View source for The Magic Button (CC 580706)

'''Series:''' Clearing Congress

'''Date:''' 6 July 1958

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

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Do you notice that vast empty space right there?

Audience: Yes.

You know? You know, I haven't been able to introduce anybody. I've been pinned down. I couldn't walk over here. I couldn't do anything. I've been limited in space. They've been making nothing out of my space. They've been making nothing out of your space. They've been getting in your road. It's bad all over.

But we have the first pictures, if they ever come out of the cans as pictures, and these are quite—it's very odd, this is the first time that we could have taken pictures which would themselves have endured. You see, this particular congress, the first six hours have a considerable longevity. Because the very least that they propose, you see, is the first time that a fact of clearing was actually publicly presented. And it wouldn't matter even if some of the techniques became moldy, which I doubt. We nevertheless, in eight years, would have found obsolescence in such a project.

Such a project, by the way, is quite expensive. They talk about motion pictures and thousands and thousands of feet of film and hours and hours of program and that sort of thing. Well, they start saying, "Well, it's two thousand for this and three thousand for that, and then of course there's the development, and that would be about another thousand or two. And then there's a thousand here and a thousand there."

And you say, "Well, that's fine! That's fine." You stop them right there and you say, "That's all, isn't it?"

"Oh, well," they say, "then we've got to get the cameras and the film and take the thing."

Costs somewhere between five and eight thousand dollars to film six hours of stuff—startling, huh?—that something new was added there to a congress.

We have a lot of things happening these days in Scientology. At first it was field offices and that sort of thing—area offices were a bit on the side of lonely outposts amongst a great many people who might possibly someday, maybe, become friendly.

And from that, why—the reason I look a little jaded is because I was up until about 2:30 Friday night talking about buying a sixty-room building for the South African operation so they'd have enough space, you know? Didn't figure it'd expand at once outside of this sixty rooms, but—and I was up till about 3:30 last night wondering what on earth we were going to do to get enough auditors in California.

And usually before at a congress, why, people from area offices would come in and they will talk to me about, "And he said so-and-so," and "They cut my throat, you know?" And it's all sort of petty and involved, and so on. And this time every conference I've had has had to do with expansion! "How are we going to get enough quarters? How are we going to get enough people? How are we possibly going to care for the traffic?"

And quite incidentally, we seem to have solved the idea of public presence. It's very interesting, but we apparently have. That definition which you see at the back of the room—boy, it's a relief to be able to say something that won't appear strange on a piece of film. That definition you see back there on the big board near the Registrar's desk, which also appears out there in the lobby—it's a definition of Clear—has, when displayed, brought several people in out of the lobby who just walked through, who then paid to attend the lecture. And they come in, they see this definition.

That's all they see—the definition. And they walk down, they want to talk to somebody about it.

One of these people listened to a lecture and has been discussing training. Isn't this interesting?

In other words, that's not an advertisement, that's a piece of truth. Isn't that interesting?

Well, this congress was to determine the future course of Scientology. And it has already done so. If this congress was smaller than usual, we knew that we would have to do something else besides clearing. We were thinking, perhaps, that we might have to go back to running engrams or something, you know, to get the thing disseminated.

But this congress is larger than usual, more active than usual and has decided beyond any doubt whatsoever that clearing is the subject. And this congress itself by its attendance and by its interest, has pretty well established in the minds of the staff that the future course of Scientology is definitely toward clearing.

Now, this might sound odd to you that there was any—doubt in the matter. But saying a thing is right in the society, or should go, does not necessarily always make it go if you're not going to manhandle the whole society. If you're going to give people any power of choice at all, you have to ask them what they like. And evidently, not only Scientology itself but the public at large would thoroughly approve if we specialized only in clearing and never did anything for anybody else, ever.

Now, what do you think about it?

Audience: Yes.

In other words, clearing is a subject which talks all by itself; people seem to be interested in this subject.

You go up to somebody, and you say, "Well …"

He says, "Wha … what are you? What's that … what's that S? That snake?"

And you say, "Well, that's Scientology." And he says, "What does it do?"

There's no reason to go on and explain any further than to say, "Well, it clears people."

"It clears people? What is the definition of Clear?"

Just give him the definition that's off the board back there. You got it made.

Nearly everybody knows something about the Freudian reconscious. And if you say, "Well, when you clear people, you do a reconscious-ectomy." They apparently understand what you're talking about. And you said, "Well,

people have mental blocks, and you pick up these mental blocks and unblock them, and they're very happy about the thing." That also communicates.

But if they press you—remember the old adding machine idea that appeared in Dianetics very early? For those of you that have forgotten it or need your memories refreshed, could I—could I just tell you that little one? The held-down five? Hm?

Audience: Yes.

All right. Now, it seems like up at Harvard University—they have a school up there, they call it a university—that they had a mechanical monster that they said was a mechanical brain. And it wouldn't turn out any right answers all of a sudden.

It was going along fine; it was whirring and clunking; it was dispensing with faculties, students, staff, everything else. And eventually we were just going to have a building sitting there with a beautiful mechanical brain in it, and everything would be fine from there on out. That's, I think, the goal of modern society. No people!

So, anyway, the thing was running along and whirring, and the wheels were coming nicely, and the big tape and data banks were all—oh, it was lovely, you know, and whirr, clank, and chutes going, and pieces of paper going, and punch card systems going and—oh, it was wonderful, wonderful.

And all of a sudden it started to lie. And they called for somebody off the ministerial staff and tried to give it a moral lecture, and they called for a psychiatrist, and he stood around and said it had a neurosis. And they gave it an IQ test and it flunked it. And finally it occurred that somebody remembered suddenly that this machine had been built by some electronics men. They were "Mama." And so they called for these fellows, and they started looking through the machine, and they made a very practical dissertation on it, and they found out that it was lying at a definite rate. It was always telling the same order of magnitude of lie.

If you asked it what five times one was, it said twenty-five. If you asked it what one times a hundred was, it said five hundred. If you asked it what one times ten was, it said fifty. And they did some common arithmetic which would have solved all the problems the machine would ever solve in the first place, and they found out that it was wrong by a factor of five.

So they started burrowing through the guts of this sort of thing, you know, and took out its appendix. And when they finally got down to the last channel where the little simple column that really did the work—you know, all the little contacts that really did the work were; they got past the advertising plates, you know, and the cybernetics attachment and all of that—they found out that a drop of solder had melted so that whatever the machine said, five was totally connected into the machine.

In other words, whatever else was added into the machine, also, unbeknownst to anyone, five was added into the machine. There was that five.

So, that anytime the machine gave you an answer of any kind, it multiplied it or divided it or added to it five. You see? It had the figure five identified with every factor of every problem that was fed to or taken out of the machine. You see that? There was a five identification.

Now, that figure five and this machine analogy is what we used to demonstrate what happened with an engram. An engram has just added a number of set factors.

This fellow knows "all women are evil." So he goes into a restaurant, and he knows that, whatever else he knows, he knows that one, you see? Just like some girl who knows "all men are alike," something like that.

But he knows this factor, "all women are evil." He goes into a restaurant, he starts to order some ice cream, and then sees that it will be served by a waitress, notices that this is a woman, decides ice cream will probably give him indigestion; he eats some ice cream and he gets indigestion. Get the idea?

He walks down the street and sees that it is a beautiful day, there are no women on the street, see? The beautifulness of the day is evaluated by the fact there are no women present, see?

He goes into a bar, and it's horrible; it has a woman bartender. But he never notices this woman. He just notices this is a horrible bar. He tells all of his friends never to go near the place. The liquor is poisoned, they have all sorts of tramps that hang around there, you get rolled for your money. You just never go near this bar. And the only thing that's really wrong with it, it's got a woman bartender.

The one factor that he never sees is the factor that is wrong! Just like the machine never noticed that five was soldered into all the answers, so he never notices at all that women are added or subtracted in everything that he does in the society.

Right-wrong, good-evil, all of these things have women connected with it. Some day, some auditor comes along and deletes this piece of solder, this aberration about women from the machinery. Zuupt. And he walks down the street, and it is a beautiful day because it is raining or because it is sunny or foggy or something else, but it's a beautiful day because it is what he might consider a beautiful day. It is no longer beautiful simply because there are no women on the street. You get the idea? And he meets some girl, and they live happily ever after if that's possible.

I actually did this to one of the finest Scientologists down under. I actually pulled this soldered "all women are bad" out of the bank one night about midnight with the first class of Scientologists taught in England.

I backed him up against the wall and sat him down on the couch. And we'd had enough of this, and his case was being very resistive. And I peeked.

It was a very bad thing to do, but I peeked. And he had murdered a sufficient number of women up and down the track that he was pretty well stuck on the subject—overt act-motivator sequence.

And I said, "Well now, get in there and pitch. Let's walk down that cave and pick up that rock and bash the woman, that girl, over the head and kill her dead."

And he screamed faintly, and I pressed right on as an auditor, and I made him do this thing. And it was basic-basic on this particular chain. And it blew up the whole chain, and his case ran very easily after that, and he's been a terrific auditor ever since.

Now, look at this as an actual explanation. It isn't too simple an explanation, then, to say "held-down five." See, it isn't too simple at all.

And this has come back to us again after all this time. I'd like to tell you some more about it because it's become so important to us in modern processing. Would you like to hear some more about this held-down five?

Audience: Yes.

Well, here's—here's the first thing that you should understand. If you haven't done very much auditing, you still have probably run into this. If you've done lots of it, you've run into it all too often.

And that is, the individual sits there, you know, just sits there getting along fine, you know? "It's all right. It's fine. I feel much better. Yeah, it's all right."

And you run processes should blow their silly head off, you know, and straighten them all up, you know, and they say, "Oh, yes, sure, fine, fine."

And you audit them for hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks, and they just keep saying, "Mm-hm."

What's wrong with this fool? What's wrong with this case?

Well, I'll tell you. And I can tell you at last very simply what's wrong with that case—is this case has only one combination that is real, and that is the held-down five. All other things are unreal to some degree.

And when you hit above or below or beyond or too short of the held-down five—that very button right there—you hit unreality.

We said one time, Book One, that if we could only establish what the mind was doing and parallel it, then we could resolve the problems of the mind.

Well, I have at last found out exactly what the mind is doing: That is real to the mind, what the mind is mocking up obsessively. What the mind is mocking up obsessively is more real to the mind than anything else which it isn't mocking up obsessively. Do you see that?

In other words, let's say, the held-down five is totally real to this preclear who goes on saying, "Oh, yes, fine. I'm getting better. Yes, I do. It's a nice wall." He can do 8-C, and he can do concepts, and he can walk through everything. He runs for hours on Op Pro by Dup and nothing much happens.

This case is a—huh! Drowning is too good for him, you know? (laughter) They just don't appreciate anything you're doing.

You could say, "Well, Help is what is wrong with them." Well, eventually if you ran enough Help, you would run into this and solve it. But the funny part of it is, is the thing they're mocking up obsessively is their help computation. Unless you run the help out of what they're mocking up obsessively—which of course helps them enormously because it kills them every lifetime or something—nothing bites. In other words, you've got a total fixation and concentration in such a case on it.

Now, everybody to some degree is obsessively—before he's Clear- obsessively mocking up something.

We get ahold of one person, we audit him for a little while, and they just clear up just as nice as you please. They come right upscale, all is rosy and nothing to it. And then we get ahold of another person, and they apparently are no worse off, and it's all unreal, and they just go along and—nice and very little increase, and it's mild, and it's going to take forever.

And if we invest eighteen thousand hours, why, we've made it—you know, you get that one. Well, that case is totally concentrated on some one mock-up.

And if you get the idea of the person actually mocking up something all the time persistently, and then inhibiting it so that he won't notice that he's mocking it up, because if he didn't inhibit it, he'd notice that he was mocking it up. If he didn't mock it up, it might not appear, or this whole thing is strictly squirrel cage. He himself could not tell you for the life of him what he's mocking up.

The way I'm—the big problem in all this, of course, is diagnosis, if you want to use that word—it isn't diagnosis. It's lookability. And if you can look, why, you've got it made. You'd hardly say it's diagnosis because it's not an illness. It is an action on the part of the case. They're creating this piece of solder. And everything they think, feel, anything else, is being short-circuited by this piece of solder into all other patterns of thinkingness—their abilities, everything else are modified by this one stupid thing.

Now, it will gather onto it locks, and it gathers on locks and locks and locks to a point where the original computation, the original mental image picture, the mock-up there that they're making all the time, has just stacked, stacked, stacked, stacked, stacked up on it, so many incidents of so many varieties and so many identifications that it looks like a ball of yarn some kitten has been playing with. It is just a snarled mass.

What's the pin that you have to take hold of and pull out? It's that one thing. It's the thing the preclear will never tell you about. Isn't that simple?

Boy, you should know that so well. The only positive method of diagnosing that we have for this particular thing is just to note carefully all the things the preclear tells us about and know they're not it.

The preclear knows about what we used to call associative restimulators, but doesn't know about the center pin. I've already mentioned that in these lectures. The person who goes out and finds a new girl every two weeks and chases around with a girl for two weeks and then leaves her, and so forth.

And you say, "Obviously …"

He says, "The trouble with me is women. I have a lot of trouble with women."

Have you search around, it has nothing to do with women. It has to do with a house. He can never stay in a house, see? It's this sort of thing- it's this sort of thing.

Therefore, auditing today requires some judgment if you're going to take a case apart fairly rapidly.

And then the oddity is, is you'll eventually take it apart in any event if you don't patty-cake and Q-and-A with the preclear.

Preclear says, "Oh, well," he says, "let's run … I … I'm … I'm very frightened of cats, you know? I'm terribly frightened of cats, and let's run cats," and so forth.

And the auditor obligingly says, "All right. All right. How could you help a cat?" Oh, you can waste more time that way.

Preclear doesn't know about it! If he knew about it, he'd be Clear. And he'd only require auditing to OT. He doesn't know about it.

What is the source of this preclear's obsessive mocking-upness? What is the source of it? He evidently had some kind of a survival mock-up that helped him survive across Lord knows how many millennia, which got invalidated and which he used again and which got invalidated. And it was the thing which basically and originally won over him and suppressed his own basic personality to a point where it doesn't exist, and only this winning mock-up exists. And the winning mock-up could be a monster or a demon; it could be a teacher, a priest; it could be a boat, any—anything that you might think of in terms of an item or object in this or any other universe might be it. It gives you a very—a very finite number of items.

But it is that—it is that combination or valence or computation or belief which assists him to create and with which he can survive, and without which—the one thing he knows, boy, this is the one thing he knows—he couldn't survive without it.

Fellow is walking down the street—crutch, broken leg. That he can't survive without.

But you see—you look at him and you obviously—you say, "All right. The trouble with him is a crutch and a broken leg. He's got a broken leg, and he feels he can't survive without it." Oh, boy! If it were only that simple.

Now, the trouble with an E-Meter is the E-Meter sticks when you hit it. And if you're not on the ball, if you're not right in there pitching, and you don't notice it the first time it stuck, then everything else that you ask him will just stick to the stick. You got it?

You could possibly run Connectedness and separate the meter out again, which is about the only thing you could do, and then go through your questioning all over again, and this time notice when it stuck.

Well, how about the preclear—walks in and sits down—who is already stuck? And then all you do is add to his stuckitity. And the longer you talk to him, the stickier he sticks? Well, how about that fellow?

Well, you'll notice it when the tone arm starts going up on your meter. And the higher that tone arm rises, the wronger you are. That's a new look, isn't it? The rising tone arm on the meter. The higher that rises, the more resistance is being added to the case and the wronger you are. You're going further and further from the truth because you've got something there!

Now, get the idea that resistance could more or less be envisioned as mass, and the mock-up which he's obsessively mocking up is mass and contains mass. And you could say that its resistance is proportional to the amount of mass there. And the more mass you add to this, the more mock-ups, the more facsimiles, the more mental image pictures that are added to this mass, the more resistance you have expressed on the meter.

Now, this may or may not be electronically correct, but it is certainly Scientologically correct. And you ask him more and more questions. (Oh, you want to know a definition: Scientology is true and electronics isn't.) Here we have a situation there where the more mass you're adding into the case, the less you must have struck the correct pin in the case. Do you see that? That's on Help.

Now, with your running Step Six, the tone arm will, for a long time, continue to rise and increase because the more you raise his ability to mock up, the more solid he can make his mental image pictures, the more the obsessive mock-up becomes solid. So, of course, you get the rising scale—this rise on the tone arm. So the longer you audit—the longer you audit Step Six without having hit the basic computation of the case—the more the arm of the E-Meter will rise.

There's nothing much wrong with it. You can do it, you can get away with it. It isn't right, but it is workable. So after a while the thing becomes so solid that even it appears. It's sort of a race between when will your preclear lose the top half of his body or when will he see it? And which one of those appears first, why, in one case you've made it, in the other place you haven't. It's nothing to become emotional about.

But that is a little bit of a rough way to audit because this will happen occasionally that this—let's say this preclear—let's say this preclear is mocking up a rock. Now, we won't worry about why he's mocking up a rock. He just is.

A rock is what you survive with; a rock helps you create. The early worship of stones which you find in England, where all the stones were believed to speak. They still have stones in some of the counties there that they tell you, "Well, that stone used to talk." It's quite interesting. And the stone helps you create.

Do you realize that modern science—you must say that, you know, with a little prayer, cross yourself in some fashion—modern science tells us we all come from mud, and most of them obsessively mock up mud. Anyway …

Here we have a rock, and this fellow is obsessively mocking up a rock. He's got a good reason for it. It is what helps him survive; it's his assistance in creativeness. But in order to keep the rock mocked up, his attention is someplace else. And then he's got four or five other types of mock-ups which are almost associated, right with, in the same space with the rock, don't you see?

And then going out from that is some tremendous agglomeration of bric-a-brac and hodge-podge, if you audited each part of which would take you forever. But he's mocking up this rock, so you run Step Six.

You say, "All right. Now, let's mock up a little cube in front of the body." "All right." "In front of that body mock up a cube and keep it from going away." "Did you?" "Thank you." "Behind that body mock up a cube and keep it from going away." "Did you?" "Thank you." So we go, with the first commands of Step Six.

And this rock which he'd gotten pretty well inhibited, see, it's crushed down, it's invisible. You see, he's mocking it up very solidly, and it has over the top of it an invisible mock-up which is a curtain mock-up—oh, it's very complicated, you know? And here's this rock. And, of course, as you run Step Six, his ability to mock up improves. Well, he's just mocking up the rock, don't you see? It's not anything that's mocked up by something else or somebody else. He may be mocking it up on numerous vias, but that's still just a mock-up. It's a mental image picture, maybe. Maybe it's a copy of something in the physical universe, but it still can be classified for our purposes as just a created picture. It has mass, and so forth.

And you improve his ability to mock up, and the rock gets a little more solid—creak. And he doesn't see it, you see? And he keeps running this thing. And it gets ooom-ooom-ooom. And he'll say, "I have a somatic," he says, "got a somatic."

And you say, "Well, that's fine. Beneath that body, mock up a cube and keep it from going away." "Did you?" "Thank you." And you go on, round and round.

And he says, "You know. I haven't got any legs. I haven't got any legs at all. I don't have any feeling in them. They disappeared."

And you say, "Well, that's fine. Now, above that body mock up a cube, keep it from going away." "Did you?" And here we go, you see?

See, the more you improve his mock-ups, the more this thing comes into view.

Well, after a while in self-defense, he will recognize—he's liable to say, "Hey, what do you know? What do you know? An American Indian."

You know, you look over here, you say, "An American Indian. What do you know? Well, I wonder where that came from."

And he—we do it a little while longer and he says, "Well," he says, "I … you know, I must be mocking that thing up, too." And he kind of takes a little responsibility for it, and it goes pffff.

Well actually, this rock can apparently give birth to all of the locks he can remember in connection with it, and he's liable to strip down all these mock-ups down to the rock and theoretically, if you ran Step Six long enough and ran it well enough, he would—say (if there was anything left of the body so he'd have vocal chords), he'd say—he'd say, "You know, I just noticed something here. A rock! Do you suppose I've been mocking that up?" And after that, he'd take some responsibility for it, and the case would run like pushing a baby carriage. There'd just be nothing to it because you've hit his obsessive mock-up, his held-down five, so that everything doesn't lock up with everything else.

Well now, theoretically, you can do that if the preclear can take the stress. Now, that rock getting more and more solid is what we call "going over the hump." Now theoretically, that would work.

In actual practice, however, we need to run Help on it. And we'll get there much more rapidly.

Now, an Indian appeared long before the rock appeared—an Indian, and then stage horses. And he starts figuring after a while—he says, "You know, these … these stage coach horses," he'll say, "I'm absolutely certain that … you know, I've always abhorred horses. You know?" And so on. "And that's probably what's wrong with me." He'll decide the Indian is wrong with him, then he'll decide the horses are wrong with him, you see?

He'll decide this is wrong with him, that's wrong with him, everything is wrong with him but the rock. They all kind of lead in because of total identification; they all kind of lead into the rock.

Well, when you have another means, and when you are bright enough and sharp enough and sufficiently on the ball enough, you can take this little key in a case, and you could go, "Ha! A rock." Key in your pocket, and you say—and you say, "Now, is it all right if I audit you?"

We get the formalities over with, the PT problem out of the road and we say, "I'm going to run a process. How could you help a rock?" "How could a rock help you?" "How could other people help a rock?" "How could a rock help other people?" "I'm going to run this little process. Now, what do we mean—what do we mean by how?" "Good."

By the way, you should really clear an auditing command about every twenty-five commands because the person keeps changing his mind about what the words mean. And if it becomes too mechanical, shake him up on the whole subject and just hash it all out from beginning to end. Because, you see, the preclear changes, and the meanings change, and he might be holding on to the earlier consideration of what he thought those words meant, but now they mean something different, but he's on the earlier ones—and he gets confused. So you clear the command.

Anyway, you clear this command, and you get right down the line. And he's sitting there. You've said, "rock," and nothing happened; he didn't jump. And you said, "Now, what do you mean by rock?"

And he said, "Oh, a solid object."

And we're all set, and "You don't mind running this?"

"No. No. No."

"Well, how do you feel about rocks?"

"Well, I never pay any attention to them then!" (Doing it.) "Rocks are just rocks, you know. My uncle … my uncle cured me of that a long time ago. He was a geologist. He used to talk about rocks all the time. It's nonsense. Pssst. Rocks. Go ahead and run it. You're wasting your time, of course."

You say, "Well, it is all right if I audit this," and you start in on the thing, and he audits it for five, six, eight, ten commands and …

Of course, if you're dealing with a central computation, I should give you a little tip. You should never run more than one command of the bracket before shifting because that's the safe way to go about it. Because you get the one command going too long in one direction, and it'll just get tighter and tighter and meaner and meaner.

So, let's just run this for a little while. The preclear all of a sudden says, "I don't know why you're auditing this. I don't see any reason to do so. Rocks are a heavy subject."

And if you're right on the button, you will get total resistance, total grief, "Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. You're being so mean to me!" And then, eventually, you will see the old ARC Tone Scale start to rise just the way it happened in old engram times when you hit the right engram. The person was in apathy and went through the incident in apathy. Well, he answers all these questions in apathy. "Well, you … guess you know what you're doing," and so on, and so on.

And then next thing you know, why, he cries because of you, and because of—the room is too hot. And then he becomes afraid, and then he becomes angry and then he moves on upstairs into the other emotional band and finally becomes bored with it. And of course, it's flat then, isn't it?

No, it is not flat. And you go up to enthusiasm and with what enthusiasm can he help rocks.

But you'll see the help/destroy combination—not dichotomy—combination operate.

"How could I help a rock? Well, it could be in the road. Somebody's going to grind it up in a concrete mixer or something like that." Of course, you're liable to notice at first, no real reality going along here. And then all of a sudden, you get ferocious comm lags—or right at the beginning, you get a ferocious comm lag.

You say, "How could a rock help you?"

The fellow will say, "Well, any fool could answer that. Uh …"

And we get this thing—we get this process on the road, we carry it on through. We will certainly see the help/destroy factor involved, and that is to say, "How could you help a rock?"

By the way, you never find any fault with a preclear's belief in the matter. He says that's how he could help a rock—that's fine. And "How could a rock help you?" "Well, all right." He's—"How could a rock help you?"

And he says, "Oh, it could knock my head off." Well, that's his answer, and from his viewpoint, that's a correct helping answer and that would be a helpful thing.

"How could you help a rock?"

"Oh, I could break it up into little pieces and feed it into a hopper and … and roast it all down to molten lava and … and pour it out into the ocean, and so it would be totally atomized and nobody would ever be able to find any part of it again."

And you just—you'd say, "Well,"—you'd be wrong to say, "Well, would that really help a rock?" That would be quite incorrect. Now, that's his idea of help at the moment.

You see, help/destroy is not a dichotomy for an excellent reason: is that destroy is a method of helping.

Well, any cavalrymen, any ex-cavalrymen—if there are any present, don't all of you gentleman stand up—any cavalryman knows that the only way you can help a horse with a bad wound or a bad broken leg or something of this sort is to shoot him. Isn't that right?

And one old Westerner that went out to Montana and he married a girl, and they went out and lived up in the hills for a long time. Finally came back to town all by himself.

And said, "Well, where's your wife?"

And he says, "Well, where's my wife? Oh, he says, "that was pretty bad."

"Well, what happened?"

"Well, she broke her leg and I had to shoot her."

But that, destroy—destroy is looked upon as a method of helping. And this was a fooler to me at first. I thought we were looking at a dichotomy at first; I thought we were looking at help and destroy as two polarities, you see, of something. But we have finally found something in the world which doesn't have a dichotomy. And that's why it is so effective. It's totally associated. It's an identified thing!

It is even identified with each part of the cycle of action. It is very helpful to destroy. Destruction is very helpful.

I went in—I was talking to a dentist one day. And as he was grinding away on his teeth or my teeth—they get sort of identified after a while—I was talking when he got the drill out of my mouth, I was talking to him about something I was interested in: geriatrics, longevity, so forth. And he finally decided that would be a very, very bad thing because people would live forever and the whole world would become overpopulated. And he went a little bit further along the line, and he says, "Well," he says, "you," he says, "if you don't kill off the whole population of Earth every twenty-five or thirty-years," he says, "why, you … you've had it." He says. "And the most … the best thing you could possibly do would be to do this every twenty-five or thirty years." And he says, "Nature does it anyway." And he was defending help and it was the glories of death, you know—how helpful death was.

And people tell you, "Well, this … all these termites that eat up all this wood." I heard somebody one time. They make some of the most exaggerated and identified defenses. This was a funny picture. They said, "God bless dry rot and God bless termites. If it weren't for dry rot and if it weren't for termites, all of Earth would be two hundred and fifty miles deep in dead trees!" Well, I thought that was very, very nice. I thought that was—I thought that was wise and good.

I got to thinking it over. I didn't know where the third or fourth crop of trees would have grown from, really, if the ground was all covered with dead trees. And I took unction with this, and I claimed then the Earth would have been buried under ferns or orchids or something of this sort, and took the rather extreme view. This was with a bunch of democratic—socialists, communists present. It was down in Greenwich Village where this thing took place. And I was noted down there for being a horribly unreasonable person because I would always take—always take the exact line calculated to defeat all offered lines.

And they were trying to help me, you see, by amalgamating me into the new order of things—where all writers would be paid by the state and be able to write what they pleased for two hours, as long as they wrote for twenty-six hours what the state wanted. And they had it all worked out one way or the other.

And I remember the horrible argument that ensued because they were utterly betrayed on their basic argument about how wonderful dry rot was, and so forth. Because it was my maintenance that they were against having the world covered with orchids. And they said—seemed to me to be a nice thought.

The whole point of help/destroy is that you can't say there is help and there is destruction. No, there is help and there is help that not everybody agrees with.

Now, this idea then of help—help is help. And it is, of course, best defined along the lines, your preclear—he'll have to redefine it many times. "Help is what you get when you're sick." Some preclears define it that way, see? So, anybody helps him, means he's sick. See?

And you get all sorts of aberrations rolling off of the top of simply clearing this word help every twenty-five or thirty commands, you see? And he has to redefine it. And he gets down to something—something like "assistance in survival" or something of the sort. And what we want is "assistance in creativeness." But if he gives you the book answer, of course, you just keep asking him. Because he does have an answer that he will understand on which he has some reality of one kind or another.

One of these Village arguments, I remember vividly. There were an awful lot of people there, and they were all very smart people, and many of them were poets and things that—of some fame. And they got involved in socialism, workabilities of. And I got involved with a writer who was a socialist, and he and I got to talking.

The trouble with me was, you see, is I was an anarchist in those days—I would tell any communist, because he would try to make me a radical.

And when I said I was an anarchist, then he'd have to work like mad because I was too radical for him, and he tried to make a conservative out of me. Get the idea?

So, anyway, we had this long conversation and we were trying to get socialism straightened out, and how would you best apply socialism or what would socialism do to Earth, and so on?

And I finally got this fellow into one of these horrible cul-de-sacs based on Aristotelian syllogisms, you know? If A equals B then God help all of us! And he agreed right straight on down the line and, too late, found himself in a dead-end canyon. The only way you could have a perfect socialism was if everybody on Earth was dead. And the way this worked out was very, very simple, you see—is that you'd have to get rid of all the misfits. And then I proved to him that everybody was—didn't quite fit, and then the—so, anyway, he was stuck with this proposition. And he stood there. And eventually his sense of humor came slightly to his rescue—and everybody else had laughed him out of countenance terribly—and it came slightly to his rescue. And he says, "Well," he says, "if the world was composed of people like you," he said, "I don't know what it wouldn't be the most helpful move anybody could make." Yeah.

His idea basically in searching around—if that man were a preclear—his basic idea of help on the fourth dynamic would, of course, have been annihilation. And I think that if you took a nuclear physicist or one of the heads of countries today and really put him over the jumps—some fellow that's subscribing right along the line—weak statesmanship, strong defense and offense, you know? And if you came right on down the line and asked him, "How would you really help mankind?" He would give you the answer, "Well, you wipe them all out." I think that this would be a very sincere answer on his part. I think he'd believe this answer.

So that help is simply help. And if you don't agree with some other people's ideas of how to help, then of course the best thing for you to do is audit them because they'll find out something about it, too.

But if you run Help on rocks and Help on this and Help on that, you will best profit if you run it on the exact thing the person is mocking up.

A person, in other words, no matter how blank his field is, how black it is, how enturbulated it is or anything else, is not thinking a wrong thought. He's mocking up and inhibiting the mock-up of something, which is definitely against his best interests, that he believes implicitly he could not live without. And everybody has to have something they cannot live without so that it can kill them.

And just exactly how they've mounted this up over a period of time and let the automaticities of experience deal them this kind of a hand, actually appears to be beyond their powers of consent, but they must have innocently consented to it at one time or another or they wouldn't be doing it. It's a cinch that now they don't know they are doing it.

So when we're looking for the central button, what we're doing is looking for the central mock-up. Now, you may find a dozen that appear to be the central mock-up, and then the central mock-up itself will fall out in your laps.

This is the most expert facet of auditing today. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you a nice little pat formula on exactly how this is done, so let your conscience be your guide. If you know the way the picture looks, and that it is a picture, I'll have to leave it up to you.

The best thing I can tell you is that if the preclear says, "That's what's wrong," it isn't. And by deductive elimination, you eventually can arrive at such a thing. But by that time he would have had to have described all objects and items in all universes, except one—and it would be up to you to notice that strange omission.

So, I invite you in projects of fast clearing to sharpen your perception. You will make it on a long run anyway with Clear Procedure. But you'll make it on a much shorter run if you are able to just—and that would be that.

Thank you.

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