# ROUTINE 1A-PROBLEMS AND CONFRONT

## A lecture given on 6 July 1961

Well, this is the what?

Audience: Sixth of July.

It’s the 6th of July. No kidding! I just read an HCOB upstairs, said it was the 7th of July. All right. It’s the 6th of July, AD 11.

And I kept you very late. I’ve been keeping you very late these evenings. Do you object to this, or is this . . . ?

Audience: No.

It’s all right? All right. Thank you.

Now you’ve just had a shift over from the process commands of Routine 1A. That’s probably not the last one on 1A, because 1A by definition is simply Problems and a Security Check. And you can’t help but run problems and see them run on a great many people, without finding odd factors of one character or another, and refining auditing commands.

The first thing I discovered is when you ran „Recall a problem,“ the person went first dynamicy and actually just as-ised his own problems and his own problems and his own problems and plowed around on the valence.

In view of the fact you’re running this on people who are very thoroughly fixed in valences, then the obvious thing to do is to boot them out of it. And that’s—new command is a six-way bracket. Best way to phrase it is „can“ and „wouldn’t confront“ on self, another and others. Actually the wording of it is not as important as that.

Now, you got an oddity: Whenever you combine an „invent“ process—a person isn’t inventing, but it’s an open invitation to invent, to the pc, to say something on the order of „What could you confront?“ see? Well, oddly enough, the cure for the Step 6 phenomena is, of course, Confront. I don’t know if you knew that that was the cure for the Step 6 phenomena—you ask somebody to invent something and the bank all goes solid. That’s why we don’t use Step 6. There were quite a few people that they’d start to invent something and the bank would go solid, you see? The whole bank would start lying up.

Well, Confront is the antidote, and a five-, six-way bracket on Confront— plus and minus confront, you see („What would you like to confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ you know, any such wording)—is a cure for this phenomenon that if you ask somebody to create, his bank goes solid. All you got to do is ask him to do some confronting after that and the bank goes back to size. Do you understand that? So this was why I wasn’t much concerned with everybody letting out—not everybody, but a few people letting out pale screams about Step 6.

It was very, very easy to remedy. There are two ways to take the edge off the bank after it has all been (quote) „beefed up.“

You’re looking at me awful blank. Don’t you know this? Don’t you know that if you run—that if you run old Step 6, the whole bank goes solid on some people?

Audience: Yes. Yes.

You know that.

Audience: Yes. We do.

All right. Did you know there was a remedy for it?

Audience: No.

Oh, I see what we’re falling into. you thought it was incurable! Well, actually—well, frankly, frankly, there’s nothing in the world easier to cure than this particular one. you just say to the fellow who’s had this happen to him—you’ve asked him to mock up, mock . . . You could actually run Creative Processes if you kept this in mind. The guy doesn’t like men with wooden legs, so you say to him, „Well, all right. Mock up a man with a wooden leg.“

He says, „Well, I can’t do it.“

You see, give him a failure right away. And you say, „Well, mock up the shadow of Treasure Island.“

„Oh, I can do that all right.“

„All right. Now put a person on Treasure Island.“

„All right, I can do that all right.“

„Good. Now mock up a pirate ship.“

„Well, I can do that all right.“

„Now mock up a cook.“

„All right. I can do that all right.“

„All right. Now mock up a parrot.“

„Okay. I can do that all right.“

„Now put the parrot on the shoulder of a man.“

„All right. I can do that all right.“

„Now mock up Long John Silver.“

„Oh. Yeah, I can do that!“

You say, „That’s okay.“ He’ll never have any further reaction from there on out to a man with a wooden leg I mean, I’m not joking. That is what you could do.

Creative Processes were wonderful. There’s no kidding about it. Because what’s it do? It takes over the automaticity of the fellow creating these things in his own bank, you see?

And you just take over the automaticity on a gradient scale, and you got it made.

Fellow is an alcoholic. You say, „Mock up a table.“

„I can do that.“

„All right. Mock up a table. Thank you.“ „Mock up a table. Thank you.“ „That’s real good. Now, all right. Now, mock up a table with an empty glass on it.“

„Uurhh, I can’t do that. It gets full of whiskey.“

Actually, that’s what an alcoholic is trying to do, is as idiotic as that. He is trying to get back to where he was before he took the drink, so the glass has always got to be full. That’s why they can’t stop drinking. I mean, it’s as stupidly idiotic as that. you act like you don’t believe me. I mean, it’s just as goofy as this—this alcoholism. The fellow sits there and he wishes he hadn’t drunk the whiskey and the only way he can get the picture back of not having drunk whiskey is to have a full glass of whiskey in front of him, see? So, you fill up his glass of whiskey and then he’s very happy for a split instant, you see?

But then, of course, it’s got to be an empty glass of whiskey because you got to make nothing of whiskey. So he doesn’t throw it in a spittoon, he throws it down his throat, see?

But the second he’s thrown it down his throat, he’s got an empty glass, so he has to fill the glass up again in order to be back where he started again. Because, of course, when he started, he had a full glass of whiskey. You think I’m kidding you, but they’re this loopy. And that is alcoholism in full parade.

All right. You ask this alcoholic, you say, „All right. Mock up an empty glass.“

„Can’t do it.“

„Well, all right. Now look, mock up the shadow of an empty glass.“

„No. I can’t do that.“

„Mock up a ring on the table where an empty glass has been.“

„All right, I can do that.“

„Okay. Do that. All right. Now mock up the shadow of the empty glass.“

„Okay, I can do that.“

„All right. Now mock up an empty glass.“

„Huhhh, all right. I can do it. It’s all right—tduuhh! It keeps trying to fill up. No, it’s going down. No-ow it’s going—filling up—oh....“

And with a terrible series—experience of relief, he says, „Huh! I can do it! Yeah, I can mock up an empty glass.“

You say, „That’s real good. Now, fill it up full of whiskey.“

„Ulp!“

And you say, „No, no, now. Now, just let it sit on the table and fill it up full of whiskey.“

„Zuhhh. Well, I can do—mmmmm-mmm-mmm. Yeah. Yeah, I can fill it full of whiskey. It’s sitting—uh, it keeps hitting me in the face.“

You say, „Well, all right. Just keep putting it back there. Now, just put it on the table and get it full of whiskey. All right. You’re all set now. Now you can kind of hold it there on the table. Can you hold it there on the table?“

„Yeahhh-ooo-eah-do-do-do-do-dooooo-ay. Hey! I can hold it on the table.“

Sometimes you’re not that lucky. It keeps pouring down their throat, pouring down their throat. But any gradient that you could possibly figure out, see? Eventually he can sit there with a whiskey bottle, he can sit there with a glass, he can sit there with a full glass of whiskey. He can sit there with any of these combinations. And when he can do that, he’s no longer an alcoholic. Just like that.

You know, the test of an alcoholic is, can he ever take a drink? The test of an alcoholic is, can he take a drink? That’s the cork test. And Alcoholics Anonymous say it is impossible to cure alcoholism or do anything about alcoholism, so therefore they must not ever take a drink, because they know this is true: that an alcoholic is no longer—not an alcoholic as long as he doesn’t take a drink. But he becomes an alcoholic at once if he takes a drink, so I guess that makes him an alcoholic all the time, doesn’t it? That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous is—all it’s doing is running a terrific „can’t-have“ on alcohol. Now, where do you think that’s going to get, huh?

All right. You can cure all that with Creative Processing. Well, all right. But because you’ve done this, because you’ve made the guy mock it up, mock it up, the bank has gotten solid. You know, he feels these ridges. He feels these masses. It is not so good. It’s not so good. His chest is caving in and all sorts of bad things are happening to him, see? And he doesn’t think this is so good. So you-ou-ou-ou . . .

Two things—two things that’ll do it. One: „What could you confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ „What could you confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ „What could you confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ Run that for a while. The bank goes thyuum.

Now, to make sure that it stays down and make sure the process doesn’t get stuck on flows or imbalanced, you run „What could you confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ „What could another confront?“ „What would another rather not confront?“ „What could others confront?“ „What would others rather not confront?“

This is carrying it out so the guy doesn’t get stuck on a stuck flow, see? And the old confront process, when it was run on self dynamic only, eventually got stuck and became inoperable, see? So we’ve—you haven’t kind of seen the old Confront Process for so long. And therefore it’s just used these days for touch-up, various types of Confront. And you’ll find these things are all operative, but they’re merely used for touch-ups on a case. But if you go for broke on this and you really start auditing Confront, you better audit with a six-way bracket: plus, minus, and self, another, others—see, plus and minus for each. And you can run Confront forever that way.

Now, a person who is stuck on another confronting, but not stuck on himself confronting, actually will not get anyplace running Confront. That is why Confront ran on some people, didn’t run on other people. In other words, people have different kinds of stuck flows. And Mr. A has a stuck flow because another won’t confront it. See, he’s trying to make another confront, another confront, another confront, see?

Miss B is totally mixed up on confront because she’s trying to get others not to confront, „Please, others not to confront.“ So she’s got a stuck flow right on that leg of the bracket.

All right. You try to run „What could you confront?“ „What would you rather not confront?“ on that person just as those two commands. But Mr. A over here, he’s stuck on „another,“ see? And Miss B. she’s stuck on „others,“ see? So you won’t get those two cases; you only get the fellow who is stuck on himself confronting.

So, if you run this six-way bracket, plus and minus on self, another, others, you take in all cases on confront. You can turn on any pictures you want to using confront in this particular way, you see? And this beefs—the beefed-up character of Step 6 disappears when you do this. It goes right down. It disappears right now. There are no consequences to it. It takes a half an hour or so, something like that and it’s gone.

And the other one is Responsibility. „What could you be responsible for? Thank you.“ „What could you be responsible for? Thank you.“ I mean, something on that order will also take the edge off of one of these banks gone solid. You see that?

You got two remedies: any version of Responsibility on pictures and any version of Confront on pictures, preferably the six-way bracket. These two things cure the Step 6 phenomena and therefore it’s not very serious, because even though you do it, you can undo it.

You do too much create on a person and they have a hard time. If you said to a person, „Tell a lie. Thank you.“ „Tell a lie. Thank you.“ „Tell a lie. Thank you.“ „Tell a lie. Thank you,“ there’d be a certain number of people, all of a sudden, things start to get awfully solid inside their head and solid out in front of their faces and solid back of their backbones. And it gets painful and it gets more and more solid and more and more solid. And you just keep on saying, „Tell a lie. Thank you.“ „Tell a lie. Thank you.“ „Tell a. . .“ And it gets more and more solid, and it’s getting very painful. Why? These people have an automaticity that if you create anything, everything they’re creating gets created.

Now, the bank is an individual creation. The bank is created by the individual. This is actually the series of proofs by which this is done: You improve picture A and then go back and look at picture B. All right. Now come up and improve picture A again—you know, turn on the sonic and visio in something in picture A—and then go back and look at picture B again. You’ll find out it’s improved in picture B. too. And this is quite curious.

Pick out a picture B as a six-years-old birthday party—pleasure moment, see? All right. Now we’re not going to permit any confronting to amount to anything of picture B. this six-year-old birthday party. All we’re going to do is improve their confronting of an automobile accident when they were nineteen—has nothing to do with the birthday party. All right. So we improve their ability to confront this automobile accident and we get all the perceptics in the automobile accident up—really, what we’re trying to do rather than improve its confronting—get all the perceptics up, sharpen them all up, making them sharper, make them clearer, open that view up of that automobile accident. Let’s hear the blood drip, you know? And then take them back and show them this birthday party. You say, „How’s the birthday party now?“

„Well, I didn’t know there were that many children there. And I can now see the front doorstep. And it’s all getting 3-D.“

You say, „Thank you very much. Very good. Now let’s get it back to this automobile accident. All right. Now take a look at the automobile accident. Now do you hear anything in that automobile accident? Do you feel anything?“

„Yeah.“

„Well, what lies over in front of the car’„

See? Just beef it up, beef it up, beef it up, beef it up. It’s getting 3-D, you know. I mean, it’s getting 3-D, and it’ll—eventually, even the person who has a black field, you can talk them into doing this.

You eventually get this picture which is a totality. If they’re stuck someplace on the track at some other picture, of course, that is the black field. The field is a picture, you see?

There isn’t such a thing as a person who has no pictures. There is a person who has an invisible picture or a person who has a black-field picture, you see? It’s not whether pictures have disintegrated and so forth. It’s just a picture. And you move them to some other part of the track, or get them to take responsibility for the part of the track they’re in, and that black field, invisible field, moving field, something like that, these things disintegrate—if they do the auditing command.

All right. Making allowances for these other various case mechanics, you improve this automobile accident like mad, you keep making him look at this six-year-old birthday party and eventually, my God, they can taste the cake, they can get the heat of the candles, they’ve got the whole lot, you see? But, what were you doing? You were improving an automobile accident when they were nineteen. Curious, isn’t it?

Well, that means you improve up one part of the bank, you’re improving up another part of the bank. That’s what it means. Who are you working on? You’re working on a pc, aren’t you? And what are you doing with the pc? You’re improving his ability to perceive. Well, to improve his ability to perceive, you’re improving his ability to create.

Now, the same phenomenon takes place if you say, „Mock up the park. Thank you.“ „Mock up the park. Thank you.“ „Mock up the park. Thank you.“ „All right. Now we want you to do it just a little bit better this time, and get some more leaves on the oak trees, and that sort of thing. Mock up the park. Thank you.“ „All right. Now, we want you to do just a little bit— let’s get some more water down there in the lake and get a little more space in this thing. Now, all right. Mock up the park. Thank you.“

And they say, „It’s getting awfully solid out there.“

And you say, „That’s good. Let’s take a look at this six-year-old birthday party.“

Holy suffering catfish! You see? The kids are all in 3-D and their screams are coming through their eardrums. You get the idea? So that any time you improve creative action, any time you improve creative ability on one part of the bank, it improves on another part of the bank. It’s quite interesting, isn’t it?

It tends to indicate, as we have discovered long since, that the only reason you can make a pc well is because he’s doing it all himself He isn’t getting any help from anyplace.

All right. If he isn’t getting any help from anyplace and he’s doing it himself, naturally you can clear him. Otherwise, you’d have to go back and find all the people who aberrated him and get them to apologize to him or something of the sort, to clear him.

Now, just the fact that you can change a pc’s case shows the—is the prima facie evidence: It shows that you are, actually, working with somebody who is doing it all himself. You know, he’s mocking up his own aberrations. He’s mocking up his own bank. There is no other automaticity. He’s mocking up his own machinery, his own circuits, everything.

All right. So therefore, you improve his ability to do any part of that and then you look over the track as far as he’s concerned and you find out it’s improved everywhere.

All right. If this is the case, then you have the situation where if you improved the pc’s ability to create without improving his ability to confront, you’ve done him in.

Art school. Art school. Technical schools. Show people how to build better electric motors—build more electric motors, build more electric motors, build more electric motors, build more electric motors, build more electric mo-.

Eventually, they’ll do nothing but break electric motors, see? Something They’ll start feeling bad. Their study will upset them. Study will upset them. Why? Because you’re asking them to create, create, create, create, create, see? And the whole bank starts beefing up. But make sure that your school is so arranged that it has no electric motors in it. It just has diagrams—has diagrams and mathematics and slide rules, but there are no electric motors to teach anybody on. Just make sure you do that.

And, of course, you spin in every electrician in the society, every potential electrician. Even though the guy was a good electrician in his last life, by the time you’ve gotten through with him, why, he’s no good now. That’s why you can’t get any washing machines repaired in this society.

Nobody—it never occurs to anybody, „Oh, you want to work for us as an electrician? Good. All right. Let’s see. Have you ever been an electrician?“

„Yeah. Oh, yeah.“

„When was that?“

„So on and so on.“

„Oh, good. At certain, certain dates. All right. Okay. Killed in World War II. All right. Chief Electrician’s Mate. Oh, that’s good. All right. Now, that was the US Navy? British Navy? What? What navy?

„German Navy. All right. That’s good. Okay. Now, what part of that life would you be willing to confront? Thank you.“ „What part would another person be willing to confront? Thank you.“ „What part would others be willing to confront? Thank you.“ Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang

„Now we’ll put you to work at $125 a week and there you go. There’s the shop.“ you would have educated him.

No, but you use this other system:

„All right. Now, we’re going to teach you to make electric motors and fix up electric motors—particularly make electric motors and create electric motors. And we’re going to fix you up. Now, all we have here are diagrams. There are lots of diagrams of electric motors, but not many diagrams actually. It’s mostly text.“

This sound like modern education? And the guy never has a prayer, don’t you see? He never has a prayer to knock out the creation. So everything he doesn’t like about electric motors or engineering or artwork or architecture, or anything else he’s studying, will eventually come to the fore, because you’re running a „can’t-have“ on him.

It isn’t an educational system, it’s a games condition. See, you fix it up so the fellow can’t have what he’s being educated in. There’s only one way to learn how to be an engineer or an aviator or anything else, is go find yourself a bridge or an airplane. That’s it, see?

Look at the number of hours you spend—as a student in Scientology— look at the number of hours you spend auditing, being audited, getting subjective reality, objective realities. Look at the number of hours compared to the number of hours you spend on theory. It’s different, isn’t it?

Audience: Mm. Yeah.

It’s a different system.

I say, all right. Look at people’s brains. Look at people’s behavior. Look at what you’re looking at. Look! You know? Get an idea on it.

All right. You take somebody who’s been floating along He’d been drifting along; he hadn’t done much auditing. He actually didn’t do much studying. He hadn’t confronted anything very much. you find all of a sudden—not having done any auditing to amount to anything and not having studied very much in the first place and not having done much observation but has just read some books, and you’ll find out he has a very hazy idea of whether auditing works or not. He doesn’t have much reality on it. He doesn’t really think it works. And the funny part of it is, the more evidence you present to him and the less work he does with the mind, the less he will believe that auditing works. Isn’t that interesting

You could present him with tons of proof, you see, in terms of graphs and testimonials, and all that sort . . . You wonder why I don’t ever specialize in graphs or testimonies? Why aren’t these plastered all over the walls and being shoved under the noses of presidents and tramps and all kinds of people, hm? Well, there’s no point in it. There’s just no point in it. The guy can’t look at problems anyhow. They don’t even know there’s a problem about the human mind. They’ll tell you—parrot-like, they’ll say, „Well, out of every fifteen people, there are nineteen of them are psychotic. Yes, we have the figures of the American Psychiatric Association. Yeah, I know. Yes, yes. Big problem. Big problem, big problem, big problem, yes, yes, yes, yes.“ Hell, he’ll never see any part of that problem!

Their own wife and eighteen children might be in the insane asylum and they wouldn’t recognize that insanity had anything to do with them or was any problem in legislative action, or the world of operation, or anything else. See? They just won’t confront the problem of it. They can’t confront the problem of it. It doesn’t exist, because they have no subjective reality on it.

Now, actually, the more theory which you present them with, unaccompanied by an ability to confront or an opportunity to confront the substance of minds and the substance of thinkingness, and the substance of beingness in life, the less reality they’re going to have on the subject of the mind, so you better leave them alone. You better let them drift in this uncomfortable miasma that they are now in, rather than deteriorate it, until you can get around to getting them audited. You get the idea? It’s a different look when you look this thing over.

You say there’s no reason to go around the legislative halls, or the armed services, or something like this, showing a bunch of things. I do some token work in this direction. But the more they hear about it without observing any of it, the less reality they’ve got on it. And that’s the hideous way this thing operates.

All training must be accompanied by confronting and all training in the arts or productivity certainly must be accompanied by confronting. Kow! man, you’d better really operate now if you’re going into the field of the arts, where it’s produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, you see?

Oh, I’d better—guy had better spend one hour a day painting and five hours a day looking at pictures, see? You better let him spend a little while figuring it all out and then actually doing it in the mass, and looking at it being done in the mass. In other words, you got to get the confront up.

Where you have a create, you’ve got to raise the confront. The cure for obsessive create is confront. This gives you some idea of the value of confrontingness.

All right. Now, let’s trace back—I’m not just mad-dogging the subject of education, except we’ve got to get to them before they do. But here’s the thing: If the guy is mocking up his own bank and if the fellow is creating his own aberration, it must be—it must be, perforce—that the road out would be a confront. Isn’t that right?

I mean, if obsessive creation or consequences (bad consequences by a reason of creation)—if these are curable by confront or some version of confront (which is to say, familiarity with the subject; let’s not just say confront), then, of course, the road out lies in, on the one hand taking over the automaticity of that obsessive creation, and on the other hand giving him great familiarity with that obsessive creation. And as soon as he gets these two things, he goes Clear.

If there’s any secret to clearing, that would be the secret. But, of course, you must have been missing a few links here. The reason I’ve given you a short talk on this is because if you didn’t know that Step 6 was curable, then, at the same time, you hadn’t thought the thought all the way through that a mind is curable. You see, because all a mind is, is an obsessive creation. It’s an unknowing, obsessive creation on the part of the individual.

There are many factors which enter into it, of course. There are infinite factors, but there are only a few important factors: create, confront, responsibility, problems, change and not-know. And these things kind of added up, when you juggle them this way and that, why, you’ve sort of got it.

Now goals, of course, prevent the individual from looking at anything. You see, he’s always looking at tomorrow. He’s never looking at what he is looking at.

We’ve got a girl right now who is very interested in going down to the seashore and she’s very interested in having a long vacation and so forth. And she’s sitting in the middle of the swimming pool with lots of help, and so forth. She’s got a big goal to have a vacation, see? And her goal to have a vacation is so tremendously strong that it absolutely prohibits any observation of where she is. There’s nothing wrong with her having a goal to have a vacation, but you begin to laugh when you look at it. It’s silly. She’s having a vacation, only she’s got such a goal to have a vacation, you see, that she hasn’t noticed.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with having goals, but what you’re looking for is the obsessive goal of the case and there’s only one of those and of course that prevents them from confronting anything in that chain. There’s nothing in that chain confronted. Why? Because the goal is so overwhelmingly obsessive that it removes their attention away from anything that is in that chain to something that isn’t yet in the chain. So of course they get no confronting of any kind on that particular chain where they have the most obsessive goal.

And when you’ve knocked it down to a totally obsessive goal and then you have found the terminal that represents this totally obsessive goal, you will now have found the terminal that they have neither ever looked at, inspected, but had then been. It’s pretty grim when you take a look at it.

Get an idea—I see that you’re looking a little bit drifty, here, about this thing—get an idea of looking at this table up here. All right. Just look at the table now. Now you’re in the process of looking at the table, aren’t you?

All right. Now look at the ceiling above the table. All right. Now, as you look at the ceiling above the table, get the idea that it isn’t there, and the only thing that is around is this table. Now, isn’t that a kind of an odd sensation?

All right. That’s a goal. That’s a goal, you see? The person isn’t where they are, they’re at an imagined future point. So of course they aren’t confronting where they are.

And there’s nothing wrong with having goals, but one of these super-plowed-in, obsessive goals leads to the person who most obsessively had this goal, which is the valence, and of course, this is the total no-confront of the bank, is all bunched in that one spot, see, with that whole track around it. Now, naturally, you get all kinds of changes when you start running goals out of people. And the more goals a person has, the less confronting he’s done of his immediacy.

Life is now. Life is now. It isn’t tomorrow. Life is now. It is right this minute, you see? So if you only looked at tomorrow while living right this minute, along one particular line—if you did this always, forever, and you never observed the immediacy of the situation, but only observed the tomorrow of it—you would eventually have as-ised any future of it at all. Couldn’t have any future, so therefore it hangs in time a hundred percent. Doesn’t move, it can’t.

And at the same time, you’ve never as-ised any immediacy of the situation. So all the immediacy of the situation is there on that chain and all its future is as-ised. Its future is gone. And there you get your obsessive goal, and there, of course, you get your most solid chain in the bank. And, of course, this is represented by a terminal.

There’s why Goals Processing works like mad. But Goals Processing undoes these little mechanisms of no confront—SOP Goals. The assessment itself starts off at a high roar and starts doing this left and right, center, in all directions. And the pc feels groggy and he feels this way and he feels that way and he feels some other way. And you sometimes despair of it. you say, „Well, good heavens, you know, this fellow is just going to go hours and hours, thousands and thousands of hours, it’s obvious, before we find any sort of a goal.“

Well, it’s not true. He’ll fall in someday.

But all the time you’re finding a goal, of course you’re taking off all of the futures and restoring the immediacies. And if you were to do Goals Processing somewhat crudely and slant it in another particular way, you could get an odd phenomenon: You could get an individual totally regressed, so that some back point of the track becomes the total reality. See, there’s no present point, there’s only this back point.

If you kind of ARC broke it and didn’t keep him moving on the track and kind of messed him up in all directions and so forth, he’d find himself sitting in the middle of the Battle of Bunker Hill or some stupid thing, you see? And everything would all be 3-D too—3-D in color. And it would be right now, right now.

Running into this right-nowness at points on the track is sometimes very startling. And where they lurk is on the goals chain. You see, they’re a moment when the fellow wished to God he were somewhere else. He’s got to be somewhere else, but he can’t be anywhere else, so he’s got a future.

And this thing he’s looking at, this totally solid scene, no part of it is observed in any way whatsoever—it’s just a total overwhelm—and he’s got a future of it. He’s got a future, see? He’s going to make a future postulate there. And it’s that „I don’t want to be here! I want nothing to do with this.“ And it just leaves it on the track as a total solidity. And one day you’re running him back down the track, and he now hasn’t got the total strain of future, so for a flicked instant he’ll get all the redcoats standing there in 3-D, you see, and smell the powder smoke, and all the rest of it. And he has been tricked, you see, he feels, into being at this spot again. And it won’t last long; he will be at that spot and he’ll go zroom into the future. He does a bounce.

So you don’t see these regressed spots very long. But that doesn’t mean the regressed spot is as-ised; that means the pc has gone into the future of it.

Now, as you’re auditing it on SOP Goals, it’s so rigged that this won’t particularly chew up your pc, and you’re also going to run some Havingness and Confront. But early in an SOP Goals run, you might very easily find a preclear hitting these 3-D regression points. You know, every time he turns around, why, „What? The place is on fire!“ you know? „Oh, well, uh, no, that’s—that’s an instant of track. Yeah!“ „Yeah, that’s pretty good, yeah. No, it is on fire! By George!“

This is the sensation he’s getting, you see, because he’s never as-ised where he is, he’s never inspected that, so he has no familiarity on that at all. He only has a familiarity on elsewhere. Now, naturally, the more familiarity he has on elsewhere, the more elsewhere—with regard to that moment—he does as-is.

So the „elsewheres“ tend to disappear and he begins to be more and more fixed in that incident where he isn’t, but where he is. This is one of the basic mechanisms of existence.

So these points—when you start to run Creative Processing of one kind or another, these points tend to come up rather easily, because of course he’s obsessively creating them all the time. And you find all sorts of 3-D stuff on the track if you’re doing this.

But your „confronts“ are very good.

Now let’s take this thing called a problem, which is the least confrontable thing there is, because it’s in motion and because it fixes one with a stable data, and all that sort of thing. And you look over problems, and if we run confront in on top of problems, we’re doing a double job, don’t you see? Also making it easier on the pc to run it with „other people confronting,“ and so forth.

He starts out, usually, with the most interesting ideas as to what other people can confront. Takes him a long time sometimes to find out that they haven’t confronted any part of what he thought they could confront. He has the idea of, well, his mother, she could sure confront problems. „Man, Mother could certainly confront problems. Boy, that’s dead easy.“

She never did anything about any of them, ever. So obviously she could confront problems, because she never did anything And then it kind of turns up, as he goes along the line and he looks at this again, and he’ll say, „Well, actually, most of these were problems Mother created. Ah, well, that’s a funny thing Well, she could certainly confront problems, I guess. Uh—or could she?“

Then he gets up to the point of, „You know, I don’t think she ever confronted a problem in her life. I don’t think she even knew they existed. Must have been! Must have been, because she never did anything about any problem. And she certainly created all the problems that she—I can’t find anything in the family—anybody creating anything in the family like problems but my mother. Now, what is this all about? She—no, she couldn’t confront problems. She didn’t know they were there.“

You get the mysterious viewpoints a person takes. One gets a totally false idea, by the way, of what other people are able to confront by what they don’t do anything about.

For instance, you see the United States right now and England and NATO at large: they’re—communism’s perfectly all right. Atomic bomb— „Well, we’ll have a deterrent: You hit us, we’ll hit you. Yeah, that’s the answer to it.“

Running problems for a little while, it suddenly dawns on you with a dull erash that these people don’t even know where the wall is with regard to this particular problem, see? They’re facing an annihilation, a total attrition and they say, „Well, what wall? No problem there. Couldn’t be anything going on.“

Now, some of these nations, well, they jump on some country or another—the Congo or something—for not conducting its parliamentary debates right. Congo kept trying to conduct them, I think, with machine guns and rape, and that isn’t done anymore. And the Congo hadn’t realized that it had gone out of style with Empress Eugenie hats. It was quite the style around here a century ago, but it’s gone out of style.

And so they were just—they kept saying to the Congo, „Well now, you fellows are out of style, that’s all, you know? I mean, it’s not done anymore, you know? Raising hell about it. And you shouldn’t throw people in jail and do all this kind of thing.“ And whole United Nations comes crashing down on the Congo and everybody starts monkeying around with the Congo, and. . .

Well, let’s look it over. This is about the most pint-size, postage-stamp problem that exists on Earth today. And it has, as its personnel, a lot of people who are rather easily handled. So of course the United Nations can confront the problem called the Congo—not do anything about it; create more problems in the Congo. But nevertheless can almost be familiar with the Congo. Don’t you see?

At the same time, two-thirds of the world population are behind an iron curtain, totally denied liberty, justice, fraternity and equality and all the things that the United Nations says it stands for and it doesn’t do a cotton-picking thing about it.

Look at that. What an interesting view of the order of magnitude. Here’s two-thirds of the world’s population: They have to have permission to eat and to sleep and to starve, and permission to not wear shoes, and they are permitted to wear a toothbrush, and I think their—their total possessions, by the way, I think, are a spoon, a comb, and a toothbrush; I think that’s about what you can own now in China, by law.

United Nations doing anything about this? Does it ever call anybody to account? Does it ever whistle anybody up and say, „Hey, you know, you blokes are not conducting yourselves with liberty, fraternity and igualdad?“ You know? They never say a word about it. They just have conferences on these fellows down in the Congo, which is about one one-hundred-thousandth of the world population.

Well, now, these things become very clear to you when you get a subjective reality on problems and people’s reaction to problems. See? I mean, all of a sudden a lot of this stuff becomes explained.

Now, similarly, a preclear’s life all of a sudden starts looking much more comprehensible to you. And it looks much more comprehensible to him.

Some pc will run a total irresponsibility about problems of any kind, shape, form, anything else. yet they see nothing incompatible with having trouble in their life and not confronting any problems in their life, and they think this is okay. And they’re liable to think you as the auditor are being mean to ask them to confront any problems. They see no connection. All of a sudden they see a connection, which is a very rapid way, of course, of going about the situation.

Now look-a-here: If a person can’t confront any problems, they of course are not going to confront any problems that they’ve got. Ahh, and we have the clue to slow clearing. See, there’s the clue. I’m quite convinced of this now, because I’ve watched an awful lot of people getting Clear. And the percentage is rather slight and apparently those that get Clear rather easily are able, at the time they get Clear, to confront problems. They just happen to be able to confront problems; this is a fluke, you see?

Well, this is adjudicated by this: Profiles don’t change when present time problems exist. You can prove this. you can take a person with a present time problem; he says he’s got a present time problem in rudiments, you know? And you say, „All right. Well . . .“ See, attend to that. „And now, let’s see, have you got any ARC breaks with me? Oh, good, that’s good. All right. Got any withholds fro- ? All right, that’s fine. All right, now we’ll begin this process. When weren’t you successful while thinking you should be in Oshkosh? Yeah, all right. When weren’t you successful while thinking you were in Oshkosh?“

And you run this for twenty-five hours or something like this, or any fool process, or TR 10, or any effective process—it doesn’t matter what you run. Just neglect, every time you do the rudiments, to take up his present time problem. Just neglect it.

It helps if you know for sure the pc you’re using for this test has a screaming one. you know, he has a terrific present time problem, see, of some kind or another. Well, it helps enormously with this test if you know that’s the case. Then you neglect it in the rudiments. Audit him on anything you want to audit him on for twenty-five hours and get him tested again.

No change. No change of profile. No change anything. Got the idea? That’s the one, see, that can’t be bugged out.

Now, if you want to reduce a profile, keep doing bad auditing which is ARC breaking the pc all the time, ARC breaking the pc, and his graph will deteriorate. But the problem one—that’s healed, of course, just by good technical auditing. But the problem one—tsk!—that’s a hangfire.

Invariably, you see a case that after twenty-five hours has had no profile change whatsoever, you can say instantly this one thing, with great certainty, and always be found right; everybody’d think you’re a wizard or something. You say, „Well, preclear had a present time problem,“ you say wisely. „Bring the preclear in.“ you put him on the meter, you say to the preclear now, „All right, now,“ (you turn your sensitivity up here a bit) „do you have a present time problem?“ Bang! You say, „How long have you had this present time problem?“

„Oh, years!“ And he says, „Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yes, yes,“ you know?

You say very wisely to the auditor, „You see?“ It’s inevitable.

All right. If that happens in day-to-day routine auditing, let’s take it on the wider magnitude of people going to Clear. They must have a tremendous number of present time problems if they don’t get any more shift toward Clear than that, see, with heavy, powerful processes booting them along.

The wise thing to do about something like this, of course, is just handle all their present time problems. How do you handle all their present time problems? Routine 1A.

All right. Now, if you’ve handled all their present time problems—let’s get practical for a moment here—if you’ve handled all their present time problems with Routine 1A, you’ve handled all problems with Routine 1A, you straightened it all up: while running problems in Model Session, would you take up present time problems? You wouldn’t take up that rudiment to which the whole auditing session is devoted, because you’re going to run a hot problem process—you’re going to run a hot problem process—in the body of the session, so why run a weak one in the rudiments? See?

So you ask the fellow if he has a present time problem. He says, „Yes.“ It falls.

You say, „Good, what is it?“

And he tells you. And you say, „All right. Very good. Thank you,“ and go on to the next one. you wouldn’t run a thing.

Because, man, you’re going to slam straight into this present time problem situation, of course, in the body of the session. Right?

Now, you’ll find all kinds of hidden standards coming up. why should you have to labor so hard? Now, I’ll tell you another reason why we got Routine 1A, is „yous guys“ were having to work far, far, far, far, far too hard to find hidden standards. And you weren’t finding them well. In other words, a pc on SOP Goals Assessment had all sorts of hidden standards he wasn’t coming up with. And you were having to work too hard to get those hidden standards, and every one of those hidden standards is categorized under one heading: problems.

So, of course, the wise thing to do is to put them on a routine that gets all the problems out of the road and then your assessment should go off like a hot rocket. See, it isn’t going to cure the whole case, but it’s certainly going to get it there. Okay?

Do you see how this is? All right.

We are always refining in the direction of more effective auditing per unit time, see? All right, if it’s going to take you seventy-five hours to run a Goals Assessment, this is only going to be true, really, because the preclear has too many hidden standards. They’re difficulties of one kind or another. They are difficulties, difficulties, difficulties. In other words, the preclear categorizes these things as problems.

Now, they can’t confront problems. All right. If they’re taking a long time, they can’t confront problems easily. All right, if they can’t confront problems easily, how are you going to get the hidden standards?

In other words, this is a bug in assessment; a bug in SOP Goals Assessment is why you’ve got Routine 1A.

You go on asking this pc, for seventy-five hours, for goals. And you ask them for goals, and you ask them for goals, and you ask them for goals, and you ask them for goals, and they never tell you the hidden standards. Even though sometimes you ask for them, they don’t tell them to you. Why? They don’t know they got them. Well, why don’t they know they got them? Because they can’t confront a problem. If they can’t confront a problem, how can they say it to you?

It’s quite common to audit a preclear for twenty-five hours and then he finds out he has a screaming present time problem with his mother-in-law and he never knew it before. You’ve probably had that happen.

Well, now apply this same observation to Goals Assessment, see? In other words, you got a slow freight; there is a bug in goals assessing The pc is not confronting his problems. So you’re running a pc who has a legion of problems. These will keep coming up and the other test of it is this: In running SOP Goals, when you’ve found the terminal and when you’ve found the level, as much as three-quarters of every session gets taken up with present time problems.

Now that the data is coming in I can tell you some of these things, see? That’s fantastic! The number of present time problems these people suddenly come up with. Look, look, are we going to run goals or are we going to run present time problems?

Now, this has been the reason for slow freight in running SOP Goals and this is the reason for slow clearing, and I’ve now put several engram wranglers on it, and I’ve got all the reasons rounded up in the south pasture, and I tell you, I group them all up as just „problems, inability to confront.“

Now, „Recall a problem“ is the most elementary of these processes, but it has this difficulty: It anises the problems the case has. It anises problems, as-ises problems, anises problems, anises problems. That’s perfectly all right, although kind of miserable. That’s perfectly all right—I mean, you could go on doing that—but it’s sort of like Dianetics (I’ve had the observation, you see): you erased all the engrams in the bank.

Well, Scientologically, there is another approach, which is to improve the ability of the preclear to confront problems. This is why this—you’ve got an auditing command change; I wanted—you’ve got an auditing command change; I wanted to see you look at it in its raw state first. And I’ve now seen that the new series of six commands produces practically the same tone arm reaction as the first command, „Recall a problem.“ See, I get almost the same reaction there.

But you’ll get a shorter run, that’s the main thing And you won’t have the bug of the pc stuck on the first dynamic, stuck on the first dynamic, stuck on the first dynamic, stuck on the first dynamic, you see? Because this pc was— basically began to worry about problems because of another dynamic. See, his basic concern about problems was usually an other dynamic. He became concerned about somebody’s inability to confront problems and then Qed-and-Aed with it, tried to force the other person to confront problems and wound up valencing See, that’s the mechanisms back of this thing.

The mechanisms of clearing somebody up are actually not very complex. But it—only thing that is difficult about it is try to isolate which mechanism it is which is most in the road. Because you can overcome most anything else, you see?

So I think Routine 1A, if assiduously run before you do an assessment, will give you Clears rather easily. I’m sure of this. We have not done it, but I’m just showing you this.

And notice that reaction on problems. Have you noticed the pc getting any reaction on running problems this way? You have noticed some reaction, huh? Hm? Have you noticed any improvement on the pc today, however in running this? You haven’t noticed that?

Have you had any pc just set his heels and practically refuse to run any part of the thing? Did a pc look like he was going to? Well, all you were running into there was the irresponsibility for problems. Now you got a pc, of course, who wouldn’t blow Clear if he had this many problems, because you wouldn’t be able to clean up this many PT problems. The PT problems would keep coming up in the SOP Goals. See, it’s the time. Probably do it. you could undoubtedly do it on SOP Goals, but let’s look at the time factor, see?

All right, you got a long assessment, seventy-five hours. Why? Why you got such a long assessment? Well, the person can’t confront any of his problems, so therefore he can’t confront any of his goals, you see? By not confronting his problems, of course, he doesn’t know what goals he’s had to get out of these problems.

All right, let’s take in the actual run, the actual run; and this is true of report after report after report after report that I get back. Five hours auditing, two hours on rudiments; five hours auditing, three and a half hours on rudiments. You look over and say, „Rudiments! What the devil is happening here? Rudiments, rudiments—PT problem. Person had PT problems, person has PT problems, person has PT problems, that person has PT problems, PT problems. And it’s marvelous how fast these present time problems come up while we’re running SOP Goals.“

Yes, it is marvelous. It is so marvelous, that SOP Goals, in view of the fact that it doesn’t devote itself to running present time problems, naturally, you’re taking a weak process and you’re having to clear up all of the side panels of the case on the subject of problems as you go, and you’ve blown, now, another hundred percent of auditing, see? I mean, pardon me, you’ve blown the fifty percent. In other words, what you could do formerly in fifty hours with SOP Goals running you should be able to do in twenty-five hours. So that is quite a saving, isn’t it?

And all these improvements are mainly in the direction of saving time— saving auditing time and making it easier and giving him a faster win. Okay?

Now, I’d say a person who is having a bad reaction to running problems, I’m afraid their clearing time probably would have been up around two thousand hours. Why? Well, they’re not Clear because they’ve got problems. It’s hanging the fire, see, but they begin to recognize these problems as they’re being audited. And then the auditor has to take up these problems with a weak process, see, and it’s a dispersion all the time that’s coming on. But the case is hanging fire because it has problems. And it’s one of these cat-chasing-his-own-tail propositions, you see, and the cat just never gets anyplace. You ask Sambo; he’s done it up here a lot of times. He never gets anyplace.

Okay. Now, what questions do you have on this particular activity of Routine 1A? Yes.

Male voice: Can you mix this Routine 1A with running SOP Goals? In other words, when you run a level flat on SOP Goals, can you take the person and put him on Routine 1A?

Oh, I suppose you could. I suppose you could mix these routines. These routines all mix, by the way. About the only thing that doesn’t mix very easily is the CCHs. I wouldn’t run the CCHs while running levels.

Male voice: Mm.

That’s about the only thing I wouldn’t do in combining things here.

Male voice: Hm-hm.

I’d run Havingness and Confront, as far as that’s concerned, on Routine 1A, if I had to. I mean, it doesn’t matter much.

Your packages are quite neat and very applicable and you don’t have to do anything really much more than the package. But now you’d find out that it’d be unnecessary while running SOP Goals to devote any time to running problems, probably, if problem was totally flat to begin with. But then, at the same time, you might open up a completely new section of the bank. And the test of this—I can just give you this one off the bat; I just know this was the way it’d be—the test would be, is your pc suddenly developing present time problems?

See, you flattened Routine 1A, you’ve done an SOP Goals, you’ve run two or three, four levels of SOP Goals and all of a sudden—everything has just been going fine up to this time—and you suddenly ask, and the pc has a present time problem. Oh, I’d let that one go by, I’d handle it, see? And next day, you find your pc has a present time problem. „Oh,“ you’d say, „come off of it here,“ and I’d go back to Routine 1A, and then come back to running SOP Goals. I wouldn’t change the terminal or anything.

Male voice: Mm.

But I’d get their confront up on problems.

That’s a well-taken point, Bob, very well taken. You could do that. But I sure wouldn’t spend too much time in SOP Goals—the way they have been doing—I wouldn’t spend too much time fooling around with the pc’s tremendous present time problems. I’d do something much more effective than to run the standard routine, see?

I mean, it’s a chronic state. Oh, yeah, a pc will have a present time problem on Tuesday and then you don’t hear any more about present time problems. Well, that’s all right. But if he hit a present time problem on Tuesday—and he hadn’t had any before—and he’s got a present time problem Tuesday, and he’s got one Wednesday, and he’s got one Thursday, and he takes up most of Friday—well, oh no, you don’t want to go in for that sort of thing Clearing is very rapid. Shouldn’t get held up like this. So it’s faster to take up the exact thing which they are hanging on, which is problems. And they’re hanging on problems.

We have never really made a frontal assault on problems before. You’ll notice we’ve been working with problems for many years, as a factor, as one of the primary factors of auditing, or it wouldn’t be in the rudiments. But we have never really attempted a frontal assault to clean all this up on the pc before we audit him. Sort of like reducing a part of the rudiments and cleaning them all up before we go on auditing the pc. That’s kind of where 1A sits. Okay?

Audience: Hm-hm. Yes.

Yes, Robin.

Male voice: Wouldn’t a hidden standard be blown open by asking the Joburg question „What would hare to happen to prove that Scientology works?“

All right. Now, I didn’t quite get the question, Robin, now.

Male voice: Wouldn’t a hidden standard be blown open . . .

Oh, wouldn’t a hidden standard be blown open by asking the question „What . . .“

Male voice: „. . . would have to happen . . .“

. . . would have to happen for you to know that Scientology works?“ Yes. Yes. But you won’t—you’ve got a reality factor. Your E-Meter only registers what is real to the pc. And the pc might have a hidden standard that wouldn’t register. He’s got some other reality involved and it’s certainly a way-outback-of-Arcturus sort of a thing. All right, that’s fine. you will get that on the E-Meter. You will clear up the immediately-known hidden standards. And then we advance the case, and he’s got a new set of hidden standards.

As soon as his reality improves and his confront goes up, we are liable to find ourselves sitting with a new set of hidden standards. That’s why we’re tackling Routine 1A frontally, head-on. Okay?

Male voice: Mm, thank you.

All right.

Any other questions? Yes.

Female voice: I wondered about the order of magnitude of a problem. In SOP Goals, for instance, would they be different, not a broken cup, or something like that. Would it be a more—a bigger problem, something with more magnificence and . . . ?

Oh, I see. you wonder about the order of magnitude of problems, and while running SOP Goals, if they wouldn’t come up as bigger problems . . .

Female voice: Yes . . .

. . . the magnitude.

Female voice: . . . as more weighty problems.

Oh, yeah, yeah. More fundamental . . .

Female voice: Yes.

. . . more fundamental problems. That’s true. And they will come up that way.

Female voice: Yes.

Now, if you have, however, a person geared in to being able to observe or confront problems very well under 1A, your magnitude of problem will be even greater when it does come up. It has to be greater for the person to do so, because he already can confront the lesser ones, you see?

Female voice: Uh-huh.

So that’s why Bob’s point is very good. When this starts to happen and these problems just come in, in staggering magnitude, and so forth, you might have to return to Routine 1A for a little while and get this leveled out as a new activity. Yes, they are. They’re much more magnitudinous. What will register as a present time problem—this is actually a clue to cases, you know; it’s a very important point. What registers as a present time problem on three different people is a total index of case level.

A hair ribbon has been dropped, see? And person A just absolutely has a fit, man. This is a fit. I mean, they all but get down and bite the asphalt, you know? It’s just the most God-awful thing that has ever happened, see?

And person B will go tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.

And person C, on exactly the same problem of a dropped hair ribbon, would simply pick it up and shove it back in the kid’s hair, see, and doesn’t even think that anything horrible has occurred.

I imagine you’ve had nurses or mothers or nannies, or something like that, that had different values for different problems. If there’s anything drives a kid mad, you know, it is somebody—the order of magnitude of problems. And it makes your parents sometimes completely incomprehensible, because, their order of magni- not yours, but their order of magnitude of problems was out, definitely was out. And you just couldn’t see what the hell the problem was, because it didn’t look like any problem to you, see? And my heavens, it’s going on and on and on, far into the night, and into the next day, and so forth, and . . .

Order of magnitude of problems. It is that factor which caused me to shift it over to the broad brackets on the thing.

But you can see some people practically faint. And I know I, one time— very dear friend of mine, an old man when I was a kid; he was a dear friend of mine. He was going along all right. He was a very sunny, cheerful sort of fellow. And I got back to this part of the world and dropped in on him one day and good heavens, he was a shattered wreck—an absolute wreck! He was a gone dog And actually, within a few years, had gradually gone downhill to a point where he was totally paralyzed and a couple of years after that died; and it was all because of one problem.

He had been working in a bank and he was a shareholder in the bank, but he also had a job in the bank. And when Frankie the Limper took over, he made sure that all the little banks went crash, see? And all the banks went boom! see? And so he gave it all to the big banks because he thought things ought to be in chains or something. That’s right. This is the actual history of it, although I’m speaking about it rather sarcastically. And this poor guy watched one of these chain banks come in and pull the routine modus operandi.

And because there was a bank moratorium, then the bank wasn’t permitted, you see, to pay out any of the accounts. If you had a checking account or a savings account, that was seized. But if you had a mortgage and the bank had a mortgage on you, you had to pay it—every penny of the mortgage, see? They got all the cash. It was the biggest raid known in financial history. I don’t know, in a few decades somebody will wake up to the fact of what that was all about—“the great friend of the people.“ But it was just that. They then were given the opportunity to seize all the cash in the bank, and then make everybody make good their paper too.

Well, of course, they pronounced all the little banks insolvent by government order and then they, of course, were grabbed by all the bank chains. So little guys such as this, with a little job and some shares in the bank, and so forth, were just wiped out. Bang!

But this appeared to be a problem of such gross magnitude to him that it pract it did! It killed him! It killed him. And I remember definitely—(Used to call him Uncle Jimmy.) I looked at him and I said, „But, Uncle Jimmy,“ I said, „you’re still a young man. I mean, all you’ve got to do is—well, I don’t care what: start another bank or get a job or start a feed business, or something. But this doesn’t seem to be very great to me.“

„Oh,“ he says, „Ronald,“ he said, „they just wiped us out. They just stole everything from us. They just ruined everybody,“ and he just went on about it, and so on and on and on. And that’s all he would talk about. That’s all he could talk about. That’s all he could think about, and so forth. And he just went down, down, down, down, down; overnight, practically thirty years was put on the man’s age, you see?

Now, that was a problem he couldn’t confront, which was terrific thievery on the part of a government. Well, what else could he expect? It’s a government. Of course, at that time of life that I was in there, and my general modus operandi, and the way I look at things anyway, this didn’t have any agreement at all. I mean, I remember it as one of the wildest points of disagreement I think I ever had on the whole track. I just couldn’t get the man’s point. I just couldn’t get his point, that this was a problem of such magnitude that it would just stop all life right there in its tracks, period. And that’s what it did.

Now, his ability to confront problems was poor to begin with, don’t you see? And he got one from an unexpected quarter, which gave him the betrayed help, or something of the sort, you see?

He probably was a member of the American Legion, and all of this kind of thing; was up there singing „The star-spangled Banner“ with everybody. And he always expected, you know, the whole works to be all good, you know, and kind and sweet and patriotic, and he never realized that politicians were crooked. That’s the basic problem that he was into.

So, not having looked at any part of this, you see, it came as a tremendous shock to him. It was just borne home with such velocity that it’d have been kinder to have shot the man with a bullet, you see?

All right. Now you see fellows failing because of business, failing because of nervous breakdowns. These are comprehensible, but there’s one that you don’t find as comprehensible as that, even. you will actually see somebody dibbling with some pieces of paper, or something of the sort, and he will announce to you that he has just hit the end of track, man. This is it, you know?

And you will just look in vain to find out how this is the end of track, you know? And you’ll have—there are fifteen ways of handling this thing. There are fifteen ways of resolving it. There are dozens of ways of arising it. I’ve seen fellows, for instance, getting just in deeper and deeper and deeper in some criminal proceeding, you know, that they’d become involved in. And you’d tell them, „Well, why don’t you go tell the man?“ you see? When you’re auditing people, you run into all kinds of weird things, as you only know too well.

„Well,“ 1 said, „why don’t you go tell the man that you took ten thousand dollars, and why don’t you take what’s left of the ten thousand dollars and give it to him and straighten it up and say, ‘Well, go ahead. Put me in jail,’ or something like that, and spend your six months, or something like that, or get off whole-hog.“

„Oh, no!“ you see? „Nothing! Oh, no!“ You know, they, „Oh, God, no!“ you know? Well, all right, that’s comprehensible. But how about something like this: The fellow has to quit his job. He just has to quit his job because the pots and pans aren’t the right size. Oh, brother, you look at this, you know, and you say, „What is going on here?“

Or you look at some fellow and he’s got a perfectly good berth on a ship, and he says, well, he’ll have to leave her at the end of the cruise, and he . . .

You say, „Why?“

„Well, just have to, you know?“

„Well, why?“

„Well, I don’t think the mate likes me.“

„You don’t think the mate likes you. How do you know the mate doesn’t like you?“

„Well, I’ve never—I—really, I just know.“

„Well, has the mate ever said anything to you?“

„Have you ever done your work all right?“ or so on.

„Oh, yes.“

„Well, what is the matter? Basically, what’s the matter here?“

„Well, I just don’t think the mate likes me and I’ll have to leave the ship at the end of the cruise.“

And you say, „Now look. why don’t you speak to the man? Why don’t you straighten it out with him, and so forth?“

And he says, „I will have to leave the ship at the end of the cruise, because I don’t think the mate likes me.“

And you say, „Well now, why don’t you take this up with the captain? Why don’t you speak to the captain about this sort of thing and get this thing straightened out, or talk to the owners, or something like . . .“

„No. At the end of the cruise I will have to leave the ship.“

You begin to believe after a while that there must be something else here, that that couldn’t possibly be the problem he’s stuck on—that’s the suspicion that you get—and you yourself are guilty of a no-confront. No. That’s the problem he’s stuck on. That’s it. There isn’t anything more than that. Only this person’s ability to confront a problem is so tiny, and the problem is so microscopic that he can’t confront, or the problem is so microscopic that he can confront—you see, these two things meet down toward the bottom; this is maybe the only problem in the world that he could confront, is this one, and so he’s got a problem, you see?

You won’t be able to fathom it. you say, „What the devil is going on here?“ Life becomes very baffling along about this point. But if you remember that the ability to confront a problem is a gradient case index. . . And you’ll see somebody sitting in the midst of ruin, disaster, sudden death and so forth; the columns of the house falling, and the children’s bodies flung about, you know, or something like this, you know, something—maybe not so dramatic, maybe it’s more just the magazines are flung about and the beds are unmade, you see, and there hasn’t been a fire in the furnace for three weeks, and you know, life has just sort of gone to pieces, man. And you see this person just sitting there worrying like mad because the lady next door has bought a new hat.

Well, that’s the level of problem that that person can confront. And these other things don’t exist, and they are not problems. They’re not only not problems, they aren’t there. And it’s just a total vanishment of everything. And you say, „My, that certain—certainly that person sure can confront problems.“ No, they can’t. How can you confront something you don’t even know about?

And the magazines flung around the floor, and the dead fire in the furnace, and the cold house, and the dirty sheets of the unmade beds, and everything else, and these things don’t exist. And then, here’s what’s odd: Somebody can walk up to her and say, „Look, why don’t you straighten this all out?“ and the person thinks the person who just said that is crazy. That’s the oddity about this sort of thing. They go around with a very interesting opinion of that other person’s sanity.

They think they should do something about it, or they think that the person should look at these things.

And you press it a little bit further and they will give you the most interestingly involved explanations of how it is not possible to look at any of these things. And even if you did look at these things, you would find out they didn’t exist anyway. And if you did find out that they existed, there couldn’t be anything you could do about it, so how could you even say that they existed? It would be some wild rationale of that character. And you’re hitting a person right where he lives when you’re getting this one.

You could probably do an intelligence test and not only that but a sanity test and ability test. you could probably just make a gradient list of problems in various spheres, categories and dynamics, you see—could divide it all up here so you got problems per dynamics, and then you got problems per zones of action in life, and then you got problems in gradient order of magnitude. And you just ask him the silly question, which would be silly perhaps to you. You just ask him one question; that is, „In each one of these groups, check the problem.“ There’ll only be one or two problems in each one of these groups for him, although every one of them is a problem. He’ll only be able to conceive as certain of these problems as being that. And where he checks that level, there he lives, which is an interesting order of magnitude.

Okay. Well, enough of all this; kept you overtime again. Hope you make a lot of success on this. Probably won’t give you a talk tomorrow. One last word: Is there anything you feel you should know in running your pc right this minute that you have not asked, or you have come up against, or something has occurred about?

You feel you got it taped? Feel you got it taped?

All right. Confront it.

Thank you very much.