Lecture: Laughter in Processing (1954)

So if the sanity of your preclear could be said to depend upon any self determinism, could be said to depend upon the ratio of his own dangerousness compared to the dangerousness of his environment. When the environment is total danger, and an individual is no danger, you have somebody who is in very bad shape indeed. A badness of shape which is impossible to conceive, even to an auditor. Simply because it’s never totally existed. It’s an absolute.

And let’s get the other extreme – an individual who is totally dangerous to his environment and where nothing in his environment is dangerous to him. Also a totality which an auditor would find very difficult indeed to see. In the first place he would go out of the band of dangerousness before he would achieve that level. It would go on a 50-50 basis. He’s just as dangerous to the environment as the environment is to him and then he would go up to being able to reject the environment at will. And so we would have him passing out of the band of dangerousness. Just like that – he’d go right on out of it. You see that?

All right. This ratio of dangerousness is an interesting principle. It was first written up in Excalibur in 1938 and the rule which was written up and which underlies this observation is: a man’s ability is dependent upon his belief in his dangerousness to his environment.¹

Notes