Lecture: Where We Are At (1) (1952)

It was wonderful in the early days–actually, the name of this science was originally Scientology–early days I was operating around in Hollywood, and you can find a sample of anything in Hollywood, I don’t care what it is.

And there were more people processed by what later became Dianetics that never knew it. Why? I well recall one old lady. She came in and all of her life she had gotten these wonderful spirit messages by automatic writings and they told her good advice, and she could see at a distance and she could get all this advice from herself and–I mean, it was told to her, excuse me. And this, all of a sudden, had ceased as an ability and she had been miserable and unhappy and upset and so on. What was it? It was a sudden cut communication line between herself and herself. She was in the state of pretty good awareness outside of herself and in a state of pretty good awareness inside of herself and had done the wonderful trick of saying, “That’s me and that’s me, but that isn’t me outside–that outside person, that isn’t I. That’s good people.” And she’d suddenly become worried about evil. The second she became worried about evil, her automatic writing ceased. Her life had been miserable. She was about–oh, I don’t know, about seventy years old, and she was trying to get back her first husband who had since married somebody else and so on.

What technique would you feed this person?

Well, of course, I didn’t have to tell anybody what I was doing. I was just this–”This strange fellow, and you go down there–and–and. . . Well, there’s . . . things happen.” And if two of these patients had ever gotten together–one had said, “Isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it wonderful– Brahman practices, and so forth, they’ve known all these centuries?”

And the other one said, “Yeah? Where did you hear about those?” And he would have said, “Well, down on the corner of blank and blank” (the streets I was working on).

The other would have said, “You heard those down there? Well, I know a fellow–must be another office down there, because this fellow keeps talking about electronics all the time.”

In other words, preclear would come in, they’d say, “I hurt” or   “I’m unhappy,” and I would just use anything on them that worked.

And they’d say, “What is this?” And I would suddenly realize that they were up to the crown of their head in mysticism or something like that. Did I have time to say, “Well, mysticism myuhm-yuhm-uhm . . .”? You never get anyplace reeducating them anyway. ¹

Notes