View source for Moral Codes- What is a Withhold (SHSBC 611004)

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

'''Date:''' 4 October 1961

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

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Okay. And this is the 4th – 4th of October. By the way, Special Briefing Course, Saint Hill.

If I can remember all this, I’ll give you the whole rundown on overt-withhold and how it got that way and then you will be much smarter cookies. I mean that. If I can remember all the put-together, how it goes together.

Because, let me tell you, it’s complicated – very, very complicated. Told you some time ago, this is very apropos to a Class II Auditor; this is part of Class II Auditor skills. This should be known and known very well.

This should be understood. And if you’re ever going to make anything out of a Security Check, if you’re ever going to get any advances with a Security Check, you’ll have to know this sort of thing. It is not enough to be able to sit there and say, “Well, have you ever raped anybody?

No? Well, have you ever raped anybody? Good.

Have you ever raped anybody? Good. Have you ever raped anybody?

Good.” Keeping TR 0 in, of course. That has very little to do with Security Checking. Security Checking is not a repetitive command.

You ask the question, you get the answer and you get off the withhold. But what’s a withhold? What is a withhold?

Well, you’ll just about to find out. And it’s a good thing, too, because I’m saving your bacon in the nick of time. I come in here, I find Mary Sue tearing your scalps off on the subject of it, and what have you been up to?

Of course, she must have found somebody auditing on this basis: “Well, have you ever done anything to a fellow staff member?” “Well, yes. I heard that Joe went out with Bessie.” Oh, no! Now, your first order of business as an auditor is to get an answer to the auditing command.

And will you tell me how that is an answer to an auditing command? “What have you done?” “I heard that…” He hasn’t done anything! How can it possibly be a withhold? I’d put another question: “Have you ever ruined people maliciously by gossip?”  MORAL CODES: 2  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD Clang, clang, clang! “Yes.” Correct, they have.

Do you know people will make up withholds just to get other people in trouble? And you’re going to sit there and let them do it? And you’re going to hear people saying things – people that have heard things about people who heard things and they understood that some- thing and they knew that so-and-so – and you let them get this off as a withhold?

Well, what auditing time are you wasting Well, you’re wasting your own time and you’re wasting the pc’s time. And basically you have demonstrated that you don’t know what a withhold is, but that is excusable up to this moment. One hour and a half from now it begins to be a crime.

See, it’s not a crime for the next hour and a half, but an hour and a half from now, the cat will be out of the bag. Only in this particular instance, it is a rather big cat, about leopard size, that is leaping out of a rather big bag, because this is one of these jackpots that we hit every once in a while in Scientology. You know, you pull the lever expecting to get out a couple of quarters, and florins, shillings, sixpences, so forth, cascade out on the floor for a half an hour.

I mean, that’s the sort of a thing which has just occurred here. And those of you who haven’t been to Las Vegas can ask those who have what I meant. What’s a withhold?

What’s an overt act? It’s important to know these things. Mr.

Doakes sits down in the auditing chair – because you, of course, being a pc, don’t pay much attention to auditing – he sits there and he says to you, he says, “Well, I have robbed banks – uh – murdered women – uh – strangled babies – uh – embezzled it, yes. I – uh – ruined marriages, I did this and I did that,” and you don’t get a single knock on the nee- dle. Oh, you say, this person is not security checkable.

Aha! But from this moment on you’re going to see that there is no such thing as a non security checkable person. Because you’re going to say that this pc you had is not capable of registering on the meter, because obviously these are tremendous things.

They’re social transgressions against your code of sociality to a point where, God almighty, he should be shot, put in a straitjacket, given a pill by a medical doctor – most horrible things happen to him. Why? Because, look, he’s robbed banks and murdered women and so forth and you don’t get a single knock on the E-Meter.

You say, “Well, the man is conscienceless. Therefore he has no withholds.” Aha, and that’s right – against your moral code, he has no withholds, because they were not transgres- sions to him. Now, your task in doing a Security Check is to get off withholds.

But what is a with- hold? What is a withhold? Now, you could say grandly, “It is what the preclear is withhold- ing.” You could say, as we have been saying about an overt act, “What is an overt act?

An overt act is what the thetan thinks is an overt act. Therefore, if I do not think I have committed  MORAL CODES: 3  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD an overt act as I strangle this person or that,” you see, “then I have not committed an overt act,” you see? No, those are not adequate replies, and those are not adequate definitions, and those are not adequate answers, and they do not add up to useful, workable definitions in the field of auditing I think you will agree with me that you, yourself, have been puzzled about this.

How is it that one person gives you some kind of a stuff and it’s not a withhold, and yet says, “Well, I – I looked down the road.” you know, it’s clang! You know, you got clang! And you say, “What did you do?

What is that?” “Well, I looked down the road,” and it cleared. And you say, “Well, what kind of a withhold could this be?” you know? “There must be more to it.” And of course you immediately exceed your function as an auditor, which is to clear the meter. If “looking down the road” cleared the meter, that was a withhold.

Now, what puzzles you is that you’re fixed on a moral code, or lack of one, which is yours, circa now. And you consider that the pc that you are security checking only has with- holds if they are transgressions against the moral code which you consider a moral code – now. And therefore you just make fantastic numbers of mistakes.

See what I’m talking about? All right. Now, let’s take this criminal.

Aha, this criminal. And we’ve got him on the meter, you know, and we say, “Well, have you ever –?” You know what a criminal should be security checked at: “Have you ever robbed a bank?” Clang! You see, you would think, boy, that’s going to go clang!

You know, because we know he’s robbed a bank. He’s actually been in Joliet, and Columbia University and other prisons – obviously he has. And you get not even a twitch of the needle.

And he looks at you blandly and says, “Yes, I have robbed banks.” Well, you see, what is astounding you at that point? There’s only one thing that is making you astonished: is that he has said something that is a transgression against what you think is his moral code, you see? And therefore you go on security checking him against your moral code, and that isn’t the code he lives by.

And he is not free of withholds. He has tre- mendous numbers of withholds, but only against the moral code he lives by. Did you ever hear the moral code of a criminal? “Thou must not squeal to the cops.” “Thou must not peach.” You could write up a long one all about how “after you’ve robbed the bank you must equally share, except if somebody didn’t help you rob the bank very much, and then you should cut his throat.” “Not to kill a cop,” could be against that moral code in some societies.

So that you ask the question from the bearing of your current moral code, and you say, “Have you ever killed a policeman?” And there’s no fall. You’re checking on the wrong moral code. You’re checking a pc who has a different moral code.

MORAL CODES: 4  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD The question should be, “Have you ever had an opportunity to kill a policeman and failed to do 80?” Clang! See, it’s against his moral code not to kill a cop. Other criminals wouldn’t speak to him.

Do you follow this? In a prison, you’d have to security check along these lines: “Have you ever failed to keep a guard in the dark as to what was going on?” See? “Have you ever cooperated with prison authorities?” “Have you ever told the truth to any official?” “Have you ever spoken to a screw kindly?” Because it’s against the moral code of the prisoners and they have their own moral code. You can say, “all PCs have withholds,” but these withholds are not necessarily against your moral code.

So we add to it; “all PCs have had moral codes against which they have transgressed.” And when you locate the moral code against which they have transgressed, you will then get off the withholds of the case and only then will you get off the withholds of the case – only then. A withhold, then, is an unspoken, unannounced transgression against a moral code by which the person was bound. Now, how many moral codes are there?

How many moral codes have there been? I’d say circa right now, there is probably a different moral code for every group, each one, large or small, in every city, county, country, continent of Earth. There’s probably five hundred of them for every language there is on this planet and there are fifty thousand languages on this planet.

I’ll give you a moral code question to a Zulu: “Has anything ever been lying around loose that you didn’t steal?” Clang! “Who didn’t you tell that to?” “I didn’t tell my father. I wouldn’t dare. He would beat me.” Because it’s moral for a Zulu to steal.

Interesting, isn’t it? So not stealing is his withhold, and you think his stealing would be his withhold. So you ask for a stealing withhold and you don’t get any response and you should have been asking for a not-stealing withhold.

Therefore it is incumbent upon the auditor to have some idea of moral codes. What’s a moral code? We’ll get into that in a moment.

But how many more moral codes do you think there have been? Now look, if circa right now there are possibly a hundred or five hundred of them for every language on Earth – let’s be moderate about it – and there are fifty thousand languages on Earth, that gives you quite a few right here in present time, right? All right, let’s go back on the track.

How many moral codes do you think there have been on the whole track in the last two-hundred trillion years? How many moral codes do you think there have been? It is some unimaginable number.

You could start up in the corner of this wall and start writ- ing – after you put down one, then just start writing zeros in tiny microscopic writing clear from that side of the wall, clear to the other side of the wall; go back to the beginning, write it  MORAL CODES: 5  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD all the way across again and then when you’ve filled the whole wall down to the bottom, then you put it twenty-first power. That would be quite a number. That would be quite a number.

Now, that is an awful lot of moral codes. So, what’s the anatomy of this? What is a moral code?

It is that series of agreements to which a person has subscribed to guarantee the survival of a group. And that is what a moral code is. It’s that series of agreements to which a person has subscribed to guarantee the sur- vival of a group.

That’s what it is. All right, I’ll tell you an old short story. This is the most vignette sort of a thing.

There was a couple of fellows and they heard there was a buried treasure. A galleon had gone up on a reef down in the South Pacific or down in the Caribbean. And they heard this galleon had gone up on a reef and that there were – just before it sank they threw a tremendous amount of gold into its bronze guns, hoping they could come back for it later and put the tampions on the guns.

And the galleon sank and these great, belled cannon were still down there filled with gold. So a couple of men got together and they picked up a native boy and they – as a crew – and they sailed away and they dived and dived and dived and dived for this old galleon’s can- non. They had agreed a hundred percent what they would do with the gold.

They had agreed completely what they would do with the gold. They would split it equally and the shares would remain on board the ship until they were taken to a certain point and at that point a banker and trucks would come down to pick it up and it would be transported properly to Switzerland. And they had agreed utterly and completely; they knew exactly what to do.

And they had agreed also not to squander it and not go getting drunk and not go doing this and not go doing that, until it was all safely cared for and they were back in their own country. They’d agreed what to do about the bills of their trip. They had it all taped.

Well, they found a couple of cannon, but they reached their arms down the muzzles of the cannon and they couldn’t find any tampion. And they went ashore after many days – their supplies were running out, everything was going to hell. And the supplies were running out and what were they going to do?

They hadn’t found any gold. Well, they had an agreement for everything except failure. They had no agreement as to what they were going to do if they failed, so they began to wrangle about it after the fact.

And they got more and more wranglous and more and more wranglous and finally one of them picked up a dirk and sank it in the other one and the other one simultaneously lopped off the other fellow’s arm with a sword. And they had an awful time because they didn’t have any agreement at all what to do in case of failure. And about that time, as one of the fellows was dying, he looked back at the boat and these guns that they had already hauled up on deck, the backs had evidently fallen out of  MORAL CODES: 6  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD them, being rolled around by the native boy and the native boy was throwing handfuls of gold into the sea.

But they had no agreement on failure. And you’ll find out that man has learned down the track, in weird ways, that where he has not agreed upon codes of conduct or what is proper in eventualities – he has agreed – where he has agreed, he survives, and where he has not agreed, he doesn’t survive. And so, people, when they get together, always draw up a long, large series of agreements on what is moral (that is, what will be contributive to survival) and what is immoral (what will be destructive of survival).

Now, moral, by these definitions, are those things which are considered to be, at any given time, survival characteristics. A survival action is a moral action. And those things are considered immoral which are considered contrasurvival.

But remember, this is for any group in any special circumstance. And here you have a group of two men going out to find gold or a whole nation being formed after the conquest of the land from some other race. It doesn’t matter what the size of the group is: They enter into certain agreements.

Now, the longevity of the agreement doesn’t have much to do with it. It could be an agreement for a day, an agreement for a month or an agreement for the next five hundred years. There’s a Constitution in the United States that is an agreement.

It was an agreement made by thirteen states as to how they would conduct their affairs. Wherever that Constitution has been breached, the country is now in trouble. There mustn’t be any income tax, the first one said.

Well, they managed to muck that up and they managed to muck up another one and another point and another point and another point. And each time they have busted up the agreement, why, they’re in trouble. Well, why are they in trouble?

Well, that’s because there aren’t any other agreements than the basic agreement. You don’t have modified agreements. If the agreement didn’t exist in the first place, you can’t keep patching it up and expect any great, lasting success.

But what I have just said is to some degree a matter of opinion, because moral codes either leap full- armed from the brass tablets of Moses as he walks down from the rain and the mist saying, “Thou shalt not sell pork to thy neighbor. Sell it to a stranger if it is tainted.” You didn’t know that was one of the Commandments, did you? But I’ve mentioned it before that it happens to be there.

There are about 162 of the Ten Commandments. And they contain all sorts of interesting bric-a-brac. But that is just a moral code.

Now, perhaps that was fine, and everybody got along fine with these first 162 precepts or principles and so forth and then somebody came along with a pitch and put a big curve into the line and altered the agreements and redefined it all, you see? And after a while nobody knew what was moral, so it got to be a confusion. And then everybody tried to enforce what  MORAL CODES: 7  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD was moral and what wasn’t moral, but nobody could make up his mind.

And the confusion got greater and greater, and then people departed from the group and dispersed. And these people, dispersing, entered into other moral groups and new moral codes were formed, which they then followed, more or less. And eventually those moral codes, of course, got diluted and messed up.

And time marched on and what did we then find? All kinds of confusion would then enter in to what was moral and what wasn’t moral. And the next thing you know, somebody would jump up and a group would get together and they would agree on a brand-new moral code, you see?

And then that moral code would get all messed up somehow or another, and people would offend against it somehow and then that group would disintegrate – because, of course, its moral agreement disintegrates, why, it – the group disintegrates. And then that confusion is succeeded a little later on the track by these various group members, now members of other groups, forming up new moral codes which go into disintegration. You see?

So you’ve got a cycle there. And the cycle of action of civilizations is simply this cy- cle of action: It is an agreement on optimum conduct; a disintegration of agreement and opti- mum conduct; a disbanding of the group; a formation of a new group with the agreement on – new agreement on – optimum conduct; a disintegration of that agreement; the dispersal of the group; the formation of a new group. Do you see the cycle?

Now, that’s the cycle of civiliza- tion. And that’s the cycle of action. The create-survive-destroy, in this particular instance, is, of course, they create a series of agreements and conducts of what is right and what is wrong They establish what is right and what is wrong, what is moral, what is immoral, what is survival, what is nonsurvival.

They establish this thing. That is what is created. And then this disintegrates by transgres- sions.

And these transgressions – unspoken, but nevertheless transgressions – by each group member gradually mount up to a disintegration. And the person who transgresses the most, quite commonly can be the person who is up there screaming the loudest that the others must follow the moral code. You look at the various Calvinist preachers and things of this character.

Man, those fellows had a ball. Ten million withholds per preacher, you see, and they were screaming to the rooftops how every- body must follow the code. Of course, you get a disintegration after a point like that.

You see how this thing goes? So your “survive,” of course, is as long as the codes or agreements continue in action. And then your “destroy” or your destructive confusion, of course, is what occurs when everybody has withholds, when everybody is going the other way to, token payment to the code but actually no adherence to it; everybody has withholds from everybody else concerning it.

The group, of course, disintegrates on the basis that when you have overts, you have separation, individuation. MORAL CODES: 8  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD So the group disintegrates and you go into a new cycle now. It stays – sometimes they stay disintegrated for a year, sometimes for hundreds of years.

There are countries on this planet right now whose moral codes have disintegrated, who haven’t yet formed a new one. Several Mediterranean countries have done this right this minute. They really don’t have a new moral code; their old one is pretty doggone shot.

The white man, with “life, liberty and equality” as spread by Tom Jefferson and so forth, now, down in Africa, is experiencing the agony of having his moral codes, as natives, totally destroyed, completely. And everybody says, “Isn’t this wonderful! Isn’t this marvel- ous!

Look, all we’re doing for these natives,” you see, and the natives are getting sicker and sicker and falling apart and they can’t handle themselves or anything else. And everybody says, “Isn’t it wonderful what we’re doing Look, we’re giving them washing machines. Of course, they don’t have any electric power in their house, but we’re giving them washing ma- chines!

And look at the marvelous things we’re doing here.” Well, the marvelous thing they’re doing, of course, is disintegrating the moral code of the tribe or the tribal unit and bringing about a total disintegration of the individuals con- cerned with it. Now, there is your general hue; there is the general state of affairs with regard to a cy- cle of action of civilization. Do you see how that went?

You see how it goes? All right. You in Scientology are involved right this minute in a certain mores.

There is a certain moral code of one kind or another. Actually, it isn’t completely formed yet. It is still in a state of formation.

But one of the reasons why you find it difficult to process another Scientologist is not that his case is worse, but because you, when you flub, transgress against the moral code of “Thou shalt be a good auditor.” That’s it. And because you are subscribing to a code of conduct that is survival, therefore, when you have overts against that code of conduct, it is the code of conduct by which you are auditing and progressing in life. So naturally, these things, then, take paramount importance in Security Checks.

The last two pages of the Form 3, all of Form 6, when straightened out, will do more for a long-term Scientologist than anything else. Why? It’s not that he’s – why, he’s been doing all these things in the name of helping people. “Well, yes,” you say. “Well, he has a perfect right to go nattering around about, ‘Well, Ron has changed his mind again!”’ You know?

You think he has a perfect right to. Well, I personally believe he has a perfect right to, don’t you see? I’m not upset by this in any way.

I’ve been shellacked by experts, you know? And I can stand up to a lot more hur- ricane than somebody sitting back in a corner nattering slightly about something or other. “Oh, well, these bulletins aren’t in order, you know? And Ron should have gotten these bulle- tins in order,” you know?

MORAL CODES: 9  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD All right. But it just so happens, by the principles of the thing, that the very fact that he is thinking them is a transgression against something he apparently has agreed to. All right, the transgression is such that it holds his case up.

It is the current moral code, then, which is the most important to the case. It is the code by which the person is now living which has dominance over all other codes. So we get a practicing Scientologist and so on and the first thing that we’ve got to do with him is straighten out his transgressions against the group agreement: “Thou shalt be a good auditor.” “Thou shalt not flub.” “Thou shalt pronounce thy commands properly.” Get the idea?

And “Thou shan’t get Scientology in trouble.” You know? This kind of thing. Whatever these codes add up to, they are what they are, don’t you see?

They aren’t so much what I say they are, they just are what they are. They’re what you’re forming up. All right.

Transgressions against those things, then, tend to make you feel like an out- sider from the group of Scientologists, and to that degree you can receive no benefit from Sci- entology, don’t you see? It’s very simple. It is not that the action is monstrous; it is the degree that the action removes the person from his group.

So that is the definition of a transgression. This has very little to do with our own moral code, only that we just, oddly enough, are suddenly – suddenly look and see what we’re doing, you know? I mean, here we are, we’re forming up a new series of agreements.

They’re not all completely formed yet, not by a long ways. But there they are. They’re a new series of agreements.

They’re a way of life. There’s “this is survival” and “that isn’t survival.” The fact that these things are – resolve life and take dominance and command over so many other moral codes and can actually run out now and change all other moral codes, of course makes this a fantastically powerful code by which we’re operating. I’m not now talking about the written Code of a Scientologist.

I am talking about what you think a Scientologist should do and should not do – what you think he should do or not do, see? Not what I think he should do or not do. That is basically the moral code which is being formed up here.

Well, it’s a very strong one because it has dominance over all other moral codes. You think it should be this way and it should be that way or it shouldn’t be this way and it shouldn’t be that way. And it all is added up to you and adjudicated on what you consider survival and what’s not considered survival.

And of course we’re in a position where we’re dominant other [over] all other activities. But let’s not worry about that for a moment. That has very small bearing on this particular lecture.

MORAL CODES: 10  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD What I’m talking about is, what is a moral code? Well, a moral code is a series of agreements to which members of the group have subscribed to promote their survival. Now, that is a moral code.

And their transgressions are the degree that they have separated themselves from free communication with the remainder of the group. That is a transgression: the degree that a per- son has separated himself from free communication with a group. And that’s all a transgres- sion is.

Now, you say, “Well, a transgression – after all, he murders a member of the group. That’s certainly a wilder transgression than this…” Well, I don’t know. He murders a member of the group and so they burn him at the stake or something of the sort or assign him to being skewered with E-Meter cans in the public square.

Something goes on. It actually is not much of a transgression. That is sort of a livingness and groups do get enturbulated one way or the other.

But get this one: Murdering a member of the group and hiding his body and never mentioning it to the rest of the group – oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Now he is pretending to be part of the group while no longer being part of the group and it is out of that sort of thing that you get the disintegration. So, he murdered a member of the group and everybody found out about it and they all knew him.

They saw him do it, and they skewered him with E-Meter cans in the middle of the square and told him, “Go thou and never get audited again, you dog” And so he went out and picked up another body And one day an auditor runs into it in session and runs it out, see? But he actually has not been separated from the group. The only person who can sepa- rate one from a group is himself, and the only mechanism he can do it by is withholding He withholds transgressions against the moral code of the group from the other members of the group and therefore he individuates from the group and the group therefore disintegrates.

This should be very simple; this is very well taped. Now, how does this all come about in the first place? What are – are there any other mechanisms back of this?

Yes, there is the mechanism of co-action, the mechanism of co- action. The last time you were dancing with somebody you were indulging in a co-action. They were moving and you were moving and so forth.

The last time you had a fight with somebody, you were in a co-action; yes, you were in violent disagreement with their actions and they were in violent disagreement with your action, but unfortunately, underneath all this, you were both fighting. Now, I’ll give you an example of a co-action of magnitude, if you will forgive the slight excursion into maritime affairs. I’ll tell you anecdotes about the Phoenician navy pretty  MORAL CODES: 11  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD soon, but right now I can only tell you anecdotes about current ones that you would be inter- ested in.

A ship is no good until it has braved some tremendous danger or indulged in combat. The crew is no good and the ship just isn’t integrated. There’s nothing to it.

You take these harbor launches that everybody goes home to the wife every night, and they come aboard, and so forth. Well, they fall apart. There is no group there to amount to anything.

But a ship, in essence, is a fairly isolated group and therefore gives us a good example. And you recruit everybody up and you’ve got all the proper number of ratings and men and they’re all at their proper stations and they’re all in the proper slots and they’ve all been trained for their duties – and nothing works. It’s so interesting.

Nothing works. There is no more nightmarish nightmare than putting a ship in commission with a new crew. For the first month or two or three months even, you are in a position where you don’t know whether the guns are going to fall off or the keel is going to suddenly wind up down the stack.

You just don’t know. The supplies never seem to get aboard and the fuel never seems to flow freely to the engines or burners. Nothing seems to ever happen in the ship.

It just – nothing happens! Ex- cept a sort of a confusion. Some kind of a weird confusion goes on.

And then one fine day this ship is out and it meets a great storm. And this storm is battering away at force 8, 9, 10 and huge, raging seas are racing on every side of it and every man is braced, and down in the engine room they’re trying to keep the screws turning over somehow or another, and the water in the bilges are sloshing all around and somebody forgot to close a seacock. And the next thing you know, they’re all being punished for their omis- sions.

And somehow or another they hold the ship together. Somehow or another they hold the ship together. And then the storm abates.

And for some peculiar reason we now have a ship. This is a noticed fact. I mean, a lot of people who have gone to sea, and so forth, could tell you this fact.

It is true of a flight group. It is true of a military company. You never really see any organization hang together at all until it has been bruised, heavily and hard, and then you will see an organization hang together.

The reason business organizations is so hard to hold together as groups, and there are so many transgressions against their codes of operation, is centered totally upon the fact that they never get mauled. The boss gets mauled and the accountant gets mauled and somebody  MORAL CODES: 12  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD else gets mauled, but nobody ever takes the whole building and mauls it. There is no mutual danger to amount to anything.

One could be created. Instead of the manager taking it all on his back every time somebody writes him a nasty letter, if he got the staff together and read it to them and they had a chance to find out what was going on and discover what was under attack here or what wasn’t under attack here, you might get a cohesed group and organization. Otherwise, no.

What is this? They have experienced the necessity to survive, and that is the whole summation of it. A group becomes a group when it has experienced mutually the necessity to survive.

And that then makes a very strong group. A ship going into action for the first time goes into it as a disintegrated series of agreements. It has no moral code, it has nothing Why?

Because nobody sees any necessity at all to survive. And then they take a rare shellacking. They’ve left a seacock open and they forgot to test out the ammunition hoist and a lot of other things weren’t done on this ship.

And all those sins start to catch them out. And they suddenly say, “We’ve got to survive around here and we had better put it into high gear.” And when they come out the other end, they’re all friends, oddly enough. They’ve gone through a mutual experience of some magnitude and they’re friends.

And their friendship for one another expresses it in itself – of a knitted group which has its own mores. You’ll find out that every ship which has been long together with itself under any kind of – well, just mediocre, the most medi – it isn’t leadership that makes a ship, it’s lack of in- terference by leadership that makes a ship. And you’ll find out that these boys will have de- veloped a whole civilization of their own.

They have their own jokes. You’ll be walking down the deck of a strange ship that is lying in some harbor someplace and somebody will say, all of a sudden – turn around and he’ll say (he’ll look at another little boat in the water or some- thing like that) and he’ll say, “Ten feet tall.” And everybody – every member of the ship’s company that is near him – will laugh like mad, you see? “What – ten?” You’re an outsider. You don’t know what he was talking about.

Well, something has happened on the ship or somebody got razzledazzled into some peculiar way and it somehow or another centers around this joke, “ten feet tall,” and every- body knows this joke, but the outsider doesn’t. Well, that’s as much a part of their civilization as: all the ship’s members know that when you go down a certain companionway and open a certain watertight door, you’d better for sure get your fingers the hell out of the road because it inevitably slams back. They all know that, but you’re a stranger and you don’t know that, so you get your fingers caught.

But they have a whole technology, and it’s just a group of men running one piece of machinery. MORAL CODES: 13  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD An oil rig, running out in the middle of Texas someplace or standing out on a Texas tower in the Gulf, something like this – the crews attached to that thing, after they’ve gone through certain experiences and so forth, cohese and become a group. And they have certain morals that are different.

It runs different, place to place. But there’s a certain pattern runs through it all. And the basic thing is you mustn’t injure the survival of a fellow group mem- ber – common denominator of a transgression.

And that’s also, by the way, the common de- nominator of the code in the first place: You mustn’t injure the survival of a certain group member. Therefore, a manager has a tendency to be far more isolated from a group, or the leader of a group has a tendency to be far more isolated from the group, than group members. Why?

Because he every now and then does injure the survival characteristics of a group member. No matter if he does it reluctantly, every now and then, on every side of him, he will find members of the group are absolutely insisting that Member X be expelled. Member X’s transgressions, in the cumulative sense, have gotten so antipathetic to other group members that they find that it is impossible to survive with Member X around.

And who do they turn it over to? Well, now, the leader of the group is not particularly aware of the transgressions of Member X because he doesn’t live the same life as the rest of the group. He’s a little bit iso- lated, don’t you see?

So he does an independent overt without a motivator. He dismisses the group member. He says, “Thou shalt be shot.

Thou shalt be turned out to starve,” or some- thing. So he tends to get all manner of overts against group members. And then he seldom tells anybody else in the group what exactly happened to Member X, because he thinks it’d be too enturbulative.

He never posts it on the bulletin board or something like this. “For the sev- enth consecutive time, Member X was found eating crackers in somebody else’s bed and therefore is no longer amongst us, by popular demand.” He never does anything like this, you see? He operates sort of on a constant withhold. And he can actually drive himself straight out of his own group.

It’s quite interesting. Ah, you get this in the isolation of command and so forth. Now, this is so true that man has at length accepted the idea of isolation of command as a normal course of human events.

It’s not necessarily normal at all. But you see, there is one of your breakdowns. Now, leadership is one of the frailties of a group, while at the same time being one of its greatest strengths.

So that you change the leadership of a group, you can change, to a marked degree, some of the characteristics of the group. But if you change the group over to a leader who then violates or changes all the mores of the group, ahh, well, we’ve got lots of trouble now. We’ve got lots of trouble.

MORAL CODES: 14  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD I have a case in point: There was a very successful company. You heard of Nick Carter and Diamond Dick and all the rest of these old pocketbooks – in their day, the comic books of the 1890s. Well, those were all published by a company known as Street & Smith.

And it had become very, very wealthy over a long period of time, and it had its mores. Boy, did that place have mores. It owned a whole square block – imagine it – in the middle of New York City, where a square foot is worth about a hundred thousand dollars.

And it owned a whole, huge square- block building about four stories high that was the clammiest, most fallen-apart old building you ever heard of, and it had printing presses in it. And the building was so shaky that when these enormous presses started to roar, the whole building shook. You could hardly hold the inkwell on the desk, you know, up in the executive offices, and so forth.

And they had – they had just gone on for years. They had unpublished manuscripts of O. Henry.

They had all kinds of things. I went into their vaults one day, and there were the originals of Ned Buntline, you know, and Annie Oakley and all of this kind of stuff. Fantastic.

And there were certain codes by which you couldn’t speak to people and could speak to people and certain precedences by which you went to lunch and did this and did that. And there were promotion precedences in every place and it was a very hidebound old outfit. Well, after all, it had been in existence for the better part of a half a century.

And all of a sudden young Mr. Smith inherited it on the basis of death dues, you see? And he had a wife.

And his wife believed that it was a nasty thing to publish things like that. Her friends wouldn’t like it. But they would like such things as fancy women’s magazines.

And so Mr. Smith Americanized himself to the degree of saluting the wife and saying, “Yes, sir.” And at the time he took over – at the time he took over – there was a seven- million-dollar sinking fund in that company. Just – just the sinking fund!

There were no strings attached to it. There were nothing It just sat there and made money. Everything made money in all directions.

He took their high-power presses, which could spit out more dime novels and maga- zines than any other high-power press in America and sold it to his nearest competitor. And then they could spit out more magazines than Street & Smith. And when he got through, he owned Mademoiselle, all on the cuff.

And the company was gone and the building was gone and everything was gone. And that is – it’s things like that, you see, which give rise and credence and get loyalty devoted to such things as socialism, communism, things of this character. Because they recognize that the leader of a group is the most capable of destroying the group.

The group might survive all sorts of storms and financial crises and crashes, but all one – well, just one thing has to happen, you see? The leader of the group goes bad, marries  MORAL CODES: 15  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD the wrong girl, who decides that her friends won’t speak to her quite well enough if she is connected with printing blood-and-thunder magazines, don’t you see? I don’t know what happened to all of that, but the staff dispersed all over the place.

And you would see these people afterwards, and they’d be sitting around in a sort of a de- graded fashion, you know? They were old Street & Smith people. They were never anything else.

They were not new popular-publications people, you see? They were old Street & Smith people, because it was one of the oldest publication groups in America. Now, you can answer the question, “Why is it that the old soldier is always degraded?” Just hire an old soldier someday to mow the front lawn.

You usually will have had it. They have a very bad employment reputation, old soldiers. Now, I’m talking about old soldiers: the sixteen-year man, the twenty-year man, the thirty-year man.

And you say at once, “Well, the army must have done something horrible to this fel- low to bring about a total disintegration of his personality and therefore the army is very bad training and therefore the army is degrading and therefore the military is very bad.” And you can get a whole nation believing the military is very bad because every product of the military which they see, after the fellow has spent ten, sixteen, twenty, thirty years in the military, is the guy is walking around in a fog, you know? He’s walking around in a daze of some kind or another or he takes to drink or he’s unreliable and he won’t do his job. And they see this sort of thing, so they say the military must be very bad.

No, they’re looking at another phenomenon. It is the phenomenon of a group member who is no longer part of the group. That’s the phenomenon they’re looking at.

He’s a perfectly good soldier, but he has no group. How can he go on being a perfectly good soldier? There’s no mores.

Any mores that he has – “Thou shalt not tell the sergeant,” you know? “Thou shalt sneak in after hours when thou dost not have a pass.” “Thou shalt raise hell with the mess sergeant.” “Thou shalt scrounge anything that isn’t nailed down, providing – providing it doth not belong to thine own company.” Tremendous mores, various kinds, you know? “Thou shalt raise hell with second lieutenants but be respectful to captains.” All these kinds of things. Well, this is the moral code by which he is lying. And of course he’s living by a moral code and he has no group connected with it anymore; he is degraded.

Is he degraded, actually, because he had overts against the army and his moral code? No. No.

He is merely degraded because of this interesting phenomenon, which you must pay some attention to: If a person is no longer a member of the group, he feels automatically that he must have had overts against it and was driven out of it. Through no fault of his own, this group has ceased to exist or he is no longer a member of it. Just the fact that he is no longer a member of the group makes him automatically – flick – believe that he must have had overts against the group.

MORAL CODES: 16  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD You see, this is the reverse phenomenon. Now, you run into this every once in a while. As a matter of fact, you run into it rather constantly.

Because the punishment or the result exists, people then believe the crime must have existed. Got the idea? You’ll see every once in a while some fellow whose wife has left him.

And he will then believe that he must have been mean to her or that he is not a good family man. Maybe it had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Maybe there was a typhoid epidemic in the area and then she died.

But he gets this other sensation, you know? The other sensation is he’s no longer a part of the group, therefore he must have offended. And you’ll find people nattering and chattering about this.

One notable example, there was one girl I knew that – whose father died in an auto- mobile accident exactly two thousand miles away and she sat around all the time trying to figure out how she killed her father. How had she killed her father? Well, was it because she didn’t answer his telephone call when he put a telephone call through to her?

Was it because she didn’t phone at the time of this? Was it because of this? Was it because of that?

Was it because she had gone to this other city in the first place? Now, if she hadn’t gone to the other city – and so forth. Well, all of this nattering, and that whole thing which the psychiatrist – ooh, this just drives the psychiatrist mad.

He worries about this more than anything else. He sits up all night sometimes worrying about this one. He will – if he finds this in a patient, he sits there and the perspiration just drips all over his white, somewhat smudged-edged weskit.

The person thinks he killed his father. And he’ll just do everything he can possibly do, you see, to try to con- vince this patient that he didn’t kill his father. And he doesn’t know the mechanism connected with it, and actually we didn’t either until just now, in the last few days here.

Well, his father’s gone, so therefore he must have offended against a group called “son-father” or “daughter-father.” See, that is a group. Daughter-father: must have offended against it because he’s no longer a member of the group. And you might say this is the com- mon denominator of people’s degraded feelings.

They are no longer a member of the group. So you will very often be processing somebody who feels that he had tremendous overts – this is not in the majority – but you’ll feel this is somebody who had tremendous overts against a group, and you won’t be able to find them. And you won’t even be able to – you won’t be able to locate them on the meter, which is what I mean.

No, the group is gone and he – it’s not any longer there, and he’s no longer with the group, so he figures it out, you see, that having suffered the final punishment for transgressing against the group, then he must have transgressed against the group. And what’s worrying him is to try to figure out how he transgressed against the group rather than simply face the fact that he’s no longer a mem- ber of the group. You got the idea?

MORAL CODES: 17  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD An awful lot of people finished up World War II, or the Korean War, feeling degraded because they were separated from their military units. Well, they were separated from their military units. Well, if they’d gone through a lot of cosurvival motion, see – if they’d gone through a lot of motion with other fellows in an effort to survive – then it cohesed the group.

And of course, how did they leave the group? Well, they just left the group by being de- mobbed, that’s all. (Naval terminology: they were “separated from service.”) Well, that was some action of some character in some personnel division someplace. And the fellow afterwards wonders if he shouldn’t have been nicer to the squadron, you know, and he shouldn’t have been nicer to the company or if he shouldn’t have been better to those people and what did he do?

And he’ll sit around and grieve, actually, about the horrible things that he did do to these fellows. Well, he’s integrating the whole thing against the fact that because he’s no longer a member of the group, then he must have transgressed against the group. You see?

In other words, he does an identification of the punishment with the action. See, it’s – only the action is necessary. Now, what actions are actually necessary to cohese a group?

Co-action in the direction of survival. If you have co-action in the direction of survival, with two or more people, you inevitably have a mores. It’s tiny and it’s not very explicit, but it’s a mores.

And it has to do with two people who went against many survival – antisurvival forces. They coacted against antipathetic forces, so therefore they are a group. And now one of the people dies or departs and we have the other person then believing he must have transgressed against the other person.

And sure enough, he does have transgres- sions and you’ll find out he’s very, very happy to find out and get off his withholds and trans- gressions against the other thing and it will blow at that time. But it’s blowing for another reason. The reason you think it is blowing is because you’ve gotten off these little, petty, two- bit withholds, you know?

No, no, he was very happy to have found he really did merit no longer being a member of the group. You got the difference? See, he figures, “Well, it was justified.

They were right, throwing me out, because look, I did have some withholds, see? I did have some of these withheld transgressions. So therefore, obviously, there it is.” See, happy as a clam, you know?

So he’s willing to be separated from the group. Up to that time it’s unknown, it’s un- explained. Did he have transgressions against the group or didn’t he have transgressions against the group?

And the only evidence he has – he’s no longer a member of the group, so he must have transgressed against the group. That’s what the equation is. If the fellow is no longer a member of the group then he must have had action against the group.

MORAL CODES: 18  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD You’ll find out that the fellow who has a dogfight over France with a German pilot, let’s say, and they go round and round and round and round and they have this hell of a dog- fight and so forth, and they finally break it off and go home – do you know, there’s always a little bit of an oddity between the two of them, so on. You know, they – every once in a while after a war, a couple of pilots who have had aerial duels and so forth, will meet. And they meet like old pals, man.

That is the group. But you see, just to that degree, they formed a group. Well, what kind of a group was it?

It was a group of tremendous co-action – con- trasurvival. But each one is trying so forcefully to survive that their action is in agreement. It’s an agreed-upon action: a dance of death in the sky.

They’re both firing at each other, aren’t they? They’re both flying airplanes, aren’t they? They’re both trying to survive, aren’t they?

They’re both in the same sky, aren’t they? They’re both in the same time period, aren’t they? Well, they know they aren’t a group.

Each one knows the other is an enemy and they know this positively and violently, that they are not a group. And so they can never explain why the dogfight hangs up. Of course, there are withholds against their own groups in there.

If one didn’t shoot the other one down, it’s actually a sort of a transgression against his own group, just to that degree. But if he has a dogfight, fails to shake – shoot the other one down and then goes home and never mentions it, now he’s actually got a transgression against his own group. You get the degree of complexity with which this mounts up.

Well, it mounts up on this basis, this basis: agreement. What is agreement? It’s two people making the same postulate stick.

Two or more people making the same postulate stick – that’s what we mean by an agreement. Two or more people making the same postulate stick – an agreement. Well now, what if they go into mutual action and their mutual action is in the direction of survival?

Oh, they’ve got the same agreements that they’re trying to make stick and now they’re going through similar actions by which they’re trying to make survival possible? Now, what have they got now? Ah, they’ve got co-action and they have a confusion of one with another.

They don’t quite differentiate their own action, so they misown other actions in their immediate vicinity. Fifteen men pulling on a rope trying to pull a seaplane out of the sea: Afterwards you say, “How much of each one’s motion was responsible for the seaplane coming out of the sea? Exactly how many ergs of your motion was part of the recovery of the seaplane?” Well, you try to break it down like that, he takes the easy course, you see?

And he says, “Well, we did it. We pulled it out of the sea.” He doesn’t differentiate how much each one did pull it out of the sea. He just says broadly, “We pulled it out of the sea.” In other words, it was fifteen men contributing unequally, some more, some less, to a line and they would contribute unequally if they were just at different positions on the line, because the  MORAL CODES: 19  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD lines get bent and twisted around things and people who are closer to bollards, you see, can’t pull as well as people who are far from them.

You get the idea? So, it’s an incalculable mathematical problem. How many ergs did each one contribute?

Well, they all solved the problem by saying, “We did it.” Oh, and they’re very happy about this – “We did it. our motion.” Now, you take some fellow who has been running an engine for an awful long time. He’s pulling water or something up a hill into a reservoir, you see? And he runs this engine and he sees the pumps running, the water going up the hill and so on.

And he runs the engine and he runs the engine and he runs the engine. Well, why, after a while, when you talk to him, does he go kind of “gurgle, gurgle,” you see? Or like these engineers that I had and so on, they start their motors.

They start their motors before they begin to talk. They say, “Wrawr, wrawr, wrawr,” and then they get to firing off and they give you the sentence. It’s quite inter- esting.

I don’t think anybody would believe that. But I’ve got Peter as a witness. He’s talked to them over the phone.

It’s quite marvelous. They start their motors and then they talk. See, they “co-action.” In other words, their action of running the motor is undifferenti- ated by them with the action of the motor.

So their action running the body and the motor’s action in running the pump – these are mutual actions. So you get co-action. Now, you can go into this on havingness of motors and you can go into it on causes of things and you can go into it in other ways, but you actually separate it best by just getting the fellow to get the idea of a mutual action with the motor.

And all of a sudden he – up to that time he’s been totally identified. His action was the motor’s actions and the motor’s actions were his actions and so they had actions. They had actions.

And if the motor conked out and all of a sudden its coil went bad, why, he goes home and has a stomachache or something like this, you know? Their mutual action is too tied in. And that is the source of an overt.

Now, let’s get around to what we’re talking about here. That is an overt act – or, that is the source of overt acts. You have mutual action with something else – and you call it a group member, a mores, a moral code – anything you want to call it – you see that, but it’s mutual action.

And then you do something cruel to that with which you have mutual action and of course you experience the somatic. And it’s just as easy as that. It isn’t any deeper than that.

That is an overt act-motivator sequence and that is its exact mechanics and that’s all there is to it. Now, you wonder why I’ve been talking about mores and groups and group action and survival and all that sort of thing Well, it just adds up to that fact. After you’ve had a tremen- dous amount of group co-action, you then embark upon a cruel action to what you have co-  MORAL CODES: 20  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD action with and you’ll get the somatic.

You must have had a cruel impulse toward co-action before you can get the somatic you administer to somebody else. You take somebody with whom we have co-action and one day, for some reason or other best known to somebody else, you accidentally break his arm. You go around afterwards nursing your own.

Why? Because your arm is his arm. And that’s how that crosses and that’s what an overt act-motivator sequence is and those are all the mechanics there are to it.

There aren’t any fancier mechanics than that. There isn’t any mechanic such as, “Well, you should be punished because you have of- fended against another member of the group.” No, that is the group dramatizing the fact I just gave you. Religionists come along, Religionists come along.

And these religionists, they tell you, “Well, do unto others as thou shalt turn thy other pig” I don’t think that’s one of the com- mandments, but it’s something like that. They get this thing reversed. In other words, they are forcing into existence something that already exists.

See, they’re saying, “Well now, you get mean, you gyp your fellow group member, and you’re really going to suffer. You’ll suffer in the long run.” Yeah, great. ‘Eighteen paternosters and three pieces of bread; that’s what it’s going to cost you or you’ll suffer from here on, you see?” They get paid for it. But actually, there is nothing there to be paid for.

A person who makes an overt act against something with which he has mutual action, of course, is incapable of differentiating what is his action and what is the other action. Fifteen men on a rope, one of them trips and butts the other one in the back and then he has a somatic in his own back, you see, because he didn’t know whether the force was his or the force was theirs, but he engaged in a cruel ac- tion. Now, all overt-motivator sequences become very pronounced when cruel actions are maliciously engaged upon while withholding.

One is really a member of the group, one is really coacting with the group, but one engages on a cruel action toward another member of the group and then tries to back out. why does he try to withhold? He tries to withhold by – just this reason: He tries to withhold because he doesn’t want the effect of the co-action. See, he tries to individuate from the group when he does a cruel act because he knows that if he does a cruel act to something he has co-action with, then, of course, he’s going to get it in the neck.

So he tries to back out. In other words, he disowns the co-action because he’s trying to get rid of the motivator he will inevitably get. So he shoots a fellow group member and having shot the fellow group member, he then seeks to withhold the fact that he has shot a fellow group member so as not to be liable to the somatics of co-action, which experience has taught him will always occur.

MORAL CODES: 21  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD And we’re just down to the basic fundamentals of nondifferentiation and identifica- tion, that is all. He identifies every group member’s action with his own action, so therefore if he is mean to a group member, he of course is liable to get it, so he tries to escape the penalty of what is woven straight into group action amongst all thetans and seeks to back out. And this will ordinarily coax him into withholding, too.

So, withhold is part of the backout. Now, if you ask him to recognize his co-action with that group member prior to his overt act, the overt act of course will blow. That’s the mechanics of it, you see?

You’ve got to get the prior action. Now, of course, the more commotion and the more action and the more withholds and the more nonsense preceded his overt act, the more the overt act is going to hang up and the more he’s going to try to withhold it. Do you follow that plainly?

That’s quite easy. In other words, he can only suffer from his overt because of former action – former co- action. He can only suffer from his overt because of former co-action.

And that co-action is the most aberrative when it is mutual survival – mutual survival. And, of course, that means a disturbed, confused area. And it also – you will spot earlier and earlier overts against fellow group members as you’re doing this, which is earlier and earlier efforts to back out.

Well, of course, he is involved in mutual survival, mutual action. He is involved with other people with mutual survival. And because he is involved with this mutual action, every time he has tried to back out of mutual action, he, of course, had sought to deny the mutuality of the action.

And he thinks he can get off the overt-motivator sequence inevitability by de- nying it, you see? If he just denies it enough, then he’s no longer part of that scene. So he in- dividuates, you see, gradually out.

And you have to knock out his individuation totally before he can walk out. That is what is the most peculiar phenomenon about it all, you see? The action he takes to escape punishment is the action which then settles in the punishment.

This is all very mechanical. There is nothing much to it. You’ll see this thing unfold.

You’ll see this thing unfold left and right. It becomes very – well, you audit a pc and you ask him for a prior confusion. Well, you could ask him for a prior survival and you’d get about the same answer.

You’re asking him for a former co-action. And of course you will find, every time you find a former co-action, it opens up the track a little bit more, so he finds a former withhold. And then you look earlier than that withhold, and of course you’ve found a former co-action again – usually a confusion, because it’s a survival action against odds, a battle of some kind or another with these two people facing the world or these ten people or this race, you see – and you find him backing out a little bit more.

And then you get a little more co-action off the case by asking him what some earlier confusion was and of course he remembers another withhold, another effort to individuate  MORAL CODES: 22  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD from the group. And these uncover just to the degree that you uncover prior confusions or prior survivals. It’s quite patent.

In other words, you’ve got to get the co-motion – if you want to use that word – the co-motion which preceded the withhold. That doesn’t mean the overt act that preceded the withhold so much as it means the co-disturbance which preceded his effort to individuate. And of course you’ll get the withhold and the motivator, just right now.

You get it right now. You ask for the co-action, and of course, that blows the mutual action he was involved in with another group member, and having blown that, you then can release the other. And it – and then he no longer withholds this fact about what he was trying to do to the group, so he’s no longer trying to disintegrate from the group, so he can move on the time track.

Every time he has a withhold, he parks himself on the time track, you see? And he can keep parking himself and parking himself on the time track till the whole time track looks like just one big now. And that one big now is the reactive mind.

And that’s all there is to the re- active mind; it’s the combined withholds which he has stacked up, which have all become part of now. But they’re efforts to individuate from groups. Well now, he really never has succeeded in individuating from any group he has ever belonged to.

Isn’t that fascinating? It doesn’t matter whether he talked to a shepherd back in the old days and they were talking there and all of a sudden a wolf came “rompthing” over, operatically, and the flock scattered. And so the shepherd picked up a cudgel and went after the wolf.

And he was just a gentleman passing by the way, but he picked up his sword and he went after the wolf, too. And they both got ahold of the wolf and they chased him over the hills and far away and made nothing out of the wolf. And then they came back and gathered up the sheep and they shook each other by the hand and he went on his way.

All right. He made a group, didn’t he? He made a group and they had an agreement.

The mores of the group is: “Protect sheep. Kill wolves.” That was their morals. That is what they were supposed to do.

Now, all right. He went along for a few years and one day a shepherd drove all the sheep through his rose garden and so he went out and put a sword through the shepherd. And he got it right in his chest.

And, “Doctor, Doctor, I have this horrible pain in my chest. I just can’t understand what this horrible pain in my chest is.” The doctor said, “Well, we – we look – we look upon that as advanced, galloping con- sumption. That’s what that is.

And you take this horrible black potion here, and it’ll get you over it.” And about eight, nine thousand bottles of black potion later, why, they bury him. He formed a group with a shepherd and then he killed a shepherd. Wasn’t even the same shepherd.

Well, what’s he done? He’s done an identification of shepherds, in the first  MORAL CODES: 23  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD place. And then he’s done an identification of motion with a shepherd earlier.

You follow this? So he gets an overt act-motivator sequence. But nobody has ever left any groups.

The magicians: Well, there have been magicians ever since there’s been track. But magicians, from time to time, have expressed this in say- ing – they haven’t come close to this at all. As a matter of fact, it’s not a stable datum of magic.

But they say, “A magician who starts in on one religion should not change his religion just because he’s practicing magic.” That’s one of the rules of the game in magic. Mustn’t change your religion. They know it’s bad luck.

They know people go to pieces on it. Well, all they found out, just to that degree, is the fellow had subscribed to a religious group of some kind or another, and now if he goes and shifts his religion, why, he’s going to get an overt-motivator sequence of some kind or other, he isn’t going to be able to explain to anybody and there he’s had it – which is quite interesting. This opens up an interesting door for Scientology, because if everybody is – if no one has ever left any group he ever belonged to, against which he had a transgression or an overt, why, that means that all new groups being formed are formed by transgressors.

And then that follows, then, that if Scientologists could get off of that particular mechanism, they would form the first true group that has existed since the beginning of the universe. Isn’t that inter- esting? Interesting vista suddenly opens up in that particular direction.

That’s all rather beside the point at this particular moment. We’re just talking about the mechanics of this thing. But that’s true, that would happen.

Now, what, what is a moral code? A moral code would be agreements – a series of agreements – which had been cemented by mutual action aimed toward survival. And a trans- gression is an action against a person or being or thing with which one has a moral code or an understanding or a co-action.

Notice that we’re trotting out Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health’s SUR- VIVAL, in caps. Notice it’s right back with us again. Because it is the action by which beings sought to survive that then brings about co-action on the part of those beings; which brings about, then, the development of a series of agreements; which then brings about the possibility of a transgression.

And the transgression, withheld, is an effort to act against the co-action of the group without suffering the consequences. But the co-action, followed by a withhold, then parks the person right there. You see, because that’s not an action.

Let me call to your attention that a withhold is a no-action after the fact of action. You break the cookie jar and then you don’t tell your mother. And you’re processing this person and he’s going along the track and there he is all of a sudden and he’s standing there in the kitchen.

He’s not looking at anything. He’s not look- ing at anything. MORAL CODES: 24  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD Have you noticed the number of pictures which pcs have where they’re not doing anything Have you noticed this?

They’re not killing anybody, they’re not breaking any bones, they’re not robbing any cookie jars, they’re not doing anything, see? There they were, just innocently standing there, just an innocent bystander. They’ll have a picture, suddenly, of a street; and there’s absolutely nothing happening on this street.

They’ll have a picture of a kitchen; there’s nothing happening in the kitchen. They will have a picture of a pot and there’s nothing happening with regard to the pot at all. Well, what are these things?

These are the points of withhold where a person has with- held his transgression against the group. And the transgression may lie minutes, hours or days before the picture. You just ask for the commotion which went on before that and he’ll give it to you and you find the withhold, then the fact that he withheld it against the mores of the group and the picture will spring, just like that.

Very tight, close mechanism. There’s nothing much to it at all. So, you look for the prior confusion.

The rule of the prior confusion comes out of this. So if the person is parked anyplace, he, of course, has a withhold at the point he is parked, but it is immediately preceded by a co-action or co-motion, for sure, and then an overt against that co-action and co-motion. And then the withhold.

So it follows down consecutively in terms of time: 12:00, co-action, co-motion, as a part of the group; 1:00, overt against this group; 2:00, parked – see, withhold against the group, the effort to move out of the group. I’m just giving you 12:00, 1:00 and 2:00 so you can see what I mean by consecutively in time. So, we have childhood, co-action with a family; teenage, overt against the family; young adulthood, complete upset with the family and awfully parked; withhold, won’t talk to the rest of the family.

You get the idea, see? Well now, this goes as far as this: One can withhold one’s self – and you mustn’t overlook this in processing. That fellow who thinks he should have been drafted and join the army and who didn’t then join the army, will be found to be in possession of a withhold which is inarticulate unless you know this particular fact: He is withholding a body, you don’t just withhold thoughts.

You just don’t withhold deeds. You can withhold a body. You can also withhold stolen goods.

You can also withhold objects of various kinds or another, which really aren’t stolen, but they’re withheld. But withholding self is the commonest one, because wherever a person has engaged in a dogfight, such as I spoke about a few minutes ago, he all the time was trying to bring about the death of the other person while withholding himself from death, which makes a disagreed unreality about the whole thing. There’s no agreement there of any kind whatsoever.

If you ask somebody, “Get the idea of withholding your body. Thank you.” “Get the idea of withholding your body. Thank you,” he’ll wind up in all kinds of dogfights and all  MORAL CODES: 25  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD kinds of activities of one kind or another where he was trying to do something.

It’s not a good method of spotting overts, but that would find a hell of a lot of overts. You’d find a lot of overts. You say, “Get the idea of withholding your body.

Thank you.” “Get the idea of with- holding your body. Thank you.” And the guy would be parked right in a whole series of overts. They wouldn’t necessarily resolve, because that isn’t where he’s stuck.

He’s stuck just a little bit later, in each particular case, because – if he’s stuck at all – because withholding your body from a dogfight is a moral action. That is a moral action. It’s immoral to depart from your squadron.

But to do something which is against the survival of the squadron and withhold that is far more aberrative. Far more aberrative. So, the transgressions against the group – well, that’s all this thing adds up to.

That’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to an overt act-motivator sequence, that is all there is to taking one apart and that is how everybody is stuck. Now, I’ll give you – I’ve given you a Class II Auditor skill, which is simply, “Locate the prior confusion.” Now, when you locate the prior confusion, of course, you’re going to locate some prior co-motion – motion with – and you will fall at once into an overt, and then you’ll fall into the withhold.

And you keep saying “prior confusion” and you’ll just go bing-bing! See? You can force the pc’s attention into the prior confusion, they come up to the overt and they’ll hit the withhold – zoomp, boomp, bang!

It’s just a one, two, three, because that’s the way it goes. Because they’re held on the track by the prior confusion, apparently held on the track by the prior confusion, but only because they have a withhold later. So it takes all three steps to park somebody on the track.

It takes a prior co-action, then it takes an overt and then it takes a withhold. And when you’ve got those three things, you get a person stuck on the track and that’s all there is to it. And that makes up the reactive bank.

And that is the anatomy of the reactive bank. First there is co-action, then there are overts and then there are withholds. And then that compositely gives us, eventually, a total jam of time.

And that total jam of time, totally buried, becomes the reactive mind and that is the reactive mind. And that’s all there is to the anatomy of the reactive mind. That’s the lot.

Now, when you clear somebody, you, of course, clear those identities which the per- son has more or less teamed up with and those identities and their now-I’m-supposed-to’s and their particular withholds and withholding these identities and helping the surv – first helping the survival of the identity, then overts with or against the identity and then withholds with or from the identity. And that is the goals terminal that you are running and that’s the anatomy of  MORAL CODES: 26  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD the goals terminal, when you get right down to it. When you run the Prehav Scale, you run all the sides of this thing off.

Every engram a person has, has these “stucks that has this sequence in it. This you will find everyplace. This is the pattern which is stamped all over the universe.

Now, I would be less than kind if I didn’t give you a very broad, general process that anybody could run rather easily, but there is one which knocks this rather heavily. There is one which is rather amusing. There is a rather amusing experimental process about this – is you find something the person has identified with something and you simply tell him to think of a mutual action with the one and then a mutual action with the other and of course these two identifications will spring apart.

I’m giving you an idea. You find out, quite by accident or by being smart or something of the sort – you find out that the pc has horses and beds totally identified. So you say, “All right.

Think of a co-action, or a mutual action with a horse. Good. Think of a mutual action with a bed.

Thank you. Think of a mutual action with a horse. Good.

Think of a mutual action with a bed. Thank you.” And all of a sudden these two identifications will spring apart. Don’t get bugged off into this, because all of a sudden, fifteen or twenty other subjects will emerge out of that particular zone.

Well, don’t get him to thinking about those too. Just keep him with horses and beds. Oh, he’ll be thinking about horses, women, beds.

That’s the first thing that’ll appear on the thing. Well, if you Qed-and-Aed with him, you’d say, “Well, think of a horse. Think of a woman.

Think of a bed. Think of a mutual action with a woman. Think of a mutual action with a bed.” That’s been suggested to him, don’t you see, by the stuff that’s coming up.

Well, don’t Q-and-A with it because the next thing you know, he’d think in connection with beds, laundresses, for some reason or other, you see? If you Qed- and-Aed you’d say, “Think of a mutual action with a horse. Think of a mutual action with a woman.

Think of a mutual action with a bed. Think of a mutual action with laundresses,” see? And this will keep on.

And you could get about seven or eight hundred of these things, and seven or eight hundred pieces of the auditing command. It’d be seven hundred or eight hun- dred parts to the auditing command if you just kept this up. So you better not do that.

You just better say, “Think of mutual action with a horse. Think of mutual action with a bed,” and go on that way, and he will just give you more stuff that is tearing off of the bank, because, of course, you’ve found a point of direct cross. That is not a very practical activity, but it’s an interesting activity.

Here is one, however, which is very practical and is a broad, one-command process and nothing else but. And that process is: “Tell me a group you are no longer part of,” or any phrase – phrasing thereof. Thank you.

MORAL CODES: 27  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD

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