Lecture: Control (January 14, 1956)

Look, there’s a big difference between bringing a person to exercise power of choice, and quite another thing — quite another thing — that you “cannot do anything else.” If you cannot do anything else but let somebody exercise his power of choice, do you know that only his bank exercises a power of choice in that session? He never does. The best thing he can duplicate is you. And if you give that body good control, he can duplicate you as part of the communication. The next thing you know, he can control the body. So good control on the part of the auditor is pant and parcel to a recovery on the part of the pc. And when good control on the part of the auditor is missing, then there is nothing for the pc to duplicate in terms of running and handling his body, and so he gets no place.

If control will lead into beingness (which it does), then his road to beingness is an increasing ability to control a body. If you operate with good control, you are not crushing his self- determinism! Almost any preclear you get hold of is so doggone lost he hasn’t ever heard of any for the last eight billion years. “Self-determinism? What’s that?”
Bank determinism!

Determinism to him is the total composite of all the bad habits, good habits, social responses, punishments, teachings that he has… And this composite, in its reaction on a machine basis, is his self-determinism. And it’s no good; it isn’t worth having around. You might as well wheel it off to the junk heap, because it’ll only bust down when you need it.

Now, you’ve got something else — you’ve got something else here that’s much more valuable. You have a person, a being, a thetan. And you start controlling that body, wham! wham! wham! wham! he says, “What do you know!”

Now, if you controlled him to a point where, and in a manner which, he was then powerless to control himself; if he was given the feeling that he himself was being overwhelmed and that your target was the overwhelming of him, you would only have hypnotism.

But if he understands rather clearly that your exercising of his body is an invitation for him to exert a power of choice and to handle it as well, he climbs upstairs by your ability to control himself. And if that block is missing in the communication ladder, then he hasn’t any stairs to climb. And you wonder why the technique doesn’t work. Well, the technique can’t work.

You can mold him in another image. You know enough about the mind to take it like putty and push it in to a new shape. You can do that; you can run an engram and key another one in. In other words, he’s sitting in engram A, you can run engram A out and shove him into engram B and let him follow its stimulus-response for a while.
Get the idea? I mean, you can do this.

You can be terribly selective. I can take a preclear and kick him back down the track into space opera, make him fight it, resist it and tell me how bad it all was, pat him on the head and have him joining the police force in a couple of days, just so he can wear one of those blue uniforms again. Have you got the idea? Well, this isn’t inviting anybody’s determinism on anything; it’s simply handling a piece of MEST! And all they’ve done on the track from beginning to end is handle people as though they were MEST, and it’s about time it stopped!

Well, how do you stop it? You do good control, which is knowing starting, changing and stopping of the preclear — and that’s good control! And you put that in there as a step. Then he can duplicate that step, and the next thing you know — first using your control pattern — he then finds out that he can control it himself; then he doesn’t need your control pattern. But if he hasn’t got an example of good, solid control, then he has nothing and he has received nothing from the auditor.

As I said, I’m leveling with you. This is an ACC. We can tell you all sorts of interesting ways to produce a tremendous number of effects. I could give you some formulas that would be so complex on the subject of control and how it controlled and to what you appealed and which you did when and where, that you would feel vastly edified.

And you would wonder why in the name of common sense your preclears didn’t respond really well: Their habit patterns changed, and you got a little shift on their APAs. Their IQ had a tendency to shift a little bit. But actually, for some reason or other…

We could set ourselves up as a black-cowled priesthood. The only reason we would do that is because we were fresh out of total game; we were in a position where we hated everybody, cared nothing for anything, totally out of communication in all directions. Yes, we could set up as a black-cowled priesthood with a tremendous number of mysteries, and boy, could we deal off the bottom of the mental deck!

We can brainwash a man in twenty seconds. What more do you want? That’s enough technique to conquer the world.¹

Notes