Now to some degree (this is the second afternoon lecture uh… December the 11th) — to some degree you may find some of the data I give you — uh… unless you take a look at the way it’s being oriented — somewhat rambling. Well, maybe it is rambling. Uh… but uh… actually, I’m demonstrating something to you — we keep picking up things and then orienting them back to a point. In other words, we’re demonstrating data, a central data and its evaluation against many other data. And we just keep picking that up and bringing it back in.

And we start talking about running regular things. Well, we show how that swings back in again.

Uh… having to have and not having to have is, of course, a form of agreement. And we keep swinging back into agreement which we undo with mock-ups — simple isn’t it?

Having to have, and trying to avoid having to have — it’s a very funny thing that this works out so… so easily. This speaks of, first, a cultivated desire: The person had to have a desire in some direction or another in order to go down tone scale. The thetan was picked up way up tone scale and Desire, and uh… so forth, is way up tone scale. So we come down tone scale a little bit on Desire.

Then when his desire paled, somebody of course, had to enforce it to keep it going. That brought him down tone scale a little further. And when he’d enforced it to a point where it was IMPOSSIBLE to do without it, then you inhibit it so the guy can’t have it.

And that’s any item or thought or belief.

Let’s take a thought on this line — let’s take Christianity — that’s a handy example. Lot of people know something about Christianity. There are a few still left in the society who do. And uh… the uh… we get Desire at the top. Yes, sir, sure enough, you tell somebody, „Life immortal — this is the route to life immortal. Here we go.“

And of course, everybody knew that there was a route to life immortal. They knew that instinctively and many other religions before Christianity had gotten into beautiful condition by selling Immortality. I almost called it, „Pie in the sky“ but I — that’s a Communist term and I don’t want to be partisan.

Uh… the war of ideas and ideologies is a fascinating war. All right?

Here we have, then, immortality and they rig it out aesthetically — give it good story value that’s all. Here it is a nice aesthetic. You desire to have immortality.

Now, then the next step is — you go through this ritual, you get immortality. That’s good. The next step is, down the line from that, that it’s very, very good — little stronger salesmanship — and uh… by the time the guy has bought this, he then buys the next step down the scale which is, „And if you don’t buy pie in the sky“ — pardon me — „immortality uh… if you don’t buy this, we’re going to send you to hell. And hell’s a terrible place.“ And you know hell was really — really interesting at first. It was just „Hell.“

By the way, do you know what the first Hell was? Everybody hoped, but thoroughly, all through the civilized world, that Rome, the corrupt prostitute of all nations, would roast in its tracks. And they hoped because of the volcanic action of Italy, that one day the ground would suddenly go „Burp!“ and a roaring sea of lava would eat up Palatine Hill and the rest of Rome. This was the slavemaster of the world, and they wanted Rome to turn into a sea of lava.

And at first when they talked about Hell, they weren’t talking about any personal Hell, they were talking about fire would occur. And they were trying to sell everybody on the basis of the disappearance of Rome. This was really — a bunch of press agents probably got — I’ve got a friend that says, „You know,“ he said, „I finally figured out how all this happened. There was a bunch of the boys got together in Rome and uh… they worked this all out — something like a bunch of hot advertising men or something — press boys — and they worked this all out and they sold it in an effort to undo and bring down in a crash the Roman Empire.“ And it sure went in that direction. Of course, he’s just joking. (It’s all true, in actual fact.)

And uh… when uh… when uh… they got uh… Rome all burned up and in flames, they thought, then they’d all be in fine shape. Well, that was the level of salesmanship at that time. It had dropped down from a good, aesthetic, beautiful desire, down to a desire that had to do with pain directed toward a certain object (Rome) mixed up.

Now, people still weren’t buying pie in the sky the way they ought to buy pie in the sky, so the next step down was, „You know we’ve been a little bit…“ Uh… by the way, they… in Nero’s time a bunch of criminals set fire to Rome and uh… this ambition was almost realized. And then they all blamed it on Nero. And uh… said — attributed it to the sympathic vibrations of his violin strings or something. And uh… we got uh… pie in the sky as a glut commodity.

You know there hadn’t been — they first expected, you know, just heaven to suddenly open up in this lifetime and there they’d be — there they’d be, right there. Oh, no. That wasn’t what happened, so they finally were saying it was after death that this took place. Oh, bunch lot less people started buying it.

So they said, „We’ve gotta make this commodity saleable,“ so they turned it into currency and enforced it with bayonets… — but spiritual bayonets. They said, „The hell of which we spoke is an actual hell, and you have your choice between going to that hell or going to heaven after death. And it all depends on whether or not you were a good boy before you died. And we can reach you after you’re dead — which is a temporal justice of kinds that uh… we enjoy.“

All right, next step then — people didn’t buy that worth a damn. A lot of people rushed in and uh… they had to make it a little bit better. And do you know, before they got through, they had seven hells?

Once in a while you’ll pick up this magic number „7“ on the track. It’s a prime number and therefore interesting to mathematicians. And there were seven this and seven that and seven stars and seven something or other. And there are seven hells.

Now very often you will find some preclear who is doing a bad spin on religion on account of religious implants, and you’ll find these confounded seven hells sitting there. And they’ve forgotten they ever heard of Dante’s Inferno and the Seven Hells — they’ve forgotten this utterly. There was a hell of ice and a hell of fire and a hell of something or other, and I don’t know what all the hells were but it’s an interesting study in sadism.

But uh… that was enforcement. We’ve gotten down tone scale to enforcement, you see.

And then they came down tone scale, finally got to a point where nobody was believing that but it took an awful long time for that curve to fall. And that curve finally fell at its lowest ebb of enforcement on earth — I mean, the heaviest ebb was the autodafé‚ in the hands of the Grand Inquisition of Spain under an infamous dope by the name of Torquemada whose life I have read in a book bound in human skin — how fitting.

Now Torquemada, Grand Inquisition — boy, they couldn’t be convinced that people weren’t convinced about these seven hells. Nobody’d ever come back and told them about ‘em. Uh… they… they couldn’t be interested too much in pie in the sky; they got much more interested in action here on earth and a lot of other things. And so the autodafé‚ really was a convincer. They’d put ‘em on a stake and they’d put the… put the stakes around them.

The only… the only crime was whether or not you accepted Church Doctrine. And a man could become a heretic for carrying his prayer book backwards. It was just getting to a level of idiocy on enforcement. Anything you did that was even vaguely to the disinterest of uh… the Church was greeted by an autodafé.

British seamen uh… caught in a… in port or something like that, arrested, „Oh, uh… you don’t believe in God exactly the way you’re supposed to, therefore you’re an heretic“ — what do you know? They burned ‘em, just like that — that was all. Put ‘em against the stake.

They had hell of fire then which was personal, highly personalized hell. And there it was.

They had brought it down to an enforcement and their havingness of it had become so scarce that it was no longer an idea; it was an actuality which was an enforced actuality and so on.

That was the grand tide of enforcement of the Christian Church.

And, what do you know? After that they got down tone scale to inhibition. They inhibited your having God unless — that was about the punishment level, that they inhibited you having God unless… you had to think a pure thought, or you had to spit pure spit or something of the sort. And uh… you… you were — there you were, and you couldn’t have God unless you were a pure soul and you wouldn’t know anything about it at all, and you had to have God at a price of, oh, I don’t know, 30 talents in some cases.

Recently some dame uh… some babe uh… pardon me. I… I keep classifying her correctly. Uh… some „lady“ uh… paid His… His… His uh… Royal — uh pardon me, uh… His uh… I don’t know. What do you call the guy? Oh, yeah. His… His uh… uh… Pope Pius? Pope Pius, that’s right. Paid him a million bucks-dollars cash to ratify her divorce properly. I mean, it had all been granted by states and bishops and everything else, but she finally had to pay him a billion bucks-dollars to knock it out.

But inhibition… inhibition, it’s got scarce. The mercy of God became very costly. It became more and more costly and more and more costly, more and more costly until it isn’t available at all now. You know, practically outside of one or two guys like Pope Pius, and I suppose there’s some whirling dervish up in the middle of the Stygian wastes or some place that you could go in and give ‘em a quick buck and they would say, „All right, we’ll give you a God — there you are, signed receipt.“ And it would be about the level.

Christianity has gotten to the point where it’s terrible scarce. You wouldn’t think so with all the churches you’ve got around, but I was talking about Christianity.

Now people have run many other things into this field. They have run practically every way you could think of to do something or be something or act some other way into this level. And you can get all sorts of things from a church now — anything but God.

You can get basketball, bridge, bowling alleys, dances, bazaars — almost anything you want to. But don’t go in and ask for a hat full of God, because they haven’t got it to sell. It’s got an inhibition and then scarcity, but if they gave you any God it wouldn’t be the idea, the spiritual idea at all. It would be a piece of MEST. You can buy God — you can go down and buy a cross — and it’s MEST. It’s all solid now.

Isn’t that interesting? Where we have Desire, Enforce and Inhibit and out through the bottom. And you have a dying, if not dead, religion. One whole nation swallowed in blood to get rid of it and bought another slavemaster much worse: Soviet Russia. Uh… other nations have a level of tolerance and fortunately never abandoned that thing which Rome abandoned.

Rome died the day it denied itself. The principle of self-denial is a very interesting principle. The fellow starts buckling up the day he says he didn’t say it, when he did. You know, he keeps saying… he keeps disowning, disowning his acts, disowning his acts, no responsibility, less and less responsibility and he’s gone.

And Rome was founded on the secure foundation of religious freedom. All races could worship anything they wanted to worship. And on that basis it thrived and it absorbed any country because Roman law was superior to any other law there was. There was more fairness, better courts and better protection under the cloak of Rome than in any other governmental system on earth at that time. And people were even happy to have a Roman rule in preference to tyrants, fascists — something of the sort.

Romans were tough. They didn’t mince about things, but they had law and a province or a newly acquired country could, in time, become fully accredited so that they would have Roman citizenship which was right to right under law.

And people actually would surrender up to Rome on this bait: justice. And she became powerful under this. She became powerful under it because she respected man, she respected the right that man should have, including the right of religious freedom.

By the way, that is a very, very relative term. You, for instance, today sit here with a constitution which guarantees religious freedom but, by golly, what would happen to you if you started to worship Baal? Man! How that would ring in the tabloids. If you started to worship Lucifer, if you started to worship any of the various gods…

One fellow, Allistair Crowley uh… picked up a level of religious worship which is very interesting — oh boy! The press played hocky with his head for his whole lifetime. The Great Beast — 666. He just had another level of religious worship.

Yes, sir. You’re free to worship everything under the Constitution so long as it’s Christian.

Don’t become Mohammedan. Nobody will come around and shoot you because you’re a Mohammedan, but don’t try to start Mohammedan churches. You’ll be discouraged very definitely.

As such, the freedom which man is guaranteed in the English-speaking world today is really not as wide as the freedom which he had as a Roman.

‘Course, part of that freedom was if he got too badly off and too far into debt and unable to protect himself and if his friends all deserted him, he could be sold into slavery. Or soldiers taken in combat could be sold into slavery. They did not take these soldiers in combat and put them in a stockade and make them work for farmers (there’s no slavery in the modern world).

Uh… there’s no slave camps in Russia. Slavery’s dead. Uh… what they do is… is… is… is they get these fellows on a want and an inhibit and — in… on an enforce and inhibit cycle and say, „You get your Saturday paycheck if you worship at the right time clock.“ That’s the God of the modern society: The time clock. He has a face the same shape as the dollar.

And uh… your society in Rome, then, suddenly denied itself. There was a race which was teaching certain doctrines — Christians, unwanted uh… unwanted gentiles, came into the Hebrew countryside and studied that religion and took it back out into the world. And uh… the people in those areas around Jerusalem and so on, didn’t have a pioneer spirit with this world… with this, they disowned these people, but these people still went out and preached this. And it had an interesting ingredient in it that no other religion up to the time had had in it. And Rome was unable to understand this. And that ingredient was hate. It’s perfectly all right, it… it… it… it’s uh… another thing to have in a religion. It’s neither bad nor good. These people were not trying to do a messianic job on the rest of the world, but gentiles used to come in there, and they’d join the church and then they’d go back to Con… well, Constantinople didn’t exist then, well, but go back to other places and start beating the drum for this new religion. That was before Christ.

And then this legend of Christ came along and people really started to beat the drum. Again the Hebrew didn’t keep this rolling, this people rolled in there an picked up this legend out of the rich legends of the Hebrew races and out she went — Ha-wham! And people went mad on this. They spun, they went up and down the pole like a… so many firemen at a five-alarm fire. They were… beautiful condition. They’d rush into Roman Courts and say, „Okay, here I am! Execute me!“ The Roman judge would say, „Well, really! Now after all. Can’t we just take this under advisement?“ And they kept getting justice and they didn’t want justice; they wanted blood, death and murder. They wanted to be a martyr!

Oh, that’s a fascinating chapter and Rome finally said, „We’re so damn tired of this that hereinafter aforesaid Christianity is not going to be accepted by the Roman Empire,“ and what do you know — crash! Down came the Roman Empire — denied itself. It denied its principles and freedom and had begun to inhibit something. It had inhibited… inhibited God in one respect or another and down she went.

Interesting, it… You know that empire still kept going for another 800 years under various guises, but it certainly went up and down after a while. In the year five hundred and something A.D., the total population of Rome consisted of two wolves walking in the ruins of the Forum. Right back, the cycle had turned all the way.

And we had this, then, as a descending spiral. And the reason I’m punching all this stuff up, I’m demonstrating something on a national, or Third Dynamic, level. It came back to this line-up: Here you had a philosophy injected which first entered with a desire, became an enforcement and an inhibition, and the first moment somebody had agreed, agreed on the level of ihihibition it died. And the first time there gets to be a heavy inhibition in any line, a thing dies because that inhibition level is, itself, death.

This tells you, then, your preclear starts in this way. First dynamic, second, third, and forth — doesn’t matter where you pick him up. Here you’re looking at him.

You know that your preclears were a part of this whole picture? This dwindling spiral of religious freedom became part of the woof and warp of the life of most preclears, who actually followed through that period.

And now today they’re left with, then… there’s just the ashes. There’s… there’s nothing more sterile today than… than religion. It is dull, just dull beyond dull. It can’t be had — it’s too scarce.

You could go around any place you wanted to and set up a soap box or something of the sort, and start giving people God, and you’d survive. Evangelists do that on about the cheapest… cheapest guitar, git-fiddle level imaginable. They get over the radio and everything else. They’re just perfectly willing to give somebody God. And… and… by the… the communication lines that are set up are just fabulous. And yet this isn’t general at all; this is not a religious revival. This is the last flick-flack sparks of the fakir who is picking up at the pitch stand something that was once very grand.

I have no partiality with regard to religion. Anybody who wants to sell pie in the sky or hot air needs no license to survive from me.

Uh… now, when we get down to cases, we find that this happened to the preclear. First he desired, then he finds out that he’s GOT to have what he originally desired, and then he can’t have it. And it just goes flick-flack down scale.

So as you run a preclear up scale, you’ve got to run him back to, to get rid of his knee, really, by mock-ups or have and have not or any other way, you’ve got to run him up scale to what? Desire to have the knee — he had a desire to have a bad knee. So let’s get him to have a desire to have a knee. And we’ll find out he made it a bad knee so that he could preserve it and so he could have a knee. He made it a bad knee so nobody else could have it. That’s your origin of chronic somatics.

He makes the body sick so it won’t be too desirable. In other words, he’s clear down bottom scale with this body: He’s down in inhibit.

And what do you know? We look up on our tone scale and we find out inhibition starts in at about 1.1 and goes right on down scale from 1.1 — and it’s death all the way.

So look up neurological illnesses and that sort of thing, on the SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL tone scale, and that’s what you find there. He’s got to inhibit the havingness of somebody else so he won’t get it.

He’s saying in another way, „Don’t eat me.“ He can’t say, „Don’t eat me“ with a club or a lightning bolt. He can’t say that. And up higher up tone scale he can’t — he’s very far from being able to say, „You don’t want to eat me, do you? You have no desire on the subject.“ And of course whatever it is that was trying to eat him would say, „Well, no, come to think about it, I don’t.“

That’s all — no force involved.

Now we go down tone scale a little bit and the fellow had to be able to say, „Oh-ho, you’re going to eat me, huh? Well, there’s your head“ — handed to him on a silver platter. „Oh, you’re going to eat me, are you? Ny, you taste good!“

And we get down tone scale from that and the fellow can no longer say this, so he says, „Look, the reason you don’t want to eat me is because I’m really poison — boy! Am I poison. Look at the arthritis in that knee. Boy, would I disagree with you.“ He gets all sorts of reasons why he has to protect something.

So you get somebody who starts out with great beauty. What do they do? They have to start protecting this beauty to maintain it. Now that’s a beautiful one, isn’t it? They can’t recreate the beauty; they can’t create it again. They know that another specious fact they can’t create anything. They can’t create the beauty, they think, so they sort of have to enforce the beauty of it. And you’ll get somebody going down tone scale on the subject of beauty. First they desired beauty, they were beauty — there was nothing to it. Uh… other people desired beauty, and then the other people — they still might have had the idea, but other people had decided they weren’t beautiful anymore.

So what do they to do? They have to enforce this beauty. First they do it with powder and paint. Then they do it with exhibitionism. You’ll find in the cycle of somebody’s life, a period when he’s actually tried to go around and practically flout himself under the noses of other people. It might have happened quite early in his life, but that period’s always there — in a dwindling spiral. He’s just flouted himself. And he’s saying, „Look, you better think that I’m good-looking or else!“ Big row about it — „You don’t think I’m pretty anymore, that’s the trouble. That’s the whole thing. I’m going to cry unless…“ Enforced — enforced beauty.

Now what do we get down at the bottom of the tone scale? — They finally wind up by making themselves uglier than they need be. They inhibit the existing beauty. „Oh! You don’t think I’m beautiful anymore? Well, you can’t see me beautiful?“ That’s all there is on this dwindling spiral.

Now we keep looking at these spirals, looking at these cycles of action. What are we doing? We just keep comparing data with the same data — agreement. In order to have any of the desire communicated, you have to have an agreement that it communicates. In order to enforce something, you have to have an agreement that it can be enforced. In order to inhibit something you have to have an agreement that it can be inhibited. And above that level of agreement, there has to have been postulates that this sort of a thing can take place — postulate, and then you agree with a postulate.

Now you get agreement… agreement itself then, because it turns into flows, becomes eventually Agree and Disagree. And that is reality itself. You agree with it or you don’t agree with it. If you don’t agree with it, it doesn’t have reality. If you do agree with it, it does.

You can agree with it too much and you’re it. And you’re not you anymore.

So we get all these fascinating, fascinating uh… complexities arising out of what? The principle of the cycle of action, resulting from Q-1.

Now how does Q-1 exactly tie into Desire and Enforce and Inhibit? Very simply. Here we have theta, create, space, energy, objects, locate energy and objects in space. That’s what it really amounts to. And we get, under desire, we get an expansive thing. Desire is a created space — funny isn’t it? — at the first level that you get it in this universe.

Of course, above that level it’s a postulate. Just below that level it starts to be a flicker of agreement. And then we get this expansiveness. First moment we enter the MEST universe. Desire can be a very wide thing, high on the tone scale — high on the tone scale — very wide, expansive, so forth. The harmony and beauty of beauty nowhere shows up like it does in a BIG space.

If you want to really knock somebody’s eyes out if you were a painter and you really wanted to ruin somebody’s… make them just so interested, you’d take a great big hall, and you take enormous curtains. And you take one picture that you painted, just that. And you put it down at one end of this hall — fix those curtains so they’re ready to drape across the thing. And then just a little brac-a-brac. Let’s put a little carpet on the floor and some curtains on the window. But by golly, let’s not have anything in there that even vaguely shows up, like the curtains around the picture.

And then let people come in at the far end of the room and see this great space. And sitting at one end of it, this small picture. They can’t help it, they just sort of cave in. They say, „Look! My God, that thing must be valuable.“

Value is in terms of space, you see.

You know that a fellow who is big and expansive and can reach around a lot of things, and so forth, has, initially, space — he’s operating in lots of space. If he tries to operate in smaller space, why uh… he gets to snapping around it quite a bit. He operates in smaller space, he’s much worse off.

Now let’s take… let’s take space, very little contact, big anchor points, so forth. Boy, ha… have you ever seen a… a… have you ever seen a waterfall, for instance, that fell a hundred and fifty feet? Anything like that. Just that big space. Now have you ever seen a waterfall that fell 150 feet and had just one plume fall all the way. There’s some such falls on the banks of the Columbia River — I don’t… And there’s some Yosemite that do this. They fall through all that space — just one plume of water comes all the way down.

Gee, people stand there and they wonder why they’re so enthralled. All of a sudden they’ve got anchor points and they’ve got bigness and they’ve got simplicity. And out of this they get harmony. You can practically feel their souls just sort of smooth down and go „Purrr.“

That’s one of the big traps of this universe, is it apparently has all this space, see. And having all this space why uh… anything like a sun, you know? Little suns, that’s all. Must have… you say, „It’s too tiny.“ No — you take a…

Let’s take a bucket full of 25 carat diamonds — the purest, most unflawed diamonds possible. Let’s take a bucket full of them — put them right there. No, no. Let’s take one — knock that away and take one great big velvet, black velvet cloth and set it on a table and put one light on it. And then take one one-carat diamond and put it on there. If Tiffany’s ever changed their policy they’d wreck their business. But they quite customarily put nothing in the window but one simple stone. And there it sits — one stone. People go by and they say, „Screeeee!“

And the boys who run these other… these… these uh… two-bits-for-a-collar-of-diamonds jewelry stores with those racks and racks and racks and racks and racks of things, have to actually, really to attract any real attention and get the passers-by to stop, they have to put in value, value, value, value, value in terms of lots of money so that people get to looking at a mass and it’s a curiosa. It’s not an appreciation at all. They get the appreciation, „Junk.“

And… and you get this — in the front of one of those windows you can have big diamonds rigged up, five-carats diamonds, ten-carat diamonds in rings and everything else like you see on New York, Broadway. You see those right straight up close to the window glass. And uh… there’ll be a rack of them sitting there and people’ll go along and say, „What do you know? Five thousand dollars! What do you know? Ten thousand dollars! What do you know? Twenty-five thousand dollars! Isn’t that interesting? You know, it’s funny how much that thing costs. I wish I had something like that. Well, let’s go over to the show.“ No interest level. No space, so of course it can’t be of any value.

Now uh… you could get something very tiny and enclose it in a very tiny place of very exquisite workmanship. You get sort of the idea of a theft when you do that, when you… when you see this little, tiny ivory worked castle, you see. Little tiny castle, and it’s got a little, tiny thing in that offsets. You sorta get the idea that somebody stole something, when you look at this thing. It… it… it’s… it’s… it gives you kind of that feeling. You d… you don’t get really the feeling — you get the feeling of beauty and exquisiteness a little bit, but — somebody swiped it.

Why? It’s very simple. I mean, somebody has taken and out of a space that he shouldn’t have, he’s worked in some beauty into it. You see, that’s too small a space to have that much in.

Now uh… let’s go in some other fields: What… what’s your great singer? The first criticism of a singer: „Oh, he has a parlor voice.“ How much space can he fill with sound? That’s the first requisite.

Caruso was the greatest singer of all time because he could knock out the back of any auditorium practically. Also he had force in his voice — he could crack wine glasses, hold a true note. And you say, „This is truth of note.“ No, that… the upset of that was there was — must have been enough force in that voice to crack wine glasses. He had perhaps great beauty of voice, perhaps not. But boy he was sure loud.

Want to become a great singer? The hell with shifting notes. Don’t even bother to carry a tune. If you were just to go out and practice so that you could take the biggest auditorium in the United States or the Hollywood Bowl and get to a point where you could fill that Bowl with sound without any electronic equipment, boy, they’d elect you. You’d get elected right then.

Now, it’s a funny thing: What’s the difference then between the great singer and the hog caller? Both of ‘em can fill a lot of space with sound. Well, look… look them over — look them over. There’s a different intention behind the sound. The intention is to call a hog in one case, and to be loud; and the intention in the other place is to interest people and create a desire.

Big difference. Where do you find your biggest difference then? Your biggest difference is up in the postulate intentional level. That’s… that’s the difference — up there. And then a little bit lower than that there’s an agreement that the singer is… is a singer, and an agreement that a hog caller is a hog caller. And we’ve agreed to laugh at hog collars and we’ve agreed to be very serious about singers — very simple.

That’s right. That’s about all there is to it. You go out to be a great singer, you make sure that everybody knows that you’re a great singer. You wear the trappings of a great singer, that’s all. I’ve seen some pianists sitting in dives that could tear the keys off the piano with any classical music — beautiful, just beautiful playing. But they didn’t have on a tail coat, they did not have an air, they didn’t have the style, they didn’t have all the symbols and trademarks of the great pianist.

How do you act as a great pianist? Hah-hah! We know how you act as a great pianist — you’re very impressive in the first place. You come in, you ignore the whole audience. You sit down, you sweep your coat tails out of the way in order to sit down at the seat of just one piano sitting on this huge stage, see? And you sit down, and then you wait very patiently until everybody deigns to be damn quiet. And you start in. And make sure that you have the grandness of gesture. That’s all it is.

The poor guy sitting down in the jukebox playing with his derby hat over one eye, maybe can play rings around that guy on the concert stage, but he doesn’t know one fact — one fact he doesn’t know: that he has to act big and great in order to be big and great. And if he acts big and great and with the proper mannerisms to be big and great, he’ll be big and great. Because he’s what? He’s not putting on anything but the agreement.

If he refuses to act within the frame of agreement which is assigned to bigness and greatness, or if he has some purpose in not acting in that frame of reference, he won’t be.

You can really pitch it any way you want to. You can just throw it in any direction. But if you’re going to throw it in any direction you want to, you’ll have to be able to initially feel that you can command space and energy. It’s all well and good to just fake in and know you’re faking in. It isn’t that people read your mind, it just shows up in the manner; the manner isn’t there.

Calli-Curcy never came out and looked at the audience apologetically — never. Neither did Caruso. Caruso came out and he’d look them over. „All right, you people are privileged now to hear me sing.“ He’d say, „Now you’re going to hear me sing.“ There… it wouldn’t — nobody would have stood a chance if they had decided not to hear him sing. Nobody would’ve stood a chance.

Now there’s… there’s you… there’s your difference. What is greatness? It’s simply that: What a beautiful language — „Great-ness.“ Big-space.

If a fellow fills up all the space he has, he’d better find bigger space.

Now there’s the quality of action, and that mostly has to do with consistent quality of action. He has a consistency and a control — increase and decrease — at will. It isn’t enough to sing loud. One must sing loud and fall off to a softness, and sing loud again at will. He must also be able to stop and start singing at will. He follows this… this whole cycle of action.

And at that level of big space, there is desire, and people see that as the space and they also will see it instantly as desire. There we have desire at work: Big space, certainty and if any force is there at all, the force is subordinate to the agreement that there should be force there.

You get the complete feeling at that level that a person would not need any force in order to carry out his mission.

Now what do you know? Do you know you could walk down here and take the star of a cup you could just walk down and take his badge away from him… and have him agree perfectly to do it, that you should do it. You just assume that you have the right to, not the right you have to defend. This is sort of a God-given right. You walk down and talk to him about his badge, and you’ll have it in your hand in a couple of seconds. You don’t have to use subterfuge to get it. That’s the way not to get it.

Now there are much easier ones. Do you know that… how they tell a shoplifter in a store? How they tell a criminal on the street? They don’t have his description. He looks suspicious. You know that people… people… cops arrest a criminal on… away from the scene of the crime a few minutes afterwards ordinarily because they look so suspicious. They just weren’t big enough to do what they did, because they knew they didn’t have the right to do it and that was the first requisite of criminality, is knowing one doesn’t have the right to do it. The second one knows one has the right to do it, it ceases to be a criminality and becomes a right.

And the difference between a right and the difference between a criminal act, is simply knowing one has a right to and knowing one doesn’t have a right to. In other words, knowing one has a right to, one would have to command enormous space and enormous power to know so completely that he would have the right to any item or object in an entire city.

Boy, would he have to be big. He’d have to be a hell of a lot bigger than that city — big. To the petty thief who knows he doesn’t have the right to pay a nickel to ride on the subway, and the second after he’s paid his nickel he still looks like he doesn’t have a right to ride on the subway. And, what do you know? He paid his nickel! Now that’s an interesting point, isn’t it. Fascinating.

He knows he doesn’t have the right to. He knows he doesn’t have the right to do anything. He has no space and no time, no havingness. And as such, he comes right on down scale.

Now there are some people who have the right natively to have a… a space bigger than a galaxy, easily. And who have come down in their own eyes to a point where they know they can’t have a space bigger than a planet, and they don’t have a right to any space bigger than a planet. And they go on acting apologetic about the whole deal. And you’d… you’d swear — they aren’t on… out like a petty thief, but they’re down in their own estimation to that degree. The very great on earth have had that feeling.

They’re scaled way down and they still have enough of this to spare. Well, there’s a… what’s the difference then between a petty thief and a person the size of the MEST universe? Well, your petty thief possibly could be, some day, the size of the MEST universe. But it would mainly depend upon his knowing he had the right to be.

And when you get a postulate-changing session going on with some preclear, you will be astonished. They’ll realize they don’t have the right to do this, or to do that or to do something else — because they agreed not to have the right.

And one could call the whole dwindling scale of stuff, „Agreeing not to be able to.“ That’s the saddest story ever sung: „I agree that I do not have the right to…“ And there are a lot of understoods back of that, a lot of postulates that have gone before. „I agree that I do not have the right to…“

The first day you ever said, „Well, all right. I see that other people are using these things and so forth.“ Just nonsensically you said one day, „Well, I agree. I uh… well, I agree that other people have the right to…“ Oh-oh! That’s the same thing, isn’t it? „I agree other people have the right to…“ is the „I agree I don’t have the right to have a right more than other people have a right.“ Oh boy!

„I agree that other people have a right to manage this or do that or square around something or other, and that I have no business monkeying with it.“ Oh-oh!

Everywhere you look in this confounded, upset, cock-eyed society everybody is saying, „I don’t take any responsibility for this. And that’s not my fault. And that’s not my responsibility, and I’m not responsible for that, and I’m responsible for something or other“ and they get down to a level, they don’t even vote. That he don’t… he can’t even take that responsibility for having elected the government of the United States because they recognize it’s kind of specious. They realize they have the perfect innate ability to own an area the size of the United States and to be an area the size of the Unites States, and yet here they are, they won’t even participate and vote one vote. They couldn’t take the responsibility to that degree.

Now there are two ways that they do that. The fellow who was as big as the size of the United States would never go near a polling vault or a box — never. He wouldn’t vote, he… because he’d be into an agreement with all these other people who were voting and he wouldn’t see that. But on a lower level a person won’t vote simply because they won’t take the responsibility for who is president. And that’s way down.

And everywhere you look, „I don’t have the right to do this, I don’t have the right to do that.“ There’s a screwball attorney uh… who is uh… fouling up like a fire drill — some little hick town someplace. Uh… and… and he’s busy trying to figure every way he can figure to lose some little two-bit court case — in Scientology. He’s doing this. Why, it’s the most fascinating thing you ever saw. These… these guys… these guys are so low they haven’t… they haven’t got any responsibility for any fellow human being, and they have no responsibility for themselves at all. Why? Because such a person has had it demonstrated to him very adequately by having his wife who was a cripple for many, many years made again to walk and play the piano.

Hah! He didn’t have any responsibility for her, did he? Didn’t have any responsibility for himself — couldn’t possible have done so. Why? Because it isn’t any responsibility of his that everything’s going wrong, and so forth. And this trial — he’s the only one that’s there. It’s up to him to say anything at all.

It’s very interesting, isn’t it? The guy could actually fail to recognize his beingness to the extent where he can’t even be the size of his own family on responsibility.

In other words, he couldn’t continue his support of something which has relieved him of the terrible burden of having a cripple in his family for the rest of her life. You understand, that would cost him just days and months and so on of misery on his own part.

And yet — yet that’s happened for him. And yet his level of responsibility is so low that he’s just figuring out any way he could possibly figure where Scientology could possibly go by the boards right in his own home town. Isn’t that fascinating?

His level of responsibility can’t be any size at all, then. ‘Cause he knows it works, it works for him, it works in his hands, he’s fully trained and yet he’s got to lose. Never had enough processing to put in your eye. But there… there’s… there’s a level of responsibility.

What is the essential difference between what I’m doing in res… in Scientology and other people? Is it because I’m brighter? No, no. Uh-uh. Is it because I… I… I know more? Naw. No there’s really only one thing, is I recognize that it’s… that it’s my job, I recognize anybody has this job. You see, anybody has this job. And there was this great big pair of boots and they were sitting right in the middle of this universe, and they were awfully big boots, and you could get down amongst them with… with telescopes. You could look the length and breadth of them and find absolutely nothing inhabiting ‘em.

And it says in these boots, it just simply said, „These are the boots which go down a road which leads out of this joint.“ And other people had been diving spaceships through them and playing hopscotch in them and… and so on, when they ever did see them, and so on. They were sitting right there.

They sat on the doorstep of every door that has ever been covered with crepe. They sat on the doorstep of every bank that ever reneged on a pledged agreement or refused a loan to somebody who was desperate. They sat on the doorstep of every church which itself was pretending to take vast responsibility. They fell across every single boulevard and progress that Man ever thought he could make. He could go ahead and take responsibility for destroying culture, but not for helping a single individual in it. Ho!

Fascinating! Why, those boots — well, you look at these boots, and they… they weren’t even big boots. They were little boots — little kids’ boots. Wasn’t anything to them. And what’d you do? You just threw some space out that big, that’s all. I mean, you narrowed the space down to the universe of one man and you found out he was a highly representative man, and then you took a look. The boots were very wearable.

And they’re very, very simply boots. But what do you know? These boots have a catch to them. They aren’t just one man’s boots. They were every man’s boots. And because I assayed to take a few steps in them and square them around and find out where the road was and what leather they were made out of, didn’t absolve a single individual who cared to benefit from those boots from wearing them. And that is the grimmest joke of all.

A person has to come up the scale so that he can take responsibility for himself and all of his fellows and the whole cock-eyed condemned universe before he can walk down that road out. Isn’t that fascinating?

He can’t even run his engram bank unless he says, „It’s my business and I mean to make it so.“ Isn’t that interesting? Because he’s down tone scale on inhibited, he knows all knowledge is inhibited, he knows all things are inhibited, he knows every thing he is scare, he knows death is inevitable, he knows all these things. He knows he has no space. He knows that life is an object, not an animate, glorious thing. And as long as he knows that, then he will know no more. And at that level one knows practically nothing.

The bank will sit there and some of the little incidents in it might be quite bright and it might be interesting. But boy! is it of narrow scope! It’ll be a little tiny bank.

Those great big ridges standing out there have to be handled by a big guy, if you’re going to handle them all the way. Now we have the modus operandi of how you get to be a big guy. There isn’t any gimmick factor whereby you all of a sudden discover you have to make up your mind to be self-determined.

You could take a preclear by the nape of his neck and hold him up there and bang his head against the wall with these techniques until he is cleared — if you start him on the line, you never have to explain a thing to him. He’ll finally wind up, but he’ll never walk out of this universe with your help. He never will.

He’ll only walk out of this universe if you permit him to recover enough force so that he can have responsibility for what’s going on.

There isn’t any hidden gimmick; there isn’t anything else he has to think; there isn’t anything he has to believe in, really, to amount to anything to go this way. And you can boot him up this line quite artificially, but what you’re really doing is taking him and putting these boots on him. He has to be fitted with these boots and these boots are called Responsibility.

The ability to handle force and take the responsibility for the use of it, the ability to create and handle space of any dimension and take the responsibility for handling it.

He’ll find himself going up the line automatically. There isn’t any funny little gimmick on the thing. It’s just a grim joke you’re playing on him. He thinks he’s been diving and ducking and jumping into the weeds and hiding under the house and so on. And he says, „Well, this is just another way to hide under the house“ — you’ve got him by one ankle; you start pulling him out.

And what do you know? He has to stand eventually. Not by any determinism of his own, really, if you really wanna make it that way. He’ll be standing out in the bright sunlight fully visible before he goes anyplace. He’s gotta be able to take responsibility for all enforcement, and all desire way up the line, and all space before he’ll walk any place.

So we’ve got that scale going back and forth, and up and down and we find out that there is a bigness which has to grow in the person. And if you don’t see that bigness growing, he’s not on his way out.

And the difference between the preclear that has to be chained down to have the boots put on him and me is, is I never wanted to be a slave and I never had to be. That’s all. I never agreed.

It was very interesting — somebody was talking about science fiction the other day, I wondered how much of all this was science fiction.

Well, there’s science fiction and science fiction. Some science fiction’s bad, some science fiction’s good. Unfortunately, for your sakes, this isn’t fiction. I wish it were. If it were just a pleasant afternoon, we could all go on being slaves.

But unfortunately — unfortunately it doesn’t happen to be fiction. Like the professor — I mean, the chair of physics up there said, „The diabolical accuracy of these predictions will be borne out by the most exacting research and investigation.“ Well, they’re diabolical because they take slaves away from those who would have slaves. And they set man free. And they’ll even set men free who don’t want to be free at all. And I think that is the most… grimmest jest.

And when it comes to… when it comes to any of these techniques, any of these techniques, they… they add up all the way up — something I talked to you about before, time and time again — uh… freedom. Freedom.

And that freedom is lots of space and ability to use it. That’s freedom — that’s all. That’s all freedom is. It’s… it’s exactly what it says it is. It is the most idiotically literal thing imaginable — freedom. Lots of space and the ability to use it.

And then complete freedom is above the level of not needing space. And not even having to agree. That’s… that is above the level of freedom. That is cause itself. And you never saw cause itself ever being worried.

It… Prime Cause has nothing which could enslave it, except itself. Just like there’s really nobody ever going to really pick up this preclear and carry him out of this universe. Nobody’s ever going to do that. He can put boots on; he’ll still have that last mile he has to walk himself.

And that means that he’ll have to take responsibility for what he does and his force. And not only that, for everything that goes on around him.

And we look at the thing that does happen, we look at these people, we look at somebody — gee. He… all he’s got to do is walk into a court and put on the proper defense which has been outlined for him. But he says, „No“ — he can’t do that. He can’t do that. „That’s not possible because all is lost. We all know all is lost.“ He hasn’t taken responsibility for his own profession or his own pride in himself or anything.

What are we looking at? Carrion? That’s how low one can get and that is actually a degradation of sorts which goes below the level of being degraded; because a person who knows he is degraded isn’t very badly. It’s a person who’s terribly degraded and isn’t even vaguely aware of it that’s dead. And you can look around and see these people on every side. And they’re going through and they say, „Nobody has any right to give me any responsibility. I have no responsibility for anything. I… I take responsibility — I’m to blame.“ — something like that. „I’m responsible. This isn’t any job of mine.“

They’re going around like that. If you said to him, „Do you feel degraded?“ They’d say, „No no-no. Just now married to Marxism.“ The hell they are. They’re lower than the dogs, because they’re gone and they don’t even know they’re gone. And that’s the horrible part of being gone.

When one is all the way gone, he ceases to know anything at all. And he doesn’t even know he’s dead.

Now on this level, there you see that dwindling spiral adding up, adding up. And it’s the track of agreement all the way down the line. And the agreement leads from Desire to Enforcement to Inhibition in each case. And that requires force and space and as you go down that spiral, you’ll find out there’s less and less space, and less and less space and finally a solid object.

Let’s not have that solid object you.

Let’s take a break.