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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- History of Research and Investigation (SOM-03) - L550603C
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CONTENTS PRACTICALITIES OF A PRACTICAL RELIGION

PRACTICALITIES OF A PRACTICAL RELIGION

A lecture given on 3 June 1955

Well now, I want to talk to you about the practicalities of a practical religion. All right.

How practical is this practical religion called Scientology? How practical is it? Have you ever heard of a religion getting itself down in black and white on the subject of what it can do for you? This religion doesn't promise anybody any pie in the sky, but it does demonstrate that an individual can, by increasing his spiritual beingness, have greater intelligence and greater control and command of his emotions and the situations in which he's involved.

For eight months we have been racking up data, getting it down in black and white: How good is it? What can we do? And for eight months we've been teaching the same processes in the HCA school. And that is fantastic! (audience laughter) Milestone. The fellow who graduates today will be able to talk to the fellow who graduated seven months ago.

Well, how practical is this practical religion? Just handed to me by special delivery from the HASI Chief of Psychometry/Scientometry, is a pack of tests which have been given to a great many people before processing and then after processing. These are very standard tests. These are the most standard intelligence tests that could be given anyone, given impartially and without the least quibble, and these tests demonstrate some of the more interesting things. Now, she left me a little note on some of these, and she said, "Since you've been gone, Ron, I'm not as satisfied with the results on this week's preclears, but I'm sending them anyhow"; then we turn them over and find out they're just as good as the other tests.

Now, let's take a look here. And here we have a preclear ("Mr. Preclear" we call them in staff auditors' conferences at the HASI), Mr. Preclear, and we discover that Mr. Preclear was tested 2-9-55 and was tested again at 4-23-55, and between the two dates he had very little processing except Group Processing, which was given every Wednesday night at HASI headquarters. And we look over here, and I just know there'll be a change. And there is a change. He just had a little Group Processing, Wednesday nights, and he got a change of from 130 to 143 in IQ. Fascinating, isn't it? This isn't even an intensive — this is just a guy, and he just walks in and he goes to some Group Processing.

All right. And here we have another preclear, tested between 4-25 and 5-14 — in other words, that's just a couple of weeks apart — and by the way, I recognize this preclear, I processed her. And we get an IQ change in — I think that's about 6 1/2 hours of processing, 5 hours. This preclear is 50 years old, never had anything happen in her whole life, and at 50 years of age she gets 5 hours of processing, and her IQ changes from 111 points to 125 points. Now, you know the only direction that IQ can go is down, and as you get old, you get dumber. Ask any kid! (audience laughter)

All right, I'm just taking them off the stack here. Now here we have a student who is 37 years of age, and this student got — you could hardly say he was processed at all — received student auditing. The way students audit is wonderful. One of them sits there and says, "All right, I'm the auditor," and the other one says, "Well, all right, but watch it!" And then they spend the remainder of the two hours arguing whether or not there was an Auditor Code break. (audience laughter) And yet, something happened here — not much, but it went from 100 to 108. That's hardly a tremendous change — that's students.

Now here we have another 5 hours of auditing. A 45-year-old lady, and — oh, by the way, this was an interesting thing. This isn't a standard processing test; this is not quite standard. I sat there and processed this lady on this line: tried to make her — to show her that these pictures she saw all the time could be made to go away just by thinking a certain thought, (snap) bing! And she'd sit there and she'd say, "Yeah, there's that automobile accident. Yeah, my two children were almost killed. Yes. Ow!"

And I'd say, "All right, now think so-and-so. Now think so-and-so. Now think it again."

"Huh! Black magic."

So I'd explain to her, "Now you see, the moment that you get the exact combination of mental image picture which is afflicting you exactly — that you get the right combination — it of course will vanish. And I'm just showing you how to do this."

We'd do this again. "Yes, there's the delivery of my first child. Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

And going, "All right, think a thought (snap). This way (snap)," so on. Bang — gone!

She'd say, "What's happening here? This is black magic."

And in 9 hours of processing I couldn't ever get it through to her. Because I didn't process her — all I tried to do was teach her how to think that thought to make pictures appear and disappear. And she could eventually do it, but she still thought that we were dealing in the realm of necromancy. And who knows, perhaps we are! Because this lady is one of the wilder cases to have just been evaluated for to the degree of teaching her a process, and she got a change from 129 to 138 IQ, which is not terrific — but I'm missing here, because it's too hard to show you at this distance, the tremendous changes indicated here on personality. This red happens to be the first test, and it's just for the birds, you know — sea gull be real sane if he was across there! And here we get, after those few hours of processing, this person following very close to a proper, normal behavior curve. Few hours of processing. The person was terribly — it says here "very subjective, moody, nervous," so on.

Well, of course, you understand these are Scientometry findings, but these are psychometric tests, so they talk in terms of disturbances and so forth. We're not interested in disturbances. That's one of the first things you should learn, you know, about Scientology — that it's an entirely different method of thinking. Psychotherapy hasn't any relationship to it, because psychotherapy goes and tries like hard — to find something wrong, you see — tries hard to find something wrong with the person so they can make it right.

In Scientology we assume there must be something right about him, and we make it righter. We're only interested in his abilities, we're not interested in his illnesses. But we see these tremendous changes taking place, just on the matter of self-mastery.

Now, this is one of the more interesting things. We work straight at the spiritual identity of the person, you see, raising its self-determinism. And we get optimum results like this: self-mastery goes from about 52 to 68. This is fantastic! In other words, the person gets to be in control of themselves. At about 50, they're going, "Well, I wonder where my body is taking me next." Below 50 they don't even know that they're there to be taken anywhere.

All right. Now here's another very, very brief intensive. And here again we get a situation where this person was 45 percent depressive, and after processing was only 10 percent depressive. Don't you think that's a little bit of a change? Over here we get this person was very subjective, you know? Figure-figure-figure-figure — 70 percent subjective. When we got through, this person was only 40 percent subjective — a drop of 70 to 40. That's changing a personality just like using paint; I mean, that's putting a new model out here, and everybody said, "Is that Grace?"

Now it's quite peculiar. All of these factors are changed. Here's another factor: This person was only 40 percent active and after these few hours of processing (5, to be exact), this person was 90 percent active — 40 to 90 percent active. That's an awful change.

All right. Well, I see I'm running into a tremendous number of these short process runs, but that's all right. Here we have a preclear, age 65. Now, "everybody knows" you're dead at 65! You can't change an old person — that's impossible. They just get sort of set in their arthritis and there they are, that's the way it is. (audience laughter) And yet this person changed in this fashion: 104 IQ to 117 IQ. 104, that's pretty low IQ; 117's all right, that's getting up toward college. It's quite a change.

Now, we look over the personality factors of this person and we find that this person went from 5 percent critical and became sufficiently critical to 35 — 5 percent critical to 35 percent critical. This means the person became sufficiently critical to tell the difference between a good pie and a mud pie. This is a big change.

Now, other changes occur on this. I will leave these in somebody's charge so that you can look them over if you're particular and closely interested in them. These, you understand, are just grabbed out of the test drawer on the basis of, "My Lord, Ron wants them clear back there in Washington — how am I going to get them there?" you see? And I look at them here and they're not in bad shape, but they could be in better.

So here we have a 25-hour intensive of a person who needed — and this is something for you Scientologists — this person needed at least 75 hours. And everybody sat there and said, "Come on, get processed for 75 hours," and the person said, "I can only be processed for 25 hours." Processed him for 25 hours, and his IQ went from 169 to 156. It dropped. And his personality got a little bit better off: His self-mastery increased 15 points, and his aggressiveness, which was "Why open the door?" you know — crash! sort of an aggressiveness, dropped to something like normal. But that person needed lots of processing and wouldn't take it. A real bad case. This case, by the way, was the blackest black V that you ever classified as a black V when they should have been classified as a black XVIII, and yet we got some change on the case.

Now, here is a person, a 25-hour intensive which — oh my, this was an interesting case. This was the case which used to give us a terrible lot of trouble — case that had polio, was crippled, was in a wheelchair, was very much surrounded by family, you know, and the auditor brings the case up 1 inch and the family drops them 5 inches, you know, and this goes on. This person only got processed 25 hours and was standing without canes at the end of the processing, and walking somewhat around the room. Got no change of IQ — IQ remained the same — but did get rather fine changes here. In other words, was 15 percent less depressive, was — gee! 35 percent better in activity, was 15 percent less critical — and here we had a hypercriticalness of existence which was just nyarrrrrrr. Person much happier at the end of that time. I believe it says here, "polio case, physical improvements, walked alone with no support after processing" — but we didn't care about this. This is the realm of the machine. Now if we'd just concentrate on this person as a spirit, the spiritual beingness of this person, the next thing you know they'll pick up the body and carry it down the street. We don't care. Do you see? But the other side of it is, if you got in there and worked with the body and worked with the body and worked with the body — and when you finished up, you'd have a body. And if you look around, there are lots of bodies.

All right. Say, some of these cases she did pull out here are spectacular — here is a 74-year-old man. Tissues of the body filling with fluid, terrible condition, 25-hour intensive, very great lymph trouble. Rather considerable personality changes here, and "unable to take any tests of any kind at the beginning of processing." No tests! Lord knows what condition he was in or how far he came up, but he certainly did come from being unable to take tests to being able to take tests. And we found that his IQ was 99 after he finished up with 25-hour intensive and was able to go on. But this is quite a notable change — an individual can't sit at a desk, can't write, can't control his hand enough to do so, quite depressed and so forth, and we process him for 25 hours and we discover that he is in pretty good condition and he can write and he can take tests.

Well, here is a 73-year-old man. These are all impossibles — I mean, "You know you can't do anything with a person like this. Seventy-three? Bury him, that's all." And we discover that this person's self-mastery rose from 20 points to 50 points, that this person's ability to figure-figure changed 10 points; in other words, he was 10 points less worried. And his IQ changed from 109 to 128. Seventy-three years old.

Now, the funny part of it is that these are staff auditor intensives, and although these people are good auditors, this work can be duplicated by careful work in Scientology. I mean, I'm not giving you stunt work. This work is duplicatable. Anybody who cares to go across this line of work and follow these steps will get the same results, which is something religion hasn't done lately.

Now, here's a 50-hour intensive, a person aged 52. Oh my, I shouldn't mention this, because we didn't find it out, because she didn't remember it until after she had been processed; and we shouldn't have done this, because, you see, we do not work with the insane. We have no desire to work with the insane, but we are in an interesting position with regard to the insane: If we're not supposed to ask any questions of the insane, how do we ever find out if anybody's insane? And once in a while an individual comes in and they look all right and they process all right, and then after their intensive they say, "Well, I guess I can finally blow those eighteen years in the mental hospital." And we say, "Oh! We shouldn't have done this." We say, "You see the APA and so forth will be awfully angry, because they're the sole proprietor of insanity. They own all the insanity there is, and …"

Scientology, you must be very careful to observe, is not interested in insanity as it is classified as insanity. An insane spirit is something we don't know anything about. A spirit is not insane. There can be an insane machine: A machine which would be insane would simply be something that was moving unpredictably and uncontrollably — that'd be an insane machine. And that is insanity according to psychiatry, as far as I know. But how would I know? Who can talk to a psychiatrist?

Every now and then some psychiatrist comes around, and after establishing firmly the fact that I am a perfectly good minister in good standing and have my union card in the right church . . . They're very sold on that, the psychiatrist and the medical doctor — you've got to have your union card, you've got to belong to the right society and so forth. So after establishing the fact that I really am in the right union, you know, they just say, "Do something for me!" Goes back to that old Roman adage: "Physician, heal thyself."

And this person had ten electric shocks and ten insulin shocks, it says up here in the corner. Remembered it after processing and didn't say it know anything about it before. And changed very remarkably — came up from 0 self-mastery to 15. (My! How can you have a 0 self-mastery?) And became from 100 percent depressive, or practically 100 percent depressive, to only 65 percent depressive. That's quite a gain, isn't it? No great change in IQ. Most of the change here was in personal ability to get along, less nervous and less depressive.

But here is the spectacular thing on this JTA, as we call these graphs — I'll show you how to read one of these in a moment — the spectacular thing here is that this person was 95 percent nervous (that would mean just like, you know, all the time) down to optimum nervous (just nervous enough to dodge at the right time — 20 percent): a change of 95 percent to 20 percent on nervousness. This is fabulous. A person who had, it says here, ten electric shocks and ten insulin shocks — and this shouldn't be here at all. We should never admit that anybody ever went into an institution and then got processing. As a matter of fact, we don't process people who have been institutionalized if we can find it out. Because that would make us psychiatrists, and I'd be insulted.

Now here is an unmarried man, 44 years of age, who changed around one way or the other. Most of the change here is in, again, nervousness. This is not a good test. This just tells you how honest we are in grabbing up just a whole slew of intensives, because if you want my candid opinion, the changes here should have been greater for the same person. They are 55 critical to 65 critical — in other words, the person became a little more critical. They are 55 percent nervous to 80 percent nervous — that's not good. But super sympathetic, unable to determine things, and that changed for the better. And here we discover that this individual mostly — the big change was from 0 submissive to 18 percent submissive. In other words, this individual was almost totally driven by the environment and moved into a band where he didn't have to submit to the environment this much — in other words, changed his personality.

Now as I go over these — I don't have any intentions of beating you around about these. Here's 109 to 119 IQ, just looking at some of these rapidly (I suppose this is a longer test), 140 to 147 IQ change — big changes in other words. 109 to 121 IQ. 136 to only 138 IQ, with no processing. That's a null test, you know — you grab somebody and test them over a period of time just to find out what happened, and you get the test variation. The variation on these tests is about 4 — about 4 points is as much as they vary in the extreme. They never vary more than that, and this varied 2 points. Shows you the test is constant.

But here's a person, 135 to 159 IQ. Oh yes, this is a very interesting fellow. We sent him back to become governor of a state. He's already a very smart chap, but he had a few little difficulties he was having. He couldn't quite get his body to run right and so forth, and we exteriorized him, and we put him in good condition, and he said, "Well now," he says, "Scientology will at least be safe in (blank)," because he's now going to run for governor.

Now here's a 50-year-old person, and just as a side comment here, not that we're interested in these things, but this person had had a brain tumor at the age of twenty-three. And he'd had so many x-ray treatments it burned off all his hair and so forth, and he got in rather foul shape. And his processing took his IQ — you see that wild series of changes there? Those graphs, how jagged they are? Well, each one of those things is a different test. Just shows you this person was changing all over the place. And his IQ went from 119 to 138. This fellow had a brain tumor and we changed his IQ. It's just about time somebody figured this out, that the brain has nothing to do with it. That's an interesting point the boys have overlooked. By the way, it's interesting that as long as they treated the brain, they never got a change in IQ. But the second you start treating the spirit, you get a change of IQ. Shows you that somebody must be arriving somewhere, and I suspicion it's us.

Now here is a person who was 51. I keep running across this — these people, after they're all through processing and so forth, they come in, they're a church member, everything is fine, and you go on and you process them and so on and they suddenly wake up and say, "You know, I just spent four years in Patton," or some institution. And you say, "Well, we're not supposed to do anything with you, you realize that. You realize you're owned property." (This person had two electric shocks.) And IQ went from 104 to 129. And if you can see these tests — you see those graphs? Each one of those is a change due to processing.

Do you know these graphs never change? You know, if you took a fellow in August and tested him on this JTA, and you took him in September and you tested him, and you took him the next year in August and tested him, and you took him three years later and tested him, you'd just get one graph. It'd just be one graph.

This happened in a week. Look at that — wham, wham, wham, wham! See those terrific changes? Now, it means we must be doing something. It means that we must have something to do with man's betterment and his ability if this sort of thing happens. From 104 to 129 — you know, 129's getting up there.

Here's 114 to 134. Who was this? Age 25 years, 25-hour intensive, and — oh, my! This person was very critical — 60 percent critical. That would mean, oh, everything is wrong in this room, everything is wrong in the hotel, everything is wrong in the congress — you know, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong — and became 20 percent critical. So, waiter would come in, fall over the rug, dump a drink in her lap, and she'd say, "That's all right, it'll be cleaned." You know, the funny part of it is, that works — the hotel would probably buy her a new dress, she was so nice about it.

Here is another change. Here's 25 hours, with wild changes here on the personality. See, we're testing two things: We're testing personality (behavior, you know — personality, reaction to the society), and we're testing intelligence, ability to solve — pose and solve problems. And this person's IQ didn't change, but the personality changed.

Now, here's something very funny, and something I've got to solve. And I wish — certainly wish — that I could announce to you that I had this exactly boxed and bracketed and all ready to serve up, but I haven't. We apparently have some processes which specifically change IQ and some that specifically change the personality. In other words, we can throw them at will. But we don't know which is which. You know why we don't know which is which? It's because I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to analyze some of these cases. I have exactly the report of each one of these people, exactly what was wrong with, and run on, and all the rest of it with the person, and have all their tests. And it's a simple matter of coordinating it, and all of a sudden we will discover which one it is. It's not even an intellectual problem, but I didn't get a chance to do it.

So anyway, here's 116 to 136 IQ. Age 39. Here's a person 45 years of age, and they went from 97 to 108 IQ. But here's — again, is the big personality shift. If you don't have a big IQ shift, you have a big personality shift. If you don't have much personality shift, you have a big IQ shift. It's quite interesting.

Here's a person 63 years of age with a big personality shift, and 90 to 98 on IQ. Here's a person 51, went from 130 to 148. You say, my goodness, don't you ever process any children? Gee, here's 118 to 149 — oh well, no wonder, he was processed 75 hours. But look at those personality changes. Fantastic.

Oh! This is one — the most famous case in Scientology or Dianetics, either one. There are auditors in this room at this moment who have sat down after giving this fellow 15, 20 or 600 hours of Dianetic processing and said, "Oh, no. He couldn't possibly have gotten through all this with no change." Yeah. And this fellow — big personality changes, and 118 to 149 IQ. And we did that in 75 hours with modern processing, and in the former four years never touched his case. And — well, there are people in this room that can testify to that. This boy was solid black glass. Matter of fact, some of them would even challenge that it was glass, they'd probably say it was basalt. Here's this fantastic case, and I didn't know I had a record of him. Well, that's very interesting.

Now, here's a person who was paroled so he could come out and get processing. And we brought him into a level where he knew there was somebody else alive on Earth except himself. You see, if there's nobody alive on Earth except the individual, then there's no reason to be merciful or decent or honest, is there? And if a person finds there's somebody else on Earth who is alive too, then there might be some point in being kind and honest. And the funny part of it is, you can look at any person who is being dishonest or who is upsetting his environment or who is getting people into trouble all the time — you could look at that person, and the actuality is he has no reality on his fellow man. He doesn't know they live. That's a very low-toned thing we call "only one." And when they get into that, then they're liable to do almost anything. All criminals are in this bracket.

Now, just going over these things — not to belabor this situation any further, it's just processing results. I'll make these pieces of paper available here. 132 to 148 on a 43-year-old man. A 31-year-old man — wild changes all over the place, with 128 to 156 IQ.

Here is a 25-year-old girl, a 90 to 98 change with — you can see that clear back there, certainly — look at these personality changes. People would ask her afterwards, "What girl?" For instance, the person was 100 percent nervous and came down to 50 percent nervous. This person was 60 percent depressive and came down to 5 percent depressive — that's "Don't knock my teacup!" and "Oh, is there an earthquake going on?" This person was 100 percent aggressive. You know, that's kind of high — any small babies got in this person's road, they got trampled! And this person dropped — and I don't know, maybe this is too far, but it didn't drop completely unoptimum — dropped to 5 percent aggressive. Maybe they backed up too far. Ah well, but the person went from 35 self-mastery to 92 self-mastery. That's from the situation being in command of her to her being in command of the situation. Changes, huh? Well now, that's a 25-year-old girl, just to give you an idea that we don't just — these aren't selective on age group.

Now, here's another girl, 39, and she went from 95 to 111 on IQ, and big personality changes, as you can see. And this person was 32 years of age, and you can see these personality changes — went from 114 to 147 IQ. 114 to 147 IQ. Here's a person who is 49. You can see these graph changes — went from 128 to 138 IQ. Here is a person 72 years of age — again, another very old person — and very oddly, went from 109 to 126 on IQ. Now this person, or all these people — oh, I could just give you here by the ton, there's more and more and more and more and more of them, but this is just a small number of cases. You know how many cases there are in the Testing Section's file drawers now? They're just — go right through cabinets. And those are just pulled out. Well, that kind of gives you an idea we've arrived someplace.

It also should give you an idea that we don't happen to have anything to do with psychology. We couldn't possibly have anything to do with psychology, because the first premise of psychology is that IQ can't change. That's not the first premise, but it's a principal one. So if we're changing IQ, then we can't possibly be doing psychology, could we?

Now, certainly we have nothing much to do with medicine, because the approach of medicine is entirely different than this. And these results only took place in this society when someone concentrated on and started to process the human spirit instead of just lackadaisically accepting the idea that everybody had a spirit, and they kept it in their watch pocket or something, and it had to be saved by enough nickels on a collection plate. If we accepted this at all — that man had a soul — that was the end of it. It was something into which we must not inquire. I don't know why. If we have these vast organizations of Western religion, all concentrated upon the saving of this thing, we'd better find out what we're saving! Seemed to me to be a wonderful idea.

Rather than stand up on the dock as a lifeguard, you know, and say, "Well, I'll go save . . . Well, I'm a lifeguard but — I don't know what I'm supposed to save, but something. Something around here got to be saved."

We had a much more forthright approach: What is this thing called the human spirit? And we found the human being! Now, that is fantastic news for any century. Think of it for a moment. We inspect and investigate and look over this thing called the human spirit, and we don't find something that is being kept in mothballs by the individual. We don't find something that he parks alongside of him. We don't find something that is cowering there in horrible feelings of guilt. We find all there is to the thinkingness, the beingness and the livingness of a human being. And that is a spirit, and that's all the thinkingness and livingness and beingness there is to a human being. He is a spirit.

All right, we look at this. We start to investigate it, examine it to find out what its characteristics are, and we discover, oddly enough, that it is an item of quality. It's a qualitative item. It has qualities. It can make a statement and make it stick. It can create or uncreate energy. It can change and control, it can own, it can form masses, it can communicate.

But, with all this, we do not have one single quantitative item in that spirit. It isn't two feet wide and three inches thick. It isn't four quarts of spirit. It isn't one position of location — not even that. These things are quantity, and man, an engineer in particular, becomes so accustomed to dealing in quantity — ergs, dynes, volts, pounds — that he forgets that we possibly might have something around that you couldn't pour out of one jar into an ohmmeter. He might overlook this fact. And they did overlook this fact. There was something around which was purely qualitative. It established its own qualities. And its best ability was simply to think a thought and make the thought stick, or to think a thought and unstick a thought. Its best abilities were that. But that it did have native characteristics, and its native characteristics were all those things you have been led to believe were good, as represented by various religions.

But it also, horribly enough, had bad characteristics. It could be awfully mean. It could feel very degraded. It could feel that it was being chased so thoroughly that it got a complete obsession to hide forevermore — a point of hiding which simply says, "I'm not a spirit. I'm a body. See? Here's a body. Hey, you guys, here's a body. That's me. Here's a body." And it could do that so long it would even forget it was doing it. You know? Offer this body out here and say, "Well, I'm it, I'm it, I'm it. And I'm not me at all, I don't exist." What a wonderful puzzle! Something which had no quantity, which had quality. And you expect to isolate this thing and describe it? How could you possibly isolate something that had only quality? How could you possibly take this thing apart and look at its component parts if it doesn't have parts?

And here's what's fantastic: This thing we have done in Scientology. It is an accomplished fact.

Now, somebody wrote me from Pennsylvania the other day, and they (I don't know where they'd been in Pennsylvania, not in Lancaster), but they wrote me and said, "I know Scientology" — this is a complete misnomer — "I know Scientology is a good psychotherapy …" That's an insult! There is no such thing as a good psychotherapy. And Scientology is not a psychotherapy. But said, "I would like to see more of the spiritual side of Scientology. And I would like to meet somebody, if there is anyone at the congress, who has had some experience with this spiritual side of Scientology."

And so, for that person's benefit, and maybe the benefit of a few others, I would like anyone to stand, when I ask you to, who has been exteriorized enough to know that they were a spirit and not a body — whether it was stable or not — but came into a certainty of the fact that they were not this body, or who has exteriorized another person to that person's great betterment and had the other person know that they were a spirit and not a body. Anybody who's done either of those two things, would you please stand. (pause; sound of people standing up) And there is the spiritual evidence of Scientology. Thank you.

All right. Just because something is logical, and just because you can experience it, doesn't mean that it is usual and mundane. This is an extraordinary thing that's happened here in this twentieth century. And nobody is even as vaguely startled by all this as myself.

You take a fellow who dabbled around in the Orient, who worked, who knew many people who were wise men, who were men of God, who were very experienced people, who could lie on beds of spikes if they wanted to, and other people who sat on mountaintops, and whirling dervishes, and magicians who came directly from the line of Kublai Khan's magician — you take somebody who's dabbled with these people, who — he isn't believing them, he's listening to them. He's listening to evidences. He's a kid, he's very forthright, very aggressive, he doesn't have any patience at all if you can't taste, feel, handle it, but nevertheless, talking to these people.

And I came back to this very city in which we're giving this congress, and I took engineering, which is about as godless a subject as anyone would ever care to meet. And majored, in that engineering, in finite energies, and thought of the finest energy I could think of — it must be the human mind. Did a computation which twenty years later came back to us as having been originated in Austria, about the molecular storage of thoughts. And I did that right here in this city, just really not more than a mile from the place we're talking right now. Experimented to discover how memory was stored, and found by no computation I could ever compute, that it — a man couldn't remember, certainly by this computation, more than three months' worth. Because there wasn't that much storage space because energies weren't that small. And I was proposed, as a young engineer, a conundrum of such magnitude that I went over to my very good friend, the head of Saint. Elizabeth's Hospital (which is also the big government hospital also in this city), Dr. William Alan White. And I said to him, "Dr. White, what have I done now?" Expected him to tell me all about it. I was all set to have him tell me about this. I was very pleased, I was hopeful, I knew he would. And he sat there and he said, "Ron, what the hell have you done? This upsets one of the most cherished ideas of psychiatry." He said, "It's nothing to do with psychiatry." He said, "If you pursue along this line" (you see, he was a golf friend — he was a golf friend of mine) — and "if you pursue along this line," he said, "you tell me about it from time to time," he says, "because I'll be watching." I hope he is, he's dead now, but I did talk to him, long before he died, about it, and he never forgot this fact, he never forgot this interesting thing: that a human mind, if it remembers with energy, and if it stores those memories as energy, therefore cannot remember more than three months. And that's fabulous. Do you know that at that time he was the leading psychiatrist in the United States.

Now, another fellow who had been more or less my mentor when I was a little kid — as a matter of fact, I followed in the footsteps of this man — Commander Thompson, who brought psychoanalysis straight from Vienna to the US Navy, and introduced psychoanalysis into the Navy and was the US Navy's authority on this in an effort to help the mentally disturbed in the Navy. This man was very much a mentor of mine. He was a good friend in need at all times. It's an odd thing that I've touched the very points of the world where this man has touched, subsequently, and I thought of it one day and wondered if there weren't some small lack of coincidence here. There was some unknowingness going on. I'd gone to the same places in the world as I grew older that he had already gone to when I knew him as a boy. I told Commander Thompson about this work, I tried to get more information, and when I had turned to Commander Thompson and Dr. William Alan White, I had turned to the only two probables in the country who could have shed any light on this subject at all. And believe me, I was through turning, because there was no place else to go. Now that was a great oddity — here were two of the most brilliant men in the field of mind research in the country, and both of them were standing there with their eyes popped.

So I went on from there, from 1932 and down through these many years, and during the last five, with the continuous correspondence, communication with and practice with and fellowship of those people in Dianetics and Scientology, we have been able to crack this problem. The human mind does not remember in energy. It makes memories out of energy and throws them away. All you have to do is get somebody over the obsession of making engrams and you've gotten rid of all of his engrams. That's all there is to it. Get him over, or those things in his vicinity over, the obsession for manufacturing an engram or a memory picture for every occasion, and you've gotten him over being upset. You've gotten him over his entire engram bank. There's how you would make a Clear. You would merely get the fellow unobsessed on this subject of making all these energy pictures. He doesn't ever store them. Now isn't that odd? There is no memory bank.

And so, with the fellowship, the good feeling, the support, the communication and the privilege of working with all these people in Dianetics and Scientology, we have solved this problem. We have found where this material belongs, and we have found with it that man is perfectly justified in believing that there is a greater, wider life to be lived by him. That man can be better, and for the first time in the history of science we are able to change the personality and the IQ of the individual at will, but much more importantly, we can point to a far, far more hopeful future for man. And I owe a great debt of gratitude to you in Dianetics and Scientology for having you to work with.

Thank you.