The whole subject of death has been one of the more mysterious subjects to Man and it has only been in Scientology itself, and not in Dianetics, that the mechanisms of death have been thoroughly understood. When I say thoroughly understood I mean, of course, only the mechanisms.
We know a great deal about death and we are actually the first people on this planet that do. This is one of the larger wins of Scientology.
It is very easy to forget about death because that is what death is, a forgettingness. However, we do have a considerable amount of information on this subject and you are entitled to that information.
Man is composed of a body, a mind and what we refer to as the thetan. Exteriorization processes give a person a considerable subjective reality on the idea that he himself is a being that is independent of a mind or a body and that there actually is a separateness between them. One doesn’t even have to be carried along to a point of where one exteriorizes in processing in order to get a reality on this.
This subject has been fully covered by me since 1952, when I defined the thetan as in Axiom 1 and devised techniques to separate any preclear from his body. This was the first scientific evidence that Man has had on the subject of the human spirit. Man thought he had a human spirit. That is totally incorrect. Man is a human spirit which is enwrapped, more or less, in a mind, which is in a body — and that is Man, Homo sapiens. He is a spirit and his usual residence is in his head and he looks at pictures and his body carries him around.
When we look at the fact that Man is a spirit which has a mind and a body, and when we describe Man in that fashion, then it becomes extremely simple to understand what his difficulties would be. His difficulties would be basically with his body or with his mind and we can understand that there obviously would be difficulties with him as a spiritual being. He has to think that he can get into a trap, has to get the idea that he can be in danger before he can get into danger. In other words, the thetan has to give permission to be trapped before he can be trapped, and is therefore easily untrapped. The moment he is untrapped he gives birth to all sorts of interesting phenomena which we know as the exteriorization phenomena, all of which are quite easily demonstrated. I actually constructed a meter once that could measure and prove a thetan to have an electrical field around him — independent of energy ridges, bodies and such combinations as that.
What happens to Man when he dies? Basically all that happens is that a separation occurs between the thetan and the body. However, he takes old facsimiles, energy phenomena and bric-a-brac that he feels he cannot do without, with him, and attaches this to the next body he picks up. He does not build a body in this lazy time of manufactured items and Frigidaires and so on. He picks one up off the genetic line, and the genetic line is a series of mocked-up automaticities which produce according to a certain blueprint from the earliest times of life on this planet through until now. Everybody — people even in biology know that there is a definite succession of steps that life takes today, as they announce in their theory of natural selection and evolution. We understand it rather thoroughly that something goes through these steps.
There is the cycle of action in Scientology which is Create, Survive (persist), Destroy. At the shoulder of the curve an individual is mostly interested in surviving, early on the curve he is interested in creating, and at the end of the curve he is interested in the disposition of the remains.
When we apply this cycle of action to the various parts I described, we get a death of the body, a partial death of the mind and a forgettingness on the part of the spiritual being, which is in itself, again, a type of death. Actually bodies stay around for quite a while after death since it takes some time for them to decompose — certain parts before other parts — and the cells in the cuticle and hair evidently live longest.
The first thing one learns about death is that it is not anything of which to be very frightened. If you are frightened of losing your pocketbook, your money, your memory, boy or girl friend, well, that’s how frightened you ought to be of dying because it’s all the same order of magnitude.
Here we strike the first observable phenomenon when we find out that the mind, in spite of mechanisms which seek to decay and wipe it out, does maintain and preserve mental-image pictures of earlier experiences. With the proper technology and an understanding of this, one can be again in possession of the mental-image pictures of earlier existences in order to understand what was going on. In view of the fact that we have not restored remembrance to the being, the mental-image pictures usually just continue to be pictures. We send somebody into a past life and he looks at a mental image picture and you might as well have sent him to the art gallery. He himself has no connection with this because the mental-image picture may be the mind’s or the body’s. (The body carries around mental-image pictures and the thetan does the same and these two combine to form the mind.)
The mind, then, is a bridge between the spirit and the body, and the mental-image pictures formed by a thetan added to and confused with the mental-image pictures formed by the body is usually how a thetan stays in a head. He confuses the two and therefore demonstration of past existences by running somebody “back down on the time track” and having him look at a picture is not very convincing. He has always had some unreality about it, has no recognition of having ever been anything else before.
The restoration of memory to one of these beings is of great interest to us, since all that is really wrong with him is that things have happened to him which he knows all about but won’t let himself in on. Therefore the restoration of memory is done as a matter of course in almost any processing, and in view of the fact that it is part of any processing, it is impossible today to process somebody, well and expertly, without having him sooner or later get some sort of a recall on a past existence with some small reality.
An individual’s own will has a great deal to do with this. One should not look for outside sources as to why his memory is shut off. Just as he must grant permission to be trapped, so must he grant permission to be made to remember. He is more or less convinced that a memory would cause him to re-experience the pain he already feels has been too much for him. He is very reluctant to face up again to this mechanism, and facing death, he almost always goes into a bit of amnesia.
The fact that one has lived before is so restrained that it itself is the reason why it is forgotten. The unpopularity of it in other ages and this one brought about a forgetter mechanism which causes an occlusion on the subject of death. The fact that one cannot talk about it is enough, all by itself, to continue to cause the forgetter mechanism.
A way to plot this would be to ask somebody, as an auditing question: “To whom can you tell the fact that you have been dead?” It works something like this: “Tell me the one person in the world who does not believe that you are insane.” It has a fantastically cataclysmic effect upon a person. He sort of believes he is going wog and spinning and so forth, and when you ask him that question you have broken the agreement chain.
You could ask a similar question, “Tell me one person in the world who believes you live more than once,” and you would get a similar reaction.
I have plumbed into this subject very deeply with lie detectors and E-Meters, checking up with grown-ups and children from all walks of life. You can, with the aid of one of these meters, put a person in such an incident. There is a peculiar behavior of the needle. It is a little hunt of the needle, and it just hunts back and forth over a small area quite frantically. It indicates that a person is still sitting in one of these exteriorization incidents.
We know a great deal about havingness and that if a person suddenly ran out of havingness he would die and we would expect so much loss of his possessions and so forth to wipe him out. It doesn’t wipe him out. This is what ordinarily occurs. He backs out at the moment of death with full memory. At that moment he knows who he is, where he has been, and so forth. You’d expect a total occlusion but it does not occur at this point. It is not true that a thetan in excellent condition gets some distance from the body and then doesn’t care about it any more. That is simply a phenomenon of havingness. When we first found that, we thought this was always the case, but we were striking at thetans ordinarily low on the tone scale. Those who forget about it immediately and do not care have actually gone into the sub-zero tone scale. In support of this you can pick up on the track times when a fellow backed out of his head and was mad and just kicked the stuffing out of the person who killed him.
At a certain level a person who had to “have” tremendously would get just so far from a body and say, “Well, I don’t care. I’ve had a very unhappy time during that life and I’m awfully glad, I don’t care.” But that person was so little alive when he was alive that his aliveness after he has died is also negligible. A person a little higher up when somebody knocks off his body, would have an interesting reaction to this. “I’ll show them they can’t put me out of the game,” and he’ll dive halfway across the country, see a maternity hospital and grab the body of a baby. Somebody higher than this would not have been in contact with bodies in the first place.
We get a very fascinating exteriorization here because it is totally cognizant. The person knows who he is and usually has very good perception. He knows where his friends are and for somebody to come around and point out this fantastic spiritual phenomena that somebody has appeared to them after he had died several thousand miles away is something like being terribly surprised because a waitress came to the table in a restaurant. If a person is killed with sudden violence and he is very surprised about the whole thing, he is sufficiently upset and unphilosophical about it that he is liable to go around and see his next of kin and the rest of his friends in an awful frenzied hurry, trying to reassure himself that he hasn’t gone to purgatory. (“Purgatory and hell” is a total myth, an invention just to make people very unhappy, and is a vicious lie.)
He has suffered the loss of mass. That is just about the frame of mind the thetan is usually in when he finds his body dead. If he is below 2.0 on the tone scale his major thought is to get another body. This he can do by finding a young child that he could bring back to life. Thetans are very good at this. But the ordinary entrance is some time around what we call the “assumption,” and the assumption occurs within a few minutes after birth in most cases. That is the usual procedure, but the thetan can hang around for some time.
They’ll hang around people. They’ll see somebody who is pregnant and they will follow them down the street. They’ll hang around the entrance to an accident ward and find somebody — some body — that is all banged up and pick up this body and pretend to be somebody else’s husband or something of the sort.
It isn’t necessarily true that all of this is taped, measured. I am telling you what is standard about this behavior and what is not. It is a case of how fast you can pick up a body before somebody else gets it. So there is a certain anxiety connected with this. Thetans often say very interesting prayers at the moment they pick up a body. They dedicate themselves to its continued growing and they are so pleased with the whole thing that they dedicate themselves to the family and go through all kinds of odd rituals of one kind or another. The odd part of it is, they don’t shut their memory off until they pick up another, a new body, and the shut-off of memory actually occurs with the pick- up of the new body.
There is a phenomena series known as the “between-lives” series, and people have some sort of a thing mocked up whereby somebody goes back through a between- lives area. This can be plotted, it is not unusual, but it is certainly not a constant. Until thirteen or fourteen hundred the between-lives area operations weren’t thriving at all. Then they started to pick it up more and more. They had to knock witchcraft totally out of Europe before the between-lives area clubs started thriving. They had to knock out any idea about demons and spirits. In other words, they had to make one feel guilty for hanging around and admiring the trees with no body to look through.
They succeeded in doing this. You can make a little child sick by just talking to him about this sort of thing, by mentioning ghosts and spirits and how bad they are and how fearful they are. He gets upset because (1) you are restimulating times when he exteriorized and (2) you are invalidating him and throwing him down tone like mad. He is a ghost, a spirit, a demon. He is all these bad things they have mocked up.
In view of the fact that two exteriorizations take place, it could get very complicated as one looked at it because the GE exteriorizes. I don’t know much about that except that there is something that mocks up bodies that we call the genetic entity and it skips from life to life. In other words, even a body doesn’t live only once. It is so obvious once you look at it that if a body lived only once it would never have learned how. The intricacy of a body, itself, is something that is developed over a long period of time.
When you realize that you have the capability of endowing things with life then we don’t even know that the genetic entity is alive. It might just be machinery or computation of one kind or another that goes on and that you continue to endow with life to some degree until you separate from it.
Another interesting phenomenon about death is that a thetan will stay around a body until it is disposed of properly. You can take an E-Meter and any preclear, and you can find times when he has been left out on a cliff and nobody even put a lid on the coffin, and there it was exposed to the wind and rain and he will stay around there until that body is totally dust. Bodies left out in the open decompose. Bodies buried in the ground go to pieces in a hurry. The rate of decay of a body is not really a point in question except that a thetan will try to accelerate it if the body isn’t cared for. A thetan doesn’t much care concerning the actual disposition of the body as long as it isn’t given any more indignity than it suffered in the lifetime. He is apt to be very upset about indignities rendered to a dead body. Even while he is “in a body, alive,” when the body is apparently alive and he is taking one around, he gets upset, if he is in any shape at all, about bodies being abused and mistreated. Much lower on the scale he is still upset about indignities to dead bodies and dead things.
He associates the body with his own identity to the degree that every time an indignity is rendered to the body he thinks it is to some degree being rendered to him; therefore he hangs around a body until it is properly disposed of. When people make wills in which they declare a certain disposition of the body, it is a very wise thing to do, if you want him to live a happy life elsewhere, to carry out those wishes, because that is his idea of what proper care is.
The Egyptians had the idea of living forever and so they wanted their bodies to live forever, but don’t think that a thetan hung around just because his body had been mummified. As far as he was concerned he was on some other genetic line and he would not particularly be upset about his body if it had been hauled out of a tomb and been put up in the Metropolitan Museum. He already would have been too far away from it to worry about it. One very worrisome case was that of a thetan whose skull was used by a carnival who put a motor in the jaws to make them keep on opening, and the thetan just couldn’t take it. I actually had to unwrap a preclear from that particular skull. He still had a finger on it even though he had another body. People actually become curators of museums just to keep a finger on a body they might have once had.
Mary Sue is the sweetest tempered girl you ever saw. We went into the British Museum, saw a whole bunch of jewels lying there and she went completely 1.5. She just got so mad that even I couldn’t talk her out of it. Finally I took her home, put her on an E-Meter and her total conviction was they were still safe in a tomb someplace.
Every once in a while some fellow will go into some area and go completely berserk and not know quite what is wrong with him. Well, he probably got killed there or something of that nature.
The subject of death is never a very serious one to a Scientologist beyond the fact that he feels kind of sorry for himself sometimes. There was somebody of such terrific elan, who made him real happy and this person was thoughtless enough to dispose of the mock-up and go out of communication and the Scientologist feels unhappy about it, for it is a thoughtless thing for a friend to do. This, by the way, is a very early concept of death. You now more or less progress back to death as it was regarded very early on this particular track in this universe. People didn’t regard it very seriously.
Death is in itself a technical subject. You can, with considerable confidence, reassure some husband whose wife is dying or has just died that she got out all right and she is going someplace else to pick up a mock-up. If you got there while the person could still talk, still communicate with you MEST-wise, in the last moments they usually have something spotted, something planned.
Now, sometimes a thetan gets so furious that he gets hallucinatory. He goes around killing all his enemies in all directions and they don’t even exist. Motto: Have your reality in good condition before you die. There are many processes which exteriorize people and give them high reality on this. Amongst those processes the key process that produces the phenomena without any great shock is old Stop, Change and Start — it produces exteriorization rather easily.
Thetans do not become body cells, walls and can get out of any trap they are in, but sometimes it is better to be in a trap than nowhere, and that is true of most people.
A thetan very often carries with him a theta body, which he mocked up on the past track and which is a number of facsimiles of old bodies he has misowned and is carrying along with him as control mechanisms which he uses to control the body he is using. He eventually develops quite a heavy, thick, automatic-control theta body. They are quite interesting. Many have electronic claws and all sorts of things. Usually the theta body structure has an electronic beam that goes down each of the fingers and he opens and closes his hand with beams. This is going off into structure, but he sometimes pulls out this theta body complete and simply takes it along.
Losing your pocketbook, some treasured possession or your body are all alike, and because of the forgetter mechanism a great mystery is made out of this. But that is death — phenomena of. And I hope sometime or another you may have no use for this whatsoever.