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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- Games and the Limitations in Games (9ACC-09A) - L541217A
- History and development of processes - QandA Period (9ACC-09B) - L541217B

CONTENTS HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESSES: GAMES AND THE LIMITATIONS IN GAMES
9ACC9A 5412C17, (Renumbered 10 in „The Solution To Entrapment“ cassettes) 10th of 35 talks to students on the 9th Advanced Clinical Course in Phoenix, Arizona between December 6, 1954 and January 21, 1955

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESSES: GAMES AND THE LIMITATIONS IN GAMES

A lecture given on 17 December 1954

Okay. I want to cover with you today a summation of processes, rather designed to give you a history of processing - developments that work.

Now, to go into a processing session here of one hour on processes and cover every process developed in Dianetics and Scientology would be a very interesting feat, very interesting feat. Because, as I have said before, and this has been substantiated, and didn't say it originally, more phenomena and more methods of handling phenomena have been developed in Dianetics and Scientology research in any one month than has developed - been developed in the history of psychology, which is almost a hundred years.

Now, there's a little bit of speedup here. And I'll tell you why that took place. You could - I'd have to really show you old cuffs to give you a complete idea of this. There are more tricks and things about the mind than one could easily count in a very, very long summer. Just count. But nearly all of these tricks are simply complications resulting from a certain series of decisions - denominators, you might say - decisions on the part of a thetan to have a game. And he has made an awful lot of decisions which he holds in common with everybody else.

In processing these - one finds himself up against the ingenuity of the thetan. And he is very ingenious. Actually he is as in - an - as an - in - ingenious today as he ever was. That's a hard thing for an auditor to entirely grasp sometimes. He sees his preclear completely unchanging, completely set, bogged in and black and just having quite a time for himself; and yet this preclear bogged down and all black and no space and so forth, yet has an ability to occlude all ability.

And when you recognize that this is a trick, this is an enormous feat to be able to occlude, hide and suppress the enormous ability of the thetan. You recognize that he's just as able as he ever was in the standpoint of making postulates. The only difference is he's decided to make them in the opposite direction. And he doesn't please us too well because it reminds us of the racehorse that starts out at the starting gate, goes around at the starting gate and runs the race backwards. That's about what this fellow is trying to do. But as far as being able to make up his mind suddenly is concerned, he is still as able as he ever was. Persuading him to make up his mind in a positive direction is quite another thing. He decides that if he turned on any visio, that the small amount of game which he has left would go glimmering. So you show him that he still has visio and off it goes; you show him he still has sonic and off it goes: He is trying to hold on to as much game as he has which in his opinion isn't much. And he does this by making a game out of his - out of his disabilities.

All games have to some degree, a disability connected with them. Someone who goes to the Olympics, gets into an interesting state of affairs, he is trying to perform various physical feats under tremendous limitations. And if he didn't introduce enough limitations, the Olympic Games Commission, of course, would - or whatever you call it - would introduce some more. For instance, they have ten events that have to take place in forty-eight hours; that's been going on for a couple of thousand years. And, this, of course, takes all the top-level athletes and just knocks them flat. Naturally, any one of them could have - could break, perhaps, the world record if permitted, you know, a rest and a breather and so forth, but they have to do all this consecutively in about two days, you know, bang-bang-bang-bang! And naturally at the end of that time they carry them out in stretchers. But there is imposition of a limitation.

Now it's a weird thing that a set of games which are evidently designed to show man that he is powerful and does have strength and can serve as a private soldier in a Greek phalanx, evidently something like this you would say would have more freedom connected with it. No, if they get any freedom at all, they will alter that freedom. If anyone starts to knock too many home runs in baseball, they change the ball. They did that on Babe Ruth, by the way. The baseball they have today is nowhere near as springy or as resilient as it was when Babe Ruth was knocking out home runs. They put another limitation on the game as soon as they find out that winning is too easy. This is a curious thing.

And we find our black five doing it just as easily as the Olympic Games Commission or the „Council of Baseball Rules of How We're Going to Fix Them Up Now.“ We find these people all doing more or less the same thing. They scent the fact that there may be an easy win in progress and so they grab another limitation and shove it into place.

Now, their imagination is what is at fault. Their imagination is grievously at fault, very much so. Because they cannot envision a game which has more motion in it than the game they are now playing. Anyone becomes very afraid at any additional motion to a game. They get it on this basis: They feel that the consequences of the game are necessarily as great as the motion which takes place in the game. The consequences of the game must be as great as the amount of motion in the game - a little law that they dream up, see. In other words, the number of consequences must match the number of possibilities of wins to get a balanced game and to keep people from winning or losing. Both wins and loses end a game, and a person becomes anxious about games being ended and they, therefore, will impose as many consequences as there are potentialities for win. And your black five is playing the game all by himself and he knows there are no other opponents and he knows there's nobody to play a game with. He recognizes this clearly. But actually this is a recognition he might as well have had in his first hour in this universe as now - that he hasn't any actual opponents. And he has turned off his ability to recognize opponents. This is one of the consequences he has added to himself

So if we look over this balance whereby the individual feels that there may - must be as many consequences as there are wins, as many consequences as there are potential motion - if we look this over we recognize that people are trying to hold a balance. And in trying to hold this balance, any advance toward more wins being countered by more consequences keeps actually, multiplying the consequences. And so we have very complicated games. And any one of these innumerable games, such as „I will be an anthropologist and guess about the past instead of simply remembering how I did make a stone axe.“ The - the game of „I am going to sit here and get this information if it kills me,“ you see; this sort of a game and so forth, whereas one knows the information. Well, now, how do we - how do we work this so that it does come up scale and more motion can be added to a game? Well, the basic thing would be of course, to create again in the individual a sufficiency of imagination. That would be the first and foremost requisite here. But how would we go about doing that?

Well, if we are fighting this scarcity of games, then inventing games would be far more important. But we discover something quite interesting. We look at two-way communication and we discover in two-way communication that originated communication is the greatest scarcity there is. And somebody originates a communication and it falls into the lap of all the disabilities of the thetan and the next thing you know, why, he's a very unhappy man because somebody has invented another game. So that he, perforce, is trying to slow down this invention of games.

The one way to have no-game - everyone recognizes this with great clarity - is simply to keep on inventing games at such a rapidity that no one can keep up with them. People have accused me of this and have completely missed on this one, that actually I was playing the same game I started to play. I have not been playing any different game or dreaming up a different game. This game was started a long time ago and is still going forward. They get stuck in the particularities of phenomena and so on. All right. And I don't! Phenomena I have learned is easy to come by.

Now, here we have this tremendous number of complexities. Now, if you recognize that a thetan has no mass, meaning or mobility and that all these things have to be invented by him, if we recognize that this is the case, then we get into one of the more interesting phases. We recognize then that every complication is a via on a communication line. Cause, distance, effect, with the rest of the horseshoe in the answer and the acknowledgment, and then cause, distance, effect with the answer and the acknowledgment on the other side of the horseshoe; this is all very well - two-way communication - but we have, sitting in the middle of all this, the idea that an individual who goes into thorough and complete communication blows all his games, just like that! So, we have cause, via, effect, and that is the communication formula of nearly everyone alive today: cause, via, effect. Got the idea?

Well, now, the a - if the preclear's formula for communication is cause, via, effect, answer, via, acknowledgment - pardon me, cause, via, effect, via, answer, via, acknowledgment, that's - that's his formula for communication - without the second horseshoe! We can understand that he is trying to keep from a full and complete, wide-open communication in all directions. We discover that this is his - this is his baby.

Now, the second that we start to open up his communication lines, we start to run into these enormous numbers - this enormous number of vias. And each one of these vias at some time or another now or then, has been a game. You see that? The way you make a game is actually, the best formula in the world is to misfire somewhere on the communication formula. And you've got a game immediately.

All right. Now, if we have - if we have each one of these vias for seventy-four, seventy-six trillion years - it adds up for some people seventy-four, some people with seventy-six-trillion years of physical universe - if we - if we have this accumulation of vias we can see very well that he was probably inventing a new one at least every day in - early on the track. You see? And latterly has been much less inventive and has simply been coasting along and only inventing a new one once every month or two.

Like, you'll find out, if you plot your preclear, that only a few weeks ago he made some sort of counter-postulate to himself: „Everything I seem to do is, you know, backwards; I say I'm going to do one thing, it's something else“ or - . You'll find he's said something like this to himself He's just decided on a new via and then not letting himself in on it, you see. And we get the - the idea here of these - this total communication lag of seventy-four, seventy-six trillion years, you see, where always - got some new vias introduced in there someplace or another which makes just more and more lag.

Now, if we were to discover the basic communication of the physical universe and find the primary via, you see, why we'd start to blow this whole thing. Well, actually we did with „survive.“ And it starts to blow this whole sequence of vias. The dynamic principle of existence is survive. The one thing you cannot prove is that you will survive forever. Think it over for a moment. How would you prove that? You'd survive forever, wouldn't you? See, it's an unprovable, unendable game. The primary via is, is wait and see - what? Whether or not you survive forever, of course!

Well, eventually you just get tired of that game a little bit so you start proving that you didn't survive and so forth; but it's sitting on the basic postulate that you are going to. And you haven't changed your first postulate when you put in the second postulate and you get an interesting set of stuff In the printed edition of The Creation of Human Ability, the Axioms and so forth that demonstrate this, go along with it, are all there. You can study them. But what we're interested in right this minute is this business of research and development of Dianetics and Scientology. And this has been the research and development of demonstration of factors involved in life and its processes, activities and goals. Now, with this research and development has been entirely based upon a very one-sided view which is why it is winning. It isn't trying to make a new game, such as a game between me and the faculty by which I prove conclusively that the professor of Bumpology at the University of Squawdump is wrong in placing a comma in the fourth paragraph. I mean, this is - no game connected with it.

And this is about the dirtiest trick that ever got played on the human race because it's something you can't tackle headlong with any security at all. Because no barriers immediately get put up. You don't get the automatic game responses that should be put up immediately You see what I mean? I mean, what we should be involved with right now is a knockdown, drag-out fight with some school of psychology or psychologists in general. We kid about it, but you notice that we're not doing anything about it. Well, the reason that we're not doing anything about it is because the second we did, we'd simply erect a new series of barriers and we would have a new game and a new via.

All right. What is a language? Let's go into this now. What is a language? A language is a set of communication symbols which each one, themselves, are a complication. Now, in view of the fact that we're only studying the symbol level of the Know to Mystery Scale - we're just studying just this one level - let's just look at how many phenomena there might be in just that one level and we get a good grasp on this. There are about three hundred thousand words in English. That means there's that many complications which can be communicated as complications. That's quite a lot, isn't it?

Now, the - that's one of those great big dictionaries - there's that many different words in it and each one means just a little bit different than all others. Now, if you go into the Oxford dictionary you get all the obsolete words too and all the misspelled ones and all the foreign words in common usage and all the derivations of words and you get an awful lot of games. So here is a very easy-to-observe, easy-to-duplicate game, isn't it? The game of language. Which in itself contains, well let's be reasonable, for most people a vocabulary of three-hundred thousand words is an unthinkably large vocabulary. Actually the average writer in the English language has a vocabulary of about fifteen thousand words. The average college student uses only about four hundred words. But that's still a lot of complications, isn't it? A tremendous number of complications there to play with. Even four hundred complications is more than you would care to address as an auditor in a quiet auditing session some afternoon.

Now, if we think of each one of these words as a complication and if by complication we mean a via and if the vias are there simply to make a game, we realize that each one of these words is a kind of a little game all by itself. And then we recognize that there would be at the widest stretch of it about fifteen thousand games the average person is playing. That's a lot of games, isn't it? Fifteen thousand games the average person is playing, if he's very intellectual and speaks the English language very well. And that's why it's so easy for somebody by - like Korzybski to come along and make a game out of language itself That's even why it's so easy for me to come along and say, „Look at those beautiful phrases in that prenatal bank.“ What a game that makes! Actually, it's a highly therapeutic game, but at the same time, look at its complications. Because we're not talking now about the fifteen thousand words, or even the four hundred words; we're talking about combinations of words into aberrative language. And this, of course, shoots the moon. Let's say the average vocabulary of four hundred is simply put into a lot of aberrative combinations and we probably have thirty to forty thousand aberrative combinations.

We started, one time, in the first Foundation, to catalog aberrative phrases. And as a matter of fact, you may have seen a list that was partially compiled of this. But I was highly enthusiastic about this because it seemed to me to be a good idea, somebody to turn out a dictionary like this. But they came in after a while and they said to me, „Hey, you know, this list is getting awfully long.“

So I said: Just a moment, let's take a look at this. And I said: Let's see the average number of words known by a college student is four hundred, and let's just take four hundred as a factor here and say that the - looking down your list there - the average number of words in one of these phrases is about three and a half for all of these phrases (the half, I guess, would be an „uh“) and now let's take the possibilities of combination of these four hundred. And I started to write the multiple figure, just on this, and it was something that had to be expressed practically with binary digits. I mean, it's a fantastically large number. Take four hundred words and combine them, randomly, three and a half times, see. Ooooh!

And just as an example of this, I wrote down several words on slips of paper and started to shove them around on the desk blotter. And out of these, just several slips, you see, we just - combination after combination after combination. Of course, each one of these plays a more complicated game than the last. Gorgeous, isn't it? The number of vias which are introduced.

Well, that is simply no more and no less than the symbol level. And if we speak now of the symbol level as a good sound measure, as the only measure, why we might have some win in sight even so; if we were just going to knock out each and everyone of these word combinations. But unfortunately, thinkingness can express more than symbols can express; and that's just above that. And the number of combinations of effort or form available, which is just above that, gets a little more complicated.

Male voice: Yes.

And if you go to Hollywood the numbers of kinds of sex involved becomes also very complicated, doesn't it? The number of sexual symbols, activities, and so forth. Hum? So all this begins to look like we're chewing off more than we can easily bite, unless we have the key to all of these riddles. And the key to the riddles is the one thing that nobody would have expected and that is that: The necessity to have a game is a necessity to cut communications.

Well, let's take the most elementary form of that. We take a fellow who wants to play a game and, he wants to play a game called „conversation.“ And he says to somebody, he said, „How are you?“

Now do you realize that he has to cut his communication till the other fellow hears and answers? Now theoretically, if you - if a scarcity of communication is very bad, we can recognize something very good here: that all you'd have to do is keep up a steady flow of communication and if you'd have to keep this communication formula just rolling from all quarters and constantly and there wouldn't be any such thing as aberration, would there? But you have to have a barrier to have a conversation, you have to have a barrier to have a game and the thirst for barriers is tremendous.

Now, every game has posed terminals and a weenie. This communication particle (the weenie) which flows around or gets changed or new particles or series of particles or something like that. It's something these two terminals are trying to acquire. Terminal A: now we're talking about cause as having mass and effect as having mass, you see. And we would have two terminals there; and what are they trying to do? They're trying to acquire this communication particle, this weenie of some sort or another. One of them originates a communication particle and it goes to the other one and then it is changed in some fashion or another and it comes back and it is acknowledged.

Well, that is a very easy flow. But the amount of change of that communication particle, the number of ways it can be shunted before it gets to effect when leaving cause, the number of ways it can then get buried and not answered, and the number of ways cause can avoid - original cause can avoid - acknowledging any answer given, all themselves go to make up a tremendously interesting game. And when we get „B“ as a terminal not originating, we really get a complicated game. That's a real complicated game. So that we have somebody out in the open and somebody very much in mystery as one of the game forms, which is one of the favorite game forms of this universe.

Now we're so used to seeing a football game where the eleven men stand up at one end of the field, visible, and eleven men stand up at the other end of the field, visible, and the weenie (the football) gets thrown around and viaed and shunted and so forth, that we rather tend to think of games as consisting of two known terminals. But let's take the game played in the society. Let's take something less artificial than a football game. That's an artificial war because everybody knows they're all good friends anyhow. They - nobody going to get killed, they're not sincere. We also know that the boys will all be through with their alma mater. And by the way professional football is nowhere near as successful as college football; that is to say, people go to see college games. Well, actually I won't go see a college game because I know most of those players are on the payroll.

I was, by the way, the first boy in America to bust that story to the print - to the newspapers: professional paid football players on college teams. I didn't get expelled for it, my fellow editor got expelled. But he didn't really get expelled, he just simply got disgusted. And he is now one of the top sports editors of America. But the two of us found that college, the college - our own college - was paying, considerable salary under the name of scholarships and bonuses and things like that, to good football players in order to make a good football team. And they were getting in more money at the stadium for every game than they were getting in through the tuition window. And this was an interesting story, we thought. So we broke it in the college paper and broke it over the Scripps-Howard news chain, which I was associate editor of the paper and my pal was also a sports reporter, as well as a student, on the paper.

Well, now why would that story make a shock? It would merely demonstrate the insincerity of the game. These fellows are being paid to play. In other words, it's really not a college game, it isn't college spirit, it isn't the viciousness and earnestness of a bunch of college boys at all; it's just how much paycheck is there in it and, therefore, it is a mercenary game, so the sincerity of the game would be then doubted.

Now, I used to go down into Virginia when I wanted to see football. I'm sure the boys in professional football played very, very good and vicious football. It's just that it isn't quite as sincere as it might be. You see, I mean, you know why they're there, they're really not representing anything. There isn't a big background to this push. I used to go down into Virginia and watch high schools playing football, and boy, that's football, that's murder. Those boys get so mad at the other school and so on. So it's definitely - definitely here you have two terminals at work. But you have an enormous amount of sincerity involved, in this and it makes quite a game. It's just the definiteness or the amount of purpose.

So amount of purpose is apparently a deciding factor in the game. How dedicated an individual is to this game: that is the criteria. And of course if the basic game were survive, naturally you would get this as a very fine game indeed. You talk about dedication and sincerity; this fellow has got to go the entire of forever in order to prove the point that he has at least stayed with the game. And that's quite a game, isn't it?

But, therefore, we have a tendency to think of game - because it's talked down to us when we're little kids - to think of game as something that is light, airy and has no real point. And we think of life and sincerity and dedication and so forth as something which is grim and very serious and so on. Well, trying to make this game called MEST universe very serious is a hard job! You recognize that the fellow must know basically that when he kicks off he's always got another chance of one kind or another somewhere. He simply backs out. There isn't any single black five - and you can remember this when somebody is terribly upset - we had a case like this very recently. Somebody was terribly upset because his wife was going to die and he wanted to make sure that this girl did not just - you know, she was dying of cancer and there was nothing to be done about it, too far gone and all that - and he wanted to make sure that this person didn't get stuck in the body or something of this sort. And his worry was entirely foolish. The trick is to try to get stuck in one. And a person is successful at that, they feel pretty good about it. The moment this person died why, this person was separate, and that's all. Because the body machinery itself would stop cooperating in pulling in the energy masses to which the thetan was holding.

You follow this? The moment the body stops cooperating in the contest, why, the thetan - it's almost impossible for him to stay within the confines and the space of the body. Out he goes, swish! Now occasionally, under great shock and duress, he will join the body entity for a short time, few generations, and then all of a sudden why, there will be another shock of some sort or another or a peaceful death or something and he will back out and say, „My golly, what am I doing here!“ But sooner or later, it all comes apart again.

Now, what's this about a hidden terminal I was talking about? It's very - it makes a very, very satisfactory game. Well, that is this seriousness trying to be added to it, you see, this mystery. Now, when you stop communication as often as it is stopped in life, you're bound to sooner or later get on the tail end of one of these communication horseshoes a mystery, no answer at all, you see, no reply or no acknowledgment. So that we get a game, which is a rather complex game, of a known terminal versus an unknown terminal. And instead of an unknown cause, we get an unknown effect point.

And that would be police and criminals - just as an example of this - police and criminals. You see the cops around here, they are very visible, aren't they? Well, they're - they think they're at the causative end of the arrest line, but they're actually the effect end of the crime line, aren't they? And crime itself is out of sight, invisible and unknown. You see what a - what a dizzy pair of horseshoes this makes? And so we get these cops rushing around like mad and eventually, by the way, a cop will question somebody about this. He'll try to - he'll put something there to keep from having a mystery there continuously and forever and so on, and he eventually starts to pick upon honest citizens. And you get this - this reversal of police societies.

Now, you've probably, on the track somewhere, run into a police society or two, where the - all of the honest citizens, you might say, or anybody who was constructive in the society was a criminal: definition of criminal. This fellow would do something or something of the sort. And definition of a non-criminal in this particular thing was somebody who would only be dedicated to destruction and mopping it all up and shooting everybody in sight.

We had an example of this here on Earth, not very long ago, when the German Reich turned into a criminal state. Hitler, for instance, could not even vaguely succeed to the rule of Germany without the assistance of the entire German criminal population. This criminal population turned into a Schutzstaffel and we had anybody who was productive in Germany, even vaguely, being immediately victimized, promptly.

Well, the police would look, you see, for the unknown terminal and they'd look for the unknown terminal, look for the unknown terminal, until finally, they would elect one; anything that was handy. But that is an end of a game; that ends a game to a very, very marked degree and starts another game. So that the game is we have a mysterious terminal and it's our purpose and desire to push this mysterious terminal into view, and if we fail to put it into view, we will then substitute for the mysterious terminal an entirely different terminal.

And so we have psychoanalysis. We have Freud being very rational, thorough and a highly competent investigator in 1884. Marvelous piece of investigation. He was doing - he was working with Breuer, they were discovering the unconscious release buttons and they were making people well; free association just without further qualification was being undertaken and it was very successful.

But Freud, in 1894, all of a sudden raised the unknown terminal into a known position. See how he - how that went? He actually was chasing an unknown; a hidden terminal, a hidden terminal, a hidden terminal, and he failed often enough to find this hidden terminal in cases, so that at length, it was necessary for him to put a known terminal into view; whether true or false. That's mostly because he was playing this game with an enormous amount of sincerity and seriousness. It became a life and death matter with this man that he place into view something. You get the feeling of desperation. For somebody to come up at the end of the Victorian age with something as highly antipathetic to the public as the libido theory, which he announced in 1894, well to less - a less able, less fast-footed man this simply would have ended his career. It didn't end his career, simply because it was the end of the Victorian age.

Now, here we had an example of this, of a known terminal being shove - I mean, pardon me - an unknown terminal being suddenly labeled and shoved into view without the unknown terminal being shoved into view, you see? We've got to have a terminal there, so we put one there and we say this is the reason and cause for everything. And then, within - within a very short time he was apologizing all over the place and writing all sorts of books and so forth on this to explain that sexual really meant social,- way off - see, and let's qualify this and make it a more acceptable terminal. He devoted nearly all of this time thereafter to making this libido theory an acceptable theory; which is the other thing these people do. And that in research and investigation has almost always been the end product: is trying desperately to make this answer, now shoved into view, intensely acceptable. And that is the whole dedication.

You will discover people around, all too often - Well, we had a boy in here the other day from San Francisco, who was spending most of his time, just this, he was spending most of his time trying to make this sudden shown-up terminal acceptable.

Well, the way to handle it in research and investigation is to be less eager to find that as the known terminal and much more careful in scouting around to find out if there isn't another terminal there too. And it is to this that you devote your time, not to convincing people that this terminal has been found. You don't spend your time convincing anybody about anything, you just keep looking. That's a game in itself. But here we have - here we have an actual condition which has resulted in the society in - here on Earth particularly - where the eagerness of - you know, „It's got to be serious, it's got to be sincere,“ and so forth - culminates in - pardon me, it's very, very well assisted. Earth is not the heaviest gravity planet that ever existed but its gravity will do. It'll do. And we find that here on this planet, and if not on many other planets, that the effort toward sincerity has culminated in a loss of a game. Well today, today we look over this very easily, very quick view here, we find something fascinating. We find that the barriers are all here. So. You don't ins infer there's a game simply because the barriers are there, by the way. Game requires actual punitive action and continuing communication. Here are all the barriers. But here is an Earth filled with automatic machinery at every hand and all of it very complicated too, believe me, so that if you moved out - let's say we did in or did for the carburetor plants of the world. Wow! Oooh!

I was fascinated, one day, to discover that the game has become so particular in the field of soldering, just soldering, that a new company entered in some machinery which was soldered as a difference from other such units and so on, and their equipment was just falling to pieces left and right. They had failed to discover how soldering is really done. And we find that there are only a few companies in the United States and only a few people in the United States who really have the big know-how on how to solder up a great mass of wires and tubes and equipment and so forth. And that it is quite a particular job. So that when a company undertook this sort of thing without consulting the people who really knew this game of soldering, why this equipment just was unworkable. And they finally had to break down and farm out manufacture to companies who were used to doing this kind of work. Well, gee whiz, you know that's getting awfully specialized, that's getting awfully particular!

A fellow is as able in playing a game as he can, under duress, and if he has to, play a number of roles. Now, we find the British machinist is not so far graduated away from the handmade age that he has forgotten how to wear a number of hats. Similarly the Spaniard, Spanish mechanic has not gone so far from this. For instance, there are several incidents I could mention of very complicated pieces of machinery being missing, just utterly missing anywhere in the country and just Lord knows how many air hours and how much complication away, and I have had British and Spanish machinists, both alike, without turning a hair suddenly turn over to the lathe and the drill press and the file and go to work. And in one of these cases, they turned out the complete assembly for the steering gear of a car. Have you any idea of the pitch of worm gears and the intricate fittings of that sort of thing?

Well, the other day, here in this country, a machinist found out that he didn't have a long enough - pardon me, a short enough bolt. Every bolt he had there was over a quarter of an inch too long to fit the hole. So he didn't finish the job! It was not his business to cut bolts. Well now, he was a long time away from the tradition of somebody who would just make a bolt, see. And so he didn't even think of cutting the end of the bolt off. He waits for everything to be manufactured. In the absence of a manufactured product, he simply stands there and looks at the thing broken down and says, „There's nothing I can do about it.“ Requires the manufactured product.

The other day, an electrical motor I saw taken back clear across the United States to be rewound. There was nothing uncommon about this electric motor at all. They rewind them in shops all over town. But this particular agency was not aware of this. They thought that a motor when it was burned out was burned out and that was the end of it and they had to ship it back to the factory, so they did so. And this whole factory operates its agencies in the United States like this. And the name of that company is General Electric. Motors don't get rewound anymore in their agencies, they get sent back to the factory. Well, they might have had some - lots of reason for this but, boy, this starts to make an awfully complicated game, doesn't it? Nobody in those agencies can wear any other hat than „Sign on the dotted line; move in the equipment. If the proper bolts are present, bolt it down.“ This is not what you might say fluid. You don't have an easily movable game.

Now, we take medicine today. The general practitioner is getting so rare that they even write full feature-length stories about him in Look magazine. He's getting this rare. One he found was found to exist in the middle of New York City and they wrote this whole article about him. Old Doctor Pottenger, the very great old man of tuberculosis, who has startled the medical profession many, many times by simply going up to somebody and putting his hand on the fellow's chest and saying, „Oh, my, two spots!“ and so forth. Unassisted by x-rays or anything else, diagnosed it. By the way, they put - this was - got to be such a hot point in the medical profession, they put up twenty-five people with or without and with varying degrees of tuberculosis on a stage before a medical conference and old Doc Pottenger went down the whole line, simply put his hands on their chests, one after the other, and diagnosed exactly - corroborated by x-rays - and exceeding x-rays to this degree: he wrote down the length of time each one of the people had left, you see, if he had tuberculosis. And his prognostication of two of the cases was exactly accurate, whereas all other prognostications were wrong on it. In other words, he was doing a better job simply by touching their chests. This old man said to me one time - I knew him, he was a nice guy - he said to me one time, he said: „The trouble with the medical profession today is specialization.“ He said, „It's all I can do,“ he said, „to put up with this ridiculous position in which I find myself of being an expert and a specialist in tuberculosis.“ The old man could whittle up tibias and carve out appendixes and cure sinusitis and do a lot of other things, you see, but the public pressure on the subject of tuberculosis simply kept him anchored in that particular field.

Now, when a fellow loses his ability to wear a number of hats, we might as well say the sentence has too many words. When a fellow loses his ability to wear a number of hats he of course, loses his ability. That is when a fellow loses his ability. We might as well put the period there. That's how you lose ability. You get so specialized, you get so fixated on known or unknown terminals, you see, that no flexibility can occur thereafter and so no change of game can occur. And when you have everybody getting fixated upon highly specialized terminals, you get this very interesting condition, this tremendously fascinating condition: They're fixed on their own terminals, not on anybody else's, and by definition a game requires two players. See that?

Female voice: Uh-huh.

All right. So we have, in this world today, we have some interesting bric-a-brac, tokens, lying around from old games. Every kid out here, if you were to give him a pair of big, holstered six-guns and so forth, he'd be a very, very happy boy. That's just a token of an ancient game. The fellows when they are taught medicine, they know they're going to specialize in a certain direction and so they - everybody makes a lick and a promise of teaching them something else. That's a token of old games, the game of the general practitioner you see, still being dramatized. We have enormous numbers of tokens and amongst them is the battleship, the destroyer, the cruiser and the aircraft carrier. Amongst these tokens we have here on Earth - old games which will never again be played - definition of a token. The weenie of an old game, the weenie or terminal of an old game which will never again be played. That's a token. That's, by the way, anything Freud meant by tokens is explained by that and anything anybody else ever meant by these things. We find this fellow smoking a pipe and we find out his grandfather smoked a pipe and his grandfather's dead and he liked his grandfather very much, that's a token, first-book token.

All right. We have airplanes, we have bombers, we have bomber pilots, we have infantrymen, we have rifles. The use of an infantryman, of course, is not entirely limited to fighting battles. The infantryman is also dedicated to sweeping the streets, barracks and things like that. So we could say offhand that he has not terribly lost - completely lost the terminal. Somebody's liable to come up brightly and say, „Well, he can always be used as a police force.“

Actually an army is the means by which a government keeps its own population in line. That's to a marked degree true. But no army is ever trained as a police force. These boys are not trained as police and they would not even vaguely be effective against the local citizenry. They could shoot all the citizens with artillery, you see, or they could level all the houses, but this is not being a police force. And turned loose in an area to be a police force, I would say that the most notable failures of all time were chalked up in World War II, where military government was suddenly usurped by a company or a regiment or a battalion commander or something of this sort, of an area. The amount of no government and no policing which immediately ensued was gorgeous to behold. In the first place, could you imagine using an M-1 in the streets of the city? The thing has a killing carrying range of a couple of miles. See? This is - becomes completely idiotic. In the first place, the bullet would go through the man you were shooting. All of their weapons, to this degree, really are weapons designed to be used against other armies and other infantrymen. In the absence of other armies and other infantrymen then we must consider all these weapons a token.

There are many other things which are interesting tokens here on Earth. The - well as far as that's concerned, the tank. Anyone of these very high-priced items which is still being built madly by the various governments of Earth is completely obsolete. And I do mean completely now. We could have said with some reservation this - if we were talking now in - in 1946, yes, there's a possibility - was a possibility in 1946 such weapons, such tokens would again be used in the game called war. But not today. Not today. In the first place, the guided missile is sufficiently well developed as to completely throw aside any possibility of using bombers if you were doing a serious attack upon the enemy. Therefore if - the guided missile, furthermore, cannot be intercepted by any man-propelled plane. It can be intercepted by a small rocket which is another little guided missile. So we have an automatic machine fighting an automatic machine.

But where do tanks come in on this? Somebody says, „Well it's always the infantry that's got to pin down the territory.“ What are you going to put this infantry into, may I ask? Completely two-foot-thick lead shields so they can walk through the area that's been bombed! I mean, what is the - what are you going to use this infantry for? Who's - who's going to - ?

Now, they're up there at the level of the continent buster. There are only a few people playing this game. You could say the United States Senate and, just to be polite, but the truth of the matter is that if the United States Senate were asked to deliberate on whether or not war would - we have never declared, by the way, an aggressive war to amount to anything - if the United States Senate were to debate or be permitted to debate on whether or not we were going to attack Russia, the signal would be adequately telegraphed forward to Russia so that the US would be hit first. So, you see, this couldn't occur so the US Senate is not a player anymore. They are not players and neither is Congress. Very possibly the president - president of the United States probably a player - possibly. But the probability is he has this all set up automatically in some fashion or another, in case he's out playing golf or something. And we find then that there would probably be the people who made, and the people who will service or who do service, and the people who built the launching platforms for, and the people who will touch the actual button of' the nuclear weapon, are part of this game. But is it a game?

In the first place - in the first place as we look at it as a game, we find out that these people could not be considered nationalists. You see, they wouldn't be playing on the side of a national team really, because to loose such a nuclear weapon today, would be to endanger and practically ruin forever and aye the atmosphere of Earth. So I would say it was these people versus the human race. But the human race isn't fighting back. It isn't even offering even vaguely a resistance.

There has to be some sort of resistance. It's not even really trying to cut communications with this. It's not really doing anything with regard to this missile. Here and there some guy like myself happened to know a little more about it. Somebody else would sound off about it occasionally, just about the existence of this thing. But that's not a game. It would probably get up into a game twenty-four hours after they declared it, if any of us survived. I know I would take the most peculiar and delicious delight if I knew the current roster at the time, and if I were left alive, in going and finding these boys, because I would still find their flesh not entirely impervious to a high-velocity explosive bullet. But I would be willing to utilize this token. Now that sounds very bloody and very vicious on my part, but remember it would be after the fact that I would be willing to do it. Because it would be very silly to do it before the fact. They'd just hire somebody else. So it's not a good game at all. It's not a good game.

The game the nations were depending on to keep their populaces interested was a game called war. And that game is over. It's the - it's the boys who press the buttons and handle the stuff - the boys who press the buttons versus the rest of the human race. But the human race isn't fighting back and isn't even a target, you might say. These fellows, if they stop and thought for a moment, are not trying to obliterate the human race. The human race would just kind of get in the road. So you see what sort of a game this is?

Well, here you have all the barriers, the tanks; you see you've got all of the gimmicks, the bric-a-brac of games, tokens of games lying around, which makes people think that a game must be in progress for somebody somewhere. See? And yet is there a game in progress? Well, you could still say yes, there are some minor games in progress; there are some minor games of one kind or another going on. There's always a game when there's two guys alive - there will still be a game of some sort going on between them. But it's a minor game. There is no real fourth dynamic game then, unless somebody comes up and stands up and represents the fourth dynamic and takes these other boys by the scruff of the neck - who are, in this case, the unknown terminal, you see, the hidden terminal - and does something about this that's very, very active and brutal. In other words, a game could be made, but no game exists.

And there is your - I'm - the only reason I'm talking about this is I haven't the, actually, the least notion right now of doing anything on that particular level in any of the patterns I have outlined. There wouldn't be any point in doing any of this. They'd just hire somebody else and they'd get snarled up in some other fashion; because there are too many guys around who can't play a game. See, they have all the bric-a-brac of the game but they're not playing a game.

That - by the way, if you categorize a rough case just on this basis only, you say, „this boy can't play a game.“ In other words, he can't do 8-C, he can't do this, he can't play a game. He does this with protest, he wants to know why, and so on. A preclear processes as easily as he can still play a game. All right. Your black five has all of the barriers, all of the spaces, all of the hidden terminals around with which to play a game; and he's not playing one. He really isn't playing a game if he's playing a completely unknown game, because all terminals are unknown, including himself. So there'd be nobody playing this game. Here is a complete playing field around which we have a ball rolling occasionally, you see. You see what he has done? He has actually ended the game and he has all the bric-a-brac for the game and he has tremendous tokens of game, but he doesn't have a game - not a game by which he would be willing to unveil some of his abilities. His perforce action is to narrow his abilities sufficiently that he will again get a game. Now understand this: He thinks if he narrows his abilities just a little bit more, he will get a game. The bottom is right there, you see. He's got lots of barriers. There's no game going on. And therefore he doesn't feel like he's alive.

And there is the definition of being alive: having a game.

You want to be alive, have a game. That's about all there can be said about it. The amount of communication that an individual does determines directly the amount of life he experiences. He does not experience any life if he does not communicate beyond simply sitting still someplace off on the side. He could do this, but he wouldn't have a game nor would he feel very alive. I heard of one silly government sitting out in one galaxy that simply sat there and knew everything there was to know everyplace that was going on in the galaxy. They did nothing about it. You see, they had total communication and no game.

The case that you protest against most often has shut all communications and no game. He's trying to shut all communications and no game. So having total communication and no game is equally undesirable as having total barriers and no communication.

Okay.

(end of lecture)