The new data which is coming out in these lectures is the resolution of the life-continuum phenomenon. How do you resolve it and what is it? This is new data and it is very workable.

Now I want to tell you a bit about Handbook for Preclears. A lot of work went into this handbook, not on the basis of how many hours it took to write it, but on the basis of a couple of years of trying to communicate these techniques. That is what is important.

If you are ever going to produce very many miracles, you are going to have to resolve the life continuum, because these people who are in terrible condition — even little children — have gratuitously and pleasantly taken upon themselves somebody else’s existence and have sought thus to resolve a failure on the part of somebody else. And a failure, of course, is simply a loss of one sort or another, whether by departure or loss of potential of some individual.

Self Analysis was a pilot project, but Self Analysis does not come to an end because this handbook comes out. If you take a case that is pretty neurotic and try to stuff this handbook at them it can be pretty bad. But if you can coax this case to use Self Analysis for a little while before you give him this handbook, you will find he will come far enough up the tone scale to work.

You take some little child and find them sick of something or other, and when you try to do something for them what do you find is the source of it? You find that they got sympathetic toward Gracie Ann. Gracie Ann was very ill and they were told a terrible sob story about Gracie Ann; maybe Gracie Ann was very sick and got in very bad condition. So the child went into sympathy and has stayed in bed, sick, for a year.

Self Analysis is an effort to connect the person with the material universe. You can read through Self Analysis and you won’t find anything but an effort to get the person reconnected with the material universe.

It sounds odd that anyone would do this. You have to work a few cases and maybe look at your own case a couple of times to find this. You will find that the incidents which do not easily give up are those incidents which are occasioned by this life-continuum phenomenon.

So, Handbook for Preclears would be too heavy for the neurotic or the psychotic but it will serve you above that level.

Valence shifting is actually no more and no less than this sort of a proposition. But valence shifting is not just into somebody else’s valence and then going on from there. A person can be in a multiple or complex valence situation. They can be holding on to many valences or they can be in no valence or they can be in a synthetic valence.

Now, when I am talking about a low-toned preclear I really mean low tones — maybe a 0.8 that isn’t spun in, where there is no volume on the 0.8 but he behaves pretty much along a 0.8 pattern. You take that individual and you find out he can’t quite click with some of the things in Hand book for Preclears: it means that either you stand there and audit him — monkey around, fool around, do the first four steps of the fifteen acts — or you shove Self Analysis at him. Let him work Self Analysis for a while. You don’t care how thoroughly he works it, one way or the other. It will do some interesting things for a case. It sort of gives him an orientation. As a matter of fact it will actually take the major apprehension off a case. It just sort of takes charge off the whole line. You are not asking the person to tackle any of his postulates; you are not asking him to tackle anything.

In the past you have been trying to shift people into their own valence by just telling them to shift into their own valence. The funny part of it is, they will, and then they can run the thing out. But if you shifted the preclear into his own valence and then you didn’t run it all the way out, he was in for trouble. So we will stop worrying about what the preclear is doing with regard to valence and start worrying about what the preclear is doing with regard to life continuum.

Something else interesting about Self Analysis is the fact that you as the auditor can use it, and you have almost an endless chain of Postulate Processing. Just recouch each of its phrases into a postulate: “Can you recall a time when . . . ?” and then make the next line into a postulate — ”Can you recall a time when you decided . . . ?” “. . . when you concluded . . . ?” “. . . when you evaluated . . . ?” — and ask him that. It turns in your hands — you can freely translate it — into Postulate Processing. But it is not headed at Postulate Processing. It is just a reorientation with the MEST universe. That is quite different from Hand book for Preclears.

If you run into some situation which is revealed to you by Effort Processing whereby the individual seems to be in some kind of a death, regardless of when or where or how, he is probably doing a life continuum for himself. Or if he is in a severe operation where he thinks he died, he will then do a life continuum for himself. But what is “himself”? It is a person being operated on. You can see how this would work.

This book in its present state is made to be handled by an auditor supervised preclear. It is your knowledge which backs up this book. The uncertainty which your preclear will feel at being turned adrift suddenly with something like this in his hands is overcome by the fact that you are interested.

So let’s use valence only as an estimate of the case. Stop working with it as a valence and start working with it in terms of life continuum.

Now, let’s say that you have a preclear who is well up the tone scale — say 1.6, and the fellow has arthritis and so forth — and you give him the handbook and say, “Well, you process it on out from here. Just follow this book out.” This fellow’s aberration is stopping motion, and you are going to have a little trouble with the case one way or the other. If you have too much trouble with the case, take this book away from him and give him Self Analysis. Tell him, “You work that for two weeks. Then everything will get a little bit better for you and then we’ll give you the handbook.”

If an individual is out of valence — if he is seeing himself, viewing himself, when he is returned to an incident, in other words — he is doing a life continuum for somebody. And very often when he is solidly inside himself, he may very well be doing a life continuum for himself. If everything is foggy and occluded and upset and so forth and yet he is still in his own valence, he is probably continuing his own life from some point which is in restimulation.

You can do that or you can just take this book and give him a little indoctrination. Don’t bother to argue with him. “Well, if you don’t accept that, that’s all right. That’s okay. Possibly you prefer something else, but this happens to work fairly well.” Talk to him kind of quietly and follow the first four steps of the fifteen acts. This will bring him up to a little higher point; it will get him squared around and up to where Dianetics has a little reality to him.

Theoretically, a person starts out in life with a free, clear control center. It starts getting aberrated relatively soon.

By the way, there is nothing like turning on a good strong somatic to give people an idea of reality. The best method I know of turning on a strong somatic with a 1.5 or a 1.6 or a 1.7 — an arthritic — is to get them to get the feel of the atmosphere. Draw their attention to a knee or something and get them to get the feel of the atmosphere on that knee and various atmospheres — various counter-emotions are what you are asking them to feel — until you find some sympathy or some anger or something of the sort on that area, and the somatic will turn on.

There is material on record which you don’t have to bring up to your preclears or really even mention in public, merely because if you want to prove it you have to throw somebody down on the couch, and that is too much work. They don’t believe it. Just don’t incite people’s incredulity by throwing a lot of odds and ends of strange phenomena at them. You can throw some very interesting phenomena at them without doing that. Just show them themselves — that is a shocker to most people. Their present-time self is enough phenomena to rock them, because they aren’t looking at the present-time self. They are not solving their problems in any way, shape or form, usually, in present time. They are trying to solve them in the future or the past. Their lives are built of straw, and from straw to straw there is a large bridge of “if.”

This counter-emotion is very interesting stuff, because it sort of seizes up somebody else’s facsimile. The counter-emotion comes in and seizes up this particular engram. It is held there by the individual but it is apparently seized up by somebody else’s emotion. So that is a very nice tnethod.

This life continuum can actually begin with conception. Something bad happens during conception or the first mitosis, and the person begins to continue his life from there. So you can get a life continuum from an engram. That is the easy case. You run it out and he is in fine shape.

Now, when you get a low-toned case you don’t give them the handbook. You could give them Self Analysis. If they don’t carry through with Self Analysis, you give them the first four acts of Hand book for Preclears yourself and build them up just a little bit, show them there is some reality to it, and then give them the handbook.

That happens every once in a while — in fact, very frequently. Just a little bit of straight processing with the auditor doing no thinking, and all of a sudden this case is back to battery and doing beautifully. What the auditor has done is resolve the preclear’s life continuum of himself, where his life was interrupted by some major incident, regardless of where that incident was on the track. It can even be that the individual is hung up in one of his own past lives. But the usual thing is that a person does a life continuum and becomes aberrated thereby.

In other words, you can give them this book at any stage that they are ready for it. And you will have some preclears who will be ready to handle the book immediately, so you just give them the book.

Now, you can process this person, you can make him happier, you can make him more successful and everything else, but it is something like doing a dance with the real aberration unless the life continuum is resolved. It wouldn’t matter how long you processed him; you would still be doing a dance with the real aberration. It would still be there. What you would have done is shape him up to a point where he could suffer it or bear it. Of course, he would come up to a point where he could suffer it or bear it almost immediately if you could resolve it. That thing — the real aberration — is the life continuum.

Then you call them and talk to them every once in a while. You keep expressing interest in their case. You keep pushing them along. You can even take this book and give assignments in it if you want to. Take a blue pencil and go over it with them and sit there and say, “Well, you go from this page to this and I’ll see you Wednesday,” and so on. You can use any trick you want to pull in order to get a person rolling on it.

You start by running all the sympathy on a case. There are going to be failures and deaths on the part of other people which show up. You just start running sympathy. Start scanning the feeling of sympathy in general, and the person will all of a sudden start pinning it down here and pinning it down there and he will begin to remember a lot of things in his life that he didn’t remember before. Then you run regret, or you take up approval — the desire for approval or giving approval.

You will find occasionally that somebody will pick up this book and what he runs into will be too hot to handle. He will start running “people who enforced agreement upon you” — something that light — and all of a sudden he will say, “Yipe! I don’t want to go any further.”

An individual often has a visio that keeps popping up. Sometimes he gets them while he is asleep and sometimes while he is awake. But if he has some sort of a visio that keeps appearing — any visio (usually it is a still visio or it is too small or something of the sort) — just run regret on it.

You call him up on Wednesday and say, “How far have you gotten with this book?”

He gets a visio of a girl dancing: she is in a dancing position, only she is stopped or something like that, or she might even be moving a little bit; it doesn’t matter. You say, “Well, scan some regret off of it.”

“Well, I didn’t get very far. I was busy. I had to go to the store. Reginald got sick. Something happened.” You go over and you take a look at the book. Go over and call on him and start in again. Find what he wrote in it. He is hung up someplace.

He says, “Why? This is obviously a ballet I attended — Swan Lake — and it’s a very pretty ballet and I enjoyed it.” “Scan regret off of it.” So he says, “All right,” and he scans. Then all of a sudden he sobs, “I killed my older sister!” “Well, how did you get there?” He remembers his older sister as having studied ballet. Does this make you a smart auditor!

Now, getting people started is the most interesting manifestation of the book. Once you get them started they will roll, because it will get interesting to them. This book is much more interesting to follow than Self Analysis as far as its processes are concerned, as you may already have discovered.

Now, if he can’t get a visio on somebody he knows he knew, scan regret — just that: regret, regret, regret. If he gets a visio, scan regret. All of a sudden the computation of the case will fall into your lap. This is a very interesting, easy technique.

You can make a rule, then, that the book should be presented to the preclear at the time the preclear is ready to pursue his case in the light of the book. Your role as an auditor is to judge when he is ready and to bring him up to a point where he will be. You might be able to do that in ten minutes and you might be able to do that in five hours. Remember, the length of time that it takes to bring an individual out of an inaccessible state into an accessible state is not included in any time estimates on this book. Any time estimates so far used on this book include only accessible cases. So sometimes you may have to spend two or three weeks fooling around with somebody to bring him out of a psychotic state, the way things are now. You might have to do that. It would be regrettable if you did, but you should be prepared to do so.

The next thing, after you start getting regret, is you will find that there is blame to be found on it. That is the second step: there is blame. So you say, “All right, let’s scan some blame off this.” “Well, I don’t blame myself for anything about this.” “Just scan some blame.” “But I don’t blame myself! I know I don’t blame myself!” “Please scan blame on this; just scan the feeling of blame off of this.”

Now, this book can be used, actually, with you just sitting there reading it, asking the questions directly out of it, getting them answered and filling it in. If you are auditing a blind man, that is what you will be doing up to the moment when you are satisfied that he is going to roll all right. Then you give it to his wife or somebody else and you get them to read the questions to him, making sure there is no emotional conflict in that auditor-preclear group and making very sure that the person who is reading this book to the preclear and getting the questions and letting him go through these things won’t take any liberties with it and will call you if anything goes wrong. This is an effort to take the load off your shoulders, not an effort to put a load on the preclear.

“Oh, yes. If I hadn’t taken the car that night, why, they would have been able to have gotten to the doctor and my little brother wouldn’t have died.”

It says right in the front of the book that there are several ways of handling it — four ways. One way is as a workbook to be used wholly by the auditor on the preclear. You actually would just sit there and all you would have to do is go through these steps: ask the questions when they are asked, explain things when the preclear doesn’t understand them, list these people all the way through, ask him to scan where he is supposed to be scanning and so forth. It is just a complete book of auditing.

That is a lot of horsefeathers, by the way. A person will find some cockeyed rationalization and then afterwards hold himself responsible for this life not having been continued, and he will promptly take over the aberrations and conclude the life. That is to say, he will keep it alive.

You as an auditor, from your experience and so forth, might suddenly see that this case is ready to run something in advance of what he is running, because this is for an average case. Make sure that your judgment is good. You don’t want to dive a 0.5 into a grief charge and expect him to run it, because a 0.5, being in grief, will not erase a grief charge. It requires a different point on the tone scale to get an erasure or a relief or a release.

When he starts blaming himself, that is in the last stages because “himself” is somebody different than “I.” When he starts blaming himself for it you will find him in the last stages of dropping down the tone scale.

You might all of a sudden find this individual way up ahead of you. All of a sudden you have gotten the computation on his case and he is just running like wildfire. You start to ask him to scan the various buttons, and you just grab hold of the chart real quick and get him scanning buttons on various dynamics. Suddenly he hits the central computation on the case of who he is being the life continuum for, so you run the sympathy off that and the preclear is off to the races. You can expect a case to do that, so you should use judgment in connection with this book.

You can actually pick up the point in any person’s life where for the first time he really actively blamed himself. It was at that moment he broke from being fairly sane to being not too well off. That was the instant, and it happens all in an instant in any man’s life. It can get progressively worse with future blames, but you can find the first time he blamed himself as a sort of a break in a person’s life from a free, happy existence.

It might even be of benefit occasionally to run an engram. The fellow is sitting in one, he seems to want to run one and there it is — run it! But you wouldn’t charge him into something heavy. This book will lead him into all the heavy charges you want.

Now, you will think you have found the time; maybe it was ten years ago. And then you will think you have found the time again; maybe that was fifteen years ago. Then you will get another time when he blamed himself, and that was twenty-three years ago. But this preclear is only twenty-six, and you say, “What goes on here?” Then all of a sudden it turns out that the little dog who ran across the street while he was sitting in his baby buggy got killed, and it was his fault because he should have yelled! He didn’t yell and therefore the dog died — something weird like this.

There is a section in this book that tells the preclear how to run his own grief charges. That is an interesting one. You are liable to find your preclear fouled up like fire drilll on it. All you have to do, though, is just probe around with enough regret and blame and life continuum until all of a sudden the charge blows anyhow. He is liable to bog on these grief charges. People run away from grief and they run away from fear charges — particularly from fear charges — so you have to watch the person. But you as an auditor using this book should also be perfectly competent to use your own judgment with regard to its processes, because this book is designed to keep the preclear from getting into trouble, and it is designed in such a way that it fits, more or less, the average case.

He is already in pretty bad shape if he really starts blaming himself that early. He has had a rough prenatal and a lot of other things.

The next method of using the book would be as a homework book to be given the preclear for use between sessions. You just go into Advanced Procedure. You are giving this preclear a thirty-six-hour intensive, and maybe you aren’t giving it as an intensive in a week; maybe this preclear is getting audited at the rate of four or five hours a week or something like that. You can space it out a little bit. Give him the workbook between sessions. Just tell him it is a workbook and say, “Well, when you come back for your next session, have this thing finished up to such and such a point.”

What is this thing we are monkeyihg with here, life continuum? You can see that it exists. You can put your hands on almost any preclear and you will find some semblance of it. You can look into your own case and find that there is something in your own case that demonstrates you to be continuing the goals, fears and identity of somebody else. How come? And particularly, how would you be able to undo this thing?

Regardless of where the preclear is in this book, you can just go right on along with Advanced Procedure as it is in Advanced Procedure and Axioms. It would really produce some fast processing if you were doing this double on him. But this person isn’t getting just a thirty-sixhour intensive. If you are giving him thirty-six hours of auditing and he is doing this book too, I don’t know where he would land. (And if you audit him wrong, the book will also unbog him ! )

The technique I have given you — run regret and run blame — does remarkably well. If you just do that you will be all right. But there is a better one — a much better one. It has to do with the emotional curve, the use of the emotional curve.

The third method to use is the one that I really started out to describe. You get the fellow to a point where you think it is safe to turn him loose; that might be in ten minutes or it might be in ten hours. At the end of this time you give him this workbook and you keep checking with him then by phone or even by house call to make sure he is going on along the line with this workbook and where he is getting to.

I spoke earlier about having decided to look for a solution of interpersonal relationships and how I found this sudden drop of the emotional curve.

Now, when he gets over to Act Ten it says “service facsimile,” but for your benefit, what that really means is this is where you take a hand as an auditor and make sure his case is fairly straight and that he has missed nothing, and you do some of the auditing otherwise. Because you may find he has already blown his service facsimile and you also may find he has accumulated twelve more.

Pain can be associated with your little trick of making somebody else do a dive from happiness down to sadness or something of the sort, and you can get blame for a somatic or something mixed up in making a person get that drop. You say, “You know that person you were trying to help — that person who had that bad stomach somatic, the anxiety-stomach somatic, you were trying to help? And you know, he felt so well, he felt fine?” The fellow says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And the last method is as a processing manual used wholly by the preclear without an auditor. This would take a pretty intelligent person. It would take somebody who was fairly savvy on the subject of Dianetics. You give him the book, he rolls on the book and he can push himself through.

You say, “Well, he’s got it back and it’s all occluded now and nobody can get to it.” Do that and you will give the fellow the stomach somatic. If you want to experiment with this, you can see it. He will actually pick up a counter-effort of his own and substitute it.

This has the particular benefit of taking care of an isolated auditor. And it also breaks down the old problem of altitude as far as the auditor is concerned, because when an auditor gets back in an area and there are only two auditors in the area, will they audit each other? No, they won’t. They will go audit themselves a flock of preclears apiece, or if they do audit each other they will knock off auditing the preclears. Something will go wrong with the process.

How does he do this? By doing this he evidently thinks that he can alleviate this other person. The whole field of faith healing was based on this premise.

One of the first goals of this book, in its creation, was breaking up the cases of the auditors themselves and resolving those cases. There isn’t any reason in the world why you as an auditor can’t tear through this book and get yourself really up on top of the thing, particularly if you use this new section on life continuum. I am going to turn that out on mimeograph and we will send it out to you so that you will have a set of questions on life continuum. But I will show you that set of questions in just a couple of moments so that you won’t lose out on it, because you will be wanting to use it on preclears.

Let me tell you how to do faith healing; there is no trick to it — but it doesn’t work. You take some fellow who has epiglutis of the esophagus or something. The best way to do it, if you really want to do it well, is you put your hand on him and hypnotize him — tactilecommunication hypnosis or something of the sort — and then you say, “Now, you can feel that pain coming off into my hand. The area is getting warmer and warmer and warmer and the pain is coming off into my hand,” and so on. He will actually feel this area getting warmer and warmer, and then you say, “All right, (snap!) it’s gone.” You have given him a somatic shutoff; that is what you have done. The funny part of it is, they are sometimes happier and so on.

Now, this book can also be handed over to somebody to read to another person, as I just mentioned. You could really do a nice trick with this book. You could get a lot of people into class as auditors’ aides; you could actually advertise for auditors’ aides to help polio victims amongst children and get them to come in and give them two or three little evening classes and say, “This is how you do it. And you call for Papa if you strike a bad snag.” You would have located already quite a few polio cases — children, in other words — and you want these people to go to a hospital or go to a home and see that the child understands and performs the various functions of this book. They could just sit there and read the book and keep track of the case and be there all the time and so on. If they got in trouble they would call you. And s you would tell them not to try to get adventurous about the situation. They would have the security of knowing there is somebody behind them who knows.

Of course, the real way you do faith healing is to be up over top static and into some other field or someplace, and you come along and see somebody lying there in horrible shape and you say, “Whhhsskt!” and — pop! — they are in beautiful shape. That would be the technical and theoretical way of doing it. We aren’t quite up to that point. But when we get up there, I’ll tell you.

There are probably many more uses than that. Somebody was talking about an armed-services project. We will have to make another call on that, because what happened was, again, a shortage of auditor talent. Terrific indoctrination evidently had to be done, so I said, “No, when the book comes out, we’ll get the book supervised through and nobody will be arguing about it.” That was one of the reasons the book had to be done this way.

Anyway, this mechanism of life continuum is easily explained out of the phenomena of survival and full responsibility.

Another thing about this book: If you are going into a specialized type of case and you are going to have lots of these cases, we can print up this book so it says it resolves that case, give it a new cover and give it a new introduction. We can stress “bingoitis” or whatever you have decided to treat as a specialized line. Or for the armed forces, I could give out a copy of this book that would say its name is Survival Under Fire. Each and every time it is still Dianetics, but you as an auditor can say, “Well, it’s especially adapted to your case.” This solves the panacea problem: people don’t want to believe that they are that simple, that they can be cured up by one thing; they want to be known as difficult individuals.

Now, if you look in Advanced Procedure and Axioms, you will find that every individual potentially considers himself responsible or is responsible for everything on every dynamic that exists in the whole universe, including Alpha Centauri and your glasses. And as he comes down the tone scale, he is electing out more and more and more things for which he is not responsible, until he gets to the bottom of the tone scale when he is not responsible for anything, including himself, at which moment he is dead. Do you see what that gradient scale is? He actually starts in with this tremendous view and then he starts losing parts of it.

Those are the various usages and you can think up a lot more. This gives you a considerable fund of data concerning the use of this book. And where you find people are skidding or they get upset by it or it needs further resolution, and in particular when you have to answer the same question over and over and over, for heaven’s sake write me a letter about it. I will keep a summation of these things so that this book can do a natural evolution.

That is full responsibility. The chart in the first book showed infinite survival as being hightoned. How right can you be? You know that if you were completely, ultimately, absolutely right, the universe would survive forever. And if any person were completely, utterly, entirely wrong, probably we would all vanish. This is the ridiculousness, the reductio ad absurdum, of the gradient scale. It says that absolute right means infinite survival clear across the boards for everything. That is how right a person would have to be to be absolutely right. The moment anybody reached that point, the whole thing would go into a static state. Let’s hope they don’t.

Now, you want these books to throw away. You want these books to be used, written in, damaged, chewed up, and you want to pick them up when you have finished a case. You want to pick them up and look them over; you might learn something from them one way or the other. And if the individual says “Well, an awful lot of information is in there that I wouldn’t want you to know about,” you say, “Oh boy, how many pages did he miss?” You say, “Well, there happens to be an Act Sixteen and that means go back through it again. Here — there is a button you need to run that’s called hide.”

And then down at the wrong end, if a person were completely wrong, theoretically everything would collapse. Those are the two unattainable, opposite poles.

This book is a destructible item. It is built to be that way. And it is also built to stay in your hands on a channel and come back to you and be destroyed.

Up at the top of infinite survival, it says if you are going to survive infinitely then you have to take the responsibility for everything. There is no question about that, simply because of this: Your survival is interdependent with all other survivals, and if you start knocking out everything here and there broadly and telling it not to survive and telling something else not to survive and so on, you keep cutting down your own survival. Do not send to find for whom the bell tolls — it’s ringing for you, bud!

You keep handing this out. When you hand this book out, you make sure you know to whom it is handed and what was wrong with the person when you handed it to him and what his name and address was. And when you hand it out, hand it out as a professional action. Don’t say “Well, here now, Bill, I think there is something here that could do you a little bit of good. You might look into it.”

So, we have this infinite scale, and as a person comes down this scale from complete survival he is starting to drop down also from complete responsibility. Complete responsibility includes complete cause also — he considers himself the cause of these things.

No, you tell him firmly, “You want to be audited? Here. Name, address, telephone number. Yes, we’ll fix up a card for you and so forth. Here you are.”

Now, the dignity of a small baby is interesting to observe. People come along and they say “Coochy-coo” and so forth, and the baby looks at them and he doesn’t like it. If you have been back there on the time track you might have noticed the feeling of dignity — way up the tone scale — of a little baby.

This book is to be handed out as a professional action. Do you get the idea? Because this book is auditing. This is auditing. It is not something that tells him about Dianetics. If he wants something that tells him about Dianetics, there is Self Analysis, and also the Foundation can produce tons of small descriptive leaflets.

People maul them around and the babies giggle and they laugh — that is to be obliging. After a while they become human.

I begin to wonder sometimes if anybody gets very busy in this business on some kind of an idea line. I got a cockeyed idea not too long ago, and I walked two blocks in each of two towns, just telling everybody I met who was obviously in horrible condition (it didn’t matter whether it was an old lady in a wheelchair, a young girl on crutches, a blind man carrying a cup — didn’t matter what), “Say, have you been down to the Foundation?” They would say, “What are you talking about?”

But the funny part of it is, the trouble a baby has is simply that he is having a little bit of difficulty with his motor-control panel. He is like somebody who has suddenly been put into a big bomber with eight engines, each one with separate throttles, and there are fuel-mixture controls and buttons, wheels, meters and gauge-s all over the place. It is terrific stuff. If anybody suddenly put you out in one of these B-47s and said “Well, take it out and land it again,” you would be in about the same fix as a baby. It is not that the baby is incapable; it is just that the baby is not articulating and he is not in control of the engine yet to any marked degree.

“Well, I just wanted to know. You know, they can probably do something for you.”

But he does have this tremendous dignity. And if you take a look at a little child of three or four who is running around the neighborhood and all of a sudden he sees a black wreath on a door, you will find him wondering what he did to cause this. It isn’t that his parents have beaten his head in and given him an aberration on the fact that he is to blame for everything ; don ‘t try to answer it that way, because it doesn’t answer that way. He wonders who it was, what he did or what it was all about, and if this happens to be a relative of a playfellow. If it is, he will try to pick up something to support this playfellow — in other words, an indirect method of bringing that relative back to life. It is a fascinating business. You will find some very basic aberrations on the track through having done this.

“Something for what?”

This is full responsibility; here is full survival. What is regret? Regret is simply an effort to take something out of the time stream — “I’m sorry it happened. I wish it hadn’t happened.” That is all it is. “I’m sorry it happened. I wish it hadn’t occurred.” Very heavy regret, of course, moves the incident out of contact, and the more you regret it, the more it goes out of contact.

“Well, for your condition — you don’t look like you are in too good shape.”

Regret is a mechanism of abdication of the post of great responsibility. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” Why do you wish it hadn’t happened? Because that cuts down your full responsibility. You weren’t able to control, you think, that particular little segment of existence, so you regret it and it goes out of existence. That is the emotion of regret.

“Well, I’m not. Where? Where did you say?”

Now, let’s look at survival and let’s look at approval. What is approval? Way up on top of the tone scale a person doesn’t hand out approval and doesn’t receive approval. But as you get down into action, you will find that an individual, still very high on the tone scale, is handing out approval to people. He is approving of this one and he is approving of that one and so forth. He doesn’t expect anything back or have any back channel on it or anything of the sort. But after a while, he gets into a co-approval basis. We used to call them “mutual admiration societies.” By this time the person is getting down the tone scale pretty far. After a while he has to have approval from others. And then he loses approval from somebody and he starts out the bottom.

“Down at the Foundation in Wichita.”

What is approval? We could print up a license to survive: “You, John Jones, this umpteenth date of something or other, are hereby granted a license to survive. Signed, Foundation.” And it would be very amazing, but if we put those in the window of the Foundation and said that anybody could have one merely by coming in, I am afraid we would not be able to keep up supplying them. I am afraid we couldn’t.

But the point is, I was trying to find if these people were alert and interested. And a lot of them practically climbed over the top of me. That is very interesting, be cause you c ou ld open an office and you could go down the street and just hand out a little card that says “Dianetics” with a description on the back of it and your name and address. You could just say to the person, “How do you feel today?”

People wouldn’t quite know why they wanted this; they would think it would be a good gag and everything else. They would show it around to their friends as a joke, and their friends would say, “Ho-ho. (Don’t quite see what’s funny about it — I haven’t got one.)”

The fellow, rolling along in his wheelchair or something of the sort, would be startled: “I don’t feel too good.”

Approval is a license to survive. And you are either not caring whether you have a license or not, which is way up on top; or you are issuing licenses to survive, which is as you come down the tone scale; or you have to exchange licenses, or you have to receive licenses to survive. When you are way down the tone scale you have to have licenses from various people to survive.

“Well, maybe we can do something about it. A lot of cases like yours get handled all right, and so on. If you want to take a crack at it, okay; come down and see me at this address.” Don’t make any point of it. Just give him the address.

You have possibly wondered why it is that some poor little child is so snarled up about having been such a pain and terror to his mother when he was born. There is regret on this and there is sympathy and there is blame, self-blame and everything else. This is a rough deal. The little child caused his mother all this trouble — she tells him about it every day — and we wonder why he is so snarled up.

There may be health sitting in that. He doesn’t know it. On the surface he thinks he wants to be healthy, and when you tackle his case, you will find it is a life continuum and he doesn’t want to give it up. But that is something you resolve afterwards.

Mama is insisting on something that isn’t really true: she was the sole cause of his survival; therefore she licensed him to survive! This is not true. So he has to pay attention to his licenser as a licensee. Only he is running on a very, very limited ticket. “You can’t go here, you can’t do this, you must do that, you can’t eat this, you must wear that, you must get up, you must go to bed” — he has a very limited ticket. It says “180-degree turns around front yard only.” That is its outermost limit. And some of these tickets say “Limited to 360-degree turns in living room and bedroom — no passengers.”

Now, you don’t have to spend seven and a half hours doing something or other for him: You give him a book. You say, “Well, go on home and read it. What’s your name, phone number and so on? I’ll just keep a check on your case.” And you do. You keep a check on that case as he goes on through.

Right to survive — that is approval. If you think you have to have approval from anybody under the sun, then you think you have to be granted a right to survive by somebody. The funny part of it is, you are the only licensee and the only licenser to you.

And he says, “Well, what’s it going to cost me?”

Look this thing over and you will find out that these situations come up along the line, and the way a person gets into this situation is not by being told or hammered into believing that he has to have this. There must be something actual and real for which the individual blames himself prior to being challenged on it. In other words, he has to elect to blame himself or blame something else first, before he starts asking for a license to survive.

You can always tell him, “Nothing, but if it helps you, if you think it helps you, you can make a contribution.”

After a person has done something wrong to another individual he will slide off into sympathy. He has hurt another individual in some way, and if he does it and fails — that is to say, if he hurts somebody and then he looks at them and sees they are hurt (he realizes he has failed in some degree at that moment) — he feels sympathy.

It is a very funny thing, but an individual will usually contribute very heavily if he thinks he is going to help somebody else. He won’t contribute because he has been helped, so much. So you can come around after you know darn well that he is better, and you can simply ask him if he would like to pay for the processing of Mary Agnes Snide who lives down the block from him. It happens to cost $150 to process Mary Agnes, and if he thinks he was helped by it or something of the sort, let him pay for Mary Agnes’s work. You can actually go into action like this.

You want to know what is behind sympathy? You go all the way back down the track and you will find an overt actl against that dynamic — somebody just being mean as the devil. You find somebody who is very sympathetic about dogs, who has a big grief charge about dogs, and you go back and you will find this person at five, six, seven years of age kicking their slats in, teasing them — beating up dogs.

One of the tough jobs out in the field is finding preclears. A lot of people sit around and no preclears show up. They even sweep off the front porch, but they don’t put out any sign; that is not “ethical.” (“Ethics” is whether you advertise for doing nothing, or not advertise for doing nothing! That is American Medical Association ethics.) The only fault that has ever been found concerning Dianetic ethics was the fact that somebody occasionally advertises in Dianetics. And you can’t have that sort of thing going on, because those doctors’ shops would just be wide open with the wind and dust blowing through them if you started advertising! Now, I want to give you the life-continuum setup for this book.

Then one day he actually hurt a dog and the dog suddenly looked pathetic to him and he felt a great deal of sympathy for this dog. After that he was fond of dogs, he protected dogs, he worked with dogs; he became very quiet about the whole deal. And then one day a dog died on him. He did a life continuum for dogs after that. He will have some habit or some activity in his actions which will be a dog’s.

The first part of it is you ask the individual, “Who is dead?” And we have ten blank spaces, numbered, for him to write down who is dead. There are blank spaces sitting in front of him so he has to fill in something. After he gets through filling in all these things and he says, “Well, there aren’t any more,” your next column is “What is dead?” There are ten blank spaces, and you tell him this is animals or pets, younger children, babies — anything like this. And you get him to fill out “What is dead?”

A person is perfectly free to do all the overt acts in the world, so long as he doesn’t fail. If he fails, he has extended an actiue sphere of responsibility.

Now you have got him set up with two columns, at which time you want him to describe the goals and the fears and the conditions of the first one of “Who is dead?” And you have ten blank spaces each for goals, conditions and fears for number one of “Who is dead?” In other words, make him completely delineate number one of “Who is dead?” on the goals of number one and the conditions of number one and the fears of number one. That gives you three columns for number one with ten entries for each column.

Now, I want you to get the difference between full responsibility and active responsibility. Full responsibility is all the way up at the top of the tone scale. You have to step down from it to go into action; you have to select something out. “I am responsible; I’m going to do something about it.” That is down the tone scale but it is not an undesirable level. You have to do that to get into the 20.0 band. You have to come down the scale because you are too static when you just say “I’m responsible.” Trucks are colliding with little children and typhoid is sweeping through the land and the Democrats are about to get into office again — all of these cataclysms are going on and the person just benignly says, “Yes, I am responsible.”

You make up the same thing for number two, the same thing for number three, the same thing for number four and so on up to ten.

He has to come down the tone scale before he wants to get in there and stop these epidemics and straighten out the children and so forth. As a matter of fact, the world wouldn’t run at all if everybody insisted on being up at the top static of full responsibility. That is just ideal, not practical.

He is sure going to get tired of bodies before he is through.

Now, you come down from that level and you go into action with your responsibility. The second you go into your action on your responsibility, you start cutting out segments for which you are responsible and you start blaming these things. “I’m not responsible for it — you are the cause of it, I’m not,” “I’m to blame. It was nobody’s fault but my own” — all this kind of stuff.

Now you take “What is dead?” — goals of, conditions of, fears of: ten entries each for goals, for conditions and for fears of every item under “What is dead?” — everything that has died in his life.

That is cause and effect in action. A person is assigning cause to other things besides himself. The second he does this he is not responsible for these things and he gets badly off.

I will give you a fast review on this: You have a column that says “Who is dead?” He lists as many people as he can think of in his life who are dead, whether related to him or not. Then you make up a column for “What is dead?” — you might say neuter-gendered. And then you make up three columns for number one of “Who’s dead?” three columns for number two of “Who is dead?” three columns for number three and so on. Then you go into “What is dead?” — three columns for number one, three columns for number two, three columns for number three and so on.

Now, when a person has sinned against the human race in some fashion or other, he will go into sympathy with the people he feels he has hurt.

When you have all that done, you have your next one: “Who failed?” “What failed?” And you have him fill in the ten blank spaces for each. He has to give you a list of at least ten people that failed. On “What failed?” these are neuter objects, including machines.

By the way, that is a wonderful word — sinned — isn’t it? There actually is a sin: the sin is failing. Just don’t fail. Go out and chop up bodies and stuff them in trunks, but don’t fail! And if you do fail, run it out!

Now, you break these down the same way — goals of, conditions of and fears of. You give him a whole sheaf on that: for number one he has to make out all three columns, and so on. He has to write all this stuff down.

An individual riding at 20.0 is not fully responsible because he has elected things out so that he can have action.

It doesn’t matter whether the people he lists are alive or dead — anybody who failed, alive or dead. He will interpret it this way: He will find somebody who is dead and he will get one life continuum on this individual at the time that this individual dies. But then after he has got that one a little bit he will all of a sudden remember a time when this individual failed, too. And he gets another life continuum from that failure. He can get really loused up. Maybe this happened ten years before the individual died, and the individual was entirely different before he failed than he was after he failed. So for ten years after the failure this preclear is keeping on for the failed person, then all of a sudden he has to keep on for the dead person.

I want to show you something about randomity and action. It ties in with this tone scale. Some people may have had a little difficulty with the Axioms in telling what randomity is. So I will ask you to imagine a rubber ball and to set this rubber ball very neatly on a table, and you can look at that rubber ball. Go ahead, look at the rubber ball.

Next, you go through the same routine on “Who departed?” and “What departed?” By the way, you will get all his repossessed cars, wives, incometax payments — all kinds of things.

The second that you are asked to look at something which is apparently static, you start up your own randomity, don’t you? There is no motion in that rubber ball. It is just sitting there. You become bored with it; that is the emotion that goes along with it. You could sit and contemplate one rubber ball or something of the sort for just so long without saying “Tsk! So what?”

Now we go into this on the other side of the ledger. The first one on this is “Who won?” — ten people who won. By golly, it will sometimes really try a fellow’s imagination. But this winning category should be the second group. You should have the dead group first and then this theta group second.

Then we take this same rubber ball and I start bouncing it and I say, “Now, watch this rubber ball bouncing.” I just start bouncing it very regularly. You watch that rubber ball bouncing just so long before you say “So what?” That is a different kind of a static; that is repetitive motion which becomes monotonous.

It should be “Who won?” and “What won?” A lot of preclears will answer this stuff very interestingly, because they will start listing what won over them — not as a life continuum or anything of the sort. They will start listing things like “Well, his name was, I think, Billy, and he beat my skull in.”

Now, if I were to bounce the rubber ball a little more erratically, or if I were to take three rubber balls and bounce them around, you would say “Very interesting.” That is randomity — erratic motion.

The next set is “Who arrived?” because every time an individual fails, he starts up in tone again when somebody else arrives, and that person will be an ally. You can really build up a fellow’s memory — his memory will really start functioning — if you ask him this question: “Who arrived?”

The optimum level of erratic motion has on its near side minus motion and it has on its other side plus motion.

So, you take up those two categories: “Who departed?” and “What departed?” is the old one; its comparative level is “Who arrived?” and “What arrived?” With these, just as with the others, you have him write down goals of, conditions of and fears of — three columns for each entry on those.

For instance, I could hit this rubber ball and have it shoot off across the room and I would have to go over and pick up the rubber ball and bring it back. Then I could hit the rubber ball again and it would fly out in another direction. That would be too much randomity; it would be too erratic. So it wouldn’t be under control.

You can make these out on sheets for a preclear or you can simply ask and straightwire the preclear. This is the way you would make it up with a mimeo sheet or something.

Supposing I put the rubber ball down and just left it: there is not enough motion. That is minus randomity. Do you see the emotional reaction? There has to be some controlled, eccentric action in motion — relatively controlled — in order to hold your attention. That is what you desire from life.

You do it just a little differently if you are straightwiring him. You have these categories, you ask them in routine order and you carry a tally sheet. You say, “Who’s dead?”

Monotony is, to you, death. It is a static, and a static is either something still or just a repetitive motion — so repetitive that it becomes, in that regard, utterly inane.

He tells you, “Grandpa.” So you get the goals, conditions and fears of Grandpa. You go ahead and work it out right there. Run its emotional curve, run some regret, run some blame — run anything — in order to discover if there is any continuum on Grandfather’s death. That is what you do if you are auditing him personally.

A person who goes to work from nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, off on Saturday, off on Sunday, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, off on Saturday, off on Sunday — the same thing week after week, particularly if every Sunday afternoon he goes to the same theater to see a movie — after a while becomes bored.

Then you take number two on that category, then number three and so on. You exhaust “Who is dead?” as a life continuum. You just work each one of those as a life continuum till you get emotional curve enough, you get the blame, you get the regret — all this stuff — off the line on this life continuum. Just work it out right there. You find out “Who is dead?” and go straight across the boards with it, asking these questions. And you just get the deaths off the case.

Now, the oddity of it is that individuals have different tolerances for randomity. This nine-tofive deal, to many people, appears to be even adventurous. You may have stood and watched something like a subwaytrain or bus driver and said, “How can that man go to the other end of the run and turn around and come back, and then turn around and go back, and keep it up for sixty years or thirty years or something like that?” You know you couldn’t do it.

This comes up in the area of sympathy in this book, in Act Eleven. You still have all the sympathy to run, but right in that same section will be this life-continuum proposition. That will be added into this book at that level. It will be the first part of the Eleventh Act.

You say, “Well, therefore, there’s something wrong with me.” Yes, there is something “wrong” with you: you desire a little more randomity than he does.

Next, you go into “What is dead?” “Who failed?” and so on, right straight across the boards, getting the goals, fears and conditions. A person will do a life continuum of somebody who failed. He will go on and “succeed for him” by failing like him. Is there anything illogical about that?

You talk to one of these boys and you say, “Gee, doesn’t that just about drive you daffy?” He says, “What?” “Running that bus! Running that bus.”

Then you get “What failed?” and then “Who departed?” You just get one name at a time, and you want to know approximately when it happened, the goals of this person, the conditions of that person, the fears of that person. (When we say “condition,” you understand, we mean physiological condition or mental condition or both.)

“How do you mean? Do you realize I have to get up every morning at six o’clock, come down here, start the bus, get in there, get my change in order . . .” And he starts going through this routine, and you can see that it is just the dullest routine in the world. The only difference on change is sometimes he drops a dime when he is loading his coins. And sometimes it is Mrs. Snodgrass, not Mrs. Smith, who gets on the bus first at the first stop to get to her job, and there is whether Mrs. Snide up the street is going to go downtown today. This is randomity to that individual.

Now, when you have finished “What departed?” you go on to “Who won?” “What won?” “Who arrived?” and “What arrived?” — the goals, conditions and fears.

Your wild adventurer demands as randomity the cataclysm and crash of nations, societies. Hitler, for instance, was down on the tone scale in his desire for randomity, but I don’t believe he was even satisfied when he was blowing himself up. There were millions dead and armies ruined and continents changed and shifted all over the place and people suffering in all directions but he was still going strong. This was a 1.5’s idea of good randomity. His appetite for randomity was too high and his idea of randomity was all plus — too much.

You will find a time that an individual’s automobile departed from him in some peculiar fashion or other, and you say, “All right, now, what was the condition of the automobile?” Right away he has to think about the automobile.

Now, on a constructive level there can also be too much randomity for an individual. Any of you who have been bewildered from time to time at sudden advances in technique were getting just a little bit too much randomity. You didn’t want quite that much randomity, in spite of the fact that the techniques are an advance for your preclears. That is to say, perhaps you took the first techniques offered and you were still working them a couple or three hours a week on a preclear and so forth; techniques then came along that could produce this result and they caught up with you.

“Well, it had piston slap.”

In other words, we are doing with a new technique a speedup every time on the case. But what you are liable to start watching is this flood of new techniques. They are actually upsetting your randomity of snapping the fingers or something; they are altering this.

“Is that so?” This individual often goes “Click-click-click-click.” (That is how ridiculous we can get!) “What were the goals of the automobile?”

There is something else you should look at: you should be very pleased this is happening. I don’t know anything, really, more boring than snapping the fingers at a preclear six hours a day, six days a week. That is pretty grim. So we are working a technique up by which an auditor will have a lot of randomity.

“Well, to run smoothly and go places, I guess. And sit in the garage when it’s cold.” The individual will go on and tell you all about this automobile. But this is an innocuous question. He really isn’t doing a continuum on this automobile. However, what he is doing is finding out that you can be a little bit off groove. He has an idea of what you are looking for: you are looking for something else.

Now, when a person comes down scale from full responsibility, he is moving into 20.0 for him when he gets to optimum. He will be optimumly busy, but don’t think he won’t be busy. The fellow that says “I’m going to buy an orange grove and sit there” has a goal and it is pretty, but when he gets there and he sits down he is liable to get right back up again.

It is not too bad a thing to be wrong once in a while. Don’t be wrong on purpose but don’t worry about being always right, because if you get your preclear to agreeing with you all the time, he gets into a state of trance or something as far as you are concerned, and you will have to snap him out of that before he will get up the tone scale.

Look what happens to the man who is advised that he had better retire for his health and take it easy, control himself, take it quiet: all of a sudden they bury him. They say, “Well, that’s the way it goes with these fellows. They just work themselves all their lives too hard and it gets them. It’s a good thing he laid off and started to rest when he did.”

So, you now have all these conditions of life continuum. This is a complete process all by itself.

An individual who is running at more or less optimum motion for him is up above all of his past counter-efforts. Do you get the idea? As he sinks down from his optimum motion or goes up from his optimum motion, he will run into bands of lower speed for himself and he will start getting clipped by counter-efforts .

Now, somebody asked me how can “What failed” have a fear? Automobiles, for instance, are afraid of running into things, of course! I am being serious. I ran a little fellow who had lost a coaster wagon. What were the goals of his coaster wagon? “To carry me.” And this somehow or other was all balled up in his head in a complete bewilderment about him being carried. The coaster wagon was somehow his mother, was something else and so on.

This is all very sequitur. This may sound to you for a moment as if it is not making a complete package, but let me show you something. We have a scale from 40.0 through 20.0 down to 0.0, and at 20.0 is optimum motion for an individual. Some fellow will go out to a race track and watch these racing cars go round and round, and he will go out on the next Sunday and watch the racing cars go round and round. What produces randomity there is the fact that these cars are going too fast, which fascinates him. The other thing which produces it is the fact that every once in a while there is a big crash.

“Well, what’s the coaster wagon afraid of?”

How a race driver can stand up to his own fans, I don’t know. Out at Indianapolis one day a race driver went over the wall, rolled and so forth, and people went down on the grounds. The first thing one of them said was “Oh, gee! Look what I got! “ He had picked up a handkerchief that had fallen out of the driver’s chest, and it was saturated with blood, still dripping. That was his idea of randomity.

“Hitting bumps.” He would get a jolt out of that.

Anyway, each individual has a potential capacity or a potential action level. That is just theoretical. Everybody, if brought to 20.0, would be not to a 20.0 but to his 20.0. A happy, healthy, exuberant, long-lived bus driver is at 20.0. He gets on in the morning and he counts his change and he checks out and goes to this end of the run, then he goes to that end of the run and so on.

So you say, “Well, all right, hitting bumps.” He had been trying to reacquire his coaster wagon ever since, only nothing he acquired which was on four wheels was satisfactory because it wasn’t a -coaster wagon. This was an individual in middle age.

Now, look at an emotional curve: A person is way up in enthusiasm; he comes in and tells everybody about this bright idea he has and then somebody says, “No, it won’t work, because . . .” and convinces him, and this fellow in enthusiasm goes shooting down the tone scale. The shift in tone is quite marked.

If you get somebody who is dissatisfied with every possession he gets, he is trying to possess again his tricycle that departed or something. It is fascinating. You ask him these questions, and it is jolting to him that there could be something about that or about this; because at the time he lost it, if he was a little child, the thing was alive to him — it had a personality and all this sort of thing. And it sort of jars it up in his mind.

What happens here? Up in enthusiasm he is running along so that his motion — the amount of randomity which he is encompassing and which he is engage d in and so forth — is up above the moti on or sp ee d of t he counter efforts which might threaten him. Do you understand that? The only way a counter-effort can threaten a person is by being faster than he is. Then he gets it.

Someone also asked whether this would include who lived and what is alive. I suppose you could include it. (Most everybody is dead, though, on the cases we get!) You would get a great deal of regret. But you can add that to the lineup.

This is proven by the fact that if you sit a fellow down very quietly and have him concentrate on a state of not-beingness, he will get his counterefforts — bang! You can demonstrate this on individuals.

So, here we have something that is very close to a complete process all by itself, merely this life-continuum process. It will make an individual much better off. Do you see what happens with each one of these cases? Something very insidious happens with these cases. You can only do so much for a case and then it does the rest of it itself.

It means, then, that when an individual is dropped suddenly in what we will call speed — this internal governor or whatever it is — he drops emotionally as well, and that is the emotional curve.

What you are looking for is the bumper, the booster that will send the preclear up the tone scale. Any one of these processes may act as a booster.

Up at the top he is not suffering from any counter-efforts; he doesn’t have anything. And then somebody says, “Well, that girl you worked on last night, you know, that had a terrible anxiety stomach and so forth and so on? Well, she’s in the hospital.”

Let’s take life continuum, for instance, and just work nothing on this case but life continuum. There are a lot of people dead on the case and so forth, and we just work nothing but that. All of a sudden this case starts going up the tone scale like a sky rocket and his somatics resolve. We have given enough oomph to this case so that not only did the inherent somatics he was holding as life continuums for people that you ran resolve, but people that you have never touched resolve too. You have just gotten his governor up to speed, so it keeps on going on up the line.

He had decided to handle this anxiety stomach, this counter-effort. He was all enthusiastic. He thought he had fixed her up and then suddenly he is informed that he didn’t handle it. His first reaction is to handle it, but he has been dropped down the tone scale to a point where he can’t, suddenly. He will get an anxiety stomach.

Now, you can take cause and effect, desire for approval and all the rest of this sort of thing, and process that. You can process that and not touch the life-continuum process, and very often you will find the preclear taking off and going up the line before you have a chance to work life continuum on him.

You can run this test on individuals. You can give them a big buildup and a sudden drop. And if you give them a big buildup and a sudden drop about an injury, they will get the injury. It is fascinating.

Or you can take just the button chart and do nothing but scan him into the possession of some of these buttons, and he will take off up the line from there. You are dealing with some very powerful techniques. They all head toward the same goal.

Let’s say you are working on a preclear; you work on him, you know you have the cause of it, you are running the thing out, you are in good shape on it and you can see his tone come up, then all of a sudden he sits up and says very apathetically, “Well, I’ve still got my sore leg.” You go sliding down the scale.

But these are just ways of unmooring a fellow from the bottom instead of mooring him there, as hypnotism tries to do, as some other techniques try to do. And you can, by the way, moor a preclear there. You can really fix him. You can authoritarianly process a preclear out of his arthritis by driving him from 1.5 down to 1.1. Then when some other auditor comes along and starts to pick him up the tone scale again, he will go through a stage of having arthritis. I have seen it happen. He goes down the tone scale from arthritis and the arthritis clears up; he goes up the tone scale and all of a sudden he gets into the strata where this life continuum that gives him arthritis is, and the arthritis turns back on — he gets some deposits back and so forth. It is not as serious as it was the first time, because he has found out that it could go away and he has made a postulate already that it went away.

How many auditors have unwittingly picked up a sore leg or some somatic and didn’t realize what its source was? You just check back over your cases, you check back over your auditing, and you will find that sooner or later something happened on it.

You can just take straight Postulate Processing — nothing but Postulate Processing — and process all an individual’s conclusions and the postulates which he later on disobeyed because the environment insisted on changing. No postulate can be laid down that will be good for the rest of time. These postulates, then, can be picked up. You can pick up enough postulates off a case so he will start up the line, too. Sometimes you find it very difficult to pick up postulates because the case is so wound up in effort or something of the sort.

It doesn’t happen right away. The reason why is that the auditor who is running up above 4.0 is not doing too badly till one day he gets carved down this way. But his next curve is going to be a deeper drop. And each time it happens he will drop, but he won’t come back quite as far. Eventually it could be a flat line and then he has come all the way down to where he can’t handle this motion. At that moment one of these things he missed on consistently in the past cuts in as a chronic somatic.

Or you can take Effort Processing, all by itself, and run nothing but one complete experience. Run it out to its last possible dregs. Run it out till you get the effort of the cells to stay next to the cells, the effort of the liver to keep on “livering,” the effort of the teeth to communicate with the liver — in other words, all the effort and all the postulates and all the emotion off one major experience in a case. If you take the whole thing and that thing was even vaguely tied in with a service facsimile, the case is going to come on up the tone scale at a heck of a run. That is why we say “a few hours of processing.”

His resilience at first is such that when this gag is pulled on him he bounces. That is all right; he bounces. If he had really looked at himself, he would have gotten a momentary twitch out of it and then bounced back up again. But when he really gets smashed down along to that flat line he gets a chronic somatic, and he is not going to get rid of it until it is processed out on the lifecontinuum factor. What has he done? He suddenly took over the responsibility of that somatic he failed on by wearing it himself.

But I do not believe there is an auditor around at this moment who has 100 percent exhausted every single speck of effort, emotion and postulate out of one engram, because that is really a job.

This is, by the way, not very esoteric. If you think this over for a while you will see that we are talking in terms of weights and balances.

You run a preclear back down the time track and you get to earlier incidents, earlier incidents, earlier incidents — just clipping them as you go down, trying to find a good early incident — and you find one that can really be processed. You will find it generally on a conclusion line. You are maybe looking for the conclusions of why this preclear doesn’t consider that he is important anymore or the conclusion that he has to obey; there are numerous conclusions you can reach this on. You start running back down the line and down the line, getting the effort within the effort to obey, within the effort to obey, within the effort to obey, and there he is, getting run through the stomach in the Peloponnesian War or something. He can’t help himself; he will be right there.

An individual, as “I,” can handle motion. You are handling motion right now: the beat of your heart, the coursing of your blood, the various activities of the human body and its actions. You are bracing against gravity; you are doing all sorts of these motions. There is lots of motion.

If you were then to take that engram — any one of these engrams (it doesn’t have to be a past death or anything like that) — and you were to exhaust it 100 percent, just sit down and knock it to pieces every way that you could possibly knock an engram to pieces, the individual’s recovery up the tone scale would be something fabulous.

Have you ever watched a person as he comes down the tone scale? He gets to anger and he will have a violent flair of relatively poorly directed motion, and then it is like the sudden flash of a lamp bulb just before it goes out. He will finally come down to where he just sits, and he gets quieter and quieter and quieter. I told you about motion, about resistance and reaction to motion in comparison to this tone scale: He isn’t handling left-over counterefforts.

Auditors have been getting results even though they were not exhausting all the efforts out of these things. You don’t ask for all the efforts out of them — I know you don’t — because there are very strange efforts that you can ask for in any one engram. There is the effort, for instance, of the tail of the spine to communicate with the brain in that incident. You ask for this and all of a sudden brand-new flashes of pain and everything turn on in the thing. You think, “Well, that’s all gone now,” and then you get over on to some other efforts.

Let’s say that when you were a kid, a baseball hit you in the eye. You were just fine. Years go by and you don’t think about this baseball hitting you in the eye at all, but then you hear about some friend of yours or something of the sort who got hit in the eye with a baseball. An immediate sort of sympathy computation goes in. You drop on the tone scale because this is bad news.

All efforts are nonsurvival. Every effort is nonsurvival in its ultimate, because at the very beginning is a state of beingness, theoretically, and then a counter-effort. Then that countereffort becomes the effort, and then another counter-effort becomes the effort and then another counter-effort becomes the effort. So each effort in turn was first nonsurvival and then survival.

Did you ever stop and think of why it was bad news to you that he got hit in the eye with a baseball? So what? So he got hit in the eye with a baseball — does this hurt your food supply line? You can always find another canasta player. But you are fully responsible, inherently; so you say, “Well, that’s fine — my responsibility, I must be to blame. I didn’t keep the baseball from hitting him in the eye.”

So all the way up the line you have the nonsurvival effort and the survival effort. You have both of these efforts. You have the effort to see and the effort not to see, the effort to hear and the effort not to hear. You can hit either side of these. You can hit the effort, meaning the individual’s effort against a counter-effort, or you can hit the counter-effort.

You can work with people for a while and they will finally come up with some dopey explanation of how it was their fault — he intended to call the fellow on Saturday and see whether or not he could play a game of golf that day, and by not calling him . . . “Therefore, there he was out playing baseball with the boys and that is how he got hit in the eye with a baseball, and that’s why it’s my fault.”

Now, when you start running Effort Processing, you just start to ask for the effort this way and the effort that way. Effort Processing does not need much delineation from me here; there is quite a bit lying around on it already. It is fascinating stuff. When I fired the gun on that thing it really exploded, and we have seen some weird things happen in Effort Processing.

But the reason you haven’t seen very many of these rationalizations is that they are tied up in emotional curves.

So, the individual’s efforts and counter-efforts exhausted 100 percent from one end to the other of a good, long, solid, hard, painful engram brings about a recovery in tone which is fabulous. You can look it over.

A little boy is out playing and life is going along all right; suddenly his mother comes out and she looks very, very sad and sorrowful. He says, “What’s the matter, Mommy? What’s the matter, Mommy?”

You have to get the thoughts, which are the postulates on that engram line. They come up about halfway through. Then sometimes you have to turn around and get the efforts to have those thoughts because the thoughts themselves won’t release. The thought is based on some earlier effort, which is action, and the effort was so strong on this postulate that you have to i process out the effort to have this effort in the engram. So you go back from the engram and process out that effort, then you come back up and go on processing the engram you started.

She says, “Nothing (sniff).” This increases his tension terrifically. She gets him built up to a tremendous level of anxiety and then pops it — “Grandpa just died.”

You ought to do it sometime just for practice — process one engram from one end to the other, completely, 100 percent. There is the effort for one side of the back to communicate with the other side of the back; there is the effort for the eye lenses not to touch the eyeballs; there is the effort of the hair not to stand up and the effort of the hair to stand up; there is the fellow’s effort to breathe and his effort not to breathe, and the effort to keep the heart beating but the desire not to keep the heart beating and the effort not to keep the heart beating. In a death, it is the effort to die and the effort not to die, the effort to hold the motion and the effort not to hold the motion, the effort of the cells not to collapse and the effort of the cells not to blow up — there are lots of efforts. But you will know what efforts to ask for, because all you have to do is ask the file clerk and he will tell you.

This little boy knows Grandpa. He has sat around Grandpa occasionally on a little footstool and said, “Gee, I wish Grandpa’s rheumatizl didn’t hurt. I wish I could see for Grandpa a little better. Gosh, he sure has a lot of trouble getting the car started; I think I’ll invent a self-starter for him or something. Yeah, I think I’ll get rich. I think I’ll get rich and I’ll have a big castle and I’ll store one whole room with chewing tobacco so he’ll never be out of chewing tobacco, because he always seems to run out of it when he wants some.” This little boy knows Grandpa. So, subject: Grandpa; habits, somatics of Grandpa, counter-efforts — these must be duplicated, because the first reaction of the little boy is to say “It’s not so. I do not believe it. It can’t be true.” That is an effort of invalidation, and this effort of invalidation comes down with a crash afterwards. That goes down too, which just drives this loss home further.

If you want to do this job of Effort Processing, just as a technique, it has remarkable results. But you should understand also that you can go on Effort Processing an individual forever until he disappears! Fortunately it would take forever to make him disappear.

When he says “I can’t believe this and I don’t want to believe this, and this isn’t true” and all that sort of thing, people then very quietly and solemnly convince him it is true. “Let’s not have any fast music around the dead. Let’s not do anything very exciting. I don’t think you ought to go to the show this afternoon, Johnny. After all, it’s only been two weeks since your grandfather died.” This keeps him running slow, and he will keep picking these somatics up. They are not Grandpa’s, they are his. But you can run this emotional curve.

Now, you know there are occluded deaths on cases. There probably isn’t a case around that doesn’t have two or three deaths that they aren’t consciously aware of having happened in their vicinity. But how do you make the individual aware that they did happen? Not by trying to sell him on the idea and going and getting the family Bible — let’s not be psychoanalysts. Let’s not go get the Bible and show him in there, “Look, your grandpapa died at such and such a date because it says right there in the front of the Bible, so therefore it’s true. All right, you’re well now. Next customer.” That is the wrong approach.

If there were an automatic process which would immediately reveal to the individual these incidents, which would reveal to him the times when he blamed himself for the death and would reveal to him the times when he had tried to defend the dead person and bring to view his thoughts with regard to his desire for approval from that person or his desire to give approval to the person in order to go on living, wouldn’t that be a very valuable technique? It really would — particularly in view of the fact that you can see Grandpa’s glasses on this preclear and Grandpa’s habits on this preclear and Grandpa’s everything on this preclear, including Grandpa’s consistent business failure. People will go on failing in businesses just for Grandpa. They will go on being professionally something else, just for Grandpa. More important than that, they will go on walking like a horse or something of the sort for dear old Bessie that died when they were two years old back in the middle-west farmhouse.

How would you like a technique that did that? It is a very simple technique. You just run the emotional curve — that is all. You just insist on running the emotional curve. The regret comes out and the blame comes out and the thought behind it comes out, and it all falls out of this darn curve:

“Can you remember the time your grandfather died?”

“No.”

“Well, how would you have felt just before you found out he died?”

“Oh, all right, I guess.”

“How would you have felt just afterwards?”

“Oh, terrible.”

“Well, how do you feel when you’re all right?”

“Oh, I feel all right.”

“How do you feel when you feel terrible?”

“Well, just terrible.”

“Well, can you get the drop between those two? Can you feel all right and then feel terrible, feel all right and feel terrible?”

“Yeah. Yeah, oh, here’s that time I hit that boy over the head with a club, knocked him out. I didn’t mean to.”

And you start picking up incidents of that magnitude (which is minor magnitude) and you pick up more incidents and more incidents and more incidents of greater and greater magnitude till all of a sudden you are picking up deaths on the case the person didn’t know anything about, much less the deaths he knew about. But if you find one of these occluded deaths, you start running it and you will find out just where he blamed himself for that death. And they all do!

That is what is rough on soldiers. They are out there on the field of battle and they go charging over the top into a flock of machine-gun bullets or something of the sort and guys fall here and guys fall there and guys fall someplace else. The soldier is responsible for all those deaths — each one of them is, really. Then he gets over into the enemy trench and he kills another human being, and he is responsible for that one, too. So he can’t win.

War is a game by which you keep people down the tone scale so that you can govern them very well. I don’t think a national government could actually exist without the threat of war — if there weren’t an aggressor around. There are aggressors around and you do have to have something to prevent their actions, because everybody is working on this same circle. But you see what happens.

Now, this soldier finally hardens himself into it and he sells himself this bill of goods: “Well, I’m me; I don’t care who else I am.” And then he gives himself a snide satisfaction for having eaten the lunch of the guy in the next bed in the hospital where they both were — the guy was his buddy and he got his buddy’s lunch. Food was kind of scarce there and his buddy died at eleven-thirty, so he got his lunch.

You will get this fellow actually holding such incidents in, saying, “I am tough. I am hard. I can stand up to all of this. Nothing of this can shake me.” He keeps telling himself this and the next thing you know, nothing can, not even life. He doesn’t enjoy anything anymore, by the way, but he sure is tough!

You will run into this case every once in a while. You try to run an emotional curve on one and it is like trying to open up brick pavement with a toothpick, until all of a sudden you start triggering approval or regret. This case is never closed down so tight that you can’t find some regret or something on it, and you just start running that off a little bit and the first thing you know, the rest of the case starts to open up.

I will give you just a momentary review of this thing: What is survival? Survival is a right to survive which an individual gives himself automatically. When he is his own right to survive, he is very fully responsible. And this right to survive operates in the society as approval.

When some other thing on some other dynamic fails to survive, an individual holds himself responsible for that failure. When he actually can demonstrate to himself that he definitely was responsible for it, you don’t get it just as an esoteric mechanism, you get it as an actual fact, and he goes into sympathy on that dynamic. He will stay sympathetic toward that dynamic and he will stay down the tone scale with regard to that dynamic, and he will keep on asking that part of that dynamic for his own survival.

At this point in the lecture, a gap exists in the available recordings. We have been unable to locate any recording or transcript for the missing section.