Thank you.

And hello, all of you. I’m very happy to see you here.

I want to welcome you to Philadelphia and the First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists and hope that I’ll be able to talk to most of you personally. And I hope during this series of lectures that you will be able to see very clearly intensely usable technology. And I hope that in the seminars and the Group Processing you will be able to see yourself that these technologies work.

All we’re interested in here in this congress, really our first, foremost thing, is to put into your hands a simplicity with which you can achieve maximal effect And if I can succeed here and if your group leaders can succeed in clarifying this material for you, I’ll be very happy. If it does something for you personally, I’ll be very happy about that I see the past extremely well exemplified here, that all has not been lost in the last three years. I look around and I see former wrecks able to sit in a chair. And I have made in the last half an hour or so at least three errors in identifying people. Thought one girl was one old lady’s daughter; it turned out to be the old lady herself. Yeah, so that’s very, very gratifying.

The first lecture of this series is called „The History and Development of Dianetics and Scientology.“

I actually shouldn’t have to go into this very deeply with very many of those present But I’ll skim lightly over the cataclysmic and sad events of the past in order to bring us up to present time. I might even unstick one or two on the time track. And I hope in this very short introduction that I might possibly demonstrate that the changes which have taken place did have some reason and purpose.

I know that there is doubt in some minds. They think that one does this sort of thing — keeps changing techniques — solely to escape the entrapment of an old reality. And whereas that’s very laudable, I’m not that afraid of theta traps.

So, in the history and in the development of, one can say now, this science, a great many changes have been very, very necessary. You know, it’s quite remarkable to sit in the ivory tower of a person who was trained as a scientist and who had sunk to the very, very lowest state of being a fiction writer and to find that his skill in both led toward one conclusion, and that was that people didn’t know quite all there was to know about the human mind. Now, that was a remarkable conclusion to reach, because we are assured on every front that this has all been solved in, I think, 1786 by a fellow by the name of Heimstätter or something of the sort, who invented Dianetics at that time. (And for those who haven’t gotten their sense of humor yet…) You know, I’d think this was a British audience here, the lag on the thing, but maybe I’ve got to readjust to American humor.

Anyway, somebody — some laughable character — not too long ago, put out a long writing on the history of Dianetics, whereby it was concluded that it was all invented in 1786, except none of it had been thought up then. It had — thought up by me later, but it had all been done in 1786 or something of this sort. And I was very interested in this, because I went and tried to find the book and the Library of Congress doesn’t know of it But it was a good try.

The whole time track is saturated with this sort of thing, so we’ll pass over — pass over lightly on this.

I came out of an ivory tower, I will say, which was very happy with the pure knowledge of a coil, the pure knowledge of Ohm’s law. Ohm’s law is beautiful, you know. And you look at these things that nobody has to think about them, you don’t have to argue about them at all, they work. And out of the somewhat detached studio where you sat down and you wrote, „Bow wow, barked Bill’s pistol and another redskin bit the dust, which he chewed reflectively,“ and you sold this at some remarkable number of cents per word, for years. And I moved out into what I laughingly thought at the time was the American scene and which turned out to be a Roman arena. (The blood of Christians is still all over it; they’ve never thrown sand over it They’ve still got some of the bodies hung up on crosses around in the society. It’s really dreadful.)

But anyway, here was Dianetics. Done in an ivory tower and applied without ever naming it, to an enormous number of people, actually, by myself and codified, as far as I could tell, so that it was perfectly understandable. I understood it People got well and this was fine, and so I didn’t think there was any more to it than that I wasn’t calling it a science at the time. It didn’t have a name yet I had to cook up the name one — late one Saturday night when somebody kept insisting it was a science and if it was a science it had its name. So I sat back and I thought real hard, and I remembered something about Greek and I remembered that „Dia, that’s ‘through’ — ’through,’ dia. And that’s through, through — yeah, that’s right ‘through mind.’ That’s all there is to it“ „Dianetics,“ I said, „is the name of this science. And you’ve heard of it of course.“ He, of course, said he had, being from Bell Labs, not from RCA Victor.

And we moved into the sphere of telling people about it instead of working with it And the next thing that happened was a publisher said, „If you will say that everybody can do it, why, I’ll publish a book on it, and this will be a very interesting book and probably sell five or six thousand copies.“ And I was very happy about this, because I was getting tired at that time of explaining it I thought if I only had a book, you see, I could just say, „Well, here’s a copy,“ you know? And go off fishing or something.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The plans of Homo sapiens and rodents aft gang agley. And as a result, people kept buying this book. And the publisher didn’t want them to buy the book. Every time they bought a copy of the book his interest in the publishing house sunk terribly, because he was trying to buy the publishing house, you see, and the publishing house was getting wealthy on this book. And this made him very angry with me, and so on.

Everybody got mad at everybody. This is a love-hate universe, you see. You start out by loving everybody and end up by hating everybody. That’s the frame — cycle. And by the time you hate everybody, that’s good and solid and that’s MEST and you’re matter then. So anyway, it ran the cycle as far as the book was concerned.

But very shortly after all this happened, a bunch of people came to me and they said, „Let’s have a big organization that can take care of all the servicing that’s going on.“

So I said, „Fine.“ Big organization, that sounded good to me. And I said, „Let’s have a big organization.“ So they had a big organization. You’ve been recovering from it ever since. Well…

Anyway (he said with no responsibility for anything that’s gone on), the whole past has actually been a social experiment by which one tried to find out the channel and the level of understanding and the optimum technique for the use of Homo sapiens. How many people are there in the British Empire? I know quite a few people in the British Empire, too. There is a country over there named Great Britain, and you add that to the hundred and fifty million in America, and that’s actually about the number of people that were involved in this thing. Because the strange part of it is, is everybody was reading the wrong things about it there for a little while about three years ago.

And the best, the very best magazine — I mean, the magazi…, your magazines that are just the soul of truth (I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about these magazines). Time magazine has never, in its entire career, uttered a single colored truth. Never a single truth of any kind has ever been published by that magazine. Anyway, I was counting up the columns one day which they had invested in the subject of Dianetics, and I was somewhat thunderstruck to find out that for the same period it was more than they had invested in the private life of the president That was very interesting to me. You would be amazed if you went back through all the copies of old magazines how much space has been devoted to Dianetics. It’s fabulous.

Now, the social experiment was what was important, and the effort to keep going with investigation and keep learning from what was happening. Many times people have turned to me and accused me, very bluntly, of simply letting a thing run off the wheels, just go off the edge of the road just to see what was going to happen. And I looked at these people thunderstruck; I was hurt I said, „How could you possibly think such a thing about me?“ But it was true. And so, a great deal was learned.

What does it take to make Homo sapiens come upscale? Well, you first have to find out where he is. And you know that I didn’t know that till a few months ago. Fantastic! With all of the tremendous certainty I pack into a paragraph, I didn’t know a few salient points.

I invented a technique known as Acceptance Level Processing; it is a variation of Expanded GITA. One can take this technique, and using brackets, which is to say, have the preclear mock up for himself, have another mock up for himself and others mock up for others what is acceptable. You will find out that that which is acceptable, which the person desires will, when mocked up, even on an occluded case, go into the bank with a crash. It’s as though one had a vacuum cleaner working in the preclear. And when you give him something that is really acceptable to him, it simply disappears by collapsing into the bank with great speed. And you can establish by this exactly what the acceptance level is of a preclear.

Now, the acceptance level of the society at large was also under study. There are eight dynamics. And the society at large had a tremendous lot to be known about it. It was wonderful how little actually was known about the society at large.

You have people like Warner Brothers or the Saturday Evening Post who would give anything, including their grandmother’s false teeth, to know what the acceptance level of the public is. Because if they knew the acceptance level of the public or if they knew that the acceptance level could be established, they could then fill that need, and filling that need they could then reap a fortune.

Hollywood today is falling flat financially because it doesn’t know that acceptance level. The amount of advertising has dwindled in the Saturday Evening Post simply because it, again, does not know that acceptance level. These magazines, these movies are shooting all over the sky in some sort of an effort, some sort of a rule of the thumb to establish it.

William Randolph Hearst went way upstairs and caught the upper fringe of the American public acceptance level. Back in 1897 or something like that he sent a photographer to Cuba, and the photographer sent — to get pictures of the war. And the photographer said, „Why, there’s no war down here.“ And Hearst sent him a very angry cable and said, „You get the pictures, I’ll get you the war.“ And he did: 1898, Spanish-American War.

Now, today you can go out here on the corner and find the upper fringe of acceptance level in the lesser yellow journals. Fantastic. The acceptance level isn’t where those people think it is at all. You’ve got to go down to the five-mile deep and then take a submarine lower to find the public — snap (snap) — acceptance level of fact.

As soon as you know this principle, by the way, anything that is a problem to you about another person — parents, anything like that — ceases to be a problem. With the data which had been assembled and with the material which was to hand in Dianetics and Scientology one could then very easily integrate what is the acceptance level of a large public, as well as the acceptance level of an individual.

Now, to give you some sort of an idea of an insight and what this suddenly does to an individual: what is the acceptance level of a psychiatrist? You see, it immediately reveals itself. You would take a psychiatrist, if you were to ask him to mock up acceptable people, he would mock up the people he is treating. Then do you expect this man immediately afterwards to bring these people to another level which is not acceptable to him? No. It’s too much to ask of the man to shift his acceptance level in actual play. That’s a shuddering sort of a fact.

Now, if you can — you can establish this for any profession or any entertainment with great ease. If the result is shocking to you and if man’s mental anatomy is then lying before you in its somewhat impure state, why, blame me. Everybody does. All right.

During this period a social experiment was conducted in one of the smaller cities of the country in one of the smaller states of the country; place named Los Angeles. And Los Angeles, California, had in it, at one time, a Foundation. The Foundation was almost broke because it simply couldn’t get itself together or pulled together in any way. And I gave the Foundation its head completely, and turned it into a socialist cooperative experiment and watched what happened. And learned by looking at that group of people what happens in cooperative experiments and what people will be subjected to.

It is a very conceited thing for a man to suddenly say to himself, „Why, I can forecast exactly what the reactions of everything and everybody will be before I have ever seen those reactions.“ That was the sort of conceit I was operating in, in 1949. I’m not operating in that conceit today; I’ve seen what can happen.

You have to look. Does you a great deal of good. When you’re walking across the street you — if you want to stay alive, if you’re amongst that small minority — look at the traffic lights and you’ll find out whether or not they’re green or red. Elementary step, isn’t it?

But you could sit in the hotel lobby and say to yourself, „Now, when I go out across the street there will probably be a short in the main switchboard of the police department, in such a way that there will be no traffic lights, so they will all jam red, and I will go out of the lobby and walk across the street and I won’t have to look at the traffic lights.“ It’s always a good thing, in this universe, to look at something. Well, I’ve had three years of looking. In those three years I have seen techniques which were pretty good techniques — a lot of them — misused, abused, turned wrong side to, misunderstood, shaken up, re-explained. I’ve also seen them used very expertly. But in those three years, until a few months ago, there was no technique that one could say, without much doubt in his own mind, „If this technique is put into the hands of an individual, it does not and will not carry with it a great deal of damage if misused, and will, if used properly, do about all the good that can be done in this universe.“

The technique is one thing in its theory. It is another thing when I apply it. It is another thing when it’s taught and an auditor applies it And it’s quite another thing what happens to it when it gets to the fifth-, sixth-stage and way out into the public It’s important to know that, you see. A technique itself does an evolution by being handed on from person to person. And you have to go out there to the fifth-, sixth-, eighth-, fifteenth-stage and look at the technique after it arrived there — not to suddenly make up your own reality about it, but to look at it for what it is, what’s it being used for and what’s it doing in people’s hands. And when you look at that you’ll go back immediately and sit down in your office and say, „Let’s see, let’s have a considerably different technique about this. Ahem.“

It’s very wonderful that these techniques have produced in the hands of people who are quite sincere, very excellent results. It’s also quite remarkable how far they have often gone off the track. But today, we can sum up the whole of processing in a sentence: Don’t think, look! That’s Scientology. That’s all there is to it Don’t think, look.

You think that’s simple? Well, girl delivered little Diana to us while we were down in Spain. And perhaps she was a little tired or something, but I kept asking her — trying to find out a couple of very salient points, and she never answered the question asked — very remarkable degree. You say, „Weather?“ And she would say, „Well, historically speaking…“

That’s what? That’s just not looking. They get to a point where they not only don’t dare look, but they don’t dare think about what’s to be thought about They can’t communicate about what’s being communicated about And that is just the lower stage of „Don’t look,“ you see?

„Don’t look,“ then, becomes a gradient scale of „First — think about it first, and then look.“ That’s why you have roadmaps. They tell you all about it before you get there. That’s the trouble with the whole — trouble with an occluded case: he has to know before he goes; he has to know, think about it before he can be and he’s so busy thinking about being that he never is. It’s simplicity itself. You see this?

So we move out a little bit deeper into this problem and we find out that he isn’t just thinking before he goes. He’s setting up the problem before he thinks about it Oh, this is really getting interesting. We’re into the field of science now. You set up the problem before you think about it and then you accumulate data, which preferably is not related to it And if you accumulate enough of this data and you put it on enough pieces of paper in enough files, it’ll impress somebody. Science. Now, that’s a little bit hard on science. Science was struggling along without a lot of things, but it could have looked. All right.

Now, we get the person who is worried about having to set up the problem before they think about it. Now, we’re getting toward normal now. And then we have the person who, of course, doesn’t dare worry. He doesn’t dare worry, because if he worried he’d have to set up the problem and if he set up the problem, then he’d think about it, you see. And then if he thought about it hard enough he might look. So you go out here in the street and you see people walking up and down the street, they’ve got big thick glasses on. That’s to help them look. And you ask people, „What are those glasses for?“ And they will say, „For looking, of course.“ That’s just it; they expect the glasses to do all the looking. Back of the glasses they have a pair of eyes, which do the looking through the glasses for the person. In other words, let’s get this removed as many times as we can get it removed so we don’t have to look.

Now, we say what about feeling? If looking is so important, what about feeling? Well, I’m afraid you’re dealing with the same thing. Feeling is condensed looking. If you just shorten up the time span of a glance, you will get waves jamming up dose enough together to produce feeling. Looking produces a sensation. If you can’t get a sensation by looking at some of the girls that you see on the streets here in Philadelphia or who are right here in this congress, I feel for you. I’ll give you the address of a good auditor.

Now, see how far we have gone in the history and development of Scientology. See where we’ve gone exactly; we’ve gone that same track. Went way back in the past. Example of Sigmund Freud: Fool around with a person’s past long enough and he’ll get into present. There’s some truth in that If you wipe out enough past, he hasn’t got any past to think about; and that was Dianetics.

Now, we had there a workable therapy. It is a therapy which is fully as workable as… Well, I know this; I don’t think a therapy can be worked out about the past that we haven’t beaten around one way or the other. I set it up all one day on symbolic logic and worked out the equations of all possible therapies, and then just started dealing them off the top of the deck — not the bottom of the deck as some auditors think I do — but deal them off the top of the deck to a number of auditors. Sure, they’re all workable. Some things are much hotter than others, some things are much cooler. But the point is that therapies which wipe out the past ended with Dianetics.

I don’t think anybody here will disagree with me when I say that Dianetics does quite a piece of work in the matter of Lock Scanning, running engrams, processing out efforts. The bulk of the cases to which it’s addressed, something will happen to that case to improve it, because of this alteration of the energy pattern of the past That’s Dianetics.

We had to move out from that, however, because the answer is not contained therein. The answer is in a field above the echelon of modern scientific definition as it existed in 1950. One had to go ahead and find out a very, very great deal about this thing with which we were dealing, which was life in a universe consisting of space, time, energy, matter. And we found out that just by taking the pattern of life’s behavior in this universe and by tracing that very carefully we could find out what life was trying to do in the universe. And if we found out what it was trying to do and how it was doing it, we would, of course, obtain from that a process which would be intensely workable and which could get out to fifteenth-hand without going too far wrong.

How could it get to fifteenth-hand without going too far wrong? Well, it’s because the vectors of existence would be so consistent with the processing itself that life itself would hold the process true to itself. You enlist for a „police force“ on the process, in other words, the whole of beingness.

In 1950 — I was running across some old tapes and notes, said, „The closer we can approximate the function and action of the mind with the process itself, the better the process will be.“ It was a good forecast because that’s what we’ve done. Now we find out even more intimately what life is trying to do, and we know and have workability that we did not possess before. Very well.

The history of Dianetics and Scientology, because history books stress organizations, is conceived by many to be the history of organizations. Other people who are individual-conscious conceive it to be, maybe, the history of a man. And neither one of these things is correct This isn’t a history of me. I have nothing to do with this as far as a life cycle is concerned, because this would have eventually happened somewhere. I don’t know, maybe I made it happen a couple of months earlier.

But the point is, sooner or later life itself would have gotten fed up with this deterioration in this universe and would have made a wild line rush to come up. Sooner or later this inevitably would happen. And as I say, maybe I’ve just speeded it up a little bit. Very well.

The line rush has been made. This does not say that there is not a future of development, but it does say that we can sure be awfully comfortable about what’s been dropped. There’s an enormous number of things left to know, and none of them with any great high priority. We can know these things a long time in the future and we’ll still be all right. Because what we’ve come up to is a process which itself delivers into the hands of the person processed a knowingness about existence. And so we don’t have to teach what existence is; this person comes to know what existence is.

If you process somebody — if somebody wants to do some research, the best way to do some research is just get processed and get processed more and more and more and more and more, and you can really process out to the thin wavy nothingness with great ease in one direction — that’s the direction of thinking about it Now, you can probably process out to the point where you can throw lightning bolts around. I don’t know, I haven’t seen any lightning bolts lately and I myself am rather lazy about lightning bolts; they’re so easy to manufacture from the public service company.

But you can go into the direction of how do you make matter and what’s its composite, or in the direction of how do you think about it, with great ease in processing, either way, and answers start turning out faster than a public stenographer could possibly take them down. And any one of these answers would be really eye-openers to somebody operating without any knowledge of what we are doing here. If you suddenly walked in with a few paragraphs taken from some preclear concerning the formation of this or the formation of that, you would undoubtedly find somebody, whose science applied to that, very interested in it (I’ve had this experience several times lately.)

It’s much better to have the formula of knowing how to know than it is to have the data which is to be known. I think you will agree with that Well, that’s the direction we’ve been going.

Now we’ve run a gradient scale from the past on up to the present. The whole past is very complex; the present is very complex. But in the midst of these complexities there were certain simplicities which, when known, delivered into a person’s hands a great deal of information which he could use in the business of living.

The history and development of Dianetics and Scientology is a natural evolution. It is not an invention, it is not a creation; it is a natural evolution of at least some part of life getting very fed up with running the same cycle. And life sooner or later would have burst through with these things and delivered from some quarter or another, I think, almost identically the answers which I am giving. Because these answers are tremendously fundamental.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica of, I think, the eleventh edition — certainly the thirteenth edition — you will find an article under the heading, „Time and Space.“ It’s a beautiful article. It doesn’t start with the words but it certainly starts with a feeling of no responsibility and ends with the final line of no responsibility concerning time and space or information therefore. It says, ‘Time and space are not a problem of science. They’re a problem of psychology.“ No responsibility.

I’m rather interested, by the way, that they say that time and space is not a problem of science, that it’s a problem of psychology. That’s very beautifully stated, but the main point here is that the thirteenth edition was saying, „We don’t know a definition for time and space. Time and space are problems of psychology.“ Oh!

The last time I looked the people that were really using time and space were the physicists. And they couldn’t move off of their left foot without knowing what space was. They just couldn’t move so they haven’t gone anyplace. They’re around playing with popguns or something — atom bombs. They’re fooling.

What’s time? What’s space? Everywhere you look, physics textbooks, anyplace else, it says, ‘Time is change of position in space.“ And „Space is associated with time.“ And „Energy is the change of a particle in space.“ And ‘Time is a manifestation of space and energy.“ And „Matter is a manifestation of space and energy.“ And „Space is a manifestation of time and energy.“

Did you ever hear about the old — the snake, you know, that grabbed himself by the tail and ate himself up? Well, that’s what happens in that definition. Yes indeed, it was a problem of psychology; I don’t know who needed the psychologist.

Well, what were time and space? Well, if life didn’t have a good statable definition for time and space which did not immediately reevaluate itself in two other definitions which evaluated themselves in the first definition… That’s, by the way, no answer. If you did mathematics that way (the way they’re often done), you would get the answer as just the answer, which would be the answer which you had already said you would get before you got the answer. So you would have the answer before you got the answer, and this would be useless to you. So they’d had to stay below that echelon and have been penalized rather heavily for it Because they didn’t include, then, the mind into the field of science.

In past societies, as nearly as I can judge, when the mind has been included at all into the field of science it has been „How did one make a slave with less unit time per individual?“ That was the main idea. The emphasis was on training, discipline, punishment, and that of course was naturally a sort of a dwindling spiral. It would run itself out sooner or later.

Now, therefore we were dealing with restriction every time we dealt with the mind, and we got a closer and closer restriction of the mind and limitation of its liberty, limitation of general freedom, and so we got the cycle of the MEST universe. Uniformly got the cycle of the MEST universe, which is birth, growth, decay, death.

Even the Vedic knew that The Vedics were very, very naive people. They were very clever people, they were very young, they were enthusiastic, and they thought life was worth living! And they gave forth many formulas of this character. And one of those formulas is that cycle of creation-destruction. It’s a very, very wise, usable thing.

But this sort of thing had never been integrated with modern science. If you said, „The Vedic people“ and tried to get into science on this phrase, somebody would have said to you, „Oh, you mean, oh, you’re studying ethnology or anthropology?“ Something of the sort. And they wouldn’t have admitted that you were studying science.

The evolution of a match as you strike it is just that: birth of the fire, growth of the fire, dwindling of the fire and vanishment of the fire. Everywhere you look in this universe you’ll see that same cycle, same cycle. All right.

Life, sooner or later, would have gotten dose enough to the bottom of the cycle to make an explosion on the subject of knowledge itself. And evidently did.

The funny part of it is, is — by the way — I never went into this cycle for the reasons that turned out. In other words, I never started to study this because I thought that the world was in terrible shape. I started to study it because it seemed to be awfully neglected.

I remember the first time I considered it was neglect — it was the field of aesthetics that interested me, not the field of the mind. I remember going into the English department of a university where I was unfortunately incarcerated at the time (as so many of you have been in universities) and I said, „I’ve just discovered something very interesting, that Japanese poetry and English poetry register with more or less the same pattern on a Koenig photometer.“ (Very crude device. Today we have oscilloscopes, and so on, which do much better work.) The old Koenig photometer consisted of four mirrors which rotated and showed you the pattern of the variation of a gas flame as you spoke against a diaphragm. Very, very old device.

And you got, more or less, the same tape for all kinds of poetry. This told you that there was something about language and rhythm which was recognized by every mind, no matter where or how trained. It told you that you might find that to be the case. That was science tying in with the mind, the aesthetic of the mind.

And the English department, they looked at me blankly. And they said, „Yes, we can see these two tapes are alike. What did you say these are two tapes of? Of what?“

I said, „It’s a device they have over in the physics department…“

„Oh, you’re from the physics department What are you doing over here in the English department? The physics department…“

That was my introduction to specialization. I found out that you weren’t supposed to think about things in another department when you were working in one department, no matter what you found out You got this beautiful picture of the snake devouring himself by his own tail.

Well, we have — the whole field of the mind having — has been shunted, sent over this way, sent over that way. It’s been sent… (I don’t want anybody to laugh here because these microphones are sensitive, both are very sensitive and a blast of laughter might hurt Mike’s ears here. So let’s be careful on this one.) They turned the field of the mind over to medicine. You see? And medicine, naturally, realized their responsibility for the field of something which in the Encyclopaedia Britannica says is the basic fundamental of physics. But medicine has never pretended to be a science, except when Morris Fishbein writes. (Morris Fishbein. He’s a little known character of the dinosaur area — tyrannosaurus rex species.) Anyway, they turned the mind over, then, when medicine wouldn’t have anything to do with it — the medical doctor, he kind of ran.

Sigmund Freud came up and said, „The mind belongs to medicine first“ And the doctors sure fixed him, if you want to read his history. And medicine eventually sort of took a little fragment of it and then they sort of handed it back, and they gave it over to a specialized field which is called psychiatry. And the psychiatrist, he had it for a little while, he had a little corner of it. He could see it was obvious to him that an insane person jerked. (This, I believe, was his single contribution to the field.) And the surgeon.

Over in Bavaria there was a blacksmith — you think I’m being disassociating here when I talk this way — but over in Bavaria there was a blacksmith. He was an idiot. Idiot blacksmith over in Bavaria. And he was standing in front of a forge one day, and the forge blew up and a crowbar went through his head, entering in one temple and going out the other temple. And this was written up in a journal (probably the American Weekly, published by Hearst — where they get most of their ideas in medicine and surgery). It was written up as having happened in Bavaria. (I think — you know, they always see ghosts and have strange things happen, and so form-it’s always in Bavaria. Probably you can’t get in there or the communication lines have been down there for so long nobody can challenge you.) But this crowbar blew through the blacksmith’s skull in Bavaria, and it was written up and it got into publications in the United States. And so they said, „We now have the answer to the human mind, which is the prefrontal lobotomy.“

I know that you, researching this, would have to really research it to find out, incredibly enough, that that is exactly what occurred. That story from Bavaria does not say that the idiot blacksmith became less of an idiot All it says is he lived. And this, as far as I can find out, is the entire background technology of the prefrontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy and the other „delicate surgical operations which are engaged upon to make the sane of America more sane,“ according to psychiatry. Except practically all the patients either die or lie mo…

But it is the interest — it is the very interesting thing that it keeps people from jerking. They lie there like a piece of protoplasm afterwards and that’s that And so, it has been handed over to the field of the surgeon.

Everybody’s been playing this game so far of no responsibility, no responsibility, no responsibility on the field of the mind, until it might bring you to the somewhat dangerous and untenable conclusion that the society at large plays very hard at the game of no responsibility. It might be that the society doesn’t take good, solid responsibility for various things.

Well now, it was very unfortunate, it was very, very unfortunate that the psychiatrist turned it over to a machine. The machine was an electric shock machine. And the second they said an electric shock machine did something to the human mind, they turned it over to me. It was an electric machine, wasn’t it? Well, I have some training in electronics, and that’s that So you see, I inherited it.

Because we were the most advanced class, at that time, in electronics, which is to say higher level of electronics, which is nuclear fission — we called it atomic molecular phenomena in America — about the first class that was taught in this country. And everybody there, you see, the whole group really represented the higher level of electronics in the United States, and nobody there would take any responsibility for the mind or what it was doing except myself. So you see, I inherited it perfectly honestly. And I can show you its deed. Show you the deed of title and transfer, because the day I read, „The psychiatrist uses an electronic wave to do something to the human mind,“ I became very interested.

I said, „What do you know. The medical doctor, the psychiatrist can now tell me some things I want to know. I want to know what is the smallest wave possible?“ And of course, it is very easy to establish that the human mind has in it the smallest wave that we’re going to find anyplace, because it can store such an enormous amount of data in such a little tiny place.

Therefore it must be stored in tiny, tiny wavelengths, smaller than we know about in electronics or nuclear physics. They must be much smaller, by the way, than the wavelengths of ultraviolet. Because, you see, just capacity; because you figure it out and you figure out that the human mind cannot store more memory than a person will need in three months. It can’t store more than three months’ worth of memory if the wave is as big as we have to have it in the field of nuclear physics. So this was beautiful to me. And I went immediately into the field of medicine to ask them, „What’s the length of the wave?“

Now, it might sound funny to you, but do you know, I thought they’d tell me. And I was astounded to discover that the field of the human mind had been inherited by a machine and nobody else was taking responsibility for it And if you wanted to do anything for it at all, you would certainly have to move in and find out why electronics influenced the human mind.

(Sigh!) That’s a terrible thing to have happen to anybody. Very, very bad. Because you found out that although everybody looked very impressive and although they wore very nice clothes (tweeds usually) and they spoke with this greatest of impartiality about it all, they didn’t know a damn thing.

It was wonderful to behold what was considered data. And it outraged anybody with a scientific training or a background to see what was „data,“ be called data. And ever since, I have been trying to demonstrate the fact that I was not wrong in trying to find out. So if you’ll bear with me, why, I’ll tell you in the rest of this series what’s finally been discovered about the matter. It’s all very simple.

But ragged as this dissertation may be on the history and development of the mind, it is not even vaguely as ragged as the work itself. For instance, the records I did keep were used to plug up rat holes or something — various people’s — and I seldom accumulated large notebooks full of material, you know.

I was severely scolded, one day, by a scientist (excuse me, „scientist“ — psychologist) very, very sadly and seriously brought to task for not keeping records. And this fellow said he’d kept records. He showed me where he’d kept records on every electric shock case that had entered into the sanitarium, and he’d kept them for years. And there was the patient’s name and there was the patient’s address and there was the age of the patient, sex of the patient, the general measurements of the patient, how long the patient had been crazy, how many times he’d been put in the sanitarium and how many times he was shocked by an electric shock machine and what kind of a machine it was and exactly what the voltage was on the machine.

And I said, „Yes, you’re saying you kept these records. Well, tell me, what did you do with these records and how did you add these records up?“

He said, „How did I what?“

„No,“ I said, „what was the purpose in keeping the records? What did you intend to find out? You know, find out from keeping the records.“

And he says, „What do you mean? Are you trying to come in here and tell me how to run my business?“

Well, his defense was not adequate. And I went so far as to take hold of these sheets of paper, and going over several of them I noticed that it referred to the admission-discharge records of the sanitarium. And I went and asked a girl if she would let me see these. And you know, I worked for about a half an hour until this fellow stopped me rather impatiently and says, „Well, I know what you’re saying there and what you’re finding out I did draw a conclusion from these. I remember now. Two or three years ago we drew a conclusion that a person who was shocked with an electric machine uniformly stayed in the sanitarium three weeks more than a person who was never shocked on an electric machine.“

I said, „Wait a minute now, you’ve given me a very wonderful conclusion. What conclusion did you draw from this: that electric shock was harmful to the human brain?“

He looked at me very blankly. And for the first time I realized this man did not know he was treating the human brain — or the human mind. This was a new thought to him. What he was doing was making records of things that were wheeled in on an operating table and put in a machine and you pulled the switch. And you made these proper records and you put them back in the files again. He was not treating the human mind. This did not occur to him.

You don’t believe that You don’t believe that anybody could operate like that and remain that shallow. Well, I think they have to remain that shallow in the face of consistent and continual failure, to remain sane. They couldn’t immediately say to themselves, „We’re here to help people’s minds.“ If they said that to themselves and said, „That’s our goal,“ it would mean immediate failure, and man doesn’t like to fail So he says, „We’re scientists. We keep records. We have a sort of a sanitarium here; it’s a jail.

And when people are jerking, why, we bring them in and we cut a section of the brain or we give them a shock and what do you know, they don’t move afterwards. In fact, it is so successful that we usually have to send a trained nurse home with them at sixty dollars a week or thirty dollars a week in order to care for the body needs of the patient for the next twenty or thirty years.“ Pretty sad.

Well, the history and development of the human mind is a contest between mercy and brutality. Somebody comes along who is foolish enough to say that it is bad to abuse human beings, that things could be better, that we could do something. And he says this into the teeth of a stream which is sweeping away the years and the lives and the happiness of peoples by too many millions to count And of course, it’s quite a shock to suddenly start going up against that stream. This universe is rigged to follow that stream; it is explicitly designed as a trap which goes from the cycle of greatness to nothingness, which is exactly backwards to the direction life tries to go.

And that is the only way life itself can fight and contest this universe. It’s trying to turn the cycle around. And yet life itself becomes suborned and becomes so beaten that it starts going down the track, downstream, and every once in a while makes a faint effort or a strong effort to turn around and go up what is upstream for this universe. Life at large has, evidently, an enormous urge toward cooperation, love, goodness, mercy, ethics, justice and other things which are pretty hard to find. It evidently has a large and inherent amount of these things.

Now, it comes up against a formation and a structure which says, „Force, viciousness, brutality, uncaringness, individuality in terms of heavy mass, empty space,“ and you get the contest And part of life could be said to operate on a beaten level. It agrees that force, brutality, love, justice are bad things — that love and justice are bad things, that force and brutality are good things. It agrees on this. And agreeing, of course, just merely becomes a part of the universe.

And on the other hand, life fighting back up against this, trying to uphold a moral, ethical level has a pretty hard struggle. Because in a society which has already begun to believe that the machine is greater than the man, you have a society which has already decided that force, brutality, injustice, betrayal and hate are the best things to have around. It’s already decided that.

Now, you turn around and tell this society about justice, and so forth. The society at large will agree with you. „These things are good,“ they will say, but they say to you, „are they attainable?“ And that is the main contest.

And that is the story and that is the history of Dianetics and Scientology. It is simply the history of life trying to turn around and go upstream again.

Let’s take a break.