Audience: Hi! Hello!

Thank you very much.

Well, tonight we start a brand-new series of tapes. Brand-new series of lectures based on Q and A.

Rightly or wrongly, Scientologists to some slight degree, to people who are interested in Scientology but aren't, yet, have the reputation of not answering questions. To some slight degree. And I'm going to show you here in the next couple of weeks that I can answer questions at great length. Therefore, this is the first of these question and answer things. And maybe I'll get tired after this — after a couple of days and we'll do something else. Anyway, this is lecture number eleven, 18th ACC, July 29, 1957. The beginning of a series of questions and answers on the subject of Scientology.

And I think that you probably haven't thought of any questions yet to amount to anything. There's hardly enough here to bother with yet, but these will come up. I'd very much appreciate questions in class. I don't partic — — I mean, about your class activities. I don't particularly appreciate questions asked so that other people will be informed, and which you already know the answer of. Now, I'm going to sit down here at least for part of this lecture and look over some of these questions. And any question that can't be asked in a paragraph… Now, here's a good question: "What would be the optimum one-week intensive to give on a case where one week of CCH 1 and 2 would just begin to crack it?"

Well, I can answer this by saying that CCH 1 and 2 would be what would be used.

Male voice: I see.

Now, this unfortunately contains the answer to the question. Don't you see? Well, "What would be the optimum one-week intensive?" is a very good question. And I think that you would like to hear the answer to that. Right?

Audience: Yes.

All right. The best intensive — the best thing to do with an intensive here today — by which we mean a twenty-five-hour, straight-at-it series of processes-would probably be the first of the CCH, which is CCH 0, followed by a good test pass here of CCH 1, CCH 2, CCH 3, CCH 4, CCH 1. That brings us to the end of the first day. Providing the auditor can't duplicate. Now, it would actually bring us about ten or twelve hours deep.

And I would then, depending on the type of case it was, continue from that point either on up the control line or I would simply crack the case wide open on all of its refusals to communicate, improve the communication, turn the fellow loose in my area and tell him to talk about Scientology to people. That's what I'd do. That's what I'd do. Now, what somebody else would do would be something else.

Now, people who don't like people communicating and things like that, they could go on and run this sort of a process: they could say, "Recall birth. Thank you. Recall conception. Thank you. Recall a past life, with great reality. Oh, you can't do that, eh? Well, thank you." And get them introverted. You see? So that they couldn't then communicate and say what a bad session it was.

Now, a lot of people who would go out anyway and say what a terrible session it was, of course should be handled that way. Raise their IQ, not their communication, you see? If they're going to be very critical of it, of course it's best to just sit on their heads for twenty-five hours and skip the rest of it.

Answering your question very directly: I'd run CCH 0 at the beginning of every session in the intensive. There's a difference between beginning of session and beginning of intensive. And I would run CCH 0 at the beginning of every session in the intensive. Keep that nice and flat, keep that from going out from under. I would run CCH 1, the presenting the paw — the hand process until I was fairly — he was fairly willing that he'd reach to me. And then I would run enough Tone 40 8-C, let him find the auditing room and — so that he wouldn't kick up any fuss that way particularly. I wouldn't make any endurance test out of it, however. And then I'd run some Hand Space Mimicry so he'd get some reality on the auditor very well; and then probably some Book Mimicry to get him to duplicate.

But if he was doing extremely well, was developing little comm lags of one kind or another, I would just go ahead and audit straight out from my assurance that he had found the auditor, the auditing room, was willing to reach. You see, that's what those first steps establish. They're not really an endurance contest; they work. You know? I mean, they can be worked in this direction.

But how can you get the most case gain and how can you get the case into the greatest level of communication, if that is your goal? How can you shed the most psychosomatics and so forth? The indicated course by the CCH processes, actually at this level of CCH 4, is not as direct as you would be willing to think. After all, you're auditors who know something about your business, don't you see? And there are things that you can just do with cases. You just decide to do something with a case and then you do it with the case. You see? And you push the case around on any course possible.

Now, you'd need to know this, however: how sure were you that you could control his body and his attention? And if you were sure that you could control his body — you know, he did CCH 1, Hand Presentation and he did CCH 2, Tone 40 8-C, he did these pretty well, he had some good reality on Hand Space Mimicry — you would have a fair guarantee that you had a good body control. Right? And there to some degree you could direct his attention.

Well, if you were going to go any further with the case on CCH, you would simply go up the ladder, don't you see? But that isn't necessarily the exact thing to do. This is a sort of a shotgun sort of thing that would get all the cases. But it's not necessarily true that you would take off there at 4 with 4. You could go this route very easily: instead of CCH 4, Book Mimicry, you could go into this department: Locational Processing. Just a training process. In this particular case though, you'd be training his attention. Well, why would you graduate from CCH 3 to training? A training process of one kind or another? You'd just be making sure that you could keep his attention directed.

Now, Locational might itself — run ninety hours — might or might not flatten a case. We don't care. But we know what it would do. We know that it would place the preclear's attention under control. And knowing that it would place his attention under control, we then could run a thinkingness process on the preclear, providing we would come back and take his attention under control adequately again and again and again. So if you were going to follow some sort of a thinkingness pattern with this preclear, it would be really up to you what you ran on him; but for sure you would have to include in this process two other processes. I don't care whether it's Rising Scale Processing you were doing, you were running Black and White or dichotomies or anything else, there's two things you'd have to include in it. And one is CCH 0 at the start of every session. And the other is Training 10 (I think it is) to direct the attention here, there and every place. Is that right? All right.

Now, why? Well, when you run a thinkingness process on a preclear with lots of significance in it, he runs into things which makes him obsessively come off of it and he is changing all the time and he's liable to run into something that makes him difficult to follow your thinkingness command. Well, if you come off of that and give him something on the order of, "Notice that wall. Notice the ceiling. Notice the floor," and make him turn his head in that particular direction, you have taken again control of his attention, don't you see? So you'd hardly call it a process because it has no end goal in itself; it's just keeping the preclear in line. And this is one way of handling the preclear's attention. Do you follow me?

So you couldn't omit — and this is scraping down the lowest thing — you just could not omit out of an intensive CCH 0 and some form or version of Locational Processing. These two things would have to be in there pitching.

All right. Training Zero is there because an individual gets into problems in the middle of an intensive, as well as at the beginning. It's all — be very well if all the present time problems occurred on Sunday and you were going to start the preclear going on Monday. It would be very nice if they would always arrange this, but very often these present time problems occur on Wednesday or even Thursday. And I have spoken to preclears about this reprovingly and I have said, "In the following week I don't want you to have any present time problems of any character," but it hasn't done any good. Probably because I didn't put a canceller in ahead of it or something.

But here is the point here, that a preclear gets into restimulation and telephones George. And George says, "Yeoow yeahhh yeahhh yeahh yeahh." Preclear got into restimulation and decided George was a perfect heel and called up George and said so. Or decided — preclear decided she didn't know how Mama had possibly put up with it all those years and wrote Mama so, and the answer doesn't come till Friday. You got the idea? In other words, the preclear in restimulation made trouble for himself. And very often while he's coming through these things he's more liable to make trouble for himself than ordinarily. So you can expect present time problems to occur during an intensive. And if you expect anything else, you're just trying to postulate out of existence the behavior of man. And I'm sure that you . . . I'm sure that you could do this, given a little spit, but I haven't been able to so far. Anyway, what — I'm doing very well on it, though.

Here's always a thought with this. The pattern of CCH is as follows: you control the body so that you can control attention; you then control attention so that you can control thinkingness. If you're going to run a thinkingness process with significance in it at all, it is at least necessary that you continue to control attention. Do you see? You can't void controlling attention, no matter what you do. If you're going to start running thinkingness — he's just sitting there and about the highest, hottest thinkingness process you can run on a preclear is this: "Think a thought. Thank you. Think a thought. Thank you. Think a thought. Thank you." And you just could carry it off almost at that basis and he'd be replying whether he would or no. It is a control of thinkingness process, which is quite an amazing process all by itself.

Now, you went that far, you could probably do it all right. The funny part of it is, it wouldn't run on me. I mean, it wouldn't run as an automaticity because I found out something the other day that's very incredible. I could sit there for about a half an hour without thinking a thought. Found it very, very easy to do. I was feeling very stupid and I said: "Well, I wonder how long I can sit here without thinking." I sat there about a half an hour and at the end of that time I wasn't even thinking about what I was supposed to be thinking about and I wasn't even thinking about not thinking, you know? And picked up the postulate at the beginning of the half hour and washed that out and looked at the clock and got up.

It is possible for you, if you're at all in control of thinkingness, not to obey the command "Think a thought." Somebody says, "Think a thought," you can say . . . "Think a thought. Think a thought." Just as I was doing this right now I wasn't thinking a single thought. All right. Not even the thought to be provocative. All right.

So, we have thinkingness — actually, oddly enough, only in upper-level cases can you get a blank. You may think that's peculiar, but people at lower levels never have blanks. It's just one long consecutive whir.

The psychologist, for instance, said in all of his textbooks, just shortly after the Chaldeans, he said in his textbooks, "Thought is an associative process whereby all subsequent thoughts depend on an earlier thought." In other words, he knocked out of existence and not-ised prime thought. You see?

Well, one can always think a prime thought and go on from there or just stop that and think another thought. It's quite an amazing ability here centers around thinkingness. So that if you're handling thinkingness, you're running up against — and the only people you get into any trouble with, by the way, are the people who can't stop thinking — you'll get a thinkingness out of control. And now you control this thinkingness and you may be able to do it for a half an hour or forty-five minutes very happily (and I'm talking about somebody who's real low-toned now) and all of a sudden you're no longer in control of the thinkingness. They're not thinking the thought that you told them to think at all. And so they are out of session. Now, understand that, please. They're out of session when they're not thinking the thought because they're not obeying the auditing command. And they act like they're out of session, too. And after a while they blow. So CCH 0 and a direction of attention process such as Locational — "Notice the ceiling. Notice the floor" — is absolutely necessary.

Now, you could tell anybody to think anything you wanted to tell him to think as an auditing command. And you understand that Trio is in itself a thinkingness thing. You consider it a Havingness Process, but he has to think the thought, "Yes, I can have that," and be answered up with some sort of a conviction that he can have it and have a basic agreement going there one way or the other inside himself. Do you understand that? CCH isn't just a process like SLP 7 or SOP 8 or something like that where you did one step, flattened it, did another step, flattened it and did another step. These are indicated processes for various levels. That's a bit different than a scale of processes which you must always climb.

Now, you take this direction of attention process, there is a pattern behind it. First you direct attention to the environment, then body plus the environment, alternately, and then run into some sort of a duplicative process on the body and the environment. And that seems to be — well, it is the best order of procedure there. So if you start directing his attention to the room and the body and so on and you're going to make a process out of it, you're not running Locational Processing. You're doing something else, you see? It's not a process. But this process, "Notice the ceiling. Notice the floor," and so on, is the simplest of the direction of attention processes.

The other day I tried to better this process. And I tried several ways to better it and finally hit on an auditing command which worked fine until it was run on somebody else and they had a question about it. And I got — the thing was run on me and I just practically blew the session. It can't be done. A variation on this like, "Touch that table. Touch the floor," and so forth. This actually can't be done the moment that an individual is no longer very closely associated with the body. It's all dependent on the earliest auditing command, isn't it? You say, "In this session we are now going to employ your body and we're going to have you touch things with your body. Is that all right with you?" Well, we might as well just halt in that moment of time because anytime the preclear changes in any way the auditing command goes by the boards; and after that he himself can touch that ceiling, touch that floor, and the auditor never notices and insists he use his hands to do it. But he hasn't been told to use his hand to do it. Don't you see? But, "Notice the ceiling. Notice the floor," and so on is a very fine process and does directly control attention and is a control factor.

Now, let's look at Havingness. Havingness says, "Look around here and tell me something you could have." The optimum running version on that, by the way, is the original Trio form, which is: "Look around here and tell me something you could have. Look around here and tell me something you would permit to remain. Tell me something with which you could dispense," or "that you could dispense with." That was the original Trio, the three questions. And they're run in a group. That is to say, a few of them are run and a few questions on one of them, a few questions on another and a few questions on the third. All right. That's permissive, isn't it? It doesn't direct his attention, does it? And he'll fly out of control with it. Some day, some hour of the intensive, the preclear was not finding things he could have. Don't you see? He was doing something else.

So that CCH 0 and Locational I would then use, whatever else I was using in the thinkingness or significance line of processing.

First I'd get — I'd follow this pattern, rather than follow processes: I would get his body under control; then his body and his attention under control; and then I would tell him what to think and show him he could think it and get him to change his mind to a point where he could behave in a more optimum fashion.

And that's the way I'd go about an intensive. And that is the optimum intensive.

Okay. Somebody here wants to know what the anatomy of a problem is. Seems to be a very interesting question.

You have to — the anatomy of a problem would consist, first, of an inspection of the CDEI Scale. All difficulties are entered through curiosity.

Curiosity killed the cat. Scientology brought it back.

Now, a problem actually is at the "C" part of the CDEI Scale as a very high-toned manifestation. The individual who could have a problem would be a person in not too bad condition. The person who is a problem is something else. That person doesn't have problems, he is them.

The problem is intention-counter-intention. We answer the question, "What is an intention?" by saying it is an intention (since a lot of you are taking this up right now, tomorrow, and I wouldn't bust your class up).

The next question that was on my desk here was, "What is an intention?" and you'll just have to beat that out tomorrow. But the whole idea of a problem is that it's something versus a something, with a doubtful outcome. Now, it can be more than one thing versus more than one thing, but we — the irreducible minimum of factors in a problem happens to be two. Except the problem of the "only one," where the only problem is that there is only one. Problems based on scarcity, however, if you will look at it, are based simply because there's an absence of another. So problems start with the base number of two and can go anywhere else.

Now, you say, "Well, it's like a war — there's one side fighting the other side and the outcome is doubtful." All right. That's fine. That is a problem. Then any war is a problem. But to say that only two sides can fight a war is foolish indeed. To say that it would be two versus one or three versus six and that it would always have this complexion would be very foolish. There is a such thing as a three-cornered war. There was such a duel fought once: Midshipman Easy, the great triangular duel — if any of you ever read Marryat's masterpiece on that. They fought a triangular duel; everybody got in his shot and so forth.

There actually was a three-way war going on one time, right here in the United States. One of the sillier wars. It happened down in the Gadsden Purchase. And the Gadsden Purchase was purchased sort of over the dead bodies of the defeated Mexicanos and so on and they didn't particularly like to sell this. But we had Mexican troops fighting American patrols and Apaches; and we had Apaches fighting Mexican troops and American patrols; and we had Americans fighting Apaches and the Mexican troops. And boy, if you don't think that was a problem! There you had a three-cornered war going on; a real one. Didn't last very long but it was awfully confusing. The doubt of outcome is a problem.

Now basically, a confusion is not a problem. That is not a good definition of a problem. A confusion is not a good definition of a problem. In the first place, a confusion isn't a problem. A confusion is simply a disorder. It is when a problem ceases to be solvable that it becomes a confusion. When you get a problem falling apart and bewildering everybody thereafter, like some places in this universe — there's the dark horse head in Orion, which is one of the more interesting stellar phenomena visible from Earth; there's a horse's head up there, coal black and no light ever comes through it. Of what is it composed? You'd say immediately, maybe, parts of your bank, but… I dare say the thing was set up at one time or another on a problem basis. It was somebody versus somebody. Then the war disappeared and the confusion remained. Follow that carefully.

Any confusion that is in a preclear's bank at this moment was at one time or another a problem which was in the realm of handling capability. One time or another somebody could handle the thing. But when the war ceased, when there was no longer another terminal, when there was no longer this thing with two terminals fighting and so forth, the weapons and other bric-a-brac used in that conflict tend to drift around.

Somebody is busy plowing in France and the end of his plowshare goes into the nose of a shell that was dead when it landed, but suddenly goes whumph! and bits of farmer and plowshare go spattering around the Picardy horizons. All right. That's no part of his game, you see? He's busy trying to plant a field and it's quite unexpected. It doesn't have anything to do with the problem at hand — is will the crops grow and will the government leave me three kernels of wheat per bushel, or two? It doesn't have to do with any of these problems and therefore it creates confusion. Now, the funny part of it is, is when this happens to him — I'm telling you about this guy with malice aforethought because it explains a lot about your pcs — this guy, when it goes off, goes booooo! He's liable to have something blow up under him like this; and if he lives through it, you'll find a very confused man. Why is he so confused? He wasn't playing that game and there was no problem.

Now, soldiers were in trenches on that field. And by the way, if you've never been over there I invite you to drive through the parts of France where the US has spent so many millions of dollars and so many troops and so forth. You'll laugh yourself silly. I mean, it's one of these horrible, gruesome jokes. You could lose the whole country in the northern part of the panhandle of Texas and never find it again. How you could get all these men in there without them sleeping on top of each other, I don't know! It just isn't ground to fight in or that much to fight over. It's — has to do with — I told you when I came back from Europe a couple of years ago I finally figured out what it was all about. The Germans came down — they got short of cows in Germany and got restless and they tried to go down and raid the French cows. And the French objected and more and more people were brought in on the thing and finally, why, these cattle rustlers got driv' off. That's happened a lot of times. Anyway, it's not something that anybody would take seriously. That's for sure. And yet the number of lives that have been lost in it…

Well, all right. The soldier could be there in the trench and a shell could land alongside of him and go boom! You know? And he'd say, "Thuuuuuh, that was close, you know?" And so on. Well, he's part of that game, see? That's part of the expected activity, he's been given to believe. Of course, he isn't any better off for it, you understand. But it's at least in a problem condition.

Now, when problems deteriorate they become confusions. Do you see that? And now you go in to solve the US government. Total confusion! Why? It's a degeneration of all the problems that were never disposed of or solved for a hundred and — three-quarters of a century.

And they generate all this confusion and then they're all going which ways and then nobody ever knows what the solutions — or what problems the solutions apply to, don't you see? "Let's see. What problem does this solution apply to?" See? Well, you run across a perfectly orderly solution like "all soldiers while on guard shall not put potatoes on the ends of their bayonets," or something, you know? And what problem did this solve? Well, nobody knows, so that sort of thing becomes army regulations, you see? Totally composed of potatoes not on the ends of bayonets. The navy has still retained some idea of it. They say somebody sometime or another has run into those difficulties and the composite of all these difficulties is in US naval regulations. And that's true. Total composite of difficulties. Only trouble is, they took it from the Queen's regulations and nobody knew what that problem was.

Now, you start unconfusing this thing, how would you go about unconfus-ing it? You'd actually simply start addressing out-of-present-time problems. You get the idea? I mean, you would start resolving problems that had existed once but which only demonstrate themselves now as debris. Do you understand that? Hm?

Very possibly the basis of this universe is a problem. It probably existed to fight some other universe or something at one time or another. And then they lost all contact, maybe, with the other universe or it disappeared or something of the sort and after this, why, you have the Milky Way and other things. And astronomers cast up vast opinions about the whole thing. It's like finding a deck of cards out in the street. There's been an awful fight and two gunmen shot each other down over eight aces in the deck or some such thing. And they've been carted away, the blood's been mopped up but nobody picked up the cards. And you come along — astronomer comes along and he looks at this deck of cards lying in the street and he makes some terrific theory out of this. He says, "This proves the existence of nymphs. This shows us conclusively that the interrelationship between alpha and beta particles is the square root of bull." See, he doesn't connect this phenomenon of a deck of cards or any such phenomena with the actual problem or conflict which caused them to exist.

Now, we're not trying to say that all things begin with a problem. But if there's any trouble anyplace, there was something to cause some curiosity to bring about a desire so that the desire could be enforced, so that it could then be inhibited. The CDEI Scale. And the problem is usually what is offered as bait, one way or the other.

Problem is a very, very interesting thing. But its anatomy is two or more intentions opposed. Opposed intentions. That's all there is to a problem. The anatomy of a problem is that it follows down the CDEI Scale. After it's ceased to be a fight, then somebody had to have a fight, don't you see? They haven't got a fight but they had to have a fight. Well, that ensues at the end of a fight. You know, he's got to have a fight, but he hasn't got a fight anymore, so you get "D." He can't tell you why. Then you've got to have have. All these little kids running around with cowboy pistols don't know it, but they're still trying to shoot Black Buck back in Nebraska. Those kids that are real serious about it have lost — have had the misfortune of killing an opponent. It was a big problem how they were going to shoot off Black Buck, you know? And they finally snuck up on him one night and stove a shiv in him. And "Black Buck," they said, "was causing problems." But you notice there was no problem until they came along and opposed Black Buck.

That's why police and criminals cause a vast problem. These two, counter-opposed, cause the problem. If the cops weren't there, you probably wouldn't have any crime to amount to anything. If the criminals weren't there, you probably wouldn't have any cops. That's understandable. Everybody realizes that. But they never look at the other side of this problem because they're not supposed to. This problem's supposed to continue in existence forever. If you didn't have any police, there probably would be very few criminals. Broken-down space opera mechanics scattered around Earth here are the debris of an old cops-and-robbers game which has now disappeared. That's just debris, don't you see?

All the preclear objects to is the debris which he is now holding, which was once a significant part of a problem. He's got solutions that no longer apply to any existing problem. So he thinks he has to do something with them and as you audit him he tries to find places to fit these solutions in. Or he realizes that these solutions no longer fit anyplace, so he's trying to knock them out. And all of it is for want of problems, want of game, want of contention, want of randomity and so on.

When we say "problem," then, we're actually saying part of a whole structure which would have to do with opponents, which would have to do with spectator sports, which would have to do with calculating machines and so on. There's nobody unhappier than somebody with a tremendously wonderful calculator that has nothing to which to address itself. See? Just sits there and gathers rot. That's a silly thing to have happen. It'd be like launching somebody with a 180 IQ into a land or civilization of monkeys. He goes around trying to show the monkeys how smart he is. There's no opponent. No opponent at all. Matter of fact, the monkeys probably think they're much smarter than he is!

So this whole vista of the problem should actually be viewed with intention-counter-intention. And you could have mystery or curiosity in either or any of the intentions. Curiosity about the outcome and curiosity about the actual problem.

The only horrible thing that occurs in thinkingness is to have no desire whatsoever to discover what the problem is before you start solving it. I did that one day. I took three or four of my buddies, they were — I was back home on a visit from the Orient and I was trying to make myself personable and trying to say, "Well, here I am, don't you remember me?" sort of thing, you know? They were working on a curb and they had a — in the old days automobile rims were not drop-center. And some of them were very difficult to get tires on and off of. And they had some old heap there or another and they were trying to get this — wrastling with this tire and I went over and said, "Here," I said, "I'll give you a hand." And with great expertness took up a tire iron and snapped the tire back onto the rim very nicely. And I said, "There you are." And they said, "Ohh, we were trying to get it off and we'd almost succeeded …" I just hadn't bothered to ascertain what the problem was, that's all!

For instance, you'll find many, many cults get into this kind of thing. They go out to do good and then they never find out what's bad; and you find them doing all sorts of weird things.

For instance, there's some peanut-whistle outfit sets up a racket in the United States called the Busy Business Bureau. And this outfit would just love to squash all these forgers and cheats and all that sort of thing, but they run out of ammunition all the time because there just aren't that many people doing bad business. They completely overlooked an interesting fact: the survival value of a bad business or a person who is doing badly is very low. Very low. They get weeded out at a mad rate. Even before the Busy Business Bureau could get a good report on them, see, they're in and gone. Somebody's selling a bunch of shrubs he pulled up in the woods as ten-thousand-dollar fruit trees and he's into the neighborhood and out and gone again long before the Busy Business Bureau hears about it. And this guy manages to survive perhaps for some time, but sooner or later somebody knows the bushes and hits him over the head with an auto wrench and that's the end of that guy and that business. Society has a habit of weeding out the wooden nutmeg salesmen. Well, the Busy Business Bureau has it all figured out that the trouble with business is that it's fraudulent. See, they know the trouble with business: it's all fraudulent and the public has to be protected against fraudulent business. And they have this huge problem mocked up of the public versus these businesses, see?

The public's in there doing business with the businesses and the businesses are doing business with the public. And when they get into trouble with each other, they don't go to the Busy Business Bureau. They chew each other up or they sue somebody and start into this natural selection. Knock somebody out of business and he isn't doing business in that community anymore, don't you see? It's naturally selective as a mechanism. Which leaves the Busy Business Bureau out on a limb because there is no general fight in progress. Consumers are consuming and producers are producing, and it's going on all the time. And out of this terrific agreement, terrific communication level, they try to make a problem and there just isn't one.

Now, if they looked around, they could undoubtedly find something to have as a problem, you know? But they keep doing asinine things. And actually I found out the other day, much to my amazement, that they're in much more trouble than they're out of, all the time. I called up somebody concerning suing the Busy Business Bureau and so forth, and he said, "Well, that would be the 10,761st suit filed this week against the organization." All they do is fight lawsuits.

Now, the ascertainment of a problem or an existing problem or the creation of a problem is necessary for a game of some kind or another, you see? Unless one is established, no game exists. And one is in the funny situation of being out in a vacant lot and he picks up the bat and he swings madly through the air and then he runs to the first base and then he jumps over into the pitcher's box and he throws a ball to first base and goes over to first base and tags himself out. Only he isn't there anymore and it makes him feel foolish. There's no game in the absence of a problem.

Now, that's pretty much the anatomy of a problem. But in view of the fact that a thetan can do with more — you know, he hasn't got enough problems, which is why he's hanging on to what he's got — he doesn't release them easily until you demonstrate to him that he can invent more. And when you show him he can invent more, then he'll let go of a few of the obsessive problems. The trouble with problems is there aren't enough of them. The only thing — reason people protest against war is there isn't enough war going on. If war could go on long enough and everybody could engage in it… See, these big shows that they put on — Warner Brothers and Roosevelt Pictures and so forth put on there in 1941 and so forth, they were actually colossal productions but nobody was any part of them, see? And it didn't make a good problem.

Therefore, Problems of Comparable Magnitude, "dream up more problems," "invent problems," "figure out a problem you could make out of that," and that sort of thing is all very necessary. And injecting mystery into it is necessary too. "Now, can you really get the feeling that there's a problem there?" and "Get yourself figuring about it" and so forth has to be interjected into it, all of which is part of the problem.

Then another thing about problems is they're disgustingly easy to solve. Almost all problems. So we get a whole race of people known as the psychos — they're not quite like the morphos. And these people mock up only problems that nobody will ever be able to handle, so great is their anxiety about the loss of a problem. They've gotten down to a point where they themselves are neither part of the contestants — they themselves are simply the confusion residue. And every time you better their condition they go into ten thousand new problems. See, they just can't rise up scale on the subject of problems; they go into new problems all the time. See, they are the confusion, the debris, the leftover debris of former games and that sort of thing. And they have become the debris. And that's worse than becoming the problem, but not much.

Okay. Well, here's a very interesting question. "Ron, will you say something on an integrated way to train an athletic team? In my case, a badminton or tennis team. Cover the following: Do any of the TRs apply? How about the PE type of instruction? How rigorous should body and muscle training be? Should processing be specialized? You once stated that you could — one could not be trained on barriers alone. What do you mean?"

Well, I've just covered part of that. Somebody said that — couldn't be trained on barriers alone. Well, let's — just what I took up here: the anatomy of a problem — that's also the anatomy of a game, don't you see? Probably a problem is a game somebody's taking seriously. And you can't just keep putting up barriers, barriers, barriers. Also there've got to be specific problems.

And on any athletic team, mental training is — I was going to say as important as physical training; I would say far more important. Far, far more important. I'll give you some kind of an idea. I was gagging here the other evening, you know, about gray hairs and that sort of thing; and so I brought the gray line down here a little bit just to show you this keeps happening all the time, see? And a little later this week, I'll wipe it out, just to show you — completely, both sides.

Now, function does monitor structure. But thought, for sure, monitors both of them. And an athletic build or activity and so forth, is to some degree dependent on muscular structure, but muscular structure is dependent upon confidence to perform the act. Confidence: can I throw that ball? Fellow doesn't think he can throw it, he will actually adjust his muscles so he can't. Now, women have for so long been taught that they mustn't, can't throw anything, that they're not hunters like the rest of the he-men, they're not Dianas or Amazons and they actually have developed a shoulder joint which does not adapt to a pitch or a throw; Their shoulder joint is quite different than men's. And it has been adapted so they can't get that kind of a swinging action. So they have to pitch underhanded or straight overhanded, but they can never get it here on the quarter or the half. I don't know, I see some of you looking at me rather surprised. Didn't you girls know that your shoulder joints were quite different than men's shoulder joints?

Now, when we see that a whole body could be designed in a certain way along the line, it isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to demonstrate that a muscle would adapt itself to not being able to throw, or adapt itself to being able to throw in consequence to the confidence a person had in his ability to perform the act. It doesn't all boil down to confidence. It boils down to willingness. And willingness is monitored to a large degree on expected wins or rewards. One has willingness to play only so long as there are a few rewards.

Now, people don't get, probably, as bad as seals. Seals are the worst of this line. A seal will not blow a horn or balance a ball on his nose without a fish. And if you ever watched a seal act, there are buckets of fish there, and every time a seal does the least little trick, he does it and then with great anxiety finishes it off and looks for his fish. And he's got to have a reward right now! And if he is not given his fish at once, that is the end of his performance and he will simply walk right straight out off the stage and that's that. Quite remarkable. He expects an instantaneous, solid reward.

Well, lots of unions are going so far down into effort now that they believe this is very much the case. For instance, they think their only reward is cash. They have lost sight entirely of pride of accomplishment and belongingness. They would rather belong to the union. They belong to the union rather than to the business, which puts them off the team at once. And they make a game out of the worker versus the business. But the business is composed only of the worker and it must take some interesting mental evolutions to get them in there, you see, and get them to believe that they could fight themselves to this degree. It's quite an operation.

Now, a little bit higher on the scale we find such a thing as an athlete. He wants applause of some kind or another. He wants a little credit for having performed the feat and so on. And he wants the belongingness on the team, the companionship with other members of the team. This is his reward. They feel friendly toward him. And sometimes he'll reach up for the crowd to such an extent he divorces himself from the remainder of the team. He becomes a star or something of this character and he becomes very unhappy in this category. Some people are working for the pride of accomplishment and the reward of just the "thank you" or "good fellow" of one person, who may very well be a dead person — a gone person, you know, a departed ally. They're still in there sweating for Grandma's pat on the head, don't you see?

Now, when you take the goals and rewards into consideration, you have, then, the willingness of an athlete to perform. And if you have his willingness to perform, then he will tend to monitor his muscles so that he can perform. In the absence of a willingness to perform for some reward or another, there is no reward. He gets no willingness to perform, he feels there is no reward, he won't perform, he's a gone dog right away. And you'll find him deteriorating. Physically deteriorating.

Now, they have various superstitions, tremendous numbers of superstitions that go along with athletics. It's just like walking in a bunch of haunts. Somebody spilled the bats just before somebody went up to bat or somebody spat on the left side of pitcher's box or you know, it's just on — which shows you the normal mental condition of an athlete. And it's for the birds. They are frail, they are very breakable, they are mentally disturbable and they are, in essence, a very, very misbehaving type of human being. And that is the professional athlete or one who is an amateur athlete of long standing. So you go up against an athlete and you're going up against somebody who is so afraid he'll break his ankle that he normally does. They are normally, at the beginning of a game, patched together with glue and baling wire. You'll see tape on their legs and wrists and so forth. And they're like a bunch of racehorses of some kind or another. They're somehow or other pumped up to go through this particular game and they go through it and they collapse.

Well, this is minimized by a clarification of goals and expected rewards. You clarify an athlete's goals, you bring him up into a position where he can be trained. And I would say there isn't any earlier step as far as an athlete is concerned. Unless it would be the same processes you would use on a psycho. You would have to run very low processes because you'd have to be able to clarify his goals. And that's the first thing you should do with him.

It's quite interesting. I'll recite you a conversation that took place between a Scientologist and a group of athletic coaches. Scientologist was called in by these coaches — very famous coaches they were — and he'd given them a little talk on the subject of goals. You had to clarify the goals of athletes. He'd taken some of my material of an earlier time here with regard to this. And they all agreed with him 100 percent. And afterwards, why, he was sitting at the luncheon with them and sitting around eating — they left the assembly hall and they went and had their buffet luncheon — he couldn't get anybody who knew what a goal was.

He'd given this beautiful speech, but nobody knew what a goal was. They hadn't a clue. And so he asked a runner that was there, of some international fame and who had been brought, like a trained seal, by his coach, you know? And he asked this runner what his goal was for the following year. And the runner thought for a long, long time and he said, "Well," he says, "I'm going to — I'm going to try to equal the record of Charlie Paddock."

"Is that your goal for this next year?"

"Yes, that's right. I'm going to try to equal the record of Charlie Paddock."

"That is your goal? Yes, that's your goal."

Well, this Scientologist spent the remainder of the luncheon working this out on two-way comm with practically everybody present. And he had a Group Processing session going on, really, on a sort of a two-way comm basis. And he made a fellow try to reach his glass of water. And the fellow would reach the glass of water. And he said, "No, no, no, now," he said, "try to reach the glass of water." So the fellow would stiffen up and try to reach the glass of water. Finally had this tremendous cognition. Then everyone around the table did it and did it until they all of a sudden understood this: you couldn't ever try to reach anything and reach it. Not possible! You either reached it or you didn't reach it. But to try to reach it was no goal.

And they began to understand more and more of this. He finally got this internationally famous runner to dream up a goal and agree that was a goal and so forth. The fellow was going to try to improve his footwork when he was on downhill runs. Give you some kind of idea of the difficulties he had getting through!

This guy wasn't going to do anything! And most athletes get hung up in the ridges of counterposition to such a degree that they start dramatizing the past games and they become, therefore, problems.

So problems of comparable magnitude, clarification of goals, what is a goal, and that sort of thing, is the first thing you take up with athletes. And you follow through this with various things.

If you were trying to train them to do something, you would write up some TRs. Tennis: you'd have a TR for standing on the court; a TR for moving from one side of the court to the other; a TR for moving from the back of the court to the net and from the net to the back of the court. You get the idea? And you'd make them get each one of these things pat. Then a TR for holding a racket; and then a TR for swinging a racket. Got this? And mind you, you would take the best athlete to do this with. You're not training a weak one. You're not training a newcomer. And he's the one you'll have the most trouble with this — the best athlete. But he'll give you the best results in the long run. Now, he doesn't break up as he will tell you he's going to do and forget the whole thing and how to do it. He won't. He will simply get better and better at it and recover his facility rather easily. But you'll have to make him practice in order to get them all together.

Pistol practice — keeping the pistol from going away; holding the pistol still. On a pistol expert, move the person — a number of little TRs, you know? "Keep the pistol from going away. Hold the pistol still. Put the pistol on the table. Pick the pistol up." Get the idea? You just got him very familiar. 8-C with the pistol, I think, was the way that began. The fellow had about three hours of this and went out and broke the national record with that pistol. So it didn't upset him, although he thought all the time that his ability to fire a pistol was being blown up with a big boom.

Now, you would take what they were doing and what they were being trained to do and then, giving them wins all the way, increase them up to a point of great familiarity with what they're doing. And rather than experience, look on it as familiarity. They are sure that they can continue to run 8-C on the court or on the track. The track will be there, that sort of thing. Just familiarity, familiarity, familiarity. And then you have to work on them on a games condition and you really have to teach them games and what no-game conditions are and games. And you do this with PE type instruction.

And the rigors of training should never be permitted to get in the way of rigors of mental activity. In other words, you keep the mental line up.

The way you develop team spirit and that sort of thing is just to get the group into good communication with one another and get them to agree upon their goal. If you got them to agree on their goal before the game, you'd find there were always two or three present that had to be talked into winning it. And then your processing is usually fairly high-level processing, all of which has to do with control of objects and familiarity, location in spaces and so on. You'll find out that you'll have to run many, many assists while you're working with athletes. Many, many assists because they're always falling down. But fortunately your assists will get less and less to the degree that you bring them up scale individually or as a team. It's one of the easier things to do.

I have known of an athlete simply reading the Axioms — they're not stupid as everybody believes; they just don't think much. There's a big difference. Just reading the Axioms and cogniting on them at the rate of about two or three minutes apiece. Say, "Oh, yes! That's this way," and so forth. "Yeah." And give you specific examples of these Axioms and so on. And they're just laid out, "Oh, that's the way it is," and so forth. They really can be swung along pretty quick. But they have been taught to be stupid and they think they mustn't think and they think that if they think they will destroy their abilities. And you have to get them over this. Because their superstition is supplanting their ability to reason. They are as successful as they think and they're no more successful than that. They have to be able to recognize and see things. You can speed up their reaction time and everything else. Ordinary Tone 40 Group Processing works on athletes.

This is a very interesting problem. This is a very interesting subject. I could talk a long time on it but that's the end of the hour.

Thank you very much.