The plot began to thicken some time ago, namely in July of 1950, when I ran once too often off the conception end of the time track into former lives. This is very reprehensible.

Here for the first time we had accurate tools with which to move somebody around on the time track when he was wide awake and alert, and moving him around on the time track very often resulted in an arrival in a past death. This is something that shouldn't happen. I mean, people live only once - everybody knows that. Of course, remember now, there's no proof, no proof that you only live once. But everybody knows that you only live once - one of those "everybody knows" things.

Now, I tried at that time to do some research in this line. And do you know, it was as though I had murdered somebody or as though I were contemplating, when I said I was going to do this research, the looting of Fort Knox or something - very criminal. Or as though I were about to commit mayhem on some fragile little child or something. This I mustn't do!

Well, Dianetics didn't get there by not doing, by refusing to do what one thought he could do. So the next thing you know, I ran a few preclears this way and that on the time track and found the three lines. There was evidently a genetic line, and he could go down a genetic line if you wanted him to, or he could go down a theta line - theta body. Fascinating. You could send him down a theta-body line. Or you could send him back into corpses from which he'd already expired - a little bit of recall being on those corpses. Oh, it was wonderful - age flashes and so on.

The odd part of it was that very occluded cases that hitherto hadn't responded well at all suddenly began opening up and feeling better after they'd run these things.

But of course "everybody knew" that you only lived once, and the battle royal which ensued on past deaths actually barred any research on them for about six months; merely because every preclear that I asked to run one was promptly and imnlediately invalidated. And it made them ill to be invalidated.

I didn't know why it would make a person so ill, You could invalidate an engram - that didn't make him very ill. But if you invalidated a past death, ohhhh!

But the amount of recovery in terms of Tone Scale, when you'd run them through these things, more than justified a very wide research on them. Nevertheless, I still left it alone, to some degree, until I figured out a way of proving it.

There were three ways of proving it. The laws of delusion had to be studied. What are the laws of delusion and hallucination! Well, I won't go into them but they're very specific. And the law of a true incident is very specific. A true incident behaves in such and such a fashion, and an illusion or a hallucination behaves in such and such a fashion. Therefore, how did past lives behave! Well, they behaved as incidents - not as hallucinations. Very interesting.

Then I began to wonder why it was that the main ones I found were deaths by violence. Well, that, as soon as I knew about effort and countereffort, was very easy to resolve. Of course a death by violence would seize upon a person more avidly than a mild, quiet family standing around, two candles at the head, two candles at the foot, everybody weeping for poor old Joe or something. Because the counter-effort would be so severe in a death by violence and the intention and the protest of the individual about going through it and dying would be such as to give him a facsimile where he could latch himself up. Very interesting.

Well, as soon as we got Effort Processing, it became impossible to keep people out of these thinga It was no longer a question of selection. The auditor who got an effort within an effort within an effort… For instance, you ask some auditor [preclear], "Run the effort it takes you not to see," and he'd get some sort of a somatic or an effort and he'd turn this on, a past death or something. Well, all you had to do was just go out and pick uy, anybody and stun them with this.

A little high-school girl I ran a few weeks ago (I ran her back along the track), "Go back to an earlier-life incident and find the incident in all early lives which is realest to you - most real to you in all early lives. Let's find that incident," She looked at me; she'd never heard of this. And here she is in pantaloons, listening to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. So she quotes it to me verbatim, comments upon his voice - which was high and squeaky - and got the whole sequence and so forth. And I brought her up the track again after running it a few times. She just couldn't figure this out. "What is that! Could I have lived before!"

She went home, of course, and told her mother, and her mother said, "Well, I don't think any of us know about that," and it closed her off. Next time she came I processed her for almost two hours before I realized that there must have been an invalidation there, flipped that off and accomplished the remainder of the processing in about half an hour.

Why was it that the invalidation of a past death produced such a terrific sag in tone? Well, that's very simple. Immortality, survival, is the answer. If a person runs a past death or a past life which he is certain and incontrovertibly knows is completely real and that it happened, he all of a sudden is holding in his two hands a proof of his own immortality, and it consequently reduces the fear of death very markedly.

What is the fear of death derived from? The fear of death is not derived from pain, but only from the "fact" that you only live once, that you are finite and that the future is very uncertain. But when a person runs a past life that he knows is real, he all of a sudden realizes it goes out for a long time into the future too, and it goes out for a long time into the past. And he's pretty hard to handle in terms of control if he has high reality on past lives. Why? Because what's the worst thing you can do to him! The worst thing you can do to him is kill him.

Don't you see how the society's control over an individual diminishes! Because what's the worst punishment society can meter out! Death. And if it no longer matters as much as it did hefore, of course the person's ability - I mean his susceptibility - to control is less and people don't like this sometimes.

All right. That contains, at once, the reason why a person goes up so high in tone and, at once, the reason why people protest so madly against running them - I mean against having them run in others - and why they are invalidated. That's on a reason level. But this still wasn't good enough.

Theoretically, if you ran every violent death off of a case and ran it up to complete higher reality, the tone of a person ought to go up to 20,0, Just like that it ought to do that. There's no reason why it shouldn't. Well, it didn't! Hmmm.

And this is something like, as elementary a problem as, "I have two apples. I know I have two apples because there was an apple and here was an apple." And after you put the apple here and here, you start counting. And you count one. No, there's something wrong there. So you take an apple here and an apple here and you put them side by side and you take your hands off of them and you start counting. You count one. Where's the other apple!

In other words, everything went out to indicate completely that the running of the worst past deaths that you could find on a case would result in a fearlessness with regard to death which would react in a person's tone. So that he would handle himself with confidence, not in fear that his next move would bring about his death, because death wasn't something to be afraid of.

What is failure! Failure is nothing more nor less than a gradient scale of death; it's a little bit of death. So if he isn't afraid of death, he isn't afraid of failing. And if he isn't afraid of failing, if he isn't afraid of being defeated by life, he'll win. And this is the way it figured out. So I put an apple there and an apple there and I count and I get one. There's something wrong here someplace. I go back over it again very carefully, again investigate the laws of delusion and the laws of incidents. Sure enough, those deaths were real. People would call off places where they obviously had never been in this life, and give one data and languages which would check completely. Wonderful! Nothing to this at all. And yet they didn't improve. Why!

Well, the first sequence of answers started coming out of the genetic line. Now this line is a series of genetic incidents, and these incidents, one after the other, form what you're now using for a body It gives you the pattern. Now, there's some very severe incidents on that line.

The second I discovered this, immediately what we had there made the psychogalvanometer a valuable instrument. Up to that time a psychogalvanometer had relatively small value. Why! Because the death of Grandma will fall maybe one division, two divisions, three divisions, four divisions, and the fellow actually can tremble this much and you're never quite sure whether there's charge on it or not. But these facsimiles - very specific facsimiles - of the genetic line, and a certain type of incident, threw charge on the psychogalvanometer which went in terms of dials' worth. In some preclear, the dial will drop as many as twenty widths of the whole dial on one of those incidents.

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

(this is where the reel to reel version of the lecture begins)

Now, on the genetic line there were such incidents as the clam - the Weeper, we called it, the Boohoo. That's the reason people cry. There was mitosis - the basic mitosis that begins all mitosis is on that line. Highly aberrative. There's the photon converter, like an algae or something of the sort; lots of charge on that.

And very particularly, the psychogalvanometer began to work when I figured out that it was what a person did to somebody else that was the somatic he got. Now, this transfer of somatics produced what we call an overt act. You choke somebody someplace and you get the somatic yourself. And most people were holding on to these somatics.

But these still didn't resolve the problem because you didn't get the tone rise you should expect to get. But this was terrifically helpful. This would turn on emotion on preclears who hadn't emoted. This would change the shape of somebody's face very easily. This would locate the charge and get an enormous charge off of a case. Very, very helpful.

We were not trying to bring people up to 4.0 anymore. That was too easy to reach. You can reach 4.0 with the Handbook for Preclears. You just keep chewing at that and you get up to 4.0 - but that's way down there. We were interested in 8.0, 10.0, 12.0: Where's an incident can - by running it all by itself, will bounce the preclear to 12,0! And that's all we want to do with - we don't want to truck around with this long run - takes hours to clear a person. Let's get busy!

Well, I studied and I thought and I studied and I thought and figured and figured and … You know, the first thing I knew, I saw the machine dive on "before time." It says, "before time." "Has anything ever happened before time!" - wondering whether or not somebody might not be pre-aberrated. And the machine just started going crazy. "Before time."

"Did something happen before time! Did somebody aberrate us before time!" And all of a sudden you get this horrible picture, this horrible idea of maybe this is hell and once we lived in heaven, and somebody came along and picked us up and said, "Mmm. You're a bad 'un!" took us before a tribunal or a council and then dumped us on the chute and we arrived here on Earth. Crash. Well, this is not very solid. But the lady went off the top of the dial on running the first part of it. The first time I've ever seen anybody go off a psychometer, all the way up, off the top. And we only ran just a little bit of it.

And then I tailor-made the idea, thinking that this was all by counterthought in some fashion - done by counter-thought in some weird way I figured - all of a sudden realized we had the Handbook for Preclears, and there had a map. It's from "not-know" to "know," it's from "effect" to "cause." In other words, if we run the cycle backwards, we will run time in reverse; therefore regret will vanish off not-knowing, and a person would theoretically go through this incident from not-knowing to knowing, not-knowing to knowing, not-knowing to knowing, and pretty soon would get into the state of knowing, running this incident. Fascinating. Ah-ha!

After I ran it for a while, experimented with it a bit more, located it in other people, and ran into something I had known of in mysticism - the third eye. This eye of the soul, the jewel eye, so forth, lot of complimentary things about this. And then suddenly located circuits. The second I located this, I located circuits. What are circuits? Circuits are divisions of your own mind which seem to make up other personalities, and these other personalities affect you and argue with you and so forth. And here was a brand-new therapy.

What you did was take the youngest circuit - that is, the last one, closest to present time - and find out which circuit back of that had set it up; and you went back through about four circuits and you blew out those four incidents, and you would turn on this eye. Only one thing wrong with it - the eye turned out to be an engram. Get this: The jewel soul, the soul of souls, the super-valuable entity, turned out to be about the most lousy, stinking trick ever done on the human race! It's a manic of sorts.

Once upon a time, a fellow by the name of Henry Ford said, "Undoubtedly, lying under the seas of the world are railroad tracks, rusting away, the forgotten and hidden relic of former great civilizations." Mm-hm. I - don't know about Atlantis. I haven't been there - not lately.

Now, this was very interesting that we all of a sudden began to turn up with information which was not B.T but B.E. - before earth. But that could also be merely before this civilization, if you want it to be that way, if you wanted to make it that way. And we really started localizing this stuff. It had on it thought, emotion and effort. And it is simply a manic which degrades, and it's laid in on a pattern.

Well, I guess if you were a civilized people and you kept being hit by the barbarians and your patrols kept getting cut down and so forth, you'd eventually do something about it too. Particularly if you had supersonic sound and you knew how to lay in an engram, even if you didn't know how to pick one up.

When did it happen? Maybe a million years ago. I can't get a proper estimate on it in terms of time, but it's some such order of magnitude. What were we and who were we?

Well, they did a nice, thorough job. They hit you in the middle of the head with a supersonic pellet and they said this would make you good and happy and cheerful and honorable. And of course it took you way down the Tone Scale. It's the supersonic equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. And then they hit you in the stomach to produce anxiety.

Sound. Did it with sound. Wonderful gimmick. And is that stuff sticky! And I'd run into this somatic on preclears before and I thought it was just a board, like a board had been pushed up against - the fellow had been squashed. And it would never release.

The way you release it is get it as sound, get it as a vibration and try to keep it from vibrating, and all of a sudden the thing will start blowing out. Turn on the eye, try to keep it from vibrating; you'll get the rest of it. It'll take quite a while to do. But you can feel yourself go down Tone Scale as this stuff hits you.

Who did it? Why? I'm sure I don't know - yet - as completely as I might. But, boy, I'd sure like to find some of those guys!

If this were just found in one person here and there, this would be one thing. But it isn't. It's pretty uniform. And the availability of that eye, to some degree, establishes a person's effort to get out of it You see, when you're yourself you'd have that. Well that'd be pretty bad because you'd be half asleep or three-quarters asleep. When you're running past deaths, what were you running into? You were running into this thing.

Now, I'm talking to you about a research line as sober and as consistent as any research line was ever conducted. A relentless search - a very relentless search - to find the wild variable. You followed all the laws you knew about thought, all the laws you knew about mind, and it didn't quite turn out right. There was something there; somebody was stealing the second apple. What was it? Well, this was it. Now, you all look very grim. (laughter) When you get around to this thing, there's real honest-to-goodness terror in it. It's practically all the terror there is on a case. It's the anxiety stomach, it's your fear of arrest, it's your fear of being mauled around, it's your unwillingness to be, and it's also - God help us all - the installed circuits. They put a man on one side and a woman on the other side, and every time you've been jealous, every time you've been upset, one of these things has gone into restimulation and come back and kicked you. Aw, what a dirty trick! Now, of course, this has lasted for a long time.

I wouldn't dare tell you about any part of this and so excite your incredulity unless I could show it to you in processing, and unless it was a very, very fast route out. And it's a very fast route. It takes quite a while to coax a preclear sometimes into running it and to get out all of its manifestations and to get his sonic on full in it and to run all the columns backwards and forwards until a person does get up to "know," But every time in the past when you tried to say, "I know," you've come up there and this confounded incident would kick in and say, "No, you don't!" And down you'd go.

Every time you tried to say, "I am cause, I amount to something, I'm important," this incident would kick in and say, "No, you're a slave." And in addition to that, circuitry setups: They gave you somebody to walk through life with you and keep you on the straight and narrow. Also to obey their laws and like them. And to stop shooting their patrols to pieces!

Evidently this was an advanced society which moved in - a society possibly not even as advanced as ours - which moved in suddenly on almost a cave society, almost Stone Age. Maybe it was planets that got crossed. Or maybe it was merely continents that got crossed. People would hardly know that. But whatever it was, here was a retarded society being suddenly hit.

Here was the story of the Polynesians; here is the story of Tahiti. A barbaric but very happy, very dignified, very cheerful, honorable people that suddenly objected to someone coming in and say, "We're going to make your laws now and you stack that wood over there and draw that water," And so you said, "Noo! Workers of the world will now arise," And you started cutting them to pieces And they objected to this, naturally.

So they evidently cooked up - maybe they did it this way. Some places they might have done it one way, some places they did it another way. They might have cooked up a big story about "this is the great thing to do; this is the stuff. We're gods and we're really going to make you into gods, and…" Pow! "We'll fix you up." Bap! "Turn on the sound." Actually, the sound box they've got runs with a crank. I don't think they even had electric motors. But there's some sound like electricity in there.

The poor fellows who manage power stations! Ohhh! I often wondered why they were so crazy I often wondered why when you got into the navy and you'd listen to a ship's generators pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, all night long in the air vents and so forth, that you'd eventually get kind of groggy. And you'd wonder what was wrong with your head - you have a headache. And you'd notice this amongst the men.

Well, I had an electric typewriter and it sat there and it whined and whined and roared and roared and roared, and it put years and millions of words' worth of lock on top of this, with all the postulates in it. It's made the case kind of rough. But it was this one.

Now, separating it out and getting the locks of electric motors and that sort of thing off of it, we were starting to whip ourselves. That's why we started to go down the line in a hurry. We had a choice, then: we were either "them" and vicious, mean and degrading, or ourselves with somatics. From that point on, that was our choice: either to be mean, wicked, ornery, vicious, degrading your fellow man, but very thorough and ride over everything, about 1.8 or 1.5; or if you wanted to be good, decent, noble or upstanding - lung somatics, nose somatics, bad eyes, headaches and general frailty. Because you'd have to take one or the other.

Therefore, anybody confronted by somebody being good … You see, if a person is confronted by somebody being very good and very honorable, the valence is stolen to some degree you see, and they have a tendency to flick into this other valence. And when you've got somebody being very mean and very wicked, you have a tendency to flick over into the good valence. And this has been this endless drama going on, on, on.

It's easy to run this incident - do it with thought, emotion and effort. Very simple to run it. What's difficult to run is, is this supersonic is so solid that you have to realize that it was such a kind of a wave in order to run it at all. Before that it wouldn't budge, because you couldn't get a preclear to run a vibration. He thought he was just being pushed, and as a push it didn't go away. And it hit there, and it hit there, and it hit there. Somatics are with it and so on. A person kind of - feel awful crippled up running this thing.

How many hours it takes the average person to run this, I don't know. But I know that running it runs you off the top of the scale. Sometimes there are quite a few Iocks on it, like overt acts. There'll be a few overt acts on it and then it'll peel down and there it'll be.

How many people present have a ringing in your ears! Is there anybody here who doesn't have a ring in his ears at one time or another! You don't have a ring in your ears!

Male voice: No sir.

Good.

Second male voice: Me neither.

You don't. Mm-hm. That's very interesting. Because that is the thing in chronic restimulation. That ring and that note is part of that engram.

I told you T was going: to tell you a fairy tale, and I don't imagine there was a single one of you could imagine it was that wild. But it's not a fairy tale. That's the road out.

Now, you'll find all sorts of strange things happen when you get near this incident, because it's full of lies. A guy will run dub-in, But he can't dub in those somatics. And you get him to run those somatics out and devil take what he's coming up with. And then when he's got the somatics out, why then take his data.

But that was the incident we kept running into and that's what, evidently, we've been playing tag with. I don't know of an earlier incident than this that is anythiny. Sure, maybe you got caught and maybe there are earlier incidents along the evolutitmary track which are worth running once you've run this. Rut that's the only reason you're down here in this [tapping on blackboard] band - down in the counter-effort band. You run this and you shoot up above it.

How well this will hold, I can't tell you from case to case - in terms of all cases. I haven't run all cases But it's right. And every time I've ever processed a preclear, there was a ghost of this one around.

A person gets into that incident and gets it restimulated, he's liable to stay and run philosophy or something thereafter. A person tries to go into mysticism and use his thought and so on, such as teleportation or ESP or any of these things, he gets that one right square in the face. It tells you not to be and not to do. So your mystic who is progressing earnestly, hard, and in spite of anything just will key that up into higher and higher restimulation. Higher and higher. Higher and higher. You get more and more nervous about it. Great stuff!

But it's what makes law and order be "law and order!" to you, with an exclamation point, because it's punishment-drive control. And punishment-drive control is not successful.

Of course, you say at the same time, whoever it was - whatever race it was - that suddenly came along and managed to get practically the whole kit and caboodle of us … I'm very anxious to get ahold of a Negro and a Chinese and an Indian - I mean an American Indian, because I think the American Indian and the Mayan might possibly have escaped it. I'm not sure. But I want to know in terms of races. Right now I want more data. I know about the white race, because there's always been this ghost there, and the number of people who will pick up this incident - very, very large number of people.

Now, what benefit you can expect out of running this is to go right on up Tone Scale. But in the process - perhaps not always - to have some of the confoundedest, most horrible somatics you've ever had. Some of them are really rough. They are side somatics, back somatics, stomach somatics and there's a certain fear on it. But actually, once you start to look at it after you've seen a map of it, it can't scare you as much anymore. And once you know what to run out of it, it can be run. But it's been there, and it's been there for an awful long time.

I wrote a story one time rather poetically talking about somebody laying across the face of Earth a black enchantment. It's a Chinese fairy tale, which is the fairy tale I'm telling you tonight. I heard it from the last of the jugglers of the empress dowager, a juggler whose lineage had reached back to Kublai Khan, and he had come into China, his ancestors had, with Kublai Khan. And he was just a bum anymore; that empress dowager's court had long since disappeared, gone to dust. He was a street juggler. He was a very clever old man. He was about eighty. He was very knowledgeable.

And he told me this story of the Chinese legend, the story of two heroes and a little girl. And the little girl all of a sudden realized that there was a black enchantment lying over the whole world - that some wicked magician had put this black enchantment over everyone so that no one could be happy anymore. So she went and found the two heroes, and they went down and they found the magician, they slew him and they lifted the black enchantment,

Well, that's what has happened, approximately, to this degree: a black enchantment has obviously been laid across man, who, natively has every potential for good, for constructive action.

But how would you keep a people from realizing it? You'd divide them within themselves. You would teach them that they had - could know only law. That they were incapable of assuming full responsibility, that they were not to meet in groups or perform various actions, and that they could not unite in a single effort forward toward the conquest of the material universe. And that was what we were told, evidently. And man has been living up to it very well ever since.

I don't know if actually, if this tape will ever go out of this room, as far as publication is concerned. This sounds utterly mad, but that's what it is - madness!

Have you ever been around an insane asylum! You can think back over it now and you can see how many poor guys were caught in this one - how many were caught in this one. "Somebody's hooking wires up to my brain. Somebody's going to read my thoughts" - on and on and on and on and on. That is the computing psychotic. And that is what a computing psychotic is: it's somebody caught in this incident. A dramatizing psychotic is somebody vdno's caught in an engram. Get the difference! Caught in this incident. But the only way a person could get caught in an engram is to be caught in this incident first. That would bring his tone down to a point where he couldn't handle himself.

Here was your fear of death. Here was your shut-off of knowledge of past lives. Here is your fear, and here is incompetence.

Now, those of you who know full well how to run this material, if you team up tomorrow, try and run it a bit, hm? Won't hurt you any That's a map I give you. And tell me what you get on it tomorrow night.

All you have to do is look for the ringing in your ears. It's supposed to be timeless. It is lost on the track. It is timeless. It moves with you - that sort of thing. And this ringing in the ears is you being even with it one way or the other. Aw, it's an interesting thing, but it's an awfully dirty trick.

If we can start shooting people up by running this single incident, if we can start shooting people up to 20.O - and I don't care what you run out of people to shoot them up to 20.0 - that's where we want them.

Oddly enough, evidently, the only reason I went on and invented Dianetics was because, to get me, they had to pull me out of the brush with both feet flailing; and my intention as I went into it was something quite beyond them, and that is "Someday I'11 get even with you bastards and find out. And the rest of the people you're doing this to are going to be undone." And evidently this is almost very close to mission accomplished, Now, I would like you to look it over and get some reality on it for your own sakes tomorrow on a co-auditing basis. You can always scan off something which you've audited through. It sometimes gets very, very heavy and very hot, but only when you're rather tired. You shouldn't run the incident, I don't think, when you're very tired. So try it out, will you?

And thank you very much for your very, very patient attention tonight. And don't have too many nightmares.