Violence (Clearing Congress 580706)
Series: Clearing Congress
Date: 6 July 1958
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, we're entering the last hour of this congress, and about all that's left of it besides this lecture is the party tonight. But we've had some very, very pleasant entertainment here from the Juvenile Six Plus One that was playing such beautiful Dixieland stuff.
Now, how would you like to meet those boys?
Okay. Thank you, fellas. Thank you.
A little later this summer, this whole band is, I think, going to be at the Academy for an HAS Course and going to teach them how to do Group Processing, Tone 40.
Audience: (various reactions)
The theory is, you see, if each one of them became absolutely expert in Tone 40ing a whole audience, they'd have it made. But it's an experiment and I think it will be very worthwhile to carry it out.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised that—right now that these boys undoubtedly make some of the bands around look mighty pale. And it's sort of surprising not to have found them already on the Steve Allen Show or something of the sort. But I would see that definitely in their future. I have a crystal ball here that's very reliable. You see that crystal ball? See, look at it. Okay. Phewww.
Well, now that you know everything there is to know, there's no further use for my talking to you here about anything very much.
Probably this will be the last congress we'll ever have, you know? Because we've really shot the wad at this congress. There isn't any further data to amount to anything, and anybody could follow the simple directions that have been given.
Of course, there's that little point of diagnosis—little point of diagnosis, which isn't diagnosis at all. Reactive bank crawling is in fashion.
Well, I haven't really any more data to give you concerning clearing or E-Meters or states of case or organizations or anything else. This is the way it gets when it starts to approach a total win, you know? You just keep going up.
Is there anything particular you'd like to hear about?
Audience: OT!
What?
Audience: OT!
OT! Well, 20th ACC is covering that.
Boy, you've been had. I plotted that one.
The simple fact of the case is, as any fool can plainly see, that an OT is simply an educated BP. That's one of those remarks that belong at the bottom of the Know to Mystery Scale.
Definition of Operating Thetan is someone who can be at cause, is willing to be at cause and can be at cause over life, matter, energy, space and time.
Funny part of it is, if you follow that definition, you at least get a Clear. Clear is an absolute state, but it happens to be only a way stop to OT—by which we mean Operating Thetan (Thee-tan, excuse me).
An Operating Thetan would simply be a thetan who could perform as a thetan without the necessity or assistance of bodies and that sort of thing. It doesn't particularly connotate the rattling of chains or anything like that, but it could.
I remember one time back in about 1632, I had a castle, I was having trouble with the real estate men, and so forth, and I rattled some chains … But that's another story.
Now, the main thing that you'll come up against in asking questions about Clears: There's a thing called basic personality which is covered in the first book, Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health. Talks about BP—it says people have a BP, they have a basic personality. There is such a thing as a basic personality, and it is a personality. It is a person; it is an individuality and it is an identity.
Now, the way people get unsold off their own basic personality is very simple. Another pattern called a personality overwhelms one to such a degree that his own BP becomes nothing, and he adopts the characteristics of another being.
This is a very mysterious thing, watching a final basic valence come off of a basic personality. It's a remarkable thing.
Because when that valence is halfway off and halfway lifted, the feeling of nothingness and stupidity that the person got, just before he got overwhelmpt totally, goes into restimulation.
And if you were to ask the person at that time who he was and what he is, he'd say, "I'm just nothing."
Actually, you tell some people to, "Be three feet back of your head." Now you say, "What are you and who are you?"
And they go, "I'm just nothing. I'm a poor little thing. I'm just … (sniff) I don't have any body. I don't have any identity, and I can't do anything. And I'm just a thetan waif."
That's the way he feels. Why? Well, he just came out of a body, and he was relying on the expression on the face. He was relying upon the posture. He was relying upon this, he was relying upon that. He was relying upon the voice tones. He was relying upon the lineage, the genealogy, the characteristics, the police record. He's relying on all these things to have a personality connotation, and when he is suddenly—denuded, you might say—naked thetan …
And by the way, some people who have difficulty exteriorizing are also afraid of being seen naked. I just threw that in.
When you have an individual who is first exposed to freedom, his first feeling is that he is nothing, that he has no characteristics, that he isn't anybody. Aid his first impulse is to go find another personality that he can artificially adopt the same way he adopted this individuality that you just got him rid of.
So don't ever run a valence halfway out because he promptly looks around and finds another one. Well, the thing he doesn't know is, he's got one! He is one!
Now, people get off into the kick of equality. Equality. Tom Jefferson would roll in his grave, I swear. Equality—everything is equal to everything is equal, is equal, is equal, is equal. It's total identification. And if you're absolutely nuts, then you're completely equal.
Not even thetans are equal to each other. They are evidently not. But down in the bottom of the mire or half-way out of a valence or something else, a fellow will say, "Well, a thetan is just a thetan, and he doesn't have any characteristics and he's just nobody," and "Where is another body?"
So that when you get a person exteriorizing by reason of death, his first impulse is to go find another body, and that's why he keeps going in the line. Thank you. Do you see that?
It's the anxiety to pick up a new identity because he has no reliance upon his own identity at all.
Every once in a while somebody says, "I wish I could find myself," or, "I wish I could be myself," and then nobody tells him how to do it. They just tell him, "Well, go on, be yourself." You know?
And so he says, "Be myself. I guess that would be like Father. No, I'd be like Mother. No, a drill sergeant is really better."
He looks for a forceful personality rather than himself. And the basic motivation back of valences is not identity nor beingness nor personality. It's a computation known as confusion and the stable datum.
A thetan is basically motionless. And when he begins to confront motion, he would rather not. And this continues throughout his career until he cures himself of it or begins to tolerate this thing called motion to such a degree that he is totally controlled by motion.
Lawlessness in this society is predicated upon intolerance to violence. Lawfulness means he can't stand violence! He is lawful because he cannot tolerate violence, therefore he had better be good or he will have to face violence.
And the nations of Earth and the police forces and the courts, the bosses and the whip—masters have alike used this mechanism since time immemorial—rule by violence. A person cannot stand motion, confusion—that's supposed to be so bad—therefore he will recoil from violence. And he is promised that in the face of violence he will not be able to survive. So therefore he must avoid violence. He must not confront violence.
And you get him going back, and back, and back away from violence, confronting no motion, until he has no further back to go and he becomes violent and gets elected as the chief of police.
In this universe, in this nation, at this time, violence is king! Threat of violence.
You ask why a peaceable, peace-loving people, like the Mexicans, can tolerate so much political chicanery and banditry? It is only the very peaceful people who have been forced arduously to be good, who are at length ruled only by violence.
Violence is the great governing principle of this universe at this time.
All you'd have to be to be totally free would be totally tolerant of violence leveled against you and yours to such a degree that it would have no effect. You must have consented some time or another to be ruled by violence. If you undid that computation, you would then be free.
Goodness, which is based upon fear, is evil and will express itself in covert hostility and destructiveness. So true goodness would have to be somewhere around true potential freedom, and freedom is totally defined by violence, tolerance of.
Do you realize that that thing they call the H-bomb offers only one thing. It does not offer good laws, good schools or anything else. It promises nothing except total extinction by violence. But it has a danger as a ruling principle, a grave danger.
Sooner or later violence fails because a thetan in fact has to consent to be ruled by violence. And some day when he doesn't consent to be ruled by it anymore, it suddenly and inexplicably becomes ineffective against him. And you'll get this oddity: an individual becomes too violent to command or to be obeyed. And when that happens you get this fantastic thing: You get an individual who says, "Oh, well, hell. Huhh. All I can do is die." And he goes on in and mops the thing up, you know?
That's of course, the rebel's greatest motto, "All I can do is die." He doesn't even have to pay taxes. The only thing he really has to do is die, he says. That's if he has a body, he dies. All right.
A thetan could be missold on that, because a thetan doesn't even have to die. As a matter of fact, he can't It isn't that he's trying to find pie in the sky and immortality to the end of his days. This is not what he's trying to find at all.
I swear an awful lot of thetans have gotten awfully bored with immortality. There's a great Greek playwright wrote a play one time about a young man who lived to be a thousand years old in perpetual youth. And his friends all got older and older and all died off, and at the end of the thing he's begging the gods to kill him. Just like some people beg you to be executed when they say they want auditing. They get very angry with you because you don't execute them.
Some day—one day you employ somebody and he wants you as the employer simply because he has elected you his executioner. And he comes around and he says, "Shoot me."
And you say, "Well, that's all right, boy. I'm sure we can get along fine," and so forth.
And after a while, why, he drops the best china on the back walk, you know? And he says, "Shoot me?"
And after he set the house on fire and run off with the maid or something of the sort, you finally get in a frame of mind where he is shootable, and you decide to shoot him. He's tired of the circumstances in which he finds himself, and knowing no other way to change them, he consents to die. Then he consents to losing all of his memory and he consents to all sorts of things, and he has this fantastic thing going on, being mocked up perpetually. And life goes on while he inhibits the fact that he has lived before, almost to such a degree that the only thing wrong with a person is that he will not take responsibility for having lived elsewhere under other circumstances.
Now, an individual who is no longer afraid of violence becomes a very dangerous individual to a state or a group which depends totally upon violence for its good order and discipline.
You and I know—and we are very lonely in this belief, believe me—that violence in the final analysis never really accomplishes anything in the handling of people or animals—never really accomplishes anything lasting.
Lasting disciplines and accomplishments, and so forth, are accomplished by the use of affinity, reality and communication. Control is possible through the use of ARC but not violence!
Violence is the last resort of the ignorant.
Now, when an individual has succumbed totally to violence, he cannot confront any motion of any kind around him, and we have nervousness, anxiety, all these various things that people have described as illnesses- mental illnesses. Funniest thing I ever heard of is a mental illness. What other kind is there?
The final, last step would just be total resistance. You'd have total resistance, rigid resistance; it would be resistance against everything and anything. And this in itself would be sort of a living tomb, and in this tomb most people live their lives away.
But violence can go very much too far. And when violence is too extravagant, it has a tendency to backfire on itself.
We open the window of our house and we look out on the street, we see a fellow out there and he's throwing tin cans or something of the sort into the gutter with a crash and a bang, and he's shouting, he's making noise, and so forth. And we say, "Well, he'll go away, you know." Don't pay too much attention to him—we walk on down the street. This is of no real concern. Then we listen for a little while longer and he's using our name in vain and he has now got a pocket pistol out, and he's starting to shoot holes in the house.
Of course, we say about that time, "Well, enough is enough, you know?" And we take old Brown Bess or something of this sort and blow his silly head off. Violence begets violence.
But somewhere down along the line, a fellow who is timid, retiring, law-abiding, never steps an inch out of the road of social codes and mores, this individual bares his fangs and attacks the object which has become too violent. So, it isn't a nice, smooth equation—handling by violence. It's a terrible liability.
I remember one time, a drunken sailor coming up to me while the ship was tied up along a dock. He came up to me, he was drunk. He had just got through beating up the gangway guard. Boy, was he violent! He was very, very violent.
And he rushed into the chart room, and I was standing there, and I had a Colt .45 in a drawer, and I started to reach for this Colt .45, and then instead of bringing it up in front of me, I just stuck it in my belt band behind me.
He saw some dim smudge standing there. He couldn't make it out what was in front of him and he raised his fist, you know, to strike. And I didn't duck. I was actually waiting to grab his arm or something as it went by. But I was not in a frame of mind which was anything but a little bit puzzled trying to figure out the situation of, how did we get this guy re-routed? And evidently it hit him between the eyes. He didn't do any recognition or anything of the sort, but somebody was motionless and nothing was reacting to the violence that should have been reacting to this violence.
And he suddenly considered himself somehow or another to be in danger! And you never saw a guy fold up and wrap up and go to pieces so fast. But nothing had been said to him. There was no magic involved or anything of the sort. It was just he, somehow or other, was coming into the realization that he had been too violent, so he punished himself by almost total succumb. Get the idea?
So we would get this sort of a picture: We could get the picture of a nation using hydrogen bombs or something of the sort against another nation and then turning around and shooting all of its own citizens! Or suddenly the government folding up and running away and disappearing. You know, they bomb everything, and then all of a sudden you can't find anybody in any part of the government! They're all gone.
You look where an army post was, and they've all thrown their rifles away. The darnedest things happen when chaos is employed, when violence is employed, because it gets chaos. And chaos is the darnedest thing. It's the antithesis of organization. You get totally unpredictable actions occurring as a result of.
The threat in the world today of a great deal of violence contained in the case of an H-bomb, is enough itself to unstabilize governments, whether it's ever used or not. It's just that much violence.
And the world's laws at this time are based upon the predication that violence rules. People obey if they are offered violence. This is this idiotic rule: If you have enough chaos, you'll have order.
Think of it for a moment. Isn't that a silly proposition? If you have enough chaos, you'll have order.
If you threaten to kill a guy hard enough, why, he'll obey.
But every once in a while he doesn't or most of the time he doesn't Violence has certainly never solved the problem of criminality in this world, has it? Having violent police forces, and so forth, it doesn't solve any real problem.
Some other means must be looked for then—some better knowledge must be entertained of this subject called human behavior.
We have a world and a universe which runs by certain rules and laws apparently, which is apparently incapable of governing itself. It apparently is not capable of sustaining its own order since it destroys itself by violence every now and then.
Now, I have worked occasionally on a research project to clear somebody by having them create violence. And they don't clear at all, nothing really clears. It is a very limited process.
This fellow is confused, so you say, "Mock up some confusion." Well, the process—I can give you this bulletin on it—is limited. It does it for a little bit, and then it tips over the other way, and you just get confusion when you mock up confusion, and he goes downhill more than uphill.
What does this mean? This means that violence or chaos or commotion is—it oddly enough doesn't even become an automaticity. It sounds odd, but a thetan doesn't have to have any of it.
Apparently a thetan could consciously control the orderly course of anything continuously without diminishment of ability to do so through any quantity of violence if he simply ignored violence! A person must agree to go out of control before he can be thrown out of control.
There isn't any reason at all why a person cannot go through an orderly series of motions in the midst of chaos and continue to go through this orderly series of motions. Just because there's violence or noise presence is not a good enough reason why he should stop being orderly. It will not impede his orderliness.
In other words, you could do an infinity of orderliness, and wind up with an ability to do an infinity of orderliness.
But apparently the way things are rigged, you could do only a small amount of violence before you hit the mat.
Isn't that an interesting thing? A thetan is a creature of order, and violence is the product of neglect.
A thetan runs best on stable data, on control, on positive starting and changing and stopping things. He runs best in an organization when he has the ability to start, change and stop and when he has the (another ability) to be started, changed and stopped himself in the organization. And as long as an orderliness proceeds in these starts and changes and stops—these various motions—as long as an orderliness proceeds, you get no diminishment, wear-out, grind-down or anything of the sort.
It's when that violence factor starts entering in that you start getting it. But what is this violence factor? It's simply neglected motions of one kind or another which somebody decides—is bad. These motions are bad and therefore he must withdraw from them and therefore he is obeying a randomity; he is obeying a chaos, not obeying an orderliness.
I can assure you that you can go forward, you could go forward playing a trumpet in an orderly fashion, in the loudest, most chaotic dance ballroom you ever heard of without ever colliding with the disorderliness of the noise. You wouldn't have to go to pieces simply by playing this trumpet, you see? If you played an orderly trumpet and if you knew what you were doing, you were controlling the thing, you see, you were doing this thing. You could neglect being cause over violence.
This is one of the most fascinating holes in the scheme of things.
You had certainly better continue to be in control of and at cause point over control actions. But we don't care whether you're in control of or not, of violence.
Violence is a state of mind, a state of beingness, a state of consideration. So, eighteen thousand tons of dust blow up in the air and scatter all over the community and that sort of thing. Well, that's violence of a sort and it blows up and gets in everybody's road, and so forth. It isn't necessarily true that it would have to be cleaned up. If you didn't think it was bad, it probably wouldn't light on you.
You personally have to meet every particle that can assault you. You have to decide to be there before you can get shot.
You get some of the oddest occurrence in accidents—very odd. The guy was present before and present after the accident, but wasn't present during it—didn't get hurt.
Every now and then why some city gets bombed. Somebody decides to make the world safe for fascism, safe for communism, safe for democracy, safe for somebody, by engaging in violence—that's the most unsafe thing they could possibly do.
Violence by definition is an uncontrollable commotion. I don't know. Do you want one? I don't want one. But who said you couldn't control a commotion? I didn't. Who said a commotion had to exist? Who defines a series of motions as a commotion? We can ask all sorts of interesting questions of this proposition of violence.
If you wanted to set man free, at large, it would be necessary to change his mind on the subject of what he should obey. And if he should obey good sense, good control, if he would obey orderliness, he would continue to be free.
But if he continues to be indoctrinated into the idea that he should obey violence, he will again become very unfree.
It's a very, very interesting thing. It's a philosophy which is almost too far beyond the reach—you say to somebody that's walking down the street—you say, "Well, if somebody started shooting at you and told you they would kill you unless you did so-and-so—is that why you obey the law? Is that why you obey police orders and that sort of thing?"
Person would say, "Well, yeah, if you didn't obey, they'd certainly ruin you."
Well, if he was a good citizen, he would probably tell you this, after he thought it over a great deal and you had some two-way comm on it: He'd finally find that he was operating on an entirely different principle. He believes that there should be good order and lawfulness and regulation on the third dynamic. He believes his society should be well ordered. That's what he believes. And he consents to have police participate in maintaining the good order. And therefore he consents to what the police say is enforcement of good order by violence. See? Around in a circle.
You could just leave it out entirely. The good citizen is actually consenting to police because he thinks the society should be an orderly society. Well, if he simply went on thinking the society should be an orderly society, he would have it made. I mean, what's the rest of this thing about cops? You know? Well, that's a very dangerous philosophy.
If you'd carry that out very far, you should say, "Any state or government which maintains itself by threat of violence and an absence of reason is not only doomed to fail, but is doomed to carry with it the corpses of all those who have consented to its violence."
We have a terribly devastating example of that which took place between 1933 and 1945, and there are a lot of chaps in this room who unfortunately had to employ some counter-violence. But I think all of us, if we got together and talked it over, we probably could have licked the whole thing without a counter-violence!
There was a chap by the name of Schicklgruber. Been a corporal some time or another—some captain got drunk and signed the wrong warrant—and this was the highest rank in that particular nation. And he decided that by simply exciting the violence of teenagers and by using the violence of criminality against the society at large and by destroying the majority of productive or cultured units in the society that he could establish Earth for himself and his friends.
At every turn of his career we can see where he should have used good sense and instead used violence.
Before he ever went to war, his German espionage system, his production, the monopoly his country was beginning to assume in the field of chemicals and other lines, had assured Germany of a dominant place in the world. I don't think he could take it. He used violence. Next thing you know, he went to war. It's always foolish.
I think he went to war because he was told by all of his generals and admirals, and so forth that he wasn't ready. And he said, "Oh, boy!" he says, "Will this be chaotic! A-ha!"
And just about the time he was supposed to receive the most strategic possible supplies from Russia, he attacked her! Before he even unloaded the trains!
Worse than that, about the time that he should have gotten awfully busy trying to consolidate der fortress umph Euruf, the damned fool attacked England. And that's been a fatal proceeding since long before Napoleon.
England was last whipped when she consented to be licked. She consented right down the line to be conquered by the Normans. The King of England at that time had assigned as his successor, Bill the Bastard. The church had carefully infiltrated itself totally with Norman French priests. The country had been set up from one end to the other to be a Norman country. And then somebody came along and accidentally fought the Battle of Hastings.
I think the importance of the Battle of Hastings was best carried out a few years ago when a commission was issued—a commission was issued to a subaltern in the British Army, and I think they gave him a lieutenancy or a captaincy or something of the sort, and they gave him his date of rank. And they made a misprint and they said his date of rank was—said his date of rank was November the 19th, 1046. Well, he takes a look at this and he went around to the mess, and he showed his brother officers, and they had a good laugh over the thing. So they billed a silly old war ministry for his back pay.
But to give you an idea of why England would have to consent to be licked before it could be whipped—what do you think the war ministry did? The war ministry, after due thought and deliberation, answered his claim and said in view of the fact that by British Army regulations, the oldest surviving officer was responsible for lost equipment on a field of battle, he was therefore responsible for all the men and horses lost at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and his pay was deducted therefore, and they found out that he still owed them 6 pounds, please remit.
Well, I have recently looked at the consequences of violence, and I find out that the Battle of Hastings finally did serve a purpose. I was very happy to find that out.
Here we come on up to present time, and we find the world in which we live trembling at the thought of being smashed by the superviolence of H-bombs, A-bombs and generals' tempers.
I believe that we'd all have to consent pretty hard to be influenced and smashed by that much violence. I believe all we'd have to do is cease to consent to be injured by that violence—to have governments that live by violence, for violence and of violence, perish from this earth.
Now, that's not a revolutionary speech, not even vaguely. It's a direct quote from Hubbard.
Well, here we are with a congress drawing to its close with nothing but a party left, and of course that is interesting, too. I think at this particular congress I have seen more bright interested people than at any other congress that we have had. And we practically had no stupid questions at this congress. What's the matter?
Actually, every question that has been shoved in my direction has been an intelligent question. It looks like we've arrived at a meeting of the minds here on a lot of things. Hm?
Now, when I say, "stupid questions," I am, of course, merely clowning. A person who asked a question does not necessarily believe it's stupid or he wouldn't ask it—or does he?
But the oddity is here that we seem, even when we talk about the complexities, the tremendous complexities of processing, and believe me, that's pretty complex. If you don't think it's complex, go all the way through the TRs long enough on each one to have a total command of it, and then long enough on the TRs to finish up with a total command of all of the actions more or less simultaneously and be able to do just a thoroughly good job of auditing without any exhaustion or boredom or upset of any kind—just that all by itself. That's quite a little hill to climb.
But I think everybody has realized that it is a climbable hill. And I think when we talk here about Clear Procedure, we talked about the deepest and most profound processes that are used in Clear Procedure. That I don't think we have any more things which do not communicate, things which require a superspecialized understanding and command of verbiage in order to get the communication of.
In other words, truth was simple after all when the most involved processes which produce the most exalted case level that we can easily attain at this time—Clear—didn't find people backing up and saying, "Boy, that's too deep for me."
Of course, an old auditor wouldn't. But I've seen some little kids right here in this congress audience this time, and I was talking about Help and said this—and Help, Destroy, and so forth, and the little kids were going "Mm-hm." You know. "Yeah."
Step Six—they went a little bit drifty there, but as soon as I started talking about mocking up the picture and what the auditing command was, oh, well, they got that. That's it. See.
When we're on a point of this much understanding with regard to the deepest technical knowledge we have, I guess we can say again: any two can do it if you know how.
I don't think auditing could continue forever to be a highly professional activity. Just as I told you in an earlier lecture, I don't know how a man could possibly run GE (that's the company) without being a good auditor. I don't know how he could run it. Of course, he could be a good accountant without being a good auditor and he'd have an awful time—(sour joke).
But the truth of the matter is, I use Scientology every time I turn around, in handling the problems which immediately confront me and even in handling Scientologists, which is quite, quite remarkable. You'd think they'd see through all this.
Somebody came up to me the other day and said, "Ron, I am …" And this, I have to confess, I'm rather proud of being this every once in a while. Of course, I'm the high priest and confessor to an awful lot of people. I'm very proud of being so. I'm glad they trust me that much.
But somebody slips into the office, and he's totally off-beat, shouldn't be there, it's the wrong time of day and they have no business there, but they've got a problem and they know they have the right to come and see me with this problem. I try to duck out or hide behind the wastebasket, but there they are. There they are anyway, and we handle the situation. They're usually glad to do so.
But doggone it, it usually wraps up on the basis: somebody comes in, and they say to me, "I'm having an awful lot of domestic difficulties. It's working this way, it's working that way, and what do you think I ought to do?"
Oh, the Auditor's Code says over here, "Do not evaluate for the preclear." I'm not held by that in personal conference with individuals where there are human problems. I always feel that a man has the right to do as he sees fit with his family and that sort of thing. Ah, but I am not above sailing in there with some good heavy-handed pieces of advice occasionally or something, particularly if I get a little bit annoyed with the guy's being dense or something, you know?
We'll get a meeting of minds, and I find the thing finally resolves on something like this: "Well, why don't you do your solution on the basis of an optimum solution? The greatest number of dynamics. The greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics." And we think that over for a while and we figure out what that would be, and they go away perfectly happy, because it is the right solution. Anything else is short-circuited, don't you see?
What's more and more interesting to me—that people come to me to hear something they know already—particularly on staff. But maybe they just want to see me or they want to hear me say it or something.
But remarkably—remarkably, the problems which confront one in the workaday world, particularly a world which is going forward, which has its economic stresses and duresses, when personalities clash and reclash, and you find yourself talking to reactive banks instead of people—you're talking to somebody who is the Rock. You're talking to the Rock, you're not talking to a human being. You wonder, "How did I confront this life before I knew these things?"
And I'll give you the answer to that: You didn't.
Now, this question comes up: Is it necessary for you to be willing and able to confront everything no matter how cruel, how mean, how low, how dirty, how vicious? To live is it necessary that you go on confronting these things perpetually just to prove that you can? I'm afraid that you can neglect violence. You don't have to confront violence. That's the only way it's violent, you knucklehead.
It's the most fascinating trick in the world. You tell a fellow, "Well, you have to be able to confront everything. And you've got to prove to me that you can! So you get out there and confront enough death and enough this …"
Well, that's a different thing than an individual having enough death. Some people get death hungry. Well, go read a detective story or something like that, you know?
I didn't used to read one, I used to write one. Kill off fifteen or sixteen people in the first two or three chapters and I'd feel better. Remedy of Havingness, not an abreaction of hostilities. Just Remedy of Havingness—enough death. Kill somebody very artistically, you know—sufficient flourishes. Hey, that's pretty good; this was a good death, very acceptable. All right.
But it's not necessary for you to go around finding dead bodies, you know, and say, "Well, it's dead. You know?" or finding insane people going around saying, "Nahyahhh," taking up psychiatry. Unnecessary to go around and look at those enough.
Not unless you have a terrific scarcity of the thing, something like that, why confront it? If it's rare and valuable and something or other, why, of course you go and look at it, but there's no reason to stand there the rest of your lives, like the psychos are doing.
Freedom of choice of what to confront may not be a road to freedom, but it's certainly a road to a vast amount of peace of mind. You don't have to confront violence, because that's the only way violence can become violent to you is by confronting the violence.
The most horrible thing you can do when somebody is bawling you out is look at the calmness of his soul. Try it sometime. Just regard how peaceful he is. He's liable to go into an hypnotic trance like you were a snake. And he's liable to say …
Now, if you're very worried about getting your body hit by his violence, you'll get hit. Because you've consented to be hit. But what if you haven't consented to being hit? The missing element when the sailor rushed into the chart room, was it didn't occur to me that I could be hit. Didn't seem to be part of the game, and it didn't become part of the game.
The game is what you make it. And I guess for a lot of people that aren't Clear yet, the one thing that you'll have to get used to is going on mocking up obsessively things you don't know what they are. You'll have—you'll probably have to get used to this because, of course, there's no hope.
But once you're in a state where you aren't totally concerned with not knowing what you don't know because it isn't knowable in some fashion, you get up into the larger concerns of the upper dynamics, and you start looking around, and you have to make up your mind what you should be confronting.
I can tell you the answer to that question is a little bit of wisdom, I can give you. You should be confronting what you think you should be confronting. It's one of these horrible simplicities.
As long as you are the one who decides to confront it or not to confront it, you've got it made. Don't confront it because you have to. Don't confront it because you must.
You can confront it to prove to yourself that you can confront it. That you can do. It's a perfectly good game.
But after you've learned that you can confront somebody or something, and you've demonstrated quite adequately to yourself, there's really no reason to go on doing it for the next two or three million years as people do and call it a reactive bank. No real reason to do that.
But speaking of confronting, it has been a very, very happy thing these last three days to confront such congenial people, such a nice audience.
I think we have had a very, very fine congress. I want to thank you very much. I appreciate your being here. And happy clearing.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I hope to see you all next congress, and we'll all be OTs. Thank you.
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