You know, we've had a — we've had an interesting time here for six years, haven't we?
Audience: Yeah!
Oh, heck, we've had a more interesting time than that.
And I hope that's nothing compared to the interesting time we're going to have for the next six.
Now, I want to clarify something. People have been walking up to staff members and they've been saying, "What's all this about Ron says he's all through with research? Yeah, I've heard that before. Isn't true."
Well, that isn't essentially what I said. I said the critical point of research — I didn't say this, but let me be very clear, concise — the critical point of research has passed. It actually has. It was critical up to a relatively few weeks ago when I finally got in the returns on what processes were doing to cases of various types here and there in various auditors' hands.
Given indoctrination — thorough indoctrination and in particular what we call High School Indoctrination of the type that those attending the ACC will get, I don't believe now — I know I have said this before; I'm telling you a fact now — I don't believe now that there is a case that is still breathing that talks the language that you happen to be speaking, or not, as the case may be, that can actually remain in a status quo under modern auditing. I really don't believe there is such a case. Now, that's no dare. That's not myself talking. I would have told you this years ago. Because I don't know any cases I couldn't crack.
But I'm now speaking of the auditor who is well trained and knows his business, and cases have actually ceased to give them a bad time.
It becomes an interesting — very, very interesting consideration of how long is it going to take — how long is it going to take to crack a case. That's a problem: How long is it going to take? What are we going to be able to do with this number of hours?
And from where I sit, and I am sure in the next few months you will find this to be a reality, I don't know now how tough a case would have to be because I haven't seen one.
Here's a fascinating thing. A case can be awfully resistant in one way or the other, but when you're — can unlock resistance itself, you find the resistance was resisting the preclear also and he's very happy to have this unlocked.
Well, therefore, if you can — if you can unlock the resistance that he is putting up to having his case washed up, well, wonderful. It would be good roads and good weather. He doesn't argue with you, that's all. He just doesn't argue with you.
Now, it should — it should be rather encouraging to you. We've had a lot of cases around dragging their heels. They shouldn't, not now, and I hope they won't.
As far as future research is concerned, as far as the tomorrow of auditing results are concerned, the situation is sufficiently in place that we have passed the critical point.
In other words, there are people who believe that the only direction they can now pursue is down! You got that? Their upswing or ability to recover is doubted by them. Do you get that point of doubt?
Well, when you run a modern process on them a great change takes place because he realizes he can get well, and that is an awfully high point of realization. He might not realize it for eight or ten hours, but he will find it out, and after that he knows there is something on Earth which can pull him out of the mire. Now, that in itself is a terribly heartening thing — very, very heartening, very wonderful thing.
People for years have been — well, at a low case level have been sort of held in place, not slipping any further. Well, we're at a point in research where there is a point of return and they can start up again. It's quite remarkable.
Now, what does this mean to Scientology? Well, it means first a much broader reality on the part of the professional auditor regarding his own capabilities because the processes today have crossed a boundary which is most astonishing.
We could have said a few months ago — did intimate it — that auditing should not be restimulative. Nobody should go downhill simply because he was auditing. Well, that has turned to this degree and an important degree it is. Auditing has taken the turn today where it is therapeutic.
That's a very important factor, very important. Because one of the reasons auditors start sliding out of auditing and stop professional practice is they find they can't stay in there and take the battering they've been taking from preclears. They get a run of very rough preclears and all of a sudden they have a feeling that they just don't want to audit the next one; they'd rather go out and play golf.
All of you have had that feeling. I've had that feeling. I've had somebody walk into the office and say, "Ron, there's somebody out here and they want you to audit him." Happens fairly often. And I say — sitting there — I remember the last one, see. I say, "I'm awfully busy writing a book." And they say, "But Ron, the organization is broke."
You know, I never get any auditing fees. I — this — aren't any auditing fees as far as I am concerned. I have the lousiest professional practice in Scientology. It's terrible! If I do any auditing it is for the purposes of research and if I have to do some auditing in the organization, I never collect a penny for it. The organization goes south with the cash. I never see it. They say, "But Ron, you know, you know, those new drinking fountains — mighty expensive." "Yeah," but I say, "I — my tires are almost off my car. I mean, can't I do something about this?" And they say, "Yes, we've got another preclear out here."
Well, I've spent quite a few hours in an auditing chair, quite a few. Huh! Wow! Time track — time track. And by this time I've audited French, Spanish, Italians, Chinese, Negroes, Africans, English, Mexicans, Canadians, Hawaiians, Japanese — must be some other race.
Male voice: Americans.
Oh, yes, Americans!
It has been said that I have audited more people per square yard of engram than any other auditor. This may or may not be true because I don't audit all week, every week. Somebody may have been sneaking up on this by this time.
But I was auditing some people recently and I planned on having a session before I came over here to the congress so I could stand the mock-up up a little more — betterwise. And I had a very interesting session all planned. I had it all figured out, and I started to audit a preclear on very modern procedure. And I audited the preclear and I audited the preclear and I felt — I thought, "This is interesting" and I kept on auditing the preclear and I kept on auditing the preclear. And the next thing you know, why, things were clearing up all around and the slime and the dust of London was kind of going away from my theta perception and I kept auditing the preclear and I thought, "Gee-whiz. What do you know! I mean, I'm — here it is" — I better not tell you this story — a breach of the Auditor's Code — "here it is 11 o'clock at night and I'm not even tired." As a matter of fact the preclear went home — came back the next day and I audited the preclear and I audited the preclear and I audited the preclear. And the preclear shoved off about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and I went out for a walk.
A little — my little copper nob, Diana, she always comes around, and she says, "I want to go shopping with Dada." She knows what she's doing. She's a smart girl. He always buys her candy, you know. She's almost four now. So anyway — very bright — and she's walking along the street alongside of me and she started to run into a fruit cart. You know, busy English traffic — the English are — well, a lot of them wear glasses but I'm not sure why they do because they can't see through them. And a couple had walked past her, one on one side and one on the other side and they just spun her around. And she came out of it — and she'd been sort of half-running to keep up with me — and she tipped over and started to go into a fruit cart. So, I was about ten feet from her, so I turned her around and put her on the sidewalk and we went walking on up the street.
I, all of a sudden said, "Now, wait a minute. Now, just a minute." She was chattering along madly — couldn't think. I said, "There's something to all this." So I very carefully watched some people stepping up a curb, and there was an old lady there who was about to step up on the curb and miss it. So I took her foot and put it more solidly on the curb. And I suddenly realized there isn't the least bit of difficulty controlling any number of bodies, if you do enough auditing.
Now, very oddly, what I've just told you happens to be the truth. It hap-pens to be the truth.
There's some processes today which are the best processes to run on preclears, very smooth, easy processes, best processes to run. There are ways to run them. But the auditor has to refrain from doing it. By refraining from doing it, however, he gets into an interesting situation.
Remember, in 8-C, I've often said you can monitor the preclear's body without letting him participate in the session at all? You know that? That's real wild. The auditor's sitting there and he is saying, "Go over and touch that wall." The body will — the preclear's body walks over and touches the wall. "Well, go over and touch that wall." The preclear's body goes over and touches that wall.
You have to actually add another thing. You have to add another thing to that process in order to make it a good process. You have to say, "All right, now, go over and touch the wall." You have to say, "Who touched it? Did you touch it? Are you sure you touched the wall?" You got the idea? You have to make the fellow aware of it and build his awareness of it; otherwise, if you're pretty hot at this sort of thing, you will just simply walk this other body around and it just goes walking around. And it's a very funny thing to watch this kind of a situation. It's really remarkable!
Now, I'm sure some of you have had this happen. We have a little process that handles an object. And we were handling this object the other day and Smokey back there said, "Well, it must have been telepathy or something. But the fellow said that just before he intended to stop it — I told him to stop it — but just before I said stop it, his hand stopped it. I tried to tell Smokey that there was a distinct possibility that he had done enough of the process so that he had to start avoiding this sort of thing, otherwise, auditing session would consist of Smokey sitting there running this other body, see. You have to get in there and get the other fellow aware that he's running his own body and then he gets well.
Now, that sounds spooky, doesn't it? That sounds bad. That sounds like a terrible invasion of privacy! It sounds like one interrupts the preclear's self-determinism, doesn't it? Well, at a certain level of case, you can ask this nasty question. What self-determinism? I'm afraid out of self-defense pre-clears being audited will have to get better!
You could take all that with a grain of salt if you want to. It's worse than that except you wouldn't believe me. When you start picking up old ladies' feet and putting them on curbs, making horses walk sideways just to embarrass a mounted policeman; when you start putting on the other drivers' brakes and stopping all traffic on the side streets, whether there are stop signs or not, just so you could go through, I'd say we are absolutely ruining self-determinism. And it's about time somebody got pan-determined!
You know, they tell a story about the wolves and the rabbits. Somebody comes along and he gets a bunch of rabbits and he makes them into wolves, see. And then these rabbits over here have got to become wolves, too. As soon as they become wolves then these do and then somebody comes back here and makes a superwolf. And then these wolves in order to get along have to be superwolves. Isn't that a horrible thing to happen? Well, it would be horrible if you were making wolves but we're not in that business!
The only time I've seen preclears fight and start to become wolves and start to be very upset about the whole thing — you could practically see lycanthropy coming like sparks up above their ears — they are just about to bare their teeth and really get going — was when you were collecting your auditing fee. This has — this has a certain restimulative action on some preclears. But naturally, now it is very easy for an auditor to do that. He just reaches into the fellow's pocket and . . . No, it's not as bad as that.
Do you know actually, it's — there's something funny that I had to tell people over in England, but I had to tell them this because it's a fantastic — an utterly fantastic situation. You think it's possible to make people worse, don't you? You think it's possible to make people worse by auditing. We learned something in 1950 and I see some faces in this room that will confirm this. As terrible as the auditing was, it was better than no auditing!
I sat down one day to find out what this was all about. And you know what I discovered? Man is basically good. I hate to tell you this, since good and bad are apparently merely adjectives and considerations as we have often said. Well then why is it that a man will go toward good but not toward bad? I don't know. I don't know that.
In order to change a person, you have to make him better. And that is the total success of Dianetics and Scientology, owing to the fact that they went on a reverse vector to every other psychotherapy and activity in the mind that was ever advanced or invented. That's an interesting point. We went straight reverse.
Now, don't tell me — don't try to tell me that we should be charitable. Don't, please, tell me I should be charitable. I'm so damned tired of being charitable! Charity begins at home.
I recently made a study, and published it in a PAB and I'm sure quite a few of you have seen it already, called, A Critique of Psychoanalysis. Male voice: Yeah, yeah.
Now, you probably thought I was just being mean. Actually, the reason I had to write that was to tell auditors something about what made cases go a bit off beam, to tell auditors what was bad auditing. And I found out that all of the things — I think there were some ten things psychoanalysis does. I got a letter of protest from Sweden on that PAB. I got another one, a letter of protest from Switzerland and got another letter of protest from Vienna, Austria, all of which were incomprehensibly stupid in their real — in their rationalization of the subject.
The only criticisms I got on it were indecipherable. I don't care what language they were written in. It was something on the basis of "Freud was a kind man. And everybody was a kind man. And the sublimation of the ego self is the real self and that isn't the self because the self is the self is the id is the self is the real self." This is just about the way they read. "And you haven't any right to criticize because to criticize because to criticize because to criticize. Sincerely yours." Boy, have they been analyzed!
But you would think immediately that I published those things to indicate that psychoanalysis was making people sick! I didn't say that. I merely said it was dishonest and it would keep a case from advancing and it would make a case feel sort of funny in auditing if they were done.
But there is, it seems, a sort of a mechanism about the mind that when it finds out it is being abused it cuts the circuit. That's an interesting thing. This is so much the case that short of surgery or the installation of an engram directly, so-called therapeutic measures are actually powerless to materially injure a mind. The only thing they can do is make the person a little more careful or a little more worried or a little more upset. But as far as actually injuring his IQ and his intelligence profile, they can't do it.
Three to five years of psychoanalysis — and I have this on very, very bad authority (a psychoanalytic report) — demonstrated no worsening of cases by reason of having been analyzed over that period of time. No betterment but no worsening.
There are a lot of people who commit suicide after analysis, I am told. But the funny part of it is, is they simply delayed the suicide until they found out that analysis didn't work either. So you can't even really assign a suicide to analysis.
If anybody says we have a large rack of suicides and deaths and casualties and so forth, boy, are they spreading propaganda. Let me guarantee some-thing to you, if we'd had a lot of that sort of thing I would have heard about it.
Years ago there were two or three — three or four political deaths, you might say — politics: people arguing with people and so forth over the relative merits of this and that and it got messed up that way.
The only death, I think, that ever occurred in the eastern area occurred on the part of a boy who came into the New York Foundation to be — to receive some Dianetic auditing. We had a psychiatrist there who was on duty, because the publisher there in New York said that that was the legal thing to have. And anybody who came in and looked a bit desperate or something of the sort would be a mental case and therefore should be interviewed by the psychiatrist. He went in, saw the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist said there was nothing could be done. The psychiatrist told the auditor in question that he wasn't to audit him and they sent the boy back out of the Foundation, and he went home and killed himself. That happened in New York City. It was smoothed over very quietly but there's no particular reason to smooth it over because we didn't kill him. That was an interesting thing.
He was turned away from being helped. He was in a frame of mind to commit suicide; somebody told him he ought to go down to the Foundation and get some help. He went down and ran into a psychiatrist. It was a dirty trick to pull on a man, wasn't it? Boy, I had that psychiatrist out of there so fast, he's probably still running. No, that's about the only casualty I know of in the East Coast. That's a pretty terrific record for all the God knows how many people have been handled and audited in Dianetics and Scientology, believe me.
You must understand they are different subjects.
The difficulties that psychotherapy had were not the difficulties really of bad treatment but of not helping. Do I make a point there? It wasn't that the treatment was terribly harmful. It's that their hope, raised, was never answered. And it was so poorly responded to that there was no further hope and they occasionally committed suicide and knocked off and did things like that. But they were simply on a waiting period and cases didn't worsen actually because of it.
As nearly as I can find out, even an expert auditor a few months ago could not have worsened a case. He could have worked at it. He could have done funny things to it. But you know, I actually conducted a series of experiments — I have in three different occasions conducted a series of experiments to find out how you could mess up people. Volunteers — they knew I could pull them out of it. We went ahead and tried to get a real flat-out mess and we've never succeeded.
Well, I tell you, some of those tests are really grim. Some of those tests are just too grim to — huh, wow! Have a fellow take an IQ test. Then he sits over here on the couch. Gets pushed back into birth, run halfway through, invalidated, evaluated for, restimulated and struck. Then he's set down in this chair over here to do an IQ test and he does better!
You can say, well, the intention in that room was pretty good and he responded to it but, no, the fellow's intention was really to get worse. We found out eventually we were adding to their havingness and improving their intelligence and profiles in just that wise. We were restimulating engrams and this made them smarter.
Now this is — this is a fact. You go before a class. You explain to them all about birth, prenatals and backtrack and everything else, you'd think you'd just spin them in. Well, once in a while you have somebody there who has a game of spinning. You know, this person lived this kind of a life before that. Mother came in, dusted off the top of the table. "Oh, you've killed me."
They were at school and the teacher dusted some chalk off the board and sat there and said, "Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh." Auditor comes in the room. They say, "You've broken the code."
And he says, "How did I do that?"
"Now you've invalidated me."
You stand up in front of them and give a lecture on electronic-type engrams and they say, "Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh," same one. In other words, we assume this person goes "Huh, huh, huh, huh." So what?
Well, we ran another series of tests. We wanted to find out how bad instruction was. This was out in Phoenix. Some of you people right here were part of this.
We practically did nothing to one whole unit but teach them. Did a little Group Processing — didn't amount to anything — and then just taught them. Taught them anything; I lectured to them about anything I could think of. And when they all finished up they were all better and it was a more successful group than groups which had indulged in auditing.
So we went ahead to find out further how bad it was to restimulate people with Scientology data. We set out overtly to do this — audit for twenty minutes, evaluate for twenty minutes, audit for another twenty minutes, evaluate for another twenty minutes — on volunteer preclears. They wanted to die. They tried hard and didn't make it. They got better! They actually got better.
Of course, evaluation isn't too bad unless it contains a lot of contradiction — invalidation along with it. But we actually did inform them of this and that.
Now, we've taken somebody — we've given them some book like What to Audit. You know, that book's name — real name should be now What Not to Audit. But, oh no, I beg your pardon — I just thought of something. That book at one time was, What to Audit and then for a while was What Not to Audit and is now What to Audit. Yeah, book title finally came due.
Anyway, person starts reading this book, you know, "Gee, gee, the Bouncer — the jumper — the Clam." Person says, "Ohhhhh, what horrible somatics I've got. Ohhhh, man — I've ju — . Boy, I'm stuck in something."
Unfortunately, stuck in something he is smarter and has a better profile than not stuck. We've given him the book to read — given a preclear, that is to say, a volunteer, What to Audit to read — with four or five people, unbeknownst to him that they were part of the test, telling him, "Oh, man, you don't want to read that. Now, look — now, for once Ron's gone too far. He's gone too far. He wants you to read that late at night without having eaten any supper."
We've gone too far now — and actually say that they were going to protest to me about it — and got the person nice and worried. So it was about all that somebody else could do to push him into the experiment. You know, "You volunteered. It's too bad. You can't go back on it now. You know, mankind and all that."
So, person read it, got restimulated, got very upset, took an after-test and it was better than the former test. I don't know, what are you going to do with these people? Person, of course, is basically running on the postulate that Scientology makes people well so he just gets well. They don't know how to do anything else, I guess!
It's very funny, though, the mind puts brakes on. You can smell the rubber. When it feels it's getting into too much trouble and that it isn't getting competently handled, it just puts the brakes on, restimulates, pulls itself out of it and so on — fights like mad with the auditor and he insists on going on, pushes the person into it bodily with a thud. You just don't — it just doesn't get there, that's all. There has to be ARC in auditing or it doesn't occur. You all know that. Auditing doesn't occur in the absence of ARC. It doesn't occur at the behest of a club.
All right. We conclude and concluded by many tests that teaching people the data of Scientology was not aberrative. We had to ascertain this. Once in a while we used to get — before we had indoctrination courses — bad auditing in HCA schools.
Now, I know this is a very discreditable thing to have and I would — I hate to have to tell you about it but I have to because there's so many of you here who have had rotten auditing in HCA schools. That's true, isn't it?
Audience: Yeah.
Pretty grim some of it. You know, we finally got to a point though where we realized with modern training — that these auditors trained modernly don't know how bad it can get. In the absence of school auditing, they never learn. But modern school auditing done after indoctrination, so forth, has very definitely minimized if not entirely eradicated this factor.
But back when we were getting real bad auditing on occasion, somebody would come in — he'd run, oh I don't know, a little this and a little of that and a little of something else and call it what he was doing and the preclear would get real upset and we'd get protests on it one way or the other.
And we would have profiles on students. And when one of these profiles would drop, we had to know this answer: Were these profiles dropping because of the data the person was taught or because of the auditing the person was receiving? A dropping profile — terrible thing, awful thing. Profile is going down from where the person had been put by Scientology and we learned that a person can lose gains he makes in Scientology auditing by more Scientology auditing, but the livingness of two or three years doesn't decrease the result. This is goofy, you know.
Only Scientology auditing can undo Scientology auditing but not even Scientology auditing can make a case worse than it was when you first saw it. I don't know, I mean, I'm just giving you the data. It doesn't have to be reasonable. It's true.
In other words, we pick the case up down here on the graph and we audited him up here. And — oh, a preclear of ours — now he's getting training and we get him an IQ test or something halfway through training and he's here. In other words, he's now only this high above where he was originally. He was there. In other words, he's lost some of his Scientology gain. That's what he loses.
And we found out that teaching him anything in the way of Scientology data is powerless to decrease his profile level. Teach him anything you want to. You can say — of course, you don't teach the public this if you want them to stay in class along with you on a group course.
But supposing you said, "Well, I don't know. You have lived before. The proof of the matter is that probably at any given instant you could shut your eyes and see your last dead body before it."
And the fellow would say, "Hey, that's right! Boy, is that a horrible death. Say, you know, Instructor, that was a horrible death."
I don't care what you teach them. Doesn't matter. Because the totality of aberration is not know — not-knownness — it is unknowingness and anything he finds out about himself, anything he finds out about the track, any truth he learns about life pulls him up scale! And because he has some mechanism in him that knows what a lie is, he doesn't buy them.
He can go down scale from having played too many games too long — the games then becoming unknown. That's how far he can go down scale and he does go down scale over long periods of time and terrific duress.
The things I have discovered though that are depressing in life, I don't think you'd be able to write about them. You haven't heard anything really this horrible on this planet.
The stuff that is on the backtrack of the preclear is of such major nature that the little old "tiddlywink" games he's been playing for the last two or three thousand years — except for some of the majesty of Rome, that was fun — aren't aberrative. And you teach him something about his backtrack, he pulls up a picture here and he pulls up one there and he says, "Whee! Look at the picture of the rocket" — boom! "I have a somatic." And he actually feels better for at least knowing that there was a possibility that it happened to him, than not knowing about it at all! How do you like that? Isn't that a terrible thing?
Now, with terrific duress, torture, getting maimed and — he loses the whole planet and he falls through space for 18,000 years and then he's put to work plastering one wall for the next 10,000 years and if he leaves that wall, why, they have a little piece of his flesh in a vat up in headquarters and all they have to do is stick a pin in it and he says, "Ow!" and he reports back. Well, that's sort of rough, you know in a mild sort of whole track way, that's sort of rough.
But that's the past of your preclear, not "Well, when I was a little boy — when I was a little boy, an older girl — she said a nasty word to me and that's why I'm crazy." Oh yeah?
So anything he learns about himself or life that he knows is true, that he has the feel of truth about it, actually makes him feel better.
The actual livingness at Lord knows what duress makes him feel worse and it just takes hundreds and hundreds of years to push a guy down scale. That is our finding. It's an important finding. Does psychoanalysis — you mean sitting on a couch and lying about all the — well, lying has — that aberrates somebody? No. No. It does not.
I don't even know if it hurts a thetan to have his prefrontal lobes cut out. We had a fellow come in one day with no prefrontal lobes and we audited him after a while. And he forgot about having no prefrontal lobes and he was as good as anybody else. That's the truth. We actually did that right here at the HGC in Washington. Putting the shock to somebody, pouring the juice to them. Nah! So they dance around for a while and they feel bad. When we get ahold of them, they're a little more explosive than other cases.
One of the reasons we consistently fail on psychos is because they keep — we don't — we don't treat psychos, we're not in that business. We are not equipped to handle psychos and other people keep shooting them with the needle, you know. You know, pick them up, dope them up, give them a shock, something like that, and then they are dumped back on the auditor again. He all of a sudden says, "What's the matter with him?"
"Oh, I don't know. He just . . ." So on. The auditor finds out he's been in eighteen institutions, that sort of thing. He didn't know this. He can't protect himself. There is no way really for an auditor to protect himself thoroughly against having a psycho pushed off on him which he then is expected to audit. It's not his business. He shouldn't be in that business! Yet there is no law which protects a person — there is no law which says, "It is against the law to walk in and ask for educational ability or spiritual guidance" or some-thing like that "when you really want psychotherapeutic treatment." There is no law like that. The reverse is the law. We don't — we don't care about this law one way or the other, we think it's for the birds.
Every psychiatrist — I'm not talking psychiatrists down. I know you don't like me to cuss psychiatrists. I mean I really know that. I really do. You don't like me to cuss psychiatrists. You think it's beneath my dignity and I want to thank you for it.
But we get into this for an excellent reason that it exists and it's part of life, this little game called, "Ruin them." It's part of life. And if we're in a position where we're so weak-headed that we feel that we must avoid this part of life and that part of life, the first thing you know life will say, "It's avoiding me — sluuuuuup," and we'll all be psychiatrists, and I wouldn't wish that off on you. So we have to cuss them a little bit.
But the finding is a very, very interesting finding and a strange commentary on a line in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, a very strange commentary. It said, "Man is basically good." The duress required to make man worse is so tremendous that I do not believe there is known to the communist today, as he operated in the Korean War, any technique that would have worsened the IQ or actual ability of a human being.
Now, you've heard about brainwashing. I happened recently to have gotten hold of the totality of information contained in the book written by Pavlov for Stalin and which hitherto has never been outside the doors of the Kremlin. I have that book. I've tried to boil it down and write it simply because it is an interesting book. It tells the researches of one man. And I can't write that bad! I actually can't. You think I'm fooling. I can't write this book. I can't boil it down. I all of a sudden start filling in all the missing pieces. No, that's right. You would too! You would!
You know so much more about the mind than this guy did that you'd start writing and you'd say, "Boy, did he miss it there. Well, it really is this way. And then it . . ." And I've started that thing about four different times trying to make a quick synopsis of it to select out the salient pieces on which Pavlov operated because I think it might be of interest to people. And I just pick it up and throw it on the back of the desk. I just can't do it. One of these days I'll be less of a prima donna with my pen.
No, but actually that's true. This book is mentioned, by the way in — I think his name is — Edward Hunter's book on brainwashing, which is currently selling here in the United States. And this book is a fascinating book. It's about 400 pages long and it tells how all of Pavlov's experiments on dogs could be applied to human beings in order to produce a certain given result and that is the text of the book.
That book never left the Kremlin. Pavlov was not permitted to leave the Kremlin while he was writing that book and he was later more or less held in arrest but he didn't realize it to the end of his life. And they started using this in the spy — not the spy trials but the trials of communist officials. Remember, back in the 30s, all of a sudden the world was startled at all these top Russian leaders confessing to everything? Well, I don't know whether they did or not. Nobody has confessed on this pattern since — or using the same material. And nobody did it in the Korean War.
Along with that I have a summation … I wanted to write a little book called — a technical book on brainwashing, and the only reason I wanted to write this book is because it is not effective. Brainwashing is not effective. I repeat that. It is not effective. It does not do a job.
Evidently a certain small percentage of people can be driven mad if you sneeze at them, but they're mad already. And on these people brainwashing works. But it's such a small percentage that it's hardly worth bothering with.
The number of man-hours concerned in brainwashing one human being is about twice as many hours as were consumed by a Dianetic preclear in 1950! Two or three thousand.
Now, look-a-here, what are we all spooking about this thing called brain-washing for? It's a hoax — a hoax of the first order of magnitude. The communist can't brainwash anybody that isn't brainwashed. He can't do it; he doesn't know how.
Now, you could doubt this because you've heard an awful lot about these terrible duresses of brainwashing and you even heard it from me and you heard it from other people but I had to get down and look. So I — having looked — I might as well tell you that I picked the cover of it up and peeked under the edge of it and found something about as — well, I suppose it's much more dangerous to put small firecrackers in your mouth and light them. It's probably much more dangerous than to get brainwashed.
They did such a bad job and they know so little about the mind that it makes a Scientologist just go, "No! No! We ought to get over and show those guys how!"
Brainwashing. This book I was going to write was a summation of the actual effects that it had on cases. You see, I knew a lot of Japanese war prisoners. In the last part of the war and so forth, I was actually interviewing quite a number of Japanese war prisoners as they were returned from prison camps. I was interviewing these chaps and taking down their experiences. They weren't being brainwashed. They were simply starved. Japanese weren't doing anything to them. They were in worse shape than the brain-washed Korean prisoner! And these guys talk about brainwashing!
It's one of these propaganda weapons. That's all it is. They say, "We have this terrific weapon called brainwashing — we're going to brainwash everybody." Well it would be awfully dangerous if they could. But do you know there is practically not a person in this room that would be permanently harmed by brainwashing except as it related to being starved and kept under conditions of duress. In other words, if you put a guy into a military stockade and fed him poorly for two or three years he's going to be in secondhand condition, isn't he?
Male voice: Yeah.
Well, that's just exactly the effect brainwashing had on them. It had no more effect than this.
If I myself had not known and seen and talked to and interviewed and made the official records of many Japanese prisoners of war, I too, would have been shocked by brainwashing. But remember, the Japanese prisoner of war was not brainwashed, he was simply kept as a prisoner of war under duress, had very little food and very little rest and not much medical treatment over a period of years. And that's rough. But the Japanese prisoner of war was in worse shape than those held by Chinese communists and brain-washed for two years! That's something to think about, isn't it?
Boy, they tried. And all they succeeded in doing was making a good game which took the ennui out of being in prison!
Pavlov talks about making a dog insane. I'd like to shake the paw of a dog the techniques contained in his book would make insane.
These learned experiments by which we reduce a circle to a square and reduce a square to a circle while ringing gongs and dah-dah bells and feeding the dog and beating the dog — oh, bah.
I had a malamute once, he was a tough dog. The only way he could accept an acknowledgment was if you took a stick of firewood and hit him between the ears. My mother, who is a very little person, very small person, used to take a stick or a chain to this malamute and just used to beat him and beat him and beat him to make him stop chasing cows. And the dog would say, "Hahh-hahh-hahh-hahh-hahh-hahh." He'd say, "I love you too!"
I used to come home after an absence. This dog was very ferocious. He was half malamute, half spitzbergen, very tough dog. He only knew one thing: when you put him on a leash and he felt that harness against his chest, he'd pull! And you went whether you wanted to or not. And he used to come — he'd see me coming up toward the house and he would rush out of the gate. I'd been gone for a month or two or three. And he would rush out of the gate with every fang bared. And I'd wait until he got there and I'd pick up the loose skin on both sides of his jowls and use his momentum and throw him about that far. And he would go over there about 25 feet and he would land, see. And he'd get up and he'd say, "Oh, it's you, Ron. How are you?" That dog was half Russian! And Pavlov said that denying him a little food would drive him crazy.
It's not true — it's not true that the tiny amount of duress recorded would have done anything to anything. A myth was built up, a fear was created in men's hearts that something could be done to their mind by men who did not know how and who had no technology about the mind anyway! And they built this myth up so good that the United States War Department and even the Marine Corps — which is surprising since they have sense — was actually willing to brainwash a bunch of people that they had, so as to proof them against brainwashing. You might as well proof a guy against suddenly leaving Earth and flying into the moon. It's just not going to happen. Why proof him against it?
There was no such subject, is all of the technique I am trying to get across to you! Not known to the Russians — there's no such subject as brain-washing. I've read their records and what they've done to people. I've studied them carefully. I've studied the best records existing and those records don't even exist in the United States. And they didn't have a subject and they didn't do it but they meant to scare everybody to death with it.
But they achieved one awful, horrible fact when they started this. They achieved something desperate and deadly: They got us to thinking about the subject.
Well, one time — once upon a time there was a Russian country — a Russian empire. I think maybe somebody will say that someday: "Once upon a time there was Russia."
Possessing almost unlimited means at our disposal in terms of research on the whole track and its unlimited means to be able to research every point and development on the whole track for 76 trillion years — that's a lot of data to look over — we went looking for real brainwashing on the theory that if it frightened people, somewhere on the track it must have happened, actually.
Now, if it actually happened, there would be a record of it, and there was. It did happen; there was a record. Billions of years ago they knew how to do it. And the only result that a modern practitioner could get on the subject of brainwashing would be to restimulate it, but that — at that time, the fellow would know more about it and he'd be smarter than he was before.
Male voice: What about Fac One?
Fac One was a Sunday school picnic. Fac One was so mild that I wonder that anybody ever bothered to let himself get aberrated with it. Boy, must he — he must have been short of problems!
No, there are methods of brainwashing people and you could do them right this minute. You can brainwash a man thoroughly in twenty seconds and the HGC could undo it in about an hour. And we could knock him down to being totally blank in a complete amnesia and then brightened right up and looking good.
In other words, the Russian did accomplish something: He made us think. A brainwashing could be done but Russia does not know how to do it.
There are records of brainwashing on the whole track but the only person that would be able to understand or do anything about it is a Scientologist and I never met a Scientologist who was so stupid as to brainwash anybody.
All a psychiatrist is doing with psychiatric treatments is dramatizing later-day brainwashes. He isn't doing a good job of it; it's just a dramatization, not a treatment. I say that advisedly not to be wicked. I mean, that's a technical fact, because the second you try to put him in the patient valence, he goes mad — boom — as is learned by institutions. But the whole subject of brainwashing is too complicated or too simple for anybody to grasp. He'd have to know all about engrams. He'd have to know all about the electronic phenomena of the body and he'd have to be able to group the whole works suddenly and quickly so that it was indecipherable. You got it?
But then, of course, an auditor could come along, run Over and Under, which is the process that straightens it up, and the track would go back together again. Why brainwash anybody? He would benefit perhaps — he would probably be a little bit injured one way or the other because a sudden shock that way would probably upset him. But he would benefit to the degree of having enjoyed an auditor's company for an hour or two.
I will tell you something dreadful. All this sizes up to is just one thing. It's a horrible fact, we might as well face it. It is all but impossible to make a mind worse! And almost anything sincerely done makes it better. But the only direction of change there is, is up as far as treatment is concerned.
In other words, you couldn't make a fellow, by some duress or another, worse. It would take him just thousands of years and lots of Fac Ones and lots of electronics and lots of losses and he — oh, I don't know, two or three times of being an emperor and being dethroned by his own mother and cast in a dungeon while a usurper, you know. It just — it'd just have to be drama, drama, drama, drama, games, games, games, games. You're not going to get that in an auditing room. You're going to get lots of games in an auditing room, but you're not going to get several million years' worth.
And when you finally — when you finally get through with all of this, he can remember it, have that much experience and be much brighter than he ever was before he started playing all these games. So what did he lose? We're here.
The reason why phrenology never changed the IQ of a human being is because they couldn't worsen it. It doesn't worsen! If they had ever tried to better anybody's IQ, they would have found out that was one of the easiest things there is to do. It tells you which direction they were going. Game dramatization — that sort of thing is a dramatization, don't you see? It's not a study, it's dramatizing study.
And so, it's very difficult to make anybody worse. It's very easy to make them better. All you have to do is change somebody. To change somebody is to make him change in the direction of good, better, and he changes. Make him in the direction of bad and he doesn't change.
Now, that's horrible, and I'm sorry and I'm sorry if it violates the favorite tale we used to tell of the little, sweet, innocent sixteen-year old girl who goes out and takes her first drink, meets a guy, he ruins her, he wrecks her life, and so forth, and that is what is wrong with her. I am sorry if it wrecks this kind of a myth. Boy, was she looking for it! You got the idea?
It is so simple, so basically simple to make a person better; it is so difficult to make him worse. The direction that has to be gone is the direction of "toward better" or "toward good." And as that is simpler, it would take a simple-minded fellow such as myself to ever try to go in that direction, it'd be probably because he was too dumb or too lazy to go in the other direction, and that's why we've won.
This whole subject of brainwashing is the greatest hoax of modern times. I hate to have to tell you that, because look at what an exciting game we had all mocked up about it. I wouldn't tell the government down here. Say, "Brain-washing, oh!"
The government shouldn't be robbed of a game like that. It would take us to do it and unfortunately we would be able to mop it up, so of what importance is it? You can't threaten a man with a disease for which there is an instant cure. The funny part of it is that if you really did this type of brainwash of which I am speaking well and thoroughly, he'd probably feel better.
What you do is give him a total amnesia, that's a brainwash, you see. And he wouldn't have any wife to worry about and he wouldn't have any old games to worry about and he wouldn't have anything to worry about and he'd go out and he'd say, "Huh! Oh, what a nice world. I wonder where I got this body? Says here my name is Joe. Well, this is a funny kind of a way to come in, I — but I — here I am. I wonder if I will get educated again?" I mean it'd be this kind of thing. He'd just be in a total amnesia, that's all.
Scientologist would get hold of him, have him pull at least one little image picture out before and a little image picture afterwards and a picture before and a picture afterwards and a picture before and a picture after-wards, and pictures — sluuuuup-urp! He'd say, "Oh, shucks! She nags all the time."
I'll tell you what's serious. I'll tell you what's serious, is having no game at all. That's serious — having nothing at all to do, having no purpose or direction. And having to sit with your existing aberrations inactive! In other words, the state the human race is in right now and from which we are trying very successfully to rescue it.
Thank you.