Lecture: Reviewing Students’ Ability to Process (1953)

I recommend to you a story called “One Was Stubborn,” I wrote one time many, many, many years ago, 1939, in a society where everybody had every­thing done for them. This was intensely unpopular, this story. It was intensely unpopular with the editor. He really writhed over it, but he had a hole in the magazine created by a shortage, by namely me, and so he bought it and he published it.

And this — this story, this story, of course, is the kid of all science fiction. Naturally, everything is dreamed up in the society, so everything is done for everybody and so that there’s nothing but barriers all over the place till they’re so sick of barriers, they decide they don’t exist anymore.

And there’s just one fellow who has decided in the society that there was some solidity underneath it all and because he won’t believe it’s all gone, it has a tendency to hang around. And they go gunning for him. They try to find this fellow that still insists there is a MEST universe.

That’s what would happen eventually; everybody — that’s what happened to Arslycus. We can run it in engrams; it sounds very, very interesting in numbers of ways. But what happened to it was that everybody got so damned sick of these barriers, they finally did something about it and they had none left. There went an entire city and civilization which was built not even on a planet. It was just sitting in thin space.

Well now, when we look at a barrier, remember that running your pc (it’s a hell of a thing for me to say, I know) but running a pc consistently and continually into engrams is telling him all the time, “There is a barrier there called an engram.”

Well, of course, the fact of the matter is, is there is a barrier there called an engram. But if you ran him into nothing but engrams and never brought him into present time, he’d get pretty solid because that’s the stuff out of which barriers are made. You see? So, our fight in all processing is to least validate barriers and most validate choices of barriers.

Because you’re going to get in processing, just as you did one day here: ran somebody down to a point where he knew he was a concept, and of course, he was in contest with space and he didn’t go all the way through on the process but he had become, to a point, where he didn’t have any barriers.

Do you know that you can run somebody on love and affection to a point where he’s just suffering to have some hate; if he could just have a little hate! What’s he want with hate? Hate makes barriers. It is out of that emotion that barriers are made.

And so, you get hating in space opera when there are no barriers and everything is so free and so loose, in all directions, boy, can those guys hate — ­whee! “Affection, who wants anything to do with affection. Oh, no! No affection! Please!” Why? It melts everything. That’s what happens to it. I mean actually, energy-wise, melts any barrier that’s been set up. ¹

Notes