Boom! An engram was laid down. And today, an amazing thing, if you want to browse around the South to find out how much this thing is mentioned.

They’re still trying to run it, as a group. They feel if they could just talk about it enough and run it enough, it’d gradually run out. Unfortunately, a large section of their culture was vanquished and they can see to hand the signs of this all around. And so they get continual locks on the initial engram. As a result, there is a group engram staring you right in the face.

Now, what we need is a process to run that engram out of the South. The South is a very big valuable section of the world. And it’s a darn shame that people are closed down by anything.

Now, we look back earlier, we find out that we have run an engram out of ourselves, out of the whole country; you could call it the English engram. England was over here and all of a sudden the new people in were being confronted by the English back and forth one way or the other and finally the new growing group of the colonies said, “The English are actually this. Down with them.” And they kicked back against them and we had a nice war, referred to by ourselves as the revolution, but not by England; and we fought them, which is always great news to a British officer. And well, we won so it wasn’t a very big engram, you see. But there was an engram there. But existing right along with this there were a lot of people—Tories—who had to go on living in this part of the world. So you had a disturbance area through there from it. And I don’t think this thing was wholly patched up and fixed up. It showed its ugly head again in 1863. The United States as such figured out that England was agin7 it and there was more turbulence. That was a lock on top of it. But then World War I came along and there was enough fighting there side by side and then all of a sudden the group had a tendency to mesh. And we got the unity that was America. You see, once upon a time, the English and the colonies had been a unity; now you’ve got a split in unity. And then because they aligned themselves as allies, and I mean that in the Dianetic sense, now all of a sudden we had another unity. And to this day now we have a pretty smooth situation. But most of the jokes that were being bruited around for instance in 1870 were at the expense of Englishmen. It was always the Englishmen.

Those were just manifestations of a group engram which had existed. So you get some sort of an idea now about how these things come along. Here we have a group known as Rome. Rome, a small body of people—they suddenly rose almost by spontaneous combustion out of nowhere, they stole a lot of big strong women and they got themselves very well set and they took over the tag end of a little peninsula and proceeded from there to rule the world.

It was all the world they could reach at that time, and they spread out wider and wider and wider and wider and wider as the unity of the group. But understand immediately, you can stand on any elevation and you can look over these unities and you can find out immediately that they are not separate entities.

They are combating each other as separate entities and causing new areas of turbulence, but they are not separate entities because they all behave exactly along the same laws—their behavior pattern is identical in each case. It isn’t a sudden living thing that comes up. It looks, as you observe it from an elevation, it looks as though you were looking at portions of a living thing—a portion of this.

Now, various spontaneous break-forths happened along this line, and this [indicating diagram on blackboard] makes the mistake of believing what it’s fighting is this, and that is the reason why it finally collapses in. See, each time they have done this, why, they have fallen in on themselves. Like the Roman Empire, the United States and Russia are doing it right now and doing a very thorough job of it. The United States says, “We are a group,” and God knows, we haven’t even thought where we come from or anything like that, or what we’re trying to do, but an odd thing—and Russia’s saying the same thing.

We’re saying, “In order for the United States and us to live, we have to destroy Russia.” Russia’s saying, “We have to destroy the United States.” And we have a great deal which is out of phase. Russia hasn’t looked around and found out the United States is not part of this [indicating on blackboard]. And the United States hasn’t looked around and found out that Russia is not part of this [indicating on blackboard]. It’s an interesting thing, somebody wrote a story not too long ago. They set up a postulate that a very interesting rescue had to be performed somewhere; and the United States and Russia were both vying in an effort to effect this rescue and so amalgamated.

It wouldn’t be quite as easy as that because there are too many engrams back along the track. There’s an engram known as Kolchak. There’s an engram that is known as Hiroshima. We can look along the line and we find out that in Russia as a group entity there lie certain definite engrams. And we look back in the United States’ track where Russia’s concerned and we find some certain definite engrams.

They have assaulted some of the things of our group. But if we look it over thoroughly, we find out the United States doesn’t even begin to have the engrams about Russia, that Russia must have about the United States. We had troops over there mopping up, trying to keep that government from getting into shape. But now it’s in shape. How many engrams did they leave around? Plenty. So you see—the problem you can see then, which is the most aberrated with regard to the other? All of a sudden something starts to resolve—you’ll begin to understand a little bit more about it. What we should know is how to knock out these various engrams. We should know something about a group process.

Now, all of this would be background music I’ve been talking to you about—the politics. Politics is essentially the treatment of the group. The group tries to function as a group. It is a body of perpetuating and perpetuated ideas, towards certain definite goals. Of course, there is always this goal, survive or succumb, one or the other. But the drive is here, and the penalty is there. So we have that goal. But our effort to survive takes on a definite shape. The United States has had forced upon it, from some source I have not yet been able to locate, the fact that it would be nasty for the United States to spread as a group over the whole world. We have impeded ourselves in some peculiar fashion. So there’s an engram back there someplace. I haven’t located it. But it just became not nice to do this.

In 1835 and 1846, we didn’t have this idea. 1898 we didn’t have this idea. And one looks a little bit further and I find a fellow by the name of the Kaiser, come to think about it, whose primary cant was that he was going to rule the world. At least that’s what the British propagandists said. And so rather than to be the devil and demon and so forth that the Kaiser and the German people represented at that time, we’d have to eschew anything that they say because that was a big engram to us. So anything bad about that engram, we have to negate against—identity thinking—so therefore it becomes nasty for us to spread our culture over the whole world.

Unless something’s done about this, we’re done—because I personally believe that American culture is a very fine culture. And you start to talk to people about it and they say, “Yes, it’s true.” Every place I find Americans I find life going along just fine, I find telephones and sanitation, and I find all these other things. And life is good. And you say, “Well, why can’t this be given to the rest of the world?” and so forth. And they say, “Well, that’s bad.” What they’re talking about is conquering people by force. The group has been educated into the belief that the only way one could conquer would be by force. I’m afraid that is the poorest way to conquer.

Since when one conquers in that fashion one creates new engrams, since he creates areas of turbulence.

It isn’t true that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, but it’s certainly true that he who imposes his will by force and not by reason, upon a reasonable human being, is going to get the consequences. So when we have the United States thinking in terms of conquest, we have a piece of identity thinking in this society. “Well, we don’t want to be like the Kaiser and Hitler, Mussolini.” What’s this got to do with it? We look over Hitler—in order to find out why Germany went on this binge we have to look back in the group history of Germany and we go clear back to the Roman legions. Germany tried to explode out of these forests and get out of there where the living wasn’t too good, and get places where the climate and the living was a little bit better and the wolves maybe a little smaller. And the German race was hit continually and consistently by Roman legions, trying to contain—stay in their borders. And more and more turbulence came up.

Good heavens, odd thing to look it over and find out twenty-five hundred years later the Germans are still trying to explode outside their borders. That was all they could think of—was in terms of force, because they were thinking as a group on identity reasoning.

You look at the general situation there and try to find out what’s the engram in Germany. Well, it happens to be the Roman legions. But there are so many locks on the thing, how could one start to run it out? There’d have to be some way to run out a group engram in order to clear Germany of this idea. It isn’t a good thing to smash another group. We get into the postulate of: Are these groups separate entities? Or do they all come from the same entity? And we have to conclude they come from the same entity in order to explain this: that every time a group smashes and destroys the works of or the identity of another group, the smashing group suffers. And it suffers very markedly. Rome came down on the bones of all the cultures she had destroyed.

She destroyed one culture too many She walled up the city of Jerusalem. She told the people to get out of there and never to come back. Now, there was a major engram created by force against a group. And the group itself came back against the Roman Empire.

Now, who would have gone back in Rome’s history any number of years after she had first evicted the citizens of Jerusalem and broken up the Jewish nation and realized that Rome itself would fall flat on its face and cease to be, really, as an entity or a group, because she had committed that act and made that engram?

We can go back in the Roman Empire and look over this thing. We start to ask ourselves immediately what engrams have we created? What have we done in our own past which will wind up with our own destruction? We see that each time a group does this, it actually is thought turning around and coming back against thought.

In other words, the group itself makes an attack here. Now instead of consolidating the gain and so forth, it finds that another attack has been made and some ground taken. And the easy way (it looks) for this thought, Thought A, to conquer some more of this is to actually conquer Thought B. You see, it looks so simple. And it’s an expeditious thing, a quick thing. So Thought A turns around and knocks out Thought B, but that means that thought has conquered much less because they have made Thought B lose all the ground that thought had gained. So actually Thought A lost. It might have then seemed to have won momentarily as a group, as Thought A. You just inspect it cursorily and you say, “Oh, yes.” But thought-major here has lost. And when thought-major loses, you can expect some dire consequences. In other words, this universe here is now less conquered than before.

Let’s postulate this: that Hitler, instead of crashing through the Maginot Line and overrunning Europe, supposing he had turned around and gone into the field of creative thought and had aided all man in his endeavor to conquer the universe. And we would have found him, for instance, turning all of his chemists to work. They, by the way, had made some remarkable strides. There was one I think—I don’t remember the number, I think it was Bayer 207 or Bayer 205, was a cure for sleeping sickness. He had tried to bargain this cure for the return of Germany’s colonies.

In other words, he didn’t just hand this out to the rest of the world of thought. He wanted some finite universe for it. He didn’t get any. Everybody turned him down and somebody else synthesized it elsewhere knowing it was in existence. He had all of these tremendous gains to offer man. And he didn’t offer them to the whole of thought.

He tried to keep them to the group. And as soon as he did that, group . . . Now we construct this: in order to expeditiously take some of this, we knock out some of the other thought units in it—where’s Germany? And you can ask the same question of any conqueror of the force level and you’ll find the same answer.

Germany could very easily, for instance, have manufactured enough chemicals, have advanced man in his tools and skills enough so that nobody would have dared touch Germany You couldn’t have touched Germany because to have touched her would have been to have impeded, obviously, the gains of the whole human race.

All Germany had to do was set herself up in such a situation that she became indispensable to mankind. The second she became indispensable to mankind she became safe. And that is the only way for an individual or a group to be completely safe amongst mankind is to be indispensable. In other words, the second that that individual or group takes cognizance of the fact that it is part of the whole entity of thought, as soon as that happens that individual or group makes a very fine bid for immortality.

These are to some degree rough estimates of a situation. I’ve tried to show you here rather cursorily how far we can get when we suddenly knock out the idea that thought is just another electrical current, when we consider it as part and parcel13 and living on the same time span and so forth as matter and energy, space and time.

We start to consider it as a separate entity and we start to look it over for its own goal, we start to find some answers. And these answers are very, very useful. We immediately get in the field of thought an equation which does not necessarily exist in the field of matter. And that’s the equation of communication, affinity and reality.

Oh sure, you find that this finite universe can fumble along just fine. It’ll transmit one energy in one form to energy in another form, and it’ll go on and it’ll bumble along one way or the other, not very perishable; within itself it’s indestructible. And it is not in peril. But you start hitting it with thought, and it becomes very much at peril. Maybe that’s why the thing kicks back so hard. Because it does kick back awfully hard. We find out then that we can explain, too, some of the other manifestations of living. And we find out that mankind, if he would ever suddenly consider himself as mankind and not as isolated groups, we find out that we would have quite an advantageous situation with regard to this. We can all see that, obviously. Russia has a great big dam that furnishes all sorts of power across the Dnieper, and the Germans blow it up.

Well, it was men who put that dam there. And men use that power. There a piece of a—MEST here had been conquered. And along came this other group and knocked it out, boom, boom. Why? Its very amusing to find out that Germany was busily engaged in trying to rebuild the doggoned thing right during the war—it had so gloriously blown it up.

Now, I suppose our occupation troops are over there in Hiroshima and Nagasaki right now trying to build the place up again. Anytime man has gone in and knocked some of man’s works flat, the person who knocked them flat has found that he usually had to put them back together again. So that we bomb and strafe and otherwise upset a large part of the continent of Europe and right now, today, the reason your taxes are way up and the reason why there is so much confusion back and forth in regard to these things and our own government is going down toward a social democracy level, so forth, is just because we raised hell with Europe.

We can see it as directly related, not indirectly. So man over here knocks out man’s works over here, so man over here now has to go over and build those works back up again because they’re necessary to man. We’ve got to reconquer territory that we’ve knocked somebody back from.

Now, what a paucity of understanding there is on the part of a group here that’d knock out the group there. And then turn around and use all our skills and so forth to go over and build it up again. The second anything like that happens we’re going to get the consequences for it, not because it’s immoral but because it happens to be that’s the way it works.

Now, we find out that back in 1932 we had the QDBX and the WPXYZ and all of this stuff. And these guys were all being hired because they were starving and so on. And the group that was in charge and in power at the time was not thinking, I’m afraid, as seriously about future groups and this other dynamic as it might have been. Otherwise, the people who were doing all that construction back in the early thirties there really would have been slugging. An estimate, for instance—here was a group within a group operating. Now, it was expeditious to do this. But it was only expeditious. They lost sight of the primary laws that underlie what thought’s trying to do, so they were just borrowing from one part of the society to pay another part of the society. And they weren’t making a real active effort to conquer this continent.

You could probably take a hundred million people and work them hard for a thousand years and you would just start to get the continent in shape. How anybody could waste five minutes monkeying around trying to figure out how to get two men to lean on a shovel where one had leaned before, I don’t know But they spent a lot of time on it.

As a consequence—have you ever been out on Highway 66? Well, Highway 66 is a little cowpath that is laughingly referred to as a transcontinental highway. It’s full of chuck holes. Most of its distance it’s two paths, and a narrow two paths at that. It carries trucks, passenger traffic and so on. It’s a bad highway.

It would have been a bad highway in 1925. I mean, if we looked at a highway and we said, “This is a highway,” nobody would have looked at Highway 66 and called it so. And here’s this thing going across the continent. And here during the early thirties there were an awful lot of men out of work.

There was a lot of stuff there; somebody had completely misread, on purpose or accidentally, all the laws of economics. And they said, “Now we have a depression, let’s see how long it can stay depressed.” And they forgot that in order to increase this all one had to do was to just attack—or maybe they didn’t know. I doubt they did, because I found out last month.

All they had to do was to just attack and make a conquest of the area. We would have had a transcontinental highway at least, because we need four transcontinental highways, not just one. We need four good ones. And we start looking around at the parks and the various works of man that would have to be done in order to make this country workable and we do get an estimate of a hundred million people could work for a thousand years; work like mad with all the available tools and they would just about start getting the place into shape a little bit. And yet, not knowing a principal mission, it wasn’t done. Now we’re very busy, now we have too many other things on the fire, the manpower is not available because we’ve just created a flock of engrams in the last few years and they’re taking and absorbing all our energies.

Now, notice how the group energy is dissipating because of the formation of engrams. We did that one wrong back in the early thirties.

Chances of our getting four transcontinental highways here anytime in the near future is rather slight. These things all have a bearing.

The second that man takes his eye off—as a group, and as the fact that he’s part of mankind—lays aside from these goals and goes over onto the side track and creates some more engrams, his group starts to get into very serious shape. They have gotten into such thoroughly serious shape that there’s a distinct possibility that this culture could be wiped off the face of the earth, and I’m not joking.

That’s how serious it’s gotten. We forget how thorough we were, actually, in 1917-18. We were pretty good, over in Europe—we did a pretty good job as far as war efforts are concerned. And a lot of people tried to build back a lot of Europe in the intervening years. But they only tried about halfway.

They let a republic go by the boards to which they had made various guarantees. They had set up a group and then they’d abandoned it—engrams; the Weimar Republic. Down that group went, in came Hitler. Things build up again. Now we did a very thorough job; now we have town-busters.

They say that during the war there, during the latter part of the war, the skies were just dark with planes going over the channel, all of them carrying bombs. Right now we’re doing the most beautiful job you ever saw—we’ve dropped 85,000 incendiary bombs on one of these little bamboo-and lath arrangements over in Korea, yesterday. Well, that’s just great. I was educated at the end of the war at Princeton for a while in civil affairs. The Navy had found out something very strange. They had found out that you couldn’t take an area and knock apart all of man’s works in it and then expect to operate in that area.

This was a very strange thing they discovered there. They didn’t state that in those terms, they just said that, “It gets to be a hell of a mess and we gotta have somebody to take care of it.” So they looked all around the field and they tried to find officers who had had experience in Asia. And they brought them into Princeton and they rammed through-assembly line—through what happens to have been a very fine school. I think the chair of economics at Columbia was teaching economics there at Princeton. The Navy brought in all of the boys they could find that were real bright and they took the officers that they had snatched out of the fleet from here and there with a high priority, and they jammed down the throat of these officers, hoping that their past experience was enough to carry them on through the job, enough knowledge to go out and set up governments, to set up units that could handle people, to square things around after the military had been at work. Very interesting that a little island like Saipan, which is nothing— Saipan is just a few miles long and a mile or two wide, it’s nothing. And that knocking out the very few thousand Japanese civilians on Saipan would create a stumbling block which would almost upset all the plans of the United States Navy.

That gives you some sort of an idea how dangerous it is to monkey around with a cultural unit in man. People were worrying about Saipan—and I mean worrying with a capital “W,” They were having fits about Saipan, There was a baby a day dying in the stockade at Saipan, No requisitions; the Navy said, “We are out to lick the Japs. We don’t have anything to do with these civilians,” and they didn’t do anything for them for a long time.

The morale of their troops there, the supply, labor problems there, the fact that they had destroyed everything that had been there, all of these things swelled up and hit the United States Navy in the face, and the Pacific attack almost came to a stop till someone went over and stopped one baby a day from dying in Saipan, It was interesting. It’s an incredible thing that one could drop something that would look offhand to somebody like a straw. How many thousand human beings, at the outside about 27,000 human beings, as a civil populace amounting to nothing—what looked like dropping a straw in the face of a powerful advance like that of the United States Navy and Army, that would suddenly look like a huge logjam. And it sure did.

Gives you some sort of an idea of the magnitude when it hits a small area and destroys a culture of man in that area—and had upset and had kicked right square back, boom, right in their teeth. Civil affairs officers went over to Saipan, they worked like mad. There was high priority on shipping, special transport, anything.

Orders were given to this effect—you want to know the emergency character of this: “If you have issued any requisition, whether they have been answered or not, issue them again,” That was the orders to the civil affairs people on Saipan, In other words, “Double or treble your orders but make sure the stuff gets here.” And the whole outfit went to work, set Saipan back together again, did what they could for its civil populace, and the attack could then proceed. This is something that one learns not by reading textbooks; he learns this sort of thing by going over and taking a look at it. There’s been too little of that in the past.

Men have evolved very beautiful tangled theories about history and groups and so forth. But few of the men who did that ever bothered to live much of it. I have noticed this as a failing in scholarly work, that there is too much data pulled from 5,000 years ago and not enough from yesterday.

Therefore, anything like this requires considerable looking. Now, in order to see any of this, one has to consider it a live subject, not a dead one a very live subject. You have to look around and see the time that the Elks did so-and-so, and consider the Elks a group, and then see how this and that happened through here, and they interacted with the town.

In your own experience when you, in other words, examine a philosophic echelon there’s no reason to suppose that because it’s a philosophic echelon it has to be compared to a book that thick. The best place to compare it is down on the lowest basic echelon.

A mathematician has a habit of getting—you can see a mathematician deals with abstracts, so he gets a foot into the field of abstract very easily—an abstract being something which does not necessarily compare to things which can be sensed, measured or experienced. In other words, an abstract is not necessarily a piece of reality. For a short time he has one foot in things which can be sensed, measured or experienced, and the other foot into the field of abstracts. But abstracts work so nicely, the next thing you know he’s got both feet up here into the field of abstracts, and he walks around and he’s very, very happy. Sure he’s happy. It doesn’t have to compare with very much. But somebody has to come down and stand down in the field of things that can be sensed, measured, experienced—ice-cream sodas and power cars and cigarettes—and look over the situation, and then the works of the mathematician become quite real because they’ve been pushed into a reality.

When we start looking over the field of groups, if we are dealing with the subject of groups very solidly—that is to say, we’re dealing not with any abstract concept of groups, but if we are mixed up with group problems, if they are real to us, they can be sensed, measured, experienced, they’re right in our hands and we look this thing over, we’ll see that the reality of it and the workability of these things is very great. For instance, today we have a group known as Dianetics. We’ve got the Foundation. The main reason I undertook this series of studies was to see if we couldn’t do something about world peace. But the next thing I knew, I had right to hand an example, and in some places a horrible example, of what can be done and misdone with groups. And I look at the group Los Angeles, and I look at the group Elizabeth, and suddenly realize that we have in the Foundations themselves the pilot project of Russia and the United States. The pilot project of group is right here. It isn’t anything esoteric, it’s right to hand. And we find out immediately what the remedies are and how we run engrams out of groups.

In other words, how to process a group.

All right. Let’s take a break on this.

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]