Thank you.

This evening we will have some Group Processing. Right now I'd like to talk to you a little bit more, if you want.

Audience: Yes.

We have quite a bit of data here in Dianetics 1955! which is compressed — pretty thoroughly compressed, actually. It deals, basically and primarily, how-ever, with two things: It deals with the existence of the energy-production unit which we call life, on the one hand. And it deals as deeply into mechanics as the ARC triangle, on the other hand.

We're looking at two things here. We are looking at the production unit of space, energy, matter, time; and we are looking at, on the other hand, the thing which produces them. And this is quite a trick. I don't know where that puts us, really, because there isn't anything else.

We are dealing at once with quality and quantity. And the only time anybody, in studying existence, has made a serious error or has gotten into trouble, has been when he has confused quality and quantity. In the physical universe we can have things which have both quality and quantity. We see a car. That is a quantity of matter occupying a quantity of space with the quality known as car. See? So there's quality and quantity.

So here we have a form. We have a form and we have something here, say this piece of furniture here, and it has a quantity of space and a quantity of material and it's occupying a certain quantity of time (measurable) and it has the quality of being a piece of furniture. And it's thee and me which assign the quality to it. And it was thee and me which put the quantity into it. We made the quantity possible for it now to occur. But you've done that, and that's across a nice long period of time. So all you have to do now is assign qualities to it.

And we find the essential difference between life in a pure state, if you want to call it that, and life in a mechanical state. We have in life, before it has produced anything or when it's just stepped back from producing something, we have it in a state where it is totally quality. It is all quality. You see, it has abilities. It doesn't have quantities of abilities; it has just that — just abilities. It doesn't have quantity of time, it has the ability of making or experiencing time but not a quantity of time.

When the fellow comes around and he says to you, "(pant, pant) I haven't got enough time to do anything. (pant) I just don't know how I'll have any time to do it. (pant, pant)" He's being an object. And he's not being very alive.

Because that individual has the potentiality, the quality, of making time. And thinking, then, that he has a quantity of time to occupy, is something like the Fleischmann yeast plant itself feeling bad because it's not a yeast cake.

Now, here we have something, then, that is capable, able and has quality but which does not have any quantity. And this is a very strange thing for somebody who is entirely quantity oriented, who thinks in terms of money, in terms of so many dollars. Money is a fait accompli, not something which you can make or create or become possessed more of. Money is just so much, you see? His idea of security will be "How much money do I have in the bank?" That's his idea of security. That's an awfully poor idea of security.

I'll tell you how secure he is. He is secure as he can bring into existence, wealth. And when he loses the ability to bring wealth into existence, even though he has saved a great deal of money, although he has a lot of quantities of money scattered around, he's liable to find himself a pauper.

Now, there is such a thing as a fellow who has a million dollars in the bank and who is a pauper. There's many a fellow been picked up in some old decayed house full of newspapers and bric-a-brac with a hundred thousand dollars in a tin can sitting on a shelf, dead because he hasn't eaten for three or four weeks. See? This fellow then — his security or longevity really didn't depend on that hundred thousand dollars.

Well now, we look at it from a highly — what we call practical, sense and we say, 'Well, that's all very well for you to talk, but it'd be awfully nice right this minute to have a couple of thousand bucks in my pocket."

Well, why haven't you? It's because you can think in terms of "It would be awfully nice to have," saying at the same time, "I don't have," saying at the same time, "To some degree there is some obstacle between two thousand bucks and me."

Now, if you think it over, you realize that money is the attention unit of the society. That's about all it is. They scatter these attention units around, and society does the astonishing, the marvelous, the fantastic trick of actually taking pieces of paper — not any longer silver and certainly not gold, (that would be too nice for everybody to have, so they don't issue that anymore) — and they take this stuff and they actually can convert it. You take a whole stack of these pieces of paper, you know, and you go bing, and you got an automobile. That's a magic of some sort or another, and it is so magicful that people become criminals and acquire the automobile without making the money go boomp. That's what's known as criminality.

But on the upper band, the impossibly high band from our standpoint at this time, an individual theoretically could be sufficiently able not to make the money go boomp, but to simply say, "Automobile zing." And you'd have an automobile. See, that's an impossible height.

But by the introduction of a via called money into every transaction, then a group can monitor the individual of the group by giving him, on rations, just so much of this stuff which is convertible, whoomp, into automobiles and food.

So, by introducing this via, you put in a barrier; a barrier to acquisition, a barrier to havingness. It's not a bad barrier. Did you ever play an old game, years and years and years ago, called Monopoly? That's a fantastic game. People sit up all night long, converting these little houses and little pieces of paper just as though that wasn't what they were doing all day long, too. That wasn't a game, that was a dramatization.

Well, here we have — here we have, then, a game called money. And a game is something in which two or more life units — get that now — two or more life units to be a game. It becomes a stuck flow if you have less than two life units playing this game. And it becomes nothing at all if there are no life units around. But we have a game defined as an activity engaged upon by two or more life units. And that's — we just define it quickly, loosely; we could say that's a game. All right.

Now, these two or more life units, in order to have a game, also have to have some barriers. The first barrier is space. Although they might coincidentally occupy exactly the same space. And they can, you know, occupy the same space and still communicate. The perfect communication is not no-communication; that's death. The perfect communication is total communication. And this would only be achieved if you were occupying exactly the same space as somebody else. But if you have total communication, you've got no game.

So the first step of the game is Joe and Bill occupying the same space and in good communication and good affinity and everybody all happy and cheerful, and they've got good agreement and everything's fine. They're going to have a game now.

Well, Bill says to Joe or Joe says to Bill, "Hey you. You get over there. I'll stay over here. And we'll have this much space between us. And then I will say, "How are you?' And you say, "I'm fine." And I'll nod. And then you say, "How are you?' And I will say, "I'm fine.' And then you nod. Okay? Let's go."

And the cycle starts. We've got a communication going. So actually the first entrance into mechanics is communication. But it's a game. And as long as a game is going to continue, and as long as you occupy a universe created for or by games, and as long as you're alive, and as long as you're part of that game in any way, shape or form, you have to go on communicating. Why? The second you do, you will continue action and life. And the second you don't, you'll be dead and you will fall out of the game.

But to make a more complicated game, we break or interrupt this communication. And it makes a much more complicated game as any program director knows who has just had his program cut in half to announce the fact that: "Bulletin — President Eisenhower has just sneezed." You see, this type of interruption — that makes a game. He goes around afterwards and he says, "What's the idea, coming in and interrupting my broadcast that way?"

And the fellow says, 'Well we had to, it was an important public bulletin."

And he says, 'Well," he says, "you shouldn't have done it."

And they, "Yow yow yow yow yow," at each other.

'Well, who's program director around here anyway?"

"Well, whose program is it? I'm the one that's trying to sell Easy-wheezy Soap Flakes, you're not." And "I'm the fellow the sponsor pays for and you're just the mechanical gimmick around here."

"I am not."

"Who are you talking to?" Back and forth.

And if they keep this up very long, why, they'll get at a very tolerable sort of a game. It'll be a sort of a bicker. But if they stop talking about it, they will just get madder at each other, and madder and madder and madder and one of them will quit and that's the end of the game. You recognize that? Well, that is the evolution of games.

The game goes all to pieces when you stop communicating, and you're not playing a game when you're not communicating to some degree. But the first step of any game is communication.

So therefore you could say a couple of terminals communicating are to some degree a barrier. You bet they are; they're a barrier of space. First barrier. And then they also have to have the barrier of time, they have to do this weird and impossible thing. Do you know they have to pretend the other fellow isn't talking so they can talk, and then vice versa pretend that the condition has reversed? And so we get time.

The Sun shines. It doesn't shine. It shines. It doesn't shine. And of course if you stand around waiting for the Sun to shine all the time and don't shine any yourself, you'll get stuck on Earth, too. That's a cinch.

But where we look over games, we find out that game is essentially a communication. Well, don't let two teams play consistently against each other too long. They won't have a game there anymore, either, because they won't be antagonists; they'll be friends.

Such a thing has happened many times in wars. Some isolated sector of the line — they forget a division, you know, or a regiment or a squad or something, and they leave it out in some isolated corner of the battle and there's — the enemy leaves another squad there and they're supposed to be shooting at each other. And they'll shoot at each other for a while and they'll shoot at each other and they'll shoot at each other.

And then one will put up some washing or something like that, a little bit, you know, and that will remind the other fellow, "Say, you know, we haven't washed our kits for a long time." So they get their long underwear and they wash that. And they go on this way and that way.

And the next thing you know, my golly, the trouble some general has, he comes down here and these guys are sitting around in the same dugouts swapping lies. That is the awfullest thing a general has to put up with, by the way, is they go into communication.

And do you know that they shoot people in time of war for going into communication with the enemy; they do. They stand up a man and shoot him because he's gone into communication with the enemy. I'd like to know what they're doing when they stand up on a parapet and fire a rifle, except communicate. Of course, it's kind of a hard crude way of communicating but it's nevertheless communication.

It's a cinch that if you shot at a fellow long enough and he shot at you long enough, you would wind up bosom buddies. That's a cinch.

Now, the only way you could really keep a war going and keep things really hot, anywhere in the world, would be to put up a communication barrier which admits of no communication whatsoever. And that would be a perfect solution to an end of game or a continuing war.

The war would not continue beyond a certain point because that thing which has been barriered out of communication just so long becomes unreal. It ceases to exist. So, actually, if you could hang a — it isn't a good solution but it's a partial solution. If you hung up an iron curtain here on Earth — you hung up an iron curtain and wouldn't let anybody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain — nobody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain (nobody communicates over here), one day somebody would walk up to you, say, "Say, you know about those Russians . . ."

And you'd say, "The what?"

He'd say, "The Russians, the Russians, you know who I'm talking about." And you'd say, "No, I don't know. Where are the Russians? What are the Russians?"

"Those people over there beyond that iron curtain."

And you'd say, "What curtain?"

See, there'd be no reality here on the fact that Russians existed. Similarly, if somebody in Russia would come around and said, "You know all those capitalists?"

And the Russian would say, "Capitalists? Go on! Where?"

"Well on the other side of the iron curtain there."

"Oh, you silly little muzhik you know that the world ends at that iron curtain. The world is totally flat, Lysenko says so. And you fall off into a nothingness and never, when you walk across that iron curtain. There's nothing over there whatsoever."

That's right. That's what happens when you cut a communication.

But, of course, a total cut of communication is almost impossible in present time — a total cut. You still get things leaking through like C-A-R-E. Like the United Nations' manifestos that are issued by the Kremlin. You get all kinds of little fragmentary communications. They keep tapping the world on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, there's some Russians over there." And they keep tapping the Russians saying, "Hey, the outside world is over there some-where." You know, just a little bit of a trickle of communication. And that is absolutely dynamite. There's not enough communication to make any A or R — just enough to nudge them into an existence of something.

Just like a guy with a circuit; it taps him often enough so that he knows that it isn't quite nothing there. And he'll get awful mad at that after a while; he's out of communication with it but he's not really — was in communication with it but he is in communication with it because he gets — some impulse or instinct somewhere, somehow comes through to him that he is a bum. Every once in a while he has a feeling like something is saying, "You're a bum."

He's saying, "You know there's something wrong with my mind." All you have to do to solve the thing would be to either totally cut communication, you know, put him way out back, or go the other way around and put him into communication with it.

Actually, the best route is to put him out of communication with it and then put him into full communication with it, at which moment it will cease to give him any trouble whatsoever.

A fellow with a broken leg is just fooling around, you know. It's nudging him, he's nudging it. He isn't in full communication with it. The way to get him over a broken leg would be to pull him off from the broken leg so he's no longer in obsessive communication with this broken leg. And then put him into communication, full communication, with the broken leg at which moment it'd heal quite rapidly. You get the idea?

We're not interested, then, in a partially cut barrier unless it's simply to promote the game. But the game is a very, very important thing. In order to have a game, you have to have mechanics. In this universe, we have to have space, energy, matter and time. Life in any universe has to have at least some of that.

So that we get the quality which says, "I can produce and play a game," and then we get the byproducts of that unit which would be the playing field, the gimmick they're playing for, the quantities of stuff they've got to cross or handle in order to have a game. So we have something that wants a game and we have the mechanics of the game. And when we go in and look over life, we find out that we shouldn't confuse these two things. We should simply say, "Well, now there's something that is capable of a game, has the quality of playing a game, originating games, continuing games, participating in games. And then there are all these byproducts over here which make games." And that would be a very marked division between two things, and we could understand things very well.

Now, this thing which can play the game or participate in a game or continue the game or originate the game, has quality only. It can, by its own consideration, be a quantity. It could say, "I am a private soldier. I don't know who else I'm fooling but I'm really fooling me," he'd say, you know, "but I am a private soldier. I am a quantity of army. I am one private soldier over army worth of army. I'm a quantity which is a part of a game."

And now if he were utterly and absolutely and entirely sold on the idea that this was all he was, you would find an aberrated person. He'd be an aberrated person. He would take no fun whatsoever in being part of the army or playing this game. He would not be aware of the game being in progress, the moment he is totally and only one private soldier.

Now, you get people in times when the civil populace has surrendered itself up to the military and a lot of civilians are walking around in uniform and getting a war fought, you get moments like this: Individuals who are supposed to be just one private soldier according to the rules will actually tell you, "Well, I'm a newspaper reporter. I was a newspaper reporter on the Clarion Bugle Gazette of Sioux Falls and that's really who I am," you know He's got a reserved identity.

And you go around and you try to get a reserve officer to confess the fact that he is just a lieutenant or something of the sort, he never tells you this. He says, "I am a lawyer. Before I got in the service, I made 850 dollars a month. I'm a big wheel where I came from." See, he is reserving his identity. He's not quite in the service. But you get a lot of high-toned action when this happens. You do actually get a period when in an army and a navy there are people around who do not entirely and only hold motion. (laughter)

These people are capable to some slight degree of playing a game and they do the darnedest things. The War Department goes slowly mad trying to keep track of the darnedest things they're liable to do. You know, they'll see an enemy someplace or another and they'll figure out something or other, and the next thing you know, why, they sneak around the hill and capture the division or something — like Sergeant York.

They do the darnedest things. They all of a sudden discover they're out of rations, you know, or they're liable to be out of rations, and they see that they can only have rations after they've signed eighteen hundred slips of paper in quadruplicate or quintuplicate so they decide to short-cut the whole thing and they have rations. And nobody can quite explain where all these rations came from, but boy, is it "legal" — typical activity. And everything just goes to the devil. These fellows introduce more randomity than anybody can stand so they have to end the war. (laughter) And they finally get to the point and they say, 'We can tolerate any action which will put a stop to this sort of thing — even peace."

Well, so we get a game in which nations play, called war. And it's only when these people get completely dredged down to the idea "I am a German." "I am a Russian." "I am a private" "I am a captain." When they've got this one hundred percent fixed, and they are that thing — that we can find these wars with tremendous quantities of brutality, very little understanding, no sympathy and nothing but destruction. And when those things occur when everyone gets superfixed in his identity, "I am a duke." "I am a prince." "I am a colonel," we get something like the Hundred Years' War.

We wonder what happened to knighthood. They got killed in the Hundred Years' War. Nobody knew how to end that one. Everybody was being himself, one hundred percent, which is to say, he thought of himself as a piece in the game called the Hundred Years' War, you know? Boy, did they have fixed titles and identities. Mmmph! They were really that.

There was no flexibility in which they could become responsible for any other dynamic than themselves. You see that? They'd have just the fixed responsibility and they had no further responsibility from that. So they could pick up some civilian and torture him. So they could burn a village without even thinking about what happened to the kids in it. Here is game without any responsibility.

War fought by people who are capable of responsibility is a skylark. War fought with no responsibility for the enemy, no responsibility for any other identity, is simply a slaughterhouse madhouse.

Where you have a game breaking down into brutality, where you have it breaking down into a slavery where nobody can change his identity, everybody's fixed utterly and so forth, only then do you get cruelty, brutality, criminality on the part of its participants. These things are not present in the position where individuals have still some freedom to choose that they are playing a game.

Have you ever noticed some little boy in the neighborhood who couldn't play the game? Who goes into a fighting fury with other children over their toys? This person who can't play the game. They're going to play a game of marbles, so somebody breaks out some marbles and lays them in the sand and they're all set and they draw a ring, and then all of a sudden this little guy comes up and he grabs all the marbles and shoves them in his pocket and runs. And the other kids say, "No, Henry." And after they've said, "No, Henry" five or six times, they go out and get him and punch the devil out of him. And then they really fix him, they say, "You can't play with us anymore." They really fix themselves, too. Every time they try to play marbles, little Henry will be up there with a BB gun. This is the degeneration away from playing a game.

Now, the big difference — let's get very close to fact with this — the big difference between the preclear you had an easy time with and the preclear you had a hard time with, was the preclear you had an easy time with could play a game. He could still play a game.

And the person you were having an awfully rough time with had gotten so fixed in some kind of an identity that he says, "This is entirely, completely, real and serious, no matter how aberrated or cockeyed it appears," and "it's not a game, this is reality, this is sincerity," see? And he's fixed, and he can't change.

And the first thing you notice about him, he has difficulty playing a game. That's the first thing you notice about him. First thing that seems out of order about him. You'll notice that by saying, "All right. Now, let's walk over and touch your finger to that wall."

So, the fellow walks over, says, "Why should I?"

You get some little kid who's totally capable of playing a game and you say, "Go over and touch the wall," so he goes over and touches the wall, bang.

And he says, "Now you touch a wall." He can sometimes play too much game for some auditors. All right.

We have a gradient scale of being able to play the game and that gradient scale is the gradient scale of fixed identity as a part of the game or quantity. It's a gradient scale of "How much quantity am I in this game? — identity/quantity. I am one man, you see. I am one person named Jones and that is all I am.

Now, all due respects to thee and me, that's not a very good condition. A person who can't be Smith sometimes isn't really aware of playing a game. It's all for sure, for sincere, see? You know, it's brutal. It's earnest. It's real. "Tell me not, in mournful numbers . . ." (laughter)

Now, it's an odd thing that a person only gets latitude of action when he has freedom to play. When a person feels that he chose to play this game, then it's a game. And when somebody else chose the game for him and put him in there, one way or the other, he has no freedom to play this game but is playing the game under duress. And a life unit that plays the game of having to play the game under duress will be in pretty sad shape in the auditing chair — have a rough time. You know, "I'm playing this game under duress. What wall?" Playing the game under duress.

You say, "Go on over and touch that wall."

"No."

Now, the odd part of it is, this freedom of choice is so significant in auditing that we find individuals, who are brought in by Mama or Papa and given auditing with no idea of what's happening, get well much more slowly than the fellow who thought it up himself.

He says, "You know I think I'll go get processed. I'm not so well off these days — I keep going like this . . . (laughter) and I'll go get processed." So he walks in and he sits down and he says, "Process me." And you go ahead — and so on. You see, he still has a freedom to change his role. He changes his role in life. That's why he can consent to come in and be processed.

The difference is not whether or not the fellow chose. The difference between these two people — the fellow who won't be processed even when he's sitting in the auditing chair and the fellow who just comes in and wants to be processed — the difference is actually a case level difference. It is not simply difference of attitude. It isn't that one chose to be there and the other one didn't chose to be there, (laughter) you know, that makes the difference in auditing. That's not what makes the difference in auditing. The difference in auditing is made this way: This fellow can choose to be somewhere and to change his role in the game. And this fellow, way down here, can't change his role in the game anymore. So he thinks this auditor is going to make him change his role in the game, and he knows he can't change his role in this game.

Now, if we were to take somebody and fix him in a chair and go "Swami, swami, hypnoanalysis, pooey, pooey," and shoot him with a little bit of narcowell, I wouldn't say what came up just that moment, but anyway .. . (laughter) — anyway, we shoot him and then we give him a slight little bit of shock, all the time saying to him, "You are a jockey. You can never be anything else but a jockey. You are a jockey." Bzz, bzz, bzz. "You are a jockey. You're nothing but a jockey. All you could do is be a jockey. You'll never be able to change being a jockey." And we just kept that up with this fellow for a few hours and repeated the treatment for a few days .. .

We bring him into an auditing session. We'd have to drag him in at the end of a leash or something. We'd have to drag him in, we'd have to force him to sit in the chair, so forth. He was unable to change his role, you see? This he's convinced of: "I can't change my role. So therefore auditing is going to do me no good. I am a quantity of game and I am not a quality of anything beyond just this one thing: The only quality I have is jockey.' The only quantity I have is this body, and this funny little silk cap." All right.

This would make a real rough preclear — real tough preclear. Don't think that you can't break such a case, you can break such a case. You have to do all sorts of action to get into communication with him because this person won't go into communication. He's a jockey. The only way he communicates is on a horse, this way … (laughter) And it goes round and round the track, that way.. . (laughter)

Psychodrama is that effort to get jockeys to be jockeys, on the theory that if you can get them to be jockeys long enough, they'll get unhorsed. But again, unless they chose to decide to be a jockey, they wouldn't become anything else but a jockey.

Now, there is a process you could run on this fellow, if you could ever communicate it to him; that is the difficulty. You see, he's fallen out of communication. The distance they fall out of communication is the distance they fall away from the game into a fixed quantity of something.

And the more they go into communication, the more they're able to change the game, change the role — they don't have to necessarily, they just can, you see, quality, the ability — until they finally get up to a point and they say, "Well, hey, what do you know, hah, I can play any kind of a game I want to. Guess I'll go on playing the same kind of a game I'm playing, but that's fun." They didn't think it was fun when they started in getting audited; they didn't think so even vaguely. But now it seems to be an awfully good joke to go down to the office and write on little pieces of paper endlessly. It's very funny.

Everybody comes in, bug-eyed, how important it is, see? You say, "That's fine. Let's play this game some more." And these people become very hard on the people around them because these people think they're playing hard, you see. And this individual sees — "Gee, here's an interesting game," and he starts to play about eight times harder than anybody else in his vicinity, and everybody gets worn out. Because this guy is playing a game, and the others are there because they have to be — difference of viewpoint.

Well, we get a fellow who is able to play the game as he can go into communication. There's nobody quite as out of communication in a football game as the water bucket. Yet all the players come around and drink out of it. But it never positions itself; it's always positioned. It's filled, it's emptied.

Now, there's an interesting kind of a water bucket that will fill itself and empty itself, but it has two legs and it's called a water carrier, to a game. And generally this is some bug-eyed kid full of hero worship, you know, "Hey, Joe, can I give you a drink now, huh?" He's playing the game. He'll be in there playing the game left and right. He hasn't yet gotten the fixed idea that all he will ever be is a water bucket.

Now there's the ratio of age to aberration. You say people who are older are harder to process. No, they're not. That is not even vaguely a true statement. I know lots of kids that are harder to process than old people. I know lots of old people that process just like anything; just — it's nothing to it. I've never found much coordination of age. Because psychology pretended to is no reason for us to believe it's true unless we can see it and demonstrate it.

I have found people, however, who are quite old who are hard to process, just as I have found people who are quite young who are hard to process. But there is some tendency in this" direction: An individual becomes more and more fixed in his role. At twenty-one he could choose what he was still going to be and he could still get away with this swindle: He could say, "Well, I really don't want to be a bank cashier but I'll just be a bank cashier here until I learn how to play this piccolo. And then I'll be a piccolo player. And I'll become very, very famous."

Now look, we have confused goals and dreams a little bit here, and thought they were an end in themselves. When a person has goals and dreams, he's merely expressing this one fact: He can change his role in the game. He is expressing his confidence that he can change his role in the game. You see that? And the manifestation of it is goals and dreams.

Don't ever try to process anybody in the direction of ideas alone. Because any thetan, even when bad off, can get different ideas. A life unit can do nothing if not get ideas and shift ideas around. It's how convincingly it can get ideas, that counts. If it can really get convinced of an idea — it's really fixed in some kind of a role — it has very few goals and dreams because it doesn't have to have. There isn't any reason to. It's fixed in this idea now.

Now, here we are, a bank cashier. And here we're going to be forty-nine and a half years from now, a bank cashier. Of course, he doesn't recognize that till he's thirty-five. And he's noticed that the fellow who married the boss's aunt and the fellow who married the boss's daughter have both been promoted over him; although he always did all of their work because they couldn't do it. He's forgotten how to be a piccolo player because he missed out his installments on the piccolo and they took it back. And he's — recognizes at last that he is fixed into the identity of being a bank cashier. And if he sells himself on the idea "I will never be anything but a bank cashier," why then, of course, he's ended his goals, dreams, future time track and he has become a quantity of something. He's become a quantity of bank cashier — one bank cashier, you see? Not a capability of becoming a lot of things, if he really put his mind to it.

All a thetan has to believe is that he can do a lot of things and be a lot of things — he doesn't even have to do and be them — he's in good shape. But the second he gets the idea that he can only be one thing and he'll never be anything else but that one thing, he's dead! How dead can you get? Believing you can only lie there.

When you believe at last you can only lie there and that's all this body is capable of, is simply to lie still and grow a little bit cold and worm-eaten at the edges, you shove off — so would anybody. Because that is end of game as far as you're concerned for that particular cycle, you see. It's a totally fixed identity. You're no longer even able to change the position of the body in space. It just lies there. See that?

So change comes first in the ability to change one's ideas, then in the ability to change one's location and position in space at will. That's a mechanic, you've moved into mechanics. And now at last, when one loses even that, he's dead. When he's lost the ability to change his location and position in space at will, he says, "I'm dead." There's probably nothing more to death than that.

I imagine you could take this jockey after he had been a jockey for a while and then convince him he couldn't move and he'd know he was dead, and he'd leave and he'd be dead. You get the idea? All right.

We look over the anatomy of games, we look over the anatomy of communication, we find out that communications are necessary barriers in order to continue a game. In the absence of communication, you don't have any space or time. And when you get no communication at all, space and time collapse, and so you get collapsed terminals.

Have you ever had the experience of some fellow having to walk right straight up to you and talk to you, you know, "Say ya, Joe, uh, uh . . " They often enforce this by eating garlic or something first. They say, "Hiya Joe" — collapsed terminals.

Well, that fellow has a hard time. He snaps terminals. He is so close to no communication at all, he has to be that close in order to perceive that there is any. See, he has to come up real close to find out if there is some. He can only make a couple of inches of space, when he should be able to make a few yards, anyhow. All right. He snaps terminals, he has to come close.

Then there's the fellow who gets on the inversion of this who doesn't dare have anybody near him. And you walk up to this fellow and he's standing there, you know, and you walk up to him. He's on the streets, perfect stranger, you're going to ask him for a match. And you walk up to him and you say, "Say, buddy . . . Wonder where he went!"

That fellow is so certain that he can't make any space that a couple of inches be darned; he does a compulsive reversal. The second that you come up, he knows you're going to make lots of space and he can make none. So he accommodates it by creating the lots of space you would make. He has to get out there far enough to agree with his idea of how far he has to be away to answer you.

In your neighborhood you probably had some little kid that used to come around and throw sand down your neck or something of the sort. He'd run way off from you and he'd say, "Nyah, nyah, nyah," you know. And you try to close terminals with him, he just goes further away. He's separated out of the group. Henry who couldn't play marbles. He knows he can't play the game and he runs away from anytime he sees a game occurring.

There's your criminal. The criminal, I swear, is totally and entirely on the run or totally entirely fixed in one place. See, he just goes from one great extreme to the other.

He hasn't done anything criminal for five or six years, he's living in this small town, he's got a job in a garage. And one day a police car drives up to the garage and all that was wrong was he has a soft spare tire he wants pumped up. When the criminal starts breathing freely again, he has moved to Los Angeles. He went out the back door. Just the appearance of this symbol called "police car" is enough to send him hundreds of miles — immediately.

Well, this is a curious manifestation, isn't it? It all has to do with the ability to play a game. The fellow who has to talk very close to you, he has a tough time having any game at all, but remember he's still got a game of some sort. And then the fellow who's got to run like the dickens every time you start to communicate, he's getting close to not having any game at all. He's trying to preserve what game he does have because he knows you're going to eat him. Then we get down to the fellow who doesn't close terminals and doesn't run. And we have, at that moment, the catatonic, and they just lie still. And you pick up their hand, you drop it… .

Had a nurse one time in an insane asylum show me how bad off this particular catatonic was. She says, "She doesn't even respond to needle jabs."

And I said, "No?" I said, "That's very interesting." (Reverend Hubbard was talking to her.) And I said, "That's very interesting."

And she says, "Yes, look." And pulls a safety pin out of her garter belt and jabs it to the hilt in this catatonic schiz. Catatonic schiz didn't twitch. She says, "You see?"

I says, sort of green, "Yes, I see."

And she says, "She doesn't even jab [respond] when you do it here," bang!

The only thing people find wrong with those people that run away, that snap terminals, that lie still, is they're kind of hopeful there might be an opponent there and they're sort of trying to shake somebody into existence so they'll come alive enough to play, you know?

And the only thing you really feel bad about, about an ally, is the fact that he has quit when he's died. You know, he's no longer there to play the game. He ran out on you. That ended that game, woof You weren't through, there were still fifteen or twenty chips in front of your place — a broken communication.

Now, a game is only possible as long as there is communication of some sort. You will find that as you monitor the communication rather poorly — pardon me — sporadically (it's occasional, it's sometimes surprising and so forth, back and forth, it's not good you know, but it's still communication), why, you will have an antagonistic sort of a game where you've got two sides playing. They will fight. That's war. You know, surprising, occasional, unpredicted heavy masses being exchanged back and forth, one way or the other, and you have a war. All right.

A game, then, is monitored in its quality by the communication involved. Now let's see that we have not — we haven't actually excluded bullets or teapots when we've talked about this communication formula.

Now, a complete communication between two soldiers would be as follows: Bill shoots at Joe. Joe prime shoots at Bill prime. Misses all around. So Joe shoots at Bill. Bill prime shoots back at Joe prime. They both shot both ways. They both originated an attack. You watch out, they're liable to wind up as friends. It's only when Joe was careless enough to shoot Bill in such a way that Bill couldn't shoot back, that we get serious about it. And that is bad marksmanship. That ends the game, right there.

And when enough Joes and enough Bills have either failed to originate communications in return, or have failed to answer communications, we get law and order: No shooting — no shooting allowed.

We get a state of affairs, by the way, exactly in the number of years which have elapsed, which is the most curious thing. It's the number of years which have elapsed — give us the amount of law and order which will occur on the subject of who shoots or how much you're permitted to shoot, something of the sort. Let's take New York City — oh, let's get a little older than that, let's take London. I imagine the fellow who walked down the street in London with a six-gun buckled down and in plain sight would not be arrested. He would probably be taken over to Bedlam and locked up. Or the bobbies would want to know what show he was in. That would be about all there would be to it. Nobody would really take it as a crime. I'm sure that nobody would really think of it as a crime anymore.

You walk down the street with a gat buckled down in New York City, you're going to be, not credited with insanity, you're simply going to be thrown into the hoosegow unless, of course, you're a known criminal, at which time they'll just take your gun away from you and set you free. And we get the fact that, if in New York, you possessed a gun and kept it in your desk drawer, you could be arrested and sent to the pen. That's a fact. If you had a gun, you kept it in the car, you'd go to the pen. If you had a gun, if there was some gun rust around anyplace, you could still probably go to the pen.

Now we move a little further west, we get the condition of affairs in Chicago. You actually would not excite much attention in Chicago if you were to take a rifle down the street, or even a gat. You could possibly have a gat, and again, it'd be the same condition: If you were a known criminal, you'd probably get your gun back after they'd arrested you. "Tools of the trade," they call it in Chicago. All right.

And now we get Arizona. And we walk up to — in a hardware store in Arizona and we see all these gats and these revolvers and pistols and so forth, and rifles, and they're all laid out on the counter and so forth. And there's a little slip of paper up in the corner of the counter, and it said, "Anyone under eighteen years of age must have the permission of his parent or guardian in order to purchase and have firearms." And "This will not, in any way, be construed as a law demanding the licensing of firearms."

And you say to this clerk, "Well, you see that .38 Smith & Wesson there? Well, I'd like to buy it. Load it up." Then pay your money over, take the Smith & Wesson, put it in your pocket, walk down the street. Cop found you — if a cop found you with that weapon concealed, and so forth, he probably wouldn't think very much of it. He'd merely think you were being polite. You were not offending the public view — something like that. But if you had it concealed or buckled on or shoved in your car or in your pocket or anything of the sort, the police would not think very much about it.

But the very funny part of all this is, is these guys are still willing to play a game. Couple of fellow — the police are still willing to play a game. The police in each one of these places have drifted away from punitively playing a game.

We get into an interesting state of affairs whereby very little attention is paid to petty crime in Arizona. Sheriffs get interested only when it gets adventurous. They can do something that looks fairly interesting to them, they'll go ahead and do it. But the rest of it — skip it.

For instance, there were a couple of boys held up — an armed — armed robbery, it was, of a service station. And they drove down the road like mad, and it got out on the police radio in the next county and so on. Couple of deputy sheriffs jumped in a car and formed a roadblock. These two bandits saw the roadblock, turned their car around, drove it way off the road and into the brush, got out of the car and ran like the dickens across sand and rocks and so forth.

And all these deputies got together and they said, "Hm." And they carefully tracked, Indian-tracker fashion, these guys, clear across this desert. They found their car, they tracked them halfway across nowhere. And they sat down and waited until — they realized these guys were probably taking a sleep up there someplace, you know. And they sneaked in on them real carefully. And they took their guns away from them and then woke them up — good game. Wouldn't have been played that way in New York.

In the first place, you wouldn't have gotten anybody to have dashed out and formed a roadblock. That would be adventurous. That would be doing something to mess up your forthcoming pension. Furthermore, you'd have probably gotten bawled out by the commissioner for going into that much motion.

Now, when a game drops from communication, it drops into motion and it first drops into rather fast light motion and then it goes into heavier and heavier motion, until nobody can move the game around at all and it's just stopped. And that's Earth. Earth is a pretty solid game — very solid. It's a fixed identity. It's a place called Earth. The number of times this planet has changed its identity in the last twenty-four hours are very few.

The playing field in this case has gotten awfully solid. And people have started to get mad at all things, they've started to get mad at the playing field. Now, what would you think of a bunch of football players who got daffy enough to get mad at the area between the goal posts? And they stopped playing football and started to sit down and pound on the ground. What would you think of these people? Be pretty batty, wouldn't they?

What do you think the physicist has done? What has he done? He kept looking at pieces of energy and matter and so forth, and it refused to move and it refused to obey and it refused to be good and it refused to do things, you see? And it didn't give him answers. Of course, it couldn't give him answers; it isn't alive.Go into the exact sciences someday and you will find around you, guys that are pretty hectically obsessed with trying to get MEST to answer up. The physicist and the electronic engineer build things that talk, build things that think. 'We'll do anything to make this stuff answer." Their wife is standing there all the time going, "Gab, gab, gab, gab, gab, walla, walla, walla" but they know she's not there.

And the physicist gets more and more fixed. This stuff doesn't answer up. It just won't answer. It won't answer. And of course, they say, "Well it might be this theory and it might be that theory." That's their way of saying, 'Well maybe it'd answer this way, maybe it'd answer that way." They're kind of mixed up. They're using the stuff through which you communicate, to communicate to: an inanimate terminal.

Well, almost anybody has some of this inanimate-terminal fixation. You can get them over a lot of this by simply having them touch walls. And they say, "See, there is a terminal right here. What are you hanging on to that old one you've got for? What do you want that old garden wall for? You got a perfectly good building wall right here." That's what 8 -C does, Opening Procedure.

But your physicist has gone out of communication to the degree that he now believes that no communication is the best possible communication, so let's get rid of the playing field. "Everybody get rid of the playing field. We can't get it to answer. But we can get far enough to blow it up. And at least it'll say, "bang!"

Now, the only secret there is about secrets is the lack of an answer. I'm not just identifying answer with answer, this is true. The answer, when absent, makes a secret. What is a secret? A secret is an absence of an answer. How do you get into secrets? By saying, "Bow are you Bill?" (pause) (sigh) You say, "Bill, how are you?" (pause) "Bill, how are you?" And at that moment, you become absolutely certain that he is holding one of the deepest secrets you ever saw in your life. Why? Because he doesn't answer. And that's the only secret there is — no answer. That's all the secret there is — no answer.

You look that over, you'll find out it's true. The people that you will believe to be very, very secret people, simply didn't answer you very often. And if they answered you little enough, then you became convinced that they must be very wise, secretive people indeed.

And so you get the wise old owl who sits in an oak. And the less he spoke, the more you figured he had some secrets to hide. And maybe he did once, but I'll give you a tip: He's forgotten them.

All of this material sum mates into just one thing. We have been looking for answers to what? The answers to answers. What is the answer to an answer? It's an answer. That's what it is.

And we take somebody who's convinced there are tremendous secrets in everything and we simply process him by making everything he thinks is secret, answer. And the next thing you know, he knows all about it. Because he knew everything there was to know in the first place. This is very simple.

So we now, by this process alone, actually can obtain any answer we want out of anything. We can actually make anything talk, whether it's space, matter, energy, time or Mama.

We get fixed on things simply waiting for an answer and after a while, they become secret. And that's what we've been looking for in Dianetics and Scientology. And if you think it over, I think you will agree with me. We have the answer to secrets. And the answer to a secret is an answer. Supply the abundance of answers, and you don't have any secret anymore about life, or about anything.

Okay, I'll see you this evening.

Thank you.