GROUP DIANETICS

A lecture given on 9 November 1950

Understanding the Third Dynamic

Something which may be of great interest is Group Dianetics. This material is still in the process of evolution. The former name for Group Dianetics was Political Dianetics, but the word political has too many connotations and is too poorly understood to be used.

Group Dianetics develops the fundamental, natural laws of groups, not the arbitrary man- made laws. And in developing these I have already discovered a great many things that I didn’t know before.

Working in the field of prediction, you set up the lowest common denominator, or at least a low common denominator on the subject, and then you carry along and see what data this common denominator predicts. If the common denominator explains existing data satisfactorily and predicts that new data will be found, and the new data is there when one looks, then one can consider that common denominator to be a very apt postulate— one which is at least useful and workable.

Truth with a capital T has been very thoroughly abused and misapplied. As a matter of fact, science as a word has as its sole definition "truth." It would be much more apt if one said that a postulate which had the highest level of workability was as close as you could get at that moment to the existing truth. Working honestly with this, one can find out a great many things which one didn’t know before. And so it is with groups.

I am going to take you along the route of the thinking process which went into the development of Group Dianetics, and perhaps we will even discover a new one.

The first thing we must know about a group is whether or not it is a body of organisms, or whether the group itself is an organism. We must know immediately whether the body of the group actually stands as itself.

Additionally, we would have to know the answer to this: Is the sum of the aggregate individual aberration the sum of the aberration of the group? If it were, it would postulate that one would have to clear everybody in the group before he could have a cleared or at least a good group. It would be a very sad thing if this were true, and it is not just out of hopefulness that we find out that that doesn’t happen to be true.

Actually a group is a body of perpetuated and perpetuating ideas that goes along toward a group goal, and the engrams of the group turn out to be the impact which exterior forces have had against the ideas of the group and its goal. They don’t exist within the minds of men; they exist within the group.

It may sound strange to you perhaps, but this theory works and the other one doesn’t and that is our only test.

We have to consider in the beginning what thought is. I wish I had a much finer definition and understanding of this thing called thought. I have actually worked toward a better understanding of thought much longer than I have worked on processing and the human mind.

I first became very interested in the subject of thought while I was taking a course in atomic and molecular phenomena at George Washington University. A class there was organized under Professor Brown. As far as I know it was the first class on atomic and molecular phenomena which was formally taught in the United States.

We had no textbooks. We only had a few papers written by people in the past. The whole subject was very nebulous. We had such conflicts as, is an x- ray a wave or is it a ray? And things were so crude at the time that you could have answered it either way and have been right.

There is an enormous body of knowledge surrounding atomic and molecular phenomena and a tremendous amount of observation has since been done, so the subject at this time, as taught in the universities, is not considered this nebulous. It has been refined. There are textbooks. They have a mathematics now, quantum mechanics, l and it has become very stylized. But I will give you this little suspicion on my part: The knowledge of it is not very greatly advanced.

For instance, in the early days of flying, the early birdmen who were working right after the Wrights knew of over a dozen ways to make a heavier- than- air object stay in the air. Finally it boiled down to where we were using two of them: Srst the tractor- propeller plane wing, and after that the helicopter. How many people associated with aviation know anything about the others? There is a matter of a rotating blade by which a heavierthan- air craft will go aloft. There are a great many of these things.

In other words, everything that was considered relatively unworkable has been stripped off the field of aviation and not further investigated. The ornithopter was once upon a time looked upon with great hope. That is a plane which flaps its wings to fly. But who has heard of an ornithopter these many years? Yet these early birdmen were working with ornithopters, and they were working with rotor suspensions and this whole array. So it was in the early days of atomic and molecular phenomena.

Today they talk about fission and about several other subjects, and they are very highly stylized on these subjects. But back of this, man’s investigation down through the years has brought him up to where, again, there are more puzzles and more strange manifestations on the part of nature than he could possibly explain. Today the nuclear physicists can pick these things up, put them aside very handily into a nice box, close the lid on it rather hastily and say, "Now we are physicists," and push this thing away because it is embarrassing. There is data in this box which contradicts the data with which they are working. But the data with which they are working happens to be very workable, so they continue to use it.

This is merely an example of thought. Any time one becomes very stylized and highly concentrated on a factor of existence or a body of facts about existence which he finds workable, he is liable to put all the rest of the data he knows into this box and push it aside because it upsets his line of thought. In such a way a man researching in the field wears blinders.

It is totally unproven that you live this life as this life. It is equally unproven by scientific methodology that you have a soul. However, it sounds good, and it may have some truth behind it and seems to have been acceptable for a long time. But they took this postulate of the human soul and said that when you live this life you have lived your only life, and man has been working with that for a couple of thousand years.

The amount of material that has been put in this box over on one side with the lid closed on it is absolutely fantastic. There is much more data that never comes to light in the field of life than there is data in the light at the present moment.

Start reaching into this box of material that has been abandoned, and you will find some very interesting things. Amongst them you will find the distinct possibility that man as an individual does not go along a genetic protoplasmic chain. In other words, as far as his personality is concerned, a man is not the product of his father and mother and his grandparents and so forth. That is the genealogical chain which belongs in the field of cytology and is called that unending stream of protoplasm which reaches back to "when life first began," if there was any period when life first began. We don’t even know if there was. The whole thing might be a circle.

Now, here we have two large fields in exact contradiction. When you look over this unending stream of protoplasm, cytology says that the protoplasm contains within it the potentialities of all of its future forms. If we look over the process of evolution and natural selection (that largely accepted but rather odd theory which doesn’t check against paleontology), we find out that evidently the environment keeps on molding this organism to some degree. But this doesn’t check back against cytology, and cytology is the backbone of biology.

Now we look over into paleontology and we find out that the early rhinoceros was going along just fine without any horn. Then for one whole generation he had a tiny nub on the end of his nose. In the next generation the nub was a little bit bigger. We go along a whole stream of generations and all of a sudden he has got a horn. Nothing in the environment was demanding this horn. As far as anybody can tell he sort of spontaneously combusted it. So here is more data.

None of this material is cross- checked, so that you can get a biologist of one school violently arguing with a biologist of another school. You can get an evolutionist arguing with an anthropologist and all of these people are in terrific disagreement, which says only one thing to me: They don’t know.

I started looking a little further along this line and I found out that there is a distinct possibility that the cellular being isn’t all there is, which is a wild departure from the currently accepted theory.

The biologist has determined authoritarianly that the human being is a cellular being. I was willing to go along with that for a while and at least take a look at it. But the longer I look at this thing, the less evidence I find. I find lots of contradictory evidence but I find practically no evidence which says that the human being has all of his recordings on a cellular level.

On the other hand, I find quite a bit of evidence that supports the fact that the individual as an individual may have existed from the beginning of time, independent of the genealogical line.

I was actually muzzled by the Board of Directors concerning early lives. The one piece of dishonest research in Dianetics was the statement that early lives were probably dub- in. You can find early lives in practically everybody. However, we have found out that you can go on and clear up an individual without paying much attention to this early life material. But if you do hit any of this it is enough to knock out that life, and you can actually clear up the material merely by running the death out. If you can’t get that death, ask the file clerk for the death necessary to resolve this case. Get that death and then knock out the other one, reducing or erasing both deaths, and those lives will cancel out as far as their aberrative effect upon this life is concerned.

But don’t take somebody back to the year 35,000 B. C. and run him halfway into a hunting accident or a death and then bring him up to present time, because he will bring the somatic with him.

Just how this appends to and depends upon somatics on incidents and injuries which a person has attained in this life is not yet known. We are in a speculative field, and these nice, smooth, streamlined postulates that people have been dealing with are about as proven as the existence of Eden.

There is no real evidence that goes along with the concept that this society has or past societies have had with regard to this. There are broader and fuller concepts which explain more than those concepts.

One of the concepts swings completely out of the field of materialism, and that is when we first begin to try to explain what thought is. When we start to look this thing over closely, we find that thought is least well explained when it is talked about on an individual basis; in other words, that an individual has within himself the sole motor of an individual thought. That postulate is shaky.

When we start looking at thought as an overall energy, things begin to clarify. And in order to go into and make any advance into the field of groups, this whole field had to be reinspected.

In the study of atomic and molecular phenomena I expected, of course, to run into something which might possibly approximate thought. That was the reason why I was studying atomic and molecular phenomena: I wanted to find thought. I wanted to find life. I had no differentiation between the two. And it seemed very rational to me that, if there were various kinds of magnetism, electricity and other things, one would find life mixed up in there— if life was that energy.

I looked very hard and although this is very far from conclusive I found absolutely nothing which responded in this finite universe (the universe which can be sensed, measured or experienced) like life itself does, except thought. It is unique. Here and there it may approximate electromagnetic laws, but it is definitely itself, much more so than electricity, which is part of the building blocks of the finite universe. There are electrons and there is electromagnetism. You have got atoms and molecules and the next thing you know, you have matter; and you can break these things back down again and you have electricity.

Then we move over and look at thought. It just doesn’t fit anywhere in this scheme of things. It doesn’t behave in the same way. In the first place it doesn’t obey the laws of time, so immediately something is wrong. In the next place it doesn’t obey the laws of space. Furthermore, it seems to be an energy which doesn’t dissipate. There is something wrong with thought in that it seems to be in contradiction with the laws of the conservation of energy.

There seem to be such things as the inertia of thought and the volume of thought, but they have no concordance with time, space, energy and matter as we know them. Where thought comes from, I don’t know, but I know that it hasn’t anything in common with the finite universe.

Thought is instantaneous. For instance, a radio wave takes a certain amount of time to travel but a thought will lay itself along 40 years and just continue.

I don’t want to go into the supertechnical aspects of this because by laying this out it becomes imponderable. One starts to regard thought as an energy which is like the energy of electricity, and immediately it is all wrong.

So, what is thought? It was discussed in an earlier lecture as big theta and little theta, and this appears to be a workable analogy.

We consider thought as something which is exterior to the finite universe. It doesn’t occupy the same time, space, energy or matter, but it procreates and evidently comes from a fairly identical source. It’s apparently a unity. Individuals along the line take pieces off this unity. In other words, an individual was once part of the central unity, and then whether in one life or many he became himself, which is nevertheless a portion of this other unity.

We look at it this way and immediately we begin to understand some of this strange phenomena about groups, about affinity. And we begin to get an understandable explanation of why people can audit people.

Did it ever occur to you that that is quite a worry to someone who is looking at a theoretical field? He says, "Why is one person necessary to audit another person?" We can get some mechanical explanations but they are not satisfactory.

If we go into the field of parapsychology, we find enough evidence to throw overboard the rest of the energy- matter- space- time idea that thought is just another energy and we are all pieces of earth. We are not. As near as I can find out, we belong to a central raiding body which is taking over the finite universe. Our main goal is an identical goal with that of the finite universe: to survive. We are still working on the two central pivots of survive and succumb. They work in the field of thought. They also work in the field of the finite universe. This does not mean that thought and the finite universe are the same just because they work on more or less the same principle.

So thought seems to be taking over the finite universe, and its main goal is the overriding of the laws of conservation of energy. Thought’s total concern seems to be the handling of matter, energy, space and time toward its own purposes. It is at war when one of these things is trying to upset its goal. And more and more, thought gets pieces of the finite universe to work for it.

At first when thought came in, maybe it didn’t have many allies. But gradually thought turns over natural laws of the finite universe in order to further the aims of thought, and when enough enemies are made into allies, a geometric progression begins and thought definitely takes it over.

If you want an analogy for this, it is very interesting that man becomes very concerned about land. An individual man will take over a large piece of land. He has space there and he has got matter. In addition to that, he will strive to live as long as he can in an effort to lick time. He wants to go places as fast as he can get there, so he is trying to overcome space. And there are large fields of study in the area of physics in an effort to condense space.

In other words, his continual effort is to beat these things at their own games and make allies out of every single piece of the finite universe that he can in order to take over the rest of it. There are even people who are thinking in terms of conquering the moon and Mars. Man is actually, so far as we know, the only creature at this time (certainly the only one on Earth) who could possibly conquer space or time in that magnitude.

Physicists are now worrying about time. It seems that if one went nearly up to the speed of light, time would start to come back to zero, according to Einstein’s equation. That would mean that a person could get out, because he would have upset his time equation. So physicists are trying to figure out how to manhandle time some more and how to manhandle space a little bit more.

Potentially man could take off and create matter out of existing energy, or manufacture energy out of which to create matter. He could get out and take over this whole universe. Of course, the instant he started doing it he would probably find out that there are other entities on other planets, not unlike men, who are trying to do the same thing.

Now we are talking about space opera, but it is interesting that there is so much interest in this and that the brains that whipped up a little bit of hellbroth to dump on Hiroshima were primarily interested in conquering time and space and getting to Mars. The only reason these people ever entered this field was to conquer energy. Now they have worked it out so that energy is likely to conquer man, but you can see what the battle is.

We have this cohesive entity, thought, and whether it is called God or collective consciousness, the moment we begin to postulate its existence and look over the problem of interrelationships with human beings, the problem starts to fall apart and ceases to be a problem.

There is probably a great deal of complexity on how the individual broke off from, or how closely he is still appended to, or how much he is still a part of, the central unity. The unity probably, on closer inspection, will turn out to be a duality— nearly everything else does. The basic number of the universe seems to be two. A universal unity is two, not one. That is one of the reasons why every datum is as valuable as it evaluates other data.

A high echelon equation is valuable as to how much data it takes in, but it is not comprehensible until it is compared to a datum of comparable magnitude.

In other words, two subjects can sit all by themselves, but neither one of them can be understood till we look at the other one. For instance, we say survive, and we can derive a lot of material from the word. But there is another one standing right alongside of it, succumb, which is the other half of it. So, survive is evaluated in terms of succumb, and succumb is evaluated in terms of survive.

The basic unit of the finite universe is two. If you started building this universe, one of the primary factors you would have to start with would be a particle of matter, which would have an outside and an inside to it. That’s two. If you got it down to a point where it was single, all by itself, it would no longer be there, so you wouldn’t have started building this universe.

The next figure is the tetrahedron, which is four triangles put together in such a way that they make a solid figure. (This is Dymaxion geometry, l by the way, which has a philosophic use.) The basic unit is two and then we take tetrahedrons and octahedrons and we can fill the whole universe with these, and they are the only figures with which we could fill the whole universe as far as we can find out today. It is an interesting thing that Dymaxion geometry would follow these postulates so very neatly.

So when we start to put together the finite universe, we find on one side survive and on the other side succumb. These two make up derivationally the field of energy, matter, space and time.

Then there is thought, and we have again survive and succumb in thought. Thought has an energy flow, but this is not dependent on finite universe space or time. It depends on its own space and time. Then we look around and find out what matter is in thought. It is simply energy which has congealed into an idea; thus ideas, in thought, are the same as matter. Then we get in thought the space it occupies; and then there is thought time, whatever thought time is.

We start working this out and we find that thought and the finite universe are parallels, and when viewed that way we begin to understand what holds groups together. The group is the combined effort of thought taking over the finite universe, and when the group finally perishes, the finite universe has taken over thought. In other words, there is a battle going on. They are both trying to survive and succumb, and there is the interconflict. They interweave and one or the other fails. There is a continuing battle and it makes a cycle, whereas races rise and fall.

A race carries along a certain impetus and finally gets enmeshed too deeply with matter in space and time and is no longer able to move. In other words, it gets driven too solidly into it and there is too much turbulence and soon the race itself perishes as a race.

When a group first begins, its goal is very high. It is going to survive and it is going to upset the laws of the conservation of energy or know the reason why. It is going to take over and conquer time, space, energy and matter, and it does pretty well at it.

Usually, at first, the group conquers more and more. But, as with every conquest and each new step, there has been a kickback of the finite universe against thought, and areas of turbulence have been set up in the individuals themselves— which is one significant factor— but they have also been set up in the group.

Now and then the group loses a war, or a great storm comes up and knocks out a town, and these things are remembered. The finite universe kicks back. Something happens in this universe— for instance, Mount Pelee blows its top off— and it lays back against the group.

In trying to take over the finite universe, thought will also assign to it other groups and bodies. They don’t recognize those as thought units; they recognize them as matter/ force units.

There is sometimes a large argument with one race as to whether or not another race is human. To the first race, the second belongs to energy, matter, space and time, not to the field of thought; they are not considered to be live entities, in other words. Any race starting out sees other races and doesn’t evaluate itself in terms of them but just considers them as part of the enemy, so it attacks them. They are just matter and energy as far as this race is concerned and not part of it. This insularity is still being practiced at this point.

The southern United States got a big group engram back around 1865 of such magnitude that the South actually has a very difficult time advancing. It is a tough one. One wonders why the group isn’t functioning as smoothly as it might. They do all right but they have their limitations. These are not self- imposed; that engram back in 1865 said, "You’re licked."

They never considered themselves as part of the group in the North. This group in the North belonged to the enemy. It was part of the finite universe. They collided with it, were defeated, and an engram was laid down. And even today, if you browse around the South, you will be amazed to find out how much this thing is mentioned. They are still trying to run it, as a group. They feel if they could just talk about it enough, it would gradually run out. Unfortunately, a large section of their culture was vanquished and they can see the signs of this all around. So they get continual locks on the initial engram. As a result, there is a group engram staring you right in the face.

What we need is a process to run that engram out of the South. It is a very big, valuable section of the world and it is a shame that people are closed down by anything.

Looking back earlier, we find out that Americans have run an engram out of the whole country— the "English engram." They were being confronted by the English back and forth, and finally the new growing group of colonists decided the English were actually energy, matter, space and time, and said, "Down with them," and they had a nice war. Because they won, it wasn’t a very big engram. But existing right along with this there were a lot of people— Tories— who had to go on living in the same part of the worlds so there was a disturbance area from it.

I don’t think this was wholly patched up. It showed its ugly head again in 1863. The United States, as such, figured out that England was against it and there was more turbulence. That was a lock on top of it.

But then World War I came along and there was enough fighting side by side so that suddenly the group had a tendency to mesh, and we got the unity that was America. Once upon a time the English and the colonies had been a unity, then they split, and then because they aligned themselves as allies, all of a sudden we had another unity. And to this day we have a pretty smooth situation. But most of the jokes that were being bruited around, for instance, in 1870 were at the expense of Englishmen, and were simply manifestations of the group engram which had existed.

Another example was a group known as Rome. Originally a small body of people, they suddenly rose almost by spontaneous combustion out of nowhere. They stole a lot of big strong women, and they took over the tag end of a little peninsula and proceeded from there to rule all the world they could reach at that time, and they spread out wider and wider— as the unity of the group.

You can look over these unities and find out immediately that they are not separate entities, rather they resemble portions of a living thing. They are combating each other as separate entities and causing new areas of turbulence but they are not separate entities, because their behavior pattern is identical in each case. Each time they have believed otherwise they have fallen in on themselves, like the Roman Empire. The United States and Russia are doing it right now and doing a very thorough job of it. The United States says, "We are a group," and Russia is saying the same thing. America is also saying, "In order for the United States to live, we have to destroy Russia," while Russia is saying, "We have to destroy the United States." So there is a great deal which is out of phase. Neither country has found out that the other is not part of the finite universe.

Somebody wrote a story not too long ago. They set up the postulate that a very interesting rescue had to be performed somewhere. And the United States and Russia were both vying in an effort to effect this rescue and so amalgamated.

It wouldn’t be quite as easy as that because there are too many engrams back along the track. We can look along the line and find out that in Russia, as a group entity, there lie certain definite engrams. And we look back at the United States’ track where Russia is concerned and we find certain definite engrams. They have assaulted some of the things of the U. S. group. But if we look it over thoroughly, we find out that the United States doesn’t even begin to have the engrams about Russia that Russia must have about the United States. America had troops over in Russia mopping up, trying to keep that government from getting into shape. But now it is in shape. How many engrams did they leave around? Plenty.

So the problem is, which is the most aberrated with regard to the other? All of a sudden something starts to resolve and we begin to understand a little bit more about this. What we should know is how to knock out these various engrams. We should know something about a group process.

Politics is essentially the treatment of the group. The group tries to function as a group. It is a body of perpetuating and perpetuated ideas toward certain definite goals. Of course, there is always this goal: survive or succumb— one or the other; but the drive is to survive, the penalty is to succumb. A group’s effort to survive takes on a definite shape. The United States has had forced upon it, from some source I have not yet been able to locate, the fact that it would be nasty for the United States to spread as a group over the whole world. It has impeded itself in some peculiar fashion. So there is an engram back there someplace. It became not nice to do this.

In 1835 and 1846 the United States didn’t have this idea, and in 1898 it didn’t have this idea. But if one looks a little bit further, he finds someone who went by the title of Kaiser whose primary cant was that he was going to rule the world. At least that’s what the British propagandists said. So, rather than be the devil that the Kaiser and the German people represented at that time, the United States had to eschew anything that they said because that was a big engram which had to be negated against— identically thinking —and therefore it became nasty for the United States to spread their culture over the whole world.

Unless something is done about this, the United States is done for. I personally believe that the American culture is a very fine culture. Every place I find Americans I find life going along just fine. I find telephones and sanitation, and life is good.

Someone says, "Well, why can’t this be given to the rest of the world?"

And the Americans say, "Well, that’s bad."

What they are talking about is conquering people by force. The group has been educated into the belief that the only way one can conquer is by force. I am afraid that that is the poorest way to conquer, because when one conquers in that fashion one creates new engrams by creating areas of turbulence.

It isn’t true that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, but it is certainly true that he who imposes his will by force and not by reason upon a reasonable human being is going to have to take the consequences.

So, when we have the United States thinking in terms of conquest, we have a piece of identity- thinking in this society, "Well, we don’t want to be like the Kaiser and Hitler and Mussolini." What has this got to do with it? When we look over Hitler in order to find out why Germany went on this binge, we have to look back down the group history of Germany and we go clear back to the Roman legions.

Germany tried to explode out of her forests where the living wasn’t too good, and to get places where the climate and the living were a little bit better and the wolves maybe a little smaller. And the German race was hit continually by Roman legions trying to contain them within their borders, causing more and more turbulence to build up.

It is an odd thing to find out that twenty- five hundred years later the Germans are still trying to explode outside their borders. The only way they could think of it was in terms of force because they were thinking as a group on identity reasoning.

One looks at the general situation and tries to find out what the engram is in Germany. It happens to be the Roman legions. But there are so many locks on it, how could one start to run it out? There would have to be some way to run out a group engram in order to clear Germany of this idea.

It isn’t a good thing to smash another group. We get into the postulate of, are these groups separate entities or do they all come from the same entity? We have to conclude that they come from the same entity in order to explain the fact that every time a group smashes the works of or the identity of another group, the smashing group suffers and it suffers very markedly.

Rome came down on the bones of all the cultures she had destroyed.

She destroyed one culture too many. She walled up the city of Jerusalem. She told the people to get out of there and never to come back. That was a major engram created by force against a group, and the group itself came back against the Roman Empire.

Who would have gone back in Rome’s history, any number of years after she had first evicted the citizens of Jerusalem and broken up the Jewish nation, and realized that Rome itself would fall flat on its face and cease to be as an entity or a group because she had committed that act and made that engram?

We can go back in the Roman Empire and look this thing over, and then we start to ask ourselves, what engrams have we created? What have we done in our own past which will wind up with our own destruction? We see that each time a group does this, it is actually thought turning back against thought rather unwittingly, because thought is in individuals making up this group and the group itself makes an attack. So instead of consolidating a gain, it finds that another attack has been made and some ground taken.

Thought A thinks that the easy way to conquer some more of the finite universe is to conquer thought B. It looks so simple. So thought A knocks out thought B. But that means that thought has conquered much less, because thought A has made thought B lose all the ground that thought had gained. So actually thought A lost. It might have seemed to have won momentarily as a group, but thought major has lost. And when thought major loses, you can expect some dire consequences. In other words, the finite universe is now less conquered than before.

Let’s postulate that Hitler, instead of crashing through the Maginot line and overrunning Europe, had gone into the field of creative thought and had aided all man in his endeavor to conquer the universe. We would have found him, for instance, turning all of his chemists to work. They had made some remarkable strides. There was one substance they discovered which was a cure for sleeping sickness. He tried to bargain this cure for the return of Germany’s colonies. In other words, he didn’t just hand this out to the rest of the world of thought. He wanted some finite universe for it. He didn’t get any. Everybody turned him down and somebody else synthesized it elsewhere knowing it was in existence. He had all of these tremendous gains to offer man. But he didn’t offer them to the whole of thought; he tried to keep them inside the group. And as soon as he did that, look what happened to Germany. You can ask the same question of any conquerer of the force level and you will find the same answer.

Germany could very easily have manufactured enough chemicals and advanced man in his tools and skills enough so that nobody would have dared touch her, because to have touched Germany would have been to have impeded, obviously, the gains of the whole human race.

All Germany had to do was to set herself up in such a situation that she would become indispensable to mankind. The instant she became indispensable to mankind she would have become safe. The only way for an individual or a group to be completely safe amongst mankind is to be indispensable.

The moment that an individual or group takes cognizance of the fact that it is part of the whole entity of thought, that individual or group makes a very fine bid for immortality.

These are to some degree rough estimates of a situation. I have tried to show you here rather cursorily how far we can get when we knock out the idea that thought is just another electrical current living on the same time span as matter and energy, space and time.

When we start to consider it as a separate entity and to look over it for its own goal, we start to find some answers, and these answers are very useful. We immediately get, in the field of thought, an equation which does not necessarily exist in the field of matter. And that is the equation of communication, affinity and reality.

Certainly you find that this finite universe can fumble along just fine. It will transmit energy in one form to energy in another form, and it will bumble along one way or the other. Within itself it is indestructible and it is not in peril, but you start hitting it with thought and it becomes very much at peril. Maybe that is why it kicks back so hard.

We find out, then, that we can also explain some of the other manifestations of living. We find out that mankind, if he would ever consider himself as mankind and not as isolated groups, would be in quite an advantageous situation.

For instance, Russia had a great big dam that furnished all sorts of power across the Dnieper, and the Germans blew it up. It was men who put that dam there, and men used that power. There was a piece of MEST that had been conquered. Then along came this other group and knocked it out. Why? It was very amusing to find out that Germany was busily engaged in trying to rebuild the dam during the war, after it had so gloriously blown it up!

American occupation troops are over in Hiroshima and Nagasaki right now trying to build the place up again. Any time man has knocked some of man’s works flat, the person who knocked them flat has found that he usually had to put them back together again. The United States bombed and strafed and otherwise upset a large part of the continent of Europe, and today the reason U. S. taxes are way up and there is so much confusion back and forth in regard to these things, and the reason why its own government is going down toward a social democracy is simply because it raised hell with Europe. It is directly related.

If man in one place knocks out man’s works in another place, man now has to build those works back up again because they are necessary to man. He has got to reconquer territory that he has knocked somebody back from.

What a paucity of understanding there is on the part of a group to knock out another group and then turn around and use its own skills and so forth to build that group up again. The moment anything like that happens, the group is going to get the consequences for it, not because it is immoral but because that happens to be the way it works.

Back in 1933 people were hired because they were starving, and the group that was in power at the time was not thinking seriously about future groups. Otherwise the people who were doing all that construction back in the early thirties really would have been slugging.

Here was a group operating within a group. It was expedient to do this construction, but those in charge lost sight of the primary laws that underlie what thought is trying to do. They were simply borrowing from one part of the society to pay another part of the society without making a real, active effort to conquer this continent.

You could probably take a hundred million people and work them hard for a thousand years and you would just start to get this continent in shape. How anybody could waste five minutes trying to figure out how to get two men to lean on a shovel where one had leaned before, I don’t know, but they spent a lot of time on it. As a consequence, Highway 66, for example, which nobody would have called a highway even in 1925, is today still a little cowpath, laughingly referred to as a transcontinental highway. It is full of chuckholes and most of its distance is just two narrow paths. Yet there were a lot of people out of work in the early thirties.

Somebody on purpose or accidentally had completely misread all the laws of economics and said, "Now we have a depression. Let’s see how long it can stay depressed." They forgot that in order to increase productivity all one had to do was attack and make a conquest of the area. We would have had a transcontinental highway at least. We actually need four good transcontinental highways.

We start looking around at the parks and the various works of man that would have to be done in order to make this country workable and we do get an estimate that a hundred million people could work for a thousand years with all the available tools, and in that time they would just about start to get the place into shape.

Yet, not knowing a basic principle, it wasn’t done. Now we have too many other things on the fire, and the manpower is not available because we have just created a flock of engrams in the last few years which are absorbing all our energies.

Notice how the group energy is dissipating because of the formation of engrams.

We handled that one wrongly back in the early thirties. The chances of our getting four transcontinental highways any time in the near future is rather slight. These things all have a bearing.

The instant that man as a group and as part of mankind lays aside these goals and goes over onto a side track and creates some more engrams, his group starts to get into very serious shape. These groups have gotten into such serious shape that there is a distinct possibility that this culture could be wiped off the face of the earth.

We forget how thorough we actually were in 1917 and 1918. We did a pretty good job over in Europe as far as war efforts were concerned.

A lot of people tried to build back a lot of Europe in the intervening years, but they only tried about halfway. They let a republic go by the boards to which they had made various guarantees. They had set up a group and then they had abandoned it— the Weimar Republic. Down that group went, in came Hitler. Things built up again. Now we did a very thorough job. They say that during the latter part of the war the skies were dark with planes going over the channel, all of them carrying bombs. Nowadays we have town- busters Just yesterday we dropped 85,000 incendiary bombs on one of these little bamboo and lath towns over in Korea.

At the end of the war I was educated at Princeton for a while in civil affairs. The Navy had found that you couldn’t take an area and knock apart all of man’s works in it and then expect to operate in that area. They didn’t state it in those terms; they just said, "It gets to be a mess and we have got to have somebody to take care of it." So they tried to find officers who had had experience in Asia, and they brought them into Princeton and ran them through an assembly line of what happens to have been a very fine school. Hoping that their past experience was enough to carry them through with the job, the Navy jammed down the throats of these officers enough knowledge for them to go out and set up governments and to set up units that could handle people, to square things around after the military had been at work.

It is very interesting that knocking out the very few thousand Japanese civilians on the little island of Saipan would create a stumbling block which would almost upset all the plans of the United States Navy. That gives you an idea how dangerous it is to monkey around with a cultural unit in man.

People were worrying about Saipan with a capital 1M There was a baby a day dying in the stockade at Saipan. The Navy had said, "We are out to beat the Japanese. We don’t have anything to do with these civilians," and they didn’t do anything for them for a long time. But the morale of their troops there, the supply of labor, the fact that they had destroyed everything that had been there— all of these things swelled up and hit the United States Navy in the face, and the Pacific attack almost came to a stop until someone went over and stopped one baby a day from dying in Saipan.

Civil Affairs officers went over to Saipan and worked extremely hard. There was high priority on shipping, special transport, anything they needed. Emergency orders were given to this effect: "If you have issued any requisitions whether they have been answered or not, issue them again." In other words, "Double or treble your orders but make sure the stuff gets there." It was only after they had set Saipan back together again and done what they could for its civil populace that the attack could then proceed.

This is something that one learns not by reading textbooks but by going over and taking a look at it. There has been too little of that in the past. Men have evolved very beautiful tangled theories about history and groups and so forth, but few of the men who did that ever bothered to live much of it. I have noticed this as a failing in scholarly work, that there is too much data pulled from 5,000 years ago and not enough from yesterday.

Therefore, anything like this requires considerable looking. And in order to see any of what he is looking at one has to consider it a live subject, not a dead one. He has to look around and see the time that the Elks did so- andso, and consider the Elks a group, and then see how this and that happened, and how they interacted with the town.

In your own experience, when you examine a philosophic echelon, there is no reason to suppose that because it is a philosophic echelon it has to be compared to a thick textbook. The best place to compare it is on the lowest basic echelon.

A mathematician deals with abstracts, so he gets a foot into the field of abstracts very easily— an abstract being something which does not necessarily compare to things which can be sensed, measured or experienced. In other words, an abstract is not necessarily a piece of reality. And for a short time he has one foot in things which can be sensed, measured or experienced and the other foot into the field of abstracts; but abstracts work so nicely that soon he has got both feet in the field of abstracts, and he walks around happily. It doesn’t have to compare with very much. But somebody has to stand down in the field of things that can be sensed, measured, experienced— such as ice cream sodas, power cars and cigarettes— and look over the situation, and then the works of the mathematician become quite real because they have been pushed into a reality.

When we start looking over the field of groups, we are not dealing with any abstract concept. We are mixed up with group problems; they are real to us; they are right in our hands. And we can see that the reality and workability of these things are very great.

For instance, today we have a group known as Dianetics. We have got the Foundations. One of the main reasons I undertook this series of studies was to see if we couldn’t do something about world peace. But the next thing I knew, I had right to hand an example of what can be done and misdone with groups. I look at the group Los Angeles and I look at the group Elizabeth, and suddenly realize that we have in the Foundations themselves the pilot project of

Russia and the United States. It isn’t anything esoteric; it is right to hand. And we find out immediately what the remedies are and how we run engrams out of groups— in other words, how to process a group.

Although there are comparable laws in operation, the laws are of a different quality between thought and the material universe. (If you call it the finite universe, you are liable to get into arguments with physicists.) Looking it over it seems that there is a specific quantity of space, time, energy and matter. One can’t talk of "expanding universe" or "contracting universe" unless he is talking in terms of some sort of a constant. So we will call it the material universe and that will get over any possible confusion.

Now, we find out that the material universe has an evident set of laws of reality. In other words it exists. The things on which thought has an agreed reality are slightly different. Every time we get into this problem we find out that we are dealing with two things, and the moment we try to deal with this as a single idea that the material universes reality is the same as a thought reality, we get into trouble. It is different. They are two separate things even though they are comparable.

Finite universe reality can be sensed, measured or experienced. In other words, electricity can be measured by its magnetic field, matter can have its mass measured and gravimetrically you can get its weight. And there are other measurements, such as taking two masses, putting them together and measuring the energy. We can also measure space, and mechanically we can measure time. As a matter of fact there are quite a few very reliable methods of measuring time. So these are things which can be sensed, measured or experienced on a very definite level.

It doesn’t have to be postulated that we are just dreaming up the fact that we are doing it and observing it. This thing is. Whether or not its color is as we see it, and some of its relationships are as we see them, is beside the point. Every time we come across this thing we know something is there.

What gives science its enormous advantage is that somebody in the year 1600, with very crude tools, sensed, measured or experienced something about the material universe, and somebody else independently in the year 1950 can sense, measure or experience the same thing and get the same answer. This thing has a consistency about it which is very easily measured. So our concept of it is that it’s real.

If we look these things over we find out that energy does certain things within itself and thereby becomes matter. We look at it occupying space and look at it with regard to time and we see that these interrelationships are constant. In addition, they have evidently been that way and will continue to be that way for a very long time. We could consider this, then, as a reality which is cohesed and adhesed. Time has a certain cohesion, a certain adhesion, and there is cohesion and adhesion in space, too. There are in energy very definite cohesions and adhesions, and matter couldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for cohesion.

One of the big questions the physicists are currently asking themselves is not what blows the atom apart, but what holds it together? So we have an affinity, but we had better call it a cohesion. This would be the affinity of the material universe for itself.

Along the line of perception, matter, for instance, has a certain perceptic quality about it. Light perceives something is there and bends around it. There are certain laws, in other words. There are certain parts of matter that go to certain parts of matter. There are radio waves which affect certain things. There are all kinds of interrelationships. This thing is in communication with itself.

So we have here a triangle of affinity, communication and reality. If this were studied further by a physicist it would demonstrate a lot of interrelationships. But we are not studying physics, we are studying thought, and we find olrt that there are approximating laws in the area of thought. We find out that if all of us agree on something, it becomes a reality. It is just as simple as that.

For instance, if the rumor were to go out that President Truman had resigned and the whole United States were to agree that President Truman was not president, Truman could be sitting right there in the White House but he would no longer be president; and as far as sanity is concerned, he would be insane if he kept on saying that he was.

We have certain ideas in our culture on which we have agreed. Anybody who violates those or suddenly disagrees with them is liable to find himself in very bad shape with regard to the rest of us.

There is a definite reality to a culture. It isn’t something which is just postulated by somebody. It has sufficient reality that an agreement or a reality in thought can mold the material universe, and any time you get something which can exert that much force, you certainly have to admit of its entity. It has an existence. Man has not sufficiently realized to what degree this is so.

Suppose some gentleman says that a mountain should be moved, and nobody else takes it up one way or the other— they don’t agree or disagree with him. But a few days later a couple of other people say, "You know, I think that mountain ought to be moved too." And then 500 or 600 people say, "You know, that mountain ought to be moved." That mountain is getting up to a point where it is about half- moved already. Once we get several thousand people agreeing that this mountain is going to be moved, the mountain gets moved— that is, within the limits of the ability of the people to carry the thing out. Of course, part of the reality of being able to carry it out is the tools they have dreamed up in order to move that mountain, the ideas they have gotten. In other words, the idea as a mass moves in against that mountain and something happens to the mountain. Or, the mountain being too resistant, something comes back and smashes against the idea. Then there is a turbulent area at that point.

Once it was agreed that nobody could travel at the speed of sound— it was impossible. People believed they would get up to the sound wall and then there would just be a dull crash and that would be the end of that. So nobody developed it any further. Then one day somebody thought on the subject and said, "I think I could get up above the wall of sound." He had noticed that the tip ends of tractor propellers had been traveling way above the speed of sound for a long time and that they had not fallen off. This was a new observation, and he decided that man could go faster than sound, so man has. And that is the way the universe of thought keeps moving in— with better ideas, better liaison.

If everybody were interested in doing things to perpetuate the universe of thought by conquest of the finite universe, we wouldn’t get into any trouble. There wouldn’t be any wars, and it would be a perfectly valid operation as long as we continued to do that.

Even the disagreements from man to man as to how this ought to be conquered would not set up very great turbulences. But the moment that some portion of thought conceives another portion of thought as a part of the material universe, a misidentification is made and you get chaos and disaster. When the first body of thought makes the attack, that attack actually comes back to the central portion of thought and creates a turbulence.

In the field of thought there is the reality of ideas and agreements, and things are real in proportion to the amount of agreement which we have about them. That is a thought reality.

As far as affinity is concerned, it is the cohesiveness of thought. When affinity is broken down, thought itself is thrown into a turbulence. But thought in turbulence against thought is not destructive until thought becomes turbulent about thought via the material universe.

As long as somebody says to me "You know, I don’t like you very much," and I say "Well, I really don’t like you very much either," nothing much is going to happen unless the dislike has been routed through the material universe.

An engram is thought too forcibly impinged on the material universe. If the two of us had an engram which contained that dialogue, the disagreement would excite a turbulence which already existed and was held in place in the material universe, and the instant that occurred there would be trouble. But without the material universe as part of the equation, affinity would not even be broken.

If somebody says "I don’t like you," and you say "I don’t like you," that isn’t a real break of affinity, that doesn’t mean you are going to cut his throat. There may be less intensity of affinity, but nothing much is going to happen.

But if this person says "I don’t like you," and hits you in the jaw (which is force impinging upon that portion of you which is also native to the material universe), we start to get into trouble because a real turbulence has been set up.

Affinity is practically unbreakable in thought until the material universe is entered as the route by which the affinity is broken.

It works the same way with reality. You and I can disagree for a long time on the subject of some reality or other, but unless a portion of the material universe is part of the broken agreement, we won’t get into any trouble about it. The only things we have ideas and realities about, actually, are concerned with this conquest of the material universe.

There is a higher echelon above this level of thought we are operating in, but I don’t know yet just what it is.

As far as communication is concerned, it has to be considered on a much broader basis than talk. That is not all there is to communication. One’s ability to perceive the material universe via its various channels of perception, such as sight, sound and smell, is communication.

It so happens that man has become sufficiently turbulent that he actually perceives man via the material universe. Thought- entity one communicates with thought- entity two by perceiving this material universe aspect of thought- entity two, and we get a route of perception. In other words, thought is not perceiving or communicating with thought, as thought, nearly as much as it evidently might.

This postulates the existence of such things as one studies in parapsychology. One looks over some of the figures that have been arrived at in that field and he finds out that there is obviously something there. How well that can be picked up, I don’t know. Evidently, once the turbulence has been removed, individuals can perceive more.

This perception doesn’t seem to be part of electromagnetic waves, but there is a definite communication. If one gets into the business of how one person audits another person, he begins to see that there is a lock- up over in the thought universe.

If we look a little bit further into this problem, we find out what a group iS.

A portion of thought conquers a certain portion of the material universe. In an orderly fashion we call that life. In other words, chemicals, minerals and so forth have been picked up by thought and converted.

Thought has the characteristic and quality of being able to convert, own and mobilize or motivate matter and energy through space and through time. Thought is a strange thing; it can pick up a few chemicals and they become mobile.

A number of portions of thought are operative in the conquest of the material universe, but thought is the driving force. When the material universe kicks back too hard and overcomes and drives out some portion of thought, life is lowered and the ability to conquer is lowered.

When the material universe kicks all the way back, such as a safe falling on a man’s head, thought is driven completely out of the material portion of the entity. That’s death.

A very fair question would be, does death mean that the individual life portion, which was encased in or controlling the body, ceases to exist? If we have postulated that there is no such thing as thought and all is matter and material universe anyway, then it would cease to exist. However, the evidence seems to indicate that thought does not necessarily cease to exist simply because the material case ceases to exist. And the more we look at this problem, the more we begin to find out that there is supportive evidence of this. It is also supportive for the group entity in another way.

The group seems to have a life and body of its own. It is not the collective individuality of the people which compose it. For example, a general recently told me, "The boys got tired of shooting the North Koreans when they were trying to surrender, and we finally took some and put them in a prison camp and trained them up. Now they are fighting on our side and doing a very good job."

So they have made a new group. Somebody rewelded some people together who were running on one series of group ideas and now we have a new group. They are doing a similar thing to what they had been doing, but exactly in reverse, and they are doing it very successfully.

We can also look over the fields of communism and atheism— not that these things are comparable. But I gave a communist a fine release once, and the moment he got up to a point where he no longer had these terrible antipathies about money he forgot about being a communist. He was a human being and his general level of thought evidently was not wrapped around this ideology, but you could still have superimposed on him the idea that he was an aberrated communist. Now you could make an unaberrated communist out of him, or a democrat, or almost anything. It would depend on the group with which he was fitting himself. And whether he accepted that group or not would depend on how closely it matched the central mission of thought as to how much of the material universe that group was going to take over— in other words, how much constructive creative conquest of the material universe was going to be done by that group. And if you could convince him that you were going to do a better job of conquering the material universe— not worrying now about conquering other bodies of thought— you would find that person in there pitching.

As long as you tackle the problem of conquering the material universe, almost anybody from almost any group will join up with you, because you are getting down to the center of his motivation. This means that if you dropped out of the equation the idea that Russia’s primary mission is to conquer groups of people, and put in the idea that it is to conquer the material universe, a lot of turbulence would go by the boards and we would start agreeing with Russia.

At the same time, if the United States, instead of considering these vast nebulous menaces that have assailed it (many of which are quite real), started concentrating on how man could best conquer the material universe, you would see most of its problems evaporating.

In other words, if any entity of a group in the world today set out on a sufficiently sentient, well- regulated and advertised program of conquering the material universe for mankind, not just for itself, people would leave it alone. There is safety.

If we look around at various groups we find out that there are all manner of aberrations which one fights against. But if one can demonstrate that he comes about as close to the central mission as you can get, the antagonism folds up, because one has approached the highest level of affinity he can approach.

We don’t have to enter any of this field on the basis of knocking out group engrams. The first step would be to take a good solid run at the material universe for the benefit of mankind— the conquest of space, time, matter and energy for the use of thought as a whole— and one would hold in abeyance most of the material which is inclined to flood in on him at the present time in the United States.

It requires, however, that one’s efforts be communicated and that he be free from an unreality about it. Agreement must be gotten on the fact that it is an effort to do just that.

Had Hitler or Napoleon or Alexander the Great done this, they would have gone a little bit further in the world than they did. For instance, there was nothing left of Alexander’s empire within two years after he was dead.

Napoleon succeeded in shortening the average Frenchman one inch. He had a fixation on the use of tall men as grenadiers and guards, and his fixation on getting guards and grenadiers killed off was such that he reduced the height of the French nation one inch. That is not a very great accomplishment. Here was all this leadership, this administrative ability, going to waste because of a complete paucity of understanding of what the group was actually trying to do.

Education along this line would have to carry with it the fact that a man is a man, and that the central mission and goal of men is not dissimilar to the world around them. It would simply have to be identified. It is a very strange thing that this has never been done. It has been sensed, but never isolated and nailed down for what it is.

People go off at wild tangents about this thing, and nations fight nations. One group says, "Well, the way for us to get rich is to go over and raid them doggone Bavarians." And then they find themselves completely pauperized as far as manpower is concerned because beyond the Bavarians there were the Pomeranians, a savage race that wanted to kill Bavarians all the time, and the Bavarians were holding up the Pomeranians from slaughtering the people who killed the Bavarians.

The reason why Russia couldn’t jump at the United States was because the German nation was in between and it was opposed to Russia. So they knocked out the German nation and now there isn’t a German nation in there to help the United States knock out Russia. Only the U. S. doesn’t have to knock out Russia in the first place. This isn’t the echelon of thought with which they should be dealing. They should be looking to the conquest of the material universe, not to the conquest of men.

Let’s go a little further on this and look over the processing of a group. One first has to codify what its primary goal is and then one will be able to start scouting up engrams. This has a parallel in human beings. One didn’t quite know what was wrong with human beings until he looked it over from the standpoint that human beings are trying to survive. Therefore he started to look for things that had tried to kill the humans. This is a very blunt, basic way to look at it, but all of a sudden we looked a bit further and we found engrams. Then we found out that we could pick up engrams, and then, by empirical testing, we found out that people started to get sane. So there must have been some truth in the matter; there must have been a reality there.

Looking along the line of groups, we find out that groups are basically trying to survive. But this has to be redefined a little bit: They are basically trying to survive despite the reaction and interaction of the material universe. Now, that changes the whole picture of the examination of history and politics all the way down the line. The group is trying to survive against the interaction and opposition of this material universe. As soon as we see this for what it is, we see that the group is not trying to survive against the interaction and reaction of other groups.

A group gets led very quickly astray on this. They look at another group and they are so poorly informed as to the actual identity of man as man that they see this other group as zetas or pinkas or something, but not as men and not as part of the universe of thought.

Life and bodies of life are more valuable to bodies of life than uncultivated matter. For instance, we couldn’t eat very well unless thought had already combined with the material universe to create life forms.

But notice that every time we knock apart some species of life form, there is usually a bad result. This is what we call the imbalance of nature. In Montgomery County, Maryland, they decided that they were tired of losing their chickens to hawks. So the state legislature put out a bounty awarding people a dollar for every hawk they killed, and the farmers went out and brought back in wagonloads of hawks. That was 20 years ago. Now Montgomery County is so overridden with rodents that they can’t raise corn.

It is all right to kill a few hawks— within limits— there is no great penalty imposed; but the moment that you really start over the border on this, you are in lots of trouble.

If a whole community can get into serious trouble by killing hawks, think what serious trouble will result for a community that goes in for killing men.

European nations have been holding down the continent of Europe, which is a big piece of material universe as far as this world is concerned, and doing a pretty good job of it. They have given us a lot of things which we have needed in the past. Then there is Asia. The amount of culture we have gotten from Asia is enormous. We look back and start adding up these things, such as silk, and we find this society is shot through with pieces of the material universe which have been conquered by Asia and given to us.

If we look over in Asia now, we find pieces of the material universe called guns have been given to Asia too, and they are having a good time over there right now.

Let us consider the goal of the group. We know that the lowest common denominator goal is this fact that thought is attempting to survive by a conquest of the material universe.

There may be methods by which thought survives other than in a conquest of the material universe. However, as we ourselves are composed partially of captured pieces of this material universe, we are of course very interested in continuing to capture it and keep it going. That is the goal.

Let’s see how a group gets a modified goal with relationship to this. The moment we have spotted the exact goal of a group, we have spotted its center line of action. Anything that impinged and inflicted pain on the group, not by killing its individual members, but by creating pain or turbulence along this center line of action, would be an engram, and any mention of it or repetition of it would be a lock. This would be pretty easy to spot.

When we look for the central goal line of the United States, we find an effort to conquer the world of the material universe for man. We are certainly developing lots of tools at a tremendous rate that will accomplish this. The trouble is that we have used too many of these tools against other men.

Wherever this central goal line has been interrupted, we have an engram. For instance, the Indians caused us a lot of engrams. It was necessary for the white man to develop weapons with which to cope with them. When the white man first arrived in North America he didn’t have in his possession weapons as good as the Indians had. There was a body of Norsemen who landed on the East Coast and spent a winter there. They were really cut to pieces by Indians, because all they had were axes and these were not much use against stone tomahawks and a very fine missile weapon in the form of a bow and arrow. The Indians had a very good armament, they were well skilled and their tactics were excellent, and the white man couldn’t stand up against them. That was back around the twelfth century.

Coming on forward, we find out that the early settlers up around the sixteenth century with their blunderbusses were just about able to cope with the Indians, but not very well. The arquebus and the musketoon were extremely hard to load and very slow, and after the person had fired once and was trying to reload he was liable to receive a flock of arrows. Eventually someone invented the rifle, but the white man still didn’t make any enormous inroads against the Indian until Colt finally invented a revolving cylinder.

The white man was sure going at it the wrong way. The first thing that the newcomers would do when they set foot on the continent was assume that they were facing the material universe, not thought plus the material universe, and they wouldn’t try to go into any communication with these people; they would form no affinity. Then they would try to take from the Indians and immediately there would be turbulence.

The number of engrams that were laid down along the Indian line was so excessive that the American Indian finally went psychotic. We read about ghost dances and messiahs appearing from anywhere and everywhere, and a big tide of thought through the Indian nations that all he had to do was kill all his dogs and the buffalo would come back. They went crazy.

They had received so many engrams from the white man and the turbulence was such that they actually fell right back, and they wouldn’t pick up the white man’s weapons and tools or adopt enough of his culture because it was something that had hurt them. And so they backed up clear across the continent and finally got out in the plains, and by that time the cavalry had multiple- shot carbines and that was the end of the Indians. The last battle was in 1898, so it took a long time.

The white man could have had the whole continent and the relatively small Indian population as well if there had been affinity and communication. But the white man had some rather strange ideas. For example, a letter to the governor of Massachusetts from a lieutenant commanding a fort was answered by the governor as follows: "My dear Lieutenant, I think your latest idea of hunting them down with dogs is very splendid. I hope you will expedite it."

That is an interesting way to treat a race— with absolutely no affinity or communication.

It is also interesting to follow the track of the Indian race in America, to see how the receipt of group engrams inhibited it, and how they prohibited it from incorporating another group’s ideas into its own group, thereby causing it to fail utterly. This series of engrams eventually overwhelmed it.

There are certain good, workable German and Russian economic practices and sociological principles existing in the world today which cannot be used in the United States because it has engrams as a group against the people who invented them.

We find out that these things are coming in sub rosa, anyhow, because they are needed. But if they were identified for what they are, you would find the whole group of the United States just throwing them by the boards. They would get rid of them instantly, which would be very far from sentient because the group as a thought unit taking over the material universe needs every single advanced idea that it can get in order to make itself and its conquests work.

So how do you run out these engrams? Well, man has kept the track wide open on this. For some peculiar reason he has been very fixated on the idea of writing history and has often said that there is some use for history, and some of the most remarkable reasons have been advanced as to why it is needed. A very full record is kept by any race. For instance, the Indian tried to keep a record by painting ideographs on the sides of his wigwams, and he kept records of all of his historical treaties by the way he wove his wampum and so on.

In Washington they have a big bureau of archives, containing a tremendous amount of history. You can actually go back along that historical line and find out where an engram was received.

It is very easy to run a group engram. It doesn’t have to be attacked, it just has to be brought to light, because in the group itself it is seldom accompanied by material evidence except as a secondary consideration. In other words, by running this you are not going to repair any cells directly, but you are going to make it possible to repair whatever was done, and that is important. You could go back along the track of history of anything, knowing well what its delineated course was, what its original goal was, and sort that out against the history of what happened to it, and all you would have to do would be to widely communicate the whole process to the group and let the group reevaluate it.

You would find many individuals would become very hot about the situation, there would be a lot of arguments, and the thing would boil up quite wildly; but as long as the communication line was kept open and it could be permitted to boil, you would find the engram disappearing. It would just heat itself up and go on out.

For instance, there is a book by the name of Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts, which did a most signal piece of good in the United States. It ran an engram. When Oliver Wiswell came out, anybody standing up for the Tories was liable to be lynched, because people had been taught in school that those Tories were pretty bad people. When the book was released, people argued about it and a lot of statements were made; these statements were read and people voiced their own opinions, and soon they lost interest in the whole subject. They had finally found out that there was another side to the picture, so they had an understanding.

The running of group engrams depends upon establishing the fact that there was another side to the picture— in other words, that there is more data.

It is only the existence of this hidden data, suppressed— the other man’s viewpoint— that creates any kind of an engram at all. There was an affinity with those other people and the moment that one begins to communicate about them, or even through the length of history with them, that affinity starts to build up. But you can’t have an affinity with something that was an enemy without all of a sudden having the whole force of thought straighten out as that affinity starts establishing itself.

If we look over the track of the Dianetic Foundation and try to find out what the Foundation is trying to do, we Snd that for the first time we have an organization which is dealing with the raw material!

This makes some very interesting group engrams, because here we pick it up on a raw material level and throw it back against the society; and if we suddenly confuse the society toward which we are driving Dianetics with the material universe and consider them as our opponents in some degree, it will fail.

Within the Foundations themselves there have been certain incidents. Regarding money, it was a matter of taking and using every resource for its best possible benefit to further Dianetics. But people from another group, standing off, not recognizing this, would look at it and say, "Ah, money, "and they would start to cut the money. The Foundation would come up against this and there would be a turbulence area.

So, it is necessary to go back and review the history of the Foundation and clear out these things. One could do this by writing a history of the Foundation with a close, solid evaluation of what it was trying to do. He would have to offer as much supportive evidence for the other side as for the Foundation, because if the thing was completely biased for the Foundation, the other side of the turbulence would be missing. There would be no understanding and therefore no communication, because there would be no agreement. You have to take the other side of the picture too.

Once that was done a lot of people would get mad, but the group could now discuss it with both sides of the picture known, and when this happened the group would get better. That is the way you run a group engram.

What really concerns us is an international situation whereby there is a consistent attack of group against group, with hidden data.

There is talk about what goes on behind the Iron Curtain, how Russia is doing everything wrong, and then sly comments are introduced about 14 million in slave camps, and 1 percent controlling 99 percent of the Russian populace, the rights of man completely violated, and an ideology which is so insidious that no man dares to look it in the face, for he would turn to stone, obviously.

Yet it is an odd thing that the Russian nation has so much appeal that all it does is put a probe into China and the group that is China goes communistic! It must be a pretty good idea.

When we start to look at it just to that degree, we begin to suspect that we don’t have all the data on the subject. So we certainly better have all the data, because if we don’t, our rancor will continue to rise above this area of turbulence until we consider eventually that Russia is not one of us as men. How does a nation go about creating war with another nation? The first step is to drop down a line of noncommunication. The next step is to try to convince the people of each of these two nations that the other nation is composed of something alien, not people. The next step is to show that there are human beings coming under the heel of these things that are not people, therefore it is very dangerous. They set up a remote example, and then they say, "What would happen to you as a nation if you came under the heel of these things which are not people?" And by that time the group is so far out of communication and so convinced about this whole thing that it will actually commit the insanity of war.

Take a look at the history of World War I. I am afraid that the lesson of World War I didn’t come out soon enough. Soldiers are always learning this horrible fact that they are fighting men. It is hard but they do learn this, in almost every war.

If you examine the early letters of the war, you will find out that the soldiers are fighting devils that are not men, but toward the end of the war you will find a bemused, amazed and somewhat ashamed attitude— they found out they were fighting men; and the instant they found that out, their spirit and activity started to cave in. You can follow the courses of wars, and you will find out that this keeps taking place.

In World War I people found out that this "Gott" that everybody was worshiping was the same Gott. It practically destroyed the Christian religion in Europe as far as its enormous force in the world was concerned, because people had been told a lie. The enemy were devils, then all of a sudden it was realized that the members of the French nation who were worshiping the Christian church were fighting the German nation which was worshiping the Christian church. And the Germans told their troops that God was on their side, while the French told their troops that God was on their side, and after the soldiers got through, the group idea suddenly shifted to the fact that somebody must have been telling a lie.

You would be amazed at the amount of turbulence there was right after World War I on this very subject, and as a result, Christianity has never assumed the stature in Europe that it had before the war. In other words, there was an unreality and it broke the affinity level. with a group. Christianity is a long way from through in Europe, but no more can men talk about the divine right of kings. The knocking apart of this belief came as a consequence of some of this action.

Every time this course of action starts you will find at the other end of it a war. How do we break this concatenation of events? It is very easy. One opens up a communication line. Communication lines exist right now through the United Nations. Take the U. S. official mind off propagandizing the American way of life to Europe, and try to take the Russian mind off propagandizing the communist way of life, because they are both selling something that doesn’t exist. That is the trouble with propaganda.

As soon as you start to sell the real Russian group and people, their actual culture, activities and goals, and start to sell the U. S. actual culture, activities and goals, each to the other, the engram and series of engrams will start to run on this subject, at least making it possible then to run the earlier engrams. There aren’t very many of them. It is at this moment with the greatest of effort that the United States and Russia as governments are able to whip up mutual antagonism, because there just aren’t enough engrams, but they are doing a pretty good job of it. They are laying locks onto some very slight engrams, and if you lay enough heavy locks onto enough light engrams you are going to get action sooner or later.

But looking this over casually, if you didn’t know the violence of these efforts that are being made, you could see that these two groups could live in the world together.

So, by establishing communication you will automatically establish affinity. There are several ways to do it. You start by getting some agreement with Russia on certain lines. You can enter the problem from any one of the three points and get these communication lines open, then publicize these small engrams, clearing them up, getting them talked over controversially, and the thing will fall apart. There couldn’t be a war under those circumstances.

Russia, however, is imbedded into an enormously violent turbulence occasioned by a long and arduous rule which entered into Russia with Genghis Khan. You have to know a great deal about Genghis Khan and the machinations of the Tatars and the hordes that came through there, and know how they treated people to understand how much violence there is underlying these various political efforts and the confusions which have kept coming into Russia since that time.

But you can run that one too. That has got to be run in Russia. It has no effect upon the U. S. except that it makes Russia just a little less sane as a group and makes her easier to shift.

This lecture has been about things which are in a large measure highly theoretical, but I have tried to show you that they have an actual practical application in the world. These things all require refinements. Any one of these tenets can be argued with. That doesn’t mean that I consider the tenets. shaky, but you are perfectly at liberty to argue with these things. The difference between a cleared society and one which is staggering along under its engrams is that in a cleared society one has the right to protest.

There are various things which happen in the existence of a group that becomes mad, and the only way, actually, they can become mad is by the group itself suppressing the discussion of those things.

Let us look, then, for an engram in this group in the United States just on the grounds of suppression. What is the most suppressed thing in the United States? It happens to be sex. And as you start processing people and looking over their lives, it is an astonishing thing to find out that that is the major aberration which you will find along the line. It is the most suppressed thing.

So, one of the dynamics has gone out of general communication. When this occurs, a great deal of trouble can ensue. That is what happens in groups. There is a group engram on the subject. People are trying harder and harder to run that engram. But they are not going back to the source. All they are doing is running late locks on it. What had better be done is that somebody had better write up the source of this aberration— how this suppression got into society.

The moment the group was given the real data of how this occurred, and was then just left to roar and scream about it for a while, you would have the entire engram run out of the entire group of the United States in a matter of months. And if somebody doesn’t get on the ball and do it pretty soon, I will have to!