Refund and Reparation

Once, a couple of years ago, I spent ten consecutive evenings in Washington, DC, talking to the superstrata of the upper crust of, as they humorously called it, mental healing—the best they had. We had a crew of auditors upstairs who were instructing them and processing them after they had listened to a little introductory talk. It was sort of an easy talk, like "The goal of life is survival. Man has several dynamics; he is not just interested in himself." I would get to that point every evening when I gave this talk—it was the same talk—and then they were supposed to go on and see how auditing was done. But they never moved out of the front room.

Every evening I had the argument "Well, how do you know that man is not only interested in himself? Now, according to Jung . . ." and I would get a bunch of unproven, unsubstantiated opinions which had nothing to do with phenomena. I would try to explain the difference between phenomena and opinion.

Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, at one of those meetings, turned around to a doctor of biology and said, "Please, Doctor, please tell me that a baby cannot hear in the womb!" So he told her and she was happy. Only he didn’t know. As a matter of fact, a doctor in practice who is on the ball knows very well that you can hear a baby cry through a stethoscope. Very often, before a baby is born, you can hear the baby cry without any stethoscope or anything else. Mothers are quite often very startled!

They never even knew of the phenomena of extended hearing. Any time an individual is very frightened, he gets extended hearing. You can take common hypnotism and you can extend a person’s hearing by hypnotic command to a point where he can hear a bus coming two or three blocks before you hear it coming—yet his hearing is normal under normal conditions.

You can check this up. You could set it up as exact experiments. This is one of the oldest tricks known to charlatans and quacks of the mind— extended hearing. But these people, the top of the field in "mental healing," didn’t know it. So at the end of that ten days I was sorry I had come to Washington.

I converted one man, who occasionally even today sends a preclear around. He recommends Dianetics to people. It is not for him, but he and I have an understanding. I happen to know more about mysticism than his mentor, Krishnamurti, knows; I am a better mystic than Krishnamurti. But I wasted those days and ever since that time I have just said, "Well, it’s wasted time," as far as talking to psychiatrists about Dianetics is concerned.