Thank you.

Want to talk to you now about chronic somatics.

In the first place, chronic somatics form the chronic complaint of most people. Most people are reduced to the basic game of an ache or pain. And as a result, we are all too often led astray, as auditors, to think that it is utterly and absolutely vitally necessary to at once eradicate the chronic somatic of the preclear. When I tell you that it's the last game he's got, you should understand that by ridding this fellow of his difficulty as your first and foremost action would land you in difficulty. Why? He would complain. He was going around with a bad leg and you cured his leg and he didn't like you anymore.

The only reason the American Medical Association has had to legislate itself into existence is because early in its career it did adopt and continue to maintain a few therapeutic actions. And maintaining these early therapeutic actions it, of course, made many, many enemies — it kept curing people. It was a dangerous thing to do.

By giving people only the additional problem of an outrageous bill, they took away their chronic difficulty and so fell into disrepute and had to go around and bribe legislatures. (I don't say they bribed legislatures, this is a — this is a wide statement, this is one of my wild statements.) (laughter) They said they wouldn't operate on their families or do anything for them anymore unless they passed legis see, that's not bribery, that's coercion — unless they passed legislation giving a total monopoly to a group on this.

Why would they become anxious? Actually, the relations between a doctor and a patient are usually good, we think. Why then should a profession of people, uniformly liked by the public, have to bring into being forceful and brutal laws which contained in them provisions of imprisonment in order to maintain their monopoly?

By that I can tell you then that a healing profession is a dangerous one. A profession which is a healing profession only is too dangerous to be touched. Why? It takes away the last couple of games the fellow has. When the man is sick, he is so short on games already that he is willing to kill himself to have something to do. He is. And if you were then specializing in making him well and only specializing in making him well, and not taking care of the mental difficulties which brought on this condition of illness, you would be in a dangerous situation which would, of course, force you at length to go to the legislature or the parliament and pass a number of laws. See?

It should be very obvious to you. You look over a preclear, you'll see these phenomena. They are very common to us now. Therefore, an auditor who thinks he can go out and practice healing is an auditor who's going to go out and fall on his face. So we don't practice healing; we practice able-izing.

Now, we may get a preclear to come in who comes in as a dare. He never came in to get healed, he came in to dare you. And you can't — "Look what they've done to me," he wanted you to know.

Now, if you simply put up a sign and said, "I view illnesses and difficulties," a lot of people would simply walk through and talk to you and go away and feel immeasurably better, twice as sick. See, they'd feel very good about this. You charge them — charge them a few pence a visit, you know, and just let them come in and show you for a couple of minutes.

Well, now, actually, it's not even funny because a little child will bark his knuckles or stub his toe or something and it's almost — you can almost see him plot the whole thing out. He barks his knuckles and like a small rocket heads immediately for Mom and says, "See?"

And Mama says, "Oh, that's nice. Mama will kiss it and make it well." And Mama does and that's the end of that game.

The funny part of it is, if he plays that game convincingly, if he's convinced he is playing a game that Mama will give him attention and that it is interesting and so forth, child will get over doing this. And actually the speed with which they heal up a bump or a bruise which is appropriately noted by both parents is quite remarkable, unless they are so short of games they keep it around to be noted tomorrow. But a child who is neglected is a child who will be hurt. And a child who is getting an adequate amount of attention doesn't ever get hurt. Isn't that odd?

You want to know what an accident-prone is, accident-prone is somebody who has generated a no-attention mechanism of one kind or another. He generates confusion so that people can't put their attention on things and so people get hurt. Now just look at that and open that up from the other remark and you more or less see what this whole business about chronic somatics is all about.

So people get sick — so what? It's not even important. That's a funny thing. I know you might feel bad right this minute while you're listening to this, but it's really not even a statement which is worth troubling yourself about. But I'll tell you the statement that is. You see, you can say, "People get sick, so what?" That's just a statement, see. It's of no importance, no particular value. But "People run out of games — good lord!" You get the difference here, see?

So when you see this fellow going down the street on crutches, you should ask yourself, "Why didn't he patch it up?" You can say he's weak, you can say he didn't have a chance, he didn't know how. Maybe all these things are true. But then he comes along to you, a Scientologist, that certainly have weapons and tools of great magnitude to do things like this, and you start to work with him and it doesn't get well. And about the time that happens, you should ask yourself, "What's going on here?" And when you do get him off of those crutches, he then becomes angry with you. You should ask yourself, "What's going on here?"

When he's going down the street on crutches, that man is short of games. So just remember these two statements: "So they're sick, so what." (Sounds hard-boiled, doesn't it? But it's very factual.) "So they're short on games — good lord." That's important.

You see — I'll give you one of the reasons why he's sick. It is a valence or a mock-up that gives him a no-effect condition so that he can render effect on others. Got that?

Have you ever seen very many people beating up cripples? It's frowned on, isn't it? Well, if it wasn't frowned on, if cripples were the thing you beat up, you'd have no more cripples. You can't really appreciate this till you get hold of a cripple and you really process him on this: "Now mock up an identity that would cope with it all."

And he says, "Oh, a fellow with a broken neck."

You say, "(Now, wait a minute. What goes on here?) All right. Mock up another identity that would cope with it all."

"Oh, um — a fellow without arms or legs."

Just remember what you're looking at: no effect for self, effect for others is a game condition.

When the society doesn't beat up fellows who have bat ears, a lot of people are going to grow bat ears. Got the idea? When it's against the mores of the society to do something bad to somebody who is in some kind of a condition, then that becomes a no-effect condition and so will be adopted by an individual who is not necessarily defeated, but who is short of games. Defeat has nothing to do with it.

A defeat by the way — and this you will understand more clearly sometime when you look over defeated troops and their dramatizations. The dramatizations of defeated troops are really something wonderful to behold. They go all out. You think of your old aunt with her hypochondria, she's nothing compared to a group of defeated troops. They've lost. They refuse to lose, really. They are now playing the game called "defeated troops." And with what thoroughness they play this game. They bare their wounds and scars, they are very difficult to heal, they whine, complain and moan about this sort of thing, they go through beautiful sadness and apathy and continue on any psychosomatic condition which arose out of the retreat or the battle. It's wonderful.

You take victorious troops and you get, to some degree, the same manifestation. They're continuing the game by being wounded — some of them are wounded, and they don't heal up right away. But I think if you looked into it carefully, you'd find victorious troops who have a chance, then, of attacking again some other army, heal up rather more swiftly than people who are defeated and thrown out of it for keeps.

Now, this becomes important. Is there a corroborating datum? Is there, anywhere? Yes. People who are left in field hospitals within sight and sound of the enemy recover from their conditions and wounds a many factor multiple compared to those who are sent to the base area and the safe lines. And that is a matter of medical record. If you can just leave that fellow up there with the holes in him, up where he still hears the guns muttering and so forth, he'll either kick the bucket and get another mock-up or heal up quick. He has hopes of getting back in the battle.

Do you know that at one time it was not customary to retire wounded or sick troops? It was not customary to do anything to them at all. So the fellow was wounded and when he got so he could hobble around again, why, they sent him up to the lines.

The American Indian fighting army is a wonderful example of this. There were majors and captains and privates and sergeants in there who had been all chewed up in earlier combats. You know, it's a very funny thing — an officer without an arm? Why, today we don't think of such a thing. An officer who had his arm cut off, of course, would be retired and that would be the end of that. But there were officers without arms, officers without legs, officers with one eye, officers without teeth — soldier would lose his right hand which made it difficult to fire, you know, something like that, why, they'd put him on some other job. Got the idea? They didn't deny him the game. And you would find the incidence of chronic somatics reduced. You didn't have this sort of a condition nearly as much since the condition didn't make him safe, didn't take him out of the game, didn't put him back in the game, didn't do anything much to it — slightly altered the condition of playing the game.

It's quite remarkable. I don't know that a man becomes an unable officer simply because he loses an arm or something like that. If they did that back in the days of the Roman legions, they just would have retired the whole legion every ten years — everybody was all scarred up. And the legion, oddly enough, never retired anybody to anywhere. They just said, "Well, there's a campaign going on, you'd better join your corps again. The eagle goes that away." And that was about all there was to it.

Now, it should be of interest as information, and you should be alert in auditing to these factors because they are tremendously important.

Now, it is a serious thing to have an army or a society which is all wounded and collapsed. You know why it's a serious thing? Not from a standpoint of sympathy, not from a standpoint of humanity, but from a standpoint of simple economics. Every person that is kept out here in a hospital playing the beautiful game of being an invalid is a drain on your productivity, a drain on your bank account directly. These chaps drop out of the production of a society and therefore lean on the rest of us. And the end product of all this is for just thee and me to be left working and everybody else sitting there. Interesting — interesting end product, isn't it?

Well, when I tell you that 40 percent of the beds in Great Britain are occupied by insane, it gives you sort of an idea of the popularity of this game called insanity. Until the game called insanity is made no-game, it will continue to have a high incidence.

For instance, insanity should be no protection whatsoever from criminal charges. There should never be a defense or plea of insanity. It'll increase insanity. People who are not guilty of criminal charges in this life will go insane to protect themselves two lives ago. Do you understand that? And there should be no unusual punishment for the insane, no unusual punishment at all, not psychiatric treatment or anything of the sort. They should be treated as a sort of a routine thing. You go find a stockade someplace and they can go to that stockade if they want to, but they really don't have to too much. Got the idea?

Now, in times of low employment, you'll get a higher incidence of illness and insanity. The depression of the '30s was remarkable for its health factors. Everybody was very sick, everybody got sick everywhere. They were living on diets, it was said, that made them ill because there wasn't enough to eat, because there was too much food. (People had it worked out well.) And yet, on these same diets, these same people had not been unhealthy earlier. They had been put out of the game, they'd been told they couldn't work. Work is one of the primary games, it's a stable datum of our modern times: You can work, you can have a job. These people couldn't have a job.

The United Nations, by the way, has some very gorgeous charters and declarations of human rights and so forth — they're just wonderful to read. They include almost everything, but they don't include the right to create employment, they merely include the right to work.

You see the society sort of falling down on itself? It no longer includes the right to create a game. So, therefore, you get a dwindling spiral of everybody depending on the old games. And when you do this, you get a sick society, you get a society full of chronic somatics, you get a society full of insane, neurotic people. You follow that?

There's another datum that'll back this up is you know there was nobody admitted to an insane asylum during the entire Battle of Britain? You know, if insanity is caused by motion which is happening right now, then everybody in the city of London should have gone mad. Nobody did. I mean it wasn't a case of fewer did, it was just nobody did. That was certainly enough game, wasn't it — hm? It was too darn much game, as a matter of fact. But, nobody failed or fell back or protested too much against this game, they got in there and they worked. So chronic somatics fell off also during that period. People were going down into bomb shelters and sitting there all night that if you today opened a window slightly near them, they would promptly get pneumonia. And yet they emerged from these damp bomb shelters and so on in not too bad a state of affairs.

I noticed this phenomenon early in the war myself. I had — everybody on board had a cold, there was hardly anybody who didn't have a cold and everybody was feeling very sad and draggy and worn-out and so on. And we'd been on an awful lot of long patrol work. That was very deadly. And we all of a sudden hit a contact and the next three days hit four more. We had guns going at any hour of the day or night. At the end of that period I was filling in the reports — you know, when you have anything as unimportant as a battle, why, you really lose out on the important work of the reports and things like that, you know, and puts you behind. And I was filling these out and I was — asked the pharmacist's mate for the summation of sick call — sick call log.

And he said, "I'd bring it up," he said, "but there's nobody in it."

Nobody had reported for sick call. I looked around and nobody had colds. Isn't that interesting? And yet, they obviously after four days of exposure, bad food, little sleep, bad weather, standing to their posts wet and sopping and so forth obviously should have all died of pneumonia.

So what was important here — the state of health or the state of game? That's the question I want you to ask of a preclear. Is it his state of health or state of game?

Now, I won't tell you all the ways of improving somebody's state of game. The first and foremost of course is just "Invent a game." But that's usually too rough for a preclear to run. "Lie about games," maybe that works. There will be many processes which come out from here on that remedy the scarcity of games and the various factors of games. But these processes are all aiming toward just that one thing: giving the fellow what he considers to be enough game. And when he doesn't have enough game he will, of course, get ill.

Now, in view of the fact that you have an unknowing games condition, he may not not-know, you see, that he doesn't have enough games. He may be in the — in a condition where he is saying, "Oh, there's just too much going on around here. Life is too furious." You see this manifestation all the time. Somebody tells you, "Oh, I work so hard. I just work day and night. I just can't possibly rest because I'm just — slave, slave, slave, slave, slave." Check up on him for twenty-four hours. You say, "What goes on here? The fellow's been sitting there for two hours and a half doodling — making little doodles on pieces of paper." What's going on?

Well, the fellow is protesting, actually, lack of game in the overall picture, you see. He is compulsively, aberratedly craving games that he doesn't know he's craving and couldn't line up or describe if he did know he was craving them. And therefore he protests against any game that is to hand because, you see, that game he doesn't consider playable to the level of the game that it is necessary for him to play. A man gets fixated on playing one game, now you try to get him to play another game. It might be more interesting to you, but it's not more interesting to him. And therefore he will tell you how hard he is playing your game, maybe, while he sits around and doodles. But he's really not got enough game. Now, you have a compulsive game condition.

None of this is an accusation of any person or a criticism of any person with regard to their health condition. Because the funny part of it is that the body's ideas of what is enough game are peculiar, to say the least. I said one time that man is in his healthiest condition when he is escaping from death at least three times a day. And you'd say, "Well, that would shatter his nerves." No. It's calm that shatters his nerves. "If I get very much more of this beautiful calmness around here, I'll go mad!"

Now, actually, an individual can get into a state of mind where he can enjoy calmness. He actually can. But the route is through processing. You can process him into it. He's in compulsive games conditions he doesn't know he's in, and so he gets a half an hour to sit still and rest. He doesn't sit still and rest. He sits still and jitters as long as he's in a compulsive game condition. You have to audit him and then he can sit still and rest.

You audit him by giving him more games. You don't audit things out of people these days — please get this very clearly — you don't audit things out of people, you audit things into people. Got that?

You have him invent more games. And if he sits there and drains his bank and takes all the answers from his bank and just as-ises these things, he all of a sudden gets worse and worse and worse. He shouldn't be inventing at all, he should be lying about things right now in present time, you know? "An airplane just divebombed that chair." You can check that as an auditor — you didn't notice one. Might not seem like a lie to your preclear, but it's in the process. You understand?

He's liable to say, "Invent a game? Oh, divebombing." The fellow who — member of an ack-ack battery for lord knows how long, he just keeps stripping airplanes off of that old game.

The old game doesn't go away till you put some new there. The old mass doesn't disintegrate till you show him he can have some more mass. Got the idea? The wrong thing to do is erase the preclear.

Now, there are many sources of chronic somatics which could be plotted out and you might find amusing and so on, but in view of the fact that the chronic somatic disappears when he finds out that he can have another identity than an ill one, that he has other factors that he can do, other things he can go about … Nevertheless a source of chronic somatics have engaged a great deal of the last many years of research.

First and foremost source of a chronic somatic is valence trouble. Fellow is in somebody's valence, that person is sick. That's one place a valence really fouls somebody up. A fellow has a sick stomach, he can't get rid of it, you don't seem to be able to do anything about it — it's Father's sick stomach. You're not auditing Father. You follow me? So he's in a sick valence. Somebody else was sick and then he can't take care of it because it isn't his sickness. Many reasons he does this, one is sympathy. You know, "My poor father." Father has a bad ear or something of the sort and, wham, he's got a bad ear.

A straight recall on some of these things sometimes is quite amusing. It's the wrong way to take it apart, but you say, "Recall a time when you noticed your father bothered about his ear." A person does, and his own ear goes away. I mean, it's a real slick little trick when it works. You spot who had a bad ear and you take it away from him. It's better to ask him something on the order "What other illnesses could you have?"

The mechanical fact of a chronic somatic is that he's on a rest point someplace with a lot of motion around it. And it's better to be sick on that rest point than well in all that motion, according to him. Got it?

Therefore, of course, you always want to put your patient in a hospital which has — where he gets awakened with the lights turned on at 5:00 A.M. and then fed something and washed at 6:00 A.M. and then the floor swept at 7:30 A.M. and then doctor's call and so forth. That's the right place to put him. If you let him dramatize the security point, he very often gets over it and this is what we know as recovery. Hospitalization, recuperation are based upon that one mechanism, practically no others. If we just let him sit down someplace and let him dramatize without interference the security point, the stop motion point, the stuck point on the track, why, he'll be very happy, for a while. It reinforces it, you know.

Another one is by postulate. You say people don't get sick by postulate. Yes, they do. "You know, I think I'll be sick today," he's sick. That's the first and foremost way people get sick, by the way.

Purpose — he wants to accomplish some particular purpose and so it happens that an illness is — fulfills that particular purpose. You can ask people for: "Give me another purpose for a bad ear." He already assumes he's given you one — he's got a bad ear. You could ask him for a few more purposes — dream up a few more purposes and he'll feel much better.

They operate as barriers. People might go too fast and stumble and fall if they didn't have artificial legs, you know. See, they operate as actual barriers. Might hit somebody if he didn't have a paralyzed arm. (This is a standard case, by the way, these are standard cases I'm talking about.) "Might hit somebody if he didn't have his whole left side paralyzed," operates as a barrier. You try to just work it out as a barrier, though, and it doesn't work out. He's got to have something else wrong with him before he can have less.

Operates as freedom: Child doesn't want to go to school, so he says, "Mama I'm sick." In other words, he can get free of something by being sick. In France they used to chop off their trigger finger so they wouldn't get drafted by little Napoleon. In other words, they'd get freed of the army by being without health. That's very common, all too common.

Then there's acceptance level: parents would only accept a sick child. So the person got into the idea of playing the game of being a sick child — age of sixty-eight is still being a sick child. What level of health is acceptable to your parents? A sick child.

And one of the better cures for this kind of a condition is to have them mock up individualities that can successfully attack — not anything in particular, but just can it successfully attack? Can attack without much liability to themselves. And they mock up nearly all of these illnesses.

And that is about all there is to chronic somatics. It isn't that we're interested in illness. We are not interested in illness particularly. Illness is only one of the phenomena of behavior and the mind. And when treated alone and as itself does not readily surrender to therapeutic agents.