How are you tonight?

Audience: Fine.

Good. Did I ruin anybody really?

Audience: No.

Ah well, I will. (audience laughter)

Very, very fine thing today — understand we had two or three exteriorizations on that hour of processing, is that right? Could I see a hand or two if anybody got out of his head all of a sudden? One, two, three, four, five — yeah, there were a few — six, seven. Good. Eight.

Now, it isn't absolutely necessary to be out of your head. But a guy that's in his head is a fool!

Now, I wanted to say a few words to you about exteriorization in view of the fact that it'd be very bad to process you immediately on a nice dinner. So I'm merely going to talk to you about exteriorization — what is this thing? And I'm going to give you a very fast rundown on the component parts of beingness. Like to hear that — component parts of beingness?

Audience: Yeah.

Well, it all sort of begins with something that has quality and no quantity. And after that, we get quantity. Like Topsy, the universe simply grows. We start with what we originally called in Dianetics the awareness of awareness unit. And this has no mass, no wavelength, no location. But it has the capability of making postulates and doing lots of other interesting things such as drinking highballs and . . . (audience laughter)

But how does it do all this? How does it do all this? It does this by saying it does. That's all there is to it. And this tremendous riddle has baffled it for a long time. How could it do all these things simply by saying it does?

Well, it would be unwilling to believe that every postulate it made would stick. Think of that for a moment — supposing every postulate you made would stick. Supposing every time you said, "I wish I was dead," there you lay, really. Wouldn't that be wonderful? But supposing every time you said, "I can best serve this situation by being old and feeble," and you were; and supposing you said, "Oh childhood, childhood! Those were the times! Da-da-da."

So one of the best things this awareness of awareness unit does is hold a gun on itself. It says, "Well, these postulates are not going to stick. I'm going on being Joe Jones. And if I had my way of it, I would be Joe Jones, Bessie Smith, P.T. Barnum, a greyhound dog, probably all in the course of half an hour. And this would be disconcerting to my friends, so I will take mercy on one and all, and just be Joe Jones." You could imagine how disconcerting it would be to have a friend like that. Makes a postulate, and there he is in full mass. That would be upsetting.

So we do all sorts of devious things to keep from obeying all of our postulates at will — because we know we can't trust ourselves; of course — that's the first thing we have to know. And we do all kinds of things to make it automatic, so that we will become surprised about it.

One of the favorite tricks of the spirit, we think of . . . You know, it's too bad that the spirit became so thoroughly monopolized by tall spires and very, very soft carpets and crosses and so forth — it's too bad, because it seems to categorize it or put it over here, you see, in a special category as having a great deal of solemnitude. And that would mean nobody'd ever laugh. If the spirit were even a solemn thing — if it were a solemn thing all the time, if it did match this mood of incense pots and all that sort of thing — if it did match that thing, we would all go around smoking.

Now, it's a great oddity, you see? If you wanted everyone to be serious about existence, you of course would tell them the spirit was a very sober experience and being, and that we must treat it with great reverence. And you'd have everybody real solemn, and nobody'd ever go to see the comics. Nobody'd ever read the AMA journal for a good laugh.

By the way, I should apologize — there are two or three medical doctors here in the crowd, and there are two or three wives of medical doctors, and actually there is no quarrel between Scientology and the medical doctor, or myself and medical doctors. I have a great many medical doctors who are very, very good friends of mine — very good friends. But there's one hell of a fight between me and the AMA, the trade union. I just wanted to get that in quietly.

As far as the APA is concerned, there is no fight with the APA (that's the American Psychiatric Association). There's no fight ,whatsoever, for the excellent reason that I was offered all the stock in the corporation once, and I didn't buy it. And I think they've been mad at me since. But the APA is a stock corporation and you get to be a member by buying some stock. And it's for sale down on the street. And we could right now own the APA if we wanted to, but why own it? The . . . You think I'm joking with you, but if you look this up, you'll find this to be the case.

Now, here we have, however, this idea of the spirit being a very solemn, solemnified — when we walk past graveyards, you know, we're supposed to — I suppose the boy is supposed to whistle, but we're supposed to say, "God rest their bones," and walk on by and so forth. And when we go into a church, the women are supposed to put their hats on, the men are supposed to take their hats off. Just why this is, I don't know. Maybe women compulsively exteriorize faster in church. But however this is, you're not supposed to laugh in the vestibule, and I suppose many a time the religious career of some young man has been utterly ruined by an inability to repress his giggles during the more sonorous moments of the sermon. And I imagine that there are even two or three people present who have thought to themselves from time to time, "My mother will smack me severely if I laugh out loud in church again," and therefore, have been solemn ever since.

But if we thought of the religious solemnity to which man is prone and which has, here and there, a great deal of beauty — if we thought of the spirit as totally belonging in that category, we would make one of the wildest errors that we could make, and which man has made. The freest spirit is liable to be a child. They're not yet sharing with the body a sufficient amount of experience in common to be entirely nailed down to the body, so they exteriorize easily. As a matter of fact, there are probably very few children interiorized. They work very well — they work very easily; if an auditor knows how to work them, he can do wonderful and remarkable things with a child. Their span of attention is fairly short on almost everything but good auditing. And you know a child responds to a good auditor in a really remarkable fashion. They will simply go on for hours without breaking their span of attention. This is fantastic.

You know, everybody knows that a child has a very short span of attention. If the auditor's good, they'll go right on being audited just as long as you're willing to audit them. Of course, they'll turn around in the middle of the session and start auditing you. But then you turn around and start auditing them again, all right, and it's good fun. But — the child's span of attention is — doesn't break up under good auditing.

I actually could probably grade the ability of an auditor on adults by the span of attention given him by a child preclear. You know, I could tell you how good he was with adults if I could measure the child's span of attention with him. Now, here's this child, and we don't find children very solemn, do we? It's very seldom I have found many solemn children, unless they wanted a nickel. And of course, a child can be solemn — this is a possibility. And they can cry and scream and so forth, and we just hope it isn't quite that bad.

But here we have this problem of the freest spirit with which we have an intimate contact is the spirit of a child. And it is very happy, and there's a great deal of laughter and a great deal of motion. And yet we have the spirit categorized over here in a field which is noted for, in the Western Hemisphere, its solemnity, stillness and "don't-moveness." Now, would that itself sort of impose a problem to an individual?

Yes it would. He would say, "Now look, if I am a spirit, I have to sit still and be solemn and look up to my betters and do this and do that. If I am a body, I can be wicked. I can sin." It's fascinating. That isn't the facts at all. That isn't the facts of the case. That's a completely erroneous conclusion. If he's free, he can sin; and if he's sitting around in a body, no sin's possible — they put you in jail, they marry you off. (audience laughter)

So we look over this view of the Western civilization and the subject of the spirit, and we find many things which don't quite jibe. We find that an individual is not as free as he is solemn, but actually is free as he is happy. So I wouldn't say we have experienced here and there a police state in the field of religion. I wouldn't go so far as to say this. But I'd say that we've made an awfully good approach to it here and there.

Now, religion has been used as a control device all too often. So have swords, cameras — even lollipops have been used as control devices. Almost anything can be used for control — to start, stop and change something. Almost anything. But notable amongst all these anythings and somethings is religion. When some-body is talked to about his spiritual beingness and how he must send his soul along some course, and how he must save himself and preserve himself and how he mustn't be able and how somebody's going to get him and "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take" — ai! Oh, no. You mean this — you're going to give this little kid insomnia and when he gets to be forty he's going to have to have an auditor for just hours and hours and hours? Little kids lie down after this type of control and expect some kind of an angel to swoop down and pick up "their thetan," whatever this is. They get into a terrible confusion, in other words. They don't think of themselves as a spirit, they begin to think of them-selves as a body, because they're told all the time to take care of their soul. It's an interesting control mechanism. It'll do a valence switch over to the body. Or at least make somebody rather schizzy.

We have a tremendous number of mechanisms of this character, and they are all control mechanisms. But this is the spirit holding a gun on other spirits; saying, "There are barriers here. Remember back there in 1006 B.C., you agreed there was a barrier here, and it's still here." And the boys say, "Okay. Okay, it's still here. All right. All right. I'll feel a wall."

We have an enormous number of agreements which operate to restrain and restrict the actions of one another. But where an individual becomes quite afraid and quite decayed, he is apt to use the most beautiful things he can lay his hands on for control things. Now, these things were never intended for control mechanisms. Happiness is not a good control mechanism, if you used it as a control mechanism; if you said to somebody, in just so many words, "It will be impossible for you to be happy unless you drop $82.65 in the poor box. And we're going to see to it that you're not going to be happy until you do that. As a matter of fact, we have an appointment tonight with a couple of saints that we know very well, and we're going to make sure you get zapped. Now, the happiness of your dear departed father depends once and for all and entirely upon your ability to cough up enough jack to send the old boy through Purgatory. And he's going to stay there, son, until we find the bottom of your bank account." Well, that's one way to remedy havingness.

Now, one of the biggest control factors there is, is mystery. Mystery is a tremendous control factor. The presentation of a mystery can operate to enslave — just as the priests of Chaldea, having made a wreck out of their own country, moved on to Babylon and made a wreck out of it. This mystery they made out of everything was their control over the society. They knew how to plot the eclipses. They knew how to forecast and predict certain heavenly activities. And they knew that this simply depended upon natural law. So how did they use this? Hah! They said, "It's a big mystery, and we're doing it, and you bow down to this mud thing over here, and you're saved. And to prove it, there's going to be an eclipse at 10:32 next Sunday. And if you have not paid all of your dues into the church by that moment, we'll keep the sun covered up." What could people do but dig?

Science is looked upon, way back on the track almost in the Dark Ages now, as a sort of a savior. Science at one time was known as a sort of a savior thing — a wonderful thing which freed man. Because it dispelled the mysteries which had been carefully built up around these agreements which we call natural phenomena. Now here was science, and it came along and said, "These eclipses happen. And no set of priests anywhere can control an eclipse."

And people said, "Hey, what do you know? I don't have to dig up anymore." And they were very thankful that science came along and pointed this fact out to them. Although it's just a little bit confusing to me why a couple of guys down at the crossroads, while sitting there on the store porch, didn't notice that the eclipse always "uneclipsed." That seems a little bit stretching it somewhat. Seems to me like people would have noticed this as time went on, that the exact incantation and prayer had very, very little to do with the eclipse of the sun or the moon. But they evidently didn't. A bunch of men came along as scientists and they made nothing out of these mysteries by demonstrating again that they were natural laws. This was a very; very, very fine thing. But science itself bade fair to go into the depths and darknesses of mystery as time went on.

The first vestige we had of this was the absolute necessity to be specialized before one could be called a scientist. One had to put in — I don't know, what is it now? One has to go to school until he's thirty-two before he can hold down a $200 a month government job? He has to go to school and go to school and go to school and he learns to be a specialist and a specialist and specialist and finally, an engineer is an expert on high-pressure steam. But he'd have to go to school another six years to learn about low-pressure steam.

We take a man who goes to universities and colleges, and studies and works hard — and this is a clever man, a man with an impulse to heal — and for years and years and years he goes on studying the human body. And then he comes out and he's a specialist in a certain type of rheumatic heart. I mean, he goes all this time to learn about this and become a specialist.

This is the way you build up a mystery, this: You make highly specialized categories within a science. And when a science goes in that direction, it no longer frees, but starts to enslave. And as time goes on, the biggest, largest of scientific organizations will become more and more and more mysterious until they have no communication lines at all. And then you get a sort of a priesthood of this sort of thing rising up — and back of the magic atom bomb or something of the sort, a little flag waves, and that means the populace is supposed to cough up another five bucks apiece. I mean, this is the way it goes. This is the way a priesthood starts. Natural phenomena is discovered, and then someone makes a mystery of it.

Right now, they are having, I am told — and I have no personal knowledge of this — that the AEC, for instance, is having a very difficult time administering its own organization. Because its security lines are so solid, its barriers are so great, that it cannot get the proper security classifications for everybody, so therefore, has crooked communication lines all over the place. And one of these fine days, this fellow will have one piece of the formula and that fellow will have another piece, and somebody else will have another part of the workability, and none of them will know where the other fellows' are. (applause) That would be good, yes — I agree with you.

But what will they — what would they do then? What is the impulse which follows in after this? The impulse, unfortunately, is simply to say, "All right. Now I have the whole bomb" — big lie — "I have the whole bomb, and I've got it right here in my desk drawer. And unless you all pay for certain numbers of candles, or buy a certain number of new test tubes and present them to the laboratory, it's going to go off. And there's nothing I'll be able to do about it. Because it's controlled by a demon. Here he is. You don't believe it — we've made him solid. We call him 'H-bomb.' " This sort of thing. Mystery. Mystery, used for control and to enslave.

Anytime you start to hide knowledge, or obscure phenomena, or make a highly specialized and limited cult out of some function of life, you can expect that there's going to be more control than is good for our happiness. This is a certainty.

Well now, this is what the spirit has done. Spirit comes along and he says, "You know, I'm able to make ideas. A body converts food into energy and goes through motions, and that is a specialized function." Is it? Well now, how'd that body get there? Well, that body has been on the track an awful long time, as even the Darwinian boys agree that it's been on the track an awful long time. And that a lot of spirits have served this body. They've built it up into various automatic and machine patterns so that it will do those various things. But any one of them could have started from scratch and created a body whole cloth that would be just as visible as any body we have present. This is a great oddity, you see?

Now here is a spirit — an individual who is very happily engaged on occupying a body and thinking that he is dependent upon this body. Because this body knows so much, it knows how to build so well, and yet he could never build anything like this, he feels. So, therefore, he's dependent upon this. And that is not true. He is not a specialist. And that is the first thing you must learn about a thetan. He can pretend to be, but he is not a specialist, and he never will be. And his health, power, strength and ability depend upon his nonspecialization.

Now, what is specialization but identity? We say that somebody is a plumber, somebody else a carpenter, somebody else an engineer, somebody else a doctor. These are identities, aren't they? They are an identity of function. But let's go down scale from that and say, "This person's name is Joe and that one's name is Bill and the other one's name is Tom." This is interesting, isn't it? That's a highly specialized affair. You mean this is the one person who has this identity? This is the only person there is who has this identity.

Tell me, is there anyone going to profit from individuals having only one identity from which they cannot escape? It's very easy to collect taxes. Very easy to find out "who done it." It's very easy to pin people down and locate them, as long as they have finite names.

But here's the oddity: You have as much crime as you identify. This is fantastic. That means you'll have as much FBI as you have FBI files. And the better and more complete these files are, and the better they're able to reach out into the world and find anybody in anywhere — there he is! — the more crime you're going to have.

Possibly while running this little process in the last hour of somebody saying, "Well, we've got you spotted now," you possibly might have had a little bit of a desperate feeling for an instant, like "I ought to do something, no matter how strange. I really kind of ought to do something." Maybe some little impulse struck you. Great possibility that that happened, not necessarily true at all. But once a criminal is entirely identified, there is no hope for him at all. And there's no slightest advantage in his being a good man. There's no return, no recovery and no change. He is committed to a course. And now it doesn't matter who he robs or kills. In other words, we have made it so that his return to good order and graces cannot be rewarded. There's no possibility, then, of having a rehabilitated criminal, as long as you have him completely spotted, categorized, you know all about him. And anytime anybody robs a hotel in Schenectady, even though he's in San Francisco, somebody picks him up. This fellow after a while learns very well that there's no reason for it at all. There's no reason why he should be honest. Quite the contrary — there's every reason why he should be dishonest.

Now, this is a great oddity. Identification. The more positively and the more easily a person can be identified, the more crime will arise. Doesn't sound possible, but it's true. It would seem the reverse, wouldn't it? It'd seem that if everybody was sort of floating around loose and not nailed down, and they could zap anybody they wanted to zap and you could kill anybody you wanted to kill and so forth, it would seem an open-and-shut case of complete and total crime. You couldn't identify people and so forth. Anybody could commit a crime and instantly get lost. You'd never be able to discover him. That would seem to just open the doors wide to a vast vista of stuff that — like you see in the Hearst papers or Time magazine or Real Detective.

Now, the great oddity — the great oddity is it isn't true. It is not true. There is not as much peace as there is police. And anytime you think there's as much peace as you have police, you will continue to see a world — as long as the world believes this, you'll continue to see the world involved in war after war after war. I don't think any of us would disagree on this: that we certainly have enough national police in the world. Russia has millions and millions and millions of men under arms; so do we. They have air forces, they have guided missiles, they have bombs, they have the OGPU and we have the CIA, and — police, police, police. Whole armies and navies. People who are there to shoot and defend and so on — these vast armies of police. If they build them up just about one million men more, you'll have a war. Peace is not proportional to police; it's inversely proportional. Great oddity.

You see, if people had a greater freedom, their want would not be as great. They would not be in a state of desperation about this and about that. They would have enough freedom so they themselves could assume some moral responsibility for the society in which they are operating. Do you know that the child labor laws which sit on the books of Washington right here, are primarily the laws responsible for juvenile delinquency, which we all admit is a pretty bad thing these days — the child labor laws. Of course, there were some capitalists. There are always some fascists around someplace that make things tough for everybody.

They put the children to work in the factories, so we were told. And eventually there had to be child labor laws so that you couldn't work any children. You know what those laws do? They simply say to a child, "You cannot participate in this game until you reach a majority and no longer care to play. You can't participate in this game. You can't play in this game. No." And the kid says, "Nyarrh! You mean I cannot demonstrate to my fellow man that I am worth doing something for or with? You mean you have robbed me of the principal method of being of service to my race, my people, my family? You mean you are telling me that I am not necessary in this society? Well, if I am not necessary, then it must follow immediately that I am worthless."

And then we have, matching these child labor laws, the most onerous juvenile delinquency laws which you ever cared to inspect. They are marvelous. They are marvelous for their complexity and stupidity. We have young men, for instance, comparable to this, who have a perfect right by law to go out and get killed for their country, but not to get drunk for it.

This is an oddity, isn't it? Well, right along with that are these police laws. They've got to get them off the street at nine o'clock. They've got to do this, they've got to do that, they've got to walk this way and that. They have no legal rights.

I saw a young man committed to an insane asylum the other day by a judge who merely had to convene a court by sitting down on an old set of steps someplace and saying, "Well, court's now in session. I find this child neglected, so this child is a ward of the court. Asylum."

The child was not present. No witnesses were present. No competent medical authority was present of any kind. No formal convention of that court was held.

That's child — juvenile delinquency in action. Now maybe that's a very extreme case. But it's a funny thing, it's the only one I happen to have inspected, and I inspected that by accident. I just sent somebody down to look into something like this juvenile delinquency thing — this is the first thing they ran into. So they came back and told me, you know. That was all in the course of an hour or so. I kind of was leery of sending them back to find a second one. What if they're worse than this?

So we have the young men and the young women of the country of an age capable of bearing and rearing children and holding down jobs, sitting around knowing they cannot be of any service to their fellow man.

Do you know how to drive somebody crazy? Just convince him he can't help anybody. Just convince him of this, and he's gone. Now we wonder why we have incidents of psychosis and neurosis and juvenile delinquency and lawbreakers, and why we have to have all these files, files, files. Every bad boy, convinced that he cannot help anybody, who gets on the police rolls is on them from there on out, and we have a real, honest-to-goodness criminal. And we're manufacturing them just as fast as we can turn the wheels of justice — huh!

We manufacture them. We spot the kid because he played hooky when he was fourteen, because he stole an apple when he was sixteen, because he stole a car when he was seventeen, because he shot a man and robbed a service station when he was eighteen . . . We're just growing a crop of criminals, of course. That's the first thing that police have to have: criminals.

Did it ever strike you as peculiar — did it ever strike you as peculiar — that a game of cops and robbers requires robbers? And that there aren't anywhere near enough robbers in this very nicely, pleasantly civilized society at this time?

You know the drawer of Dick Tracy has a most marvelous time trying to find enough villains for Dick Tracy to chase: No-Face and Stone-Face and Hoe-Face and Bow-Face. And they just have a fantastic time trying to get these villains. And it really never occurs to anybody, "Gee, copping would be a lot of fun if there were that many crooks and that much chasing to be done."

But do you know what a cop does? He drives around in a squad car, getting a squad-car spread. He's supposed to be alert, supposed to be on the ball. He's supposed to arrest somebody. He's a cop. They lecture him all the time: "Crime must cease!" Maybe there isn't any!

There's nothing sillier than a cop without a crook to chase or an army without a war to fight. And they make themselves look as unsilly as fast as they can.

Now here we have — here we have this oddity of people falling away from an understanding of themselves to such a degree, because of control — exterior control — and ardures and duress, that they begin to believe that no one can be trusted, and so there have to be that many more barriers.

But the barriers themselves demonstrate that nobody can be trusted. So then we conclude that nobody can be trusted so we get some more barriers. So then we conclude that nobody is trustworthy, so we get some more barriers, and we've come back to a lower part of the cycle, and on down it goes.

You have to accumulate barriers in order to be safe. If you're having to be safe, then there must be something dangerous around. That's the most obvious conclusion in the world.

For instance, if you drove up and down the streets all the time with a couple of armed guards sitting in a turret above your head in your car, armed with loaded machine guns, and you yourself were surrounded entirely by bulletproof glass, and if the whole bottom of the car was so fixed so that land mines and bombs couldn't explode under it, just drive around in that car for a few days, and you will begin to believe that people are after you.

This is a certainty. "I've got this many barriers." And we get to the primary aberration that man suffers from, and one of the reasons he holds himself up all the time: "There must be a reason." See, he always says, "There must be a reason." I've run into this in some of the most remarkable things. Fellow gets up, makes a speech. He says — tells all the people that he's gotten in there that Scientology is very good. And he starts his speech out by telling them this, and before it's all over, then he says, "It's all very good, except all the people connected with it are crazy and everything."

And the oddity is, is the auditors in the area sit around and say, "Well, there must be some good reason why these people are doing this. Yeah, there must be some reason why they do this. It must be explainable just from the behavior. And it's probably explainable from the fact that well, probably nobody in Scientology is any good. Maybe that means me, too. But there must be some good, valid reason why this is the case. Let me see. Must be, must be a reason."

Yeah, there's a reason, undoubtedly a reason, if you can call insanity a reason. Or if you can call an outright desire to knock Dianetics and Scientology flat in California a reason. But they always figure there must be a better reason than that. And that probably is the finest aberration I've ever run across in somebody: "must be a better reason."

I've had people sit and be reasonable, and figure out all the reasons why Joe suddenly rushed in and drew his revolver and killed Bill. And there must be all kinds of reasons about this. And they will go on with these reasons just by the hour, and completely miss the fact that it might have been that he just came in, drew his revolver and shot Bill. Get the idea? There might not be any reason to it at all.

Now, if you drive around protected on every side by armor plate, or if you live in a society which has to be buttressed up by Lord knows how many echelons of police or armies, you may eventually get to the feeling, "You know, there must be a reason all these people are here. You know, there' must be a reason why we have cops eight deep on every corner. There just must be a reason, that's all. Somebody's more dangerous than we are, otherwise we wouldn't have to protect ourselves quite this hard."

And I have just described the thetan interior: "If I am hiding this hard," he says, "somebody must be after me. If I am trying this hard to protect this body, something must be trying to cave it in. If I have to work with all these difficulties in order to own everything, then there must be somebody trying to take them away from me." And going on up scale, "If I have to hammer and pound to assert responsibility and make other people responsible, it must follow that everybody's irresponsible, including me. And if I have to sweat and strain and groan this hard to get this body up in the morning and to get it to go to bed at night, it must be very difficult to operate bodies. And therefore control is a serious business."

And a little bit higher on the scale is "Everybody talks about dying; therefore, it follows that someday I'm going to die. And look at all these apathetic people; therefore, society must have something to be apathetic about. And if all these people are sitting around crying, it must be a sad world. And if everybody in my vicinity is scared to death — boy, we must be haunted! And if my parents and employer are mad at me all the time, I must be a skunk. And if everybody I know is antagonistic to each other, it must mean people are no damn good. And if everybody in New York is bored, it must be that it's a very boring place."

But fortunately, in some respects — we go in and we see a banker. He's being very conservative, so we figure there must be something there to be doubtful about. And much more happily — much more happily — we see somebody who is tremendously enthusiastic, and if we're in pretty good shape, we say, "You know, there must be something around here to be enthusiastic about." But you know what man says today if he sees somebody very enthusiastic? He says, "He's crazy!"

And if we see somebody sitting there being terribly serene — and it's apparently quite an effort to go on being serene — it must follow that it's awful hard work to be serene.

In other words, as we look at this Tone Scale from the bottom up to the top, every time we add "There must be a reason," we get some unjustified generality which leads us then to conclusions which are not always to our own best interests.

I have had this odd experience: I have been on a ship which was having a very hard time struggling in high seas and high winds, which had its engines disabled. And I had a rescue party drop aboard. All the sailors were convinced that the ship was going to pound itself to pieces and go down.

This was really not a justified conclusion, it was just that the sea was so violent that it appeared to be likely. But they had all come to the conclusion that they were going through their last days right there in those last minutes — each minute about twelve years long. And the rescue party dropped down on the deck of the ship and didn't share this conclusion. And three men in a rescue party did work which twenty-eight men on the derelict had been unable to accomplish. And the three men in the rescue party did it in about ten minutes, where the others had failed for almost ten hours.

Different set of conclusions. Same situation, same ship. Of course, you could say, "Well, the crew that was already aboard were tired." So was the rescue party. They had to row across three miles of open sea to get there. They were twice as tired as the boys who were still aboard.

So we conclude there that you must be able to have an independent attitude toward existence, regardless of the circumstances of existence. It is obviously possible to have an independent attitude toward existence, independent of an existing attitude toward existence. And it is not necessarily certain that the independent attitude of existence is going to succumb to the general attitude of existence. This is not an absolute certainty.

Well, we started out talking about postulates. A person can have an independent attitude toward existence, regardless of what is going on, and make things better or worse at will, to the degree that he retains his confidence and faith in himself and his ability to make postulates.

He can say he feels this way, and he feels this way. But he has to be able to trust himself, to say that. He should be able to say, "I can persevere; I can succeed," and then succeed. He should also be able to say, "Well, I guess I'll fail this time," and simply fail. He would have to be alike unimpressed by winning or losing. He would have to be somewhat unimpressed. But he would be able to do that.

He could then take command of the existing situation or better any situation without being tremendously influenced by the circumstances which surround him.

What do we call this? We call this self-determinism. An individual, then, is as capable of happiness or livingness — I would rather call it livingness — he is as capable of living as he is capable of determining the actions of himself and others by a simple postulate.

And an individual who can do this is a giant amongst his fellows. And an individual who can't, has been, is, and always will be a slave.

Thank you.