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.

It has taken me a long time to get the ammo stuffed into the breech, the pointer on his ledge, the trainer swiveled around in the right direction and get a hand on a lanyard.

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.

I happen to believe in action — lots of action. As a “philosopher” I am a complete bust, because everything is all set for the philosopher if he is just permitted to think and maunder around and monkey around with something and write it down in a book, let the book get dusty and write some more and let that one get dusty and so on.

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.

I was interested in the field of engineering because engineers build things. I found out that when you tried to build things in this world the steel would stand up but the human beings wouldn’t. Isn’t that interesting? So I decided to do something about it if I possibly could. There wasn’t quite a bit done about it then, but the direction of it is action — definite action.

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.

We have a world today where everybody is busy blowing each other up, with secret police running inside and outside and economics going up and down like barometers before a hurricane. People are shivering in their tracks, the workers are all throwing down their chains so people can put bigger chains upon them, institutions are being built to take care of the insane so that we can have more insane, people are being thrown on operating tables and hacked up, children get started into their lives with eight strikes against them and everybody is busy fighting for a little piece of dirt that is floating around in the solar system. What a limited view man has had!

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.

Trying to do something about that takes action.

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.

The production of an attitude of mind capable of constructively resolving the problems of man and delivering into his hands the conquest of the material universe happened to lie through the field of epistemology, and that channel went through the human mind. And that all leads out into action.

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.

So, this gun is pointed — laid, trained — loaded and cocked. It has taken a year and a half to find out how to tell people to do what, to produce a frame of mind which was up the tone scale.

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.

But there is in existence now a package which handles this, with ramifications such that you in the field, wherever you are, are not occasioned too much turmoil or difficulty because of some alteration in the package. This bridge is built pretty wide now and as a net result we can be a cause which will undoubtedly produce at least a very interesting effect upon the society.

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.

So when we think of cause and effect, the cause-and-effect situation in Dianetics is a very interesting one to examine. What are we trying to cause and what will be the effect? We can take that up a little later.

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

Right now, let’s just take a look at the great purity of philosophy. I wish Kant were alive today, and Hegel and a few of the boys. Would they have fun: you would keep showing them phenomena and they would show you their mystic numbers.

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.”

Of course, that kind of a situation can’t exist today; fortunately we have an enlightened world. You can show individuals phenomena and they immediately recognize them as phenomena and work with them — I wish!

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.

Cause and effect: Once upon a time there was a life source, and it developed into a more complex life source and that developed into a more complex life source. We can say that what it was trying to cause — one of the things it was trying to cause, certainly — was a conquest of the material universe. That may be just one of its goals but it is still a very important one. It is important because when you get an individual way up above 20.0, he starts to separate from the material universe. He is neither happy nor healthy nor anything else. Regardless of what he is trying to do, when he starts going out through the top he starts to leave the material universe and he ceases to gain in his conquest of it.

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.

Now, when an individual goes down from 20.0 he also loses contact and loses the ability to handle the material universe.

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.

When you find a person operating at optimum — healthy, unworried, successful, everything running for him, things working — he is riding at about 20.0 or ten points to either side of it, and he is in good shape.

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.

We could get into a big argument about whether or not an individual is in good shape when he is healthy and strong and happy and effective and efficient and so forth. Maybe that individual isn’t in good shape; maybe the ideal would be something else. Maybe the ideal living organism would be something else. Possibly somebody could say, “Well, the ideal state is to sit on a bed of spikes and be able to resist the pain of the spikes.” Somebody else can do that if he wants to, but he sure isn’t going to get anything done!

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.

So what are we trying to cause? We will just postulate that it is the conquest of the material universe and when an individual begins to produce an effect, the effect he is producing — when it is a good effect — is an alignment of the inherent disorder in the physical universe.

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.”

When an individual fails as a cause, he becomes himself chaotic. His living body is part MEST; even his own MEST starts to demonstrate the chaotic effect of the material universe.

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!

A very ideal situation would be to be pure cause but this is, of course, the ideal state of being, which is up above the level of the ideal state of action. If an individual is fully responsible, then the individual is full cause along all dynamics, isn’t he? If he is going to survive infinitely or something of that sort, he is again full cause. He says “I am” as his state of beingness. He goes into a big state of beingness, “I am.” That means “I am cause.”

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.

We notice, as we look this over, that two things happen to a human being: he ceases to desire to be a cause or negates against being a cause, and he negates against being an effect. He does not want to be either a cause or an effect. He is a cause and something happens and it goes wrong and therefore it is fault, blame, regret and so forth. All of these things follow out from cause and he is in trouble. On the other hand, the individual does not want to be an effect of somebody else’s cause; he fends off from being this.

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.”

But an individual can desire to be a cause and he can desire to be an effect. So actually this thing works out the way you have seen so many of these things work out.

“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.”

Up along the top of the scale you have desired cause; below that you have enforced cause (that is blame) and still lower you have inhibited cause. And then you have desired effect, enforced effect and inhibited effect.

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.

Now, out of this formula — and you can call it a formula if you want to, because an awful lot of things work out when you start looking at this — come many complexities in the organization of living. Actually, it is a restatement of approval, regret, survive, full responsibility, full state of beingness and so forth. But it can be codified this way.

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.

We are just making a restatement in terms of cause and effect. What is full responsibility? A fellow who is at full responsibility is willing to have caused anything, so that is way up top.

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.

Desired cause: When you get an individual down the line to a point where he no longer desires to be cause, he is pretty badly off. When you take an individual and enforce the fact upon him that he is cause, just the act of enforcing it upon him is blaming; it says, “You’re cause” — and when he starts to blame himself finally, he comes down to the point where he won’t be cause for anything. He won’t be cause for the satisfaction of his own hunger. He won’t cause anything to happen.

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.

And then we have desired effect: You would be surprised how many effects there are that are desirable. There are the effects of food, clothing, shelter and pleasure. Individuals desire to be an effect.

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 old mystic, the old-time ascetic, knew exactly how to get into a state of affairs where he went way up toward 40.0. He just said, “No pleasure, no effect — no effect of anything.” And of course, he went right on out through the top. He didn’t accept any cause on the line, particularly, but he refused to be an effect of any kind, and so there he went. You can see them today in India up in the highlands. They are very interesting people; of course, they don’t have much understanding of humanity. You go over there and you say, “It’s all right to be sitting there with your legs crossed, with the lice running up and down in the hems of your white robe, but it’s not my idea of a good way to live life” — nothing happens.

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?

The ascetic knows a lot better than to ever permit himself to be an effect of anything, because the second he permits himself to be an effect, he opens the door to somebody or something else’s cause.

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.

There is contained in this all the ramifications of how you go about being a saint. And if you want to get there and become a saint, just close all those doors of effect and you will be a saint. (If you close the doors of food too, you will be a dead saint!)

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, on effect, a person has to agree to be aberrated. That, by the way, is in the first handbook; a person has to agree to be aberrated. Here is one of the methods he uses to agree: He wants to be affected this way and that way and some other way, and then some other way and some other way. Eventually he has the doors wide open and anything can roll down that channel. He starts to hit a dwindling spiral the moment he wants to be an effect.

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.”

The young artist who says “Ah, I want to live! I want to know how life will affect me, and so forth” — he finds out. He stops painting too, because as long as he is an artist he is cause; as long as he is cause he is an artist. But when he becomes effect, he becomes chaotic, unplanning and so on.

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.

Then there is the second dynamic. Poor old Freud: he was so close aboard the boat that I suppose that was why society got so mad at him. When he developed the libido theory he was looking right straight at this; there it was. You open the door to be an effect and you become one. What you do to become an effect becomes then the channel of aberration. An individual says, “I want to be affected pleasurably. I want to be very definitely and desperately affected,” and so forth, and it is very interesting that he will be affected by his counter-efforts and by everything else.

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.

We take the second dynamic: There is a solid communication line on the second dynamic — tactile. You want to know why so many men take their wives’ orders? They want to be an effect — they have a tactile communication line — and the wife says, “Go out and jump in front of the locomotive, please,” and they do. Why? They are an effect; therefore they have elected her to be cause, particularly if she is ornery about it. She is cause. If she can ever accomplish getting blamed on the second dynamic, she is really cause — her word is law! That is how blame operates. Anything you blame becomes cause; it becomes higher and more powerful than you and it can therefore and thereafter regulate you. You blame it — you say, “There’s cause” — and you are saying at the same time, “I’m not cause.” And thereafter from that source you get your orders.

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.

If you want to know how to make an engram really effective against you, all you do is blame it on somebody. Blame its restimulation upon the auditor, blame a dental operation upon the dentist, and that engram — and dentists and auditors — thereafter will have a peculiarly powerful effect upon you.

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.

If you want to get a preclear into a complete, apathetic, slavish state — in other words, if you want to get him into the state of a psychiatric patient — all you have to do is demonstrate to him that it is his fault, continually demonstrate to him that this was his fault and that was his fault, until all of a sudden he ceases to want to be cause. Then get him to blame you and blame you very heavily. (This is, by the way, psychiatric practice.) Eventually, of course, if you can get him to blame you as the auditor and blame you and blame you, pretty soon you will really be cause. You can say, “Do a loop,” and he will loop. That is how you set it up.

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

If you want to really rule an organization, be so ornery and so mean and do so m any overt acts that there won ‘t be an in dividual in that organi z ati on but will blame you, and after that they do everything you say.

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.

How is a marine company run so well? The officers in the Marine Corps know all about this, evidently; they evidently found out about this somewhere under the walls of Tripoli’ or something. The officers don’t have anything much to do with the troops. They aren’t the cause of anything or the effect of anything, particularly; they sort of hold off. They are the people that give the sergeants hell once in a while, maybe. They set a good example in battle. It is the British Army and British Marine Corps philosophy from which that is borrowed.

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.

They get it all blamed on the sergeant. The sergeant takes all the blame. It is his fault, but it is also his blame. Everybody blames him actively and then they have a good, smooth-running company.

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

Don’t think for a moment that that sergeant can come down along the line and go into ARC with all these enlisted men and have anything happen in that company. It won’t. Why? Because he is then not cause — they haven’t elected him cause.

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!

Now, do you elect an individual cause by going around and voting? No — elected officers are rarely successful officers. Why? You have to blame yourself; you elected them, didn’t you? So what you really should do is elect a group to appoint an officer, and you would get results then.

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.

For instance, the government of the United States would be far more fascistic if Congress were permitted to select, after Congress was elected, a president. We would have a government there that would really be operating with a meat chopper. Only we don’t want a government like that. Furthermore, we don’t want all the government we pay for.

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.

So you open up a channel by which you will be an effect: you can expect that channel, as you roll along, to be an aberrative channel. This gives food, clothing, housing and, in particular, sex (because it has a communication channel that is tactile) terrific emphasis. What do you worry about all the time? Food, clothing, shelter and the second dynamic.

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

The only reason you worry about them, the only reason they don’t happen almost automatically, is that you want to be an effect. So a person is made to work for his food. It is a very funny thing that nobody ever set it up s o a person had to work for his after- s have loti on or ski ing tri p to S un Val ley or other odds and ends, and gave him the food. That doesn’t quite work out. The employer has uniformly selected a channel where the individual is of necessity effect and he has used that for pay. Also, he gets obedience when he does this.

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.

As a matter of fact there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. There are a lot of things that have been overlooked. There are lots of ways to crack a blacksnake whip over men, there are lots of ways to enslave them; there are lots of ways to un de rm ine person al ities and c haracter an d everyth ing el se in this. This is a real hot package! I think it would sell very, very quickly in Moscow or Washington. The package is hot. But it doesn’t get very hot if an auditor knows about it.

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.

“Let’s scan everything and every time in your life when you postulated to yourself that you wanted to be an effect.” “Let’s scan every time you blamed anybody for doing something to you.” Let’s get those out of the line and the first thing you know, the individual starts up the tone scale. Why does he start up the tone scale? Because you are taking away all the times when he desired to be an effect.

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.

Now, when an individual desires to be an effect of his own memories, this is really royal! A person starts in saying, “Well, I’d like to cherish this memory. That was an awfully good show; I’d like to think about that later. I hope nobody spoils this illusion for me.” He has been an effect. He has been watching this beautiful picture or a dance or ballet or something of the sort and he says, “I want to cherish this memory, I want to keep this around.” All of a sudden he has assigned value to memory, value to a facsimile. That is the first crime.

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.

Value the show, be damned! Go to it tomorrow night, go to it next week or go to other shows. The only moment you are alive is now. There isn’t any other moment.

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.

When individuals pick up past memories and cherish them, the first thing you know, they find themselves cherishing material objects, and then they start wondering what all this burden of psychosomatic illness is. An auditor tries to get them to let go of this but down at the bottom is a terrific desire to be an effect.

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.

You start going down the line and you say, “When did you want yourself to be influenced pleasantly by a memory?”

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 preclear sort of squirms for a minute and says, “How did you know?”

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.

Freud was to some degree right. On the second dynamic, because of this tactile communication system, you have a complete setup. And then the society fixes up everybody by saying, “No, you’re not twenty-one yet and you have to get married.” So a person goes through all his teens desiring to be an effect, but every time he is it is illegal in some fashion or other. So he not only desires to be an effect but he has to hide the effect. Pretty soon he hides it from himself. And about the time he gets to be forty-five or fifty somebody says, “I wouldn’t go out with him.” He loses his potency because he has hidden it all! All the way down the line he has pushed it back. He desired to be an effect and then he said, “No, I’ve got to hide this because if people found out the horrible things that I did, why, I would be ruined socially. So therefore I have to hide all this wanting to be an effect.”

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.

He is thirty-two years old and he goes to a motion picture. It shows the Rockettes or something of the sort and they are doing a beautiful dance, and he is sitting there and the plot runs off in front of his face. A couple of teenagers down the line seem to be getting a big bang out of this movie but he doesn’t seem to be able to. Then he goes outside and he looks and there is green grass and blue sky, and a couple down the line seem to think that that is very nice but for some reason or other it doesn’t look very nice to him anymore. And he all of a sudden realizes that the world is not pleasant to him, that he does not any longer experience pleasure. So then he cooks up a big dream of how he is really going to make sure that Mary and the kids are secure or something and nobly goes on his way.

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.”

What he has actually done is he has desired to be an effect, hidden it, put it back, got up a lot of blame and then, out of fear of shame (which is what guilt is; it is down between 0.9 and 0.6), he has just hidden all this. He hides it from himself. His memories become dangerous. He does not dare exhibit his memories so he starts telling people, “Well, I forget. I don’t know her name. I don’t know where that was.” He knows he is dodging something but he can’t figure out quite what he is dodging. The facsimiles are really handling him.

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.

You should understand this point very clearly: There is a great world of difference between looking at present-time reality and looking at the memory of present-time reality. That is why we are calling them facsimiles, because they are facsimiles: you make a box top that looks just more or less like it and send it in and you get your spoon. It is not the real thing. And handling it is handling a memory; it is not handling a concrete past. It is like handling a motion-picture reel or something of the sort; it is not handling a past.

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 go back down the time track and find the time you were in San Francisco or Dallas or someplace. You can remember that right this minute — when you were at some other place. Now, right here in present time, think how far away that was: not in time; think in miles — distance. Just get a concept of these towns being well over the horizon. They are a long way away. That is reality.

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.

But an individual who is building up a “hide,” building up a shame, getting all loused up with wanting to be an effect this way, that way, other ways and so forth, eventually starts to hide his own memories. And then all of a sudden he says, “I’m hiding these things; therefore they must be dangerous. You know, they must be awfully dangerous — I have to work so hard to hide them.” And then he either gets to you or they get him.

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.

But there is a whole sphere of aberrative operation contained in this: a person’s desire to be a cause, his efforts to keep from being an enforced cause — ”you’re to blame” — and his efforts to keep from having cause in-~ hibited in him.

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.

What happens here? A couple doesn’t want children. That is sex: desired cause of children. The first thing you know, it isn’t any fun anymore. They don’t want to be cause, so they come down the tone scale. The second they don’t want to be cause they start down the tone scale and there goes the old shell game.

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, we take somebody around grief: You talk to them crossly, roughly or something of the sort and you tell them they have got to straighten up, and all of a sudden they begin to cry, quite unexpectedly. You say, “Oh, gee, I was too rough.” You didn’t want to be a cause. You didn’t want to be a cause of their tears, so you go into sympathy.

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.”

Actually, most of the things that anybody has ever been mad about in this world don’t amount to anything. You go back over the things you have been mad about in the past and if you really take a look at them they look pretty silly to you. They are generally an effort to enforce cause elsewhere. That is really what anger is.

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.

Grief is “I’m not cause. Look what you’ve done to me. You’ve ruined me.” That is grief.

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.

Apathy is “Well, here I lie — you can’t think I caused anything, can you? I’m innocent. Look at me. I’m innocent.”

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.

But real cause way up at the top gets confused by a 1.5 with 1.5 enforced cause. So a fellow who is causing something encounters a 1.5 and the 1.5 says, “He’s trying to force cause on me because he’s trying to cause something. Therefore it’s causing; therefore the only thing I can possibly do about the thing is stop it! So therefore I’ll stop all cause that I see around and I will pretend that I am cause. I won’t do anything to be cause, but I’ll pretend I’m cause and I’ll tell everybody how much time I have to put in being cause all the time. But I won’t do anything, so I won’t have to be cause. And then I’ll show them that they’re cause and then I’ll get sympathy.” At 1.5 a fellow really wants sympathy and approval. He is really trying to take out a license from you to survive.

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.

If you ever doubt this, get somebody who is terrifically angry at you sometime and just question him about what approval you can show him. He will break down and do a complete explanation. A person at 1.5 is applying for a license to survive; he is applying for it by making himself horrible to have around.

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!

At 0.5 the person is making himself completely innocuous, innocent, enervated — ”I’m just a poor little thing; you wouldn’t refuse me a license, would you?”

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

There is the gradient scale of cause. If you want to know where an individual is on the tone scale, see how much he is willing to cause. But then look at the quality of what he is willing to cause.

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.

Now, on the effect line, an individual can safely be an effect on any channel he wants to be an effect on — he is completely safe in being an effect — as long as he doesn’t negate being a cause on any channel. Because if he desires to be an effect everything is all fine, but if all of a sudden he negates being a cause he is prime to suddenly become an effect — and he will get it.

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?”

This is the same as the individual you sit down and tell to sit quietly and concentrate on nothingness. He then is an effect; you are making an effect out of him, and the more of an effect he is, the more counter-efforts he will continue to get.

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.

There are individuals who are sort of plowing through life and they have wanted to be an effect on many things and they don’t want to cause very much. They won’t eat much and so forth; they are kind of just maundering through life gradually, slowly, carrying along. They aren’t a cause, they aren’t an effect, but they sure are close to going out the bottom and they sure give you as an auditor a lot of trouble. One of the reasons they give you trouble is they are not going to be an effect on what you say either, because that is the last ditch.

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.

You find such people going around worrying about things; they have to concentrate awfully hard on being right if they are going to be alive at all. They correct you when you use an improper word. They leave an idea to go sidetracking over to make sure that the words are all right and so on. They do all sorts of interesting things. They are an effect, but they are so close to being a real, unlive effect (how much of an effect can a person be? Dead!) that when you try to affect them with something and you use a little bit too much horsepower on the thing, you will drive them right out through the bottom.

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

But if you start using powderpuff techniques they can throw you out, for the good reason that they don’t want to be any more of an effect. You, asking them to do something, are asking them to be more of an effect. This is a weird one. How do you get to it? How do you solve it?

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.

They usually got that way because there was a lot of stuff on cause and effect. There have been a lot of people around them telling them that they were cause, “and cause is important, it’s serious.” This is blame — ”You see what you caused now! This is serious. You ought to know better than to do such a thing. You’re to blame!” and so on.

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.

Actually the button behind these buttons is the seriousness with which the charge of cause is leveled at individuals. If you want to start repairing this individual, you pick up about the lightest button you can find on the case. It will be one of those buttons on our chart, and it most likely will be a “serious” button of some sort. You can’t run anything very heavy on these people. When they are way down on the tone scale, you can even get them to work a lock and the lock won’t blow; it is just too heavy for them.

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.

In processing they can’t be an effect, and yet they won’t cause themselves to climb up the tone scale and get well. That is why these cases give you trouble. So what do you do? Actually there is something you can do: You can just follow the general steps leading into the solution of insanity — mimicry and so forth. You can get them in. They are willing to mimic you because you are obviously alive. Then you can find out who they are being insane for on a life continuum.

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.

And by the way, practically every insane person is busily being insane for somebody else, not for themselves. The nobility of the human race! They lie there and let prefrontal lobotomies be performed on them, they let electric shocks happen to them, they let themselves be shot with sodium pentothall — they even let psychiatrists talk to them! In other words, they will go through anything to hang on to somebody else’s goal to be insane. That is very fascinating.

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.

There may be a faster way of hitting the case, but in Handbook for Preclears there is a list of the exact steps you take to bring a psychotic out of it. What you hit after that is probably a life continuum, and the case should blow very quickly.

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.

I want to give you the source on cause and effect: The basic concept on cause and effect is Persian. I first learned of it out of a manuscript which was published about A.D. 850. It talks about the role of a practitioner of the Magi. He is supposed to cause things and it warns him not to be affected by them. That is all it says. I ran into that thing head-on and I scratched my head over it for some time and tried to figure it out. I figured there was something more there and more than they knew they were writing. I coasted along for quite a while before I finally got it disentangled.

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.”

Now, processing the life continuum is actually Postulate Processing. Postulates cause life continuum; it is the variety in which they are made and the difficulty of getting to them that gives trouble.

“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.

An individual says, “I’m going to try to help, and I want him to be well, and I want him to be happy,” and then all of a sudden that other person is dead. The individual has then had his own postulates torn up and thrown in his face. He said, “I’m going to do something,” and then something prevented it from happening; something caused death. So he says, “I must have done it because I said I was going to do otherwise, and I must be to blame because I said I was going to help and I didn’t. My postulate is wrong, so therefore I’m wrong, so therefore I must be to blame on this death.”

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.

This is true along any line of postulates. Postulates lie behind this sort of thing. An individual makes a postulate of one sort or another and it follows on out.

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.

The trick in processing the life continuum is in how you dig up these postulates, because that was such a terrible failure that to get this death undone and get some of the somatic off it and get it squared around and get back to the actual postulate really requires a little bit of doing. Once one understands, however, the mechanics of the emotional curve and running a little bit of effort and so on, these postulates will fall out. It is when you get the earliest postulates off the thing that the case starts falling apart in an awful hurry. Postulates are very, very important!

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.

Cause and effect is very much to the point in this. A woman says to herself one New Year’s Eve, “I’m not going to smoke anymore, I’m going to be nice to my husband, I’m not going to burn any more steaks, I’m not going to talk about Mrs. Wompatattle anymore and I’m going to be nice to the children. Now, there, I’ve done my New Year’s Day duty.” She writes them all down and breaks them all on the second day of January and goes into a decline and is hell to live with the rest of the year.

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.

Why? Because postulates were made which had to be altered but weren’t altered, so the individual was going up against these postulates with a solid crunch. After she had made this postulate, every time she smoked she was calling herself a liar, because she was going up against the postulate.

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 works out this way: On Tuesday you say “I’m never going to have anything to do with Annabelle anymore — never!” and on Wednesday you go over to her house. That is a failure. It is a failure to you with you because you said so-and-so and then you made a liar out of yourself, so you failed.

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.”

What happens is that an individual cannot make a single postulate without becoming the effect of that postulate, because an individual is riding in a time continuum. He can’t say “I am going to be a so-and-so” without moving on forward in time to a position where he is supposed to be the so-and-so. And he becomes a so-and-so even in his own eyes.

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 .

Cause and effect: A postulate is a cause, and the second the individual moves away from that point in time he becomes the effect of this postulate. S o an in dividual is be ing continu ally an effect of his past whether he likes it or not. He is continually an effect of his past unless he gets swiveled completely out of valence or something of the sort, or unless he starts life over again or decides to be suddenly all over again. As a matter of fact, you could decide that and just drop all the past facsimiles and everything else and let them all go by the boards. You would have a fine case of amnesia, but you would be very happy! Every once in a while somebody does this; he just swivels completely out of valence and he is no longer subject to his own postulates. He says, “I’m somebody else. Now I am somebody else.” People who change their names effect this to some degree.

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.

This is why postulates are so important — because of cause and effect. A postulate is cause, a conclusion actually can become a cause, an evaluation can become a cause, and the individual moving along on his own time continuum then becomes the effect of this cause. You should be very chary of making promises. You say, “All right, next Tuesday I will...” but you probably won’t be there. So just before you say “Next Tuesday I will . . .” make sure you say “(You know when I promise people things I never mean it.) Next Tuesday I will. . .” And you will be able to go through all next Tuesday without keeping any appointment or doing anything and feel perfectly at ease and go to bed that night with no conscience whatsoever.

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.

What is conscience? It is simply negating against your own — not somebody else’s — causes. If there is such a thing as conscience, it would be that. You have said on Tuesday, “All right, I will be a good boy, I won’t do it anymore. I won’t do it anymore, I’ll be a good boy” — not under duress or anything like 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.

Then, come Wednesday, you are walking home from school and everything looks fine to you, particularly those apples. So you shin over the fence and you climb the apple tree to get a whole bunch of apples and you put them in your shirt and you get back on the road again. You start walking along and then for some reason or other you feel guilty. You know nobody is going to come and take you off to jail — not for stealing some apples — and you try to figure this out. “What’s wrong? Is it because I’m afraid of somebody catching me or something?” You consult everything but your own postulates; you consult everything else. And so you finally get the weird ideas “I am afraid of police. I’m afraid Papa and Mama will punish me. I’m afraid I will be deserted by the whole society and left to die upon these arid plains of the Bronx” — anything but the fact that “-last Tuesday I said I would be a good boy, and now I’m not being a good boy.”

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.

You are your own judge and, believe me, all too often you are your own executioner. Fascinating, isn’t it?

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.

Now, if you can remember sometime in your life when you felt guilty of something, you can go back earlier and find the postulate that you are guilty of disobeying. There is really only one person you are going to disobey and that is you. You are the only person it is serious to disobey, and that is only serious until you get up the “serious” button. After that you say, “Well, let’s see, next Tuesday I’m going to be the Sultan of Siam,” and next Tuesday instead you are a hobo — so what?

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.

I have heard individuals say, “You know, I have to take the rest of life unseriously and I take only myself seriously.” There it goes, from the first dynamic out. You might think that this is the sort of thing that obtains on every hand — it does. But the only reason you take yourself seriously is that so many other people have. This is a beautiful operation: You make a person make a postulate, then you make them make the postulate again and make it again, and then all of a sudden you find them disobeying their own postulate. Then you say, “Hm-hm. You yourself said . . .” “Now, you promised Mama that . . .” That is the way it works. So these things start to look serious to you.

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.

Also, remember that every time in your life that you got hurt, you made the decision which got you hurt. Therefore you are liable to start taking your own decisions seriously, particularly if you agreed sometime or another that Mama hurt or that hurting was bad or if you are taking part in a life continuum for someone who believed that pain was horrible.

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.”

The actual truth of the matter is you could probably stand up to anything as far as pain is concerned. I would bet that a Chinese torturer couldn’t make much of an effect on an individual unless he was severely aberrated on the subject of how much pain should hurt and how important pain was.

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.

You know where this comes from? This comes from the one-life theory. This theory was arrived at without any scientific conclusion and without much thought. It was probably postulated sometime in the past in an effort to control individuals and to impress little children into the fact that they had to behave and do what they should do, because you would have an awful time trying to control people who believed they would have another chance. So you get them to make the postulate when they are still tottering around and tripping over their triangular pants that they only live once and that life is serious and it is important. Then you can lay a lot of regret into the life too. A person is swinging along, getting along fine and all of a sudden it occurs to him when he is twenty-two that he will never again be twenty-one. He gets married and he says, “I’ll never again be free. I’ll never again be able to take out four girlfriends in the same night.”

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.

Life is sown with these horrible regrets. An individual begins at last to look back to the times when he should have but he didn’t, and does he regret that! Because he has been taught that “you only live once and you’ll never have another chance.”

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.

This also makes a person very brave on the battlefield. It is really horrendous that this boy goes out and lays down his life. That is great stuff; you can play it up very strongly. The whole truth of the matter is, it was very, very fine of the boy to go ahead and do what he thought he ought to do. But he did it! He had full responsibility when he did. The only reason that this could be considered very bad is if one were holding on to a one-life theory. Then it becomes horrible; it becomes strictly nightmare stuff! Little children start dreaming about coffins and this and that; people all around them are telling them “You’ve only got one life to live!” and the child is trying to fight himself out of this one way or the other.

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.

I would have had a very easy mind during the last war. I used to get pretty wrought up on two counts: my own life was skidding by ineffectively and my own work was not being performed, and on the other hand the lives and energies of a great many men were being wasted. I still protest their being wasted, because it is an ignoble waste! That is real waste.

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.

But if you really want to hang it up as something just utterly gruesome, convince a man that he has only got one life and then take it away from him.

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.

What we will do for randomity in this society!

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.

Don’t get me wrong. Any part of any life laid down for a cause is a very worthwhile proposition. It is real sacrifice; there is no doubt about that. But don’t rub it in!

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.

I don’t care whether you pick up this other theory or not. Just remember that you have thoroughly agreed and have had it postulated into you, “of your own free will, out of a vast amount of phenomena which has been examined thoroughly by experts all through the ages and found to be utterly and completely true and without any slightest contradiction,” that you only live one life!

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.

One of the horrible things you can do is just show that the evidence doesn’t exist on the other side and then show people that you have something. And as long as it stays a reasonable society, a society which always will agree with you when you show them the phenomena, we are safe!

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.

Therefore, a whole new process here really opens up to your eyes when you look at cause and effect. You have seen it in Advanced Procedure. An individual throws himself wide open to be an effect and after that can really be an effect. But this is perfectly all right. In order for him to be an effect — affected pleasurably or by pleasure — he also has to be willing to be a cause.

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.”

An individual who goes through life only wanting to be an effect is a sick person. I would bet that you have an acquaintance or a preclear who, if you kind of looked at them and took a real quick glance at them right this instant, is going through life being nothing but an effect, and who is bound and determined to be nothing but an effect. They sometimes will justify it by wanting to be an effect of pleasure — they want to enjoy life and so forth, they say. They don’t want to cause enjoyment in life: they want to enjoy life.

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, all of the ramifications which come off this are very obvious. You really need no more than this.

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

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?”

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.”

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.

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.