When you have hit somebody with the Mantra and will not back away from their seeing it, a silence begins. It is the silence every experienced questioner knows, be he priest or policeman.

When you hit near the nub, you can tell generally where that nub is. The person on the other side begins to say he already answered that when he hasn’t or that it has already been dealt with, which it hasn’t.

This last is a good trick, because your refusing to stop making the basic point, over and over and over, gives him a chance to say that, somewhere in all your repetitions and his attempts to get around the point, there was an answer.

It is important for you to know this is a regular trick.

But it is also an example of Mantra Thinking. When I bring it up specifically we all know that when the police get down to the real thing, a felon will stop talking. He at least gets surly, as if talking hurts him.

And now we get back to the nub of Mantra Thinking: We all know it, but we don’t THINK about it.

By now we all know that no one is going to deal with Mantra, because it is so clearly true. So by now we should be thinking a little about the nature of the silence — and the silencing — which every guilty person uses when he is caught red-handed.

Silence sometimes takes the form of a scream. On every University campus is a resident group of thugs who will shout down the Mantra or anything that Mommy Professor wants suppressed. Like Al Capone, Mommy Professor will disavow all knowledge and have an alibi.

As I say, people all know something but they never THINK about it. They bitch about their taxes being high and they know that anyone saying anything disagreeable to the establishment will be shouted down, but it never occurs to them that they SHOULDN’T be financing a so-called university where all dissent is shouted down.

It took me years to get the Mantra into the form in which any possible response was already covered in the Mantra itself. After a couple of forceful repeats showing that was said in the Mantra and we’ve all heard it a million times, he retreats into silence and trying to change the subject.

I repeat, this is the same silence you run into if you are questioning someone and begin to show you know they did it and how you can prove it.

Getting them to confess is the next step. But no one is going to confess when he has the whole backing of those in power behind his lie.

When the confessing begins, the whole game will be up.