Okay. And I would like to talk to you now about the specific road that we have traveled in arriving at where we are. It's always a very good thing to take a rearview mirror and take a look.

The name of the road has been "Trouble." The Western societies at this time do not particularly encourage independent investigation on any subject. Investigation is something that should be done somewhere else by somebody else, by contract, and never mentioned.

The fact of the matter is, however, that the developments of a society are not brought into being by groups of individuals employed behind desks. I dare say there are very, very, very few significant developments that have ever come forward this way.

If you look around amongst those desks you will find out that there's very few of the desks doing any thinking. And if you look into the paper trays, if you look into them very searchingly, you won't find a single piece of paper that's thinking a thing.

There's somebody there. You take any group of individuals engaged in research, there'll be one or two of them who will be turning out ideas. This is a great thing that some of these large, huge, over swollen corporations should recognize. You don't buy things by writing a check for millions of dollars and shoving it at a group of people and way, "Build us a ruddy rod." It buys nothing.

The best that group could do would be to look around for the existing ideas which have been originated by one individual, or two or six, and taking those ideas and improving upon them, or taking into their midst somebody who originates such information.

But the ordinary course of writing a big check and handing it to somebody has been no knowledge for the race. That's a brutal statement but it's a true one.

As a matter of fact, the person who originates the idea is not terribly important. A human being ought to be able to originate lots of ideas. He shouldn't be getting a lot of pats on the back simply because he originates an idea. But the society at the same time should not kick him in the teeth. See, there's one side and the other of this.

And in a field which has remained relatively research, certainly somebody should think — sooner or later somebody'd start thinking about it.

Now, here's an odd thing: We all depend on this thing called a mind. Everybody agrees on this in this whole society. They say that man's best weapon is his mind. And yet, as we look this over — man's best weapon — we find everybody totally certain about how everybody else ought to use theirs, and nobody knows how to use his! And the one thing, then, a society could use would be an operating manual for the human mind. And I don't mean a prefrontal lobotomy.

In other words, there ought to be a mechanic's manual. Somebody builds himself a 155-millimeter gun, or builds a gun of 155 millimeters which is patterned after Hotchkiss's naval cannon which was "going to make war so horrible that then we would never again have war." Do you know how many inventions were invented that way? Nobel's invention was supposed to end all wars. All of Hotchkiss's inventions, which are naval big mounted cannon and machine guns, the original machine guns, and so forth — they were all supposed to make war so horrible that nobody would fight war again. And they came right on up. But nobody has the crust to say this about the atom bomb. This one — the only one that could even vaguely be true about.

But all these boys, Nobel and the rest of them, give peace prizes over it; they're trying to end war by making something so horrible.

Well, these boys build themselves a 155-millimeter cannon that's scheduled to kill, murder, maim, blow up and destroy men and all their possessions and families, and they very carefully sit down and write an operating manual saying, "This is the lanyard. See figure 1, part A. Pull rope B. This is the right wheel. This is the left wheel. This is the muzzle. This is the breech." They write these manuals exhaustively. And probably the manual is the only reason a 155-millimeter gun works. It makes everybody make enough agreement so that they make the gun fire.

Well anyhow, here we have this avowedly wonderful and important thing: the human mind. And we go down to the library and we look under the stack cards — "human mind": "Libido theory — not to be read by Catholics." We read over here, it says, "Prefrontal lobotomies, number of fatalities omitted from data." We look over here: "Why everybody has to be electric-shocked although nobody ever got well from them."

Well, we're not talking about the human mind, we're talking about doing things that have some bearing on, or related to, the human mind. Then we have a book, it's called The Human Mind — it's by some fellow by the name of Pettinger or something. And we look over this book, and we read it over, and we find out it's a bunch of detailed case histories about little girls that did something nasty. And fellows who get into institutions and are very loving to their wife but keep writing letters to their girlfriends, and this is how crazy they are.

In other words, the whole book talks about insanity. And it says on the cover The Human Mind. And that's an insult, because there is no book around — if we've got to be so mechanistic — that says how crazy cannons can get! Everybody'd think that was silly if all the operating manuals on cannons merely talked about was how crazy they could get and how they kept rolling over parapets and how they backfired and rimfired and spitfired, and all we could ever find out about a cannon was that they blew up. We'd stop using them, wouldn't we? I thought that would sink in!

All right. As we look over the field of the mind, we don't find an operating manual. We could use one. The proceeds of this congress will be utilized to create one, which I think a few people could use. And maybe they'll stop stuffing baby bottles into the cannon, and trying to load the thing by putting on hubcaps, and maybe they'll get over the idea that mind and crazy are synonyms. They might just barely get over this idea.

Faced with a tremendous amount of rational thinking, faced by a great many rational actions, people who have studied the mind — and, by the way, I don't tell you that we're studying the mind — but people who have studied the mind in the past have apparently written about craziness or upsets or irregularities. Well, if they know so much about irregularities, you and I could suppose that then they would know something about the regularities of the mind. Follows, doesn't it? "If we just write all this stuff over here about irregularities, then all these people over here will think we know all the regularities."

And you walk up to somebody who has written all about these irregularities about the mind, and you say, "Where's the lanyard?"

"What are you talking about?"

"How do you make somebody laugh? Why do people cry?"

"You're taking an unfair advantage of me. All of this material would be far, far too deep for you. If you will look up several learned authorities, you will discover that this data is not for laymen, because it's all over your head." And at no time, evidently, should you be permitted to learn how to run this concrete mixer, or whatever it is, called a human mind.

Well, that's the status of the human mind. We have three categories, then, which evidently have very little to do with the spirit but have to do with some-thing: We have medicine, psychiatry and psychology

Well, now, psychology does have something to do with the human mind. It does. It does experimental work. It tries to learn something about it by observation. Started about 1862 by a fellow by the name of Wundt, the "only Wundt," and … (audience laughter) (That was a pun!) And he had a good, sound idea. Matter of fact, I've used his idea very well, which is apply scientific methodology to the mind in order to discover something about it. And they departed after that and didn't bother to study scientific methodology and didn't much observe the mind, but we've got psychology.

Now, if somebody is interested in psychology, that is all due respect to that, but let us be sure we know what we are interested in. We are interested in a subject which has certain definite boundaries, and these boundaries are announced many, many times in psychology textbooks. And psychology is not the broad field of thinkingness. That is not what it covers. It covers exactly what it says it covers. And it says it covers certain things in every college textbook on the subject of psychology. And the latest work on the subject of psychology (the only real psychologist who is included in "Who Knows and What" — his book, the authority) defines psychology in this wise: "It would be impossible to define the word psychology unless one studied the history of psychology, for the word psyche is Greek for soul or mind, and psychology is not related to the soul and probably not even to the mind." Unquote. Unparaphrase. That's almost an exact quote.

But there's psychology. Now, it's relatively undefined, but we look into the textbooks and we find it is a study of the brain and nervous system. You got that? The brain and the nervous system, and its reaction patterns. Stimulus-response is about its horizon.

Now, that has with it certain definite things. One of these things is this, very specifically: one of these things says that a man must adjust to his environment. This is part of the philosophy of psychology — there is such a thing. Man has to adjust to his environment and then he'll be happy. In other words, if you're in an insane asylum, if you're as insane as the asylum you'll be happy. Well, that follows from that definition. Doesn't follow? Seemed like it did.

Anyhow, all right. He must adjust to his environment. If he lives in Washington, he must wear nothing but paper, eat nothing but paper, talk nothing but paper.

Anyhow, there are other things which are very specific. One is that personality is unchangeable, and also intelligence. But particularly intelligence — that is unchangeable. Now, these are the limits of psychology. They are many times announced and they are muchly carried forward.

Now, one of the leading psychologists of the country and a very, very able man — I know him, he doesn't know me — Dr. Fred Moss of George Washington University. Held down the psychology department; many times been called in by the president, say, "What are we going to do about this?" He proposes the right solution, so he gets fired. He one time was called in by Hoover as part of a commission to take care of all the accidents the country was having and to make a recommendation as to how to put them down. He added up all the figures, found out most of the accidents were people under a certain age and people over a certain age — so we just refuse driver's licenses to these people and we wouldn't have any accidents. Most reasonable solution in the world, so he was fired. Well, anyway . . . Look at all the votes that'd cost somebody!

Now, that fellow, in the field of psychology, found the first observations of Dianetics many, many years ago — "What? No! It's not psychology." So we've had an expert and authoritative opinion on the subject. We haven't been doing psychology all these years. And I have carefully paid attention to that fact. And I have also carefully not followed along in the tradition of psychology, just for the good reason that it said certain things were impossible. And when somebody starts to tell you things are impossible …

By the way, did you ever work with somebody in an armed service or an office, and every time you went over and said, "How about getting this letter out by five o'clock?" they said, "That's impossible." And you said, "How about taking my car around to the garage?" and so on, and they said, "Well, I haven't got any keys," you know, "it's impossible." And you said, "Well, would you mind cashing my check, too, when you went to the b ," they said, "That's impossible." "Let's see if we can sell a little bit more this …" "That's impossible."

Did you ever do any business with a person like this? Well, you might have had some communication of sorts with them, but you never got anything done in that vicinity, is that right? So when they start to tell you, "This is impossible and this is impossible and that can't be done and this can't be done and that can't be done" — if you are of that novel disposition which desires to make some forward progress, if you belong to that small and insignificant majority that would like to get the show on the road — you stay away from these organizations that tell you, "That's impossible and that's impossible and that's impossible," and you'll get somewhere.

Because all a barrier is, is something across which or through which thou shalt not pass. So obviously that is operating and acting as a barrier, isn't it? That right? Somebody who says, "Not possible, no progress, can't," so on — we've just got a bunch of barriers here, haven't we?

All right. Field of medicine has its own sphere of operation: operation. It handles drugs, surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics. Fine. Mechanics. If they were good mechanics, I'd say that's fine. And most of them are. They're pretty good guys. But they should never forget that they're mechanics. They should never be permitted to forget they're mechanics. Because they get over in a field where they don't belong — the mind. They don't belong there.

Your medical doctor is a trained psychologist — all right, let him fool around with the mind, remembering that the mind is tissue. Remember that? Tissue. It's a thing. It's a machine that runs on neurons which transmit energy at ten feet per second velocity and do this and do that.

So let's just look at this — let's look at this carefully. Instead of feeling great awe in these directions, let's look exactly at what we're doing. If we're handling a machine, then we'd better be an expert on the subject of that machine, right? The medical doctor then has a definite sphere of action, and his knowledge of that sphere and his ability in that sphere is his reason for existence, and therefore he does have a reason for existence. It's a mechanical reason for existence.

Every time he moves out of that, he starts saying "can't, can't, can't, can't, impossible, can't." Why does he say this? It's because you can't reach into a brain with a big spanner and adjust some of the hexagonal bolts and nuts in it. Can't do it. So it's out of his sphere. If he could do it — fine.

Now, let's take psychiatry Let's see, where will we take it? (audience laughter) Psychiatry actually has a definite function in the society, which is the care and feeding of the insane. And as long as they would stay in that sphere and not get out of that sphere, I would be very happy with them. We'd all be happy with them. We'd say, "Look at those self-sacrificing dogs. Look at those poor guys, in there batting the head against the wall with all those psychotics. That's a rough deal," and so forth. But that's their sphere. If these guys want spheres, we'll give them spheres. Glong! So psychiatry has to do with the insane.

Now, psychoanalysis specialized in the neurotic. And if you study the works of Dr. Freud — thrown out by the doctors at one time — but if you study the works of Dr. Freud you will discover that his specialty was neurosis. Person had to be able to talk at least consecutively with him in order for him to get anyplace with this person. Now there was his specialty. And he was good at this, and he made the only single advance along this line that was notable. So they can have the neurotic.

Now, we've got all these illnesses nicely comparted. We've got the mechanical troubles — the medical doctor can have these. Psychos, psychosis-psychiatrists can have these. Neurosis — why, that's the whole job of the analyst and so forth. And this mechanical thing called a brain — why, everything to do with that, that can belong over here to the psychologists, huh? That's a good place for that. Now we're all set there, aren't we? We've got that all divided up. But all we've divided up to date was machinery, materialism. That's totally what we've divided up, isn't it?

Now, who and where are we going to put technology about the human soul? You can right away think of a religion. Although that religion exists in the belief that technology, or finite shape, exists in relationship to the human soul, remember something: It isn't concentrating on that. And we have found a body of technology and information which may be of interest to all those things I have mentioned, but which would be of peculiar and particular interest to religion, which nobody is sitting on — exactly nobody.

The technology related to the human spirit has gone begging since the last great yoga. He tried to do something about this.

Well, that's an interesting thing. Here's a totally uncovered field. If there was anything practical to religion in this life at all, it would be in that sphere, then, wouldn't it? It would be the technology relating to the human spirit: if the spirit can make things well, if it can monitor the body, if it can change these other things. Doesn't matter if it can or can't heal a broken leg on the spot — you'd still have medicine. If somebody went mad, you've still got a house to put him in — psychiatrists.

But, here's the point: There's a whole sphere of existence that nobody is taking any slightest responsibility for.

Now you want to know how psychology and Scientology line up, or how medicine and Scientology line up — they don't! That's the answer to that — they don't. Not even vaguely. Here is this huge sphere in this society that is not at all demarked or boundaried. And every time we come along with this information — we say, "Well, that's psychology" — we come bump, right into the wall. And every time we come along and say, "This does something for medicine," we go crash, right into the wall. Every time we come along and we say,' Well, this complements psychi," crash. Why? Because it doesn't.

Do you think that the repairer of a railroad locomotive has any business whatsoever taking the tonsils out of the engineer? Well, that's the size of it. That is actually the size of it. If everybody before has considered that we're dealing with a railroad locomotive and nobody was paying any attention at all to the engineer, they could then sloppily consider that they knew something about engineers, and if' they were qualified to take on and take off a steam fitting in a Mallet locomotive, they, of course, could do a prefrontal lobotomy on an engineer. Follows. They could take a leg on and off — this is just part of the machinery.

Only it's not part of the machinery — somebody's driving the machine. Somebody's thinking, somebody is feeling his way through life as a sentient being, somebody is originating ideas, he's originating reactions, he's originating emotions. He's not just acting on a stimulus-response pattern forevermore. And who has taken the survey or purview of this thing or this individual? We have, that's who has.

Religion would wander badly unless it had the technology of the human spirit. That would be the vital thing to have, for religion to become a practical, everyday thing.

Well, he's actually healed something — or has he? Maybe he didn't heal anything; maybe he just restored the idea that she could breathe without sneezing. Maybe he just restored the idea that nothing was after her. You know? Bugs. A bacteria is a physical paranoia. If you're not afraid of bugs, they won't bite either.

All right. This fellow does this. He does this, he turns off this cold. Customer comes in, sits down, he says, "I'd like to buy some insurance. I — I don't know, things are pretty awful. I'd like to buy some insurance, because one day the atomic bomb's going to kill everybody and then my wife and children won't be cared for." And if he has any interest at all in his company, he doesn't promptly pick up that pencil over there and lick its point and start to write up the order; he tells them about another company right down the street. Because at the end of a year or two, whenever the suicide clause runs out — bang! Or this guy's going to go through a bridge, or this guy's going to do something. In other words, he takes a look at him and sees how liable this individual is to succumb and finds him far too liable to succumb. So he's a bad risk.

Fellow walks in, said, "Like to buy some insurance — wife keeps insisting on it."

And you say, "What's your name?"

And he says, "Jones."

Hah! Pick up that pencil, write him up. He's going to live to be ninety. It's real practical, isn't it?

Well, that's not psychology — that's religion. Isn't that odd?

Psychology would never find this out. Never discover this. They wouldn't predict the length of time this individual was going to survive by his spiritual action. Guy's tired of life, he's going to kick himself off, because there's no liability to it at all. Psychologist sits there fondly believing that people are restrained by fear of death. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. No, there's many a soldier goes out and charges like mad because it's such a nice thing to do to die. Far from being restrained by death, people wouldn't be playing this game at all unless they thought they could be killed at it. That's a hopeful fact. To many, many people it's a very hopeful fact: "Gee, you mean within the next year or so, I'll kick the bucket? Thanks! Thanks. I didn't have any hope there for a while."

Because it's the being who is surviving, not the body. And it isn't true that everybody's trying to keep his body running on and on and on and forever and forever and forever, not unless he could change it around or do something more in keeping with what he wanted to do.

Let's look at the backtrack now. I said we were going to look at the backtrack and I've been talking about all these other sciences. What's that got to do with it? These things are an expression of man's deteriorization on the subject of materialism and the machine, to where the law tries to enfranchise only the mechanic, where the law attempts to restrain people from healing because it's a mechanical procedure.

We find things kind of far gone and shot, because this is about as far as you can get from the truth. This is not the truth. And unless very soon we get some freedom to heal, we're going to get freedom from healing. There is no reason under the sun why any of the groups I have mentioned should have any monopoly at all. And equally no reason under the sun, except by knowledge alone, should we have any monopoly whatsoever on the human spirit.

The only test of proprietorship would be how well you could work or control something; and if you can make somebody well if he's sick, then looks to me like you're the boy to get hold of. And if you can't, then you're not the person to get hold of. And that's the only test there has ever been and the only test there should ever be in the field of healing. Can you make them well? Okay. You can't? Huh! Don't bother to send the bill.

Sent a doctor some plumber's wages the other day. Figured out how many hours he'd been on the job and figured out what a plumber would get for that length of time and sent him plumber's wages, because he did a plumber's job. He rushed a delivery with great violence and severely injured his patient, because he had to get home to dinner. So he wasn't a good mechanic, was he? Well, by golly, when a guy can't even be a good mechanic, it's about time for him to either go back to school or get some processing or something.

But here's the main thing I'm driving at: To that field which can accomplish does accomplishment belong. Doingness belongs to those who can do; dyingness belongs to those who can die; livingness belongs to those who can live. And as we look on the backtrack, we are not looking at the backtrack of one man's endeavor or a group's endeavor in the field of Dianetics and Scientology. This is not what we're looking at.

We are looking at a whole civilization which step by step and grade by grade has dropped further and further into the idea that the mechanic and the mechanical aspect are everything, and that the spirit and livingness are nothing. When we get to a point where a man dealing with a mind starts raving about the efficacies of a drug, we've gone a long way — a pathetically long way — down.

Sanity is thinkingness! Now, if it's going to be handled with a needle .. . Of course, we could take a needle and make somebody think differently just take one and jab it into somebody and he'll think differently. But the sensation and the pain are what make him think differently, nothing else.

Now, we look on this backtrack and we find out that in the days of the Greeks they still had, scattered around, all kinds of gods and goddesses and all sorts of things. In other words, Operating Thetans all over the place — Athena, the rest of the boys and girls. Why, very certainly an Operating Thetan could come over a battle. We hear today, "Of course, the Greeks were sort of childish. They had various myths which are all untrue, untrue, untrue. And there's no explanation for anything they did or believed, and they were all nutty and so that's what they believed because they were all kind of childish and it had no bearing on any reality, so we have to accept them just as the fairy tales they are."

Boy, if that isn't an evaluated viewpoint! Yet there's a paperback book down here on the newsstands right this minute, Mythology, and it starts out that way. They teach kids in school, "Of course there's no such thing as a spirit, god or goddess or anything like that. This is a bunch of stories, you know."

I'll bet you back in Greek times — and a lot of GEs have been on the line through the Greek era — I'll bet you there wasn't much doubt in somebody's mind after he'd been zapped. One good, solid zap on the field of battle; he hasn't got — nothing's being fired at him, and he's standing there saying, "I'm not going to have a thing to do with it. The dickens with defending Minerva or Juno or anything else." Bang! "All right. I'll get in there and pitch."

They used to tell stories about these gods and goddesses sweeping down over the field of battle and taking a hand in human affairs and mixing things up one way or the other. They're not necessarily fairy tales, we find out today. That's a fascinating thing to discover in this practical, solid age of the twentieth century. Cute, since we can by processing put somebody in a position where he could influence individuals other than his own body. If he could influence individuals other than his own body, certainly you can follow out that a spirit must be able to influence other things and other destinies. And it doesn't have to go very far from that to understand the idea of gods and goddesses.

And furthermore, if you wanted to get up above the gravity of Earth and have a good time, you'd probably live on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier or any of these other mountains where they've always said the gods lived. Wouldn't that be a good idea? You know, you get up there and it's cold — you can make nice mock-ups where it's cold. Good area to make mock-ups.

Now we're moving right out of the realm of the probability and apparently into the realm of the fairy tale, but that was a long time ago. That was a long time ago, and so we can look at it as, you know, they didn't know anything. Maybe they didn't, but boy, they sure had a lot of fun! Had a lot of fun. Life had more zip, and additionally more zap!

All right. We come on down into the Dark Ages, and we find demon exorcism — people had invented demons by that time. Enough thetans had gone bad, enough spirits were enwrapped in blackness, for demons to be the usual order of the day. So we had everybody involved in exorcising demons.

Now if they'd exercised them instead of exorcised them, they would have gotten somewhere. Fellow would have recognized the error of his ways and snapped up to it and gone and found some other body to haunt. We can do that today. Demon exorcism, however, is a very crude effort at healing, but what do you know, has a percentage of success in its day comparable to anything this civilization had five years ago. It was just as successful. There's no reason to look down on it. But they were still dealing with the spirit, if with the demon.

See, first we — dealing with gods, you know, and goddesses and splendor and beautiful statues and all of that. And it went down through Rome and came on down the line and we finally got to a point at where we're dealing with demons. Not bright, shiny gods anymore that could put out flitter, but guys that were awful black that made you sick if they grabbed you. Tells us something, huh?

All right. We come down the track a little bit further and we discover, according to the early Puritan Calvinists — the Calvinists and the early Puritan fathers, the boys who were doing preaching when they first hit this continent — and boy, those were rugged boys, too. I read a great deal of their newspapers. I haven't read the schoolbook histories. I have some feeling that the schoolbook history is sometimes colored. And I've read some of the original papers, newspapers and sermons from 1600, 1650 — you know, that period. Rrrrrrr! It's a wonder they lasted that long. It's a wonder that the paper would hold those words that long, you know, without burning straight through. Because when they weren't talking about hell, they were talking about demons. And when they weren't talking about demons — that is to say, hell's demons — they were talking about brimstone. And when they weren't talking about brimstone, they were talking about the certainty that your sins were going to land you there.

And with this great variety, they did, however, build a strong race on a strong continent. You could even get that bad off on the field of religion and produce an effect! Hellfire and brimstone. And man, they kept at it till about 1800, hot and heavy very hot and very heavy. But these were the civilizing influences of this continent. There weren't any others to amount to anything. Fellow used to go out and say, "Well, I better be a good boy. Well, I won't kill him today, I'll kill him tomorrow — God probably won't be looking tomorrow."

The hellfire, brimstone, if-you're-not-good-you're-going-straight-to-hell school of religion was still better than no religion, because it at least mentioned the spirit — it at least gave it some acknowledgment. Now does that make more sense to you? It at least said "hello" and "okay" to it.

Then we come on down the years and we find what is called the Industrial Revolution. The "Industrial Evolution," it should be called. And the wheels began to turn, and the mills began to mill in long sheds, and people started getting more TB because of cotton lint — in other words, we had progress. And we started turning out more goods than Mama could turn out on her hand loom, and we started running out of game — which is also very handy stuff to cover yourself with if you're cold — and we start running out of game, we start making fur, or blankets.

And we get a kind of a questioning period of "Is it or isn't it?" you know — it's all milder — or "Is God there?" or "Is there a spirit?" you know? "I wonder about my soul, if I have one." Which finally culminated in the Darwin trials in Tennessee — the "monkey trials" — where a whole country is treated to the fantastic spectacle of its finest orator shouting and screaming on the side of Darwinism or the Lord or wherever he was, and other people shouting and screaming about it.

One of them saying, "It's just evolution," and — you know, by this time we'd heard all about "man came out of a sea of ammonia." (You know, that's a good place — somebody must have had an ammonia AA as near as I can figure out, to get that together.) Anyway — "Man came out of this sea of ammonia and he just got there by accident and he's here by accident and he's just a machine and he just runs and that's all there is to him and there isn't any soul there at all and this is evolution and this is the way it is and if you don't say this on the examination paper you will get zero." Biology.

So, here all of a sudden it becomes questionable whether a soul exists or not, with the "monkey trials" of Tennessee. Darwinism. Did the soul even exist? What do you see in this but a dwindling spiral?

Now we come up to modern times, where no sensible scientist through the '20s would permit himself to discuss this embarrassing question of godly origin. This soul sort of thing had just dropped by the boards — that there was a godly origin, God-created. He wouldn't be pulled in on that. It was not the fashionable thing to think. The fashionable thing to think was cytology, biology — that was fashionable. Physics, chemistry, but nothing about the soul at all.

Until in their old age, some scientific philosophers finally wrote their final books and said, "Well, when we get all through figuring this out, we really can't conceive of anything but that something like God must have had some sort of a hand in it somewhere." Of course they'd have to get to be seventy or eighty years of age or Sir James Jean-ish to get up to this point and finally make this confession, put it in their memoirs and then die real quick so their confreres couldn't cut their throats.

And right now if you were to walk up to a nuclear physicist who is up to his ears in gamma rays and you were to say to him, "Do you know that there is a process known as exteriorization by which an individual is told to be three feet back of his head, and that 50 percent of the human race can do so," the fellow would absolutely gibber. I mean, he'd just ridicule, he'd make fun of you, he'd push you around on the subject: "Hah! Can't be! Ha-ha! Heh-heh-heh! Man has a soul? Hah! We know he hasn't got a soul, and that's why it's perfectly all right for us to destroy everything everywhere. There's nothing guarding it anywhere. There's no liability whatsoever."

You know, it's a very funny thing, but we've even forgotten that horrible lesson. Back in the old days, duelists very often had an embarrassing thing occur to them. And if you read their memoirs (not Dumas's accounts), if you read the memoirs of duelists and so on, you'll find out that they every now and then had a very bad experience; because their opponent when killed exteriorized at them and chewed them up most horribly. And those are in the accounts of duelists. You know, he's dueling there left and right, and all of a sudden skewers the guy right through the heart and the guy exteriorizes right straight out of there, comes right up his arm and bow! And won't leave him alone, you know? Say, "Well, you killed me. Go ahead, try to make love to her. Go ahead."

You'll find these things in the 1500s — in memoirs, personal letters, things like that. "Dear Charles; I'm in terrible condition. I killed a man three days ago and he's still around." Modern psychiatrist has an explanation for this fellow — say he's haunted by feelings of guilt, and therefore is hallucinating and he believes that he's being bothered by this individual.

But the funny part of it is, a psychiatrist could say that, but he wouldn't have any cure for it. No cure at all. Whereas the other fellow's got a cure for it — back in the 1500s they had a cure for it. Fellow would put out enough funds to the family of the deceased and make enough concessions and pray hard enough, the guy'd finally leave. It would happen. Now this is an oddity, isn't it, that we look back through the many thousands of years past and we find great spiritual awareness.

Even in the earlier days, spiritual perception had nothing to do with facsimiles, engrams or hallucinations — we had lots of perception of this, lots of discussion with this. Fellow comes down and he's sitting down alongside of the road, he's feeling bad — maybe two or three thousand years ago — he doesn't seem to be doing well. And the fellow says, "I'm haunted."

The passerby understands this. He says, "What do you know, guy's haunted. Well, get away from me." You know, just "So what?" All kinds of odd manifestations of this kind and that — seem perfectly routine and usual.

Then we come on up through the centuries, and although we increase a great deal in mechanical knowledge, we seem to lose all spiritual awareness. And then we say, "Well, we're much better off not believing in those horrible things called ghosts and demons and things that go boomp in the night. No. Ha! We're practical, scientific people and we don't believe in these things." And that's why our asylums are more full today than they ever have been in the history of man, and why psychosis, neurosis, is at a higher incidence today than it ever has been. Isn't that fascinating? You don't suppose there's any coordination between these two facts?

Well, looking at the backtrack then, and looking forward until now, we discover that there is really — if a person as a spirit were so inactive that he could not avenge himself upon his accuser or murderer, then we would find no liability to murder, would we? Except maybe "Dragnet." Maybe we would have to depend upon the TV programs that they manufacture especially for five-year-old children to convince them that they shouldn't kill their fellow man — maybe this would be our moral restraint. Maybe we could depend on this, and maybe we couldn't. But the fact is that there's no actual, spiritual kickback for reason of destroying some other being or his possessions. So we wouldn't have to be careful, would we? "Kill them all!" And that's just what we're saying right now as a nation.

It's an odd thing that these two, three facts seem to go together. It's also an odd thing that as long as we address the spirit, as long as we exteriorize the person, and as long as we return to the individual some belief and faith in himself, he gets better, brighter, his IQ goes up, his ability to handle things gets better, he becomes more powerful, more persistent and he becomes kinder and more merciful — more tolerant, less critical. And if we start treating the machine we get a patched-up broken leg. And that's all we get.

Now this is a fantastic state of affairs to discover in the middle of the twentieth century, because what we've discovered is not popular. If I were standing here telling you today about a little machine — you start this little machine running and you ask the other fellow to put his head in there and it goes sparkety-sparkety-spark and it polishes up his eyebrows or something — you'd say, "That's fine, we can just make a million out of that, very easily."

But this other thing is a hard thing to sell, because the spirit of man has gotten so little acknowledgment. There have been so few "hellos" and "okays" to the individual as a spirit, and so much "hello" and "okay" to the individual as a body, that people have begun to feel safe in the destruction of bodies. Because all a body can do is hit or fire a gun. So it's perfectly safe to do things to people, to whole nations of people. What feeling of guilt would you possibly get? None. So we get a lessening of moral responsibility.

And that isn't the only reason we've got a lessening of moral responsibility. We've got a lessening because less and less people can have anything. The only person who would think of destroying a whole nation or a whole Earth would be somebody who would be sickened by the thought of owning it. Only such a person would contemplate its widespread, wholesale destruction. He would have to be a sick man very sick.

And so we find sick men today advising many policies, and unless some few of us become active and thoughtful in the direction of a practical religion, the technology of the spirit, and revive some feeling, some height, some decency, this planet will be as bald as a billiard ball. And there are some around that are.

And this is a good playground. The back history of this race was destruction and more destruction and more destruction as far as this planet was concerned, with less building and less building and less building, until we get today where we can deliver the big punch to end it all.

It never occurs to anybody that there might be some few amongst us who didn't feel it necessary to end it all.

It is to that few that I am today appealing.

Thank you.