View source for How to Talk to Friends About Scientology (PDC 521218)

'''Series:''' PDC

'''Date:''' 18 December 1952

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

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← [[Lecture_Index_PDC|Back to Series]]

This is the last evening lecture of the lecture series, December the 18th, first hour.

I want to talk to you something about how you talk to people about Scientology.

And we’ve been just getting along fine here on an informal basis, we’ll just keep on. Somebody has to change the spotlights.

Anyway. The conviction which you are trying to carry is a conviction of action; it is not a conviction of reason. And as such, you actually need a little preparation, not on the catechism basis that they give in some of the… some of the cults on this line whereby anybody that asks you anything then they have the pat answer for it. Let’s go at it on a reverse vector again.

There’s a lot of people tackle a guy on anything that anyone knows. What is invalidation? Invalidation in actuality is the impingement of force. That’s invalidation.

The lowest level a person can get on the tone scale is not wanting to criticize – not wanting to be critical. That’s as low as a person really can get… is not wanting to be critical. Because criticism builds right on up into invalidation, and that’s a gradient scale and it goes from criticism on the aberrated or stimulus-response thought level, fades on in to emotional reaction, counter-emotion to somebody’s activities, and goes right straight to the next point of the gradient scale which is counter-effort. Now, there’s your three levels, and of course they come up from that. As a person withdraws from force he goes down from the application of force into not wanting to apply the force so he applies emotion. And not wanting to apply that so uh… he applies an aberrated stimulus-response thought, and then not wanting to apply the stimulus-response thought, he gets into a much more involved situation than he would normally propose.

We’ve got here a question which you probably need in order to settle some of this in your own mind, and that’s simply here on this graph; we have here our 20.0 (it has been days since I used one of those) and here’s… down here is 0.0. And let’s take a look here and we’ll find this is an action level in that area somewhere around here: 20-22. Now action can carry with it, but does not necessarily carry with it, the delivery of force. But it certainly carries with it, the delivery of effort of one sort or another, but it’s the type of effort that you wouldn’t ordinarily recognize as effort because it’s in such wide space and delivered so regulatedly that it is very closely monitored and activated effort. So, you don’t call that effort as the effort band as we know it. But that’s a harmonic, an upper harmonic of the effort band. Or you could say that work and matter themselves are the lower harmonic of this, the actual action band or effort band. Action becomes solider and solider and solider and eventually becomes matter.

So let’s take a look at this center band, and let’s plot three things which you should know of pretty well in thought, emotion and effort, and find out where they lie here and this actually is in effort band.

Now, let’s take a look above this. I won’t bother to put a number on it because that number is just a meaningless arbitrary, but this next line up here when I say above effort is what? And the next line up above this is what? Way up here above 40 is a thought band. Okay?

Now, those… you never… you’ve never saw those… those words on that tone scale before in that order. Because that sensation band Is actually emotion. That’s high-toned emotion, but it’s… higher-toned emotion Is sensation. Lower down it’s sort of… the emotion band is sort of an effort emotion; MESTy, very MESTy Now, this… this is. this is very airy. You are up here around space; that thought band up there is postulates. A little bit lower than that we have agreements. Now, maybe we’ve never quite looked at it this way before.

I said about DEI as being a harmonic uh… uh… DEI being cycles within cycles? Well, this cycles within cycles theory is actually the same theory as harmonics, and you wanna know where harmonics come from in radio, music, piano music uh… where they come from in electronic waves of any kind, sound or anything of the sort, you look at the cycle within the cycle. There is the „grand cycle of the whole band“ and the whole change, and then there’s these intermediate cycles. DEI was a little piece of the big DEI Scale – desired and enforce and inhibit. All right.

Now, let’s go down here and find out we… now that we’ve gone to effort, let’s go to something else. And let’s get down below this, and we’ll get… and boy, we are really in here now, just below this we get emotional and uh… sensation. Up here it’s kind of enjoyable, down here you get an emotional sensation. What do you get under that? You get an effort band.

Now, what do you get under that effort band? You get what you’ve been calling a very high level emotion and right in that strata there you get about the highest level of reason that man’s attained. And here again we have thought. And I suppose this could be plotted out – I’m not giving you all the harmonics here by a long ways – and uh… effort, emotion. Now, let’s have thought again. All right, let’s have effort again, although it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter whether we add these things on, it’s just what you… it’s just gonna be this cycle. You can take chunks of this cycle and you will accurately locate which one of the three that you’re plotting at that time or not as the case may be. But it could be all the efforts on this tone scale, and that could be effort-effort-effort-effort-effort-effort-effort. What were all these efforts? Or it could be emotion-emotion-emotion-emotion-emotion. What were all those? You’ve got a name for practically every one of ‘em; sensation high sensation, exhilaration is enthusiasm on a lower part on the band, and… and… and boredom is actually a lower harmonic of being calm, a very low harmonic, MESTy.

And we get down here and uh… we have found again maybe these three. And then we get way down here, and we get heavy effort again.

Now, actually we’re… because we’ve been studying this from the viewpoint of homo sapiens, at 0.0 effort area (that’s not 0.0 effort, but uh… just in that area), effort, emotion, thought; now, we’ve gotten down here and we get a heavy brand of… oh boy, these bands really get thin; they really get awfully close together; these get packed tight right down at the bottom.

I couldn’t draw – I’ll have to give you little sections, some sort of an idea over here under the 0.0 of the… the bands as they would get together there – there’d just be so many together the area would just be completely black, they’d be repeating themselves so often and so close together. Here Is your geometric progression at work and it starts up from way down below there and matter starts in from the top, wide, less wide, closer together and packed right on down tight.

A piece of matter is actually thought, effort and emotion all at one and the same time. This is a new thought to you maybe; it’ll be less of a new thought when you pick up matter sometime and you can feel what it has to think. ‘Course, it doesn’t have any think in it at all, except it’s a sort of a solidified thought. It… it… it… it just has that appeal value to it.

For instance, this… this… ashtray… this ashtray has a prettied up thought in it. It doesn’t… it doesn’t say ‘ashtray’; it is saying ‘pretty piece of pottery’. And whoever made it and so on, this is the thought that went into it. ‘a pretty piece of pottery’. And yet it can exert an effort, can t it? If you direct it. And it can uh… do all sorts of things. Uh… and it has… it has an emotion. That’s very strange, it has an emotion something like agony. That’s very weird. It… it has an actual emotion. Well, anyhow. You think I’m kidding you. You ought to try that sometime.

You ought to ask a piece of matter, „Now, what emotion do you…“ Don’t go nutty on this. You ought to ask a piece of matter sometime, „What… what thought is in you? What effort are you capable of? And uh… and uh… what… what emotion do you express?“ It’ll sometimes be very startling to you what a clear-cut certainty of answer there is sitting there under your gaze.

Because you’re dealing with a piece of MEST universe that originally came out as a thought, and a thinkingness, and a beingness, and an emotionalness and all these other things. Well, as things condense, these bands get closer and closer together, and closer and closer together and closer and closer together until all of a sudden you’ve got matter.

Now, it’s very amazing to pick up a cannonball, a small cannonball of some sort or another that’s lying on a battlefield; it’s still thinking the same thought, if you can call that thinking. There it is, more or less made with it. Why? Its… its present time is ALWAYS. But ALWAYS at the bottom of the scale.

I mention this to you. But there’s… there’s a very funny thing about this. It’s… it’s… it’s a fact you see… you are putting into something the emotion which it expresses, but you are also capable of contacting the agreement which brought it into beingness. You’ll understand this a lot… a lot more; we re clarifying an awful lot of things that man has felt, and felt that he felt, and thought that he heard, and tried to pin certainties on to them. Well, there’s no use trying to put a certainty on to this stuff. It’s just funny or amusing.

When anything gets down from clear up here above 40.0… let’s take a… let’s take some electrons running through a line, and once upon a time somebody said „Let there be light.“ And you’ve got an electron running through the line, and your engineer comes along and he fools around with this electron going through the line. What’s it got to say about it? It’s got something to say about it. It’s still there; it’s still a piece of beingness that it once was, and it’s still banging around in the exterior universe, and here he is, and somebody else could take him and shoot him down the line – put him down a piece of copper wire one way or the other. But it’s not a him, it’s not a personality; it isn’t a thetan that’s decayed.

Although it’s very very peculiar, you get way down small and then try to look at things of this order of magnitude, and they apparently have a sort of an aliveness to them. It’s fascinating to behold. But it’s held together by a thought basically, and that thought in impinging in various postulated spaces condenses, ‘cause this space condenses and the thought made space for the existence, and therefore you’ve got a condensation of beingness which becomes a condensation, and in this area here of the center, you’ve got a condensation of action so you have considerable activity taking place. You have enormous volatility of elements. The volatility of elements regardless of temperature or anything of the sort would take place along that 20 level.

And then you’ve got harder and solider and solider and solider and you’ve got energy. And you get a preclear in apathy, but you can get a preclear in apathy that’s actually gleeful, and that’s ‘the glee of insanity’. He’s in apathy about doing anything; he’s really just practically right there on the verge of tears any minute, and what’s he do? He cackles and screams with laughter over something. So you’ve just got that down further and further and further and all of a sudden from this effort called apathy we’re down lower on the band, lower on the band, lower on the band, you’ll get some PC and you can put your foot against him; woo… you could actually almost put your MEST hand against the man’s ridges and give him a shove when he walks in the door. You almost can do that; I mean he’s that far out, and he’s that hard and that solid.

Well, you get way down, you compress it too tight, you’ve got plutonium, you get boom’. A new thought. Now, you could put it on a circular pattern and say, „From that came all new thought.“ Nope, it’s just under too much stress, because, boy, there is nothing that makes MEST like plutonium. It makes more MEST into enMEST in less time than any other known element.

Well, so we’ve got these bands tight packed down together here.

Now, when you speak of ‘counter-effort’, do you mean a bust in the jaw? There’s counter-effort, a bust in the jaw. It’s down in this band here someplace. That’s invalidation by force. Or do you mean this: highly measured, terrifically competent, enormously controlled and regulated delivery of force as an impact. That’s still invalidation. Boy, there’s nothing like an invalidation which is done with force and extreme competence. Your fellows get out there on the football field and that sort of thing, when they’ve been beaten by a team that is enormously skilled, oh, do they feel silly. Why it’s invalidation, measured in force, but it isn’t in terms of „Well, we’ve gotten down to a point where we’ve all run out of ideas, we’ll mash each other’s bodies up.“ That’s irrational; it’s still a game up here.

All right, let’s take what’s… what’s a sensation, emotion here? That’s very, very high-toned stuff for homo-sapiens to be… exhilaration and so on.

Now, let’s look down here at effort on that band. Well that would be a light feather-touch as far as that’s concerned, but it would again be terrifically competent, very competent. And as a man goes down tone scale he begins to do things like regret his own competence, because it delivers too many overt acts; it hurts, then, to be competent, so he goes on down the line.

So, we get into this band down here: emotion. Well, that’s probably the emotion that most… emotional band, that most people use… listen to the theater. Why, most people that… when they get really high toned, they probably would get up that high on sensation. Maybe that is as high as sex goes; this… this… this band here that’s just a second emotional band above zero. Oh, way down here at the bottom of course where they’ve got that black line, all those things are more or less packed together, no differentiation, all identification; thought, emotion and effort all become the same thing.

Well, what’s criticism? Of course, if a fellow is fencing, and he crosses foils with an expert and that expert just undoes the buckles of his mask or something of the sort, with the… the button, meanwhile while his opponent… I mean, while this fellow is fencing like mad trying to hold off the expert and the expert simply unbuckles his… his mask and takes it off and starts to unravel his fencing sweater. It would sound to me like that’d be a little critical, wouldn’t it?

So we get down here, it’d be any… any level of that is, you could say, it’s a criticism. Well, invalidation we think is uh… to ignore but to meet with force could also be invalidation. So it’d be two kinds of invalidations. ‘Validation’ would be the positive thing. There’s always a third little thing lurking around in any of this material, and this is called the ‘null point’. You’ll see it on the cycle of action; you’re always running into the null. The cycle of action has at its exact center CONSERVATION; START, INCREASE, NO CHANGE, DECREASE, STOPPED. That really is the cycle of action. There’s a complete maybe right in the middle of the cycle of action. You see why that would be? It would be the null point between increase and decrease. It would be the null point between growing and decaying; there is a plateau in there where something hits. Why is it a plateau? It’s an effort to maintain the state, and of course that requires a maybe. The way you maintain the state is to have a maybe, and if you get somebody wanting to really act slow just throw a maybe into his computer and he’ll maintain the state all right. You can get almost anybody stopped if you completely balance his computer, you get no action, and you get an apparent… a stop which… which is called CONSERVATION.

We want these woods for a long time; therefore, they are not to be destroyed. Therefore, we’re very careful and we let nothing decay in ‘em, and we re careful of what we let grow in ‘em.“ And so we monitor those two things and we get the center of the band, the MAYBE between GROWTH, and DECAY which is CONVERSATION and we’ll have the woods for a long time. That’s NULL, no action.

That’s why 20.00 as calling 20 an action band is wrong and has been consistently wrong, uh… but it hasn’t been wrong so much as just careless. Actually, the action bands uh… come up to their heaviest competence down around 10 and 30, but why s… why strain everybody. One around 10 is fast action in terms of decay, and the one up around 30 is fast action in terms of growth and increase. Well, let’s call it all an action band. You see, we can call this that because we have our internal cycle of the grand cycle. It’s all right. We needn’t put… you’d think it was awfully funny if I kept putting into the middle of it CONSERVE.

Here we have thought, and we have start, and at the end we have stop, and in the middle of it we put CONSERVE. It… it would be… it would be foisting off on you the… the impression that there wasn’t anything we could do about it, and START and STOP and CONSERVE are all STOP. They really are, they’re all STOP. One comes from STOP. You have to go from STOP to get a START. And… and so one has to go to STOP to get a stop, and in order to CONSERVE he merely balances and that STOPs.

If you get the idea of a fulcrum sitting up here and in the middle it’d be just carefully balanced like that, and we tipped it – over she’d go. But that can be tipped. The stop at the end and the start at the end, once you start that thing, boy, it’s HELL to stop.

Do this test on a preclear someday; get him to get the idea of starting something, some preclear that doesn’t have three-dimensional vision; try it now, somebody who isn’t satisfied with the three-dimensionalism of his vision.

Get a picture and get the idea of trying to start it. Now try to change it. Now, let’s stop it.

If you do that, occasionally you… you’ll notice something… a manifestation. What manifestation do you notice? Did anybody get that… you… you work… you work that every once in a while you’d see something happening there. Did you get anything on that? You didn’t really try to start something?

I had to push it to start it.

LRH: Hum?

I had to push it to start it.

LRH: Oh, you have to push it to start it. We’re already into the effort band.

Well, let’s get a look at something you started once. It’ll make it a little more real to you. Get a look at something you started, and no… notice the dimensions in it. You know? Get the visio on something you started and notice the dimensions in it. How were the dimensions in that visio?… You re operating from space down when you do that. What… what dimension? Did anybody get any d… dimensions in the… in that visio of starting?

Voice: Get depth.

LRH: You have got a depth? That’s all we are looking for.

Voice: Three-dimensions in mine.

LRH: You got three-dimensions?

Voice: Yeah.

Now look at a time when you stopped something.

Voice: It flattens down.

LRH: Yeah.

Voice: Yeah.

LRH: Well! Of course start is up at 40.0, and that’s space, and you’ve been in that cycle of action? Why it goes that way? We’re not dealing with anything strange or peculiar.

Uh… all right, now these flows go as directed up here – these are as directed, and these flows down here tend to go opposite to as-directed. They go opposite below 20.0 and that’s why we keep using this 20.0 as it is the NULL point between plus and minus. This is positive. The fellow makes a postulate anywhere in that area you get it carried out. And this is minus. The chances of him getting something carried out on a postulate in this area are… just reverse below 20.0.

I am going to grow up and be a good buy.“ And so he winds up as a gangster. And he never quite figures out why this is.

I am going to give up smoking.“ Oh, boy, how can he give up smoking, if he says he’s going to give up smoking. It’s obvious, the fellow’s a homo sapiens, isn’t he? Well, how can he ever be on a positive line? It’d be impossible for him to be.

So the best way in the world for this individual to go on smoking and practically ruin himself is to try to give up smoking. I think the cigarette companies have found this out empirically and actually go around trying to coax people to give up smoking.

If you had the thought „Now, I’ve got to smoke“ and would just consistently and continually tell yourself that you had to smoke and make yourself smoke and buy several brands of cigarettes and every time you found a cigarette was not in your hand be sure and put one in your hand and just make yourself have a cigarette, you’ve started to operate from way up on the band. Well, because you know, and you can operate from knowingness and you can handle flows if you know what they consist of. You don’t have to be completely supine just because they exist.

I say, you… you… the fellow out… he knows, he’s running on a reversal on colors, so he says to himself, „Well, all right. Now let’s see, I couldn’t get it when I said ‘Try to get green.’ Let’s see how… now I’ll try not to get green and I’ll get green. That’s right.“ And he does and he looks at the pretty green, and he says, „Well, I guess I can handle that.“

I mean very fast, it doesn’t take long at all for a flow to get knocked off.

So this goes on the LONG run opposite as directed. Here’s where you get, down here, more than up there; you get the… up there too. Here you act on the upper part of the band… you act to bring about a good result, and what do you get? You get the lower part of the band. What a trick.

Because what starts up in the upper part of the band will finish off a cycle of action, and that goes into the lower part of the band, and then of course that goes into the opposite polarities and flows.

Decay is everything going the wrong way when it should go the right way. And don’t ever forget that from 20 down to 0.0 that is decay. That is on the way out. It… if you had to go up… straight up the MEST universe line, following the agreements of the MEST universe 100 per cent and not paralleling them with your own universe line, oh boy, would you ever dig out of this pile? I am afraid not! Why, it’s just… just… it’s just too… too booby trapped with this opposite flow deal. You say, „I wanna be clear,“ so you’ll knock off being audited. It’s just as silly as that.

Well, when we look at this, we see that counter-emotion, counter-effort gets more oppositer and gets more and more negative the lower we go on it.

Until we get up here, boy, is this up here… in… where we’ve got this line, is that positive, man that’s really positive. And down here, brother, is that really negative.

Up above the level of 40.0 when you say „Spit“ they spit, believe me. And down below the level of 40.0 when you say „Spit“, boy, they don’t spit, believe me. It’s a fact.

So you go around and you tell somebody, „Okay, Scientology,“ you say, „is very fine and we’ve been working on this and we really are trying to do something about it, maybe we can do something for your back.“

And they say, „Ha! Ha! Well! Nothing can be done for my back, of course.

You could practically have to take over ownership as you would a piece of MEST before you can do anything about it.

You get preclears down at the bottom of that scale, you practically have to slide in behind the wheel to get ‘em rolling. They’re like an automobile. They don’t even have self-starters, sometimes you have to get out and crank. But the point is that there you have your layout of… why you try to sell something, it is just fabulous that advertising works! Just FABULOUS that it works. But why does it work? Did you ever ask yourself that: „Why does advertising work?“ It’s just one thing in the advertising sign that works; you could put in a big dissertation, you could say, „Buick cars are mounted on a… on a something or other, and uh… Jaguars uh… have so much pounds per horsepower and they’re made out of so on, and differentials, and they drive at such-and-such a speed. And they do this and they do that and so on, and you could have this nice little dissertation… on print. Nobody’d give a damn whether they owned one or not. But if you put a picture of one that’s an aesthetic, and the higher you go and the tinier you get on the wave length, the less oppositeness of reaction you get. So aesthetic show a tendency to come out in the pure rather than in the negative, and they have much less negative response contact than positive. So if you do something very aesthetically you’re more liable to get some sort of an agreement on the thing.

If people in this field were all to dress up in white gowns with purple sandals and we had a great big monastery sitting on top of a hill someplace and olive groves and all that sort of thing everybody’d go and they’d say, „That’s… that’s where Scientology is. That’s right,“ and so on. It’d just be fine. „Well, that is one of those Scientologists now. Look at their gowns and so on.“ „Now, don’t get too close to him, he is liable to put a curse on you.’ And uh… that’s right; that’s the way it’d roll; but there’s the aesthetic.

As a matter of fact, it’s well within your choice to know about that.

As opposed to the aesthetic… as opposed to the aesthetic is another answer, and that’s to use the effort band. „Oh, uh… you uh… you don’t like Scientology, huh?“ Pow!

But have you got any reason in this lower band here? You know, there are probably not more… there are probably not more than 30,000 people at that in the United States who could probably eat this stuff up. Are you aware of that fact? That’s very strange for me to say that. Go ahead and feel lonesome. You haven’t taken a good look in a long time… taken a look at your immediate circle of friends, something like that.

The truth of the matter is… the truth is that the intellectuals of the entire world, by a survey which was rather competently done, by the way, are sort of plotted in a pyramid of what are the IQ’s of people on earth? This poor guy who gets out of college and decides he has to work hard to succeed, what a boob! He doesn’t have to work at all to succeed. There’s just nothing to it. He can talk, can’t he? I mean, he can say, „Please pass the butter,“ can’t he? He can… he knows how to wear a tie and a coat, doesn’t he? He’s set. He’s the upper crust. He is! That’s no kidding.

He’s… regardless of what state he’s supposed to be in, a survey of all of this demonstrated that at any one time on earth there were not more than about 10,000 people of a caliber that was sufficient to do a little steering or leading. And that wasn’t a very high IQ; and it doesn’t flatter you very much. It isn’t up there around Army Alpha 212, as you’d think it is; not at all. There is only about 10,000 of them really.

And below that level you have something in the neighborhood of about 100,000 or 150,000, 200,000 people who have a competence of assimilation. That’s about all.

You can count then on those people directing others or leading them. And if you’re very experienced on it and you really did a good job, it’s sort of like… I don’t know… like patting kids on the head. I’m not being patronizing. I mean that’s the successful attitude when it comes to those people. And we get the share of those in the United States, and we carve that down, we find out a handful, just a handful of people in the United States supported by another triple handful of people in the United States out of 150 millions.

And if you have a savage enough truth, or a beautiful enough truth, they can go through, but don’t ever try to get a reasonable enough truth, because you won’t ever talk to reason.

If, perhaps, you talked to people, demonstrated to them, worked with them very hard and showed them very hard over a long period of time, quite convincing and demonstrated a lot to them, you would appeal to them on a level of reason. But my God, do you know what you would have done if you did that? What you would have done is something very interesting; by education you would’ve kicked ‘em upscale. The weapon was in your own hands at the time you were talking. By that, I mean you’ve got a reasonability.

Now, let’s… let’s… let’s not be snide or put this into the category of „we’re all so smart and they’re all so dumb.“ I’m telling you something that’s very nakedly true; that has a workability as I have worked it out.

We have when we get down to this business… If you’re trying to tell people on the standpoint of reason… A Critique of Pure Reason would be a critique of the minus sign down here on this chart, you’ve got a negative flow. So, when you try to tell people, „Look, we know something; it’ll make you a lot happier and better, and you can climb out of this mess.“ You’re just a handful. Most of you’ve been pitching in this league for a couple of years. Strange, isn’t it? It’s strange you re not an auditorium full. You’ll never be a auditorium full. There aren’t that many. That’s all there is to it – there just aren’t.’

You could go out and have vases fly off the immediate part of the stage and ‘pow’ them for people. You can also dress up Annie Oakley in a beautiful white hat with a beautiful cowboy skirt and have her stand in the saddle and ride around the arena and do the same thing with a shotgun and get the same crowd. You think I’m kidding you? Well, it’s the same line.

So therefore you have two levels of appeal which are quite direct and quite direct indeed is you just go ahead and you work; you don’t try to tell anybody anything beyond perhaps you intimate to them once in a while that you might be able to do something for them. But you could intimate that for God sakes on a… on an aesthetic, an aesthetic or a completely false sympathy line. „Oh, you poor fellow.“ He… he won’t miss the irony. I mean, he… he won’t hit it. He doesn’t know, You just… you just assign all knowingness to everybody around you and you’ll get in trouble, because they’re not all knowing. You go down… you’re not gonna put this postulate into the line, you are not going to say uh…, „Well, you uh… here you are uh… you know all about this, and you know that sympathy could kill a man without half trying.“ Oh, no! He wouldn’t believe it!

„Yeah, I’ve seen these sympathetic guys,“ he’d say and so on, and uh… „Yeah,“ and so on and so on. „And, but you know, I do get awfully tired,“ he’ll say. „Gimme. Gimme. Gimme some more… gimme some more cohesiveness of matter so that I can solidify further and go down a little bit further on the tone scale.“ He will.

And you just sit there and you’d say, „You poor fellow. Yes, I’m… I’m sure of that.“

And that tells you that way up there at the top of the tone scale, the first pretense is that it’s not all pretense, and that’s the first thing a fellow learns! The first pretense is to pretend that it’s not all pretense.

A guy starts selling himself then and selling himself and selling himself. You cannot have a… a game unless you pretend there’s a game! And then if you say, „The game is serious,“ and „The game is all,“ and „We’re not pretending anymore, and therefore this is not a game,“ oh, boy, how grim can we get?

We have to be absolutely truthful and sincere; and SINCERITY is the main thing, and TRUTHFULNESS is the main thing, and don’t lie to anybody, and never daa… and you’ll get ahead.“ You… brother, you sure will. You’ll get ahead right on that cycle of action right towards zero.

I think it was – where is he? Yeah, there he is. Yeah, he told me up here on the stand, he couldn’t tell me a lie! Well, that isn’t because of me; it’s just because he’s got to believe that… that the MEST universe is that way. Now, you’ll find pcs are like this. It’s a TRAP not being able to prevaricate. You don’t have to have a reason to prevaricate. It’s when people have to have a reason to prevaricate that it becomes lying. Before that time it’s just ornamentin’.

I was downtown the other day, and I… there’s this yellow taxi there, and I started to step into this yellow taxi and I’ll be a son of a gun if there wasn’t a big ape sitting in the back with the smuggest grin. I closed the door and walked on down the street.“ This makes life more colorful.

You would be surprised what it would do for you if you suddenly threw one of those in every once in a while. The finest way in the world people can put you up tone scale is to find out that you’re lying. Yeah, you go around being afraid you’ll be found out you are lying.

I made a preclear one day. I just gave him one process only; every once in a while I’ll hand out a process to some other preclear that I don’t want to process very long, I just give him a couple of straightwire questions, I have only got maybe two minutes, and I say, „Now, look. You say – what’s your trouble? Oh, well, now look. I want you to go out and tell somebody a lie so they will find out that you are lying… that you were lying. And then do that several times and uh… tell it in such a way that they can discover you’re lying.“

And this guy says, „Oh, no.“

I said, Well, go ahead, do that.“

„I’ll do it if you say so.“

Okay, now we’re all set, and he went out and he did it and it cracked his case of course. He was so afraid people would find out the truth, that is to say that he was lying, that he wouldn’t lie, and so he had to assign everything as truth and he was having a really rough time with the whole deal. All he had to do was tell someone a lie so that they’d find it out, and then of course, what did he expect would happen? He… the will… walls would sort of start to creak you see, and he could brace himself because this person was bound to do what? Criticize him. Criticizing, when they do criticism artistically, they do it with a club. So he’s afraid of being hurt! Afraid of having his space collapsed around him, and afraid of becoming matter. And therefore he’s afraid of criticism because he has it identified with force! Which it is! Criticism is the shadow of force! And it… the threat of force. „Well, I want to criticize you because I wouldn’t want you to get into a lot of trouble doing something or other. And I don’t mean to be critical of your driving, but if someday…“ They act like they’re trying to prevent you from being hurt all the time, or being upset, or losing heavily, and that’s the reason for criticism, isn’t it? Only, what they’re really doing is they don’t for a moment suppose that they are really helping you. They really don’t suppose this. They’re just indulging themselves one way or the other, a little pretense going on. The next thing you know why they’ve got you practically destroyed. If you’re afraid of being hurt physically, you’ll be afraid of being criticized.

The fellow goes out and he tells somebody. He says, „Well, I uh… just saw your wife uh… I just saw your wife outside the door… hm…“ And the guy rushes down to find out what his wife’s doing there; he comes back and the whole project was a failure because the fellow figured it was a practical joke and they’re allowable. And this fellow had to really get down and figure quite a bit to find out finally how to tell a lie so that he would be found out. And it occupied his mind so much, he didn’t have any time to think about his neurosis or anything, and he finally made the grade – he finally made the grade. He called up and said that a bill had been paid, and of course that could be found out. And he said it very straight facedly and he kept insisting from there on the bill had been paid. And he insisted that the check was there and it had arrived, that he had the receipt, and he just went on with a complete show about the bill being paid fully expecting any moment to go mad himself and discover that he didn’t know whether it had been paid or not! And what do you know, his level of certainty on the fact he was lying got better and better and better, and he began to enjoy it and so forth, so he started calling up all sorts of people and telling them he had paid them. And his credit got much better! Anybody’d loan him money.

If you want to get a horrible reputation and get killed, you just go around sincerely and honestly helping people. If you want to know who’s helping people in this world go around and find out who’s just on the verge of being killed. You ought to look it over. It’s fascinating! This of course reverse vector.

Well, all of this adds up to the fact that if you go around asking a society for a license to survive, and you keep on telling them „Now, look, you’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’ve got a whole track. And you’ve really lived before and we’re really’d be amazed about the whole thing and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on yowl-yowl-yowl-yowl-yowl-yawl.“ Oh no, not under any circumstances, please, please, please for my sake don’t do that.

I have tried to do what I could in this subject and… and tried to square it around. I am actually working from a fairly high level on… on the operational end, I expect to see it go right but I want to see it applied. Ap… applied here to homo sapiens pretty well ‘cause I… I know he can be dug out, but you can’t dig him out on a cross flow. No sir.’ ‘Cause every time you pull him up, he’s going to go down. He’s… you are going to pull him up one inch, he’s going to go down six inches. That’s because he is su… so sure that a lie is terrible, and that pretense is the most horrible thing; he’s got to have the truth, and the only truth he’ll assume is that truth which is fed to him on his level of the tone band, which is KILL, FEAR, DIE, FADE, OBEY. Great, big code he has to run on. So that’s the truth he buys. And you will have to sell him on a reverse vector by not selling him at all.

You go around and say to him… say to him, „Now, this Scientology is really all right.“ But I tell you, I can just see some of you now sitting in a… in a… in a… a rather arty uh… in a rather arty living room, in some studio apartment or something of this sort, talking to these two people… and they’re… they’re a… an attorney and his wife or something like that, and they’re nice people and they have always looked bright to you and uh… I can see these people, and uh… they are saying, „But that’s perfectly incredible! It’s mysticism. I never thought you were a mystic or that you go in for that sort of thing.“

I can just see you earnestly and pleadingly say… saying, „Please give me a license to survive. Please give me a license to survive. Please.“

I hear you mixed up with that new cult.“

You tell ‘em, „It is the biggest cult. It’s the biggest cult in the world today. And uh… it’s very funny because you see it doesn’t work.“

And the fellow says, „What?“

And you say… and you say, „It’s very funny but Scientology just doesn’t work. That’s all.“

And if you want to tell him anything… you want to s… hang it on somebody and say it’s somebody’s fault, you just tell ‘em, „If Ron heard me tell you that it would help your back, he would probably be very upset. But confidently the truth of the matter is it will.“ If you wanna blame somebody, the name’s yours. My name anyhow. But there’s… there is your… your answer.

I probably shouldn’t put this on the tape) but don’t be surprised if you were to find… you were to find all sorts of people springing up around insisting „It’s bad! It works!“ And so, now don’t… don’t be too amazed.

But don’t you be amazed if you get a level of ostracism on the basis of trying to plead its cause or case; it doesn’t need a case pled. Nobody is going to be able to execute it; it can’t be shot, nothing can happen to it, that is the truth. It has the thickest armour plate in the world, zero space, it’s an idea. There’s no reason in your being uh… defensive about it in any category and the truth of the matter is that if you tried hard, you could actually sell people on Scientology, just… they would just get squirrelly if you never talked any other way than „it didn’t work.“ Just look at them, „It doesn’t work.“ Not come-on… not as a come-on so they’ll say… never seize on to it so that it becomes a come-on.

„I’m not supposed to tell you that this’ll fix up your back.“ „It probably wouldn’t. It very often KILLS people! Do you know, confidentially, I don’t know why I got mixed up in this because I’ve never been in quite a cold-blooded atmosphere, but do you know that the Hubbard Foundation at 237 North 16th Street there is right next door to a…“ You can tell them, „Of course, I don’t mean to infer that anybody took that address next to that mortuary on purpose.“ „And don’t get wrong the impression I was trying… I was trying not to tell you that.“ And if you just follow that up real close and so forth and then say, „Of course I’m kidding you.“ This will set their teeth on edge. Oh-ohh!

Now if somebody says… somebody says to you… somebody says to you „Oh, you are a theta clear, huh? You… I understand you’re a theta clear that’s… and so on. Well, why don’t you do so-and-so and so-and-so and prove this!“

I was a theta clear? I want to know’. Was it some member of the… of the uh… Foundation, somebody like that? Was it another auditor? It wasn’t another auditor, was it? TELL ME!!“ As though you’d just been insulted beyond insult, just reverse your emotional vector on the whole deal, and they’ll have terrific reasons then to believe why they’ve got to be scared to death of you.

I were you, I’d fix up a dummy, and take a book or something of the sort and write on the face of it THE BLACK BOOK OF SCIENTOLOGY or something of the sort and then band it very tightly so it’s hard to open and people… instead of… people come around, they want to have a s… a snide smile on their face, something like that because of what you’re doing… make a point of having it on the desk and suddenly kicking it into the desk drawer and slam the desk door real quick. And say, „Hello, Joe!“ Do it with a perfectly straight face. And he’ll feel sort of creepy about the whole thing. The reason he will feel creepy is a very, very good reason why he’ll feel creepy. There’s a terrific reason why; is because he basically knows that anybody that starts on this track becomes excessively dangerous. That’s true.’ It doesn’t matter how stupid he’s acting, there is some kind of an echoing memory lost back of all that automaticity that’s saying, „Oh boy, no, no, no. I was in an area once, there was a thetan in the area, and I killed this deer in this forest, and oh, lord, that was the horriblest past death I think I have.“ And he’ll be saying, „Of course, there is no such thing.“ It’s not true; thetans are bad people to have around if they’re bad people.

Now, furthermore, you don’t take any responsibility for… for. uh… anything that you own beyond the level of just having it all anyway. I mean there’s no… no sense in going around wondering whether or not you have responsibility, don’t have responsibility or whether you took responsibility or didn’t take respons… This is pointless, this… you’re thinking about BLAME if you are doing that.

No, you… you just… do you want to know how to take responsibility for everything? Is go out someday and go on up to… go on up to the top of one of the taller buildings or something of the sort or get out of your head and take a look at the town. And uh… just see how your town is coming out here, „Well, I guess they’re doing all right now. Okay.“ Just make a postulate like that once in a while. Very funny! You probably come down after that, walk ten feet down in line and have some man ask you if he can spit in the sidewalk.

I would like to point out really the fact of trying to tell people about Scientology; there is… there are some texts, the Professional Course Texts, and so forth; the British edition of SELF ANALYSIS will be available and that’s… and that says Dianetics, I know; SELF ANALYSIS IN DIANETICS is the title of it. Yeah, but it’s fine; it’ll do ‘em a lot of good; it won’t worry ‘em any. And I had it read by several people and, boy, were they stupid people I picked. I picked the most stupid people I could pick, and I wrote that and rewrote that text on the description of it until every one of ‘em knew what I was talking about and agreed with it, and they worked fine. And that’s right; that’s a good book. And you go around the place and you’ll say, „Well, I found out more from that book than any other book.“ And we’re trying to make that book available to auditors cheap so they don’t have to do a lot of explaining. And don’t even bother to explain this.

„What is the business about energy units, and you getting out of your head and everything else?“

And you say, „Who’s been telling you about that?“

And they say, „Oh, it was all over the place. It was in… it was in LOSS OF TIME magazine and…“

And you say, „Well, it was in that… but you… nobody has been talking to you about it, have they?“

And they say, „N… no.“

And you say, „You’re sure?“

„No.“

„Well, all right.“ Just close the conversation. And then don’t be so anxious to see a reaction.

The only reason a guy can’t pull this stuff off smoothly is because he is so anxious to see a reaction on the part of other people. And their anxiety is not to show one. You let them go home and sweat. They sweat.

You have… you have yourself a situation where you… you just uh… rush the game like a poker player. I mean, he’s… he’s too anxious to find out what the other fellow’s cards are he just can’t wait! Oh, no, that’s a bad way to play a game.

That person, just uh… they toss it off and they appear to be very indifferent about it, and if you were to look inside their heads you’d see this… this festering seething mass; that’s their concern about this whole thing, and they’re sitting there saying blandly, „Would you have another cup of tea, my dear.“ And uh… they’re very calm about this whole thing. They’re not.

If you see somebody nailed to the top of the Empire State Building flagpost with a huge beautiful silken banner flopping down around the inert body or something like that, why, don’t be too surprised or amazed; it’ll be in a good cause; he was a member of The Better Dead Club or something of the sort, but the banner will… would say, „Scientology doesn’t work.“ And that would… that would be the byword.

I tell people. They say, „Oh, you’ve got a pitch going“ or something like that.

I say, „I haven’t got a pitch going or anything like that.“ Don’t let them them put it in that line. „It is just the fact that you have got to have something around that doesn’t function at all.“ And I always throw this stuff up. And they start looking at rather peculiarly. You say, „Well, it doesn’t work! It really doesn’t. There’s no use getting upset about it; it doesn’t.“

And the guys say, „Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Bad stuff.“

So I advice to you very well that line of tactic because you’ll knock a lot of guys in the head.

Once in a while when you feel yourself being trapped, remember that chart and just reverse the vector on somebody; it works really every time, even if you don’t see the reaction instantly.

Let’s take a break.

ABOUT SCIENTOLOGY

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