Any person who is doing a piece of research, and who then falls away from what he is doing, you see, because it might suddenly come across somebody else's prejudices or something of this sort, actually isn't worth the paper he writes on. That's an unfortunate thing. Because every now and then, you find yourself doing a bit of a bull in the china shop, you know. You say, "I didn't mean to go through that door, but here I am. And what's all this crockery doing under my feet?"

And if it comes to actually spotting what it is that makes a preclear upset, and if it comes to actually looking over the situation in which a preclear finds himself and giving back to the preclear some of his capabilities, if it comes to the situation where we face that on one hand, and on the other hand stepping on corns, I guess we just better trod away, because that's about all there is to it. We better step on the corns.

It's quite certain - it's quite certain that if one really confronted the genus of aberration in man, he would sooner or later confront at the same time certain active, existing forces in the universe around him which were interested in retaining that aberrated state. It just follows this way on a mathematical formula, because the preclear then would not be restimulated unless the factors were present.

Now, from age to age and time to time, people have tramped on a lot of corns, to be inelegant about it, in an effort to point out to people what was wrong, and what they ought to do right on the third dynamic and the fourth and so forth. And they very often have tramped on the wrong corns. And they must have tramped rather consistently on the wrong corns, because now, if they tramped on the right ones, everything would be all right, wouldn't it? So it just follows on a mathematical equation that nobody ever stepped on the right corns. That's very inelegantly expressed, I know, but we must then have in our environment at this date and time, the primary, principal factors which continue in restimulation the aberrations of individuals. Otherwise we would have very able individuals who would be doing a very good job and living a very happy life. It simply follows. And it must be that nobody ever stepped on them very hard before. So I guess we'll tromp!

The Roman Catholic Church has a certain vested interest in aberration. First and foremost in its history, we discover that it professed that ignorance as the best lot for man. First and foremost, that was the thing it started out on. And it thought this paid off very well and was a very, very good control mechanism, and they continued this up to the days of Alexander IV - the days of Cesare Borgia, you know. You've heard of Lucrezia Borgia, I think she - her name - her face appears on every poison bottle, doesn't it? Anyway, this lady of the Church, who was very serviceable to Cesare Borgia and Alexander IV, eventually made religion into big business. It had never been big business before the reign of Pope Alexander IV. Big business. And it then swelled out as an operating control mechanism across the entirety of Western civilization. And it has left its mark.

But if we're looking at the days when it really became big and forceful and powerful, we're looking about twelve hundred years too late. It had already caved in the Roman Empire - already. Already soldiers had been put in the frame of mind that they should go forth without their armor and either get carved up or run. That finally became the morale of the Roman soldier. This is the truth of the matter. When he became thoroughly Christianized, he was gone. Is there some coordination in these factors? There certainly is.

What can a thetan do? What can a thetan do, precisely? He can create, he can cause things to survive and he can destroy. Very, very interesting things. He can, on the Know to Mystery Scale, do a great many more things, but all of them seem to be monitoring these three factors: He can create, he can cause things to survive and he can destroy.

What would you think of a philosophy which preempted, as its particular province, all creation, all survival and all destruction? What if somebody in the society immediately put up a big sign, said, "Hands off. Hands off. We are the only ones that can destroy, we are the only ones that can monitor your continued survival and we are the only ones who have any purview over creation." You'd think normally that somebody would gun them down. Something would happen to such people. Well, it's an - the only odd thing about all of this is that nothing did happen to them particularly. That's the only odd thing. Because I don't think man ever woke up to what was happening.

Now, this is not an antireligious speech. This speech is the first proreligious speech made since the year zero. I want you to classify that very carefully. This speech is in favor of religion. But it's not in favor of Christianity. It can't be, if we are true to our goals.

Look, if you tell somebody that he cannot create anything, you have made every single object he looks at into an other-ownership. Is that right? Every object. It's an other-ownership. Therefore you have at one fell swoop cut his havingness to zero. That's a real sudden move, isn't it?

Now, we ran into this principle of ownership, and if you care to test it on somebody, you will discover, if you haven't already, that if you get him to get various ownerships on any facsimile or mental image picture, if you get him to get the various ownerships of a chair sitting out there - saying that he owns it, that somebody else owns it and so forth - he will discover who owns it to the degree that it appears lighter or disappears. The true ownership of the chair brings about a lightening of the chair or a disappearance of the chair. And it certainly brings about a disappearance of a mental image picture.

Therefore, to get the true ownership makes things lighter, less massy, less brutal, you might say. And the individual, then, who is called upon to totally misown everything would then and there make everything completely solid, right? Things would get terrifically solid. And that would not just apply to the walls, the sidewalks, the trees; this would also apply to the entirety of his reactive bank.

Now, any thetan on the track has at one time or another subscribed to the philosophy that he must otherwise own those things which he wanted to persist. He has dreamed this up as an old-time oddity. It's something he must do if he wants the wall to persist, he mocks up the wall and he says, "Look what Joe did." See, that's a cute trick. He's already agreed to the principle of other-ownership; but he has, at that moment, a workable universe, doesn't he? The universe is fairly workable - things do not appear too onerously heavy, too thick, too formidable, too immovable. He doesn't believe that these things are going to crush him at every moment. They appear light. He is able to handle them to some degree. He always is slightly cognizant of his own creation. He always sort of knows out of this corner of the eye, you know, "Well, I really made it, although Joe did."

Now, supposing we take this fellow and we put him under terrific duress, and we make him believe absolutely and utterly that not only did he not make it, but that he can't even contact or understand the man who made it or the being who made it. Supposing we told him that if he didn't do this, and if he didn't believe this, he would then and thereupon forfeit, first, all of his survival on this Earth (they had neat ways in those days of putting a chap on the rack or taking off his head) or he would then and thereafter burn forever, if he didn't believe this strange thing. Terrific duress involved here - enormous duress.

And at once, the universe must have become very solid to some peoplemust have become awfully solid. In fact, it must have become somebody else's universe. And having become somebody else's universe, it thereupon must have been almost impossible to manage. It would just seem incredible. The idea of moving that pile of stone from A to B - just be too much work. It'd be an exhausting thing. He had no part in their creation; therefore, to handle them? Uh-uh. All right.

Look at the other side of it now - destruction. The sanity of an individual depends upon his ability to eradicate from his experience those experiences which are antipathetic to his happiness, survival, on all the dynamics. That's a bad thing perhaps to realize that happiness depends upon destruction. But if an individual cannot destroy, to some degree he there is going to be hung with every bad experience he will ever have experienced. And if he is totally inhibited from any kind of destruction, that means that every bad experience he ever wants to destroy will thereupon more persistently persist. And there we have aberration.

And the church and this strange philosophy of other-creation, taken too seriously - that's the only thing wrong with it - has oppressed the idea of destroying to a point where nobody can erase an engram just by looking at it, something like that. That's a very desirable state of mind. Had a bad experience? Look it over, it's gone. All right.

Here, then, the church did further than that, they did more than thatthey said, "Destruction is our province. We send you to hell! All the hellfire and damnation there is, is under our fingertip and control. The only destruction going to be done around here anyplace is going to be done by us."

Wow! If you take create out, and you take destroy out and make these factors out of the ability of the normal human being, you have condemned him to insanity, to exhaustion, to disinterest, unhappiness, but more importantlymuch more importantly - you have condemned him to the occupation of two levels. And there we find our modern world today. It exists in two levels.

As near as most people can get under this duress and upbringing … And it doesn't matter today that we aren't really saddled with the monks; our educational systems, our mores and so on are saturated with this material, and it is carried on and on and on. It is only now, actually, that one could lift up his head and look around and say, "Whew! It really wasn't that true after all." You know?

Now, the one thing that people, broadly, can do in order to create is to create a problem. They can create problems. To go much higher than that, in terms of creation, exceeds their ability. Their havingness is so small - you see, they can't have everything if everything was created otherwise - their havingness is so small that to have a little havingness, to do a little creation, they can at least create a problem. It's pathetic when you come to think about it. But if you look at it real - very closely, if you look at it very sharply, I think you will discover that this is true: that people can create problems. And people do create problems. They create problems and confusions and so forth. They're not permitted to do anything else.

Supposing some fellow came out here and he suddenly said, "Well, I don't believe, really, that some strange being that I never ran into that's buttered all over the universe was the only one who could mock up bricks." And he tries it out, you know. Mock up a brick. Mock up - hey, what do you know, and it's a nice brick. "Hey, Joe, look at this brick."

Joe's obliging and he says, "Huh! Yeah, that's a pretty good brick," you know.

Two or three other guys saying, "Yeah, that's a nice brick. Fine. It's got good weight, good texture."

They have created a brick. And from this one brick creates a dozen more bricks, and then creates about six, eight, ten thousand more bricks. I think the brick trust would get after him along about that time. They'd probably be in touch with the Vatican saying somebody's trying to break the brick trust up here.

But people would be quite upset. You know how they handled this problem? This problem was an actual problem and a real one five centuries A.D. Was a real problem, quite real to the legislators. You find the most astonishing and fabulous laws, with punishments that only the most craven thetan that had ever been dispossessed could have originated. The punishments for these - oh, they're the most fabulous things. They were: His eyeballs were going to be slowly torn out (this was in a legal code, you see), his tongue would be ripped out by the roots and he would be disemboweled slowly with a dull knife - you know, pleasantries.

And these were to be the punishments meted out against the crime of magic. And for - up till about 600 A.D., this crime of magic was so worrisome to the boys who were pulling this operation off - it was so worrisome that they interested every Christian emperor of the Eastern and Western Empire in punishing this crime. And royal edicts - you can't imagine the queen up here right now writing an edict, "Anybody guilty of the crime of magic shall be. . ." and then just droolingly runs off about five paragraphs of horrible tortures. Must have worried them, because this is really the only - they let heresies go by, you know. They simply said, "Well, excommunicate him, exile him or something." They let heresy go by and a few other things, but not magic. This was the one thing you mustn't do. You mustn't say, "Here's a nice brick. Joe, how do you like this brick? Hm?"

And somebody else says, "Gee, you know, that's a good brick." And the next thing you know, you got a dozen bricks. You created something. That's magic.

You suddenly said, "That is a nice building across the street on this side of the street." And there we had a building on this side of the street. That was magic.

We have these crimes described in detail in the early days of the last two thousand years, and therefore we are talking about the maddest two thousand years that man has ever lived through. We're talking about an utterly mad two thousand years. I don't think it was a natural two thousand years. And it certainly wasn't religious, if by religion we mean worship, if we mean love for one's fellow man, if we mean peace, if we mean honor - we certainly are not talking about religion in any way, shape or form, if we're talking about the last two thousand years. Brutality, yes. The Spanish Inquisition, yes. Madhouses all over the place, yes.

Man stopped building massively, man started getting tired, man stopped playing a game and started being a slave. And we've had two thousand years of it. And I hope we're calling an end to an era.

It's only necessary to rehabilitate somebody's role of creation in this universe, and his own concept that he is capable of destroying - you know, just to destroy something is not to be malicious; he's capable of eradicating or knocking out something - we must rehabilitate those two things, and we get an immediate fall-away from all of the ardures and unhappinesses and upsets of existence. It's the most remarkable thing you ever wanted to see. This is interesting. All right.

But if the only thing that is left in the field of creation, to the individual who is out here selling apples or pushing money across the counter in a bankthe only thing left is, is to create a problem, you mean, we're going to manage this society? You mean if everybody in it has, as a high level of creation, the creation of problems? Oh no. It's not possible to do anything then, is it? You suddenly say, "All right. Now let's build a nice, straight road."

Immediate remark thereafter, "Well, what are we going to pave it with?"

"We're going to pave it with tar."

"Well, the tar wagons don't work."

You say, "Wait a minute. Somehow or other we'll get some tar wagons that work and try to pass it off."

"Yes, but how are we going to get it past the planning commission?"

You ever tried to do anything in this society? Everybody stands around and they say, "Well, what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about those others?"

I bet your own parents have possibly even said to you from time to time, "Well, dear, it's very, very difficult to become a - very difficult to become a writer" or "very difficult to become a gem expert. . It's awfully hard. Why don't you - why don't you apprentice yourself to the bricklayers' guild or somethingsomething easy."

Every time you came up with a goal, they came up with a problem. Now get this as a one-two in a society that you're trying to operate in on the third and fourth dynamic.

You say, "Let's all be happier."

Everybody says, "Problem, problem, problem, problem, problem." Uhhhh!

You say, "Let's all be a little healthier."

"Problem, problem, problem, problem, problem."

Get the idea? You get this immediate reaction, and you'll get no progress. How any progress has occurred, I don't know. It's just fabulous.

Actually, no progress did occur to amount to anything until man discovered that he could make MEST move MEST, and we had the industrial age. And man right now is engaged in a very interesting activity of making pieces of MEST move pieces of MEST. He has learned that you can burn coal that generates steam that pushes something or other. In the old days, he'd push it over himself. Now, why, he burns coal to generate steam and pays the tax here and runs into some more problems there. But he has learned that MEST can move MEST.

And so we have had a very strange and artificial revival of human courage. See, he somehow or other got by this roadblock. He isn't by it directly, you understand. He doesn't feel that he is totally capable of doing this. The feeling of tiredness is still with him. His feeling of "What's the use?" is still with him. His lack of ambition, his inability to complete goals, these things are still with him, so much so that all a nuclear physicist can think of doing with this wonderful thing called atomic fission - and which I now call atomic fizzle - all he can think of doing is blowing somebody up, you know? That's a wonderful ambition, isn't it? He finally has gotten MEST to a point of where MEST will blow up MEST. We're trying to put a crew together right now that will simply as-is nuclear physics. Wonder who will win.

Anyhow, anytime you meet a nuclear physicist, please realize one is standing in front of you.

Anyway, you see how he got around this? He beat it with his own wits. And he got himself and gained for himself enough leisure so he could think about a few of these things. And he's been thinking about this furiously. He's just going to say, "How did I get here, you know? What are we doing here? What is this all about? Something happened somewhere - I just know that there was a collision somewhere along the track, something occurred."

And he's been trying to put his finger on it. Yes, something did occur a couple of thousand years ago. Somebody said, "Huh! All creation was done by a being that you will never have any contact with and you better believe it or we'll finish you. More importantly, we'll finish your loved ones. That's what we do best."

Now, you say, "Well, I can at least chew up the countryside."

"No, no. No, anybody guilty of too much destroying is actually poaching upon the preserves of a fellow by the name of Satan. And he doesn't like that. And we protect Satan, so you're not permitted to destroy anything." All right.

So if every time you came up with a goal, somebody - the society is rigged that you are at once confronted with a problem, what are you going to do? You're not going to make any progress. That's right. Isn't that correct? All right.

Now, let's look at something else. If any time you said, "I want to knock down this old porch that's on the back of the house," everybody said, "Oh no, that was actually put up in Adams's time, you know, and that - ha-ha! Don't do that." You were crushed down on the subject of destroying - some fellow comes along and he does you in, and you're not even allowed to point your finger at him, you know? If there's going to be no destruction of any kind anywhere, the deadwood is going to pile up mighty thick, particularly in the reactive bank. But, if everybody was knocked off that, where else would they have to go in order to do a little destruction? What covert destruction took place of actual destruction? Lying. Lying.

You have the cycle of action from create over to destroy collapsed down to this pale shadow-problems and lies. People say, "It's not there." They say, "It never happened to me." They say, "I never was that person," i.e., I've never lived before. They say, "I am now somebody else. It is now something else." We start to process some preclear, and instead of an erased incident - which would occur if he were able to destroy the incident of his own creation - instead of an erased incident sitting there, we discover something quite remarkable is sitting there. We discover a not-ised incident, see? He has lied about it. He says it's not there. It is there, but he said it's not there, and that is not-isness, you see?

Instead of coming up to somebody and gunning him down with a submachine gun or something of the sort because he's wrecked everybody, we would say to our friend, "You know, really, I heard - I heard that his wife told her maid that so-and-so and so-and-so and that means that he really did do something pretty terrible about eight, nine years ago." You get the idea? You get how boldly and forwardly and confrontedly we can destroy this man, you see? We don't. We go way over here someplace, and we say to somebody or other that we heard that he … You get the idea? Or we say the incident is not there anymore - there it sits, you know, Fac One right in front of his face - "That incident isn't there anymore. We've not-ised it," and there it sits, you see.

And we then have a problem in the society of seeking after truth when our lowest level of destructiveness now allowed is lying. But lying is a high level of creation, too, you know. Interesting, isn't it? How are you going to get a society which is going to run smoothly and happily, if the people in it are dedicated to problems and lying? How is this society going to function? It's going to be an interesting game. Only it might get too interesting, it might get too much game, might get so there's no game there at all anymore. And that would be fascinating - no game at all. Will not be fascinating to me. I'm a great believer in having a decent game and everybody in it having his chance.

But I will say that in processing a preclear, we find at once that we can reach him on one of these two levels - lying and problems. Why do we find him reachable on lying and problems? If we can get him to lie about something, if we can get him to invent some problems, we've started him on his way and we can solve his case for him - providing we also get him to create, and providing we also get him to throw away some mass - in other words, remedy havingness.

We have him invent problems and lie about various items, and that works fine as long as we also practice at the same time creation and destruction with the preclear. And if we can teach him to create and teach him to destroy in mock-up forms, he comes up to the degree of where he takes over, at least slightly, some of his own responsibility in having created this universe. He had a part in creating it, believe me. I refer you to the Factors. And unless he is recalled to that responsibility, the stuff continues to be thick, unwieldy and he continues to be tired, and he continues also in a state of mind that he can't do anything about anything. That's the end product of control: can't do anything about anything.

You'd have a real able society if everybody in it believed you couldn't do anything about anything anyhow. You would think offhand that it would be an easy society to govern. Now, that was the first goal - the first goal of these heavy duress religious motions that were made in man's direction was to make him easy to govern, to make him tractable, to put him into a slavery that was very easy to handle. If you can show me where a criminal or a psychotic are easy to handle, I will then agree that it was a good method.

I would say a government was an awfully weak government - whether it's the early government of Theodosius or a late government of somebody else - if that government had to have everybody in it completely weak and disabled before it could govern them. I'd say that was really a big bunch of strong, worthwhile people - wonderful! They couldn't possibly have had any strength at all.

Now, where - where do we get such a control mechanism starting? Is it simply a dwindling spiral? It has an exact start: It is when one person feels that he must exert himself way beyond any actuality in order to create an effect. When an individual, to create an effect that will satisfy him that he has created an effect, has to blow down about six towns - wow! Somebody really had what they used to call an "inferiority complex." You see that?

If he really has difficulty conceiving that he himself has created an effect so that he has to create an effect of blowing down six towns or a nation, we see that this boy is off somehow or another. There's something wrong here somewhere; this boy is not hitting on all twelve cylinders - we've got a Hitler on our hands.

You think Hitler was going all-out to conquer the world. No, Hitler was just going out to try to convince Hitler that he created an effect. That's the totality of operation. And he'd get - keep getting the news in there, you know, and the news would come in, "Well, we've just destroyed eighty thousand peasants here and nine towns there, and we've blown everything down someplace else. And we've just executed all these villagers."

And these reports would keep coming in and they didn't mean anything to him. He - "Zuh-zuh, well, order a charge - attack! Attack. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah - attack!" What was he trying to do? How far did his troops have to go, how far did he have to go, to find out he'd done something? Well, he never did find out. He never did find out that he'd done anything; maybe up to the moment that he killed himself. And at that moment he might have said, just before he pulled the trigger or whatever he did, he might have said, "You know, I appear to have started a slight commotion around here someplace." In other words, his attestation of discovering he'd created an effect was to kill himself Interesting thing. But that's about when it occurred. All right.

An individual who becomes anxious about being able to reach, becomes anxious about the effect he is going to create. And he is also of a mind that he has not been able to put out an anchor point. Now, let's take a little baby or a monkey … Take a monkey - let's get Darwinian. I was going to draw a poster the other day and appoint the three principal villains. Darwin was one of them. And he's a real character, this guy Darwin. I mean - a thetan descends from monkeys. Doesn't make sense at all.

Anyhow, you take this monkey, and you give the monkey something he doesn't like. You see, you give him a small bit of fruit that's too sour or something, you know. And he doesn't like this; he's already developed a distaste for it. And you give it to him and he throws it away. And you go to the place where he threw it away and you pick it up again and you put it back in his hands, you know. And he throws it away. And you go and you pick it up and you put it back in his hands. And he throws it away. And you go and pick it up and you put it back in his hands. And he throws it away. And you put it back in his hands. He'll finally let it sit there. You know what you've done to him? You've taught him he couldn't put out that anchor point. You've taught him he can't put out that anchor point. If you've taught him that, you've taught him he couldn't make space. You see that?

So that if everybody got everything he put out thrown back at him … The women know this. They very often say to their husbands - the husband said, "Dear, aren't you ready yet?"

And they say, "Aren't you ready yet? You're always saying, 'Aren't you ready yet?' to me."

"Isn't dinner ready

"You're always asking me, 'Isn't dinner ready?'"

"Ohhhhhh." After a while the old man is sitting there in apathy. Why? No remark he put out evidently stuck. Always flew back at him. It'll leave him with no space. That's the end product. All right.

Now a fellow puts something out and somebody says, "Okay." Well, the fellow who's saying, "Okay," out there merely means, "It's here." Get the idea? So that good two-way communication at all times tells the fellow, "You put one out. It's here." See? Yeah, we're making space, we're making space, we're making space.

But if every time you said hello, somebody said hello to you, and you said hello back again, and they said hello back to you, you wouldn't have too much communication going here. Fellow after a while, wouldn't know whether the space was coming from the other guy or from him. You see the difference? All right.

Now, if we've got an interchange of space getting messed up here, and we have no interlocking space being created at any time, people are going to start running out of it. Well, that's a curious thing. People are going to start running out of space.

How can you run out of space? Well, that's awful easy. I'll tell you one of the symptoms of running out of space: being able to shoot something from Russia and have it land in New York. That's a symptom of running out of space. It's all very fine, we stand around and cheer and say, "Well, the Vickers Viscount" - a lovely little airplane and I'm very fond of them, but it's still "the Vickers Viscount just left here and it arrived there." Wham, wham, you know? Gee. You know, that puts these two places a couple of hours apart. Well, to man at a walking pace, this puts them eight miles apart. They may be eight hundred miles apart. You got the idea?

Well, it's just given him that much less space. And all this hurry, hurry, hurry and rush, rush, rush has gotten down to the point where you can get a police action - which is a wonderful thing, I mean, it's gorgeous. We're all in favor of law and order, providing anybody in law and order is in favor of law and order, not just more chaos. That's a point. All right.

If we have somebody down in Cornwall, and the cops up in London want him - swish - he's got! Well, maybe they want him for a political crime. Maybe they want him for not immediately subscribing to the last antiheresy bulletin or something. Well, looks to me like under fast transport, we have given this person less space. And giving him less space, we have also, then, given him less freedom of idea.

You see, basically, with all mechanics laid aside, the world is only as big as you think it is. This world at one time appeared sufficiently large to look like a flat plane to a thetan three feet back of his head. You exteriorize them these days and they see a sphere. They don't have any real idea of a nice, big size connected with the thing. There isn't much space to move around in. In other words, you've got less and less playground. Well, if you get a playground too small, you haven't got any game left. You see that?

So speed is all right and all that, but it's not totally a virtue - not totally virtuous, you see, that we've condensed space to this degree. You used to be able to go over to Devon, you know, and come back and talk about the natives and everybody would sit around and say, "No! No kidding!" you know?

Well, by golly, you can go to the middle of Tibet and come back and sit around now and nobody will even listen to you. They'll say, "We saw all that on TV last week." Difference of space, difference of interest. And your interest level drops consistently as the space apparently condenses.

Well, it's quite fascinating that you stop making space, you stop having space. Takes quite a little while for your automatic machinery to run down to a point where you don't have any space left. The next thing you know, why, you take one step and you're in Berlin, you know. It's not that you're that big, it's that Berlin got that small and the distance between got that tiny.

Just a few years ago, there were some people around who were regretting the condensation of that space. I know I talked to a few of them in Germany, and, boy, they sure regretted it. They said, "You know that Great Britain and the United States got altogether too close to Berlin." Every night or so, they heard of it, you know. The rubbage is still lying all over the place. Got too close together.

Now, where you can get a condensation of space of this degree, you also start people running out of ideas. Why is this? It's a very curious thing that the emission of an idea today is quite an event. It wasn't a few years ago. You pick up a bestseller, you expect that something that maybe twenty-five thousand people have paid - I don't know, what's a book cost these days? Ten, twelve pounds? You pick up this book and everybody's reading it, and you say, "Boy, this must be some book, you know. This must be just crammed full of ideas." And you start reading the thing and it says - well, there's John and there's Mary, and there's … And it's a house and somebody gets murdered. And they suspect the butler.

'Well, that's interesting," you say, "but I think I've read this somewhere before." You have, too. Believe me! Literary modes are condensed and stereotyped today the like of which you never heard of.

For instance, even the dramatic off-trail movie that is being made in Italy is now stereotyped. You just film it without much light on it, with everybody looking a little bit desperate, and you've got it.

Now, all of this has to do with the complexion of the game one is playing. If people are getting less ideas and actually people could be punished more for the ideas that they get. The church itself is no longer free. It has not been free for a very long time. It committed itself to a certain course of action and to a large degree disappeared from the ken of man. The church is not today carrying on in the United States, although the United States is known as a very religious country. Yes, yes, it's still carrying on as a kind of a religious country, but with amazement we look around and don't find very much religion.

You know, you hear a lot of talk about religion. We hear a lot of agreement, the fact that it's a religious country. But why should some of our people walk into a hospital and say, "I'm a minister. I've come in to visit the sick," and have the superintendent come down and shake them by the hand? Why? That's because no ministers have been near the place. You look in vain for any ministers in this society. Where are they? Well, they've just been gone for quite a while.

Now, this doesn't mean that there aren't groups - self-sacrificing, wellmeaning groups - trying to do the very best they can throughout the world in the name of what they believe to be true. And it'd be very far from my design or effort to stamp upon their toes. Well, I'm tired of having mine stamped on. I'm trying to get a show on the road here or there a little bit, you know. I mean, I like to get my letters answered once in a while and something like this. And I keep running into a philosophy of "Nothing can be done about it," and "There's nothing to do anyway," and "It's all so tiring," and so forth. One begins to believe, after a while, that there's been a certain philosophy in this direction.

But let's go back just to the swap of anchor points - the swap of anchor points alone. And we find out when everybody has kicked everybody else's anchor points in, using whatever handy system there is to hand to kick in anchor points, we find, then, that we are left without a universe. Now, I tell you that very frankly - we're left without a universe.

You think the atom bomb is a big menace today. It really isn't a menace today at all. That's why I started calling it the atomic fizzle. I'm even going to write a book called "The Atomic Fizzle, The Boys That Failed" - really dig them. Well, they started out with such happy dreams, they were going to blow up all life, you know? Truth of the matter is, that an atomic bomb can be blasted around here on Earth, and we still have an awful lot more planets left. I was out the other day and took a survey and there are lots of them, you'll be glad to know. Several of them not even settled yet. There's a couple in a Stone Age and if you haven't bashed anybody in the head lately, you could take off for there.

But here we have an incapability even of putting an end-all to this situation, see? They will have condensed, however, space here on Earth considerably. If we think of radioactivity as something which you will have to shun and step back from and, you know, go into horror about and so forth, you can just see the action of pulling back in anchor points completely different than having your anchor points knocked in. People show you things that are dreadful enough and you recoil from these things. Nothing you can do about them, and they follow you in. You pull in your own anchor points. And eventually you're left without any space. You don't have any concept of space - that's it.

But remember that religion as such has simply been used by the unscrupulous and the unthinking in order to create a furtherance of this situation of knocking in everybody's anchor point. And they're too far knocked in - too much barrier, too little game.

So you have to get the anchor points out a little bit. You have to get the people reaching just a little bit more. If you don't, there's just going to be no space left. Don't you see what happens? And as far as an individual is concerned, he will look out and he will see no space.

Right now, you look at Cape Town, South Africa. You don't see much space. That's the truth of the matter. You say, "I can get on an airplane and go down there," see. You've licked space to the degree that you can use a mechanical means to cover the space, don't you see? And you don't immediately interpret that as a condensation of space, but it is a condensation of space.

Now, you take a television set, and it's sitting there and it's running off pictures of Cape Town. Believe me, your space or distance to Cape Town is just the distance between you and that screen. And that's just a few feet, much less an airplane. Let's take the airplane out of it, and we're practically dived into the television set, you know. We're practically in the middle of Cape Town.

This kind of a condensation works on people, until people at length don't even see the space in the road out here. They think of everything kind of on a TV-set basis, you know. Then they - people start looking at facsimiles with their naked eyes. Now, this is very, very hard for you to envision, but there's an awful lot of people walking up and down that street that are looking at a facsimile of what they're looking at with their body's eyes.

They go around and try to get glasses fitted. Oh, people give them glasses Put glasses on somebody so he can see his facsimiles better? I mean, that's real - real cute. But you ask this person, you say, "Now, how big does this room look to you?"

And he says, "How big? It looks as big as the room."

You say, "Well, could the room look any bigger to you?"

"That's silly, you know. The room is as big as the room is big. That's how big the room is."

You say, "Oh yeah?" You give him a little bit of processing, and all of a sudden, gee, you've got a big room.

He says, "You know, the walls went back there about five, six feet!"

No, the walls didn't go anyplace. His concept of space rose and, in many cases, he stopped looking at facsimiles of the walls and started looking at the walls. There are an awful lot of people around who are looking at facsimiles of everything they're looking at. And then you wonder why they don't understand you. They're looking at a facsimile of you. It's probably eight or nine feet closer to them than you are, although they're under - only standing four feet away from you, if you can understand that, an inverted facsimile. All right.

Where do we enter this problem? Actually it's in the level of sharing responsibility for the creation of those things which exist here on Earth - not just the good things but the bad things, too. And also sharing some responsibility for having created an oppressive phase of religion.

Religion is something designed basically to make man happy, to raise his spiritual nature, to keep him aware of the fact that he himself is a spirit and so forth. That was the basic purpose of religion. Not to keep him under control, to oppress him, to make a criminal or a madman out of him. That was not the purpose of religion. So, where it's been derailed to those purposes and supercontrols, it can be put back on the rails again.

You have, today, in your hands, the weapons necessary to actually accomplish this goal. You do have. There's no getting around it. Processing as such, today, does solve these problems.

Now, there is a very crude process. You remember we used to spot walls? Well, that's liable to run somebody out of a little bit of havingness, and we have to be very careful these days about havingness. We spot walls. If we could just get the fellow to look around and accept the fact that he had - in other words, we have actually made him twist it a little bit over and say, "Look, I can have some responsibility in having created this wall," see? That's actually the little thing that you're turning on in his mind. He doesn't just have a wall; he says, "I can have some responsibility for having created this wall." That's what happens when he says, "Yes, there is a wall there."

Did you ever have a preclear suddenly look at you ecstatically and say, "You know, I've got a wall!" One was being processed in Washington who just wrote me a letter and he said, "I sat there for a half an hour being audited, wondering what I could have - and this was toward the end of the sessionwhat I could really have. And I finally found out that I could have this fountain pen that I bought a couple of weeks ago. So here I am at the end of this session, sitting here writing you a letter with this fountain pen I can have." And he says, "It's my total possessions in the whole universe, but," he says, "it's the nicest fountain pen you ever wanted to see." He was real pleased with this.

That's what had happened. He had taken on some of the responsibility for having created the fountain pen. That's really the little thing that triggered. And he felt to some degree that he had the power of keeping and destroying, if he wanted to, that fountain pen. You get the idea? He could also knock it apart, he could wear it out, he could use it. Do you know many people can't use their possessions because they might wear them out, which would be a bit of destruction - which is quite cute. All right.

Now, as we look this over, we find then that his universe has opened up to one fountain pen. This individual for a long time has been passing as sane and a good chap and so forth, but he himself privately knew that he was strictly fruitcake - really nutty, really. He knew he was off, in some fashion. He was coping with the environment, but he wasn't letting on. You get the idea? Hejust coping with it. And now this tremendous gain: He found he could have a fountain pen, which meant at the same time he's found out that he undoubtedly had some part in the creation of the fountain pen, and undoubtedly had some liberty in destroying the fountain pen, and therefore did have a fountain pen and could use a fountain pen, and he was very happy about it. Quite distinctly different. All right.

And we make somebody look over here at this wall and instead of going on a large via of saying, "The composite of 'we' which we call God built this wall," and going on a large line, just let him recognize to some degree his share in it.

Well, there's a way of doing that. You have him look at the wall and increase it. And look at another wall and increase it. And then after a while you have him, when his havingness is increased to this degree and he's getting along fine (this is not a good process by the way, it's just one of those mediamedia; it's better than lots of processes, but it's not the best one), we have him look at the wall and increase it, look at another wall and increase it, look at another wall and increase it. And then we finally get him to increase and then decrease, increase and then decrease, increase and then decrease, increase and then decrease the wall. It's a variation on spotting which is much better than spotting. It's better than straight spotting, because it increases a person's havingness. It sooner or later turns on some awareness of the fact that he is at all times creating that wall. And when he gets some slight little awareness of this, the walls cease to be oppressive, and he can bear to look at them.

Do you know that most preclears really cannot bear to look on a real object? They cannot bear really to look on your face as an auditor. You say, "Is there - you got an auditor here?"

And they say, "Oh yes, yes." They know it. They haven't looked at you, really.

To suddenly confront the actuality of your existence in that chair and to see that they were faced with a face of a body would be too much for them. They would sort of go bzooo! and they'd feel their heart flip or something of the sort.

I had a fellow one time who was doing mock-ups go into a partial state of collapse with the greatest of ease. I asked him to get an idea that there was somebody on his right side and somebody on his left side, and he said, "What are they supposed to be doing?"

And I said, "Well, just get the fellow - the idea the fellow on your left side has a hand touching your shoulder."

So he said, "All right … No, no, you don't!" Took me an hour to get the man back in session again. He was in a state of shock. It was the first reality he had run into. That was too real - much too real.

I had a preclear look at me one time and said, "You - you've been asking me what would happen if I got well," (an old-time Consequence Process) and he says, "I can tell you." He said, "I'd start seeing things. And amongst the things I'd start seeing would be you!"

They know if they see them, they possibly never unsee them, don't you see? So that's why you'd run this increase process actually to increase the wall and increase that and increase it, increase it and go around, and then finally increase and reduce, increase and reduce, increase and reduce. You don't care what they reduce.

After a while, they'll say, "You know, I've got some share in handling these walls." And having had some share in handling the wall, why, they'll be happier about the walls, and one of these days find out that it's not impossible to look straight at the wall. "There it is. I have a partial responsibility in creating it at any moment. I also can uncreate it. It's perfectly all right. I don't need any help along this line. I needn't shake so in my boots."

Now, here's another process which is a Havingness Process which is quite important because it is the lowest-rung Havingness Process. This runs on people who cannot get mock-ups. They've gone completely below the ability to create, completely below the ability to destroy. And as a result, these people are usually, by the way, worried about spirits and mysticism and things like that. They get upset about these things, naturally. All right.

But what Havingness Process would you run on this individual? It's a very important one. It's very allied to this "Increase the wall." Just say, "Look around the room and find something in the room that you could have."

They sometimes comm lag a long time, they sometimes find a scrap of dust, they sometimes just expansively say, "Oh, I could have all of it."

Oh yeah? You're really dealing with a tough one there. "Tell me some lies about the wall," something like this, may as-is more than they can afford to give, so you're on a very touchy thing. But I have yet to have this process, "Look around and tell me something in the room you could have," fail to remedy havingness one way or the other.

Now, it doesn't remedy, it repairs havingness. To turn it into a remedy of havingness is "Look around this room and tell me something in it you could dispose of." And you've started the person on a remedy of havingness, which must be both ways.

This can be varied, for somebody who's slightly exteriorized, to "Look around the room and tell me something that your body could have." And you would ask that for quite a while before you adventured upon such a question as "Look around this room and tell me something your body doesn't have to have in the room." That question might be enough to spin somebody. That would be too little havingness, suddenly.

Now here, then, we are combating in our Havingness, in our Spotting Processes and so forth, these actual factors, and I haven't just been raving here to run down the powers that be and the various institutions and so forth. I've been trying to show you as clearly as I could that we are rehabilitating something which has gone, to a large degree, in the individual. We must rehabilitate some of his responsibility in having created this universe and the situations in it, bad or good. This must be rehabilitated in the individual.

Also, if we do not want to have on our hands criminals who are obsessively destroying everything they touch, we must put destruction back in the control of the individual so that it doesn't sit there as an automaticity. In other words, a person has to know when he's destroying something. He doesn't go out here and have "accidental" accidents all the time, you know. He doesn't accidentally blow the other fellow's head off in a mad rage. He knows he can; he doesn't.

So we have - the other situation is an individual has to know that he can dispose of something; he himself can dispose of something. We've got to put these two things back to a marked degree in the hands of the individual. And when we put those two things back in his hands, we then are confronted with an individual who has a potential of survival. And until we put him back in control of creativeness and destructiveness - until he can control these two things - we have not put survival in his hands and the net result of all of his livingness will be succumb. Bodies die and people die because these things go out of their control.

Now, I hope nothing I have said has particularly offended anyone on the subject of Christianity and religion. If you ever want people thoroughly controlled, if you want the society to go downhill, why, throw in such a mockup as was thrown in, in the early days of two thousand years ago, and you'll probably get the same result - a dark age.

I don't say that there's anything bad about what was done; I merely say it's inexcusable. And I say that we shouldn't be carrying with us today, in this enlightened age, all the germs of destruction which destroyed our forefathers so utterly.