Lecture: Child Scientology (1957)

Where do you go from here? Well, we know in Scientology where you go from here. There’s no use kidding ourselves and saying, “Well, the public doesn’t like us to talk about things like that.” We know where you go from here. You go and pick up another baby and you’re on your way. Well, if that’s the case, we have to take up where you’ve been.

Now, an E-meter is a very interesting thing and an E-meter tells us… We still have them around, by the way. And every once in a while, we use an electropsychometer, we use one to track things down. And you can take one of these E-meters, or you could take the biggest and most beautiful police lie-detector you ever laid your eyes on, and get exactly the same results, because that’s all an E-meter is, it’s a more accurate police lie-detector. You take either of these instruments and you could trace somebody back earlier than this life. Now, I’m not, I’m not telling you, now, a bunch of Eastern superstition, I’m telling you something that’s probably much better founded than MV squared. I mean, this is demonstrable, this is very easily demonstrable – demonstrable with an E-meter, demonstrable in other ways. And the individual, who starts to get well in processing, falls through, he falls out of this life into earlier lives and starts knocking stuff out of them. And he finds it’s much more aberrative to become…

Well, let’s say he is having trouble with his present wife, and his last wife fed him cyanide.

Now, you’re going to get this fellow over his worries about his present wife, and leave the fact that he’s been killed by a wife just utterly neglected? Hah! How silly. In other words, he’s worried about women because they’ve knocked him off. So, the auditor could sit there and saw away on little pieces and chips of a log, you know, and chip at it with a teaspoon. And he could do some interesting things, he could wipe out all the times his wife has been nasty to him, he could wipe out all the times his mother has kicked him down the stairs, and he, the auditor could erase and deal with numerous other incidents dealing with women in the current lifetime. And the mystery of it would be that, at the end of the time, the fellow wouldn’t feel quite as bad about his wife, but women wouldn’t be solved. Alright. We, we erase this getting knocked off with cyanide in the last life and, all of a sudden, why, the fellow’ll say, “Well, to handle women, I’ll just buy up all the cyanide in the world and … “In other words, being killed was a much more serious experience than having a teacup slammed in front of him angrily.

Do you see that?

So, when we deal with the magnitude of human aberration, we’re dealing with the drama of life and death which has happened many, many times. Now, an E-meter demonstrates this, processing demonstrates this. And when all of this Bridey Murphy came out, I imagine a few of you wondered why we didn’t plunge in. Well, as a matter of fact, we plunged out, at once. The London Express people were quite upset with us because we told them, “Can it, can it. Lay off of it, lay off of it. Skip it.” They came forward to us with a program whereby they were going to offer reward for any other people who had remembered former existences. We said, “Can it!” And they said, “Why? Why? I mean, gee whiz, we think this is a good idea!” We said, “Look, it isn’t how to find people who have lived before. That isn’t the trick. It’s to get them OUT of having lived before that’s the trick.” And sure enough, in three days they cancelled their entire program – on our advice, originally, but they had found out that they were flooded by people who remembered having lived before, and they were plunging all over the track and getting stuck into things and so forth, and having a wonderful time. And the London Express came off of this whole program immediately.

The trick is not getting people into past lives – it’s getting them out of them, that’s the trick. And you start to run Then and Now Solids today on the most innocuous, skeptical person that you ever saw at all, and you’ve gotten him up with CCH to a point where he could run it, and the next thing you know, why, he’s running a life here and a life there. And he sees a little girl running, he sees a little girl running around, and he says, in auditing, “What’s all that? Little girl running around… My god, no wonder, no wonder I’m having trouble with sex, I was a little girl in my last life.” See? I mean, you get, you get all sorts of things. You worry about homosexuality. I don’t know how there could be anything else, the way you get scrambled on sexes on the track. It’s quite remarkable that the sexes stay straight, I mean, I think that’s the remarkable thing.

Now, you take Creative Processing. Creative Processing works. We have somebody mock up – create the mental image picture of – women or men or cycles of action, something like this. Those pictures are not usually hitting against this lifetime. They are actually dealing with earlier existences. I’m sorry we have to face up to this, I’m sorry we have to be brave and strong and say that’s it. Of course, it’s a good thing that, that something has forced us out into the open on this, because any inquiring mind can pick up an E-meter, do some auditing and so forth, and run into this phenomena.

The phenomena is not just there to be run into, it is inescapably present. We have been aware of this phenomena, by the way, since middle 1950.

Well, we never had any real reason to go outside the field of auditing and say anything about it until children, as a subject, came along. And now it becomes vital that we say something about it. Why? Look, this little child has just gone through the experience of death and his tiny, his havingness is not up to the larger body that he just lost, he is insecure, he is entirely disoriented, he has lost all of his possessions, he’s lost all of his friends, and he’s lost his memory. And yet, he’s still aware of all of these things having been, and he picks up this body and he tries to get oriented somehow. Now, listen, if you had somebody with that much loss on his immediate backtrack, you would find him in an “only one” state, wouldn’t you? You would find him pared down to nothing, wouldn’t you? He would really be STRICKEN. That’s a child. All you have to know about children is cases. And if you don’t stop compartmenting children out as a special category, which is the standard for the human being, or if you don’t stop just compartmenting them out, you’ll continue to have trouble trying to instruct them, trying to do something with them and so forth. They’re in AWFUL condition. It’s a wonder they’re not psycho, but they’re not. They’re the ones that didn’t go psycho, they went and picked up another body. You got that? So, they actually represent the tougher strata of thetans. They’re still in there, willing to pitch.

But, boy! What kind of a state is he in? He’s terribly easily exhausted, his havingness is shot. You can’t give him, you can’t give him a Buick roadster. All you can give him, on a gradient scale, is a little tiny plastic car, that long. He can have that, he lost his Buick roadster. Now, do you see the function and this fixation on toys? They build back a gradient scale of havingness, that’s all.

Now the kid’s got to wait for eighteen, twenty years, everybody tells him, until he can have a body that he can do something with. They tell him also that he won’t be able to work until he’s got gray hair. They tell him he’s got to remain totally dependent. They tell him he doesn’t have any role in the society. Look-a-here, he’s just been kicked out by death, and now somebody’s going to make him wait all these years to be enfranchised again or have any duties. You know that a little kid is tremendous. He will actually try to work to the best of his ability. Most parents are too impatient with children to just let them work, because the children mess things up and so forth. So, the average child, by the time he’s five, six years old, is somewhat disabused of the idea of working. That’s how you’d really ruin a society.

You’ve got to spend time… Little girl comes in, she’s about 3-4 years old, and you’re mopping the floor, something like that, and the little girl takes a sloppy rag and bangs it into the wallpaper and so forth. Aw, give her a break, give her a break, show her how to wring it out and guide her hand a little bit on the floor and let her mop the floor, too. She comes up smiling. “What do you know, you mean I could really maybe be some use someday!” Don’t just say, “Get out of here now, you’re messing things up,” and all that sort of thing.

Children are people. Don’t forget it, because the whole problem becomes unworkable the moment you assume anything else. Children are people. Alright.¹

Notes