Lecture: The Free Being (1963)

But beware of a planet in which there is as much progress as you find this particular planet. This planet has gone through the phase of the prop aircraft in something like twenty – five or thirty years, see. It’s gone all the way through the era of locomotives until they are now in a terrible decline. Various forces are at work on this particular planet which are unusual, in the extreme. They are very unusual and that makes this planet very restive.

One of the reasons for this – and I won’t say it’s the only reason for this, but the only reason I can lay my hands on at the moment – is this planet is being used as a dumping ground. If – you’ll find this Sun 12 is very distant. It’s way out on the rim of a galaxy. And it’s very handy to other galaxies, and it’s very handy to the center of this galaxy. Nothing against anyone’s character and it’s nothing really that anybody did; he just happened to get picked up in that scoop that day and that was it. And it’s been used as a dumping ground – a rather consistent, continual dumping ground – and it’s being used as a dumping ground right up to this minute.

Now, this of course gives you a very heterogeneous type of society; you have enormous elements of one kind or another – all of them running relatively uncontrolled. There is no master hand guiding all this, but everybody feels that there must be a master hand guiding all this because there’s so much trouble. No. When a master hand is guiding things, there isn’t any trouble; things are calm. It’s only when the master hand doesn’t guide things that there is trouble.

And, for instance, a society normally has some thetan around someplace, and he’s kicking some mock – ups together one way or the other, and he’s kind of figuring on things, and he’s playing a game one way or the other, and it keeps going for a long time. And he gives it some indifferent attention and it never changes; he doesn’t see any reason to change it particularly.

Some other thetan comes along and he says, “Well, we’ll have a fight.” So he makes up some mock – ups and he makes up some diseases to feed to the mock – ups that the thetan has already mocked up, and so on. And they get these two in collision one way or the other, and they have some wars and battles and so forth. It’s rather mildly interesting and they don’t pay too much attention to it. Eventually, they both go off and forget about it, and the whole thing goes to pieces.

That’s the normal, crudest look. You could say they’re very dedicated, earnest, severe looks, but I am afraid the attitude has been quite comparable to a child’s making up a little play town – attitude quite similar to that: meat bodies and mock – ups. Well, when you take bodies which have been mocked up and thetans who have been indoctrinated in very definite lines – to fight, to do this, to have certain types of societies; to do this, to do that, to do the other thing – and then they get scooped up from this galaxy and that system and this star and here and there and the other place and are dumped in on one system as unwanted merchandise, you have these tremendous impulses which are at work, one against another. And it works up a lot of heat of friction. You have such a society here at this particular time.

This society belongs nominally to the Espinol United Stars. This is Sun 12, and it is one little tiny pinpoint. Their whole title is Espinol United Stars, pardon me, Espinol United Moons, Planets and Asteroids, this part of the Universe is ours, Hup!

But this, yeah, “This quarter of the Universe is ours,” it translates better. “This quarter of the Universe is ours.” And it’s so much quarter of the universe, and this is so lost in the middle of it that there’s been no command post occupied for this system now since 1150 A.D., at the time when a group on Mars was finally abolished and vanished, and so forth, and nobody took any interest in this system. This system has been running wild since that time.

You notice at that time we had a sudden resurgence in (quote) “science,” we had a sudden resurgence in this, that or the other thing. It became an uncontrolled civilization. And since that time has been used (and was used before this, of course) consistently as a dumping ground because nobody pays any attention to it. You don’t have scout ships coming out to meet your transport that is dumping ice cubes in the Pacific Ocean, you see. There – it’s a very handy place – it’s like the city garbage dump with no cop to tell you, you can’t dump there, see? And there’s nobody alert, there’s nobody doing anything on this planet to debar this sort of thing. And it’s quite interesting that you have represented here samples of many societies in many times and places and impulses which are quite fantastic.

Probably the most basic impulse on the planet is simply the basic impulse of thetans, who have been reduced to more or less a meat – body level, which is total cooperation – total cooperation with one another. Total, as you see in the communist thing, as you see in democracy. “We are all equal,” you see. “We are all equal: there must be no personalities of any kind, the cult of the personality must be banished, what we really are is equal.” And they’ve sort of come back to this because that is a common denominator of their indoctrination. They are indoctrinated to the idea that they have teammates, and from this, you see, you get this other equality factor. You might not agree with that particularly, but I’m just giving you some kind of a sketch here of things as they are.