Refund and Reparation

This is a love-hate universe. What do you think a ridge is? A ridge basically is a symptom of anger, hate. If you really want to get somebody mired beautifully, get him to hate something and start cutting his communication lines on hate.

You'd say hate is unacceptable. No, it isn't. Christianity made it scarce. Those Christian cults which have best succeeded, however, and when it was really roaring across the countryside and hillsides through America, boy, you were supposed to get down there and really hate that devil. That devil was something that was a concrete thing. There was no doubt about that devil at all. In fact, he had far more importance than God or Christ. You had fellows like Billy Sunday, an ex-baseball player. He played to tremendous crowds, stadiums full of people. And he'd get up there and he'd start talking about "fighting the devil." He'd been a baseball player and chewed tobacco and had been wicked in all directions until all of a sudden he saw the light. And he used to get up on the stage and he'd roll off his coat and roll up his sleeves and stand there with a pugilist posture and dare the devil to come up on the stage and fight him, see. Very dramatic! And America bought this just like mad. Of course, this fellow was trying to be "Sunday." And you had him very successful at it.

So that Christianity and religion of that character actually only works on two emotions: hate and love. There isn't any in-between about it and you've got a love-hate universe going.

Now love, the way it's defined, is really not admiration. It's just a sort of a surrender.

There's too many gradients of it to just say love and then let it go. What do they mean by love? Well, you've got to love your neighbor. I never saw anybody jumping out of the front door of the house and rushing over, throwing his arms around old Mr. Jones or something like that; and yet they understand this, that people will tell you who never did that, that they love their neighbor. It's a sort of a flat, no-emotion proposition of "let's all lie down and die."

And you've got, then, the other condition: you've got to hate evil. Well, the whole tenet of resistance to evil is one to which I recommend you as an auditor for an investigation of what has happened to your preclear. The theory of resistance to evil. Denial of self and resistance to evil are two keynotes in understanding what goes on in a preclear.

People have made him resist evil. Now, you can see readily that if you have two objects and one object is made to fight the other object, the two are going to set up resistances to each other in terms of electronic flow, in terms of just mass against mass, in terms of heat, and so on. These things are going to hang up and neither one of them is going to go anyplace.

Keep that in mind, neither one of them is going to go anyplace. Resistance to evil is the way to make a man evil.

This explains to you the astonishing decays in the past of churches and their priests.

They will resist evil and resist evil and boy, they really get nice and evil. You can't have a pure line of communication which goes into an evil spot because at least that part of the communication line which is in the evil spot is going to become evil.

What is evil? Well, evil would just be anything you'd care to make it – just anything. There is no thing under this sun, under the sun anywhere, that you can set up and say, "That is evil."

And I guess you would get evil defined as something you didn't like. So, if you started resisting everything you didn't like, you wouldn't have anything you liked in a very, very short time.

The panacea for all ills in this universe is not love, but actually admiration. Admiration melts everything down. So, if they get you to resist evil, they're turning you away toward things you can't admire so you never have a chance to melt it down.

What's evil? It's what you don't like, that's what's evil. What's good? Well, it's that thing you like, that's what's good. Real easy.

What do you like? Well, you walk down the street here and you'll find one fellow would just love to run over little schoolchildren. Well, you'll find the society won't agree with him. He could just dote on the idea of the maimed and dying and the screams thereof. Well, the society wouldn't agree with him but as far as he's concerned that's "good."

Now, true enough in Scientology we have done an awful lot of describing, but as a description on a brand-new level of action. What I describe in a book you can look for and find at once. And a book on Scientology is not a book of philosophy to air the erudite and aesthetic opinions of LRH. It is a road map of where it is, what it is - if you want to look at it. And the end product is not reading a book. The end product is taking a look at it.

Now, the only reason a road map is necessary is because so many phony road maps have been issued. And a book on Scientology becomes necessary if one has had the misfortune of being educated in the twentieth century in a public school.

Female voice: I agree.

You've been told all sorts of things - via-via-via, wiggle-wiggle, alter-is, not-is. And a book on Scientology is a road map out of a morass of "don't looks." Do you see that?

That's all it is.

But we have achieved a subject then. But the subject itself embraces life and the subject of the subject is life: livingness, actingness, doingness, beingness, and havingness.

Now that is the subject of Scientology.

The subject of Scientology is not Professor Fromptf's contradiction of Professor Snodgrass's Phrumpfs. It is not a learned dissertation on how many angels can stand on the head of a pin.

I ran across a book the other day which was used until recently by a very large and profitable organization. I think it has - its central organization is in, just a minute, don't tell me - its central organization, it's someplace over in Europe. A lot of our troops took it recently, but they left this central organization alone. I don't know why. Rome, that's right - Rome. I knew it was some town where the plumbing was sort of outside.

And they talk all about demon exorcism. But I assure you, they had to invent the demon before they could exorcise him.

There is a great deal of material of a discursive nature on whether or not man is going to go to heaven or going to go to hell. And a lot of attempts to put in his hands some sort of a road map that will take him to either place. But the key question has never been asked: Is there heaven? Is there hell?

I've been looking recently and I can't find them.

Imagine the disappointment of somebody who kicks off, well aware of having led an exemplary life, gets a knock all ready, and can't find any Pearly Gates. He would then feel he was rather lost. Just as you would feel lost if you were told to go to Brumpfville and nobody had ever built it. But that's no reason for an individual to believe he's wrong just because he can't find Brumpfville. The question is: Is there such a town?

Now if somebody wants to come up and say, "Look, here's a road map: You take two turns to the right; three good turns to the left; three pennies in the collection plate; and a couple of Ave Marias - and there's the Pearly Gates." If somebody comes up with that, I follow the directions, I arrive at the Pearly Gates; I'll go back and shake him by the hand.

But I've read several road maps on the subject recently, exteriorized rather neatly - went around. As near as I can find out somebody fell into one of the volcanoes out in the South Pacific or something one time, and got an idea that hell existed. But I don't know what kind of a shape a thetan would be in to be bothered by a little heat!

These road maps that man has been given to read all had a pitch. They had a pitch - they were to make him be good for somebody else's benefit but not his own. That is my opinion, for what it's worth. To make him produce for somebody else - not himself.

All of these road maps have been written out of a misguided idea that you have to have slaves. And I've seen slaves around, and I've never found them doing anything but giving trouble. Man cannot afford slavery. It isn't whether or not slavery is bad or slavery is good, or whether it's esoteric or against the Emancipation 24th Amendment, or the 29th, or which ever one that is.

That is not the point.

The point is, can people afford to have slavery in their vicinity? On a national level, can any nation afford to have a poor, bunged-up neighbor? No. Can any nation afford to wreck the government of another nation? No.

You know, he's got this pressure around his face, and so forth. [1] And boy, you could explain this to him like mad. You would explain it to him on a basis of demonology.

And you could make it so exciting and so significant, give the history of demons, their separate and various names, how they are all bossed by separate and particular archangels or arch devils, and how this has affected him in various ways and how to use them in various ways. And if you were convincing enough, he would lose that mass.[2] [3]

This is what's known as demon exorcism. If you pray hard enough, if you explain hard enough, if you yell hard enough or beat a tom-tom hard enough, you'll finally bang enough significance into this mass so he doesn't have to pull it up to his chest to look at it.

But of course he has to be in an hypnotic state to have this done to him, doesn't he? So this actually compounds the felony and that's why evaluation is bad. As I say, you could actually make somebody get rid of one of these masses, simply by putting enough significance into it for him. That's hypnotism. That's why people are willing to be hypnotized. They've got to have enough significance to explain why they're going through all this strain. They're standing in one place, they are working hard, there's got to be a reason why all the way along the line. They don't have a reason why. — L. Ron Hubbard
Lecture 6 May 1954: Anatomy of Universes

But Dianetics is also, to some, a strange and frightening thing. It invades and enlightens so many fields and activities that it cannot but search out and expose those who profit by ignorance and suppression and whose sole importance rests upon their ability to control other human beings. Where is the revolutionary leader, who by teachings of hate and prejudice would unseat a government, when his troops suddenly understand that the ideology he preaches is ancient and passe? Where is the society which existed to cure (but did not) some dread disease which Dianetics can nullify with ease? Where will such a society get more funds? And what of the practitioner, who studied twelve long years to become an expert in exorcising demons from the insane, when he is suddenly informed that a few weeks of study in Dianetics qualifies any intelligent man to do a much better-and much less harmful-job?