Lecture: Universes (1) (1954)

All right. And yet where are we today in the field of reason? – you might say the healing of reason. Where would you go to in the society? Let’s take conditions as they existed in 1945. Where would John Doe have gone in the society to have had something happen to his reason to better it? Let’s say he’d been through a long and arduous war.

Let’s say he’d been many – two years, maybe, a prisoner of the enemy. He’d been starved; he was upset. He found out that every time he heard something drop in the middle of the night, or he heard an automobile horn at some far distance, he would be shattered, he’d lie there and shake. He’d find out that halfway through the night he might awaken in a terribly nervous state, sweating, be unable to do anything but walk around the block several times, something like this and so on. And having to… that would be all right if he didn’t have anything else to do but sort of look at these symptoms. But he had to go on living too.

Now, what would that man do? Who would he turn to in the society? Who would he turn to? Would he turn to the medical doctor? The medical doctor, turned to, would say, “Well, I don’t know. These B1 shots that we’re giving you are not too bad, you…”

The fellow say, “Yes, I feel fine for an hour,” he says, “but what about the rest of the twenty-three hours?”

“Well, have you ever been to church?” I’m not being funny now. This was the reply of medical doctors in the services and outside the services to service men.

Hm! This is funny isn’t it? That man’s asking what can we do about this. Therefore, he must know inherently that the condition is something that can have something done for it. Just by the fact that he would seek help tells you that he is postulating that there is a remedy. And where would he go for this remedy? I say, the medical doctor – “B1. Go to church. Why don’t you go see somebody or other?”

The psychologists, the clinical psychologists, who were on duty with the service or outside the service when approached were only evasive, very evasive. They were men full of great security which they never produced. They would say to the individual, “Well… well, if we work for several years at this we probably can do…” This is psychoanalysts, also. “If we work at this for a year I’ll tell you whether or not you can do something about it.”

The serviceman would say, ‘All right. We’ll work at it for a year.” He’s willing.

Well, all right. Now… now we spend the first hour with the psychoanalyst or clinical psychologist – we’re trying to find out where he’s going to get the money to pay for four one-hour periods per week at fifteen to twenty-five dollars a period. That’s sixty dollars a week minimum, to go on for a year just to discover if something can be done for him. Sixty a week? Well, I tell you, a fellow in that condition can’t earn sixty a week. He’s doing darn well if he can earn thirty.

You say the government will do something for these boys. Ha-ha! The government didn’t do anything for them. The government couldn’t and told them it couldn’t. Well, in the society or in the service, they received a dead-end answer from psychology. In the field of analysis many doctors had taken up what they called narcosynthesis. If you knock them out deep enough and make them relive an experience, why, sometime something happens. They neglect to tell you that 85 or 90 percent of the time they drive a guy completely off his rockers with narcosynthesis.

One doctor told me… had the nerve to tell me in a meeting one time, “You’ve said that something occurs which is not for the best in the field of narcosynthesis. Well, let me inform you that I’ve now been using it on servicemen for two years, and I have yet to know the derogatory or bad result.”

And I said, “Why, doctor, you need glasses.” And his colleagues laughed a little bit. And I said, “Where are your clinical records? I’ll be down tomorrow to see them,” as though I were a police force or something.

“Oh, well,” he said, “these … uh, hmm.” he said, “these have all been shipped back to the government.”

I said, “Well, I’m sure we can get them back again. If you’ve never had a derogatory comment on the subject of narcosynthesis, I think that maybe we ought to review your cases or something.”

“Oh, they’re dispersed all over the place.”

“Oh, you mean there’s no way to check back against your word… we have to take your word that there’s no harm in narcosynthesis. You don’t have a single clinical record, then, that backs this up.”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“Why don’t you sit down and we’ll get on with the lecture.”

Naturally the fellow had known it time and time again but he said “Here’s a gimmick, here’s some way I can probe into the mind somehow or another and dramatize that attempted abortion which I’ve been carrying around all these years, and nobody’s going to take this dramatization away from me.”

But it didn’t do anything for the serviceman. What would you have done as a serviceman in 1945 in this society to receive any relief for nervousness, anxiety or anything of the sort? The answer is nothing. There was no profession in 1945 which produced any relief or any betterment in the field of psychosomatic illness, nervousness or the human mind.

Now, that’s an awfully flat, blunt statement, and I am not really given to making statements that can’t be backed up. That’s the truth. There was none in 1945. It’s 1954 now. We’ve just reversed those numbers, and there is one, and that’s the Scientologist. You can go to a Scientologist.

And so if you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, the Scientologist can do something about it. He doesn’t have to work with this character for 189 hours to do something about a symptom or a manifestation like that. This is a big broad symptom.

The fellow says, I’ve got. .. my legs get so nervous, I get so tense, I can’t see what I’m doing, I’m just about to go mad.” The Scientologist has techniques which reduce this, almost immediately.

Interesting, isn’t it? It looks like something must have happened here, then, in the last twenty-five years. There was nothing in 1945; there is something in 1954. Well, that’s the difference. Let’s look at the facts of the case, and let’s not try to fight through, anymore, a bunch of fog and haze that is thrown up in front of people. What are the facts of the case? And the facts of the case are there was nobody functioning in the society to bring about surcease from sorrow. Nobody.

A lot of people were talking about it and getting paid for it, but they weren’t doing it. And now in Scientology we have people who are doing it.

Now, this investigation covered the whole field of the mind. It started out, actually, not in the field of nuclear physics, but started out, really, in the field of Freudian analysis. I was fortunate enough to be trained to some degree by Commander Thompson, who had himself studied with Sigmund Freud. And I was very young while this was going on. The first time I ran into Freudian analysis I was twelve years old. It’s very amusing. But in banging around the world, I never had much time to go to school. I never went to high school. I took New York regents examinations and went immediately into engineering school in college.

There were many years in there when most boys are pinned down in classrooms when I wasn’t. Well, I got quite interested when I was twelve, mostly because I was interested in Commander Thompson. And the years went along and I knew Thompson again here and there, and I read books that he sent me and so forth.

But in the interim I was in India, and I was struck with a horrible fact. India has all the data and none of the energy. The West has all the energy and none of the data. Freud was a… being sort of in the Oriental Europe, you might say, was more or less at a crossroads where the superstitions of the East would mingle with the force and efficiency of the West. He for the first time really decided to do something about this if he could, and that is what is remarkable about Freud. The decision to do something about it, and the teaching that something could be done about it was not introduced by Scientology, not by a long way. It was introduced by Sigmund Freud. And if he only introduced that fact, no matter how funny some of his solutions may seem to us, remember that this was a new and startling fact in a world which was totally unsympathetic.

He was a medical doctor. He gave up his entire medical career. He was thrown out of medicine, bodily, for daring to say that something could be done about the mind. Up to that time the mind was something that belonged to the priests and the witches. And Freud said it doesn’t have to belong to the priests and witches, it really should belong to the field of medicine. And medicine sixty years after still had refused to accept the responsibility for the mind.¹

Notes