Exteriorization from Masses (3ACC 540108)
Series: 3rd Advanced Clinical Course (3ACC)
Date: 8 January 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 8 January 1954
All right. This is the first morning lecture of January the 8th, 1954 and we're going to take up here some rather simple data. It'll appear a little bit new to you till you begin to think it over and we're talking straight now on its application. And you'll gradually get this squared around as to how the basics that have gone in these earlier lectures integrate into the material which I'm giving you right now. That's because we are now applying it to a very specific task and that task is the exteriorization of the preclear.
A preclear interiorized is, at first, on an automaticity of not letting go. He's automatically holding on, that's his automaticity. That's his chief, main automaticity. And he's fixed in a bundle of energy – another automaticity – and he is, therefore, being a symbol.
And this whole thing goes into the production of power. This problem of exteriorization, honest, is much simpler but really much more mechanical than making an electric motor. There's just nothing simpler than this.
Now, you people who hear me say electricity every once in a while, jump, if you are not acquainted with the subject. But let me assure you that the people around who say they know something about electricity don't say so if you press them a little bit. Because the first thing they were ever taught was that nobody knows anything about electricity That always is the beginning of every course in electrical engineering.
"All right you people, nobody knows anything about electricity and that's the first thing you know about it – that nobody knows how it's created or what it is. Now, we'll go on from there and learn all about it." Which is about the most defeated subject there is. And that's the common way of handling this.
Well, the subject of "electricity" has to do with an interchange of energy or potentials between terminals. And when you've stated that as a clear definition – it is a perfectly clear definition – it's interchange of potential between two terminals. And I don't care what you do with it after it gets to these terminals and so forth, but it will resolve itself into mechanical energy or heat energy. And this, therefore, can be directly applied.
There's magnetic fields connected with it and they're supposed to be different than gravity. I don't know quite how anybody got that way, but they are supposed to be very different than gravity. When you deal with magnetism or attraction or gravity – I don't care what you call it – you're dealing with fixed or unfixed attention. When an individual's attention is too closely fixed upon a planet, he will stay there – gravitywise. He doesn't fly off the face of it.
And so, you find GEs in rather bad condition when you've started to run something on them like, well, when you've started to run any one of these processes. But particularly sound, by the way, for some reason or other (because it's a perception), you'll find out that their feet will get tired or their feet will feel very lumpy or something will happen to their feet and their legs, their feet. You'll hear this – and their feet will get restless or they get nervous or something like that. This is attention fixed upon the planet. See, that's "gravity." If that wasn't there, they'd be light as a bird and actually could levitate.
When we get down to what actually is mass and what is the deep significance of mass, we'd certainly better go into the mechanics of thought. Because there is no other deep significance anywhere to be found in physics, electronics, anywhere else. They haven't any significances, they just quit. They say, "A potential goes from here to there and we can do something with it." Yeah, we can do something else with it, as a new potential.
So they take two terminals and they impose and take away space on them. Now, if you were to have two magnets or, actually, just two copper bars and you were to run a wire to each one and to run the wire to both sides of a meter and then you were to take these in your hands, have them insulated and everything from your hands, but take them in your hands there and push them this way and this way – look at the needle, you're going to have current running. Might be a terribly slight current, but it's going to be running.
Now, in its essence, this is done artificially in an electric motor. It doesn't look like it's being done in an electric motor, because the thing is done by rotation and you've got something going flip-flop, see? Flip-flop, flip-flop. And you've got a magnet in there or coils of wire and so forth, which are, first, parallel to the electrodes – that is, there's two electrodes sitting around this dynamo – two electrodes sitting there around the central coil, you might say, and you've brought these two electrodes closer together by putting the coil close to them. And then you put it vertical, so now you've got a different set of electrodes working. And you're actually working, not a plus and minus, but in 8-80 you'll find a resolution of this problem. It's very brief, but it sure means an awful lot to an electrical engineer. I mean, he looks at that thing and he says, "Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh – well gee, we missed something, we've been talking all the time."
What he gets fascinated with, at first, is that every plus has to be a minus and every minus a plus, simultaneously with its being its own pole. You can't have two terminals and produce anything, you've got to have four. The plus terminal has got to be minus and the minus terminal has got to be plus. That is to say, at the same time they're being plus and minus. Here's your main problem. And that is a double terminal in our category. An electric motor won't run as a matched terminal, it runs as a double terminal. We needn't go into such a technical aspect of it, merely because it's not important. But when we say Double Terminal, we say get somebody to put four of something out there, boy, they charge and discharge and do all sorts of things a lot more readily than if you put two out there. Because, you see, in essence, there are two terminals in the coil of the motor, as well as two electrodes in the magnet sections which surround it. And when these things change in position to each other, you get an electrical current generated.
In other words, you've actually – although you're rotating something, it looks just like you're just sitting there rotating something – actually you're changing the position of these terminals with relation to each other in space. Because, at first, the coil is vertical and then it's horizontal, and then it's vertical and it's horizontal and as a result, why, you get, actually, four terminals working. You get two permanent terminals and two spinning terminals.
Well, you can take four of anything and push them in at each other and pull them out at each other and if you've got a meter hooked up to them, you'll get a current. I don't care what it is either, you can take four pieces of wood and you could get some kind of a tiny little current, as long as you're pushing them in and out. It isn't air friction. It's any time you start changing space on something, you get this confounded thing called an electrical potential.
You start putting space between something and increasing it and then you decrease it and increase it and decrease it and so forth, you fool around with it on a laboratory bench and you'll learn more about electricity in less time than they've known for a long while. Just simply because of this: they neglected the space. Naturally an electronics man would neglect space, because he can't have space. And you take any of these cases, any of these electronics cases, you'll find out what they're short on – they can't look at space.
They're trying to get away from space and get into more solid things. And their lack of space has taken out the most important thing in the motor, which is space. Space is the most important thing in the motor, not terminals and potential and all the rest of this and that.
Now, we go into this more deeply and we find out that the only thing we can find that's really happening in the motor – if we look it over very carefully – that something is imposing space on a couple of terminals. And the terminals could be infinitely tiny. So if they could be infinitely tiny, we're just left there with imposed space. And we start working with this and we find out that space is being imposed on these two terminals.
Well, what's doing this? Well, the base of the motor, of course. I mean just the cast-iron base of this motor is imposing distance between these two things. And then you've got something else delivering (quote) "mechanical energy" (unquote) to this motor, but that is doing, again, by making the coil vertical and then horizontal and then vertical and then horizontal, it's changing it in space. That's all that's doing. So even the mechanical energy end of the thing is imposing space upon this motor.
But, what thing is imposing space on it? Well, the base of the motor. Well, all right. What imposes space on the base of the motor? Well, the concrete that it's sitting on, of course. Well, what's imposing space on the concrete? Well, Earth is. Well, what's imposing space on Earth? Well, the Earth is sitting out here going in an orbit around the Sun and centripetal, centrifugal, gravitic forces are actually keeping it sitting there. If the Earth were to go a little faster, by the way, it'd pull in a little closer or go out a little further from the Sun, it would all depend on how you applied it.
You take Mercury for instance, it's chasing around the Sun at a hell of a rate of speed, it's going zing-zing-zing-zing-zing, You can almost see Mercury move if you stand there with a pair of field glasses and look at it just right after sunset, when Mercury is just above the Sun, or sunrise, when it's just a little ahead of the Sun. It's really on its way, that's because it's close in to the Sun.
But gravity and centrifugal force are themselves balanced, here, in order to keep Earth at this position from the Sun. In other words, we have imposed – however it has been done, it's just simply that Earth has space imposed on it by the solar system. And so we have that space imposed, so again we've got imposed space. So now we take the solar system and it has space imposed on it by this galaxy. It's under all kinds of "inka-fluences" and "aka-fluences." There's one star system, for instance, has tremendous gravitic strength here right in this solar system – an adjacent system, the system of Lyra. And there's a star system that is moving fast toward Earth, And Earth is moving fast in some other directions.
By the way, the speeds of all this are quite great. The star system that is moving straight at Earth, by the way, is traveling at twelve and a half miles a second. And, it'll be a long time getting here.
The galaxy has space imposed upon the solar system and the island universes around have space imposed upon them and the MEST universe itself has space imposed upon it and we go on outside of this thing, the first and immediate definition we would get for God was somebody who imposed space.
And we have power itself as the ability to impose space on terminals. And when you define power or define strength or define work as the ability to impose space on two terminals, why, we're cooking right along there, we're right on the front burner. Why? It's mostly because it works out immediately into a tremendous number of interesting data which solve cases and permit exteriorization.
Now, the funny part about this is, is that matter itself is not a series of particles but a series of condensed spaces. We can perceive the spaces but it's pretty hard to perceive, as we go along the line here, anything vaguely resembling particles.
The engineer is up against this right now. He, poor fellow, is batting his brains out trying to find a particle. And every time he finds a particle, he finds a smaller particle.
And every time he finds a smaller particle, he finds that, although it has mass, it evidently is doing something else than what he thought it was and so on.
The elusive chase of the particles is the effort to find something in a universe where nothing exists. And he'll go mad. I mean, they never will find the basic particle. This task started back in Greek days and they're still at it. And you'd think there had been enough smart men back during the last twenty-five hundred years to have at least found the particle, but nobody has.
Well, you say, "Of course they've found a particle, there's the wall." Yeah, when you get it up in that mass, that's good – easy to find, but let's not try to take the wall apart and find a particle smaller than the wall. Let's try to find molecules. And as such, you understand, molecules as such, nobody has ever seen them.
Here's chemistry. Chemistry, in its beautiful setup today, has molecules all figured out. Oh boy! They've just got them all set. Well, they got them all set all right. But in the science of physics, which is the companion science, they've got them all set, too, but quite another pattern.
Physics, working with them to deliver energy from them, and chemistry, working with them to deliver chemical compounds out of them, get entirely different structures of matter. Oh, it's peculiar, they're both studying the same thing, aren't they?
Chemistry goes into copper and takes copper apart and says, "The pattern of the molecules and atoms and so forth in copper are so-and-so." And they get it all set up and it's just gorgeously arrayed and they have cute little devices there, with a number of balls sticking in them with rods. And they set – this is a copper molecule or something – and they set that up on the laboratory lecture bench. It's real cute. It's completely meaningless. It has been meaningless for just years and years and years. It doesn't even hold water vaguely, even in chemical theory.
But they set this thing up, it's a bunch of golf balls strung on sticks and they say, "Well, these things are the molecules and over here are the benzene rings" or something. I don't care what they say, but here's this cute device that looks like something Rube Goldberg built, and they say, "This is a molecule of copper, a molecule of ethyl gasoline or something" and oh boy!
And over in physics, why, they dish up one, they say, "This is a molecule of copper." Well boy, if you saw these two together, you wouldn't even suspect they were cousins. The physicist's picture of a molecule and the chemist's picture of the same molecule – they're entirely different pictures. Well, this is cute, but it isn't getting them anyplace in their effort to find out what is the final particle.
What is the basic particle of which the universe is built? Well, every time they try to get a little closer in on this basic particle of what the universe is built of, it becomes very funny indeed, because they just find out a more basic particle. And they find more component parts involved and they just keep going down.
Well, they go down in exact ratio to the power of their microscopes. They don't go down any further than that. Every time they get a new microscope, they say, "This is it." And then they find out that they didn't have the tubes turned on or something and they have to change their minds. Well, all this adds a great deal of confusion to chemics and physics, but it doesn't add any to us. It added a lot to us for a long time.
If we can consider matter as consecutive spaces, why, we're in a pretty happy state. Because we consider, in its most powerful factor, a piece of matter is as powerful as it can be made to expand its spaces.
Now, let's take plutonium. Boy, I tell you, plutonium really can expand its spaces. It makes an atom bomb. And those particles go out in so many different directions and make so many new spaces and so on, that there's a hell of a bang and a crash and a thud and here we go! See, I mean… But that's condensed way down. Now, here's your condensed space.
Now, if a fellow is doing this exercise right, of having eight anchor points out and drawing them together, he's actually condensing space. Well, right up to this point, I haven't told you anything that you need to even vaguely consider. Except this: that power, strength and force derives from the ability to impose or delete space from terminals. If you consider it in that light, why, by golly, you're there. You're all right.
A preclear has no power. All right. He can't impose space between terminals, that's all. He can't reduce it or increase it. A fellow can't communicate. Well, a communication line is of finite length, from C to E. And if he can't increase or decrease the lines, why, about the best he'll be able to do is sit on a fixed distance line. A fixed distance line. That is to say, the fellow can go through a very routine conversation. You know, he uses your voice and his body and his voice and your body and the MEST universe keeps the space imposed. And he's been taught all the symbols and one day he wonders why he can't get any justice in this universe. Well, he can't get any justice in the universe for the excellent reason he hasn't got any power.
What's he depending on? He's depending for his communication lines and his imposition of space and so forth – a great dependency just on the MEST universe. In other words, the MEST universe has been set up over there to a total automaticity and he has no power left. He can't impose space or delete space from between two terminals.
Now, you'll find his interpersonal relations going in this fashion: somebody goes away from him and he can't get them back, somebody comes up close to him and he can't get them away. Let's just look at the interpersonal relations, see? And such a person thinks other people, who might be in a better state, would mind his being close to them or far from them and so forth. The state of knowingness bridges all distances. And a person who can impose space or take space out from between two terminals can handle distance ably.
So let's get the idea of a preclear being a problem in terminals and the terminal is simply a point, whether it has great mass or little mass. If a terminal has enormous mass, it'll keep letting off spaces against another terminal – he'll get a trickle – a current flow. That's what a battery is. The battery in your car and so forth, is just a couple of masses with space between them and you get a trickle of letting off spaces. You know, the pieces of space disappear. You actually get a little bit further distance between the two terminals and you get an electrical current.
All right. Your preclear says, "I have no power." Well, you immediately look at this as a problem in particles, flows. It's not a problem in particles or flows, it's a problem in spaces. All these things are problems in spaces.
Now, what's a mass?
A mass is a whole bunch of condensed spaces. Let's just define it as that, and we've got it. A mass is a bunch of condensed spaces.
Why does a mass let off power? Why can you set up two masses, one next to the other, and get a trickle of electricity between them? Well, they let off spaces. Somebody had to impose the space on them to let the space off of them. Well, your preclear thinks he can go around and find masses of stuff which will do this. And there's your electronics man – he's always prospecting around trying to find some new substance that will let off these spaces so that he can get a better current between two things. He seldom succeeds beyond a certain limit.
Well, this has to do with processing, it has to do with preclears and it has to do with them very intimately. An individual who has begun to depend for his power upon existing masses – he conceives masses to be existing and he depends for his power upon these masses – will immediately suffer from a tremendous loss of power with any loss of mass, Now, you follow me?
Let's take terminals and we find out that two big terminals will let off quite a lot of space, which is to say, generate quite a current. Two smaller terminals will still generate a current. All right. We take these big terminals and it's interchanging spaces with other things and – these big masses – and all of a sudden we put a little terminal near it. Well, that big terminal is going to take all of the spaces off the little terminal in an awful hurry. You can see this. Here you have this huge magnet and this little tiny magnet and we get this little tiny magnet close to this huge magnet. And if we could actually observe with a fine enough microscope, we would see that pieces of space, in other words, energy or mass, is leaving that little terminal like mad. Oh, it leaves it just at a mad rate. It would actually disappear in a very short space of time.
So we take these two masses, we put them near each other and the small one suffers. You follow this? This is quite important. Because you take a preclear and exteriorize him from the body and what energy he's still hanging on to will suddenly depart from him and go back to the bigger mass, the body, at which you get a tremendous feeling of lack of power on the preclears who won't exteriorize easily. So they feel degraded. And that in itself is degradation. And that's all degradation is. Degradation consists of being separated from a larger mass.
Now, I want to go over that again: degradation consists of being separated from a larger mass. Now, I want to go over it again: self-pride and self-respect diminish when one is separated from a larger mass. Now, I'll go over that again: power, energy and so forth diminishes when separated from a larger mass. Now, let's take a toothpick and pull it out of the orange. You don't get an immediate observable electrical potential, but we'll use it as an example. We take the toothpick out of the orange. When we take the toothpick out of the orange, it would be the toothpick that suffered, The toothpick would feel it had been degraded. It'd feel it had been pulled out. Now, that's not a problem in electronics.
So, let's take a real problem in electronics. Let's take a huge magnet and then let's take a soft, spongy piece of iron and let's hold this tiny little piece of iron at a short distance from the magnet. Now, if we impose the space on it and we leave it there for actually just a few days, the iron will have vanished out of the little iron – it won't be there anymore. This is a laboratory experiment if you care to perform it sometime when you're around a physics lab. It has to be a very soft piece of iron, it has to be a great big magnet. And so the little piece of iron disappears. Well, that little piece of iron, you could say, was degraded – it had lost its self-respect.
Now, you want to know the deep significance of the preclear who goes around and says, "I have been degraded. I feel guilty. I have done wrong. I don't know quite what's wrong with me, I don't have the force and power to go on. I don't have the energy to do any work."
All these things all add up to – you know what all these things add up to? The deep, deep, deep significance of them is a small mass has been taken away from a large mass too many times. If you've got that, I'm saying this very slowly and going over it, because honest, honest, if you've got that, you've got what's wrong with the preclear in terms of energy and space. And he immediately conceives himself not to know because he didn't predict it.
Y'll know, the only way a fellow proves he doesn't know is to find out he didn't predict something right. In other words, he's wrong. So all of a sudden he exteriorizes and he says, "Gee. I really want to get out of this mass" and then the second he's out of this mass, he feels immediately degraded. Well, he's wrong of course, isn't he?
Now, the preclear who has bought total agreement with the MEST universe, or near it, with great dependency upon the MEST universe, gets into terms of having to have mass in order to have respect. That's because he's depending on already made or already discovered terminals for his energy. You know, like you come along and you grab a body. The reason you grab a body is because you know you can't put out enough energy and pack it in tight enough and mold it around in order to make an observable body. You know you can't do that, so you grab on to this other terminal. Now, you start to exteriorize from it, Well, you're just a smaller mass because, believe mc, a thetan has mass. In his best state, he doesn't have any mass, but he has mass only because he's hanging on to some old grips and some old license plates and a couple of gimmicks. My golly, he looks like an attic on the move, if you were to let him take all of his junk.
Well, now these larger masses, around, rob him of everything he has. Now, everything in this universe is discharging to some degree against everything else in this universe, that's the extreme condition. The Sun, by the way, most observably, is discharging at the rest of the galaxy. Very observably, the Sun is discharging at Earth, isn't it? Well, that's a fission problem, a problem in fission. You'd say offhand, the Sun was reducing in mass. Well, I don't know that it's reducing in mass anywhere near to the degree that it's increasing in mass, if you haven't been up on the Sun and sat in one of its plumes or looked at one of its spots – a good thing to do sometime is go up and sit just opposite one of its spots and watch it for a while.
And you'll find out that anybody's worry about the Sun going out is not well founded. Suns go out when they're so big that their electrons can't escape from them – you know, they can't radiate – they can't get rid of anything and they get into a dull red glow. Their alpha particles can't get out of their own gravitic field, in other words. They can't discharge. A healthy Sun will keep on burning practically forever because it's being continually fed new mass in the terms of meteorites and so forth. Dust gets loose from the asteroid belt and where do you think it goes? You don't think it is all outbound just because the Sun shines out. No sir, it drifts along and drifts along and, all of a sudden, it slows a little bit down in speed and it slows more down in speed and it goes into a sort of a vortex motion and it comes in eventually and goes into the Sun.
Now, the Moon, sitting up there without much friction around it, is hit by thirty thousand meteors a day. Well, it's a big bunch of meteors. You can always send a preclear up there and have him find a landing meteor – thirty thousand a day, well heck, he can just take one slight glance around and he'll find a meteor landing. And you can put him in front of these things as they come in toward the Moon and he'll be very upset because you've put him right in front of something that's going to hit him. And then you just have him pass through it and he finds out for the first time nothing can hit him.
But as long as he thinks he has mass, as long as he's sold on the idea that his dynamic power, and anything else he has as power, is something he gets by reason of discharging against havingness – some other havingness – you know, he has to have something to discharge against some other something. As long as he believes that, you have a problem of terminals. And as long as you have a problem of terminals with your preclear, why, he won't exteriorize easily. Because he tries to take all his junk along with him. The reason he tries to take the junk along with him is because he knows he can't make any more.
When he knows he can't create, then he his to have. Havingness sets in when creation goes out. And you get the story of the painter.
A fellow will start in, painting. He keeps making paintings and he doesn't give any of them away. Now, by the way, if he would just take some of his favorite paintings and go out to some distance and just bust them all to hell and throw them in a fire, you know, and go back again, you know he'd start painting again. Just let him get rid of some of that "paintingness mass" and he'd feel much better. As a matter of fact, he'd start to create.
Now, the writer who begins to collect his books – the most fatal thing for a writer to do – he begins to collect all of his written works. And he gets them piled up around the place and, by golly, the more he gets there, why, the less he puts out.
Even though they've been published, you sec, they've apparently still come back, he still actually hasn't gotten rid of them. And the fellow who keeps filling a trunk full of manuscripts – he's the fellow who really gets discouraged, because you don't even get the motion of something going out and coming back in, in the form of a printed work. It just goes out and comes back as itself. In other words, he can't get rid of it. So he can't shine. Shiningness is, in essence, getting rid of something, throwing it away. Shiningness. How do you shine? Well, throw things away.
Now, people get inverted on this, finally, and they decide the reason they aren't succeeding very well is because they've given too many things away or they've "given too much of themselves." I've heard this expression used more and more times in the Middle West, for instance, they've "given too much of themselves" and so forth. Now, if they're in bad shape, they didn't give enough. That's the only thing wrong with them. They didn't do enough work, they didn't help enough people, they didn't get out and plow enough furrows – that's all that's wrong with them. And when they got their bushelbasket loads of grain and put them in silos and so forth, they didn't take enough down to the local church or they didn't throw enough out in the road, as a matter of fact. They ate it all. That's quite silly, you know, that's bringing it home again.
All these data compare. The only reason I'm throwing them into human experience for you, there, is just – this is a problem in shiningness. You want your preclear to shine and create. Well, he won't create if he gets a certain mass which inhibits his putting things away from him.
All right. So, we have a problem in masses and terminals. That's why "wasting" is such a terrifically effective technique. You know, you could sit around, here – a lot of these "all techniques" – you can't, of course, run a subjective technique forever without plowing somebody down.
The truth of the matter is, however, if you merely had a fellow waste masses, if you can get him actually to waste masses, build it up on a gradient scale and get him to waste more and more masses, just waste them (not particularly accept them or anything else, just waste them), just take one side of that bracket, why, you'd finally change his mind about being able to shine.
Now, one of the things a preclear will do – if you have a preclear try to throw something away from him, if it comes back, boy, is he having mass trouble. See, have him mock-up a baseball and pitch it out. And the baseball comes back at him, in mock-up, he's having mass trouble. He's having havingness trouble. He can't get rid of something and he can't create. So creation comes down as the best index of a preclear or a thetan's power – his ability to create.
Now, people come around him and they grab things that he has created. You know, he'll create a mock-up and before he even gets a chance to inspect it, something else will grab it. And he'll give it a yank back. And he starts up his first entrance into flows.
Somebody tries to take something away from him and he tries to pull it back. Well, this results in his mounding himself up like one of the Indian mounds full of junk. See, he eventually accumulates mass there. Makes one wonder if Earth or something like that isn't basically a thetan who is accumulating mass. That isn't really the way it's done however, I mean, it's an analogy. Actually, these planets get built and built just as thoroughly as you could build a mud pie. Somebody goes out and he throws a terrific number of particles into space, then he collects a lot of little small particles together and gets it to be a cumulative mass. And then he won't let this mass expand, he holds it together and then he pitches it into the other mass of particles and they'll condense hard enough to make a Sun that shines. Sometimes they overestimate it and throw too many particles out and then you get a Sun which goes dull red. That's a failure. And then the thetan figures he doesn't have enough power to cut that mass of the Sun in half and make two other suns out of it. I don't know why he figures this, figures he has to do it with other masses. I know I've sort of exceeded your limit of credulity right then, but the sun builders, they make new galaxies. There are dead galaxies out there, real dead. Well, of course, that's the field of Para-Scientology, we won't worry about it. Anyway…
When we get a problem in exteriorization, we have a problem in masses. That's all we've got a problem in. When we get a problem of no self-respect, we've got a problem in the fellow having been exteriorized from too large a mass too suddenly. When we get a fellow who's too thin, we got a fellow who's been exteriorized from a large mass too suddenly. You know, he can't have.
Now, you wonder what's wrong with the college kids. The dirtiest trick is played upon a college person – the dirtiest trick! In their adult years actually – you understand that in Rome, a boy was fourteen, he became a proconsul and he got married when he was sixteen. And here we simply suppress sex and everything until the guy is twenty-nine or fifty-two or eighty-nine or something, it's getting longer and longer. That's because there's a greater and greater scarcity of bodies, I suppose.
Well now, as we look over this problem, if college – just as an example, here we have this kid: he goes to college for a long time, he studies, he's got these closed spaces. In other words, that gives him mass all right, closed classrooms and so on. And after he's been at it for a few years – he's already gone to school, I think, something on the order of about twelve years in his more basic schools – now all of a sudden he's in college and he's got four more years to go. By this time, he's studying engineering (he's thirty-five or thirty-six), [laughter] but anyway, all joking aside, the boy is there in his adult years.
The society is goofy on the subject of trying to make a teenager into a child. The teenager – for instance, such operations as Booth Tarkington's Seventeen – there's a book there. That's real vicious, that's real mean. Because in the first place, the reason the guy is like that is because he's been disenfranchised of his first manhood. His first manhood sets in, actually, at about fourteen-thirteen, fourteen.
He starts to get a grip on life – that's past the age of puberty usually – and he's looking around, he's trying to establish himself and his family keeps holding on to him. And he's unable to get away from his family. And they've even got the laws in the United States fixed so a child can't work, he can't support himself. And he's got to stay there. In other words, they won't let that boy shine – even though they call him a "son." [laughter] And he's stuck.
Now, a child is prevented from working until he's some, oh, my golly, he's an antique before he can work in the United States. He's just an antique. He's practically rheumatic and got lumbago before they finally turn him loose. The age I think is – I don't know, they have to be careful at sixteen, seventeen – I think it's about eighteen before they can really start to work.
Note: This lecture is continued on the next disc.