Lecture: The Anatomy of The Overt Act Part II (1952)

Now, an auditor who is sitting under a parental set of control centers –   teachers, parents, grandparents, law-enforcement agencies, anything and everything you want, have put control centers over this individual one way or the other. He is actually working under a set of alien control centers. How can he be himself? He can’t be.

Here he is, then; actually, his own limbs are working under the manipulation of others. And where is his? And why doesn’t his control center merely banish all this other stuff, with ease? Well, I will tell you: his is sitting back there five hundred or five thousand years on the death of his brother. Grim. You run out the service facsimile, the rest of this stuff resolves, because nobody can just esoterically shift control over you.

Any time you tried to train a dog, you concentrated on that dog, didn’t you? You took your own control center and you put it over Fido and you said, “There you are, Fido. Sit up, beg, bark, roll over, come here, go there, drop this, pick up that.” Of course, if your Fido is rather disobedient you are going to be unhappy with Fido. Fido is going to start making you nervous.  Why? Because his presence tells you very adequately that you are not in control of the physical universe because you are not controlling his body, and you have elected to control his body by putting a control center over him. So the second that you elected to control his body, you also elected to lose if he was a disobedient dog. And then one day Fido disappears, and there is your control center, hanging over Fido, and he is gone. What is grief? Is it the loss of Fido or loss of your control center? Well, it’s a little bit of each.¹

Notes