How are you today?

Thank you.

Well, today being the second day of this congress, seems to me like we'd better get down to business and stop this fooling around, this talking about religion and junk and stuff, and getting down to — well, at least solid gold tacks.

Now, the essence of the situation is that a great many years ago, a caveman named Ugh decided he could do something for a caveman named Oogh. And at that time there were no laws preventing Ugh from doing anything to Oogh, and he fooled around and he said, "Be three feet back of your head." And after that the technology was lost and we've just rediscovered it.

No, all fooling aside, there is a great deal to be known about processing as it exists today, and a great deal of differentiation should be made by us who are doing processing to understand rather clearly that we are not trying to find something wrong with somebody so we can make it right.

Do you know what would happen if you started to make something wrong — tried to find something wrong with somebody and then made it right? Well, I invite you to look over the axioms of life as contained in The Creation of Human Ability. That which you change persists. Now, let's look at that very clearly. That which you change persists. The only way you get a persistence, the only way you get time, is by changing MEST. By changing matter, energy and space, you get time. And if there's no change, there's no time, and it's as simple as that. So that if you try to change in any degree matter, energy, space and — you get time, you get persistence. What is time but persistence? So that which you change, if it be made of space or of energy or matter, will persist. You should see that very clearly.

We take a car and we move it around in space — and I call to your attention something that every motorist has noted and no motorist had quite understood: that when he failed to drive his car it went to pieces. Have you ever noticed that? You park it in the garage, that's that; the battery goes down, the tires go flat. Maybe it was up on blocks, maybe the battery was taken over to the service station and put on continuous charge and all of this was done. That's some small prevention of the situation. But then — then three months later you put the battery back in, you take it down off the blocks and you "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," "rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr," and oil smoke goes out the rear end, won't steer. That's an oddity. The only reason it stayed there at all is because Earth is going around and it was being changed in space, at least to some degree. If it were not being changed in space at all, it would not be there; it would cease to persist. Now this is a great oddity — a great oddity. I don't call upon your superstition in this regard, I merely call upon you to observe in its crude form something else.

All right. Let's take a chronic somatic, what we know as a chronic somatic: a pain which persists. And we take this preclear with this nice pain and we say, "Move it to the right, move it to the left, move it up, move it down, move it to the right, move it to the left." Now if it weren't for the fact that life was present, that pain would go on to the end of time — if it weren't for the fact that life was present. Another factor alone occasionally lets you get away with it, and that is the factor of pan-determinism: You're exerting control over something, so you change your mind about its dangerousness. And although you might not feel the pain anymore, believe me, it still exists.

You could take a preclear who has had a chronic somatic treated as it is treated in the healing sciences, so-called — as this chronic somatic is treated in the healing sciences — and we know very well that little Roscoe had a bad set of tonsils. We know this. He had a very poor set of tonsils. And so they held him down, you know, kindly, and put the ether mask on his face kindly and when he tried to struggle, why, they kindly shoved his hrrm-rm-hrrm-rm-hm-rm, and they got some water and they scrubbed around like this, and worked him over this way and that, packed him off, changed his position after the operation while he was still asleep and put him in a hospital room right down the corridor. Well this, of course, cured the tonsils. See, he's cured of tonsils — that's a great certainty. Everybody would agree he no longer has tonsils, is this right?

Well then, how in the name of common sense can a Dianetic Auditor take this person back down the time track into the past and find tonsils and pain in an operation? How does this exist? How can this be? And yet it's done, and many, many of those present have done this. So we have this fellow going through life — (wheezing noises) he can't talk very well, you know, he has sore throats all the time, and we wonder what's wrong with him. What's wrong with him is his tonsils, but they're not there anymore! But that's what's wrong with him: the fact that his tonsils were changed. So the second we operated, we got ourselves a persistence of the condition.

They take somebody — I'm talking now about the healing sciences — they take somebody with arthritis. They shoot them full of gold shots and they massage them and they shake them in a bag — I don't know what they do to them — and they work him over one way or the other. And these people curl up a little more and a little more and a little more. Occasionally some terrific thing occurs and they get well — you know, bang! sort of, get well. Well, this bang-get-well idea is something that has haunted the healing sciences for many, many centuries. They felt that there must be a button — there just must be a button — if people suddenly would recover from things. It never occurred to them that they might be, all of a sudden, confronting another being who wasn't sick. Think of that for a moment. The sudden recovery might very well be another being who wasn't sick, because all a life form would have to do, or a life unit would have to do, rather, would be to change its mind about who it was and just abandon all connection with and responsibility for anything and everything it had been, which would come down toward amnesia and so forth, and say, "Well, I'm not that person anymore; I am somebody else."

We see this in religion. We see somebody walk up to the front of the room to Aimee Semple McPherson or some other great spiritual leader, and we see this person walk up to the front of the room and all of a sudden he said, "Wow! I'm saved!" And Aimee or somebody says, "Roll again," and … (audience laughter) What exactly has happened? Well, we've had a remarkable communication change but we've also had an identity change. We've had an identity change on the part of the person.

Now, you could say, "I am not (my name)" — see, "I am not (your name)" — "I'm somebody else," and if you were very good at this, you could actually make it stick. You know? You could say, "I am no longer Oswald. My name is Joe and I live in Keokuk." What would happen to the chronic somatic? Well, if he did it to change the chronic somatic, he'd still have it. That's the most fascinating thing.

Now, we're not talking — we're talking about a chronic somatic; we're not talking about a psychosomatic illness. We've too long confused these things. A chronic somatic is simply a sensation; sex could be called a chronic somatic. The point is that to have a sensation is not necessarily to be ill. You know, a lot of people believe that's the case, you know — if they have a sensation they're sick: "Something must be wrong with me, I have some feeling in my nose!" And we say these sensations are good and we say they're bad.

I processed a little girl one time, and she — about halfway through the session (we weren't processing what she was worried about, we were just getting her located and so forth) — and she all of a sudden looked at me and she said, "Wow!"

And I said, "What's the matter?"

And she said, "Do you know, I've had a headache."

"Oh?" I says.

"Yes," she said, "I've had a headache for years, only I didn't know what a headache was, and all of a sudden I haven't got a headache!" She sat there thinking about this. She said, "How am I going to get my headache back?"

Now, Lord knows — Lord knows what a headache was to her. I don't know. Maybe it was a delightful sensation! Who knows?

We found in reviewing, in the healing sciences, the work of Freud — we discovered something very fascinating: that he had people all categorized, and there have been lots of them ever since. And he had them all lined up and the masochist was the interesting one — he evidently enjoyed pain; he enjoyed being beaten and so forth. Freud describes him. Personally I've never met anyone who was a masochist, but I've met a lot of people who hoped they were. (audience laughter) And we have to ask of this: What is the degree of pain? What is this degree of pain? What do they call pain? It's an interesting thing. A fellow comes in and he says, "Oooh, my hip's killing me!" What is it? A little quiver or an agonizing ache? Now, every individual has his tolerance of pain but we are all too prone to assume that pain is a finite quantity which is measurable.

Now, we meet somebody else and he is screaming, he is writhing, he is getting down on the floor and chewing the rug because he tapped his finger lightly with a nail file. Now, you've known people that just superexaggerate any sensation.

Now, we commonly think of — again, referring to the work of Freud — we commonly think of sex, and we popularly think of it and so on, as a pleasant series of sensations. I mean, this is more or less definition: supposed to be something desirable and attainable. Maybe this sensation called sex, to a great many people, is intensely painful. And they know it's intensely painful to them and at the same time they are assuming, because everybody else knows that it's pleasurable, that it ought to be pleasant, you see. And they would get into a rather dreadful state of mind about this situation because it would mean they were different than other people, or there was something changed or altered about life — and the funny part of it is, maybe we're all under the same delusion! See? Maybe there's just a popular belief sitting out here that has nothing to do with any of us that says sex is pleasurable, and maybe it hurts everybody. You see how quickly we can go adrift when we start to classify this situation.

Now I am fascinated with the fact that one man's experience, described, is apparently understood by another man. This is the most fabulous thing that you could possibly view. Here you have an individual, a personality, and he himself does not have inherently (except as he would make it with postulates) time or space or energy or mass. He apparently has no slightest logical method of creating those things in such a way as to go into communication with some other such unit. And these two people talk gaily together and one of them says, "I have a terrible pain." And the other one of them says, "Oh, I've had an illness similar to that." If you listen to human beings, they talk this way. They go into a hotel — the hospital room, you know, they walk into this hospital room and there's this fellow lying there and he's in a beautiful state of somnolence — he's practically in an hypnotic trance, you see. And they say, "My brother had an illness just like yours. He went on just like you are going and they told him he was getting better and he was getting better, but he died." Have you ever been in a hospital and had visitors? Well, anyway — always happens. It's quite remarkable.

Now, nobody would do that if he never got a kickback of what he was doing to other people. Would he? That's an interesting fact. People wouldn't go around butchering people with words or swords if there was any slightest recoil, if it could happen to them, now would they? They wouldn't do that. So obviously nothing can happen to a person as a result of having made an effect out of another person. Isn't this obvious?

Well, this is a great oddity. That must be an agreement, too. The recoil itself must be an agreement. "One of the best ways I know," somebody says, "to protect myself from damage is to enforce the agreement upon those who would attack me that they will suffer in some mystic and mysterious way because of their activities agin me." Now, that's an interesting agreement, isn't it? But what a wonderful protective mechanism! Or is it mechanically a fact? These are mysteries. These are mysteries very germane to the field of religion. Is it a mechanical fact that if you go out and cut off Gertrude's head, you'll at least have a pain in your throat? Is that a mechanical fact?

Well, if you're going to be in communication with anybody anywhere, it happens to be a mechanical fact. But basically it was probably an idea of a wonderful way to restrain. But it has gone so much further than just a wonderful way to restrain that you could absolutely count on the fact, going down here to a taxi driver and start in convincing this hard-boiled fellow that he had harmed you, and he would go into apathy. You actually could do this, if you worked on it long enough.

One of the interesting things to do to a human being as a little test of this — an interesting test, too (how solid can an agreement be, is what I'm talking about) — is we take a dog. A dog doesn't think, he just reacts, according to one of the sciences called — hah! — psychology. And I had a dog once that could think — he had me figured out. Anyway, we take this dog, and it's a very funny thing, but these mechanisms are so exact that we can make this dog go into propitiation by screaming and running away from him. Now, the dog comes up and he nibbles at the cuff of your trousers or your wrist or something like that and you say, "Ow! Stop! Don't!" You know? He didn't hurt you at all, and you say, "Don't! Don't! Get away!" and you turn around and you start to run away and so forth. And the dog will get real brave — oh! And if he's in pretty good shape he'll just get awfully brave, and then all of a sudden he'll say, "You know, maybe I hurt him." And he'll come over and he'll lick your wrist — he'll look at you real worried.

This is the foulest trick you can play on a little kid. The cycle of action of a little kid in this regard is quite interesting. A little kid, swatting away at you, you know — normal childhood reaction — pasting you around one way or the other; you all of a sudden say, "Ow! That hurt! Don't! Stop that now, that hurt!" Kid look at you, probably come over and look at you, kiss the spot to make it well — kid's worried. You've zinged him down Tone Scale to a propitiation and concern over having injured another. Only there was no pain involved. Now do you see where we're going? You can do this. You can do this to anyone. And there's no pain involved.

I wonder if there's any pain involved anywhere? Well, there isn't, unless you have to convince somebody. Now let's take this mechanism — let's look this mechanism over very carefully and let's have this little kid — this is a tough little mug; he comes from Park Avenue. (audience laughter) And this very tough little mug, he comes over and he says, "Nyarrrh, you big sis," and so forth, and he hauls off and swats you one. And you say, "Ow! Don't do that! Hey you, you hurt. Don't, now!" And he says, "Ha-ha!" you know, and bang! bang! hits you some more. By the way, when they're pretty stuck and pretty aberrated, they'll keep on a persistence along this line and they'll hit you around and so forth, and you know what you'd have to do? You'd probably have to turn on a bleeding wrist to show him — say, "Look, see what you did." And the kid would say, "Gee! I really didn't mean to ruin you." See, now he's convinced.

The problem is, what degree of energy or mass is necessary to convince? How much pain does it take to convince somebody else that you have been hurt? How much pain would you have to turn on to convince some son of the devil? How many swellings and malformations would you have to turn on to convince this person that he ought to go down Tone Scale to be nice? Are we talking about the same mechanism?

All right, here is one of the interesting things. We have this person fighting and he's got a spear, and he lunges and we say, "Ow! Hey! That's dangerous! Don't!" and so forth. And he draws back — because he's being paid to do it by some government — he lunges again with this spear. Well, if we just let him come in close and nick us, he's liable to stop. But if that doesn't work, then the next — you see, there's no reason why we should be inaccurate at all, no reason why we shouldn't just get run through in the first place; we can be accurate that way as well as be accurate in stabbing people. All right. And the next time that he lunges, well, we have to get bunged up a little bit more. And finally when we're lying there in a mass and welter of blood and battered armor, this fellow says, "Ha-ha! Poor fellow. Well, he was a worthy fighter," and walks away. What did it take? It took almost a complete destruction of the mock-up to convince this other person that he has harmed or done wrong, and that is death.

So after a person has lived through a number of incidents of one kind or another, he comes at last to the realization that the only way he could really convince others that they had better regard him a little better — since he cannot seem to enjoin it with the sword in his own hand, he puts the sword in theirs and dies, then you have this wonderful mechanism called death. And that's how to really get even with somebody.

Ask some little five-year-old kid sometime, "Did you ever wish you were dead? Did you ever wish you were dead?"

"Did I ever wish I was dead, are you crazy? Of course I've wished I was dead. That'd make them sorry!"

Get some seven- or eight-year-old little girl sometime — and it'd be absolutely impossible, I'm sure, to find one who was in fairly good condition anywhere who would not be able to list you a dozen such incidents. There she would be lying in a coffin, flowers — that'd fix them! That'd convince them they should have been nicer to her! They all should have been nicer to her, or to him.

You could take some little kid and you can ask him to repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me." Just that, see — just ask him to repeat this over and over with no former description or comment of any kind — and what are you going to get? He'll start to cry. Just like that. He's already gotten himself two feet deep into the grave, just by repeating this thing: "They should have been nicer to me."

Now let's say that we're going to address fatally — that we were going to address a chronic somatic: some persistent ache, pain or sensation or malformation or condition, or condition of living. We were going to address any one of these — chronic condition — and we would find that if we had the person repeat over and over, "They should have been nicer to me," this condition will turn on more and more and more. If we're merely treating the fact that he can't earn a living or something of the sort, he'll get worse at it. You know, he'll get even poorer. If we're trying to get him over a broken leg or something of the sort, why, it will start hurting and he will develop complications. This we are sure of.

This is the spirit affecting the body, and the thetan running the anatomy and the machine. It's proof, conviction, convincingness. And when they fail with ideas, they make the ideas solid, and we have mass.

What's mass? Mass is an idea that has failed. And it has been changed many times, and heavens, is it persisting! And if you want it to persist some more, roll it around some more.

Now there's really two levels on the Tone Scale. Above 2.0 is survival. Below 2.0 is succumb. In other words, above this artificial, arbitrary figure of 2.0, we have the goal of an individual is to survive. See, that's survival is there. But below that level — and please grasp this fact, please, because it makes things so much easier for the auditor — below that level, the goal is to succumb. Now, we have a percentile of goal. In other words, somebody wants to 70 percent succumb and 30 percent survive, and so we get a very conflicting state of mind, as we could call it colloquially — state of mind. (I don't know what a state of mind would be. Call it an arrangement of ideas, and you would come much closer.) All right. So this person wants to succumb some percentage and survive another percentage.

Now we go down Tone Scale and we find out this person wants to succumb 90 percent and wants to survive 10 percent. Well, there's not much conflict there. One of the first things this fellow will think of, in terms of himself, is how he could kill himself — if he could think about himself at that level. If he thought about you, he would think kind of how he could kill you, and we get the criminal bands; quite interesting manifestation. Once a person has failed to convince the society around him of his worth, he is liable to take the course, the downward spiral, into levels of succumb which require murder or death as the only sufficient proof — criminality. He cannot have, he has to steal. It's covert havingness; stealing is just covert havingness. And he has to butcher, make nothing of, chew up, slap around anyone in his vicinity. He can't afford to be nice to them. Why can't he? Well, he knows the best thing for everybody: that's succumb.

It's just as you run on an individual some process of duplication, and have him then run this process on some body part, like an ear. You know? "Get the idea, now, of the goals of your ear." You know? "What are the goals of this ear?" you know, and you go on. The first thing you run into is — one of the first things you run into is: "Gee, let's everybody be ears!" That's what this ear thinks, you know: "Everybody's got to be an ear!" Big toe thinks, "Everybody should be a big toe." And this person thinks, "Everybody should be dead." And we get that wonderful philosophy, that glorious ornament to the thinkingness of the human race, Will and the Idea, by a guy named Schopenhauer who conceived out of the greatness of his Germanic wisdom and out of the deduction of reduction to absurdity, that the best possible thing for the human race would be for everybody and everything to quit and stop it in its tracks and that would be the end of that! And that's the best thing to do!

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

But that's still higher toned than a Hitler who says, "Now, let's see, the best way for Germans to live is to kill everybody." Because the universe is so set together that an individual who goes out to kill everybody, dies himself. There is a retribution. There is a rapid and exact retribution for one's acts.

If a person thinks he can be happy without making those around him happy, he's crazy. Now, I beg your pardon, that's a technical term which belongs in the field of psychiatry. It is the total and sole proprietary matter of psychiatry. But this fellow is crazy anyhow.

Now, here is a great oddity, then: that there is an interaction from human being to human being, and this interaction follows an agreed-upon pattern for there to be sustained any communication at all. If we are going to sustain any communication or concourse with our fellows, then we become liable to all of the laws, rules and offshoots of communication. And if we do not feel ourselves strong enough, wise enough, competent or able enough to support these liabilities, then we have no business whatsoever living with the human race, but should find ourselves a nice little cave someplace back of the Atlas or somewhere and sit down and live on goat milk.

Now, an individual could not help but come to that conclusion that hecould not sustain communication — he could not help but conclude that it would be impossible for him to go on communicating with all these people — if he himself believed that everybody, or at least a lot of bodies, should die.Now, you follow this? The individual who has to go and find himself a cage or a cave would be somebody who had already come to the conclusion that everybody else must die. Why? Because talking to people gives him a kind of dyingness, which tells you immediately what the intent of his communications must be. If by talking to people, he himself experiences dyingness, he must then intend no good for his fellows; but quite on the contrary, if turned loose and let go just a little bit, he'll get that sword nice and sharp and get to work.

It's that individual, and the restraint of that individual, which brings about the condition known as police — who, in a rational, sane society, are about as useful as bubonic plague. And yet we're taught that if there weren't police in the society, everybody'd get murdered. Well now, this is a great deal of confidence in our fellow man, isn't it? Whose conclusion is it? It must be the conclusion of a person whose intent and goal is to murder everybody — to show them. So therefore, the idea of restraint, the idea of restriction, barrier and breaking off, must perforce spring from people who had better be barriered.

The feeling that one is being mauled around by the society is not an unnatural feeling. It is when that feeling amounts to the conclusion that in order to survive, one has no other course but to maul around everyone, that one becomes lost to himself and to all others and had better go find that cave.

Here are the liabilities of communication. All by himself with no space, no energy, no matter, the individual theoretically could survive in a timeless state which would persist forever. It's a paradox, isn't it? Theoretically, he could do this. Theoretically, one could be in a condition which desired no communication, which wanted no concourse, which needed none, and which wouldn't even know about any. Theoretically, that condition can exist.

But if there is communication, we have to have, first and foremost, two terminals. Even when a fellow is talking to himself, he still has to say part of himself is somebody else. So we're talking about a two-terminal condition. And the moment we have a two-terminal condition and communication, we have a universe in construction. And if that universe sweeps along in its construction to where communication seems to be unbearably painful to the majority of its inhabitants, somebody'd better as-is it.

Here we have a condition here of the only panacea — the only real panacea in mechanical terms — for space and energy, matter and time: communication. It is the sole curative element which can dependably change, alter and eradicate, without penalty, space, energy and matter.

What happens to a person who shuns it? What quality of black glass does his bank become? What happens to an individual who says — having already assumed communication and having gone into communication — now says, "Communication, that makes me feel bad. I don't like that. It's too painful to talk; it's too horrible to contemplate. I've got to draw barriers here and secretaries there and cut telephone wires over here and tom-up mail over in this corner." He's on his way. Where? Well, one thing — he's on his way to believing that everybody is going to be after him and at the same time, to the conclusion that he had better be after everybody. In other words, a Wall Street man.

Now, this condition is not particularly perilous. But we go four or five harmonics down this Tone Scale, we get into a condition which is very interesting indeed. We get to your political fascist, your criminal, the insane, the psychiatrist. We get to people who have to use mass in a violent way in order to convince any-body of anything.

The Chinese know this very well. I, once upon a time, heard a little story about the Chinese. There were two coolies, two rickshaw boys, and they had drawn up in the street and they'd dropped their rickshaws and they were going "Nee-chongy-tonky-alamonpinyon," and — at each other and screaming back and forth. And an American was standing there with a Chinese friend and he watched this conversation going on and on — on. He finally turned around to his Chinese friend and he says, "Hey," he says, "what's the matter with those guys? Why don't they fight?"

"Oh," his Chinese friend says, "the fellow who strikes first blow confess he run out of ideas!"

So we have this interesting thing. We have an interesting thing here: We have the idea as sufficient unto itself, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with some space and some energy and some mass, and then we have the idea which has to be backed up with lots of energy and lots of space and lots of mass, and then we have the idea which is so perilously and tenuously held that it has to be backed up by the consideration that space, energy and mass is bad and you're going to get it!

When somebody tries to tell you how bad it is over there and how you're all going to be cut up and you're going to be sliced up and it's going to be horrible things happening to you and you're going to go to jail for 126 years and the jails are terrible and so on and when they start on along this line, this fellow's just confessed to you he's run out of ideas. Certainly effective ones — certainly effective ones.

Now, people get into this state of being quite easily. They believe that the space and the energy and the mass is the important driving force, and that there is no more important driving force in this world than space and energy and mass. And they believe these are — things are just fabulous. And they believe, at the same time, that the greatest healer is time.

Time is not the great healer; it is the great charlatan. Because time, mass, energy and space do not exist independent of the postulates of life. We're merely looking at another set of postulates represented with the urgency of conviction.

So we have a problem here when we're looking at a human being. We have a problem. This human being has gotten into the interesting state of believing that he could convince nobody of his presence unless he hands up a body. The only way that can convince somebody you're there is to give them a body. Now, isn't that interesting? Think of it for a moment. It'll start to appear rather ridiculous to you. The only way you could convince anybody you were there, or that you were anybody, would be to present them with a body. We show them a body; that convinces them. It stands in space, it moves with energy, and it is mass — and they know you're there.

If some of you are having a hard time trying to figure out how the devil they would know you were there unless you did present a body, be aware of this interesting thing: You must be trying to keep from being located.

Think it over for a moment. If you think the only way you could make anybody else aware of your presence would be to present a body, then you're presenting some kind of a substitute over here and you're saying, "Hey," you know, "tsk, tsk, tsk. That's me. Ha-ha!" Big joke! Everybody says, "How are you, Mr. Jones?" you know, and so forth. And if Jones is up here not making himself known, he still must have the conviction that he mustn't be located; that something will happen to him if he's located.

And there we get the top peak of aberration, and that is the highest level of aberration: "There is something rather detrimental to being located. There is something slightly wrong with being located."

"There's something slightly wrong with locating things" is your black V case. Not only slightly wrong: "I sure better locate nothing. I'd better not locate a thing. If I do any looking, I'm liable to see something, and if I see something, woooo!" But the funny part of it is, is there's no argument or reason at all that goes behind the woooo! but just that — woooo!

Now, you might accept this idea that fear of being located or dislike of being located or even tremendous desire to be located, such as your exhibitionist (and we've had lots of those since Freud invented them); these factors must contain in them a certain amount of truth if their use on the spirit of man and with his cooperation produces marked changes in his behavior, in his intelligence, in his ability, in his perception and his willingness to be perceived. And if we use these factors and produce marked changes in the ideas, personalities of people, and we better them and make them freer, then I feel that we must be talking somewhere close to truth. It is not necessarily true that we are speaking the truth; we are merely speaking the workability.

Truth is a very interesting thing, since the only way we get any persistence of any kind or any form or any energy or any mass is by changing it. Only if we alter truth do we get persistence. This is fabulous, but very true.

That means some pessimist is going to come along and he's going to think to himself now — he's going to think to himself, "You mean that everything at which I look has a lie in it?" Well, if you want to state it crudely, yes. If a lie can be defined as an alteration of truth, or a departure from the truest true you know, then that's perfectly true. The floor is there because it's a damned lie.

But one can easily accustom himself to these lies. It's only when the individual becomes hectic and very upset about lies that stuff that is composed of lies goes out of his control.

Nor does this give anyone like Hitler a license to deal only in lies. If he deals only in lies, he'll as-is everything, too. He will bring about a condition of such persistency of lies that he won't have any truth left. You must always have a certain amount of truth left; because it is the alteration of truth which gives us persistence, which gives us survival. We must alter or repostulate truth. And if you alter lies and continue to alter lies, you get something else entirely different because you haven't got the first postulate to be followed by the second. Some truth must always be present, and it is only when no truth is left that we get the bad end of nothing.

Therefore, the lessons which we learn in processing today in Scientology are very, very interesting lessons. They bridge upon and across some of the greatest philosophic conundrums that have ever been advanced by man. What is justice? What is right? What is wrong? What is good behavior? What is bad behavior? There's many a person going around, the only thing that's wrong with them at all, that they conceive to be wrong with them, is that they can't quite figure out how it all ought to be. They see badness and viciousness and villainy on every side succeeding. They see this consistently. They see injustice, bought courts, they see perjury and false witnesses being rewarded on every hand. And something in them says that the only thing upon which this whole universe and all of us within it can possibly depend is truth. And truth, somehow, is decency and goodness and charity and mercy and kindness. They see this, and yet all they see rewarded is viciousness. And they get this sort of a conundrum in their heads and they just say, "Vr-rr-rr-rr-rr! I don't like it!"

The only thing that's wrong with them is, is they have lost so much of their own basic truth that they are no longer able to combat an untruth. And the only thing you have to do with them is let them recover some of their basic truth; let them see that there is a reward for decency and kindness and justice and mercy and charity; let them see that these things are basic; let them see that communication is not bad, it's good; let them see that decency, honor are extant.

How would you let them see this? Processing. Almost any processing leads in this direction today.

An individual who has had all of his truth perverted has nothing left.

Because the only actuality there is, must begin with a certain amount of truth. And then for the actuality to persist, it must be altered. And when we alter the alteration, and then alter that alteration, we begin to walk through a cobweb of lies which is liable to trap anyone — and has even trapped some of the best thinking minds of the last several thousand years. If you don't believe this, read some of the books of the philosophers. Read Plato's dissertation on man. If you've ever read a mad-dog piece of writing, that's one. He had departed far enough from the truth, even Plato, so that he had conceived that man himself was a pretty evil rat.

Now, processing today depends less upon the alteration of the moral nature of the individual than upon the rehabilitation in the individual of his ability to recognize and to be truth.

Well, what is truth?

If you want to know what truth is for this universe, it's the definition of a static, and, I am afraid, a fairly close path of the fifty-one Axioms in The Creation of Human Ability. They work, because they bring an individual closer to truth and much further away from disaster and lies than anything else has brought him. So there must be an interweave of truth in these Axioms, because in their use, one recovers truth.

What is the basic truth?

The basic truth is that an individual can survive without any communication with his fellows. He can. He can persist one way or the other by his own postulates. He can. And he won't have any games — not a one. He won't have any fun — none. But maybe that's all right, too. And that every individual has within himself free choice to go where he wills, do what he would, think what he wants.

It's by the interruption of that free choice by himself and by his agreements that we get solidifies, barriers. And these barriers only become onerous and very bad to have around when the individual has more barriers than he has truth.

And therefore we say to the preclear who can't exteriorize well that we've got to give him some more processing. Why? We've got to change his level of truth, which is to say, we've got to give less stress to these barriers and more stress to the individual. Therefore, when we process a chronic somatic, when we process a body, when we process space, energy and mass, we're changing barriers, and they only persist by being changed. Which leaves us one whole sphere to process, which is much more important than the sphere of barriers, and that whole sphere is the processing of truth itself, which — in you and which is you, a thetan.

And a thetan, thereby and therefore, can be processed infinitely without bringing about a persistence of bad conditions. He can be processed without any liabilities. His problems can be addressed and changed without liability, and the only liability there could possibly be in auditing would be to address barriers, because we would make barriers persist. So therefore, we no longer process barriers of any kind. All we do, perhaps, is to get the individual habituated to the idea that there might possibly be some barriers somewhere, and that he could recognize this fact without dying. And when we've done that, we can go on and process the individual.

Therefore, we are not in the healing sciences — because there is absolutely nothing wrong of any kind whatsoever with that which we treat, which is the thetan, the spirit of man.

Thank you.