View source for Power of Life and Death (7ACC 540714)

'''Series:''' 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)

'''Date:''' 14 July 1954

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

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Okay. This morning I'm going to talk to you about a matter of life and death. About time we talked about this matter of life and death because we are studying to be experts in the subject of life and so, therefore, we had better know where it fits into processing.

Inevitably, survival has to do with life and death, doesn't it? Survive-succumb, live-die. When we look over the track of a preclear, we discover usually that he is in one of two frames of mind: he can make them live or he can make them die. And these are the only two frames of mind you'll find a preclear in, except one which is a mixture of the two, which is naaaaaah.

Now, the computation on a case can be immediately derived from this matter of "I make them live. I make them die." You notice I don't say, "I can cause them to live." No, he isn't usually that grammatical, he's not that mild nor certainly that analytical. It is nothing but an impulse, you might say, on which he is operating. The number of preclears you get who will consciously or ever have consciously thought to themselves, "I have the power of life and I have the power of death," are so few that you will probably never see one.

This has so long since gone by the boards that the race itself considers itself nothing but symbols. They are dancing on the strings of some other master – God or the Devil or something of the sort. It actually is a long, long while – I would say, probably, here on Earth, probably in terms of a million and a quarter million and a half years – since anyone said, "I have the power of life" and really knew he had the power of death – long time. It's sort of like looking into the underworld, if you want my candid opinion. (I don't feel flattering this morning.)

We have every race on the face of Earth with some sort of a legend of having been created. Bah! We have the Apaches over here having been created not just by God but by a demon called Black Hactcin. We have in Europe all manner of created thisas and thatas. In India itself, they had legends of how Man got created from mud and so forth.

About the only one who is trying to say, "I can destroy life," today, is the nuclear physicist. And unfortunately that's all he knows how to say. "I can destroy." That's what he says. But he doesn't really bring it into the category where it belongs, which is, "I have the power of death." That would be considered improper in his alma mater or something impolite. It's nothing you'd discuss at a faculty tea.

Now, here and there, we get some Genghis Khan or something of the sort and he, too, does not say, "I have the power of death." He says, "I have the power of killing. I can kill some things and I can knock some things down." But he does not expect a town to completely vanish. He still expects rubble to stay there. He does not expect the bodies to just go up in smoke. He expects to have to destroy them in lime pits or build pyramids out of their skulls and so on. In other words, he doesn't have the power of death at all. And the only thing he's dramatizing – one thing he's dramatizing is just, "I've got to prove to you that I can kill." That's the only thing he's doing. That's the total political significance of the invasions of Genghis Khan, of Hitler and the Republican Party. Total – total significance. They're going to prove it to you – that they're deadly.

The man who gets into a rage, who threatens you, who walks up close to you and sneers and mouths at you and so forth, is simply trying to say to you in a completely uncomprehended way – even by him – he's trying to say, "I am death." But it's been so many, so many eons since he could say that word that he doesn't even know what he's trying to say. Instead of that, he says, "I am angry." He says, "I can harm you." He doesn't even dare say, "I can destroy you." He says, "I can harm you."

If you want to know what's wrong at any time with a preclear, size it up in terms of life and death. Today we're dealing with fundamentals that are very, very fundamental. He runs on two computations from which a third can be derived. But these computations are so completely suppressed, forgotten, lost, that should you wish to scrape the very bottom of the unconscious or reconscious or whatever it was that Freud had nightmares that Man had – if you wanted to scrape the very, very bottom of this, this is all you would find at the bottom of it: "I have the power of life; I have the power of death." That would be the postulate which makes up livingness.

Now, we move out of the sphere of pure mechanics of space and all these other things of which we have spoken, just moving right straight out of there into a tremendously, flat, comprehensible statement and that is what we discover as the entrance into life: "I can grant life. I can bring life to. I can create livingness in. And on the other hand, I can destroy utterly. I can kill. I am death."

Your preclear who is unable to get well is expressing, as his most basic impulse, "They bring death." And that is his computation. He is proving it. He has even moved out of the sphere of proving that he's death and he merely wishes to prove that they bring death. Who? Father. Mother, The armed services. Who cares? Somebody, somewhere – they bring death. And he is there as a living symbol that proves it. And more often than not, when you get somebody who is in fair shape as a preclear, this preclear is sitting there simply to prove that they bring life. It's removed. (When I say a preclear that's in fair shape, I mean one that you would get at the beginning of session off the street somewhere.)

This is the bottom of the unconscious. This is the barbaric impulse. This is the terribly strange and incomprehensible, utterly unfathomable computation which motivates Man as well as tigers, cats and mice. The serpent develops his venom as a proof that he can bring death. The ant develops whatever poison he has on the same computation. And so do men develop ugliness, bad temper, incompetency and trouble. It's a gradient scale of their bringing death.

They go out, they get into a car, they drive it a few blocks and it goes clank. What happened to it? Well, they brought death to it. Only they didn't bring death to it. Because if there's any one thing that has been proven to this individual – that he must not represent himself as a power of death. He must not. The police say so, the state says so, the federal government says so, the church says so, everybody says so – that he must not represent himself as a destructive power. And if this is long enough suppressed, why, he gets to very, very intricate levels, very covert on this line. He says, "I … I … I can't cure my cold." He can't even destroy cold germs, which is remarkable when you come to think about it, thinking of his size and the size of the cold germs! (If there are any cold germs.)

And, of course, all cold germs are dramatizing, as far as anybody can see, is "We would like to, but we can't quite bring about death. We have to have pneumococci come in and finish that off. They're a little less tamed. So we can open up a primary infection channel for the secondary infection to finish off the patient."

Of course, the biologist is so sunk that he says, "The parasite never intends to kill the host." Howahhh! No such thing. If a parasite could – being in a parasitic frame of mind – he would slaughter everything in sight because obviously that form of life has drifted down to a level where it no longer really cares to survive. Well, who wants to crawl around in somebody's lungs?

Well, where we have a preclear, we have basic computations in life and death. He is either saying, "They have brought death and look at all this blackness. That proves it" or he is saying, "They have brought life." Or he may even be saying, "If I eat well and keep my shoes tied, I can thereby demonstrate to you that I am still alive, so therefore, I am not necessarily inhibiting life." He gets it up to this tremendously high, exalted computation.

Well, this is a pretty sad-looking picture when you consider that you're dealing with an energy-production unit which not only has the power of creating space and of locating energy and objects in space and time but, less mechanically, has the power of life and death. Now, this is a pretty low level. "Look. I am not killing this body. I have tied my shoes and brushed my teeth." What sort of a protest is this? Well, it's pretty, pretty weak little protest.

Now, you're looking at a number of inversions in a hundred billion complexities out of this basic computation. The funny part of it is, you see, that any preclear you process, at one time or another, has probably played the game of Black Hactcin, the Apache god who created all the animals and Man too, or the Indian Old Man of the Blackfeet, or the god jub-jub of the Upper Pango River who, out of his muddy hands, created all of life in that particular area and the area is alive so that proves it. Or somebody named Yahweh. Or somebody named Lord knows what. In other words, it's a no-responsibility, isn't it? "Look, I didn't create anything around here. Black Hactcin over there, that's the fellow that created it. Yahweh, that's the guy."

Funny part of it is, that if Yahweh duplicated himself so as to obtain this many thetans, then, of course, each duplicate would be a duplicate of Yahweh. But perhaps people would not recognize, in their inability to duplicate, that if a god duplicated himself you would have another god. So it wouldn't matter how minutely he duplicated himself, you would still have another line of gods, wouldn't you? Well, this is very confusing and very complex.

But if there is any life in Man at all, therefore, there must be god in Man, no matter what creed, what computation or what dramatization he is currently following.

And the statement that "somebody created me" – that statement all by itself adds up to "I haven't got any responsibility. It's not my fault that things are doing this and that." So that's no responsibility, isn't it? No responsibility: "I didn't create this life. I am not alive because I decided to live. I am alive because somebody came along and made me live. It's all other-determined. Any life I have came from some other source."

And you get a thetan dramatizing this by picking up a mock-up at birth. And he goes and picks up a mock-up at birth. Well, it's all very well and maybe it works out all right, and maybe this makes a workable world and maybe it's an interesting game. But when the player is no longer a player and becomes a piece and then breaks, to a point where he is no longer capable of recognizing that he himself has the power of absolute creation of anything – including a universe such as this one – and he also has the power of complete destruction, why, looks to me like there's some improvements could be made.

Now, I would go so far as to say that if some improvements don't get made, why, the beasts of the field and the man of the city will be indistinguishable. The beast of the field might have been otherwise created or cast up in whole cloth, true enough, but remember, he's alive, too. The whole puzzler in this is that if anything is demonstrating life – anything is demonstrating at life, it must have been the result of a duplication at the very least. It must at least have been the result of a duplication.

We just won't take spontaneous genesis of a thetan. We'll cake one thetan and say spontaneous genesis of this one thetan. Nobody ever really seems to get a good, solid belly laugh out of that one: that one god created all these other beings. I mean, the spontaneous genesis of that one god is immediately indicated. All right.

Actually, it isn't any more incredible to suppose the spontaneous genesis of a billion gods than it is the spontaneous genesis of one. What's the difference? In view of the fact that life does not have quantity, this becomes an incomprehensible picture when anybody tells you there is only one god.

Christian missionaries who used to go over to India, by the way, thousands or so years ago, and try to convince everybody about one god, and everybody thought they were insane. Everybody knew there were lots of gods. Anyway, the dramatization of the "only one" shows up there.

Where we get, then, something which is alive, we have indicated there that there must have been some sort of – at least, either a spontaneous combustion or a duplication. And in either way, there's no sign tag on it saying, "Limited only to a tiger." There couldn't be. Now, you could duplicate yourself and say, "Now, I am a tiger and therefore you are a tiger and that's all you know how to be: a tiger." But the duplication came first and the implant came second. So that any living thing, by this reasoning and actually by demonstration in processing, has the power of being a god – any living thing, whether an ant or a leaf or a phagocyte. Just the presence of life in something would immediately indicate that it possessed the basic potentials, then, of creating life and bringing about death.

Well, how far could this go? Is this really true? Yes, it really is true. A monocell duplicates itself as perfectly as any thetan who is in good shape ever duplicated himself. A monocell does it lots of times, and everything he knows as himself, he duplicates into his progeny. So now we have two memory banks (that's interesting, isn't it?) which are duplicates. And now the second one duplicates again and now we've got three identical memory banks. Now, the only slight difference there might be there, is number three might now experience experiences which would not then become a part of the memory bank of number one. This is a possibility, but these things are rather difficult to test.

It is not difficult to test, however, and had any biologist been able to work in the field of biology, they long since would have tested and discovered this to be true. I say that, by the way, advisedly – not just as a knock against biology. The littleness that biology cared

to know about life is an insult to the rest of Man, The biologist could have tested this fact – and it is true – that a monocell on its first, second, third and fourth subdivisions does transfer its entire memory bank. It retains it. Here is A and it puts its memory bank over into A1; A1 still retaining a memory bank, that memory bank now transfers to A2. And if you don't think these little animalcules are complex, well, you ought to look at them through a microscope sometime. And they are the very, very complex little beasties.

But this looks to me like a rather purer state than Man is in. Look what Man has to do in order to duplicate himself – particularly in hot weather. We have in Man, apparently, a lost power here someplace or another. He doesn't just say, "A man!" and have another man like a monocell does. Well, we don't care how fast it's done or how slow it's done or what system is used. We say to a man, "Be three feet back of your head" and 50 percent of the men we address this to will be three feet back of their head and they, thereafter, can be put into some kind of a condition approximating divinity if-if-if we address this one factor particularly: the power to create life, the power to create death.

Now, this is apt to get lost in processing. The power of life and death is apt to get lost in processing for the excellent reason that people by tacit consent stay away from it. It is dangerous to be a god. The last one that cropped up here on Earth, they crucified. It's dangerous to be a god. This is obvious.

Now, in processing, this is a factor which underlies and interweaves with practically everything you do in processing. You can take a Beep Meter and you can test somebody's power in the granting of beingness. Now, what is granting of beingness? This is this business of granting life. This is "I can create life." Very few people know that they can do this. They haven't any idea they can do anything like this. They wouldn't even think about it if they could. But you can take this Beep Meter and hold the electrode to somebody's cheek and have somebody else make the connection – that is to say, just by looking at the electrode and the fellow's cheek, make the Beep Meter sound. In other words, a third party to this experiment can make the connection. He can put life into the electrical conduit lines of a meter, which is a very, very satisfactory thing to an engineer. Engineers have always distrusted life. They couldn't put it on a meter. Well, it can be put on a meter now and we discover that this can happen.

An individual is as well off in the field of healing as he can grant life, because his unwillingness to grant life will reflect itself in a poor performance. His unwillingness to grant life, regardless of whether or not he is sitting there actually granting life to this other being – see, we'll just lay that aside and forget about that – but his willingness to grant life will reflect itself in verbalizations in other ways: in failure to remember exactly what to do, in knocking off a session too soon, in not permitting a comm lag to run itself out. You'll see these things manifest themselves.

The healing which was talked about, about two thousand years ago was, of course, evidently a direct application of energy. And we had somebody around there who could just take a look and the whole guy would light up. And this evidently was the way that healing was done. Or the person had himself suddenly enough faith or enough something or other so that he turned his own lights on. It wouldn't matter who turned whose lights on. The fact of the matter is, two thousand years ago they were turning some lights on. And one guy did it for a short time and they've been talking about it ever since. So somebody must feel that this was spectacular.

Well, there isn't any reason anybody should feel it's spectacular. We can measure it on an engineering meter today. Now, it's not spectacular in any way save in its absence. That's spectacular. How possibly can a being with the power to create life and create death abdicate from such a position? Well, it must take a lot of doing. But in essence, we have only abdicated from one position – the power to grant life, the power to give death.

An individual who cannot make a mock-up disappear is one who has lost his power to grant death. These mock-ups which are terrifically persistent – which go on persisting – the fellow can't get rid of them, they leave little trails, various things happen in an effort to process them. This individual has lost his power to grant death. One grants death, rather than says, "cease to exist."

Now, where does this apply directly and immediately in the field of processing? Well, you'd better ask yourself first, where does it apply in the field of living? And you can look around you, you can walk down any street in any city of the world, and when you become very good at this, you can just check off the beings you see, just on this basis he can or he can't grant life; he can or he can't grant death. Check them off. A tramp, he's trying to prove that he can grant death. But what a pale form of death – a dirty face and ragged clothes. That's death! Pooh! A woman trying to prove she can grant death by having kids that are upset. I mean, what little, tiny, shallow puddles we're walking in compared to the deep ocean which could be there.

The main trouble with existence in most people's minds is its continuous continuance in any phase which begins. You know, they start an action and then it just keeps on going. Then they suffer the consequences of it and so on. This is quite upsetting to them. Well, the reason it's upsetting to them, of course, is because they believe that they have lost the power to grant death. They can't stop that action or stop the concatenations going out from that action. That's their main difficulty.

Now, where it comes to healing, there's hardly a person alive who, when a child or in his teens or sometime or another in his life, has not attempted to bring back to life something that was dying. And this is your ally computation and so forth. The cave-in resulting from an ally is not from – as was first supposed – not from suddenly having an absence, not from an actual loss, but the absolute recognition that one failed to grant life. And when things die around a person, this merely proves to him – when he wanted them to live – this proves to him conclusively that he has lost the power to grant life.

So, he goes through life trying to prove to all and sundry that he can grant life by doing this, by doing that – helping in mild, quiet, little ways that are not obtrusive and so forth. But he himself knows he has lost the power. He doesn't have the power anymore to grant life. He knows this. Fie can't even remember his past. It's all gone.

And the police are there and everybody else is there to make sure that he doesn't grant the power of death or he doesn't have the power to grant death. And between the two of these things, he gets caught and compressed toward the center, nyaaaaaaah, closer and closer, and we finally get Mr. Average Citizen – apathy.

Apathy could be characterized as that condition in which a person can no longer create livingness at will and death at will. Oh, but this means that there must be an awful wide band of apathy if it's that bluntly to be described. Yes, there is. But that's where apathy sets in – where an individual loses the power to grant life and death. And from there on out, it doesn't much matter what he does.

That is the only power which he has which is sacred unto him and which he peculiarly possesses. As long as he has that power, he is an orientation-point. When he loses that power he is a symbol. He is dependent upon somebody else's orientation-point.

And so much for the power of life and death.

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[[Category:Lectures 1954]]