FREEZONE BIBLE ASSOCIATION TECH POST
TAPE LECTURE 5 JUL 54 7TH ACC #12 LAUGHTER IN PROCESSING
(FZ BIBLE 7thACC Tape 11 THINGS IN TIME AND SPACE is also
being posted at this time)
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(The 7th ACC consists of half hour lectures, many of them
are already transcribed in the Phoenix Lectures book, so
this could be considered a supplemental chapter to
Phoenix lectures)
Transcript of Taped Lecture by L. Ron Hubbard 7 ACC 12 -
5407C05 Dated: July 5, 1954
Title: LAUGHTER IN PROCESSING
Now I'm going to talk to you about a disrelated subject in
the normal course of processing. I'm going to talk to you
about some common denominators that may or may not fit, at
this time, smoothly into Scientology. Now, I could talk to
you very learnedly perhaps, per chance, mayhap, on some
disrelated processes indeed but I'm not going to do this.
The first one is, and probably the name of this tape should
be, the role of laughter in processing. And of course
there's another one that we will talk about immediately
after that which will have to do with dangerousness, it's
use in processing.
If you know your history and your literature you will know
that the Italian had a psychotherapy in the 15th Century.
It is mirrored in the "Pantemeroni of Gamatista Basile" and
in "The Decameron" by Boccacio. The whole thing centered
around ... this whole therapy centered around laughter. The
entire effort on the part of the therapist, the sage, the
seer, was to make the patient laugh. The one thing which
was feared was melancholy. So much so that we have today
many records of melancholia and melancholia itself is
considered to be a type of insanity.
Well, this may or may not be a type of insanity but
certainly this psychotherapy has progressed very markedly
up from the fifteenth century. Now how much earlier this
was is marked in the fact that it is occasionally cursorily
mentioned with such brevity that one doesn't quite see it
in passing at all in "The Arabian Nights", a collection of
stories of Asia. Lord knows then exactly when this one was
thought up but it is certain that it was conceived by a
society which yet had not forgotten how to laugh and had
been conceived then in a time and age when people could
still be gallant and glorious and noble and other modernly
despicable things.
If we look back at the Vedic Hymns we discover what would
seem today to be a naivete. Which naivete was a level of
simplicity which no one seems to be able to approach today.
And declining from that period onward we find man uniformly
progressing into deeper and deeper stratas of seriousness.
Life is becoming far, far, far more serious but in the 15th
Century we still had some of the tradition of knighthood.
We still had somebody who was perfectly willing to go out
and do or die for a lady's glove or a veil. We still had
somebody who was perfectly willing to spend all his life
doing something that would be obviously very trivial
today. We find Omar Kyam just before this period, by the
way, an earlier period, dedicating his entire life not to
poetry but to catching up with a slave girl he had once
owned and trying to locate her again. In other words, this
was a good adventure.
Simultaneously in these periods we had a tradition of
spirit law, of ghosts, of magical healing, and so on, and
gradually those became discredited and as man began to
approach a highly mechanistic level of existence he was
less and less able to conceive of this sort of thing,
until today when you went to the most ... if you were to go
today to the most learned institution in western culture
you would find immediately that there was no such thing as
a human soul. This they know they know.
So much so that there is a State, the ... a negative one
State of the Union - California - one of the smaller
States, that has in it something they call a university
which had a Chair founded in it to experiment with psychic
research, and the person who occupied that chair, that's
the University of California at Berkley, the person who
occupied that chair decided that if anything had to be done
with psychic research at all, it was simply to disprove or
discredit any psychic researcher in the United States in
any way he possibly could. And this is the Chair of psychic
research of the University of California in Berkley.
That's as close as you would come to it except at Duke
University where there's a little more sincere effort going
on where someone is trying mechanistically to explain
prediction and prescience. A fellow by the name of Rhine
operating at Duke University. Now these... these efforts
are peculiar. Rhine's work is so peculiar, he's every once
in a while called down and racked around. But in no place
in any of these Universities, although you might find in
the university constitution and in its history that it had
God and things like that in it, it's sort of a form people
go through these days, and if you were to ask any of the
people in the physics laboratories of any of these
universities or at any government physics laboratory if
there was such a thing as a human soul, you would be met in
the teeth with a great deal of viscous ridicule. Oh, not
laughter, not laughter, just viscous ridicule on the idea
there that could be such a thing. The brain, obviously is a
machine, after all can't they produce computers. Can't they
produce these big electronic computers. Well that proves
conclusively that man is then just a machine.
And what level of action or beauty do we find concurrent
with this attitude. It should be very interesting to you if
you wish to study cultures. What is their concept of
beauty, glory, nobility? What is their concept of
adventure? What is their general attitude toward courage?
Well I don't mean to mess up your ears.
Now where it comes then to the decline of a society or the
approach of a society to an entirely mechanistic, soulless
level, we find it sliding further and further into a sort
of a neurosis of some sort or another. We find its
sanitariums getting very full and we find it sliding
further and further from anything like a technique - make
them laugh! That technique would be utterly inconceivable
in any institution that you approach today. Inconceivable
as a therapy. Utterly inconceivable. What! Make a patient
laugh and he would become sane? Oh no. And yet that was the
only existing psychotherapy of fifteen hundred - pardon me
.. the 15th century. Those years had only this
psychotherapy. So much so that many a king, it was said,
would give half his kingdom away when his daughter or son
was afflicted with melancholia, to the first clown that
came along that could make this melancholic person laugh.
Well there must be something in this if this was the
totality of therapy and if we discover in this modern age
that these universities I have been slandering and libeling
because actually they are sincere institutions run by
sincere and honest and serious men who have only the best
possible goals at heart for their country and so forth,
such as blow 'em all up. These organizations are on a level
of seriousness which is incredible indeed. Their
materialism and their seriousness are comparable with their
lack of beauty and lack of adventure. All of these things
are a parody.
Where you discover one of these things setting in to an
educational institution, or a culture, or a preclear, you
find them all going hand in glove. You find one of them
present, you will find others present and of course nothing
figures harder and looks less than a department in a modern
university. Figure, figure, figure, figure, high
generalities, generalities, generalities. No adventure,
it's all very serious. There's nothing gallant about any of
this. The soul does not exist. Fairy tales - well, we'll
make a study out of fairy tales and actually we discover,
as Freud did, that they're all based on sex. And we find
the story of the fairy godmother was actually lesbianism
setting in on the part of Cinderella. We discover these
things and we'll discover them on these various dynamics.
All right! Must be some sort of a parity here. So it tells
this that somewhere on the line people took life
sufficiently unseriously - get this though - that all they
had to do was laugh and they would recover. We go back in
Dianetics and discover that over the years I tried to get
auditors to produce line charges on the part of the
preclear. Anybody who is quite familiar with Dianetics is
familiar with this mechanism of line charge. Well now we
don't know if it does a lot of good or not on the part of
the preclear since it's spotty. There seems to be one type
of laughter which is an hysteria. It's a sort of an other
determined nervous reaction. So there's several kinds of
laughter involved here. Many kinds, as a matter of fact.
But we discover that each one of these kinds adds up to
this - rejection.
The ability to put something away from one and much worse
than this - to make nothing out of something... Aah! An
individual who can easily make nothing out of something,
laughs easily. And a person who cannot make nothing out of
something but has to make something, something, something,
something out of something, does not laugh easily. Aah- we
find the body in the university not laughing. We find them
being very serious and we find them trying to make
something out of something that something goes into the
something, the something, something, and I don't know of a
single place in a modern university where you would
suddenly be confronted with a sign saying, "There's nothing
to it!"
Now, there is a coordination here. And so there is a
coordination with laughter and a thetan. An individual can
laugh as long as he feels he has some freedom to make
nothing out of it. What do you think your preclear is doing
as he sits there and chews and chews and chews on a lock
or a secondary or something of the sort, and he doesn't
digest it even if he can swallow it. He's unable to make
nothing out of it. Well, isn't there a simpler mechanism to
make nothing out of things than to run this arduous
seriousness. Yes, indeed there is - indeed so.
To cure him of not laughing - now supposing we just use
this as an overall process and we just cured our preclear
of this condition - not laughing. We cured him of not
laughingness. We reassessed our cases we confront on this
basis - melancholia versus jovialovia. Today, jovialovia is
the most horrible disease known to man. Do you realize that
fellow laughs - hmpf. Give him the place of the president
of the university? Oh no - no, no, we need somebody who can
drag his chin across, across thresholds. That's obviously
that. That's somebody we need. He just wouldn't get very
far if he insisted on laughing at life. Would he?
Can you imagine anybody in any bank or university or any
place in the society today being promoted to the top
because he had a good solid hearty laugh and could laugh at
anything and everything and didn't care what he laughed at.
Can you imagine this? Can you imagine an honorary and
mythical post - president of the United States - being
filled by somebody who could laugh a great deal and
honestly and sincerely - mmhm? I said it was mythical and
legendary because as far as I can find out, today why the
United States is in the interesting condition of sort of a
going round and round on the subject of who is governing
what and the post of president is mainly trying to find
out, if he possibly can, where his mail is coming from or
something of the sort.
I notice in more recent times he's having greater and
greater difficulty with his briefing. He, he .. that's
right, he has an awful time these days with communication
lines. He doesn't know whether they go to McCarthy or go to
Stevens or whether the proper route is to the secretary of
the communist party in order to reach the Chief of Staff or
just exactly what his route is, see. Did you notice that?
He had to put out a directive saying that none of his
people could testify, and so forth. It's an interesting
state of affairs and yet this individual is really higher
toned than anybody else around him but I don't see him
laughing very much. It's all very serious, isn't it? Real
serious! So is the whole society today - real serious.
It must be real serious if you have to develop a bomb that
will wipe out an awful lot of pleasant things to look at.
Must be, must be serious if you have such horrible enemies
that you can only settle with them by settling the world.
That's quite obvious, isn't it? Well, I tell you, the order
of magnitude is really up there in the stars these days.
Well, this is wandering a little bit from the subject - or
is it? It would take a man who couldn't laugh to invent - a
man who couldn't laugh to launch and explode an atom bomb.
I've never seen anybody quite as serious as some of the
dictators. I've known quite a few of them by second hand
situations and these boys take it awfully seriously. That's
very, very, very serious. Everything is on an emergency
basis. They're running at about 1.5. That is when they're
good they're running at 1.5 and then they go down tone
scale and lose the war. What's this amount to for a
psychotherapist? A lot.
There must be something deadly and horrible in laughter if
it must be avoided to that degree. That's what we must
conclude. You want to turn up some somatics on a preclear?
Have him mock up people laughing and duplicate whatever he
gets and just keep on having him mock up people laughing
and mocking up himself laughing, seeing if you can get
anywhere in the direction of a hearty unrestrained
laughter. See if you could do that? It is an interesting
process because it is a tremendously workable process. It
will turn on somatics on many of a preclear that you will
process, the like of which he's never heard of before, and
it will quite often turn off serious chronic somatics. Just
mocking up people laughing.
What is laughter? Laughter is ridicule. Laughter is
something that makes nothing of things, isn't it? Well a
person who then is terribly fascinated with having to be
something and has fallen entirely away from the right to be
nothing, cannot tolerate laughter because that makes
nothing of things. So that is just a little short circuited
sort of a look at the whole thing and it gives you a
process. And it gives you a very good process. There has
been no better process since the days of the Renaisance.
Take a general process - the amount of psychotherapy which
a fellow like Hope, or somebody like that, throws out is
tremendous. It's very good. Right up until Dianetics and
Scientology, in any year more cases were cured by having
something they could laugh at than were ever cured by all
the theories and machinery of all the scientists on earth.
Remember now, what is basically wrong with your preclear is
he can't make nothing out of something and the human
emotion of making nothing out of something of course is
laughter. Not embarrassed laughter, just good, hearty,
unrestrained laughter. You'll find your preclear stuck in
periods where someone was laughing hysterically,
psychotically, or laughing out of pain and you will
discover that this is very, very painful to the preclear
indeed. This is actually very interesting stuff in
processing - laughter.
All right! There's another principle in processing. The
principle of dangerousness. We find that an individual
declines at length into a state of mind whereby he believes
that the only way he can occupy a space or continue to
occupy a space or be permitted to go out of a space that he
is occupying is by the passport of his own dangerousness.
And when an individual is no longer dangerous, when he is
no longer dangerous he then conceives the environment to be
dangerous to him to such a degree that he has to stay where
he's put and that he can't be where he wants to be.
Things are too dangerous and therefore he cannot move
himself around freely and as the definition of self
determinism is moving things around at will, we of course
find this individual intimately overcome because he cannot
move himself around at will. Why? He isn't sufficiently
dangerous to guarantee an open passage on the courses he
would like to take. On the other hand, the environment
itself is sufficiently dangerous to him that he can be
stopped or chased out. So we have this ratio in progress as
almost a total therapy in itself. See, we talked about
laughter as a total therapy.
All right. Now something a little more serious, a little
more down scale, you see, than laughter is this item of
dangerousness. So if the sanity of your preclear could be
said to depend upon any self determinism, could be said to
depend upon the ratio of his own dangerousness compared to
the dangerousness of his environment. When the environment
is total danger, and an individual is no danger, you have
somebody who is in very bad shape indeed. A badness of
shape which is impossible to conceive, even to an auditor.
Simply because it's never totally existed. It's an
absolute.
And let's get the other extreme - an individual who is
totally dangerous to his environment and where nothing in
his environment is dangerous to him. Also a totality which
an auditor would find very difficult indeed to see. In the
first place he would go out of the band of dangerousness
before he would achieve that level. It would go on a 50-50
basis. He's just as dangerous to the environment as the
environment is to him and then he would go up to being able
to reject the environment at will. And so we would have him
passing out of the band of dangerousness. Just like that -
he'd go right on out of it. You see that?
All right. This ratio of dangerousness is an interesting
principle. It was first written up in Excalibur in 1938 and
the rule which was written up and which underlies this
observation is: - a man's ability is dependent upon his
belief in his dangerousness to his environment.
Might have better been expressed as capability but that was
the way it was expressed in Excalibur in 1938. Says many,
many workable principles. One of the earliest times you
will run into it is when you have somebody who is out of
communication and you're trying to get them to strike at
your hand. We can administer to a cat, to a dog, to a
horse, psychotherapy in this degree. And what do you know,
it's very workable, very certain, sure fire psychotherapy.
We get the animal to take a push or a little movement
forward toward us at which moment taking great care not to
be too rapid and so frighten this beast, we withdraw and we
find the next time the person or beast is more willing to
move overtly and then we withdraw more rapidly.
We can do this with a hand. We can put our hand down
alongside of a sick person who is almost totally out of
communication, and they move their hand as though to push
against our fingers and we retreat a little bit with our
fingers. We find out they get a little bit more overt -
this is curious to them and they'll get a little bit more
overt and we retreat again a little harder. And the first
thing you know, we find them picking up in consciousness
and picking up in general activity and they then begin to
conceive themselves as being at least slightly dangerous to
their environment.
I have brought children out of tantrums and cats out of
neurosis and preclears into communication with this type of
an activity. Get them to make a slight forward move at
which moment I permit my hand to retreat. To give you some
idea how early this can be worked. It worked on my little
boy when he was about a month and a half old. He was not
doing well. He was having a lot of stomach upset. He was in
the hospital three days in the hands of the medicos and it
was almost too much for him. They were trying to feed him
condensed milk and he had an allergy to it and I ... the
doctor said he'd have to stay there ten days and I said ...
I asked him if he didn't think he was being very
adventurous and they didn't keep him there ten days.
I brought him home and mixed up a formula closely
approximating something he could eat and he went on his
way. But a month and a half later he was still suffering
from the effects of the amount of noise, confusion, upset
and so forth at the hospital. So, I was a little bit
concerned with him and started to think about I wonder what
the dickens I could do. All of a sudden it occurred to me -
this fact of dangerousness and so I let my hand retreat -
this is the youngest I ever worked, I worked it on other
babies older than this but not on a month and a half for
heaven sakes and I let my hand retreat from him a few times
and he all of a sudden found out this was happening and
this little boy hadn't done much in the way of laughing,
he'd been very serious indeed, you see, and all of a sudden
he broke out into a smile and we did this a few more times
and I acted very terrified indeed and he broke out into a
roaring laughter through the whole thing. It was the finest
thing he ever saw and so on and then he became, as they
quite ordinarily do, very affectionate and so on. It just
raises them up unbelievably and that was the end of his
real stomach trouble. There was no further stomach trouble
after that. This was about 15 minutes of processing. The
results are fast and they're good.
It is only when an army man or a part of a military unit is
convinced that he is no longer dangerous to the enemy that
he falls apart. Beware having anything to do with a
company, regiment, or division that has had any part in a
rout. They will steal you blind and cut your throat in the
dark no matter who you are or what. Their pride in self is
gone. It's the most fantastic deterioration which you've
ever witnessed in your life. Troops, they say, have to be
seasoned but let's say it better than that. Troops have to
have watched the enemy run under fire before they are
really cocky troops. Now that's seasoning and they found
out that they didn't run under fire. They have to find out
these things before they are good. But there is
dangerousness to the environment and you will find out any
preclear that comes to you who's case is hard to handle has
this as a basic factor in the case. This case believes the
entire environment to be dangerous and no part of it to be
safe. And a little higher on the tone scale than that
believes that laughter is very dangerous, deadly and
impossible.
So we have a new route out, which is a very old route, very
old. We get 'em to believe that the environment is slightly
dangerous ... I mean, pardon me... that they're slightly
dangerous to the environment and the environment itself is
slightly less dangerous to them and then by mock ups, or
any other fashion, we could demonstrate to them that
laughter wasn't going to kill them. If we could do those
two things with a case, we would do some wonderful and
remarkable things in psychotherapy. These are two levels of
case actually. After the person departs from dangerousness,
he begins to laugh. It's a very healthy thing, to be able
to laugh, very, very healthy thing. Even an hysterical kind
of laughter is healthier than a solemnity. People have
heard hysterical laughter and have heard other kinds of
laughter and they've conceived it to be very dangerous.
There's only one thing dangerous about laughing and that's
not laughing.
(end of lecture)
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