Lecture: The Psychogalvanometer
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1952, 2 February
Document title: The Psychogalvanometer
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Professional Course
Location: Wichita, Kansas
Document ID: 5202C02A
Description: Hubbard gives an imaginary example of an argument his audience could have with a Catholic priest about the responsibility of God.
You are going to hear an awful lot of things. From time to time people are going to come in and they are going to tell you about “We have just made a four-headed Clear. We have just done this and done that.”
Don’t particularly snarl at these people and get angry and jump up and down and scream. This is one of the phenomena which you run into. You are going to run into this in the field. You are going to have people come in and say, “Oh, well, we’ve got a brand-new technique over here. All you do is stand the preclear on his head in the corner and pour water up his pant leg and he gets well.”
But we have now a very good map which you should know, and which you could point out very ably to anybody who wishes to follow the line of mysticism, metaphysics or the ecstatic religions of life. Only this is the complete map; don’t let them sell you a partial map — you have a better one, a nice complete map. If you want to argue in the field of religion, you can take that upper band of this map — you can take the upper strata of this Chart of Attitudes — and you can start arguing, if you want to go into this endless zero-equals-zero type of argument you get in religion (Did he? Didn’t he? Was he? Wasn’t he? Has he? Hasn’t he? — all that sort of thing); you can go into that strata if you want to, and if you do, you will find yourself very well equipped if you get the person to arguing on full responsibility.
“What is the responsibility of the individual within the full responsibility of God? What is the full responsibility of God?” A Catholic priest is very able at this. Tackle one sometime: You’ll make a fool out of him, because he can’t admit that you are fully responsible. And the second you point out evil in the world, he can’t admit then that God is fully responsible. So who is God? Obviously God is a little bit different than he has been painted.
“There’s full responsibility. Full responsibility is very logical; it has to be full responsibility. If God has full responsibility, then God doesn’t have any randomity — isn’t that right? Well, that’s right, he wouldn’t have any randomity. So, if God doesn’t have any randomity, that means that he has elected himself to be fully responsible for everything that goes on in the world. Therefore, he is fully responsible for the devil. Therefore, the acts of God are devilish!” No.
I did want to tell you about these things and I thought it was about time that we had a rundown on this score. I thought you might like to know a little bit more of how Dianetics fits into this and what it has to do with Dianetics. And I hope I have given you some information on this line you can use.
Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 2 February). The Psychogalvanometer. Professional Course, (5202C02A). Lecture conducted from Wichita, Kansas.