“Those effects which are resisted, one becomes. All right. Now, let’s take this cigarette habit. The fellow has all set it up automatically. He reaches in his pocket automatically, he pulls out a cigarette and smokes it. Now, he set this thing up automatically—he just does it, you see. …
“A habit: the definition of that is something one does without consulting his awareness, which means it’s a ridge. It’s something one does without consulting his awareness. So now you come along and you call his awareness to the fact that he has to stop it. You know, resist that effect, resist that effect, resist that—you just close terminals with it, bang. Now you make him a complete slave to the ridge. …
“How do you stop somebody from smoking a cigarette? You just make him obsessively, compulsively, but all on his own determinism, light cigarette after cigarette and puff them and pick them up and stuff them in his mouth and light them and smoke them down and stamp them out and light them and smoke them down and stamp them out, and after you’ve done it for fifteen, twenty minutes or a half an hour, the fellow won’t smoke cigarettes. Not because you made him sick or anything else. He has just taken the piece of machinery and been it. He has become the piece of machinery, so therefore he can handle it, so therefore he can throw it away. He isn’t resisting it anymore and after that he doesn’t have to smoke cigarettes.”
— L. Ron Hubbard
Excerpted from the lecture Talk on E-Meter delivered on 30 December 1953. This can be found in the Western Congress lectures. Track 11.
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