Thank you. Thank you.

You'll be very glad to hear tonight that I'm not going to lecture on anything that would be of any use to you anywhere and that'll take the strain off.

Male voice: Good.

So don't bother to listen. And just relax, just relax.

We have here a very interesting subject for tonight's debate: the rise and fall of the Atlantean Civilization. The Rise and Fall of the Atlantean Civilization. This is a very interesting book here and it says that this country got bigger and bigger — this country called Atlantis — it got bigger and bigger and then after a while it got so big that one side of it was mad at the other side and somebody invented an H-bomb and that was the end of Atlantis.

Well, that's the end of that book. All right!

And then we have this other subject tonight — we have this other subject tonight which came in my — these books come in my office and I'm always happy to receive them but sometimes I wonder. Most books I'm very happy to see and read, but sometimes they come by, and I'm just showing you an example, and this is Atomic Suicide. It has some material in it which I'm sure that you will be very, very glad to hear. This is — "We Define God" is the name of the chapter. Page 119, section nine.

"God thinks in electric impulsations which are recorded in motion as four pairs of rings which are compressed into spheres. Each cyclic pulsation is manifested by the projection of four concentric light rings in one plane from the point of the magnetic mind-light in which the red half of the spectrum is on the outside . . ."

Male voice: I don't believe it.

The whole book is like that! The whole book. You can just pick it up anyplace.

So anyway, we won't lecture about those.

What's the — this is the fourteenth lecture of the 18th ACC, Aug. 1, 1957. Tonight we're going to talk about thinnies.

Thinnies. Title of the lecture.

An electronic computer, if it did all of the recording of the human mind, would require enough tubes to burn enough light — as much light as would be generated by Niagara Falls, and another Niagara Falls would be required to cool that computer. In other words, something that would do all the recording, filing and analyzing that is done by the mind would occupy many city blocks and it would use just billions of electronic tubes and it would require Niagara Falls to cool it. It'd use as much power as is consumed by the ordinary small town by modern electronic standards. Pretty complicated stuff, providing you suppose the human mind is a computer.

Now obviously, although you sometimes may think to the contrary, your head is not that big and it doesn't generate that much heat.

Now, a small experiment in obnosis will demonstrate this. I don't care where you make the experiment. You could make the experiment right now. The point is, viewed as a computer, as a picture-taker which files the pictures, the human mind is impossible. Now, I've known that for twenty-five years. But just how impossible it was was not the point. What it did was first the point. And you will discover a dissertation on what it did and what it does in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Fairly good coverage — that, and The History of Man — fairly good coverage, but how it does it actually is something I've been awfully quiet about. I sort of glossed over it.

I glossed over it so well that I don't think any of you even asked the question very hard because I dared not ask the question of how it did all this, because it wasn't possible. The human mind couldn't possibly store these pictures. The human mind couldn't possibly reanalyze by inspection and cross-inspection of pictures. The human mind couldn't possibly store fifty-three perceptions per picture and then a running fire of pictures at the rate of about twenty-five per second for many years. No machine could do these things. Therefore, it must be that there is a simpler explanation. That simple explanation would be this: supposing the physical universe itself thinned down and with you still standing there, looked like a picture. In other words, you look at the wall and the wall looks solid to us, right here and now, and then it — in that instant of time that you first looked at it an instant ago — now is thin, with a remote viewpoint still in front of it. And you're in communication with the remote viewpoint — then we'd be running a sort of change of space not-thereness, so that the physical universe itself, which we can observe, is to some degree, one way or another, moving forward in time — is evidently a very large computer all by itself.

Now, this merely puts the burden on the physical universe to be this complicated. But that makes one complication for the many of us, rather than a complication for each one of us. There's no particular reason to choose the simpler. But when we think that the human mind stores these mental image pictures with fifty-three perceptions per each and twenty-five pictures a second, on everything that is viewed — when we think of this in terms of storage, we're not going down any very probable course. In the first place there's no place to put them. All kinds of absurdities come up the moment we view the whole idea as "mental image picture." So we might as well take this as a whole and look at it on the basis that these mental image pictures which we see of yesteryear are actually the physical universe still there in another instant of time, now past, in front of which we have parked a remote viewpoint with which we are in communication and with which we can get into communication.

Now, there's several things in support of this theory — it is a theory. First, any wild change of environment — such as a person dies and comes into another life — leaves him confused as to the past and his confusion as to the past is such that he knows nothing about his past as could be told to him by pictures. He's been displaced too widely and therefore cannot easily get in touch with these old remu — remote viewpoints he's left parked around. But when we run him on the process known as Then and Now Solids, we rather easily steer him back along these courses and have him pick up these old viewpoints. The only reason Then and Now Solids works is because we're taking over the automaticity of the physical universe making itself solid again. And the person starts picking up these old viewpoints he has left parked around.

Now, this gets to be an absurdly simple mechanism after a while. Providing you don't look at the complexity of the physical universe necessary to have it work! It means that the physical universe is a concatenation of pictures which are solid in any given instant for all of us — they're solid in any instant for all of us — and an instant afterwards that set of pictures is no longer solid but a new set of pictures is solid. It means somebody's working overtime mocking things up. But the point is we have a very wide agreement on this.

Now, the only reason we'd be studying this at all is quite an interesting one. The only thing wrong with a mind is a mind. I'll go over that again. The only thing wrong with a mind is that it is a mind. That is all that is wrong with it: it is. Because it's so rigged up that every action an individual undertakes, every action undertaken is then held in suspense. Everything he's done bad and done wrong is held in suspense to the end of time.

And somebody talks about karma. They're talking about — without knowing what they were talking about — this series of pictures retained by the mind. All the pain and agony of yesterday can be carried in this mind and can be turned on again against the individual. This mind may have use. Who knows? But for sure it has liability. It has kickback. It is a sort of a trap. An individual is never free of his acts of yesterday. Well, maybe this is desirable in the other fellow but it's not too desirable in you, is it?

Retribution, the mind, conscience, guilt, restraint. And this would be all very well, providing anybody could prove that an unrestrained being is always damaging. And yet in processing we find out that the more we do for somebody the easier he is on his fellow man and it's only those people who are totally plowed into these minds who commit crimes, are criminals, lead countries . . . Only such people as are totally trapped with no hope of ever getting out are reactively engaged in the commission of crimes.

Quite amazing. The more complexity developed in the mind — it seems to us with our tests and our processing — the greater liability to the society. That sort of makes it a devil's universe, doesn't it?

An individual goes along and the more he lives, the more experience he gets, the more he knows he better not communicate and associate. And the more he refuses to communicate and associate, the less he'll find out about his fellow man and the less actual restraint there is upon his doing things. And the more restraint he gets, why, the less restrained he acts. It's a wonderful thing. This is a philosophic enigma.

An animal has one of the most complex minds you ever cared to have anything to do with. You get into a cat's head, you don't find much brain but boy do you find lots of mind. You get into a rabbit's head — the same breed of feline almost — cats and rabbits seem to have no trouble associating with each other. But this rabbit, in great terror, sees a wolf behind every rock and takes a fixed picture of every rock. He has one of the most obsessed, mystery-infested minds that anybody ever had anything to do with. Quite interesting.

You say, "How do you know about the mind of a rabbit?"

Well, I could tell you I've put them on an E-Meter and tell you a bunch of lies. As a matter of fact I've looked at rabbits' minds. Also senators' minds. Also wolves' minds. And I find out that it is almost a scale here — that the more mind there is and the less that mind can be handled by the person who possesses it, the more craven the conduct of the individual and the less good he does his fellows.

Well, one could say then it must be the devil's universe. It isn't — and this may be news to you — the content of the mind that is bothering you. It is the fact that you have one.

That's a large bullet to chew, as a matter of fact. And we went in with Dianetics to clean up somebody's mind, we went in with Scientology to get them so they could handle one. There's a further step, and that's a mindectomy.

You could characterize somebody as a mindless saint and you could characterize somebody else of less optimum behavior as a fully minded devil. And everything that we have learned on this would seem to indicate that the mind itself, rather than prevent evil, creates it. It forms an insulating mass beyond which a thetan cannot experience and in view of the fact that it does this, he therefore cares little what he does to his fellow being because when he strikes pain into a man he feels it not. If you were in very good shape and you hit somebody on the head, you'd feel it! Not with your fist but with his head. But if you can be totally introverted about the whole thing and not feel anything more than your head, you can safely hit him on the head, can't you? So a mind acts as a restraint of feeling and it may have in it a great many things which deter one from proceeding against one's fellows on a conscience basis, but for sure it insulates someone from ever feeling what happens to his fellows.

About the most that Homo sapiens does is occasionally get a headache because somebody else has a headache. Now, he thinks this is a counter-restimulation. It is not a counter-restimulation. He's already identifying himself with that person and feels his headache. It isn't any headache anyplace else but in that person. Getting the somatic from somebody else is simply the mechanism of solving a problem. As we solve a problem over and over and over, get more and more solutions to a problem, we'll find out we get closure with the problem. And as we get more and more problems of comparable magnitude we see that space opening up between the individual and the problem. You could ask anybody — you're running problems of comparable magnitude on him and you ask, "Where is that problem now?" and oddly enough he'll always — usually — spot a location. Now you run a few more problems of comparable magnitude and you say, "Where's the problem now?" and he'll spot a location further away. Pretty soon it disappears way out there somewhere.

All right. We take the same problem we've just solved and we say, "Give us a solution." How fascinating! "Give us a solution. Give us another solution. Another solution. Another solution. Another solution. Another solution. Where is the problem now?"

"There."

"Give us another solution. Where is the problem now?"

"There."

"Give us another solution. Where is the problem now?"

"Right where I am."

Now we can say, "Give us a problem of comparable magnitude to that problem. Another problem of comparable magnitude." And out the problem moves again. How fantastic! This is weird! It's an interesting phenomenon which you should be acquainted with because it's one of the major phenomena you use in auditing. You know that separation is taking place the more problems you have somebody dream up; and the more problems you solve the more closure you get. One of the reasons for this is the solution is more or less one side of an existing problem preserved and the other side gone. So the thing snaps in on the body, missing its own terminal.

The process of solution is the process of knocking out one side or the other of a problem. You can generalize to that degree. When you knock out one side of a problem of course it has to snap in on something and so it snaps in on the individual's body.

But this tells us a great deal. This gives us a lot of philosophic bait. Just exactly what is going on here? You mean we solve problems and we go snap into them? And we invent more problems and they part from us? Well, the enormity of space of this universe obviously indicates that it is an enormous problem.

Space seems to be created in this fashion.

Now, see here! Nobody could possibly believe that mental image pictures are so valuable that nobody could possibly let go of any of them. You yourself would think this was a silly idea. And yet right now at this moment your mind is still manufacturing them and storing them up. Well, that's fine. Of course you can say they're an aid to memory, like a pencil and paper. A person who takes notes on everything he hears and can't remember every — anything himself would do this.

Let's see if we can't find and examine a system on the subject of mental image pictures which might work in a more simple fashion. Let us assume this complexity: that the universe is a parade, through time, of pictures. And any given instant all those pictures at that instant are solid, and those ahead of it and those behind that instant are thin. So actually time is a parade of solidity through established pictures.

Yes, but we do have a power of choice, so therefore we have some means of altering what part of the universe we're going to take a picture of. Now, we could alter what part of the universe we were going to take a picture of by altering our position in the universe. But the forthcoming pictures of the universe, on a very gross level, would be where they are. In other words, the forthcoming pictures of Earth will be in predictable positions in the vicinity of the Sun. But your automobile, pictures of, will not be in predictable positions. You get the idea? And as we go from great to small, why, we see that we get less and less predictable positions in proportion to the mass. The greater the mass, the more predictable the position; the less the mass, the less predictable the position. So you could always move the small things of life. And the smallest thing I could think of at the moment would be a remote viewpoint. That's pretty tiny.

Now, are they — are they facsimiles or are they actually the universe, thinned down — not pictures of the universe, but the actual universe thinned down — that we see as pictures?

This is a very vast — this is a very large datum. A vast question. How would we see these things? Well, when we stand before them, an impression of ourselves looking becomes our communication with the picture. In other words, we leave bits and pieces of us-ness on the track too, and so we can see these old pictures.

Now, if that theory were correct, a method of erasing pictures would at once become manifest and would work. All you had to do was take over the automaticity of remote viewpoints in front of the scenery. Or erase old remote viewpoints parked in front of the scenery. And if either of these two things worked I would have a tendency to believe that we were dealing with thin-nies, not with pictures.

Now, you could still call them facsimiles if you said, "This, gotten thin, is a facsimile of what it was." And you could preserve the word facsimile on this dogleg piece of logic.

Now, if you were looking at that wall you would leave in that moment of time a remote viewpoint from that position in space. In other words, it's a location in space. Now, I presume that most of you had supper. Now, can you get a picture of any part of it before, during or after supper this evening?

Audience: Yes.

You can?

All right. Very well. Very well. Now, just get the idea of putting a remote viewpoint in front of that picture.

Now, what happened? It went away partially or wholly, didn't it?

Audience: Yes.

Well, those of you that didn't get it to go away fully just put it — do it again as another action.

Did it swing away?

Audience: Yes.

Well, isn't that a fascinating thing? Did it swing away or did that part of youness come here?

Male voice: The latter.

You think it came here, huh? Isn't this fascinating.

I want to know what you're doing leaving pieces of you scattered all over this universe! In other words, we've caught you off base haunting the past. If this is true.

Now, we have tested many things in the handling of pictures. And any one of the methods, if successful, could have been understood through the handling of the remote viewpoint which was looking at the picture. We of course could go through a thoroughgoing erasure of the thing providing one was in one's own valence — which would only mean, "Let's assume your own viewpoint."

Now, Dianetics made the individual assume that viewpoint again and then look it over and look it over and look it over. Now, the oddity was, is occasionally the thing didn't erase. Occasionally it just got sticky. That perhaps is because we didn't thoroughly understand what we were doing. We were trying to erase the picture, whereas as a matter of fact, all we had to do was erase the viewpoint.

Now, Lord knows how much disturbance we have created in the past because it's totally possible that there is another wave of present time following this one. And everything's all solid for you here and now, isn't it?

Male voice: Yeah.

Maybe it's all solid for a lot of other people a little later. But they'd feel haunted, wouldn't they, if you've gone before? Maybe the universe is a number, a vast number of successive waves of viewers of the thickness. And maybe as we go by we make it just a little more solid for an instant but maybe the first wave going through is mocking it up. And then each successive wave adds to it. This building, to a wave coming ten years after us, would be also thick to the degree that we thickened it up. It might be solid concrete to them, see? They might have the wildest idea of what solid is — "a teaspoon weighs a ton" sort of thing. Well, all manner of fantastic explanations occur to one when he looks at all this phenomena. It's a wonderful philosophic jigsaw. But the only interest we have in it is the separation of the individual from the concatenation of pictures which victimize him.

Look, there is no reason, when an individual has been sick, for him to be sick again by remembering having been sick. And yet that is what the mind does for one. An individual has been si — is sick and then a little bit later, a few years later, he suddenly remembers having been sick and gets sick again. In other words, he more occupies the old viewpoint than he does the present viewpoint. He's running viewpoints and change in space and he is leaving something behind him to look at it in each new consecutive position he occupies. Him, a thetan. Now, this is evidently more or less the way it is. Certainly it is a mechanic.

Now, exactly how we go to work erasing this, how we go to work amputating this and so forth, I hope you understand is an entirely separate thing from the very lovely philosophic enigma of "What Is It?" — how you handle it.

Now, we already know lots of ways to handle it. We know most of the picture mechanisms, as a matter of fact. I'd be very surprised to run into a new picture mechanism. And I was very surprised when I ran into this thin-nies deal. It was simply, though, a new idea about how one has pictures. It was a new idea of howness — how does one have pictures? Well, if you can separate them simply by expressing a willingness to occupy various viewpoints in front of sceneries, we could see how 8-C would work like mad. You walk a fellow around and have him look at the wall — and in other words, occupy viewpoints — and if he could knowingly and willingly occupy these various viewpoints, he of course would blow an awful lot of pictures. And when 8-C starts turning on somatics an individual is actually running out old pictures.

Now, there's no mass to you as a being. There actually is no time in you as a being, except as you consider or postulate it. Therefore you can get yourself very easily entangled with some past you. And thus you can get stuck-on-the-trackness and restimulation and so forth. There's no difference whether you're here or there. It is a remote viewpoint and you are a remote viewpoint in front of the wall. There's more of you in present time than there was in the past. There isn't just a finite quantity of you. There's a feeling on your part, however, that you are willing to look at just so many things at a time. And when you find yourself occupying too many past viewpoints and the scenery getting too jumbled up and you can't make it out completely, why, you decide to just shut it all off and you get most of these occlusions of one kind or another — for whatever reason you decided to shut it off.

Well, this makes an interesting view — the idea of thinnies.

Now, the howness of it would then have to do with either taking over an automaticity of leaving remote viewpoints parked wherever you park — you park in front of that wall, when you walk away from it you leave a remote viewpoint in front of the wall. All right, if you ever get a picture of the wall, that's what you must do, evidently, to get it. Therefore study along those lines would indicate what one had to do in order to take over this automaticity. Well, in view of the fact that you and the youness of you, parked in the past, might as well be parked in the present, we can evidently slide these pictures all over the place but the pictures never move. Pictures never go anyplace or do anything. You just slide back and forth on change of space through time. Your theory is that you can occupy any position you have occupied. And sure enough, we find only those areas of the track are stuck where a person was unwilling to have stood there. So we have somebody be willing to stand in front of things. We get a certain new condition of mind with regard to things. But supposing we made him dramatize "unwilling to stand there."

"Look at that wall and get the idea of being unwilling to be there looking at the wall." You'd sure strip off a lot of walls. Well, here'd go the mind. Therefore the mind is capable of being erased, providing one wanted to erase it.

Now, before one would erase the mind, however, he would have to be able to perform the services which the mind pretends to perform: the services of experience, the services of control, being able to take a number of bodies and stack them all together and then control our present body. We controlled a bunch of bodies in the past, therefore we could control the present body by putting things through this.

It has uses. An individual would have to discover, one way or the other, that these uses were — these favors were obtainable or doable by himself before he'd be totally willing to give up the mental image picture system.

But I think the mental image picture system is one of the sillier systems and I think probably — "Invent a system by which to retain the past," "Invent a system of incomparable magnitude to the mind" — various processes apparently open up in front of us. Then and Now Solids is the most reliable, up-to-date process we have which straightens this out. The individual does change space and does move back into the past and then moves up into the present and moves into the past and moves into the present and moves into the past and moves into the present. And he is taking over the king-sized automaticity of all, which is "make it more solid." He must have lost track of how to make things solid if he's still making those facsimiles on the backtrack slightly solid. There's something wrong with his solidifier if he's still got pictures. So we could take over this automaticity of solidities of the past — as represented as pictures — and we would find these things doing two things: some of them, obsessively made solid, would key out. And those that weren't visible at all, we would suddenly have the facility of making them solid again.

The funny part of it is, is a preclear can make them almost totally solid. And there have been instances of preclears walking around inside these pictures of the past, doing things and looking at things which he didn't see when he was there the first time. There's an incident on record of a fellow reading the back side of a newspaper he only saw the front side of.

Now, there's — Then and Now Solids does not tack itself down to the present, you know. Then Solids you would interpret offhand as being the past, but they might as well be the future and a person doesn't hold to just the past on this. He'll go up into the future and start doing this in the future. Lord knows what the mysterious consequences of it all are. Maybe if somebody went up into the future and made it all solid from all possible viewpoints, why, we would suddenly get to the edge of the ocean and fall off into the mouths of big fish the way Columbus said. I mean, almost anything could happen.

Well now, running the process Then and Now Solids is a very interesting experience for both auditor and preclear. Where the person has experienced sudden and surprising shifts in space, he has facsimiles which will not compute. Individual went to sleep in Utah, woke up in Honduras. When he went to sleep in Utah he had no intention of going to Honduras. When he wakes up the following morning he's puzzled. A few years goes by, he meets a Scientologist, Scientologist starts running him. He's erased all this. It was just so incomprehensible to go to sleep in Utah and wake up in Honduras that he just wiped the whole thing out. He says, "Dickens with that. Nobody can live with that kind of stuff!"

Scientologist is running him and he's — "Get a picture and make it a little more solid" and, "Did you do that? Thank you. Look at that chair. Make it a little more solid. Thank you." Back and forth, and the first thing you know, the fellow falls off into this sudden shift. He stops going back to Honduras, which is where you thought he came from, and all of a sudden starts landing in Utah. And Utah to Honduras to now, to Honduras to Utah, to Honduras to now. And all of a sudden he says, "Well, look! There was a change between these two places." He picks up these two viewpoints and he understands that there was this sudden shift and the moment he understands there was a sudden shift — just that and no more; he doesn't even have to understand why there was a shift — he'll get computational data. That is to say, he'll say, "Well, well, well! This is a very strange thing, but I've often wondered why high, dry places were upsetting to me because I had never been in one! I had always been in wet, wet Honduras. But when I'd get in a place that was dry, why — like a room, you know, or something like that that was awfully dry, I'd feel upset and I never could understand that. And that's Utah. Well now, let's see. I went from Utah to Honduras and . .."

Then he goes back on the track further than that and finds out that it was actually — just before Utah, why, it was north Alaska. Now he's going back through Honduras, through Utah to north Alaska.

"Oh well," he says, "lookee. I'm the same fellow in North Alaska, Utah, Honduras and now. Hah! Computes." And he'll tell you some sort of a computation off of this thing and all of a sudden with a whir-clack his time track straightens out. Instead of being sections of track, each section an only-one, it is just one track. He's one person on one track.

Now, individuals get these life computations, which is a fascinating subject. They get subject computations and life computations. They get person computations and so on. The life computation is the most fascinating one; a person's later life doesn't agree with his earlier life — that is, in this lifetime. This fellow has been going around, he's — owns a series of bars. And he goes around, he's rather unhappy in life and he just doesn't feel right about it. He owns this series of bars and he feels he's making money but he just can't kind of reconcile this and he doesn't — he just feels uncomfortable about the whole thing. You start running him on Then and Now Solids, he falls through. He gets into a section of his life where as a little boy he signed the pledge — his mother was a member of the WCTU and so on. And he just — this just doesn't add up with the fact that he is now an owner of bars. See, the two things will not compute. And in view of the fact that they won't compute, he abandons one or the other of them. Now, quite often he'll abandon his modern activity because it won't compute with the earlier activity.

Now, reliance on an object to preserve havingness is one of these computations — reliance on what preserves havingness. Early part of his life he depended utterly on his father to preserve his havingness. Middle of his life he depended utterly on his first wife to preserve his havingness. But the last stretch of his life has brought into his life somebody who is identical to his father who did nothing but steal from him. This just doesn't make sense and he doesn't make any sense out of it and his remark to you, an auditor, is that — "My life doesn't make sense."

I had a rather elementary one. When I was a little boy I never went anyplace without a rifle. Montana, there's just a rifle; rifle — Montana. They just go together, see? I'd go out and there'd always be a rifle stuck in a saddle boot. A saddle was not cinched unless it had a rifle in it of course, you know. A wolf jump up, something like this would happen, why, you took a rifle and you blew his silly head off. People left you alone because you had a rifle. You wanted to preserve your possessions, why, you had a rifle. You get the idea? It was a reliance on this item, see — big reliance on one item. And a little boy that doesn't like to bite wolves because of his immaturity on the subject feels safe on such a thing.

All right. All of a sudden, out of this highly wild, barbaric area was suddenly — move "over into what's laughingly called civilization, see? You go down the street in New York City carrying a rifle, you're liable to be tapped on the shoulder. You'd have to explain to somebody that a rifle was — the rifle was intended to go out to the rifle matches, not to shoot any wolves or shoot any people. This is a protection of havingness, though. What system do you use to protect havingness? A rifle!

Later life, no rifle is permitted to you, you can't have one, you'd better not shoot one in the city limits. One fine day, why, some tough kid in the teens you know, walks up, takes your car away from you and goes over the hills and far away. Where were you? You were just standing there. What were you supposed to do to him? You're supposed to take a rifle and say, "No!" and have him put the object down and go away. See, that's the system.

But that system no longer works. It doesn't — can't do that. It's not done. How do you protect your havingness? Well, you're supposed to go to court. Heh-heh-heh! So this finally winds up into the computation that you couldn't possibly have. You got this?

So here's this dogleg, noncomputational thing. Had subjective reality on this and it's a very pat example of this. In other words, one protects havingness in this section of life with an implement, and in this section of life the implement is not allowed. Well, one has not moved up into this section of life with something else to protect havingness, don't you see? So he feels like he can't. Then and Now Solids all of a sudden took these two areas and went clank! All of a sudden it was very obvious it was merely the lack of a rifle. Well, what's a substitute for a rifle? See? That's easy. I don't know what I was using a rifle for. Anyway . . .

Protection of havingness is not terribly difficult unless you have a total investment in an implement. And this total dependency, being so great and ceasing so suddenly, will then not let you be inventive. Now, the kids of tomorrow will think of entertainment in terms of television sets. They're not — won't be inventive on the subject.

The engineer of early aeronautical times had a dependency on nothing; he didn't have anything to work with, he couldn't have built anything anyhow, he figured. It was all impossible and therefore not very serious, so he dreamed up all the forms of flying there were. There's seventeen or eighteen — I've forgotten how many now — methods of flying which have never been used! It just happened that the airfoil — stable airfoil — was buildable at that time with his equipment. Aeronautical engineer graduates from Cal Tech or some other of the people's schools, and engineer starts in and you say to him, "Build an airplane."

And he's, "All right. You take an airfoil and some kind of fuselage and you take a tractor propeller or the reactor-type motor and there's your airplane."

And you say, "Where did this thing come from?" The airfoil is not necessarily an efficient thing at all. A tractor-type propeller, particularly one run by a Wright Whirlwind engine, is taking 50 percent of its power to cancel the other 50 percent of its power, and how it flies at all Lord only knows. The lift-drag ratio of rotor planes, for instance, is so incredibly bad that how anybody keeps up with rotors — I don't know why they'd keep up with rotors, but everybody's married to these rotors! See? They get an airfoil or a certain type of airfoil — a rotor is just a rotating airfoil — and they get certain types of things. They get a — earlier people get a dependency on them. First they invent them, then they get a dependency on them. People that come after that have a tendency to pick this up as a matter of course. It's an "everybody knows." What is an airplane? Everybody knows it's something that has an airfoil. That's silly. That's silly. It's not even safe to be up in the air with an airfoil. I know. I've had a couple of them go whap. It's very uncomfortable!

How about antimagnetic devices, antigravitic? What is gravity, anyhow? Well, there's a fellow down here, Henri Coanda, that's done a considerable study on that and it's so baffling to the US Air Force at this moment that they think Coanda is a very brilliant man, but nobody else can grasp it because the things he builds fly but don't have any airfoil. You see? They're not real, then.

Well, a thetan probably comes along and he says, "Well, this thing called a mind is just part of what I need to get along with — just total dependency on it" and so forth. Now we think up a way of living; well, there's a mind and a way of living would be to take a mind and you do so-and-so.

And you say, "No, no, no, no, no. No!" You say, "Come on now. Now, dream up some kind of a method of living a life."

"Well," he says, "you take your mind and you start — and then you . . ."

"Zzrrr."

Now, that's nothing more than a whole track computation. It's a method of having. Some kind of a method of having that somebody picked up in a silly moment. But it doesn't work. And it doesn't work the way it did. And it isn't useful somehow or another and it's made a dogleg and so he can't understand it. And although he's still got it he places no real dependency on it and he's trying to live anyhow and you get noncomputational. Well, that's why the mind is noncomputational, because everybody starts out to think with first the mind, and then he — and it's not necessarily a mechanism that's useful in that category at all. As a matter of fact, I think it's quite the contrary. A mechanism that stops you from thinking every time you start to think is hardly a mechanism with which you should think!

So you could pass to a whole race's computation from this first little life computation, see? The thing doesn't equate. You've had something that you depended on, then you didn't have it or didn't need it or couldn't use it or it's against the law or something of the sort and you had to live thereafter, so that left you without any method to what? To do something you could do before you got the item that you first were doing with. This is very fascinating.

About the only thing I know that would be allowable in that category would be Scientology. It solves itself. You are aware of the fact that Scientology does rub itself out. This is a rather interesting thing. It is a self-solving science.

There are two processes that run themselves out, for instance, today, which is quite interesting. All the Axioms run themselves out. "Give me that hand. Thank you," and Tone 40 8-C, if run long enough, run out all the times they were run, regardless of who ran them or how poorly or how well. As a matter of fact, if a person doesn't need it very much, he runs it out in the first hour. He runs out in the first hour the first half-hour of it being run on him. This is quite remarkable. It just runs out, that's all. Same way with Tone 40 8-C.

Now, Scientology as a whole runs itself out, too. It won't leave you stuck with it because it is its own solvent. But that isn't true of any other science or item that's been on the track so far, if you can remember it and if it's still around.

For sure aeronautics don't run themselves out — they run themselves in. Automobiling is getting more and more complicated. I imagine if you were to take somebody today as an automotive engineer and tell him to build you an automobile, he'd build you an automobile and it'd be an automobile just like any other automobile. And he'd say, "Well, this is the safe thing to do." Funny part of it was, shipbuilding went almost the same route. Now, they got dependent on an iron hull. And you say, "Well, iron hulls are quite recent — Monitor and Merrimac. Oh no, they're much earlier than that. But they got dependent on an iron hull and today you go down and try to build a sailing ship that sails and you get something built by Alden and you fall off of it and get drowned and the masts come out of it. (That's libel because there are a lot of Alden ships that will sail across a calm sound on a calm day.) You say, "What are these . . . ? The old boys building them and so forth probably have some memory of something or other." And you say, "Well, why not, instead of that funny spoon bow, why not put something up here that'll throw the spray off not on the deck?" They wouldn't know why.

So arts even get lost to a point of where they don't even remember what they knew. You got the idea? Probably Christianity had an awful lot of technology connected with it when it first came out which is no longer present, because it was the principal method of healing for about twelve or fourteen hundred years. Medical science leaving in the laws of the country that healing can still be done by the churches, is quite amusing; very, very amusing because the only healing they had after they wiped out the witchcraft was Christianity and ministers. Ministers apologizing today for healing is something like they — the same thing as their apologizing for Christ's crucifixion, see? They're apologizing for their own religious skill. If they themselves can't heal, well, they certainly skidded someplace because the early missionaries that were sent to here and there and across the world to heathenize the barbarians for sure depended almost totally on healing. They used to bring along religious relics. And Lord knows what they did with them. They did accomplish some results.

But regardless of this, the whole subject is still there; but evidently there's a little something missing. There's no unity of thought on the subject, certainly. There are tremendous schisms on it. Well, there's still a tremendous dependency on it. So somebody in the United States says "religion" and immediately everybody says "Christianity." This doesn't even follow. Let me assure you that there are dozens and dozens of religions in the United States that have nothing to do with Christianity and they are nevertheless religions. Buddhism is one of them. There are quite a good many Buddhist churches in the country and they have nothing to do with Christianity. But evidently, according to the government, religion is Christianity, which I think is quite interesting. You get this narrowing down of what a thing is, until it isn't anything else and then no ability to view that anything else could exist. Don't you see?

All right. Quite amusing. The US Navy — the US Navy admits that Buddhism exists and there are other religions than Christian religions.

There was a very hard-boiled commander on a South Pacific island and he didn't like chaplains, and chaplains had come and gone and come and gone off of his particular post. And one day, why, he got a new chaplain and he said, "Now, be sure," he says to the new chaplain, "and preach all of the services for the men here and I'll dismiss you if you don't."

And chaplain came back and fellow says, "Well, have you preached all the services?"

And the chaplain says, "Oh, yes. Yes I have."

And he says, "Well," he says, "you're fired. Return back to your base." He says, "Because I'm a Buddhist and you haven't preached any Buddhist ceremony."

Now anyway, a breadth of view and an inventiveness is the only safe thing a thetan could have, if we want to speak of safety and security. An ability to view something broadly, an ability to see something new, an ability to invent and an ability to shed dependencies which are no longer serviceable; and the mind won't let a thetan do any of these things. Therefore it must be some kind of an antique mechanism.

Now, how did the mind get into that condition? It's because life to life, and parts of lives to parts of lives, you get noncomputables. An individual knows how to live. The way to live is to be a hotel keeper in Boston. You own a big hotel, you are very snooty with the rich, you are very mean to the people who come in and don't pay their bills. You get the idea? You run this hotel right down the groove and that is the way you live.

And then one day he falls downstairs or kicks the bucket in some fashion or another, eats too much Boston baked beans, goes into a Boston restaurant and dies. Next life, why, he's got a father that has a successful rock quarry and the old man says, "Now, you want to learn how to run this rock quarry" and the kid can't get interested in the rock quarry and he can't do anything about the rock quarry and he doesn't know anything about the rock quarry. And the old man dies and the kid can't even run the rock quarry, and it all goes to pieces and so forth. Well, why? You say, "Well, he just had an allergy to rocks. That's — must be it." No, that wasn't it at all! He knew how you made a living! You made a living by managing a hotel in Boston! And sometime during his early life I am sure that he would have told his father to buy him a hotel so he could live. Got the idea?

Now, after that he knows what happens if you get mixed up with rock quarries. You kick the bucket! You starve to death. This is the sort of things that the mind teaches one. Noncomputables, you see? How to have. How to live. But from one lifetime to another, one carries the mind along with him and lets it teach him, sub rosa, on a 1.1, sub-1.1 basis what it's all about — only that doesn't compute with anything he's doing now. And in disgust he forgets everything he was doing before, but it now influences everything he's doing. Therefore it is some interest to us to have processes such as Then and Now Solids and know how to run them well. But it's much greater interest to know what the entire mechanism is all about. If we knew what the mechanism was, very precisely, we could knock it out or reequate it or make it more usable very easily, and I'm sure all of us would agree this needs to be done.

Thank you.

Thank you.