overts and withholds

Thank you.¹; ²

Well first, you know, I think we ought to make sure that we take care of some of our better people. I think we ought to thank Mary Adams for that beautiful job she’s doing on that organ
as usual. Where was she? Voice from audience: [unintelligible] Stand up! There she is. And I see that somebody just blew in from damp old – I mean dear old England. Here’s Pam and Ray Kemp – stand up. Here a few telegrams and a … By the way – I – this is a beautiful globe. I’m told that Eisenhower’s globe is just exactly like this one and that this is one of the biggest and fanciest made anywhere. And that the globe in the White House is just like this. So that I can have the only globe like this, somebody will have to get that back from the White House.

[laughter] I understand little old Indonesia over here has twelve of them though. I don’t know what they were doing with twelve of them, I didn’t know they were going to conquer that much space. They’re that dark spot there. But let me read off a few of these telegrams to you here.

Here’s first and foremost on the list here is: “Ron we send you and congress delegates our very best for a very successful congress, HASI New Zealand.” Right down there. [Indicating locations on the globe to the audience.]

And here’s one: “Best wishes for the most successful congress ever, love HCO and HASI South Africa.” Right there.

And “Ron all the best for a responsibly responsive congress, Love HASI London.” Clear up here.

And here’s one: “Ron all best for congress and following course, HASI and HCO Australia.” And “Ron and delegates, here’s wishing you everything for the bestest ever congress, Love HCO London.”

And “Best wishes to Ron, Mary Sue, Staff, and all congress attenders for a fine congress and a prosperous 1960, from all staff at HCO WW Saint Hill.

Now there’s some more of them here, but most of these people are represented. And I’m sure that HASI DC and FCDC wishes us a very fine congress since they’re giving it. And HASI Los Angeles is right in there pitching and well attended at this congress and thank them for carrying on out there in the jungle. Actually you know I started the nucleus of one here in Calcutta.

There is one here that is firing in Greece. There is one in Paris. The one in Germany is doing much better.

There is something doing down here in South America. We’re doing just fine. Nobody yet has conquered Mexico. Would some Texan please take note. Now there’s no doubt about it, we’re winning hot and heavy. But we certainly can win from here on out providing we can sort of hold on to it long enough that we don’t blow. Now I’m going to set you a good example – I haven’t blown.

Now if we can abide by this example, we’ll have it made. And one of the problems that we face actually, is not so much people leaving Central Organizations, but I’m going to talk to you very close now if you want to hear it, about the second dynamic – marriage. You like to hear about marriage?

Audience: Yeah.

Now, you can salvage more marriages per square house than ever before. Let’s take a look at marriage.

Our actual index of breakup on marriage is probably less than for the world at large, but it’s too high. It’s too high. It shouldn’t be up there at all. And there have been a lot of marriages that have stayed there together through thick and thin in Scientology, and people are to be congratulated on it because really, occasionally it’s been through thick and thin.

Now I wasn’t just pretending to set an example a little while ago telling you I was still on post – I’ll let you in on a little secret – Mary Sue and I, you know, have been married now for eight years. We went down to Oklahoma and hooked it up about eight years ago. Smart move on my part; probably not so smart on hers.

But if you look over that and a few other little things, you see that I am not the philosopher in the ivory tower, talking about something I know not what of, which I think in earlier generations was the requisite for all philosophers and advisers – to have no experience of any kind whatsoever in any subject about which they were advising.

And as I used to be president of the American Fiction Guild, author’s league up in New York, when I was a kid – that’s right, I was a kid – it was very funny to me; I used to laugh myself
silly; all of the confession stories written in America are written by unmarried ladies who have reached forty or fifty.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being an unmarried lady reaching forty or fifty. This is perfectly fine. But how come all these confession stories? Yeah, that’s interesting. Because it was out of the current lifetime’s field of experience. I realize now they were writing about past lives – that they were picking it up whole track and just putting it in modern dress – but they didn’t know what they were writing about, basically, in this lifetime.

And they didn’t know what they were advising the younger generation about – the old Bernarr MacFadden and Fawcett Publications with their “come to realize,” you know, plots and all that sort of thing.

And you can advise people about things you don’t know anything about. That’s perfectly easy to do, in fact, one of the easiest things to do man does.

But I was sitting around with a bunch of these ladies one day – had a luncheon – and they all came around afterwards. They were having some drinks. I gave them some advice about writing.  It upset them very much. I was the old high-speed kid on writing. You know, I could sit down and turn out five, ten thousand words in a single day of production, send it off, get a check.

Ninety-four percent acceptance was my record first time out. Now, fifteen million words in print. This was – this was good, hot, heavy production. It brought back the coffee and cakes and paid for a lot of research and other things. But anyway, these people were all there, and I said, “You know,” I said, “you get pretty high rates in the confession-story racket.” I said, “I ought to write some of those.”

And they all said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

So leaving them with my bottle of corn, I went upstairs, wrote a confession story and got a thousand dollars for it from Bernarr MacFadden.

“Yes, I remember. I was just a young maid, trusting and inexperienced, and he was a handsome devil…” Ah, very easy. Very easy.

I saw then that you could do things you didn’t know anything about. They weren’t necessarily good but you could do something about them.

Almost as adventurous as getting married. Because when you’re getting married, you’re doing something you don’t know anything about. Did you ever think of that? Hm, did you ever think about it? That’s the one trip, one lifetime sort of a thing, don’t you see? And when you try it a couple of times, why, usually you know less about it the second time than you did the first time. Now, it doesn’t say that operating manuals haven’t been written for marriages. I know there are several extant, all written by bachelors or people who have not been – like most of the care-of-children-for-the-mother books are always written by bachelors.

Now, marriage is an interesting boat to steer. It’s not a third dynamic activity, and yet it is kind of. It generally ceases to be a second dynamic activity but has to remain so.

The genus of marriage is one of these things that is a big pose on the early track. And that is thetan association. Thetans early on the track very often got the idea that they would mock each other up, you know, as – they would be brothers, or they would be a family or something of the sort, and they would all appear to be related: cousins, sisters, uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers.

Mothers/fathers actually comes later on the track. Earlier it was just thetan brotherhoods. And this pretense at association was something that seldom worked out very well because everybody knew they were just pretending and they knew there was no real familial relationship. This falsity or the ideas of this falsity actually continue forward into the modern family. It’s very easy to break down a family because there is no relationship in a family except a pretended relationship. Think of it for a moment and you realize that you’re supporting a thing which can’t exist. A thetan was never the daughter of another thetan. No thetan was ever the father of another thetan, no matter what the Good Book says. That’s the truth of the matter.

Now, any time you have a relationship which isn’t inherent or based on immediate and direct fact, you have to work at it.

Now, I’m not saying that marriage is a false relationship. It isn’t. In this society and time, a family is the closest knit, self-perpetuating, self-protecting unit and is necessary  economically and otherwise to the society the way it’s rigged at this present time. And who destroys marriage, destroys the civilization. That’s fairly sure.

That’s why the commies try so hard.

A culture will go by the boards if its basic building block, the family, is removed as a valid building block. But this is no reason we should get mocked up and silly about what the
relationship is. The relationship, basically, is a postulated relationship. There is no truth in the relationship. It is a postulated relationship.

And when people stop postulating it, it ceases to exist! And that’s what happens to most marriages. People stop mocking up the family unit, and the moment they stop mocking it up, it
isn’t. You see what happens to marriages?

It isn’t the other way around: It isn’t that all men are evil, so therefore, contracts such as marriage dissolve usually in infidelity and go all to pieces. That is not true. The reverse is true;
that when you have a purely postulated relationship which has no real existence in fact, you have to continue to create it. And a family which doesn’t continue to create itself as a family will cease to exist as a family. That’s about all you need to know about it.

When I was a little kid, most people in this society at this time had a considerable formula. All over the world people are having trouble with this thing. They’re having lots of trouble with this thing because they’re running on an automaticity; they think this thing will hang together through no effort of their own. And if it hangs together through no effort of their own, I’ve never heard of it. It won’t.

Now, you have unhappy experiences familially. Father’s taking his role very seriously. He is arbiter of the destiny of it all. He must be totally contributed to. Actually, the Greek and Roman family had the power of life and death vested in the role of father. He could order executed any family member. They must have had a lot of trouble, mustn’t they have?

You want to know how much trouble any society had, look at what laws they had to pass. The vigor of the law is directly proportional to the might – amount of trouble they were having. You think the Puritans were pure – read their list of laws.

Where people aren’t having trouble with crime, they don’t take many precautions against it. But where they are having trouble with crime, they pass lots of laws. That you know for sure.
Well, mother – mother decides that she’s been victimized and should have married the other fellow – which is obvious.

Your father and mother weren’t making perhaps – maybe they were making – but perhaps they weren’t making too good a go of it. And if they weren’t making too good a go of it, then you looked at this and you said, “Now, look at that! This institution which is inherent in nature, and nothing will ever change, doesn’t perpetuate itself and is not much good. Because, look, it isn’t hanging together”.

You had a failure. You probably tried to postulate the family into a unit when you were a little kid. You know, you were – you were working at it. You were working at it. You were trying to postulate it into a unit. You were trying to square the thing up one way or the other. You were trying to get a Papa-loves-Mama thing going one way or the other. You were trying to show them that they had something to live for and so forth.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons you would get hurt was to make Papa and Mama realize they had responsibilities for the family. Childhood illness and all this sort of thing comes
directly after familial upsets. Just trace it down. And maybe you had some failures because it’s pretty hard when you don’t have very much body to make an effect on very big bodies. Or
you’ve got it figured that way, so you don’t have much effect on big bodies.

Actually, you were probably something to reckon with. But you might have or might not have had a good example. Let me acquaint you that it has nothing to do with whether or not you can make a marriage, because the example you were looking at existed without benefit of any knowledge of how men worked or what they were all about, or how women worked and what they were all about. And existing without that information, how could they do anything but run along and get flat tires every quarter of a mile. That was pretty rough one way or the other.

Now, if you go at this and realize that a marriage is something you have to postulate into existence and keep mocked up, and when you stop working at it, it will cease, but then everything else is rigged to perpetuate it while you’re not trying to keep it going, of course it will be a destruction. If you realize that, and if you know the technology I’ve been giving you at this congress, you can make any marriage stick or you can recover any facet of any marriage or plaster one back together again any way you want to. It takes a little doing and it takes a little guts.

And that’s an understatement if I ever made one.

Now, Suzie and I have been working at this, so we’d have some kind of a reality on the situation. And if she and I have got anything to patch up, wow. Because we’ve – everything has been pretty darn smooth compared to most marriages, see?

We decided we would take this new technology, you see, and we would apply it just right on down the groove as prescribed and straighten it all up and straighten out all the overts and
withholds, boom, boom, and fix it all up.

Well, we didn’t do it because it was on the rocks and it was the easiest look at anything you ever took, and honest to Pete, we almost had each other’s heads there for a week or so. So I said, “Well, I’ve got the data, but it’s kind of odd data that if Suzie and I, who have no real trouble and who have no real overts or withholds to amount to anything, can almost cut each other’s heads off doing this, what’s some poor guy going to do out in Oshkosh trying to patch it up with his wife?”

As I say, we didn’t have anything. You know, the overt and withhold of the value of Christmas presents. Just withholds on Christmas presents, things like this, you know? Overt thoughts,critical thoughts occasionally, you know? Something rough like, “Well, he cares more about that preclear than he does about me because he’s been auditing all night,” you know, sort of thing. Snarl, snarl, you know?

But we found out something fantastic. We thought we were fond of each other. And we got all this stuff cleaned up, wow!

So I would say that it’s very difficult to postulate a marriage. I hate to touch upon a personal thing like that and so forth, and maybe it upsets you a little bit – I hope not, but I’m not in the mood to withhold anything from you.

Now, a marriage which has broken down into a superseparateness of overts and withholds is almost impossible to put back in the run again simply by postulating it into existence. After
people have separated themselves out from each other, they have to unseparate themselves again. It’s all very well with sweetness and light coming in some June day tra-la, tra-la, tra-la, and you see this handsome brute (or not so handsome), and you see this beautiful girl (and not so beautiful), and they come together, and they say, “Well, we will do or die until end do us doth,” or whatever it is. And they think they’ve made a marriage. Why, they haven’t started yet. Now they’ve got to find out how they look before breakfast. You think this thing has a lot to do with the second dynamic. It doesn’t; it has mostly to do with cosmetics and razor blades. They’ve got to learn to live with each other if they can. Now, to some degree, they have wiped out, sort of, by the act of getting married what they were doing before that that’s by more or less tacit consent and so forth and they start from there.

Now, what happens from there on out is what counts. But sometimes things they have done before, that they are violently withholding from each other, don’t even let the marriage get
started. Forty-eight hours later, they’re on the rocks. Why? Well, there’s just too much overt and withhold before they even knew each other.

Well, even that one can be salvaged – even that one. But how about one that has ground on for years and years and the overts have mounted up – and the overts and the withholds, and they’ve fallen apart? And – do you know it’s traditional that at the end of three years, husbands and wives don’t get any kick out of each other. This is sort of in the textbook. All the psychologists know that.

But if at the end of three years this is the case, how about at the end of ten? Well, they’ve kind of learned to endure, or they’re both in propitiation. They’re getting along somehow and they would rather have it that way than have it some other way. They’d rather be married than not. They think they’re making it okay. And they don’t think too much about the girl or the guy that they should have married instead, anymore. It’s going along somehow.

Now into that relationship we can introduce one of the most startling pieces of bombardism you ever heard of: We can clear up the marriage! And it really goes. All a divorce is, for instance, or all an inclination or a withdrawal is: simply too many overts and withholds against the marital partner. That’s all! It’s as uncomplicated as that.

And all of these strainings and leavings and “I ought to go” and “I ought not to stay” and “I ought to do something else” and “We ought to split it up” or “I’d be much better off if we hadn’t,” and “Maybe if I…” something, yap-yap, you know? – all of those rationales stem immediately from the partner who is making those rationales, from that partner’s overts and withholds against the other partner.

Actually, he’s trying to protect the other partner from his own viciousness. That’s the basic reason. So he said, “Well, I’d better leave, we’d better break it up” or “cool it off.” And that’s usually the gradient scale of a marriage breakup is “Cool it off.” “We ought to leave,” “We part,” see? But that “cool it off” usually occurs. And, boy, we can take these things now and uncool them off.

Now, to ask you to take one of these things and set it down across from the marital partner, give him the cans and say, “Well…” (It’s very easy, very interesting. I postulated a marital partner, and I got two.) And we say, “Well now, George (or Agnes), come clean. Let’s level it here.” There’s a process that goes this way – a very deadly process. Not particularly advised but it’s terribly workable: “What have you done? What have you withheld? what have you done? What have you withheld? What have you done?” – not necessarily “to me,” you see?

Now, that’s the deadly shotgun. That takes them all on all dynamics. But if you’re just cleaning up a marriage, it’s “What have you done to me?” (keeping the Auditor’s Code) “What have
you withheld from me? What have you done to me? What have you withheld from me?”

The person that takes the beating is the auditor. You really have to look this one over. And remembering, every time we find a big one, run Responsibility, as I’ll give it to you, on that incident. Got the idea? “What part of that incident could you be responsible for?” “What part of that incident could you be responsible for?” or some other process command.

And next night – oh, man, you spend days not talking to each other, let me tell you. But the funny part of it is, is the only time you start to claw each other up doing something like this is when you as the auditor goofed and had a loss. And then everything starts to go rickety-rackety. As long as you can actually be effective and feel the thing is going forward and you’re winning, you’re all right. You’re just all right.

But you all of a sudden get detoured and talked out of running what you should have run and talked out of going someplace else. You feel you’ve got it all mishmashed and you find yourself auditing some incident whereby they were a Phoenician galley slave – that had nothing to do with the marriage. Only once in a blue moon is a button so hot that you have to pull the button, you know, like broken shoelaces or something of this sort, you know?

All of a sudden this person, this marital partner, keeps coming up with the fact, “Yes, I know, but I withheld from you that I noticed your shoelaces were broken and had been retied.” We seem to get this one again and again and again. You know, “Your shoelaces were broken,” and “You didn’t pay attention to your shoelaces” and “You didn’t pay attention to your shoelaces and didn’t…”

Yeah, what the hell is this all about, you know? Shoelaces! Well, we just better run this one down. What’s this business about shoelaces? And we find out they hanged themselves in the county jail three lives ago with some broken shoelaces or something. It’s a – has something to do with it.

But the point is that as long as we’re successful, it goes along fine. It’s only when we get a little bit detoured that people get unhappy about it.

I would say there’s a formula for this sort of thing: that a couple of people who know how to audit ought to get an E-Meter. By the way, you really can’t – you really need one of those things today; you can’t audit without one of those things. I mean it just can’t be done. And of course, it’s – they’re real dynamite to have around a business. You can just go down the line, take all the criminals out, patch up all the right places and square it up and go to the boss and say, “All right. Now, what are you withholding, son?”

And he says, “Well, I didn’t mean you were to make a check on me!”

And you say, “Oh, come now.”

“Well, all right, all right, all – oh, blast it! Well, I haven’t embezzled any funds anyhow.”

Yeah, you can check out a business these days and really make one whiz. Before this congress is over, I’ll tell you how to check out a government; you’re in business, man. But maritally, you need one of those confounded things just to break it down. Not so much that the other person has tremendous things they’re withholding, but they very often can’t get the nerve to tell you unless you know about it already via the meter. And you just don’t succeed in cleaning them up, that’s all.

Furthermore, you don’t know these days how long to run something unless you’ve got a person on a meter, because you run it until the tone arm goes to Clear for their sex. You run against the tone arm, not the needle. That’s right, that’s right. That’s when a process is flat. I can just give you that in passing here, but it’s not an incidental datum. If you’re running one of these Responsibility or other allied processes that’s a good process, you audit that thing for a man until it is stably at 3.0 before you leave that incident alone. Or – and for a Woman, when it’s stably at 2.0 and isn’t varying any, you get it right there so it’s stable. Otherwise the incident itself is not flat, You can take any part of a case and clear it down to the Clear reading, and that’s done by the tone arm.

You know when you have a hot incident or a hot part of the case because the arm goes up on the meter! Not the needle! The hell with the needle! The arm! We’re only interested in incidents with enough charge to move this tone arm! Do you get that?

These things that go click click, click, oh, they’d aberrate somebody, I guess, if he was already nuts. But these little sweeps that go over here, “What did you just think of? Well that’s too bad.” No, no, no.

For instance, you’ll find that the little wife was actually out in bars all during that week you were in Syracuse, and you start talking about bars… You say, “Well, what do you know? There must be something there.” Yeah, there’s something there and it won’t come down until you find out what it is, too.

Now, three, four times probably while you’re trying to clean up a marriage between you, you will undoubtedly decide that it’s all over and there’s no reason to go on with it because one couldn’t possibly. The thing that saves the day each time is remember what you did. Just keep that thought firmly in mind, and it’ll come through to a perfect completion.

You start clearing up a marriage by establishing two-way communication in the marriage and you’ve got it made. But if little Suzie and I with as little trouble as we’ve had in life can go round and round for a couple of weeks – we got to laughing about this. One night it got ridiculous. We said, “Oh, think of somebody trying to do with – this in San Francisco without even a professional certificate.” Do it off of the textbook, you know? Oh. No trained forbearance, you see? No schooling in how to sit there with gritted teeth and take it, you know? No built-in supports of “Give the command and the acknowledgment,” you know? Guy going totally wog-wog-wog – a trained auditor doing that can still say the command and give the acknowledgment; he might not appear bright.

And I said then, “Well, I’ll have to tell people about this at the congress because they’re going to start trying it anyhow, and we’d better tell them the right way to go about it.”

And we’d say offhand that it runs like this: If you want – if you think that your marriage can be made better and you are not, both of you, trained auditors, then for people who are sort of in – you know, they’re in Scientology – I’m not whipping up any business for auditors – the wrong way to go about it is get audited through on it. If you want to get audited, get audited through to Clear. (And you should be, you understand?) But the right way to get audited on a marriage would have to do with the marital partners facing each other with the meter; you understand?

Male voice: Yeah.

Otherwise, a phenomenon of transference or upset or super-sympathy and so forth can set in, and it just shouldn’t be there. You understand?

So if a PC comes to you – he’s having trouble with the marriage, the best thing that you can possibly do is say, “Well, are you both willing to settle up this marriage before we go any further?”

“Settle up the marriage, yes, but my wife wouldn’t have anything to do with Scientology.”

“Oh, is that so? Well, better bring her over. I want to show her how an E-Meter works!”

Set them both down in the session with the meter between them and let them go at it back and forth. And they’ll be in-session!

But you shouldn’t really take one marital partner at a time and pluck them off someplace into an auditing room and do it all very super-secret and all that sort of thing. You ought to get them both by the scruff of the neck and sit them down across from each other with an E-Meter between them, and if they don’t know how to do it and so forth, you sit there and hold the meter, you know, and audit them. Any auditing you’re doing, though, have one of the partners back of you. Works.

Don’t do it in absentia – got the idea? – if you really want to keep their marriage together They’d probably go home and beat each other’s heads off. But that’s better than leaving each other! Almost anybody who has been deserted will tell you that. That’s right.

But where we have a – where we have a marriage to clean up, we could do it with a pro. (Insufficient skill, you know?) I’d say don’t flinch at trying to do it up totally untrained. Go ahead and take a rap at it. There’s enough Scientologists around now that they can pick you up out of the corner and put you back together again.

That would be the roughest way to go about it but I wouldn’t flinch at tackling it. No real training. Just read a book about an E-Meter and got one, you know, and then, you know, somehow or other going to straighten this out with Grace or with Edgar. Uh-hew. And you probably would come through all right. But of course, that’s not the problem of most of the people here.

The next workable thing would be to get a pro to help you out and do a double audit. But undoubtedly the most workable thing of all would be for the husband and wife to save up a little bit and get it all squared around and then go to school, carefully keeping – both of them keeping their noses clean and knowing what they were doing and get trained. When they’re all finished with school, then have at it! That requires a lot of self-restraint, but that would be the most perfect fix-up. But I would, of course, only tell Scientologists that one. Otherwise, people would have to be more or less straightened up by a pro.

Now, to take anybody that knows nothing about Scientology, give him one of these things, aw, nah, nah. Why kill people? They’d just kill each other off that’s all.

In the first place, only one person would be doing it. The other would have no cooperation. It’d probably be totally covert. They’d have the total idea it was what the other person had done that had wrecked the marriage. You get that they – all these misconceptions would stack together to a total bust. They’d simply use it as some kind of a police detector.

It was a sad day when instrumentation got into the hands of the police – called lie detectors. First place, there is no such thing as a lie detector These things don’t detect lies. They detect unrealities and disagreements and misemotions. But they don’t detect lies. They detect those things the person is sorry he did. But what police officer, untrained in Scientology, could ever get that forgiving to admit that the person was sorry he did it. Because he knows what’s wrong with criminals: Criminals are people who are never sorry about anything.

Now, he doesn’t even know about criminals. A criminal is somebody who is on automatic and who isn’t there. But he’s on automatic and isn’t there because he’d better not participate because he knows he’s a criminal. “The machine is more reliable than the man,” by the way, is the slogan a criminal operates on.

Now, I didn’t say that a space opera society always wound up as a criminal society. I didn’t say that, but you can quote me.

Now maritally the soundest plan, if somebody – if a couple knew a bit about auditing and so forth – the – soundest plan would actually to – be to go through a Comm Course/Upper Indoc all over again. You know, just – find somebody who’s teaching a Comm Course and Upper Indoc and just go through it. Both of them you know? And just groove it in, you know; and get the discipline in there. Get it pounded in with a little bit of spikes, you know. Then take this and get the overts and withholds off on the whole thing and Responsibility run on each and every part of them, and the marriage would go back together again, click.

Don t believe that it’ll go together without a few flying frying pans, See? Man, you’re a perfectionist if you believe that’s going to happen. Don’t believe that you can all put it together again in one night because the number of overts and withholds usually take a little longer to detail.

Now all of this simply adds up to the fact that we have our paws on this thing called a family. Because what is the most upsetting thing about children? The most upsetting thing about children is that they blow; children blow the family. In America they routinely blow the family in their teens. And man has been looking at this for so long, he believes this is a good thing. It is? “Well, the child, obviously, at thirteen-fourteen has to become critical of his or her parents, naturally. That’s the way it should be, and then has to become more and more estranged, and eventually goes out and makes a family of her own, and that’s the way life works.” It is?

Some of the best families I’ve ever seen put together were by kids who hadn’t blown their own families. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Do you know how young you can E-Meter a kid in his overts and withholds? Goo-goo-chi-goo fellows. I wouldn’t say how young, but it’s awful young.

And you take a child of six, five, seven, something like that – that’s easy. That’s a simple one. They’re as easy to audit as adult preclears if you short session them; give them very short sessions and very simple semantic processes. Don’t give them anything tough in semantics and they audit just perfectly.

And you always give them formal sessions, you know? Don’t ever shortchange them with a little pat-on-the-back auditing and a little lick and a promise and an assist here and an assist there and never end the session, so forth. Give them more dignity than that. And a child will stop trying to pull the family to pieces.

Now, the upset and uproar that is supposed to be the common lot of all families because of children, actually hasn’t much to do with the family. I know my kids recently became unhysterical. They had a nanny who was treating them fairly decently – had a Scientologist as a nanny, you know – and they settled down, you know? And they calmed down. They’d – they’ve never been very boisterous or uproarious in disturbing things. They’ve been loud enough, but they’re very free-spoken children, you know? They’re very free in motion, very outflowing.

But this new Scientologist that had just come on to take care of them, you know, was not necessarily giving them good 8-C or bad 8-C, but wasn’t doing anything to upset them particularly, and they were going along just dandy. And they got so calm and cooperative, you see, with the rest of staff that we had a couple of people on staff that were coming around
saying, “Something’s the matter with the children. They’re sick.”

I was interested enough to go and look, you know, and I didn’t find anything going wrong at all. They were about twice as free spoken as they had been before, you know? But they just weren’t running in hysterical circles making everybody miserable. So of course, they thought they were sick because they weren’t behaving as “everybody knows” children should.

Now, when children have too many overts and withholds against their parents, they make life miserable for their parents. This is the darnedest thing you ever heard of. When they have too many overts and withholds against their parents, they make life miserable for their parents. It’s silly.

And if the parents permit them to go on having this many overts and withholds against the parents, then they really start making life miserable for everybody and then they start blowing the family. And by the time they’re sixteen or seventeen this “natural phenomenon” of their leaving the family will take place. We don’t care if they left the family or not. Actually, Roman children used to get official posts and jobs and get married by the time they were fourteen or fifteen, which is about the right time. You think I’m joking now. I’m not.

One of the wicked things you can do to a child is to prevent them from starting their life. And I’m not saying that college is totally a bad operation. I didn’t say that. I just think so; that’s just an opinion.

But it does seem that it puts an awful postponement on marriage. And this “got to wait to live – got to wait to live,” you know, gets people so they just go totally irresponsible on the third dynamic.

You get little kids around twelve, thirteen – they start picking up responsibilities on the third dynamic. Have you noticed that? And if you let that go too long, why, they start running irresponsibilities on the third dynamic, and you have – well, you have a government like this one. Now, marriage then would consist of putting together a thetan association without overts and withholds, postulated into existence, continued for the mutual perpetuation and protection of the members and the group. Very, very simple arrangement actually. A highly satisfactory arrangement if it continues to be simple but a very complex arrangement if it doesn’t be.

Now, it isn’t that mother-in-laws are the people who always wreck marriages. You could say offhand that mother-in-laws should all be shot and so forth, and then we would have free marriages and it’d be nice. Or we could have woman’s suffrage and then marriage would be okay, or that we could have complete emancipation, instantaneous divorce, and marriage could be okay.

And there – all of these social, sticky-plaster pieces of nonsense are just efforts to have a marriage without ever really having a marriage. None of these things ever made a marriage – quick divorce or preventing this or that.

The Chinese go the opposite, you know? A marriage occurs but it really doesn’t occur because the oldest man of the father’s – of the husband’s family is still the head of the family, and the wife still serves the husband’s mother, and – oh, I don’t know, it’s all – they all get very complicated.

We get surrounded by bunches of rules and that sort of thing. We don’t care what rules they’re surrounded by as long as there is free communication amongst the members of that group. And if there’s free communication amongst the members of that group, their affinity is sufficiently high to take the shocks and hammers and pounds of life. Now, life does hand out a few hammers and pounds and shocks.

And if the individuals connected with a family are not self-supportive, then these shocks can be rough one way or the other. The person does something and apparently thinks things are done to him, and he’s trying to make it and can’t and all that sort of thing. But on a self-supportive, mutually co-supportive basis, why, people have a better chance of making it than alone. And that’s one of the basic philosophies on which marriage is based.

Of course, a little kid wouldn’t make it at all, and none of you would have made it at all, if it hadn’t have been for a marriage – on the line you’re going on. Unless you have the power of mocking up a body right there, spat, why the geological [genealogical]-biological pattern of familial relationships and growth and all that sort of thing is the thing which will carry it on. When the state comes along and tries to supplant the family with barracks, watch out. Somebody has man down to a criminal level where he has to implant people to get anything
done.

But a marriage can exist. A marriage no matter how strained can he put back together again. And a marriage can exist.

But at the same time I’m saying that, of course, I’m saying that a group can exist. But a group cannot exist without two-way communication. And a group cannot exist unless it continues to he postulated into existence by members of the group. And when large numbers of the group are engaged in unpostulating it, or in postulating it out of existence – as revolutionary parties and that sort of thing are concerned then, of course, the rest of the group has to work much harder to keep the group back in. Eventually they get tired of keeping the group back in and it falls apart.

But if we’re going to have a group then we have to work at a group. The group has to be clean as far as the individuals in the group are concerned. There has to be free communication and there has to be a continued wish to continue to postulate the group into existence. If we do those things, we have a group. And whether it applies to marriage or whether it applies to a company or whether it applies to a government or whether it applies to something just a little bit bigger – Scientology around the world – why, that’s how you make a group. And I hope we can benefit from that information.

Thank you.

Notes