View source for Space Opera (2ACC 531217)

'''Series:''' 2nd Advanced Clinical Course (2ACC)

'''Date:''' 17 December 1953

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

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And this is the evening lecture of December the 17th. And this evening we are going to cover some rather hit-or-miss material. It's hit-or-miss because it belongs in the education of an auditor.

Auditors should know an awful lot of things. Actually, the optimum auditor— and we could give a long and very learned conversation here, monologue on the subject of the optimum auditor and how he should have a beard eighteen feet long or something of the sort, and something, you know, about that. But actually, the optimum auditor is one who's done some living. That's rather desirable, to have done some living. Because as you see an awful lot of preclears come by, you see an awful lot of people who have neglected to do any. They've done lots of dying in their life, but very little living. And when it comes to you understanding a large number of people, if you've done a large lot of living, you can understand a large lot of people.

That is to say, if you've done enough living, let us say, to cover eight or ten people, why, it's fairly certain that you'll be able to understand some of the people who come to you. Otherwise, they're liable to be rather incomprehensible, and you're liable to find yourself in a state of—well, let's say, criticism or something— about their life. Or you're—the state of noncomprehension: "What's the matter with this jerk?" you're liable to say to yourself. "What the heck's the matter with him?" and so on.

You just don't realize that in Hollywood it's "the thing" to slap people's wrists. You know, I mean, it's just not done, anything else. I think there was a—if you'll pardon this crude interjection into an otherwise scholastic moment— I think there was some natural intercourse in Hollywood one time, and it got out and it got into the Los Angeles Times (which will print anything) and do you know that they sued the paper and banished the people from the state. They didn't send them to the gas chamber—they were, there at first. I mean, this is a real area of the world: Los Angeles is the world's most aberrated city. I wouldn't say that in Los Angeles, mostly because there isn't hardly anybody out there in Los Angeles that'd understand the fact. They've lived there most of their lives.

But if you really want to get some living in, or some processing in or something like that, you ought to go in some of these areas once in a while. Just make a trip and look around. Because you'll find out that not all areas of the world are being all areas of the world. That isn't just bitterness on the subject of Los Angeles, that happens to be nothing but the solid truth.

Port Said is supposed to be the world's wickedest city. The second up and second runner for that is Ketchikan, Alaska, and it's—catches all the sewage from Seattle, Ketchikan does.

Everybody who gets in trouble with the state police and the Feds and everybody else will eventually turn up somewhere in the backwoods of Alaska— if they can make it. Nobody goes by his right name and they have a murder every morning for breakfast. It's not quite that bad, because they're not murders, they're suicides. And they find a fellow with his head blown off by a shotgun— no sign of a shotgun, footprints all around, sound of tremendous struggle, the fellow's pockets emptied. The sheriff comes out, he takes a look at the body, and he says, "Huh! Suicide."

They have there in Ketchikan the only stream in the world where the fish and the fishermen go up to spawn. It's a red-light district. (audience laughter) It stretches up around the curve of really a very beautiful little stream. But the buildings have trapdoors. Most of Ketchikan is built over water and a very fast tide, and nearly every building there has trapdoors. And the fishermen—it's mostly fishermen that come in there with any money—wear rather heavy rubber boots, and water gets into these boots rather quickly and they go down rather fast. You see, the air is in the boots at first, you see, and that holds the boots up till the fellow drowns, and then the water fills, and then the boots hold him on the ground. And then the tide there is rather fast, and it sweeps the body out past Chacon, the cape there, and nobody ever knows anything more about it.

But when the police do find a fisherman drowned or floating there in the straits, without anything in his pockets and so forth, they look him over very carefully and say, "Hm! Suicide." Wonderful place of the world.

There—the FBI had an agent up there for some time, he was a nice, innocent young boy. He didn't understand the facts of the world. And I remember— he didn't know me, he had never seen my credentials or anything vaguely resembling it—and he was going over to pick up a German who was incautiously operating a radio station giving weather reports, and he decided his gun was in his road. And he didn't know me, and I had spotted this radio station in for him, and he handed me the gun—loaded, dark night. Interesting. So I put a fatherly hand upon his shoulder and I said, "Son"—I was about his age— "Son," I said, "let me tell you something. I happen to be that man's confederate and the tide is swift down there, so just walk quietly ahead of me now."

And he turned sort of white, he didn't even say, "You're kidding," because he actually had learned a little bit in Alaska. Shock was very educational to him. Gave him his gun back and we went up and picked up the guy, see. But that was a very educational shock. I think six or eight months later if anybody had asked this agent for his gun, why, he would have reached for a blackjack.

No. No kidding. All kidding aside, there's a lot of living goes on in the world, and sometimes a person has a tendency to believe that all hands and everyone has lived in a rather hothouse atmosphere.

Actually, the people who are the worst off, normally have done the most living. It isn't that living itself is terribly aberrative, but the world gives you to understand that it is. And these people have had two things happen to them: They've done a lot of living and then somebody has taught them carefully that it was all wrong. And when this has occurred, you have an interesting case. He takes you quite a little while to process. But you can dig him out, eventually.

Now, there's nothing like living, in other words, to teach somebody about living. Short of a good, wide and vicious life, a little bit of tolerance will do a lot of substituting. And you'll find that the preclear—any preclear who sits down in a processing chair, no matter who he is and no matter how sweet she looks—remember that this is a Homo sapiens. And remember that in Africa if a very sweet, innocent girl straight off the sidewalks of New York were to show up, it would be the animals who ran.

The animal kingdom is pretty bright. That's—this is no kidding about that. The animals the world around, when they know anything about man, run. The only thing that's a little bit aside from this is a Kodiak bear.

They used to kid me an awful lot I—in the "Explorers Log" and so on. The—let's see, I think it's one of their yearbooks called Through Hell and High Water, why, somebody tags me in there about this. But I roped a Kodiak bear one time on the basis of... He was swimming, you see, and he had a very small head, and the head was—you know, hair all plastered down—you couldn't see that he was a big bear. And a Kodiak bear goes about sixteen hundred pounds; the world's largest carnivorous animal.

Well, he's a little bit different than the animals of Africa in that he has it in for man, and he doesn't care what happens to him. And he will sit behind trees and wait for men to pass by just so he can knock them flat. He makes a specialty of it. Once a man has done something to a Kodiak bear, why, then the bear will sit around and brood about it and so on. Well, anyway, it's beside the point.

When an individual has a preclear in a chair, he doesn't have an uncomplex, tame, "won't harm you," "no viciousness in you" character. This is not what's sitting there in the chair.

It's true that in the fairly civilized area of the world, that certain behavior patterns can be expected, such as, "How are you?" and "Am I on time for the session?" and "Goodbye," and that sort of thing. I mean, that these things can happen.

But as far as this preclear's past and present, and what his future will be—well, that's pretty much in your hands. And you will handle it as well as you realize that—not anything can happen, that's not the thing to realize. But if you realize that about 80 percent of the time, your having mixed yourself up with this preclear is going to result unfavorably, you'll be right. You'll be 80 percent right if you figure that out.

Why? Well, it's because people who are bad off, if you are foolish enough to specialize in these characters, people who are bad off, they have a lot of bitingness to come up through. And you start pulling them on up through the line, you see, and you're pulling them up through an awful lot of strata of snap and snarl and crunch.

Some of my adventures in auditing have been very remarkable in that—I processed a dearest old lady, she was the sweetest old lady. She just was strictly lavender and old lace, you see. And golly, she was apparently very, very grateful till I began to wonder who was ruining my reputation in the neighborhood. She was.

And the reason for this was, is I had stopped processing her before she thought I should have stopped processing her. Well, the point is, I got her up to where she wasn't dying in agony and I thought, "Well, that's good enough, we'll go on to somebody else." Well, that wasn't the way she saw it. And the next thing I knew, why, all sorts of interesting phenomena was occurring, such as the people of next door passing me by and carefully looking the opposite direction and so forth. Well, now I had kept a dear, sweet old lady from kicking the bucket. This is the truth of the matter, and yet here was my reputation ruined in the neighborhood.

Now, if an auditor expects that his life is going to be entirely free from such shocks and incidents, he is going to be 80 percent wrong.

The most satisfactory critters to deal with are the young'uns. And that's mainly because they haven't been able to develop sufficient viciousness. But the meanest ones, the meanest ones to deal with, are actually the older ones. They've got a lot of accumulated orneriness. And these boys, they very often take it out on you.

Now, if an auditor's in pretty good condition, this never kicks him around. He simply carries the case on forward up through the band and over the top, and the fellow is very cheerful and everything is lovely.

But if an auditor is—has the feeling that he's going to sort of cave in on the line and it's—you know, I mean, he's worried about restimulation, and he's worried about what this preclear is going to do because he fears the preclear was going to do something wrong and damaging or something, to the auditor or to himself, why, he of course doesn't kick the preclear all the way up on the line. He suppresses the fellow on the way, you see? So he just doesn't get the same result.

The auditor will probably be listening to himself with amazement someday saying, "All right, now be three feet back of your head. Now let's see through, and select page 214 of the book that's on the table. Now you—now read that page there without opening the book—oh, you can't do that? Well, let's see, now go down to the city hall and find the license number of my car. Ah, you can't do that. Well, let's see now …"

And he'll say, "Wait a minute, what am I doing to this preclear?" It's almost that much of a basic response till a person is in pretty good shape. Mostly because the preclear gets up along the line and starts kicking the auditor to pieces. You know, he starts bearing down and so on.

There was one boy in the First Unit—we haven't heard from him since, but he's—good condition. But he got audited, and he came up—pretty up the line, and he hit a level of overtness which was terrific, you know? I mean, you ask him a question or something like that, and if you didn't hear his answer or something, why boy, he'd just about snap your head off. Bang! And the case was progressed on up through that. For some little time there, for a couple of weeks, it was about as much as your life was worth to cast a shadow in this fellow's direction. Well, we'd dragged him up out of apathy, actually, and he'd gone up through the anger band.

So when you think of this thing called "human nature," well, throw all that aside and just don't worry about that anymore. And just sort of start in from scratch on what you know, and fully expect that as you pull this person up along the line, he's probably going to be ornery, mean, insulting, damaging, biting, probably going to gossip about you, rumor things around, say mean things behind your back. I mean—and don't be so surprised if they do. Only reason— I'm not trying to tell you all men are bad, I'm just trying to tell you, "Don't be so surprised!" That's all.

It's that chart right up there on the wall, that Chart of Human Evaluation: You'd be amazed, but you generally find people—when you start to process them, you generally find them well, well, well below 2.0, and they come up through just those manifestations.

Now, the techniques we have move them up there rapidly; they move up rapidly. You sometimes don't quite see them go by some of these states, because they're going by rather quickly.

But if you take a case who has a large amount of hold and has done an enormous amount of living and has done a lot of resisting of the MEST universe and is a—bad perception, and that sort of thing, he's liable to come up slowly. Well, he'll pass through these states. Well, don't be so surprised. It says so right there on that chart, and your experience will tell you so, and so on. There's no reason to have bad morale about it.

Now, you bring him up through those bands, and you bring him up there and you get him above the general highest level of Homo sap, which is around 4.0, and you've got quite a guy on your hands. But you won't bring all of your preclears up there.

You'll do a lot of coffee shop auditing, a lot of hit-and-run auditing, a half an hour's session here or there. The boss doesn't feel good that day, and you say, "Well, why don't you be three feet back of your head," you say, very charmingly, and he does. And you say, "All right, now just straighten out that earache." And he does. And you say, "That's fine. Now, duplicate something or other," or something. You know, I mean, do it totally—very careless session. And then at noon he's mad as hell at you. He's mad as hell at everybody and so on. You just bumped him up the Tone Scale. The guy's been in fear for years, and all of a sudden you just slapped him up into 1.5, and there he sits.

Well, you just helped him out, see? Why should you rate this? You're totally put upon now. All you want to do is cure the guy's earache and here he is mad all over the place and so on. Well, don't be surprised, because this type of auditing quite normally results in that kind of result. Fellows don't appreciate it. You fix up something real well for them, and they just don't appreciate it.

If you're going to audit somebody, well, audit toward a finite result, and give it some time and do it on schedule. And you'll find out you get along a lot better with auditing, rather than use it as a parlor trick. Auditing used as a parlor trick will wind more people up mad at you. And they're only mad at you merely because you just processed them just a short distance.

Well anyway, just in—just optimum knowingness on the part of an auditor, it's good practice for you always to suspect the worst, and then process as though that was the truth. And if the past of the preclear isn't sufficiently lurid for you, well, during the session while he's running something that doesn't require too much attention for you, well, mock it up a little more lurid. Don't try to get him to buy it—just satisfy yourself, satisfy your own dramatic urge in the matter. Because the definition of drama, preclear by preclear, each time is different; and human beings have come along distinctly different tracks.

Which is to say—let's take the problem of somebody who walks out of this room and walks down to the corner and walks back here again. Well, he accumulated some perception during that period, and he has accumulated, you might say, a little experience. It's just the experience of walking down to the corner and coming back here again.

Well, all right. Then the next fellow leaves this room and goes down to the corner and walks back here again. You know he had an entirely different experience? I mean, given the same body, given the same equal conditions, same background, they would at that moment become different, just by having walked down to the corner and back. See, two different tracks have now been established.

Well, now let's take—make it a little more complicated here. People have been walking down separate tracks for seventy-six trillion years. And if you took two of them and they walked side by side through a hundred thousand years—you see, I mean, they each would have had a different viewpoint on what was happening. And by that I don't mean consideration. They just would have seen it—because one would have seen it two feet or three feet over from the other one—see, he'd have had a slightly different view of the situation.

Well, that's an incredible thing—somebody walking along with somebody else for a hundred thousand years. Well, there's seventy-six trillion years on that track. So you get different—you get a different pattern of experience person by person.

People can live in the same family and live all their lives together on the same farm, and yet each one will come up at the end of one lifetime with an entirely different pattern of experience than anyone else.

Now, this is not the essential difference amongst people, the essential difference—that's just amongst experience. The essential difference amongst people is established in the basic personality. The basic personality was never so real as it is today. You pop a thetan out of his head and you put him through enormous numbers of drills and you snap him through this and you snap him through that, and he's still the same guy. And you knock out engrams and automaticities and chew up energy and throw it away and give him different abilities and make him able to haunt ably and do all sorts of things and so on—he's still the same guy, as far as his basic personality is concerned.

That is to say, he's sort of—his life—his forward push in life is motivated by more or less the same concerns as they were before. This will mystify you a little bit as an auditor. Sometimes you'll think a person has changed wildly until you look very closely, and you will find out: Well, they were interested in building things, they were interested in creating things, they were interested in this and that, and their interest patterns stay pretty much the same.

What happens is, they get more intense and become much more vivid. They are able to accomplish, then, the things which they were only dreaming about before. Which makes, at first glance, an entirely different person. See, but it's only at first glance that it's a different person. Once you've stripped off all of the aberration off of a person, you find a personality. It happens that you find more personality than before.

Indian teachings would have you believe (they unfortunately did not have the experience of observation of people)—Indian teachings would have you believe that everybody sort of wind up as the—wound up as the same gob of goo. That everybody got peeled off or shucked off the same stack and this was it.

Well, let's say that this was true. You'd still get one thetan coming off the north side and another thetan coming off the south side of this primary entity that exploded. I mean, you'd still get that difference between the two of them, and it's quite a difference.

There is, by the way, an incident on the track—two kinds of incidents I might mention in passing. One is the basic explosion. Now, this is a real funny one. It's the basic explosion.

Everybody was part of this one guy. I mean, they're—not everybody but, you know, quite a few people were—not quite a few people, but there was one guy, you see, this big fellow. And all of a sudden he went boom! and people went in all directions. See, there was just one guy, and then there was boom! and then people went in all directions.

In other words, you've got a bombastic or explosive duplication. And people will occasionally find this one, and that tracks back immediately to these Indian beliefs. It's—was quite amusing to me to find that explosive duplication on the track because the Hindu had described everything about it but the explosion itself. And you'll find it from preclear to preclear.

Now, there's another kind of incident on how the thetan accounts for being here, and something he will run rather consistently. And someday, who knows, in processing we may make use of this fact. It may turn up to be a much more significant fact than it is at the present moment. I mean, it might be much more useful. And so it's one—there's these disrelated little pieces, you know, I kind of like to keep my eye on them. I don't like them to get off under the desk; if they're going to fall off the desk, let them fall out there on the plain floor. And this is one of them.

The mock-up gets in trouble and he goes down to fish it out. That's about all you can say about the incident, see? The mock-up gets in trouble and he dives down to fish it out.

Down from where? Well, he leaves a somethingness of which he was a part, and becomes a separateness to fish this mock-up out of trouble. And the mock-up usually gets into trouble by going into a chunk of blackness or something, and he can't see it and he can't observe it. And he—possibly before that time he was sort of monitoring it from a telephone booth or someplace. And he just dives down to bring it out of trouble, and after that he's part of the mock-up. Well, that's a very interesting, interesting thing. You'll find that case after case. I see a couple of smiles here, people have run into it here.

[to student] You have? Yeah.

Well, it's a sudden decision. And there's a decision: "Well, I'll go down and get it out of trouble." And it's a big postulate on the track, nice big postulate. You could run this on preclears. I don't know, because I haven't done it very widely or generally, but I've produced results with this: "I will go down and get it out of trouble," you know? Just push that postulate around, move it around like you do any other symbol, and have something blow on the case. Because the fellow's still running on the determination to get something out of trouble. Quite fascinating.

There's an awful lot of machinery, rather creaky machinery in spots, and complex machinery, which stands in back of the scenery. Don't blind your eyes just because you've got something like SOP 8-C that bails people out. Don't forget that we are neglecting machinery. We're neglecting it because we ordinarily don't have to do anything to it at all.

Now, when I say machinery, I mean machinery—I mean, just—not automaticity. I mean, just as though you looked behind the main curtain of the stage and, you know, you see all these sandbags that raise and lower the other scenes, and you see the propmen standing around there and the electricians and the switchboards and piles of costumes and dressing rooms. You know, it's quite a—if you've stood out in front or sat out in front in a large theater in a tremendous production and you've seen this enormous illusion and it's just so gorgeous. And then, if you've ever done this, walked around to the stage door and walked in, seen all these fellows in derby hats and shirt sleeves, and old battered props standing around, and stuff that a vaudeville act back in 1890 forgot to carry away, and the bare bricks that stand back of that beautiful painted scenery. And you see the rhinestones close up and they're sure rhinestones— cracked, too. And it's a different view, just a different view.

Well now, all of that sort of thing still stays around in life. There's all kinds of odds and ends. People will come up and confront you with some of the darnedest things in terms of this bric-a-brac. Call it bric-a-brac, the stuff's not significant, particularly. You can get him out of any kind of an automaticity he gets into, any kind of an incident he gets into, just with Step Ia—just key it out, you see.

But he's liable to get real interested. You'll find somebody in one like this: he'll be—you just know this preclear isn't there. And you keep locating him and locating him and locating him. Instead of locating somewhere around his body, he suddenly locates himself standing in front of a huge switchboard with his hands on a railing and with somebody standing behind him, and he's got a black suit on.

Now, this is just—this is not preclear by preclear, this is just bric-a-brac, see, not significant. But he's standing there with a black suit on, and he's got somebody behind him telling him what to do. And this will occasionally vary itself so he's got something that looks like a television screen in front of him. He's running a mock-up with it.

Well now, if you run into that one and you were to tell the preclear, "Now look down at your hands" he would get quite ill. Because the hands of this particular type of detached body and so on, are the most horrible-looking things in the world, and he is actually electrically pinned to this switchboard. He's standing there at a switchboard and his hands are a horror to him. And every once in a while, you get some preclear who can't look at his hands or if you asked him to look straight at his hands, he would get kind of sick.

Well, if you run it down very far, you'll run into this incident, bing-bang! And you tell him to look at those hands and he gets sick, but thoroughly. Well, what you do is make him mock them up in quantity and throw them away until he ... If he runs into something like that, he runs into strange phenomena, what do you do with it? Well, you use the various means you have to hand: Creative Processing, create it-destroy it, get lots of them, key it out—oh, get into communication with it and do all sorts of things. Put it in various places, make walls out of it and look through each successive one at the new facsimile of it, you know?

But it's easy to confuse one of these incidents with a facsimile. That one doesn't happen to be a facsimile. Now there is a reality, you see, back of all this which is better than facsimiles. And it would be just like the preclear suddenly finds himself up against this wall up here—standing there. He thinks he's been running around Earth all this time and he hasn't been. He's been standing up facing a black wall, with somebody behind him telling him what to do. And that's reality. I mean, he just suddenly finds himself there, that's it.

But you're still in communication with him, because you're in communication with the mock-up. Now, the trick in that case is just to keep your head, you see. And he exteriorizes out of that body, which is hanging on to the rails, as fast as he'll exteriorize out of anything. You've at last found what to get him out of. So you just exteriorize him out of that body and get him down here.

Now, one of the ways to do it is "Now be the space of that body. Now be the space of this body. Now be the space of that body, this body, that body, this body, that body, this body, that body, this body" and creak, creak, bong and spong, and he will be elsewhere.

You get the kind of thing that could happen in processing? It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes it does and that's the machinery.

Now, one of these days, I fully expect that you will run into somebody who belongs or did belong to the planet builder temples. And those boys ran on an implant that was up there at about a hundred thousand volts, you know, I mean it was a big implant. And they went around doing fantastic things and so on, but they could be easily degraded by losing their power and they went along on a lot of superstitions and—quite an interesting study.

You see, in seventy-six trillion years, with the imagination of all hands going at full blast in order to create randomity, you're liable to get quite a few strange and different situations.

It is the fashion of today that when one writes, for instance, about the year 1870, one talks and has his characters talk, exactly as they talk today— which is flat, offhand, unemotional, undramatic and rather bored. Well, that's true of any age—that they write about all other ages in the same tenor as the age in which the writing is being done. Don't overlook the fact that 1870 conversation between a man and a woman would have sounded to you like somebody was kidding somebody. You just wouldn't believe it, that's all—the tremendous stress on the dramatic and the emotional. And as a matter of fact, this was as late as 1915, it was still being done: the stress on the dramatic, the stress on the emotional.

If anybody had half a chance to make a superdramatic production out of something, they promptly did it, with no shame or embarrassment, you see. They just made a dramatic production on the spot. Everybody was his own best producer, you might say, and the women swooned with great ease. Men stood up and actually did say, "You cur, sir. Do you realize that you have uttered a foul word in the presence of a lady? Well, go back to your common kind, sir." Just routine conversation.

You hear some word spoken in the presence of a lady today, why, she laughs. (audience laughter)

So, we have a problem of differences of periods, differences of periods. And differences come about in the preclear as you process him because he's in an agreement with a society which isn't emotional. And this society must appear bored and rather diffident about everything. And all of a sudden, you start roaring into stuff that's even like 1870, you see, and—gee, different picture.

So your preclear isn't quite able to make an acceptance of reality, because the bridge is too great between the tenor or drama of the moment, and the drama contained in the incident.

For instance, the amount of high tension that you find in space opera doesn't compare dramatically. Space opera—the level of viciousness of space opera was such ... I wrote a story one time called Final Blackout, many years ago, and its tenor is a mild shadow of space opera—I mean the same mood, to some degree. The villain of the piece and the way they looked at things and so forth, was rather—more or less the same. All right.

Now, that story, Final Blackout, published here, received a great deal of mail on the subject of its excessive brutality. If you have read the story, you wouldn't—you'd be amazed at the number of protests on its excessive brutality and their incapability of understanding such a character as the hero of that piece. Entirely different character, he was completely out of their orbit.

Now, he would have been considered a fairly mild, routine character in space opera. It's not a story of space opera, by the way, it's a story of the next war. And the character was not particularly modeled from that, but I just give you the idea. Here is a story of a similarity of character, and we have a protest; we have protests from the American scene because a person is too brutal.

Well now, every once in a while a preclear will run into this. You know, he'll run into periods when he was all-out, you might say, or going full blast or at high speed, and he disowns himself. You see, his current experience and what you expect of him as an auditor and so forth, are all so out of disagreement to that. So he can't hang his track together. His emotional moods have too great a disparity. And his reality has to come up on an awful lot of things before he starts to hang anything like Straightwire recall on his whole track.

But it does things to him in terms of this present society; and this is a little bit of a liability in processing. This society has about the same level of drama as a cow snoring on a somewhat foggy day. Just about the same level of drama. Even the teenagers—even the teenagers, the best they can do now is steal a few automobiles. Well, I mean, that's about the top limit of anything they dream up or do. It's fantastic.

I see them down around—but at the same time, the teenagers are getting, year by year, a little tougher, and you can watch it coming up. We're going into a new era, believe me. And the main part of that is, is all the space helmets and rocket pistols that are being sold down in the toy stores.

Now, that's—it's odder than it sounds, because I have now to date taken two little kids, both of them below ten, out of space opera incidents. I just keyed them out without talking any more about it, see, and located the incident and keyed them out. And they became well, and they'd been desperately sick right up to that moment.

Well, space opera had a tendency to sort of lay it into people. You didn't just shoot somebody in space opera. I mean, pooh! The whole gag was to get a bigger gun and a—with a larger blast and let them explode even more beautifully out in vacuums. And hang them up in ships and let them do a perihelion around a planet for a while and roast them alive. And I ran—have run the most interesting incidents out of preclears. There isn't any reason to my—keep on dodging with you this way, because you people are coming on up toward Theta Clear. You get up toward Theta Clear up there, and you get out into outer space and you'll see that things are still happening, things are still going on.

A ship is—a liner or something like that, in space opera—grabbed off, somebody wants to know where that thar bunch of gold is it's supposed to be carrying. And nobody talks, so the—one of the boys on the boarding crew gets ahold of one of the crewmen on the merchant vessel and takes a crowbar—I mean, just a routine crowbar—and pries out the lower part of his backbone. And the amount of implant is so great on this crewman that he never utters a whimper or says a word or betrays the hiding place of anything. In other words, they take it kind of seriously.

Sounds very far-fetched and far-drawn. Well, that's the whole thing this society at this time is trying to do: It's trying to find everything far-fetched and it's trying to find everything overdramatized.

This stems mainly from having had in its midst, the movies, for now— let's see, almost half a century of movies—and entertainment in the form of the written word to this length of time that they've had it. Because the movie screen says to them: "Elsewhere—be elsewhere, be elsewhere, be elsewhere." And the truth of the matter is that you could, at this moment, produce a movie that would take—I mean, just without saying anything about clearing—that would actually remove over 50 percent of the audience from the theater and send them elsewhere. Yes, you could make such a movie.

So here's the individual threatened with being pried out of his head. That is to say, "Now we are going to go to the Bahamas." Just take a travelogue, see. Well, he's in the Bahamas. Only he's not in the Bahamas. He's in the Bahamas though, but he's not in the Bahamas. So he—that's the maybe that has to set in there immediately—bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing. You know, "I'm not in the Bahamas, I'm looking at the Bahamas on a screen." Because there's no trick at all to being in the Bahamas. Why keep looking at it on a movie screen?

The fellow says, "We are now in Bahamas, the beautiful," and ping! he could be sitting in a palm tree as far as that's concerned. And little kids, if they didn't make so much noise, and ever listen to the screen, they probably are every once in a while. Only nobody ever checks up on it. And you don't ask questions, you don't get answers.

Well anyway, here's the problem: The audience sits there and is sent visually—see, that's a lot different than being sent verbally—but they're sent visually all over the darn universe. There's space opera and everything else now in pictures, see. And they're just shot visually all over the place at the same time having to hold themselves still in a theater seat. And you could actually run this on a preclear. You can get the impulse as the screen flashes one way or the other. Just get him to get an idea—even if he has no visio or anything, it doesn't matter—get the idea of a theater screen up in front of him.

I'll do it right now. I'll show you what I mean: Get a theater screen up in front of you there, and get the idea of it sending you someplace, and you not going.

Now it sends you someplace else, and you don't go. You stay there and look at the screen.

Now it sends you someplace else and, again, you don't go.

And it sends you someplace else and you don't go.

Now it's got a picture of a highway unreeling on it, and you aren't going anyplace.

And that's the modern automobile. There's the highway unreeling and you not going anyplace—except you are going someplace, except you're not going anyplace. Look at that highway unreel—you see that highway? You get the idea? It's got an invisible barrier in front of you. Here we go! See that?

Well now, throw that one away.

And we got the—we've got some sort of an idea of why a preclear gets nailed down in his head, you see. Many suggestions are thrown at him on comm lines, and he seeks to duplicate, see? The screen says Bahamas, he tries to duplicate—not picture Bahamas, but he starts to duplicate Bahamas. But it's not polite to leave your family or leave the theater, you see. So then he has to stay there in the theater seat and look at the picture of the Bahamas.

This is the snakiest trick of all, you see, is something like that. And then the movie starts showing never-never land that doesn't exist geographically at all, and this is real good. The audience breathes a huge sigh of relief and relaxes and enjoys it. Watching the feature pictures is a duty. And watching Walt Disney, of course, is always welcome because there's no such place to go to. So they can sit there and watch it. No check, no counter-check on it.

You ever notice, an audience always—they just nearly always cheer when anything of Disney's is shown on. Little short feature—audience cheers and claps their hands. There's only two or three other pictures that get the same response, and they're all cartoons. There's those Tom and Jerry cartoons, and an audience—always glad to see them.

Well, this is never-never land, and that's real welcome. Therefore you'd say offhand that fairy tales were less aberrative than costume historicals and geographically accurately placed pictures—just offhand.

But you'll find many a preclear—and this is not a process to get them out of their heads—but you'll find many a preclear really stuck in and unable to move simply because he's checked himself from leaving so often while he was sitting looking at pictures and reading books. See, the book says someplace; it'd be real nice.

Well now, costume historicals try to send him up and down the time track. And they're very interesting. Now you want to get somebody out more easily that you're having a little trouble with—this is not a springing technique, but it's one that gets them there—is "what movies aren't they?" and "what books aren't they?" and so forth, and "what scenes aren't they?" And "Get a time when you didn't go to the Bahamas," you know? "Now recall a time …" Well now, you see, this stuff is all lying on the same track.

Well, in processing a preclear, you'll run into an awful lot of phenomena. If you wanted to boil all this rambling dissertation down this evening, you could just put it onto the basis of, the optimum auditor—the optimum auditor goes on using processes which resolve the case, and while interested in, is not detoured by, phenomena and the back-of-stage props that turn up.

You can go chasing off wildly on this track. I know—I've been over what is contained in the genetic bank and what the thetan's carting along with him and so forth, and it's considerable. Believe me, it's really considerable.

Well, the hump that your preclear hits is to find himself fully equipped for drama in an undramatic world. He's in good shape, he's in good motion, he can get all sorts of things done, and all of a sudden he looks around and he says, "Gee-whiz."

Well now, he can go in two directions there: He can sort of monitor himself down and live a life of quiet desperation thereafter, or he can simply engage in some of the more dramatic aspects of existence. You'll normally find him doing the latter.

SOP 8-O is, of course, a technique which simply drills up the capabilities, on a gradient scale, of the thetan so he can see, hear, speak, get out electricity, throw out postulates, control bodies other than his own, and do other things which are well within his abilities. It's quite routine for a preclear to get out of his body and not be able to make a single sound. Well that should appear peculiar to you, not the reverse. He doesn't need all this machinery, for instance, like a voice box.

That's the silliest thing of all: to have a machine that talks, you see. He doesn't need this machinery like a voice box. But it startles people a great deal when they're talked to, and they're apt to go, at this society level at this time, straight into hypnosis. They hear a voice talking to them from nowhere, they just go bong. I know, I've done it. And it's just very upsetting to people. Done it with preclears, too, and they always come back and report the same action: they say they didn't... "I had to stop it because the bus was about to be wrecked." Yeah, people get excited about it. I don't know why they should, but they do.

Anyway, you can do all sorts of things like this and the first thing your preclear starts to add up his capabilities to is mischief. That's the first thing he thinks of; he thinks of these capabilities in terms of mischief. Rather undignified proceeding. And if he just uses them for mischief and then he doesn't see any further goal at all in doing such things, or he doesn't realize that there are other parts of this universe too and there are other universes and lots of other things—if he just gets up to a level of mischief, why, he'll get tired of mischief rather quickly.

You know, he keeps going in and out of the gatekeeper's house and every time you're saying, "Now be inside the tollgate house. Now be outside over the river. Now be inside the tollhouse; now be outside over the river." And then you suddenly find out that every time he goes into the tollhouse, he's giving the bridgekeeper's—back of the bridgekeeper's head a good kick, and the fellow is getting, by this time, pretty frantic. Preclear might not mention this to you, but he does that rather routinely.

Well, SOP 8-O boosts him on up to a point of where he can at least be interested without mischief. Not to get the mischief out of the woods, because that's always happening, but mostly to give him a little broader look at something.

Now, you won't ever get anybody up to a point where he's exteriorized, able and very, very concerned with existence. These factors just don't fit. They don't go together. It's like saying, "All right, we're going to build this iron bridge out of feathers." You're not going to build an iron bridge out of feathers, and you're not going to build a serious person with exteriorization.

You could, however, of course, get him into another body and bop him with enough voltage and show him how serious everything was and—but what would you have then? You'd just have another guy. Well, you've got lots of them.

And the point I have here is, is he is capable of an enormous amount of constructive action. He's capable of great creative action, and his field—this one you're liable to ignore, don't ignore this one—his greatest surge forward will be when you rehabilitate him artistically by taking out of him all of his uncertainty about his own beauty and the beauty of his own work.

In other words, when you take art criticism out of him. And when you remove artistic criticism out of him, he will rather definitely change. Now you don't get somebody who's going to go off and fight wars just because everything is so horrible. You're not going to get him doing that. But you will get him engaged in things that are very interesting.

Now, he is perfectly willing to look at things and inspect things and do that sort of thing, but if you rehabilitate his artistic, creative ability, he's doing the finest thing that he does on the track, and he gets very, very interested. If you were to do this possibly with only a few dozen people, you would have a renaissance on Earth. You just wouldn't help it, because it's almost completely missing here on Earth today.

When one looks at the ruined towers and walls of former glories, and when he reads about the Seven Wonders of the World ... By the way, did you ever read about the Seven Wonders of the World? Might cross your mind some time, what manner of people were these? For instance, the Colossus of Rhodes was built out of, I think, tin and bronze. And it stood with one foot on a headland and the other foot on the shore and the ships passed in and out under the giant's legs. This was a long time ago. And everybody knows nobody knew anything about iron and steel and bronze and tin in those days. They also knew that nobody ever went to Great Britain.

By the way, it was finally bought by a junk dealer after many ages had passed and it had crashed and so forth. They—bought for salvage. That was the Colossus of Rhodes. But it took that fellow an awful long time to try to get some means of hauling some part of his buy away.

Well, here is not so much artistic construction as—think of the frame of mind of somebody who decided he was going to have a beautiful statue in the harbor. Total utility: a beautiful statue in the harbor. Total—no further utility. You get less and less utility, yet less and less application for these things. And as you do that, you get the tone of the society higher and higher and higher up.

Somebody said once—some old Arab philosopher, I think it was. Oh no, it was Omar Khayyam, isn't it? "When you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy white hyacinth for your soul's sake."

Who said that?

Male voice: Omar Khayyam.

Is that Omar Khayyam? Yeah. I don't know why they didn't sell both loaves. I don't know what good a loaf of bread is, truth of the matter.

Female voice: Maybe it was good then!

So you have a lot of latitude with a preclear that you may not look at, merely because of the boresome level of the society today. The only thing beautiful in this society today is the body of a car (oh, and I shouldn't add this worldly remark to this group) or a beautiful woman. This is about the end-all of the whole proposition when the—when you consider what's being done artistically today: it's nothing.

You go up to New York and you look and you'll find the better artists— the better artists are in commerce. And they're doing a pretty good job of a glass of Schenley's with some ice in it, but it's very utilitarian. Very.

And you look at what's being considered art, and you'll think you've walked into the local sanitarium. Art has gotten to be something which is fantastically unreal. Well, that's art now. And never occurs to anybody—let's say a bunch of millionaires get together up there and they're going to build a new building up in New York. And they worry and worry and worry about what the cost of it is, and who they're going to rent the thing to, and how they're going to acquire the ground, and who are they going to get on the city hall to condemn it all, and they're going to worry about everything. And they throw into the lap of some kid or some firm that's related to the mayor, the plans of the building. And you get something that shouldn't happen, ordinarily.

Just forget it. The skyscraper today is built to last about twenty-five years. After that it's not supposed to be standing there anymore. Somebody's supposed to tear it down or something. And it's remarkable that there's so much latitude between utilitarian today and the beauty that is possible. I mean, it's one of these infinity tracks. We don't have any gradients, see? I mean, there isn't anything to look at, in terms of span, that give you how much there is up the line up here toward beauty.

Right where you have beauty and the society level today, you see, it is something like—well, you travel from the beginning of a yardstick, you see, up to the first eighth of an inch, you know. And then you operate between that first eighth of an inch and the beginning of the yardstick. And you got the rest of the yardstick to work with, see, and nobody ever notices there's another there—that there's any yardstick there. Everybody's totally convinced that there's only the first eighth of an inch. Well, that's about the way it is.

And an auditor will be plagued continually by preclears saying—if an auditor neglects this artistic factor, why, the preclear will plague him continually. "All right, so I can do these things, so what? So what, so I can do these things. So what? I mean, it…" And the auditor is rather nonplused sometimes if he doesn't realize where the root lies there. But the root lies toward art. You rehabilitate his artistic ability, and believe me, he won't be telling you "So what?" Because that's the best there is in him. And when that is eclipsed, then the best of the thetan is eclipsed.

And he can do all sorts of things. You never saw a thetan get so busy as trying to build some kind of a mock-up all by his lonesome—not by just saying it's there, you see, but by taking masses of energy which he creates and putting it in there and shaping it up there and looking at it this way and looking at it that way and beaming it up here and stringing it up there and getting some color into it over there, you know, and so on. You talk about busy! He just gets busy and serious and so forth. He can get real serious about art—real serious.

And by the way, what he considers good art would rather exceed the imagination of most of the boys—it's rather tremendously variable, but it's rather overcolored and so on, to the dingy school of artists who are now operating today.

Well, it's something like that school of Dutch painters which flourished here in the last century or two, and I think is still flourishing, and that one of our American magazine cover painters, Norman Rockwell, studied for a while.

It's very wonderful. What they do, you see, is you take yellow and you get some brown—you kind of thin it down, you know, so it won't be gaudy. And then you get some red and you get some brown and you kind of thin it down, you make it real thin. And then you get some blue and you throw some brown into it, you know, and get it thinned down real good. And then you paint it with a dirty brush, you know, so it won't be too bright. And I think he—the four … The paintings he did for the four slavery—I mean, the four freedoms are done in that tradition.

Well, a thetan doesn't work in that tradition. I don't know what happens to him, but he just seems to go all out. He thinks color ought to be color, you know, and so on. He gets gaudy. And most anybody today would tell him that he should be more restrained. Restraint is the greatest expression of art, according to the modern school. Trouble is, they restrain themselves down to the point where they're using mostly soot on dark paper.

So, as an auditor you have quite a breadth of experience, quite a large piece of living you're looking at. And if you keep on comparing it to today's livingness— keep on comparing being a thetan to today's livingness—your preclear's going to be completely flabbergasted. I mean, he's not going to know why he's been exteriorized. He's not going to know what to do. You're going to be in a state of confusion.

And I hope tonight I've to some degree answered the question of "Well, I'm theta cleared, what do I do now?"

Well, you can do anything that was done on the track, or you can do it wilder. Or you can go into any span of art there is, and the universe itself is wide-open, even though the saloons close at ten o'clock in most of the towns in the US.

Okay.

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