Refund and Reparation

A man is as well off as he can consider himself dangerous to his environment.

I will tell you a little short anecdote, which is quite amusing. Well, sometime early in 1945 I flunked my overseas examination. Well, I crawled around and felt sorry for myself, and the fact of it was that the Judo instructor there at the hospital brought up the idea that there was a shortage of people in the war—there was. So he kept up my training for me.

I think it was July 25th that I went down to Hollywood and three sailors with Petty Officers’ ratings accosted me on the street. They were drunk. They were out to kill officers. And the three of them tied into me. An unbelievable thing happened. One of them turned me around facing him while the second one took a heavy beer bottle to bring it down on my skull. I took the fellow who brought the beer bottle down, threw him over my head into this fellow, who went down and hit the side of a bumper. The beer bottle hit the pavement, broke the end off, and the other fellow reared up where he had been sitting on the running board of a car, and I put it in his face. That’s what you are trained to do.

Overnight, the wound in my side healed—overnight. They wouldn’t let me out at all, but I could get extended leave from the hospital. I went down to Hollywood and messed around at the studios. In the middle of all that I managed to complete all the researches which I’d stacked up and which had been interrupted by the war.

Steam. . . where had it come from? You get your teeth shoved in this way and that, and you develop a tremendous amount of inflow. And then one day you just outflow! The Chief Petty Officer in charge of the Shore Patrol had been sitting at his desk, telling me, “Under no circumstances should you have taken any action. You were trifling with your life.” Telling me what a good boy I ought to be. And then through the door he saw the Shore Patrol bring these people in. Of course, they were all saturated with blood, and they were all messed up. And he just shut up right then!

He was running the usual social dramatization—”You must protect yourself.” The society teaches you to hold in. All you have to do to somebody is to prevent him from outflowing to make him ill. And someday he decides to outflow. Not only the social world but the world of yourself can act to cause you to prevent outflow. Outflow is prevented by regret, it is prevented by all sorts of things. If one has something terrifically valuable he protects it—which is what? Prevent an inflow! Well, when you say prevent an inflow you might as well say prevent an outflow. If you hold flows from coming in toward you you might as well flow them in, because sooner or later that dike that you put up is going to burst. So you get these confounded actions in this universe composing a picture of tremendous inflow, not balanced at all by outflow.

What does this all add up to? Any time that you protect and defend, you are aiding and abetting all the structures which make up this universe.¹ The child who is taught to defend himself against these big, vicious automobiles some day turns out to be one of the lousiest drivers you ever saw, because he is taught to defend and protect. All you have to assume is that safety is desirable to have all of the ills of Pandora’s box swarm around your head.

Just what boxing glove can hit a thetan I wouldn’t know. A thetan has to mock himself up to be reachable.² You are dealing with the idea of what a person is supposed to feel as a result of, when it comes to inflows. And that’s just an idea. If a person over-defends himself through some exaggerated idea of pain, he will suffer the full consequences of that over-defense, just to the degree that anybody else over-defends himself to that degree.