A NEW SLANT ON LIFE (PART 2)

HOW TO LIVE WITH CHILDREN


An adult has certain rights around children which the children and modern adults rather
tend to ignore. A good, stable adult with love and tolerance in his heart is about the best therapy
a child can have.

The main consideration in raising children is the problem of training them without
breaking them. You want to raise your child in such a way that you don’t have to control him,
so that he will be in full possession of himself at all times. Upon that depends his good
behavior, his health, his sanity.

Children are not dogs. They can’t be trained as dogs are trained. They are not
controllable items. They are, and let’s not overlook the point, men and women. A child is not a
special species of animal distinct from Man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained
full growth.

Any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children.

How would you like to be pulled and hauled and ordered about and restrained from
doing whatever you wanted to do? You’d resent it. The only reason a child “doesn’t” resent it
is because he’s small. You’d half murder somebody who treated you, an adult, with the orders,
contradiction and disrespect given to the average child. The child doesn’t strike back because he
isn’t big enough. He gets your floor muddy, interrupts your nap, destroys the peace of the
home instead. If he had equality with you in the matter of rights, he’d not ask this “revenge”.
This “revenge” is standard child behavior.

A child has a right to his self-determinism. You say that if he is not restrained from
pulling things down on himself, running into the road, etc., etc., he’ll be hurt. What are you,
as an adult, doing to make that child live in rooms or an environment where he can be hurt? The
fault is yours, not his, if he breaks things.

The sweetness and love of a child is preserved only so long as he can exert his own
self-determinism. You interrupt that and, to a degree, you interrupt his life.

There are only two reasons why a child’s right to decide for himself has to be
interrupted—the fragility and danger of his environment and you, for you work out on him the
things that were done to you, regardless of what you think.

When you give a child something, it’s his. It’s not still yours. Clothes, toys, quarters,
what he has been given, must remain under his exclusive control. So he tears up his shirt,
wrecks his bed, breaks his fire engine. It’s none of your business. How would you like to
have somebody give you a Christmas present and then tell you, day after day thereafter, what
you are to do with it, and even punish you if you failed to care for it the way the donor wishes?
You’d wreck that donor and ruin that present. You know you would. The child wrecks your
nerves when you do it to him. That’s revenge. He cries. He pesters you. He breaks your
things. He “accidentally” spills his milk. And he wrecks, on purpose, the possession about
which he is so often cautioned. Why? Because he is fighting for his own self-determinism, his
own right to own and make his weight felt on his environment. This “possession” is another
channel by which he can be controlled. So he has to fight the possession and the controller.

In raising your child, you must avoid “training” him into a social animal. Your child
begins by being more sociable, more dignified than you are. In a relatively short time, the
treatment he gets so checks him that he revolts. This revolt can be intensified until he is a terror
to have around. He will be noisy, thoughtless, careless of possessions, unclean— anything, in
short, which will annoy you. Train him, control him and you’ll lose his love. You’ve lost the
child forever that you seek to control and own.

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Another thing is the matter of contribution. You have no right to deny your child the
right to contribute. A human being feels able and competent only so long as he is permitted to
contribute as much as, or more than he has contributed to him.

Another thing is the matter of contribution. You have no right to deny your child the
right to contribute. A human being feels able and competent only so long as he is permitted to
contribute as much as, or more than he has contributed to him.

Permit a child to sit on your lap. He’ll sit there, contented. Now put your arms around
him and constrain him to sit there. Do this, even though he wasn’t even trying to leave.
Instantly he’ll squirm. He’ll fight to get away from you. He’ll get angry. He’ll cry. Recall
now, he was happy before you started to hold him. (You should actually make this
experiment.)

Your efforts to mold, train, control this child in general react on him exactly like trying
to hold him on your lap.

Of course, you will have difficulty if this child of yours has already been trained,
controlled, ordered about, denied his own possessions. In mid-flight, you change your tactics.
You try to give him his freedom. He’s so suspicious of you he will have a terrible time trying
to adjust. The transition period will be difficult. But, at the end of it, you’ll have a
well-ordered, sociable child, thoughtful of you and, very important to you, a child who loves
you.

The child who is under constraint, shepherded, handled, controlled, has a very bad
anxiety postulated. His parents are survival entities. They mean food, clothing, shelter,
affection. This means he wants to be near them. He wants to love them, naturally, being their
child.

But on the other hand, his parents are non-survival entities. His whole being and life
depend upon his rights to use his own decision about his movements and his possessions and
his body. Parents seek to interrupt this out of the mistaken idea that a child is an idiot who
won’t learn unless “controlled”. So he has to fight shy, to fight against, to annoy and to harass
an enemy.

Here is anxiety. “I love them dearly. I also need them. But they mean an interruption of
my ability, my mind, my potential life. What am I going to do about my parents? I can’t live
with them. I can’t live without them. Oh, dear, oh, dear!” There he sits in his rompers running
this problem through his head. That problem, that anxiety, will be with him for eighteen years,
more or less. And it will half wreck his life.

Freedom for the child means freedom for you.

Abandoning the possessions of the child to their fate means eventual safety for the
child’s possessions.

What terrible will power is demanded of a parent not to give constant streams of
directions to a child. But it has to be done, if you want a well, a happy, a careful, a beautiful,
an intelligent child!

The child has a duty toward you. He has to be able to take care of you, not an illusion
that he is, but actually. And you have to have the patience to allow yourself to be cared for
sloppily until, by sheer experience, itself—not by your directions—he learns how to do it well.
Care for the child?—nonsense! He has probably got a better grasp of immediate situations than
you have.

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ON MARRIAGE


Communication is the root of marital success from which a strong union can grow, and
non-communication is the rock on which the ship will bash out her keel.

In the first place, men and women aren’t too careful “on whom they up and marry”. In
the absence of any basic training about neurosis, psychosis, or how to judge a good cook or a
good wage-earner, that tricky, treacherous and not always easy-to-identify thing called “love”
is the sole guiding factor in the selection of mates. It is too much to expect of a society above
the level of ants to be entirely practical about an institution as basically impractical as marriage.
Thus, it is not amazing that the mis-selection of partners goes on with such abandon.

There are ways, however, not only to select a marriage partner, but also to guarantee
the continuation of that marriage, and these ways are simple. They depend uniformly upon
communication.

There should be some parity of intellect and sanity between a husband and wife for
them to have a successful marriage. In Western culture, it is expected that the women shall have
some command of the humanities and sciences. It is easy to establish the educational
background of a potential marriage partner; it is not so easy to gauge their capability regarding
sex, family or children, or their sanity.

In the past, efforts were made to establish sanity with ink-blots, square blocks and tests
with marbles to find out if anybody had lost any. The resulting figures had to be personally
interpreted with a crystal ball and then re-interpreted for application.

In Scientology, there is a test for sanity and comparative sanity which is so simple that
anyone can apply it. What is the “communication lag” of the individual?—When asked a
question, how long does it take him to answer? When a remark is addressed to him, how long
does it take for him to register and return? The fast answer tells of the fast mind and the sane
mind, providing the answer is a sequitur; the slow answer tells of down-scale. Marital partners
who have the same communication lag will get along; where one partner is fast and one is
slow, the situation will become unbearable to the fast partner and miserable to the slow one.

The repair of a marriage which is going on the rocks does not always require the
auditing of the marriage partners. It may be that another family factor is in the scene. This may
be in the person of a relative, such as the mother-in-law. How does one solve this factor
without using a shotgun? This, again, is simple. The mother-in-law, if there is trouble in the
family, is responsible for cutting communication or inverting communication. One or the other
of the partners, then, is cut off the communication channel on which he belongs. He senses this
and objects strenuously to it.

Jealousy is the largest factor in breaking up marriages. Jealousy comes about because
of the insecurity of the jealous person, and the jealousy may or may not have foundation. This
person is afraid of hidden communication lines and will do anything to try to uncover them.
This acts upon the other partner to make him feel that his communication lines are being cut; for
he thinks himself entitled to have open communication lines, whereas his marital partner insists
that he shut many of them. The resultant rows are violent, as represented by the fact that, where
jealousy exists in a profession such as acting, insurance companies will not issue policies —the
suicide rate is too high.

The subject of marriage could not be covered in many chapters, but here is given the
basic clue to a successful marriage—Communicate !

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THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS

THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS

Jobs are not held consistently and in actuality by flukes of fate or fortune. Those who
depend upon luck generally experience bad luck. The ability to hold a job depends in the main
upon ability. One must be able to control his work and must be able to be controlled in doing
his work. One must be able, as well, to leave certain areas uncontrolled. One’s intelligence is
directly related to his ability. There is no such thing as being too smart. But there is such a
thing as being too stupid.

But one may be both able and intelligent without succeeding. A vital part of success is
the ability to handle and control, not only one’s tools of the trade, but the people with whom
one is surrounded. In order to do this, one must be capable of a very high level of affinity, he
must be able to tolerate massive realities and he must, as well, be able to give and receive
communication.

The ingredients of success are then: first, an ability to confront work with joy and not
horror; a wish to do work for its own sake, not because one “has to have a paycheck”. One
must be able to work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of exhaustion. If one
experiences these things, there is something wrong with him. There is some element in his
environment that he should be controlling that he isn’t controlling, or his accumulated injuries
are such as to make him shy away from all people and masses with whom he should be in
intimate contact.

The ingredients of successful work are: training and experience in the subject being
addressed, good general intelligence and ability, a capability of high affinity, a tolerance of
reality, and the ability to communicate and receive ideas. Given these things there is left only a
slim chance of failure. Given these things a man can ignore all of the accidents of birth,
marriage or fortune, for birth, marriage and fortune are not capable of placing these necessary
ingredients in one’s hands. One could have all the money in the world and yet be unable to
perform an hour’s honest labor. Such a man would be a miserably unhappy one.

The person who studiously avoids work usually works far longer and far harder than
the man who pleasantly confronts it and does it. Men who cannot work are not happy men.

Work is the stable datum of this society. Without something to do there is nothing for
which to live. A man who cannot work is as good as dead and usually prefers death and works
to achieve it.

The mysteries of life are not today, with Scientology, very mysterious. Mystery is not a
needful ingredient. Only the very aberrated man desires to have vast secrets held away from
him. Scientology has slashed through many of the complexities which have been erected for
men and has bared the core of these problems. Scientology for the first time in man’s history
can predictably raise intelligence, increase ability, bring about a return of the ability to play a
game, and permit man to escape from the dwindling spiral of his own disabilities. Therefore
work itself can become a game, a pleasant and happy thing.

There is one thing which has been learned in Scientology which is very important to the
state of mind of the workman. One often feels in this society that he is working for the
immediate paycheck and that he does not gain for the whole society anything of any
importance. He does not know several things. One of these is how few good workmen are. On
the level of executives, it is interesting to note how precious any large company finds a man
who can handle and control jobs and men. Such people are rare. All the empty space in the
structure of this workaday world is at the top.

And there is another thing which is quite important, and that is the fact that the world

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today has been led to believe, by mental philosophies calculated to betray them, that when one
is dead it is all over and done with and that one has no further responsibility for anything. It is
highly doubtful if this is true. One inherits tomorrow what he died out of yesterday.

today has been led to believe, by mental philosophies calculated to betray them, that when one
is dead it is all over and done with and that one has no further responsibility for anything. It is
highly doubtful if this is true. One inherits tomorrow what he died out of yesterday.

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ON THE DEATH OF CONSCIOUSNESS


Where does one cease to Survive and begin to Succumb? The point of demarcation is
not death as we know it. It is marked by what one might call the death of the consciousness of
the individual.

Man’s greatest weapon is his reason. Lacking the teeth, the armor-plated hide, the
claws of so many other life forms, Man has relied upon his ability to reason in order to further
himself in his survival.

The selection of the ability to think as a chief weapon is a fortunate one. It has awarded
Man the kingdom of Earth. Reason is an excellent weapon. The animal with his teeth, with his
armor-plated hide, with his long claws, is fixed with weapons he cannot alter. He cannot adjust
to a changing environment. And it is terribly important to survival to change when the
environment changes. Every extinct species became extinct because it could not change to
control a new environment. Reason remedies this failure to a marked extent. For Man can
invent new tools and new weapons and a whole new environment. Reason permits him to
change to fit new situations. Reason keeps him in control of new environments.

Any animal that simply adjusts itself to match its environment is doomed. Environments
change rapidly. Animals that can control and change the environment have the best chance of
survival.

The only way you can organize a collective state is to convince men that they must
adjust and adapt themselves, like animals, to a constant environment. The people must be
deprived of the right to control, as individuals, their environment. Then they can be regimented
and herded into groups. They become owned, not owners. Reason and the right to reason must
be taken from them, for the very center of reason is the right to make up one’s own mind about
one’s environment.

The elements fight Man and man fights man. The primary target of the enemies of Man
or a man is his right and ability to reason. The crude and blundering forces of the elements,
storms, cold and night bear down against, challenge and then, mayhap, crush the Reason as
well as the body.

But just as unconsciousness always precedes death, even by instants, so does the death
of Reason precede the death of the organism. And this action may happen in a long span of
time, even half a lifetime, even more.

Have you watched the high alertness of a young man breasting the forces which oppose
life? And watched another in old age? You will find that what has suffered has been his ability
to Reason. He has gained hard-won experience and on this experience he seeks, from middle
age on, to travel. It is a truism that youth thinks fast on little experience. And that age thinks
slowly on much. The Reason of youth is very far from always right, for youth is attempting to
reason without adequate data.

Suppose we had a man who had retained all his ability to reason and yet had a great deal
of experience. Suppose our gray-beards could think with all the enthusiasm and vitality of
youth and yet had all their experience as well. Age says to youth, “You have no experience!”
Youth says to age, “You have no vision; you will not accept or even examine new ideas!”
Obviously, an ideal arrangement would be for one to have the experience of age and the vitality
and vision of youth.

You may have said to yourself, “With all my experience now, what wouldn’t I give for
some of the enthusiasm I had once.” Or perhaps, you have excused it all by saying you have
“lost your illusions”. But you are not sure that they were illusions. Are brightness in life, quick
enthusiasm, a desire and will to live, a belief in destiny, are these things illusions? Or are they

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symptoms of the very stuff of which vital life is made? And isn’t their decline a symptom of
death?

symptoms of the very stuff of which vital life is made? And isn’t their decline a symptom of
death?

Suppose you could wipe out of your life all the pain, physical and otherwise, which
you have accumulated. Would it be so terrible to have to part with a broken heart or a
psychosomatic illness, with fears and anxieties and dreads?

Suppose a man had a chance again, with all he knows, to look life and the Universe in
the eye again and say it could be whipped. Do you recall a day, when you were younger, and
you woke to find bright dew sparkling on the grass, the leaves, to find the golden sun bright
upon a happy world? Do you recall how beautiful and fine it once was? The first sweet kiss?
The warmth of true friendship? The intimacy of a moonlight ride? What made it become
otherwise than a brilliant world?

The consciousness of the world around one is not an absolute thing. One can be more
conscious of color and brightness and joy at one time of life than at another. One can more
easily feel the brilliant reality of things in youth than in age. And isn’t this something like a
decline of consciousness, of awareness?

What is it that makes us less aware of the brilliance of the world around us? Has the
world changed? No, for each new generation sees the glamour and the glory, the vitality of
life—the same life that age may see as dull, at best. The individual changes. And what makes
him change? Is it a decay of his glands and sinews? Hardly, for all the work that has been done
on glands and sinews—the structure of the body—has restored little, if any, of the brilliance of
living.

“Ah, youth,” sighs the adult, “if I but had your zest again!” What reduced that zest?

As one’s consciousness of the brilliance of life declines, so has declined one’s own
consciousness. Awareness decreases exactly as consciousness decreases. The ability to
perceive the world around one and the ability to draw accurate conclusions about it are, to all
intents, the same thing.

Glasses are a symptom of the decline of consciousness. One needs one’s sight
bolstered to make the world look brighter. The inability to move swiftly, as one ran when one
was a child, is a decline of consciousness and ability.

Complete unconsciousness is death. Half unconsciousness is half-death. A
quarter-unconsciousness is a quarter of death. And as one accumulates the pain attendant upon
life and fails to accumulate the pleasures, one gradually loses one’s race with the gentleman
with the scythe. And there ensues, at last, the physical incapacity for seeing, for thinking and
for being, as in death.

How does one accumulate this pain? And if one were to get rid of it would full
consciousness and a full bright concept of life return? And is there a way to get rid of it? With
Scientology, the answer is YES.

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ACCENT ON ABILITY


When we say “Life”, all of us know, more or less, what we are talking about; but when
we use this word “Life” practically, we must examine the purposes and behavior, and in
particular, the formulas evolved by Life in order to have the game called “Life”.

When we say “Life”, we mean Understanding; and when we say “Understanding”, we
mean Affinity, Reality, and Communication. To understand all would be to live at the highest
level of potential action and ability. The quality of Life exists in the presence of
Understanding—in the presence then, of Affinity, Reality and Communication.

Life would exist to a far less active degree in the levels of misunderstanding,
incomprehensibility, psychosomatic illness, and physical and mental incapability’s. Because
Life is Understanding, it attempts to understand. When it turns and faces the incomprehensible,
it feels balked and baffled.

If one is obsessively, and without understanding, being determined into
incomprehensibility, then of course he is lost. Thus we discover that the only trap into which
Life could fall is to do things without knowing it is doing them.

One can always understand that his ability can increase, because in the direction of an
increase in ability is further understanding. Ability is dependent entirely upon a greater and
better understanding of that field or area in which one cares to be more able. When one attempts
to understand inability he is of course looking at less comprehensibility, less understanding,
and so does not then understand lessening ability anywhere near as well as he understands
increasing ability. In the absence of understanding of ability we get a fear of loss of ability,
which is simply the fear of an unknown or a thought-to-beunknowable thing, for there is less
knownness and less understanding in less ability.

Part of understanding and ability is control. Of course, it is not necessary to control
everything everywhere if one totally understands them. However, in a lesser understanding of
things, and of course in the spirit of having a game, control becomes a necessary factor. The
anatomy of control is Start, Stop and Change, and this is fully as important to know as
Understanding itself, and as the triangle which composes Understanding:

Affinity, Reality and Communication.

The doctors and nurses in a contagious ward have some degree of control over the
illnesses which they see before them. It is only when they begin to recognize their inability to
handle these ills or these patients that they, themselves, succumb to these. In view of the fact
that of recent centuries we have been very successful in handling contagious diseases, doctors
and nurses, then, can walk with impunity through contagious wards.

The fighters of disease, having some measure of control over the disease, are then no
longer afraid of the disease and so it cannot affect them. Of course, there would be a level of
body understanding on this which might yet still mirror fear, but we would have the same
statement obtaining. People who are able to control something do not need to be afraid of it and
do not suffer ill effects from it. People who cannot control things can receive bad effects from
those things.

The common denominator of all neurosis, psychosis, aberration and psychosomatic ills
is “can’t work”. Any nation which has a high incidence of these is reduced in production and is
reduced in longevity.

Amongst the unable is the criminal, who is unable to think of the other fellow, unable to
determine his own actions, unable to follow orders, unable to make things grow, unable to
determine the difference between good and evil, unable to think at all on the future. Anybody

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has some of these; the criminal has all of them.

has some of these; the criminal has all of them.

The accent is on ability.

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HONEST PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS, TOO

HONEST PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS, TOO

When you know the technology of the mind, you know that it is a mistake to use
“individual rights” and “freedom” as arguments to protect those who would only destroy.

Individual rights were not originated to protect criminals, but to bring freedom to honest
men. Into this area of protection then dived those who needed “freedom” and “individual
liberty” to cover their own questionable activities.

Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free—he is in
his own trap. When his own deeds cannot be disclosed, then he is a prisoner; he must withhold
himself from his fellows and is a slave to his own conscience. Freedom must be deserved
before any freedom is possible.

To protect dishonest people is to condemn them to their own hells. By making
“individual rights” a synonym for “protect the criminal” one helps bring about a slave state for
all, for where “individual liberty” is abused, an impatience with it arises which at length sweeps
us all away. The targets of all disciplinary laws are the few who err. Such laws, unfortunately,
also injure and restrict those who do not err. If all were honest, there would be no disciplinary
threats.

There is only one way out for a dishonest person—facing up to his own responsibilities
in the society and putting himself back into communication with his fellow man, his family, the
world at large. By seeking to invoke his “individual rights” to protect himself from an
examination of his deeds, he reduces, just that much, the future of individual liberty—for he
himself is not free. Yet he infects others who are honest by using their right to freedom to
protect himself.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a guilty conscience.

And it will lie no more easily by seeking to protect misdeeds by pleas of “freedom
means that you must never look at me”. The right of a person to survive is directly related to his
honesty.

Freedom for man does not mean freedom to injure man. Freedom of speech does not
mean freedom to harm by lies.

Man cannot be free while there are those amongst him who are slaves to their own
terrors.

The mission of a techno-space society is to subordinate the individual and control him
by economic and political duress. The only casualty in a machine age is the individual and his
freedom.

To preserve that freedom one must not permit men to hide their evil intentions under the
protection of that freedom. To be free, a man must be honest with himself and with his fellows.

If a man uses his own honesty to protest the unmasking of dishonesty, then that man is
an enemy of his own freedom.

We can stand in the sun only so long as we don’t let the deeds of others bring the
darkness.

Freedom is for the honest men. Individual liberty exists only for those who have the

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ability to be free.

ability to be free.

Only a madman would break a wanted object he could repair.

The individual must not die in this machine age—rights or no rights. The criminal and

madman must not triumph with their new-found tools of destruction.

The least free person is the person who cannot reveal his own acts and who protests the
revelation of the improper acts of others. On such people will be built a future political slavery
where we all have numbers—and our guilt—unless we act.

It is fascinating that blackmail and punishment are the keynotes of all dark operations.
What would happen if these two commodities no longer existed? What would happen if all men
were free enough to speak? Then and only then, would you have freedom.

On the day when we can fully trust each other, there will be peace on Earth.

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ACCEPTANCE LEVEL


One thing that a person will discover is that he has been carefully taught that certain
things are bad and, therefore, not enjoyable and that he has set up resistance’s to these things
and that they, at length— these resistance’s—have become a sponge for the things they were
set up to counteract and the resistance, caving in, has created a hunger for that which was, at
first, resisted.

This is the physical universe at work in its very best operation: Make one fight
something, then so arrange it that one winds up craving for what one was fighting.

You can, if you look about you, see Acceptance Level dramatized in every activity of
life. You can understand, then, why some woman will not clean up a living room; a living
room is not acceptable, except in a cluttered fashion to this person. You can understand, also,
why some man leaves a beautiful and helpful girl and runs off with a maid or a prostitute; his
acceptance level was too far below the beautiful girl. You can understand, too, some of you,
why you were not acceptable in your own homes when you were young; you were too bright
and too cheerful and this was too high above those around you. You can understand, as well,
why the newspapers print the stories they do.

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CONFRONTING

CONFRONTING

The first step of handling anything is gaining an ability to face it.

It could be said that war continues as a threat to man because man cannot confront war.
The idea of making war so terrible that no one will be able to fight it is the exact reverse of
fact—if one wishes to end war. The invention of the long bow, gun powder, heavy naval
cannon, machine guns, liquid fire, and the hydrogen bomb add only more and more certainty
that war will continue. As each new element which man cannot confront is added to elements
he has not been able to confront so far, man engages himself upon a decreasing ability to
handle war.

We are looking here at the basic anatomy of all problems. Problems start with an
inability to confront anything. Whether we apply this to domestic quarrels or to insects, to
garbage dumps or Picasso, one can always trace the beginning of any existing problem to an
unwillingness to confront.

Let us take a domestic scene. The husband or the wife cannot confront the other, cannot
confront second dynamic consequences, cannot confront the economic burdens, and so we
have domestic strife. The less any of these actually are confronted, the more problem they will
become.

It is a truism that one never solves anything by running away from it. Of course, one
might also say that one never solves cannon balls by baring his breast to them. But I assure you
that if nobody cared whether cannon balls were fired or not, control of people by threat of
cannon balls would cease.

Down on Skid Row where flotsam and jetsam exist to keep the police busy, we could
not find one man whose basic difficulties, whose downfall could not be traced at once to an
inability to confront. A criminal once came to me whose entire right side was paralyzed. Yet,
this man made his living by walking up to people in alleys, striking them and robbing

them. Why he struck people he could not connect with his paralyzed side and arm.
From his infancy he had been educated not to confront men. The nearest he could come to
confronting men was to strike them, and so his criminal career.

The more the horribleness of crime is deified by television and public press, the less the
society will be able to handle crime. The more formidable is made the juvenile delinquent, the
less the society will be able to handle the juvenile delinquent.

In education, the more esoteric and difficult a subject is made, the less the student will
be able to handle the subject. When a subject is made too formidable by an instructor, the more
the student retreats from it. There were, for instance, some early European mental studies
which were so complicated and so incomprehensible and which were sewn with such lack of
understanding of man that no student could possibly confront them.

Man, at large today, is in this state with regard to the human spirit. For centuries man
was educated to believe in demons, ghouls, and things that went boomp in the night. There
was an organization in southern Europe which capitalized upon this terror and made demons
and devils so formidable that at length man could not even face the fact that any of his fellows
had souls. And thus we entered an entirely materialistic age. With the background teaching that
no one can confront the “invisible”, vengeful religions sought to move forward into a foremost
place of control. Naturally, they failed to achieve their goal and irreligion became the order of
the day, thus opening the door for Communism and other idiocies. Although it might seem true
that one cannot confront the invisible, who said that a spirit was always invisible? Rather, let’s

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say that it is impossible for man or anything else to confront the nonexistent; and thus when
nonexistent gods are invented and are given more roles in the society, we discover man
becomes so degraded that he cannot even confront the spirit in his fellows, much less become
moral.

say that it is impossible for man or anything else to confront the nonexistent; and thus when
nonexistent gods are invented and are given more roles in the society, we discover man
becomes so degraded that he cannot even confront the spirit in his fellows, much less become
moral.

A “Clear”, in an absolute sense, would be someone who could confront anything and
everything in the past, present and future.

The handling of a problem seems to be simply the increase of ability to confront the
problem, and when the problem can be totally confronted, it no longer exists. This is strange
and miraculous.

Man’s difficulties are a compound of his cowardice’s. To have difficulties in life, all it
is necessary to do is to start running away from the business of livingness. After that, problems
of unsolvable magnitude are assured. When individuals are restrained from confronting life,
they accrue a vast ability to have difficulties with it.

Various nervous traits can be traced at once by trying to confront with something which
insists on running away. A nervous hand, for instance, would be a hand with which the
individual is trying to confront something. The forward motion of the nervousness would be
the effort to make it confront; the backward motion of it would be its refusal to confront. Of
course, the basic error is confronting with the hand.

The world is never bright to those who cannot confront it. Everything is a dull gray to a
defeated army. The whole trick of somebody telling you “it’s all bad over there” is contained in
the fact that he is trying to keep you from confronting something and thus make you retreat
from life. Eyeglasses, nervous twitches, tensions, all of these things stem from an
unwillingness to confront. When that willingness is repaired, these disabilities tend to
disappear.

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ON BRINGING ORDER


When you start to introduce order into anything, disorder shows up and blows off.
Therefore, efforts to bring order in the society or any part of it will be productive of disorder
for a while every time.

The trick is to keep on bringing order; and soon the disorder is gone, and you have
orderly activity remaining. But if you hate disorder and fight disorder only, don’t ever try to
bring order to anything, for the resulting disorder will drive you half mad.

Only if you can ignore disorder and can understand this principle, can you have a
working world.



(PART 3)