PERCEPTION AND OWNERSHIP | INTRODUCTION | |
A Lecture Given on 4 January 1954 63 Minutes | Lecture Given on 4 January 1954 63 Minutes | |
And this is the second lecture of the first Monday of the Third Unit. | Ob, Now, this is the first lecture to the first day of the Third Unit in the Clinical Advanced Course. And one of the first things we’re going to cover, naturally, is how to audit. And we’re going to cover all this material from the standpoint of how you communicate it to somebody else. | |
Now, we have in this Unit a fair parity of training. You may doubt that as soon as we get into our examination - because I’m going to correct this examination and (I’m sorry) _ post it. And these things will happen quite regularly, just to make it a bit of a two-way flow. Now, we’re not doing this to penalize you, we’re just doing this to show you how well you’re getting along. | Well, that means I’ve got to communicate it to you and then communicate to you, as well, how you can communicate it to somebody else and it invites the investment of your own originality in communicating it. Because there are many ways to say the same thing. You would be amazed when I tell you that I have been saying the same thing practically for a year and each time it comes up very different. And people are quite convinced that I have then said something else that is brand-new. | |
And the first thing we’ve got to go into in any of this is the language with which we’re operating. And we’re operating with a language which is English. And don’t make a mistake about it, we are operating with English. | But the fault there lies with me, it does not lie with thee. Trying to put into English and trying to put into a tight packet, the information of “what is livingness”-information contained in that “what is livingness”-trying to put that together tightly so it will convey a meaning which may be usefully applied is actually the biggest task in Scientology. | |
' There’s an auditor, I think, around who says to his preclears, “Now, just take it as though I were a five-year-old child telling you.” He says this to his preclears so they’ll get the idea of what he’s saying. | Anybody knows he is alive. Just think of that, anybody knows he’s alive. Well, all right. Then you would immediately ask, "All right. You know you’re alive. All right, what’s livingness?” | |
— Now, I’m not trying to hit you at that level but we’re hitting the meaning of the words ™ practically at that level. What is a cow? A cow is an animal with horns, ears, that gives milk and moos. It eats hay. We all know that. You’ll find the language of this particular subject has now boiled down to almost that strata. And the only place you’re going to err and you will err in this direction, is you will try to read too much significance into what we’re doing. | And the guy immediately-"Well, knowing you’re alive, of course.” | |
We’re going in a slightly opposite direction to most instruction. We’re trying to read less significance into things and give it a clarity rather than more deeper and more arduous and onerous mysteries. | Well now, explain it to me. | |
You understand that you, as its Instructor instructing auditors, could go ahead and plow through with a magic wand that would wind everybody up in such a consistent and continuous mystery, they would all practically spin in. You understand that? I mean, you could wind them up in a big mystery. But we’re not trying to wind you up in a mystery. You see that? We’re not interested in a mystery. We’re interested in a clarity. | Female voice: Expansion of theta awareness. | |
The thing wrong with your preclear is hidden influence. When he really gets wrong, everything is a big mystery. You see, his knowingness is down. | All right. | |
Now, what is the definition of no-knowingness? Mystery. See? No-knowingness. | Male voice: Beingness. | |
Your preclear is as well as he knows. He’s no more well than he knows-your index. | What is it? | |
Now, is that a knowingness of data? No. It is a potential knowingness of condition. You get the difference between “it is the knowingness of data” or “the potential knowingness of condition”? You see that as an essential difference? | Male voice: Beingness. | |
Let’s take a datum. A datum - and this, by the way, is a slightly incorrect datum, but it’ll do for us. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. (That’s not quite the right speed. It’s a slight error, but that figure serves the physicist.) And so now we tell you the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. And we sit back handsomely, fold our arms and think we’ve said something. | Beingness. | |
We haven’t said a damn thing! “Second? What is a second?” That’s the first thing we’d have to say. “Mile? What’s a mile?” That’s the next thing we’d have to say. And the third thing we’d have to say is, “ What universe?” All universes? Mest universe? And then we’d have to say, “It is constant - for what universe?” And that is the speed of light. | What is it? | |
And that would be - supposedly would be intelligible, however, and they say that in the physics class all the time: the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. And then sit back proudly and fold their arms and think they’ve said something. Well, they haven’t said anything. It’s a relative datum and that’s all it is. That is, it simply depends on what we have agreed to call a distance and what we have agreed to call a changing interval of spaces. And we’ve agreed on these two things, why, then we’ve got sense out of it. | Male voice: That one I never had a good answer for. | |
But if it was something that we put down and hung to and clung to and embraced to our bosom desperately, why, oh, that would be real interesting, because it wouldn’t get us anyplace. We would be able, then, to compute other relative data. And datum after datum, we would have a huge pile of data with which we could arduously construct something which you ought to be able to construct by saying, “It exists.” | That’s a good dodge. All right. Here. When you read The Factors, you get there some of the fundamentals in this thing of "what is livingness?” | |
Now, if you’re in a state of mind where you’re perfectly willing to say, “All right, it exists ...” And then you’re even willing beyond that to have your student say, “Well, he said it exists. Okay, now let’s see ... uh, let’s see, this applies now to the field of so-and-so. Yes. And this means that space travel, so-and-so .... And Einstein said so-and-so and that means that when you exceed the speed of light, why, everything foreshortens. And that means, significantly, that Man Can’t exceed the speed of light and if he did, why, then he Would get infinitely big. And all of that turns into the fact that, gee, Man can only go, then, at... gee, he can only go about 185,000 miles a second, because time would approach zero if you did that...” | But let’s never lose sight of what we’re looking at. And we’re just looking at the answer of what is livingness. Therefore, those things are best received which are couched in terms with which a person has acquaintance with, in terms of livingness. | |
Oh boy! Where are we going? Where are we going when we take that datum and start to read it out and out and out? We’re not comfortably willing to say, “All right. It exists. It’s a datum.” But we have to get significant and more significant and relate it and relate it and relate it and relate it and relate it in order to make something more out of it and so on. We’ve got a concatenation known as logic, which, in itself is merely a dramatization of this fact in this universe: this universe is made up of consecutive spaces - consecutive spaces. All spaces are adjacent to all other spaces in this universe, which means that all parts of this universe are in communication with all other parts of this universe. | Now let’s say, "What is livingness?” to a group of carpenters. Well, you immediately get the idea: pound-pound, hammer-hammer, saw-saw, construct-construct, draw your paycheck, kick about the foreman and so forth. And go home and you get some beer and you get drunk and it goes well with pumpernickel. And you run a car that’s not too good and not too bad and you worry about the fact because wages have dropped to sixty-five dollars an hour and you go on in along this line and that’s livingness in his first analysis. | |
Now, I’m telling you this datum although it will spin people if they completely examine it. It will actually spin people if they try to read down into this because it is the single trap of this universe. All spaces are consecutive to all other spaces, so everything is adjacent to everything and, therefore, everything in this universe, at any instant, is consecutive to everything else in this universe at any instant. So therefore, everything in this universe is in communication with everything else in this universe at any given instant. And that, in itself, is identification and that is insanity. | Now, you have something wrong with this carpenter and you ask, "What is wrong with you?” Well, you shouldn’t ask, "What is wrong with you?” You should ask, "What is wrong with your livingness?” And you immediately get a slightly different change, which is a better communication. | |
And if you can’t throw some imagination in to break up the confluence of the conflecutors and if you can’t break it down and shift time a little bit, you are caught inescapably in that barrier. So therefore, the MEST universe is a wonderful universe, but it doesn’t make a single diet. And if you try to make a single diet out of the MEST universe, you’re going to get indigestion. And that indigestion is known as psychosis. | You say, “What’s wrong with your livingness?” | |
So we’ve got two other universes, fortunately. And one of them is yours and the other fellow’s is the other fellow’s - the other universe is the other fellow’s. | Well, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the man’s livingness. Hammer, hammer, hammer. Pound, pound, pound. Wages are liable to drop below sixty-five dollars an hour. The pumpernickel isn’t so good anymore and it’s gone up in price and he isn’t driving these days a Cadillac. He had a Cadillac last year and he had to get rid of it and get a big Buick because-you know, things have dropped. | |
So we’ve got three universes: we’ve got your universe, we’ve got the MEST universe and we’ve got the other fellow’s universe, which shows you immediately there must be an infinity of other universes. But they all come under one classification: the other fellow’s. Because the MEST universe is yours, it isn’t yours and the other fellow’s. This is hard for a student to wrap around sometimes, because it’s too obvious. It’s yours. It isn’t yours and his. | Well, what’s wrong with livingness? Well, he’ll answer you “scarcity” if he really adds all this up. Scarcity. | |
Now, we talk about it to people and you will even find yourself talking to students about this in order to avoid the argument. You’ll find yourself teaching students, “Well, the MEST universe is an agreed-upon universe. And it’s your universe and the other fellow’s _ universe and it’s where we get together. And therefore, it’s half his and half yours.” | Well obviously, you ask “Scarcity of what?” | |
And that’s a very happy frame and it’s a very close, quick statement of it and it involves no further conflecutors of the configuroogenots, see? So we just say, “Well, it’s a compromise — universe wherein all is made of agreement” and that’s a terribly easy statement. And it’s also not true. But it’s an awfully easy statement. | And he might think it over a little bit and he’d say, “Well, a scarcity ofmm-mmm-mmmm, oh, pumpernickel. Scar— nd, that isn’t really what’s wrong. Scarcity oi-hmmm, well, it’s a scarcity-it’s a scarcity of leisure, that’s what it is. I just don’t get enough time to loaf and go fishing. I’m at it all the day, hammer and pound and so forth and I just don’t get a chance to have any leisure time. And there’s just too much work involved with this whole thing.” | |
The reason it’s not true is because it doesn’t work and that’s the only reason why. | And then he’d say, “Well really, that’s not the case. It’s really a trouble but the thing is, is there really isn’t enough work. And that kind of worries me.” | |
Because the second we start to use this universe as an agreed-upon universe, we do it with ARC and agreement upon universe, we find out people’s perceptions, as long as they run masses of people agreeing with masses of people that the universe is here and so | Well, when you started to analyze what is livingness with this carpenter, you would run into, eventually, the nothing of the wrongness and the nothing of the rightness about life and the nothing of the somethingness and the something of the nothingness. And when you got it back and forth and worked around, you’d find out it really came down to two main concerns: a concern about the nothingnesses and a concern about somethingnesses. | |
forth, we find out their perceptics go up, tick-tick-tkk-tick-tick, brighten, brighten, brighten _ and we think we’re on a terrific track. And we think, “Oh boy, now we’ve really proven ARC. Now we’re right there. No wonder ARC is so terribly effective.” And then all of a sudden, his perceptics stop improving and take a dive and he starts to get sick. | And when you’d run it all down, why, you would have a package, you see? It could be composed of something and nothing. In terms of what? | |
What’s the matter? Why, this thing was a beautiful theory: the MEST universe is 50 percent yours and 50 percent the other fellow’s. No it isn’t, it’s yours. Now, we’re not off into a mystery or metaphysics. I told you we were going to talk about awful plain things and then I’ve thrown you this thing. Isn’t that a dirty trick? Isn’t that a horribly dirty trick? | Well, not in terms of carpentering, that’s too specific, it would be in terms of livingness. So livingness would be composed of the somethingness of livingness and the nothingness of livingness. And the nothingness of livingness is dyingness. That’s the main thing he’s worried about is dyingness. | |
Well, the proof of the matter is, how good are your mock-ups? Your mock-ups are as good as you own them. And the MEST universe is as visible to you as you own it. And the test of it is, try duplicating things you own and then try duplicating things you don’t own._ And so, we will go about this right now and demonstrate this and it will demonstrate limitedly, to this. Now let’s pick up some possession of yours, such as your pocketbook - your pocketbook, your coat, a pin, anything like that, anything you’ve got, that’s right, anything you’ve got that’s very personal. | And so when we have to analyze all this out, we find out that anywhere we enter the problems of livingness, we come up with a somethingness and a nothingness and a maybeness. You know, is it a something or is it a nothing? Or is it a nothing or is it a something? | |
All right, now let’s duplicate it. | And out of this maybeness, then, we get a what? Maybeness is composed, actually, of something and nothing together, they make a maybeness. But this leads us off immediately into a certainness in two directions. A certain of nothing, certain of something. And we still find in the middle ground, maybeness, which is uncertainty. | |
Did you get a good duplicate? All right. Now, did you do that? Do you see that, that you got a good duplicate of it? All right. | Now, this divides into three zones of time and as we ask this carpenter about this, he’d say, “Well, in the old days so-and-so and so-and-so, but now so-and-so and so-and-so. However, in the future it may so-and-so and so-and-so.” And so we have a category for each one of these. The somethingness and the nothingness of yesterday, the somethingness and nothingness of today and the somethingness and nothingness of tomorrow. | |
Okay. See that package of cigarettes? That’s mine. This is my package of cigarettes. О This is mine. I bought them down at the store. I’ve smoked two-thirds of them - more f | than that. It’s mine. I paid my money for it. Mine. Duplicate it. Is it as good as yours? | Which gives us, immediately, a certainness of the somethingness of tomorrow, a certainness of the nothingness of tomorrow, a certain of the somethingness of now, a certain of the nothingness of now, a certain of the somethingness which is past, a certain of the nothingness which is past and all those things entangled make uncertainty yesterday, uncertainty today and uncertainty tomorrow. |
Well, it’s a funny thing, it’ll work in crowds of thousands. I mean, you can take guy after guy after guy and you can show him this. | And out of these uncertainties, his life seems to be made up. And everything he is worried about will have something to do with uncertainty. And this would immediately lead you to believe that what we would do would be immediately to untackle all the uncertainties o£ yesterday and today and tomorrow and by tackling all these uncertainties, so unravel his problem. Only the auditor who did that uniformly, would fail. | |
All right. Now, this is a sheet which holds your schedule. This is your schedule, this is yours. Belongs to you as a class unit. Belongs to you, it’s yours personally. All right. | Why? Because uncertainty is not a substance. Uncertainty is a condition which results from two things: that is the lack of substance and the existence of substance. So we've got these two things. And throughout auditing and throughout instruction and wherever we go, whether we’re talking about carpenters or the livingness of a brick or the livingness of a book or the livingness of a gopher, it doesn’t matter. We’re looking at the condition of uncertainty and avoiding the processing of uncertainty. And we are applying whatever we know to the two certainties that we can reach, which is the nothing and the something, in the three zones of the major barrier there is - time. | |
Duplicate it. Little bit better than the cigarette pack? | And in essence we have, then, the package of the entire MEST universe. And it is composed, actually, of no more than these factors. | |
Now, of course, there’s some people that are running an inversion on the thing, that will get something, actually, duplicated which is enforced upon them better than something which is not. And that is called sort of a delusive duplication. And their mock-ups will behave crazily and do other weird things when they do that. | But to have any of these factors, we have to have an awareness. Without an awareness, we have no cognizance. We have no recognition of any problem. We have no recognition of any condition or any state unless we have an awareness of the condition or a state. Is that correct? Seems right. It’s as if you could overreach this material very easily. It’s what nearly everyone has been doing here, for really - hate to say it’s this long, but the truth of the matter is that we can say and agree with the libraries - thirty-five hundred years. | |
Now, that’s a very, very brief test, isn’t it? There’s nothing much to that test. But you f | did get a better duplicate, didn’t you, of the cigarette package? And when I told you this was yours, you got a better duplicate of it. | Well, the truth of the matter is, the last time some of this stuff was thrown around here on Earth was about eighty-two hundred years ago. And it is still kicking around, as was written down much, much later in the Vedic Hymns. And there was a lot of this stuff around about eighty-two hundred years ago or thereabouts. And a little fragment of that has leaked through. |
I have some of you looking at me kind of wonderingly - there’s two or three in the Unit - what happened? Let’s find out what the other side of it was. Did you get a better duplicate of it? You got no duplicate of any of them. That’s what the answer is on that | Well now, we’re right back to actualities and blunt realities, you might say, good, solid blunt realities. And we are dealing not with an evaluation of Freudianism so that we can validate Freudianism and validate somebody’s expenditure of time on having studied | |
Now, what did you choose of your own? Yeah, you. | Freud. We are not seeking now to validate the Vedic Hymns and so validate somebody who has spent a lot of time studying the Vedic Hymns. We’re not trying to validate the Vedic peoples. We’re not trying to validate anybody. We’re not trying to agree with anything, in other words. That’s the furthest thing from our thoughts. | |
Female voice: My purse... | However, we have to do some agreement in terms of language. Otherwise, MEST-wise, we don’t have any communication for this instruction. Now, we’re actually running, then, for your purposes-not actually, but for your purposes-we are actually running a somethingness-nothingness, in terms of data. | |
Your purse. Is your purse yours? | We are trying, if we possibly can, to regard these simplicities of livingness as a knownness. See, these simplicities of livingness as a knownness and applying it to a nothingness of knownness, which is the preclear. And we get our something-nothing then. | |
Female voice: 1 thought it was. | Now, the data which we have here is very bluntly data which stands application. The witness of that is the fact you’ll get your first big jump, or anybody does, when he gets data certainty, when he gets into data certainty and when he gets the idea, yes, he’s certain of his data, that’s the first big certainty he gets under instruction or processing and so on. | |
Well, is it yours? | That’s a preclear’s first big jump. You know, “Now, remember something real,” you ask this preclear. | |
Female voice: Yes. | And the preclear says - two minutes later, three minutes later, five minutes later-he says, “You know, I ate breakfast this morning and that’s really real.” | |
It is? | And you will break a psychosis just like that, [snap] That’s the first thing he runs into is a data certainty. Something happened to him, he knows that he remembers that it happened and he knows that it happened and therefore he has penetrated, to that degree, the time barrier. And so he is very happy about it because he’s run into a data certainty. | |
Female voice: Mm-hm. | Now, the first data certainty you will run into under instruction, as far as Scientology goes, that there is actually data to be certain of. And the second you run into that, that there is a somethingness about this data, then you will have a big somethingness. And you’ll compare that somethingness with the nothingness of pcs that you pick out of the raw and out of the street or something and this fellow is walking around in “What fog?” You know? It’s one step further than “What room?” - it’s “What fog?” | |
Well, I’m not going to argue with you or evaluate a case. Now, is it yours or is it yours as much as that light fixture is yours? Which is most yours, your purse or the light fixture? | And this chap is liable to wind up in two conditions. One, if you were to approach him with a sufficiently mystic atmosphere and to permit him only a slight inkling of what was going on, you might wind him up with a greater sanity, comparatively speaking, and you might bring to him a better standpoint as far as himself and his family and others are concerned and, boy, you’d sure bring him into a big “maybe” where you were concerned, see? | |
Female voice: My purse. | Why would you do that? It’s just because you’ve handed him this terrific somethingness, you see, and he’s only able to absorb a part of it and that clashes with his nothingness and he comes halfway out of his nothingness and halfway meets your somethingness as you present it to him, so he gets on a terrific maybe where you’re concerned. | |
Your purse is. And let’s examine it just a little bit further. Have you a more personal possession than the purse? | And this’ll be true of you as an Instructor and it’s always true of the auditor. And the auditor, to some slight degree, has a rough time of it. The preclear is apt to be fighty toward an auditor. He’s apt not to thank an auditor. An auditor only saved his leg and yanked him out of death’s door and did a few other things for him and he still complains about his earache or something. | |
No, no more personal possession than the purse? How about your glasses? | It’s really nonsensical the way preclears react, until you realize that you have yanked him from a nothingness halfway toward a somethingness and you haven’t educated him or you haven’t done anything to him to straighten him out, really. All you did was take the somethingness that you knew about and you just looked at this case and you brought a sufficient degree of communication into being with the future, a present and the past-wiped out enough barriers, in other words, in terms of distance and energy and so on. You just gave him enough reach to a point of where he was sailing straight down the road as far as handling himself was concerned. | |
Female voice: Yes. | You didn’t bring him up to a point of where he could handle life or do any fantastic stunts or anything like that. You didn’t bring him up to a big somethingness. And he’ll sit there right in the middle ground as far as you’re concerned. | |
All right. Let’s duplicate them. | And if you don’t watch it, in teaching a class of auditors, you will bring the auditors up into that uncertainness about you as an Instructor, which will then be very difficult for you. So let’s get the air clear right now because we’re on the first relay-the first point of this relay system. | |
Did you get a duplicate that time? | Right now, we don’t intend to bring you out of a nothingness. In the first place, you’re in control of a great deal of livingness. And it’s there for you to look at and you’re not in a fog. There isn’t a one here that doesn’t have, at this moment, some certainty that what we’re doing, when applied to a human being, at least-even crudely-will produce some sort of an effect. And then we’re out of that nothingness, aren’t we? So we’re not dealing in a complete zero. | |
Female voice: No. I’m not sure thatlknow what you mean by a duplicate of it. Do you mean, in fact, did I see them? No. lean put something up and say that my glasses are there. | All right. So probably where we sit is someplace between a maybe and a somethingness. So let’s just take it from that maybe, between that maybe and a somethingness, and yank it over toward a somethingness as fast as possible. And then let’s deal with exactly those somethingnesses which we know and those exact nothingnesses which we know exist. | |
All right. | And then let’s deal, as Instructors, thereafter, in the form of trying to teach in the form of-now, I myself may fall way and woefully short of this goal-but trying to teach as much as possible in the frame of livingness of those we instruct. And by such, we will give them immediate association with the somethingness of the information instead of hanging them up on a maybe. | |
Here we have, more than anything else, a language breakdown. What do you mean by a duplicate? What you mean, is an image. Not a mental image, by the way, because it’s an actual image. You can put a wire into it and get juice off of it, so we can hardly call it what we normally classify as imaginary. "Imaginary” is something, by definition, which doesn’t exist but which we merely think it does. Well, what exists is, by classification, something could be tested on a meter or measured. | Now, there may be one or two here who are trained in nuclear physics. Certainly there are several here who are trained in at least high-school level physics. To these it wouldn’t appear, then, a complete darkness if we were to suddenly start out and I were to give you today the three laws of motion and as they apply to human behavior. That wouldn’t be too far afield. | |
The physicist’s definition of what exists is something that can be measured, weighed, scouted, looked over, felt, sensed, experienced. That is a physicist’s definition. | Mostly we live in a mechanical society and we have, in this day and age, some inkling of this. But it would be a mistake to start out in this mechanistic approach, because we’re educated into believing that machines are inanimate, unliving objects, to some degree, and that motion itself is a sort of an unlivingness and so we would have started teaching you immediately in terms of dead tissue - the one mistake medicine and biology has repeated and repeated and repeated to a point where their advancement is cut to almost nothing. | |
Well, a mock-up has mass and so goes out of the field of the imaginary. All right. | They try to understand livingness by looking at the dead. They take a tissue and slash it out of some body and then examine this tissue and they say, “Look at all the atoms and molecules.” Balderdash. That tissue won’t work in terms of atoms and molecules. You can do all you want to it in terms of atoms and molecules and, by golly, it won’t come back to life again. | |
Now, we got our point across here-most everybody on this. Now, we’ve got a universe which, actually, is running on a mock-up at the speed of light. When we say the speed of light, we have said one of the emptiest things we could say - except in relative speeds. How fast do you mock-up and unmock? Well, you mock-up and unmock, obviously, at the speed of light or you would not have a MEST universe around you. | Now, on the day when that piece of tissue would come back to life again-just by studying the three laws of motion and atoms and molecules-on that day, we are then and only then justified in talking about the three laws of motion. You see, in terms of atoms and molecules, and say, “This is livingness.” | |
Now, light makes, as a particle travels, consecutive new spaces, because space is a viewpoint of dimension. And so every time - every time we have a particle in a new position, we have a new piece of space. | You see, if we’ve proven conclusively that dead tissue will come back to life and live and procreate and be happy and breathe and all the rest of it, by simply applying some more atoms and molecules, if we’ve done this, why, then we’re justified in talking about livingness in terms of deadness. | |
What’s the definition of space? It’s the viewpoint of dimension. | But today, we are not able to demonstrate this. There is no catalyst known, throughout all of modern chemistry, which will take dead tissue and make it reproduce. But we can take a Mathison E-Meter and take its probe and put it across a scar which is real dead-put the probe, in other words, on the other side of the scar and give the fellow the electrode to hold and, as an auditor, we can simply sit there and connect the two sides of the terminal - that is to say the terminals - we’d connect that probe with the beingness of the person and it goes through, pop! And the preclear knows when it goes through, pop! And we know when it goes through, And more importantly, the meter at that moment says mowwww. | |
And so, every time a particle changes in position, we have a new space. And we can ask, right at that minute, does a particle change position? Or do we have a new particle? | And what do you think happens after that? You do that, the scar tissue goes away. So therefore, we are justified in talking about livingness in terms of livingness. And we’re not justified in talking about livingness in terms of deadness or mechanicalness or anything else and trying to evolve everything through a sea of mud. | |
Well, if you’ve got new particles every time, your perception is fantastically beautiful. And if you are changing particles in position, without going through the something-nothing line and you’re sort of leaving it all up to the superautomaticity of your automaticities to keep something moving there, and all of this, and you’re just leaning on this with great weight and heaviness and saying "That’s it,” it behaves just like automaticity behaves. | So let’s take just what we know and go up from there and the first place we know we’re alive or moderately so. | |
In other words, we’re up against the problem of fading reality. This is a fading reality - greater and greater reliance upon an automatic machine. You know? It’s not my responsibility, it’s somebody else’s responsibility. | Now, this probe experiment is one, actually, you should make, because at once we have something dead-MEST, molecules, atoms-saying that there is a livingness. We’ve made it admit it. Engineering has tried to make it admit it for a long time. It tried to steal all sorts of tissues alive and keep them alive long enough to examine them. They’ve fooled around with this (I’m talking now about engineering, not about medicine), they’ve fooled around with currents and flows and that sort of thing, trying to measure them. | |
The one thing that’ll kick a black case in the head and really make it sit there and squawk is to start running cause and effect or responsibility. He’s running other cause and self effect - other responsibility and less responsibility for himself. In other words, he isn’t owning. | Well, we made the hump. And we find out, then, that one human being can monitor an energy in another human being. Well, if this is the case, if one human being can do it in another human being and we find out that the scar tissue abates, which it does, then the subject of living is something that should be studied by the living, in terms of livingness. | |
Now, when you own everything there is in sight, you get a brilliant clarity of perception, which, as you sit there, would be incredible to you. I mean you couldn’t see things this bright, that’s all, I mean they’re too bright. Everything gets - it gets up to the point finally where you start to look at the walls and you’re expecting an effect, you see? | And the dichotomy which we are running-that is the plus and minus on the thing-is not livingness versus deadness. That’s not what we’re running. We’re not talking about that and if you get off on that groove at any time, you’ve avoided the whole question. What we’re talking about is something essentially very simple-we’re talking about livingness in a something state or in a nothing state. And we’re not then talking about deadness at all. | |
You look at something and you expect particles to come back to you (it says in the physics textbook). And you look at the wall and the particles are reflected back to you. | And it is doubtful if the condition-deadness-is fulfilled other than in the dictionary, by definition. It’s very doubtful. If you examine all this in relative states of livingness, why, it makes kind of sense to you because it makes you immediately a cousin to the whole universe and you become less scared of it, although it terrifies you for a while when you first glimpse this fact. | |
And there you sit looking at the particles as they come back to you and mirroring this image of the particles as they come back to you and so you see the wall. Well, that would mean there would be a consecutive flow of wall pictures coming back to you, from the wall to you, at gradients of one over c. I’m sorry to get so technical, but it’s just every time there’s a particle shift, it’s coming back to you at a nothing-something, nothing-something, nothing-something, nothing-something, zzrrrrrrrrttt, bang! We get the picture of the wall. | And you’re talking about not-survival and non-survival, you’re talking about a relative degree of survival which goes from an unattainable absolute of no-survival to an unattainable absolute of constant, continuous survival. So when we are studying survival-when I’m talking about an absolute, I mean survival in an absolute, finite, measurable state, unchanging, unvarying and going forevermore till the end of some interminably, unterminatable time. That would be the utter absolute of survival. Unobtainable. See, neither one of these ends of this spectrum are obtainable. | |
That’s the way it would work theoretically. | So we’re studying, if we’re studying life itself, we’re unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, we’re studying a rather horrible thing. We’re studying the survival of something which tries desperately, every now and then, to become a nothing and having become a nothing, tries again to be a something. And so we get survival as the study of somethingness and nothingness in terms of form. Survival as something, since survival itself is inevitable. We’ll see that as we go along. I mean, this is one of those horrible things that it’s too horrible for an individual to immediately look at, the truth of the matter is. | |
Does it work that way? Does it actually work that way? Well, we’ve set it up automatically | I mean, we’re not up against, then, something which the imagination can’t embrace. That’s easy for the imagination to embrace, but it’s kind of horrible. If you sit somebody down and you say, “All right, now get the idea ...” (This is the way you really push this thing through at some individual, you could practically murder him.) “Now get the idea of you sitting there in just that position, thinking just that thing to the end of time without any slightest chance of any change.” The individual will practically cut his throat because that’s the one thought he mustn’t think. That’s the horrible thought. Now, I invite you to just make a little note of that and try it. And then make sure that you do it for about a half an hour and at the end of that time go find an auditor. | |
to work that way, so we can say it works that way. But after we’ve relied on it for a while, it doesn’t work that way anymore and it starts to fade out and our perception goes by the boards. | You will have either sunk to a “not caringness” about the whole thing, which is the most utter, complete apathy you’ve ever reached, or you will simply have picked out of it some of the certainty and truth of the fact that you’re on a track which you’re trying to vary and which is pretty hard to vary. And your effort is to vary the state of survival toward a somethingness of form or a nothingness of form. And you’re just trying to vary this, one way or the other, back and forth, enough to produce some certainty of change. | |
But if we turn around and do this trick now: now, I want you to look at the front wall of the room and just take a look at it now. | And as long as you can produce some change, you’ll be perfectly happy about it. And the less change you’re able to produce and the more times you have failed to produce a change, why, the less certain you will be that you can change and the more you are chained to the inevitable treadmill. | |
Now move the image of it right in on your chest. | Societies will commit suicide. Criminals will do terrible things. Almost anything will be done by a living being in an effort to vary the state of his survival. Now he gets, finally, to where he dramatizes the one thing he’s trying to avoid-and here we get to the preclear or the group we’re processing-he finally dramatizes what he has tried for a long while to avoid: a constancy of survival. And he’s dramatizing it, which means a constancy without change. | |
All right. Now let’s take a look at that front wall and move the image on your chest again. | And there sits your poor preclear. And you say, “Run this, run that, do this, do that” and he does this and does that and he runs this and he runs that and he keeps looking at you alertly, expecting some change to take place. | |
Now let’s look at the front wall and move the image on your chest again. | Well, why does he expect the change to take place? Well, I’ll tell you why he expects it to, is he knows he cant effect one. He can’t cause a change. So he’s come to you or the auditor you will be instructing, he will come to him eventually and he will look at him alertly and say—and what he’s saying as he sits there in the seat is—he’s saying just this, really, he’s saying, “My God, here I sit and life is going right on at this constant rate, a slight decline perhaps, but it’s going on at this constant rate. There’s no real variation W in the forms of things which I am producing and seeing. There is no real change taking d place and I have lost my power and ability to effect these changes and here I am. And that’s what’s wrong with me. Now, please, you are powerful, you can do something. Please effect a change-any kind of a change! Make me sick! Make me close to death! Make me d go to a hospital! We don’t care what you do to me, but please do something to effect a м change in the condition of my survival.” | |
Just the front wall and then the image on your chest. You don’t have to move it by gradients as it comes to you, just put it there on the front wall and then push it against your chest. The chest of your body now. Now look at the front wall and now let’s put the front wall against your chest. In other words, the picture of it against your chest. | And that’s all a preclear’s sitting there and asking for. He isn’t asking to (quote) “get well,” (quote) “get better” or any one of these things. He isn’t asking all those things. And the second that you, as an Instructor, can disabuse your student auditor of “get better,” “get well”-as soon as you can disabuse that student auditor of this as a goal, why, you " will have started him in the direction of auditing. | |
Now let’s look at it up here. Now put a picture of it against your body, your chest, again. | Otherwise, you’ve started him in the direction of failure. Because you’ve given him what? An unbalanced problem. You’ve said, “Now look, son, there’s only one direction we expect you to take a preclear in. And that’s to make him get better and to make him get well and to make him get whole and to make him survive and keep on living without change. And we expect you to do this to a preclear.” | |
Now the front wall and against your chest again. Don’t turn it around or anything, just pull it in on you. | And then this poor guy goes out and he processes this preclear and he makes a Theta Clear out of him. And this person is in beautiful condition on Saturday-of course, the person has cancer, that’s beside the point, and the person is also eighty-nine and that’s beside the point and so forth. And on Monday morning he gets a telephone call from " the family and they say, “He’s dead.” In the same tone of voice as you say, “You did it.” And if you’ve trained an auditor so poorly that he’s surprised, then you haven’t trained * him at all. Well, what did the auditor do? He did the most beautifully, classic job of exactly what he’s supposed to do. He made it possible for the preclear to make a change in survival. He sure did. In other words, there was victory. | |
All right. Now let’s do worse than that. Let’s take this cigarette package and let’s put it in an exact area. | Here was this poor thetan, keeping on an unchanging state, dragging around a body that was an unvariable thing, the only direction it was changing was south on its own determinism and that was such a low state there was nothing even dramatic about it, it was just sort of rotting away, you see. | |
Now pick out an exact area of your chest, an exact spot. All right. Now look at the cigarette package here. Now put the cigarette package at that spot on your chest. | And here's this thetan, he’s got to go on now for possibly-he doesn’t know, but it might be for years and years and years up to a point where they put him in a coffin, you see? And then the electronic fields sort of damp out and disappear from this body up to a point where he can suddenly do a bunk and become nothing and forget all about it and not know anything about what happened to him and be completely confused and then go on the cycle of pretending he’s something else and hooking up somewhere else. In other words, leaving it all to chance. | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | The auditor just picked up that whole problem, chopped it up into bits and put this answer in its place: exteriorize him, stabilize him, ditch a body, go get another one. Well now, that isn’t the end and all of auditing. That isn’t the goal of this auditor, particularly. His goal is anything that could produce a change in survival. | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | Now, we call that a communication change simply because communication depends on time and it depends on distance and it depends upon some kind of a sense message. In other words, it’s a form symbolized. | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | So the auditor’s there, we say, to produce a communication change. And we’ll hear that many, many times. I’ll say that over and over and over: “The auditor’s supposed to produce communication change. If you run the technique for three minutes and don’t produce a communication change, run something else.” | |
Doing that? Are you getting a picture there on your chest? | And we’ll say that over and over and over and over and over and over. Well, what are we saying? “Communication change.” We have to understand what a communication is and, well, we had better be presenting, every few minutes on a case, a different aspect of survival-a slightly different aspect of survival. In other words, he is more aware or less aware. He is surviving at a faster time rate or a slower time rate. | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | In other words, just keep pulling this case around, because the moment it hangs fire and starts to run constant, that is the one thing the guy is dramatizing. And that’s what’s wrong with the case. You see that? | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | Now, when we’re going in this direction, then, it puts us beyond being-and I don’t want to say this for public consumption, but I have to say this because there’s no sense in every auditor that comes along breaking his heart over it. I am not trying to deliver into the hands of you-even vaguely-that your mission is to save all of humanity. Because the second I would say, “Save humanity and demonstrate this and demonstrate that,” it would immediately narrow the definition down to what your understanding of saving humanity is. And let me tell you one of the most vicious and horrible societies that ever existed-one of the most vicious societies that I know of back on the track-wouldn’t let a man die. In other words, a person had no freedom to die. | |
Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. | Didn’t matter what kind of condition he was in, he continued to survive. That society had patched it up in such a way that we had survival as the inevitable conclusion. They had magnificent surgeons, they had magnificent electronics men. They could wire up any kind of a body to repair almost anything. They had biochemical gimmicks which would put back in the voice, which would redevelop this, which would polish up that-a fellow could be without arms and without legs and he would still be fitted by small electronic impulse generators which would control a couple of stumps for him. | |
Ping, ping. One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two. You starting to get the pressure of this against your chest? Hm? | He couldn’t die. It didn’t matter how ugly he was or how ornery he’d gotten or how much he’d lost or what the change was or wasn’t, this individual in this society could not die. It didn’t matter how many battles he’d gotten messed up in or how he’d served the society or something. It was the awfullest curse there was. The most terrible curse there is on the track is an unchanging state of survival. | |
Sure. Because you’re putting a duplicate of it, a real duplicate of it. And do you know, if you kept that up and you were good enough, you would have this cigarette package here and against your chest too? And it’d be just as real to you in both places. Well, that wouldn’t be delusion. | The society dramatizes that. Instead of sending a fellow to an electric chair, they put him in jail for the rest of his life. They give him life imprisonment which is complete, unchanging, continuous, enforced survival. And if you want to make a preclear get real sick, just run out and run into and bog down on that particular computation and he gets sick. | |
Man has steered men off of truth by giving him a deeper significance to everything. What is simpler than this? You see a picture, you feel its weight, you can do all these things with this picture in the universe around you. You have been trained and you are, by experience, continuing along in that training to expect everything to appear exactly where they appear. And you expect to perceive them by some automaticity which, somehow or other, transfers this wall or this tree to some sort of a screen or something which is you so that you then perceive them. Well, this becomes a superincredibility. I mean, somewhere, you have to look at the picture. You see this? All right. This is one of these idiotic simplicities: somewhere you have to look at the picture. | Now, every once in a while, you get a preclear sick at his stomach and you wonder why he’s sick at his stomach. Well, it’s right there on that computation. If you start running nothingnesses-and you’ll balance it back between something and nothingness-and all of a sudden the guy is riding the continuous, inexorable center of survival and he’s just going right down the track on it. And he envisions no change from a state he is afraid of. He’s in a state which he is afraid of and now he envisions no change from that state. | |
Now, let’s take the idea that you’ve got eyes, and this image up here comes through the lenses of the eyes and is channeled through an optic nerve and then registers on a screen. And therefore, by biological and medical definition, we have perception of what we have seen. | And at that moment we have, entering the individual, what we call hopelessness. And what’s hopelessness? Is no change from a state one is afraid of. And the state one is afraid of is halfway between something and nothing. Neither fish nor no fish, or fowl or no fowl, or horse or no horse, or car or no car. And that’s what a person’s afraid of. When we enter effort into this, we get what is known as anxiety, you know? He isn’t over on the nothing and he isn’t over on the something side of it, he’s just hanging in the center. | |
Now, do you see that as perception? You know, that’s the definition of medical perception, biological perception. Here is the image, now here is the image here, now we have the image coming through entering the eyes, being focused dually and then focusing upon a screen and this screen then takes the image and so we see the eye ... Oh, there’s something very wrong about this somewhere. Somewhere, there’s something quite haywire, something very silly about it. Because they haven’t put in where we inspect the picture. Somewhere, you’ve got to look at it, otherwise it’s all very fine. See, it’s a wonderful explanation, except it doesn’t explain anything. | Well, that is the middle course, the exact middle course, of survival. A person can say, "I am a man” and be a man. Now, you noticed a little earlier I told you beingness enters into it. He can be something, which is changing the-it’s over on the something side, you see? He can be a man. | |
And this again is another (as I started to talk to you about early in this) data. So I can give you this big consecutive datum - a big consecutive data about - you see this wall and it goes in your two eyes and it comes back and it impresses itself on two screens at the back of the heads. And then these two screens are coordinated onto one screen and so we have a perception so that we know the wall is up here, because we have seen it back there in the back of the head. And they even go to the point where the image is inverted and then they give all these parts names. And this is all very cute. But do you know that the entire mechanism could have gone by the boards and the fellow can still see? | Well, he says, “I am a man.” And he enters into this as a somethingness and he carries on in this as a somethingness and he goes along perfectly fine on this as a somethingness but it’s a lame solution, very lame solution, really. Because he is a man, except there’s always that sneaking little tap-tap-tap right back of the left ear, you know, “Or am I? Am I? Am I really? Am I not really just pretending? No, no, I am a man. I am sincere about this” and so forth. | |
There’s a child right now, down south someplace, that the doctors are very, very worried about, because the child has no sight because he has no pupil in his right eye. He was born that way. And he still keeps seeing out of his right eye. And nobody has told him he shouldn’t do that yet, but they’ll manage it in two or three years so that he won’t see out of it anymore. | And the more he fails at being what is defined as a man, the more he gets this little knock-knock-knock. "I’m really just pretending, I hope. I... really am pretending - I’m not quite. Am I a man?” And he begins to seek a higher state of perfection. | |
See, but he obviously can’t see out of it because there’s no pupil there. In other words, the physical universe isn’t agreeing with the datum, so therefore, let’s throw away the physical universe. See, that’s the wrong way to go about it: just take a bunch of data and then everything that doesn’t agree with our package of data, let’s just throw it away. See, that’s the wrong way to instruct, it’s the wrong way to study. That’s reverse end to, because the datum is simply a conclusion. And when you have finally finished processing your preclear out of all the conclusions he has ever concluded, you’ve got a blank screen - total blank as far as aberration is concerned - and you’d have terrific imaginative ability. | What is this higher state of perfection? He wants to be a man better. Now, he doesn’t want to be a better man-he wants to be a man better. You get that? | |
What’s wrong with your preclear? Conclusions. What are conclusions? Data. Datum, Ю datum, datum, another datum, another datum, another datum, another datum, which relates, which relates, which relates, which makes a terrific woof and warp of logic, which in itself is very impressive but which all boils down to the fact that it’s a dramatization of the consecutive spaces of the MEST universe. Everything is next to everything. Saturn is next to Earth by reason of consecutive spaces between Saturn and Earth. You see that? Therefore, a particle leaving Saturn in this direction would, someday or other, arrive on Earth, no matter what speed it was leaving, theoretically. | Now, if a man was defined as something that smelled-let me be crude for a moment, I seldom will be in this Unit, we’re all amongst friends here-a man is something that smells of horse biscuits and sweat and drips chewing tobacco and is in a remarkable state of unwashedness. Well, if that’s a man, and he has very, very closely approximated this condition, he’s happy! He’s real satisfied. If that’s what a man is, he is now a man, he has a conviction that he is a something. You follow that? | |
That’s the way this universe is put together. This universe is supposed to perceive itself within itself, to perceive itself to be in communication within itself and so forth. Well, it couldn’t be any other way and it’s idiotically simple that way, because that’s how the thetan is perceiving it and putting it there so that he can perceive it. | So, sometimes you get these tremendously successful societies of cowboys or tremendously successful societies of infantrymen-they’re dirty, they’re lousy, they’re diseased, they have venereal disease and dysentery, but that’s the way a soldier’s supposed to be and if that’s what their basic education defined a soldier as, they would be the happiest somethings you ever ran into. | |
The easiest thing to agree upon is an identification - So if everybody is going to get into complete agreement about something, he’d better have an identification to start with. I’m not trying to overreach you in any way, but let’s all conceive the easiest thing to agree upon. | They’re being soldiers or they’re being cowboys or they’re being something. But God help and the Lord smite a society which trains somebody up to be a soldier with a clean uniform, without dysentery, with nobility, glory, medals, with officers who are sensible, with a government which is sincere and with wars which have a real purpose, [laughter] | |
Now let’s agree on the easiest thing in this room to agree upon - let’s say this package of cigarettes - and we’ll agree that this package of cigarettes is up here. Well, how do we possibly ever come to an agreement so we can see it? So that I see a package of cigarettes and I can tell you via sound waves that you can see the package of cigarettes? | Now, if you take this poor little kid and you train him up like that and one day he all of a sudden finds himself an infantryman: dirty, dysentery, venereal disease-anything you could think of-bad rations, lousy officers, insincere politicians, a cause that isn’t worth a sniff into a matchbox, then he isn’t being something. Why? Because it’s never been defined for him as a something. He’s never defined it himself as a something. | |
We have identified. We even have an English word, which is a cross up and in itself, an explanation of this phenomenon. It’s a package of cigarettes, isn’t it? Well, as long as we simply say, “Object, here.” “Object.” We all get object, see? But there is the object. | I swear to Pete, if somebody had come along in kindergarten and taken him as a little boy and said, “Well, probably someday you’re going to be a soldier. Well, soldiers are real tough and they’re real mean and they’re real bad and they’re real no good and they actually amount to nothing afterwards as civilians because they’re so used to taking an enforced direction, they’re no good. They just have a hell of a time in life thereafter and they get dirty and they get diseased and they get shot up and nobody takes care of them and nobody cares where they’re buried and the sanctity of their existence is missing and they don’t have politicians that are any good and their officers are terrible.” | |
Now, let’s go at it a little more obliquely and put the package of cigarettes in my pocket. And I say, “All right. Now, there’s a package of cigarettes out in front of me and so on.” And I agree that it’s out in front of me. And everybody can say at that moment, “Well, he’s really not holding one out in front of him, so, of course there isn’t really one out in front of him.” So we have entered the first hidden influence and the first symbolical explanation of an actual object into the subject of the conversation. | And if they just taught this little kid all these things, see, and they just taught him day after day and he read books-fictionized stories-about the lone infantryman that got away from his company and was all dirty and mean and so forth and finally got into this village. And he found in this village this dirty, horrible old woman, you see, and the two of them managed to scrounge a whole bunch of hogs that were all dirty and they managed to sell them to the rest of the company at a gyp price and this was a funny story. You know, that little kid would get to be twenty years of age, twenty-two years of age and then the government would grab him and just this sort of thing would happen. | |
Now, all right. Now it leaves up to your decision what kind of a package of cigarettes to put out in front of me, doesn’t it? So we get a nonidentification. For instance, the package of cigarettes you put there is not the package of cigarettes which you put there. Is that right? I mean, one of you puts - they fold it one way and it looks the other way and so forth. | The kid would be very happy about the whole thing. He wouldn’t complain about it. So what? He’s being something. But he never finds the mythical character and so we get the divergence between the practical and the ideal. | |
So, in order to get a good identification on anything, we’d have to have a consecutive-space-identified sort of thing about every object there was. In other words, we have to agree on the simplest, most obvious point to get a complete agreement. Now, you know that by experience, don’t you? You know this by experience, that the best way to continue a conversation is to find the most obvious point of agreement you can find with the other person and continue from that point. And that is the soul of conversation as long as it’s going to be conversation. And when it ceases to be the soul of the conversation, we get into that thing called disagreement or argument. And then we don’t see the same thing eye to eye anymore. | The mythical character is the main trap. The ideal character or the mythical character. And in such a wise, the creative artist in the society serves Satan, you could say, if Satan exists. The creative artist keeps painting up this ideal hero: a cowboy with clean underdrawers, who smells like fresh shaving soap, who is noble, who always goes to the rescue and who always has rescues to go to-that’s the most important point of it. | |
This thing is woven through the language. It’s woven through experience. It’s one of those terribly obvious things. It’s this enormous iron block sitting there that everybody looks through and overlooks, because it is an iron block, because it is sitting there, because everybody knows it’s sitting there -o nly nobody knows it anymore. Because we’re all into a deeper significance about this iron block or this package of cigarettes or somewhat. | And this fellow, who is an admirable horseman, who loves horses, who takes good care of his horse, whose horse is faithful to him—this admirable character is always followed around by a Sancho Panza who is always devoted and all the rest of the cowboys respect him. How far can we go with this sort of stuff? See? Because that’s the real stuff that belongs out back of the barn in a big pile-talking to cowboys-that’s really where it belongs. Because after a person has imbibed this balderdash of the knight-errant, the gallant soldier, the beautiful, noble cowboy, his definition of a somethingness is an unobtainable somethingness. And so he has an unobtainable goal. | |
So we begin to disqualify the one thing which is putting the package of cigarettes there, which is your ability to put a package of cigarettes there. And believe me, when you can no longer put a package of cigarettes up here, you can’t see a package of cigarettes. And that’s the test of it with a preclear and that’s how you resolve perceptions on a case. When the individual is no longer able to put a package of cigarettes up here and reimpress that package of cigarettes upon his own chest or in his own head, he can no longer see a package of cigarettes. | The MEST universe is never going to rig it up so that you can have somebody who is like this. In the first place, I know how to ride horses, I know how to ride horses. The way I ride a horse is never give a horse an even break when you can give them an uneven one. Horses are not there to agree with you. They are there to be ridden. And as a consequence, ever since I made up my mind to that, me and horses have just gotten along fine. | |
And that’s the only thing that’s wrong with a thetan: he expects to have a backboard to drop the perceptic against in order to perceive the perceptic. So he would rather look at a facsimile. He takes a picture of the perceptic and then brings the picture up and looks at it. And he’s perfectly happy to do that, except it doesn’t happen to agree with anybody else’s picture. And the reason it doesn’t agree with other people’s picture is a very simple one itself: because he’s not looking at the picture to begin with. He’s not perceiving, because he can run at a different rate of time. He isn’t having to run at time, he hasn’t got a body to meter. He hasn’t got a body to put there which he has agreed runs at a certain speed. | You can take a look at a horse, back into the barn and find a worse bit, find one that’s a little rusty, preferably, and has got a Spanish curb on it and that cinches down real mean-you could pull on it real hard and it’d bust his jaw. Or if he’s a perfectly mean, innocent, sweet little horse and so forth, why, give him a straight bit. Just give him a straight bit and so forth, but make sure you’ve got a leaded quirt in your pocket. | |
In other words, his agreements are broken at the point when he is exteriorized, because he can now freely make his own space or unmake it. And you’ve got to drill him up, actually, to a point where he is willing or unwilling, at will, to reassume the MEST universe. He conceives it dangerous, he conceives it this way and he conceives it that way. | And ever since I’ve decided that it’s you and the horse, not “me and my noble steed, see, who loves me dearly,” my horses and I have just gotten along splendidly. And the horse understood what I was doing-I was riding him. I wasn’t loving him. And nobody has picked me up out of any ditches. | |
Why? Because it’s in such a terribly rote agreement. He has more imagination, he has more pliability, he has more beingness than is required. He can always improve on the universe. He’s got this, that and the other thing that he can do about the universe, see? We’ve put flexibility back into it again. | But I started in on this very early. I started getting my education on this before I was five. And horses look at five-year-olds and, by golly, they’re very nice. They won’t step on them after they’ve thrown them. That’s right. They’re careful of it. I’ve actually had a mustang stand with his foot raised up immediately above my stomach and not put the foot down. Which I thought was real nice. Told him so, profanely. | |
Why? Because he’s now not being something. You see? If you’re being something, then you’d better perceive something and be perceived, because if you don’t perceive as something,then you aren’t anything. This get you? How do you know you’re there? Well, because you see you’re there, of course. But above that level, you could know you were there. | Well, what is this problem that we’re running into? There we have an education in terms of horses. Now, I can take an Eastern kid any day of the week and educate him to the nobility of horseflesh through the Lone Ranger or Trigger or some of these other horses that are around-the Lone Ranger, by the way, isn’t a horse, he’s only half horse. Now, we can take this Eastern kid and we bring him out and do you know before we actually get him to learn how to ride, he’ll practically kill himself. He’ll practically ruin himself before he has a chance. | |
And you’d come along to somebody else and you’d say to him, “Now, do you know I’m here?” | And the truth of the matter is, he may get to a point through that false education of the beauties of horseflesh and the nobility and the stamina-he’s also taught that horses run all the time. In all the Western movies, horses run all the time or stand there and look noble. I’ve never seen horses walking to any great degree. If they’re walking, they’re just getting ready to run or they’ve just been running. | |
If the other fellow was a real high grade, up the line, he’d say, “Yeah. I know you’re there.” Okay. So we don’t have to look. But after we know less, we have to look more. So we get knowingness, lookingness and, when we can’t look so much, then we’ve got to feel about it. And then when we can’t feel about it so much because feeling is, you know, not agreed-upon and we’ve got to go into effort about it. And we go into effort about it and we can’t face effort anymore and we can’t work and we can’t face effort and we can’t push things around and things don’t move just because we make a postulate. Well, let’s get down into thinkingness and now let’s compute, you know, that it must be there. | And so we have this problem in education. We don’t have somebody-unless we educate him just right-we don’t have somebody who is going to make a good horseman. Why? Because his basic education on the subject of horses is wrong. | |
“Well, it must be there because . .. Well, it follows as a logical conclusion that if there were two doors, then these two doors must have been cut in something, so naturally if there were two doors there, then there must be a wall there. Ha-ha! Now, this concludes that there probably is a wall there, because there are two doors there, because we’ve assumed that there were two doors there because somebody said so. So this means there’s a barrier, so we better not go in that direction.” That’s thinking about it, see? | Horses are there to be loved and be affectionate and to run all the time. And that’s not what horses are for. Horses are to carry you across the countryside with as least bodily injury as possible and with as little exhaustion on the part of the rider as possible and-if we’ve got to conserve horses-as easy as possible on the horse if we’ve got to conserve horses. If there’s a scarcity of horses-if, if, if. But those are “ifs.” The others are necessities, which is “horses are there to carry you across the countryside with as little threat to your security and as little upset to your dignity and seat as possible. And that’s what a horse is for.” | |
Now, looking about it would be to simply look up there and see what was the agreed-upon particle thought procedure of fixed ideas with relationship to the door and the window or the door and the wall. In other words, you just look at it - you’d know, perceive, put, mock-up there to be no problem. You see. So, you see as well as you know and you see as poorly as you think. And when you really get poor, thinking becomes symbolization. | And you learn how to handle horses from that viewpoint and by golly, you’d make a terrific horseman. And actually, you get out and you get on a horse and you take the horse someplace, the darn horse will arrive in pretty good condition. There’s no maybe in his mind about who’s riding who. He has no doubts about it and he sees himself heading for this chaparral at a mad rate or he’s going into this giant cactus or something at a mad rate and he all of a sudden realizes that he has been doing this and avoids it. | |
Condensed thinking is a symbol. A symbol is condensed thinking. Thinking is condensed effort, effort is condensed emotion, emotion is condensed looking and looking is condensed knowing. And so we got it, we got our scale of experience. | Why does he realize it? Well, he maybe got a quarter inch of spur in his neck or he got a Spanish curb suddenly yanked down on him or he was actually spilled into the brush on the other side of it. In other words, he was picked up and removed from that course. | |
Now, our problem here is not as great as you think it is. It’s really not anywhere near as great as you think it is. It’s a remarkably easy problem. And I have to tell you that every once in a while, because one of these days you’re going to have to agree with me that it’s an easy problem. | And the funny part of it is, is after he’s done that two or three times, he doesn’t run at giant cactus anymore. He inspects the trail in front of him. He decides, “Well, this dumb rider decides we’re all going to live, so okay, we’ll live.” | |
And it simply hinges, then, on this: a person’s ability to construct something, like a wall, is dependent upon his feeling that he has a right to construct the wall. So the way you’d (quote) “keep somebody from constructing a wall” (unquote) would be to make walls private. And make building permits necessary. And the person who doesn’t perceive well has to go around getting building permits all the time, to look. He buys them from the optician, he gets them from the government. | He makes a good horseman. You get him to the end of the run, he isn’t much lathered up, he’s not nervous, he hasn’t been yanked around, he hasn’t been upset by anything, because there’s no maybe on the track-he’s been ridden. When he arrives at someplace, he stands there-complete confidence. | |
Now, this is very funny, but if you don’t own something, at least to some degree or other, you don’t perceive it worth a nickel. And that’s why moving a person around from one part of the country to another when he’s very young will bring him down, eventually, in perception. And it may push him way up in thinkingness, but it sure doesn’t push him up into lookingness or feelingness - it cuts those bands out. | Now, you take dogs and you want to train a dog, you get the same thing. If the dog begins to believe that you love him desperately and you won’t punish him very much if he does wrong and he is supposed to also do tricks and be cute, but he’s also maybe supposed to mind sometimes, you’ll find a dog that has a bad indigestion, he is nervous, he has a tendency to sleep. He’s not quite secure in other words he’s riding on a maybe. | |
Do you see what we’re doing there? He owns the country. He was raised in Keokuk. And by golly, it wouldn’t matter if the mayor came down and said, “Young man, the city owns that mountain and you are not supposed to look at that mountain anymore.” He would say something very ungraceful, I’m sure. Because he’s known since he was old enough to open his eyes that that was his mountain. And the mayor never can come down and issue a revocation. He owns it. It’s his mountain. It’s his town. They’re his people. | He either has a master or he has a friend. He doesn’t know which. Because sometimes his friend becomes a master and sometimes his master becomes a friend. He hasn’t any certainty. The master doesn’t leave him alone and the friend doesn’t leave him alone completely, you see? So he doesn’t know which it is. | |
And a great comfort of mind results from this, because he doesn’t question his own ownership. He just goes on, he lives in Keokuk to the end of his days. His perception is terrific, he exteriorizes. You walk up to him and say, “Be three feet back of your head,” pang, he is. Not much to this, it’s very easy to do. | So I had a dog once that was a very good friend of mine and he practically ruined me. I was very small. And after that time, I’ve had a number of dogs who never had any doubt in their mind about a friendship. Now, I’m not talking about me-you take the dog trainer. But the point is I just happen to know something about dogs and horses a little bit. And nothing in my mind is further from a maybe. So it’s a good certainty to talk about. | |
But you shift him all over the country now. And every time he goes to a new town, everybody rushes up to him and says, “This is our town. It’s nice, isn’t it? Why don’t you look it over?” But they tell him that awful quick. | And none of these dogs had any doubt in their mind, whatsoever, about our relationship. The relationship was a very definite, positive thing. And the limits to which they could stretch disobedience were exactly defined. And the most terrific example of this was a malamute, who was half malamute and half spitzbergen, and all he knew how to do was pull. And inherently-he’d inherited this from way back on the track. All you had to do was put a strap tight across his chest and he was off. | |
The war, or any war, carries with it a wonderful manifestation: the troops that got there a half an hour ago are the old-timers. And you come in as new troops, see? And they say, “Well, over that way, that was where the action was fought and you can look over our battlefield or this is - you can look over our barracks, it’s down this far.” And they disenfranchise everybody that shows up - rapidly. They’ve only been there a half an hour and they’re old-timers. | He knew nothing else. And he thought when you beat him, when you hit him, something like that, he thought, “Well, [sigh] some sensation.” | |
I was aware of this during the last war and very often reversed it utterly. I would go around and find the oldest settler and I would say, “Have you found my canteen?” Or “Have you found my baggage?” You talk about respect, I was immediately the oldest settler. | Now, I saw a woman whip that dog one time. And the dog just got happier and happier and she was laying on with all of her might! He was a big, brutal, big-boned dog-real tough. And that dog and I met and I had to do something about the dog because he had a habit of putting his paws on little children who were not quite as tall as he was in the first place and it would just knock them down, squash. And then he’d stand there and look at them, the stupid bum, “I wonder what I’ve done to the child? Do you suppose the child has done something to me? I don’t know, maybe.” | |
I landed, one time, on an island very, very early in the war and did this trick, in terms of the oldest company. There had been a small landing force in there right away and they were being cocky and overbearing to the point of taking everything that showed up and nailing everything down and getting the best of everything. And I didn’t intend that this condition should continue, because my rate of havingness was very low at the moment. So I went around and said, “Well, thank God you boys got here. And what have you done with the crashed pieces of the plane I was in here yesterday?” | And I found out that any dog, very early, gets the idea that if you can bite him or he can bite you, why, that determines whether or not who is where. Well, instead of biting the dog, it’s sufficient to just prevent the dog from biting you. Well, how do you do that? Well, you make the dog attack you and then you pick him up on both sides of the jowls and you throw him about twenty-five feet, prying his jaws open with your thumbs. | |
And they said, “My golly, is that so? Where is it?” | You can do it to a wolf, the most savage wolf that ever lived, by the way. There isn’t any reason a man really should be very afraid. He ought to be afraid of a bear because a bear is a good boxer. But wolves and things like that, that isn’t too tough. Because if your timing is up, you can just grab something like that on both sides of the jowls and just keep him going. And you know, it takes the maybe out of their minds? But here we’re talking about brute force-we’re not talking about thought or brains or anything else-we’re just talking about brute force. | |
And, “Oh,” I said, “my God, you’ve bulldozed it over. You dunderheads!” See? And the Seabees is what had been in there and they’re intolerable, the Seabees are. They take ownership of everything and issue the islands and things to people piecemeal thereafter. | And here’s our problem then: What is one’s relationship with existence and what is his goals? What’s he trying to be, what’s he trying to do? | |
Well, do you know that it’s an actual problem in perception? Incoming troops expect to be directed, but the first troops in know there’s nobody to direct them. And the difference between the pride and the cockiness of the first troops in and the last troops in is not battle seasoning, it’s a problem in ownership, that’s all. | Well, the closer he can get to defining what he’s trying to do or defining what he’s not trying to do, the closer he can get to that, the more able he is to arrive somewhere. And the further he is from precisely defining these goals, the further he is from trying to arrive. | |
And the difference between the boy who has had to leave his hometown at an early age and has been in hometowns consecutively ever since and the fellow who’s stayed there forevermore, is that the boy who had to leave has ever since been trying to hide the fact that he has been degraded in terms of ownership and that his havingness is less. And he has to measure up to it, so he goes to the big city to “make good.” He goes here and he goes there and he does this and he does that “to make good.” | So we take the horse who is half servant and half friend, who doesn’t quite know, one way or the other, and we find him in a state of anxiety. And people come around with this horse and they wonder why this horse is so nervous all the time. Well, the horse doesn’t know what it’s all about, really. He doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to do. And we’re very mystified because we find Tough Tony Joe down here, he has a mustang and this mustang gets his head beaten in if he ever bucks and yet this horse is perfectly happy. Perfectly happy horse-good digestion and everything. | |
Make good for what? They always have to make good, though. Well, it’ll follow with them having some slight loss in their own hometown. And if you want to trace back the first loss of havingness on the part of an individual, you will trace back to his first degradation, which is, of course, his first loss of power or pride and his first break of perception, which is, of course, his first break of ownership. The young man does not go to the big city to make good until he’s already been disenfranchised in his own town. | Well, we find this other fellow with a dog, and this dog-he never pets this dog. Once in a while he says, “Good boy.” | |
This doesn’t say that he won’t become a tough, adventurous, mean, ornery fellow. This doesn’t say that he won’t be tremendously successful, as success is measured. This won’t say that he doesn’t survive at a high, constant rate. See, it doesn’t say any of those things. It merely says his perception is less. And it says his sense of ownership of the world around him is kind of forced and, sooner or later, will cave in slightly. It doesn’t say the fellow isn’t able or isn’t strong or isn’t proud. But it does say that he won’t exteriorize worth a nickel. See? We close terminals with that right away, quick. | And the dog looks at him, “Okay. So he praised me.” And yeah, we find this dog proud and happy, with his head held up and doing things and, by golly, the fellow that owns him just never pets him, never does anything much for him. But there’s no maybes. He expects him to go in a certain direction and do a certain thing and he brooks no kickback or he simply leaves him alone and never gives him an order. Produces the same effect: you have certainty. And out of certainty itself, you get pride. | |
Why? Because exteriorization is in itself a disenfranchisement which is performed by the auditor. And when performed on an individual who is very alert to being disenfranchised, results in an immediate state of degradation, which is so sharp and so marked that often the individual is not aware of an exteriorization having taken place at all. His knowingness just goes out, bing. He maybe exteriorizes for a minute or thirty seconds. He’s actually exteriorized! | And when you're trying to rehabilitate a preclear, you’re trying to rehabilitate certainty. And don’t forget that the closest next-door neighbor to that on certainty, just this general certainty, is of course, knowingness. And the closest next-door neighbor to knowingness is ability to make a postulate and have it come true. And the closest next-door neighbor to having a postulate and making it come true is arriving at a somethingness or a nothingness goal and really arrive at it. | |
And for a split instant as he was going out, he recognizes the fact that he is about to leave and then he doesn’t know anything about it. And ten or fifteen seconds later, you ask him, “Did you get outside?” And he says no, he didn’t exteriorize. He did! He exteriorized. A person never fails to exteriorize. But a person often fails to be certain that he did. | And arriving at a somethingness point or a nothingness point depends on whether or not one can make a postulate come true. | |
And in the worst cases - in the cases that are roughest, at first, to handle them, but not very rough, now - he doesn’t know anything about it. It’s a sort of an unconsciousness. Why? Can’t perceive. Why? The last thing he owns is the area he’s in: his havingness is immediately adjacent to his body. His havingness is so close in that the moment his ownership is exceeded in terms of boundary, he feels a degradation. | And development of energy by a thetan is whether or not one can merely say there is energy and have energy. Now, you get how we can take a postulate now and bring it straight down from a thetan, all by himself, who says there is space, see? “There is space,” he says, “There’s space.” That’s all there is to it. He says, “There’s now space.” Okay, there’s space. And one, that comes down to a point of where he recognizes that there is a wall. It’s a matter of direction. He is able to give or receive directions. He’s able to be cause or effect. He’s able to put space there and then feel the space is there. No difference between that and being able to live in the MEST universe. | |
You, by the way, you could do this to this person. I have had auditors in training try this as a little experiment: walk up to a perfect stranger in a store and say, “Get out.” The people leave. | If he is able to put space there and have space there and be perfectly happy and content about it-of both causing the space and being the effect of the same space-if he’s able to do that, then let’s go right straight from there and see that he is able at the same time, then, to be compatible with the MEST universe or not be compatible with the MEST universe. See? | |
If you know the physiological type to say “get out” to, you’ll get an immediate response. The guy will just leave, that’s all. And he’ll get outside and he’ll feel very degraded and he’ll feel very upset and he won’t quite know what’s happened to him. But he’s sure that he did right by getting out, but he knows he doesn’t belong in there. Well, that guy doesn’t own the store and it’s a piece of mass that he doesn’t have any right in. | He’s able to be in the MEST universe and be happy about it-both happy enough to have caused it and happy enough to be the effect of it. This is a problem of postulates. It goes straight back up the track to postulates. And the postulate, the basic postulate, is there is something or there is nothing, which is a stated condition, see? A condition is always composed of somethingnesses and nothingnesses.So out of this stated condition there is something or there is nothing, we get, then, a resulting condition. And the condition of mind of the individual is that he must be perfectly aware of whether there is going to be something or there is nothing or be willing to be unaware of it. You know, surprise effects-he must be perfectly willing to have a surprise effect. Well, that’s what we get into in terms of randomity. | |
And so we get right of ownership immediately adjacent to Theta Clearing. And the worse a person is off about this, the more he’s worried about owning. | Well, we’re not very far afield here. The preclear is as well off, then, as he is able to experience a condition-cause a condition or experience a condition-which breaks right down to whether he is able to give or receive and act upon, to give and have or have not acted upon, or to receive and act or not act upon postulates. | |
Now, we’re in a problem, here, which isn’t the problem of “is he a good guy or is he a bad guy or is he hard to live with or isn’t he hard to live with?” The funnier part of it is, the cagier boy, the fellow who’s more likely to survive on a good, hard, tough ratio, is actually the fellow who has a tremendous awareness and knowingness which has been built up by defenses. | In other words, direction. In other words, orders. And that degenerates into a middle ground of whether or not he knows whether his orders are being obeyed or will not be obeyed or whether he cares whether they’re going to be obeyed or not obeyed-in other words, whether he’s anxious about it or not. Or anxious about having to obey or _ not obeying instructions or directions which he receives, And we get this condition of " beingness as the first observable condition of beingness of the preclear. | |
Now, let’s get the difference between the country boob who has owned all of his life and the fellow who had to get out and went to the big town and is now a sharpie. The country fellow, he’s just a boob, he figures, he’s a simpleton. You can come along and sell him walnuts any time you want to. | And the more he goes into effect, why, the more unwilling he is to have direction because the more intolerable it will become to him to have direction and the less he will “ be able to change his own survival condition. | |
Why? He owns the walnuts you’re trying to sell him, already. He’s very comfortable about existence, he is easy to fool. Why? Because he doesn’t look for anybody to fool him. Will he get very bad off from having been fooled? Very doubtful, very doubtful. Unless you fooled him so bad that you moved him right out of his neighborhood - moved him out of his entire area into a strange world - then that would be bad. | In order to change his survival condition, he has to have a postulate obeyed, doesn’t | |
But the other fellow has “learned how to get along.” Now, a fellow who can learn how to get along and still not get hard-boiled about it all and still not be terribly calloused or dishonest, who can still have problems of ownership within himself and yet, at the same time, go on owning or not owning and carrying forward, you’re just looking at a difference of degree of individual. You’re looking at a difference, what you might call, of “native horsepower.” And we get another factor in there which is unpalatable to people who are raised in a tradition of “everybody is so equal - except some are more equal than others.” And this tradition is not very good, it’s kind of a nutty one because it’s a dramatization of the constancy of space, consecutive spaces of the MEST universe—you know, total agreement! You know, everybody is equal, that’s the same as total agreement. We all agree. We all agree. And you’ll find many a person raised in that tradition is kind of having a rough time of it. | So he says “Boo” and the dog doesn’t bark at all. So he says at that moment, “Well, what do you know? Some randomity has shown up.” Well now, he doesn’t feel himself called upon to unmock the dog or to be mean about it or ornery about it. The moment he’s in that condition, do you know that he’ll almost invariably be obeyed, by anything and everything, even the birds of the air and the flowers of the field? But he’s got to be in that kind of a frame of mind. | |
All right. What’s our problem, then, between thetan and thetan and thetan and thetan? It’s, what’s the ratio, the potential of the individual, how much can he have gone through and still maintain and hold up his head in terms of ownership? In other words, how much can he be disenfranchised of and still be? It’s a ratio of how much can he lose? Which, you’re also saying, is “What is his native horsepower?” | Now, it isn’t the kind of a frame of mind that you determine a preclear into or that he gets determined to have or not have. That isn’t that kind of a frame of mind. It’s a frame of mind which one obtains by a confidence in one’s own power. Which means that one has to have pride and confidence and self-respect and it all boils down to whether or not one’s got certainty. And almost any kind of certainty is better than an uncertainty. And all certainties are made of somethingness or nothingness. | |
Now, you knew this in your neighborhood. All these little kids, they’re all raised in the same town. Only, there was little Johnny down the street and you went down and if you ever threatened to take a stick of candy - even an old secondhand piece of candy - away from little Johnny, he immediately broke down and cried. And he was going home and tell everybody and he was going to get the cops after you and he was going to - he got in a desperate state. | A fellow could be perfectly content if he was absolutely sure that he would never have any power, that he doesn’t have any power, that he never will have any power and that this is just that. And he’s not a person of power, he’s a weakling, he’s a coward, he’s a bum. And this is the condition and this is the condition he is in and this is what he’s in and if he has no doubt about it and he doesn’t want to be anything else and he isn’t being nagged all the time to be something else, he’d be a happy boy. | |
And then there was Bill. And Bill would be standing there eating a piece of candy and although Bill was smaller and slenderer and not, evidently, nearly as physically powerful as Johnny, you walked over to take this piece of candy away from Bill. And you took the piece of candy away from Bill - you did not! You got it maybe, but Bill got it back. It was kind of soiled, but he didn’t get disenfranchised easily. He went on owning the piece of candy, even though you had taken it away from him. See? | And therefore, people can say with some truth, a slave is a happy man. He has no responsibility. Oh, he’s only unhappy when he thinks he might ought to have some but hasn’t any. And then we get into a different condition, don’t you see? | |
Well, do you know, an individual could actually be a citizen of the entire world? He could be sort of raised owning the entire Earth. Even though he was in one spot. And he could be moved around all over the place, you see? And although it would kind of dim on him a little bit, because he’d be moved away from his possessions and things would happen to him that he wouldn’t like and he’d get puzzled about ethics and morals and whether he should trust people and he’d get into all sorts of conundrums, but he’d still go on to some degree owning all of Earth. His perception would stay good, his strength would be up, his power would be up and his doingness would stay high. | Now we’re not advocating anything here in terms of philosophy. We’re just talking about changing a condition. We’re talking about changing the condition of survival. | |
And then there’s the other fellow, although he was born in the same place, who was born up with the tradition of owning his front yard but not the front yard next door, see? Well, perhaps this could be counted for a difference on the point of spiral. Maybe the fellow born owning all of Earth, maybe he's on an earlier spiral. Maybe he isn't quite | The preclear can’t, he expects the auditor to. And you are expected, of course, to train auditors so they can not only change the condition of survival of an individual but be perfectly relaxed when they don’t. And when you’ve given them this proper frame of reference in which to study, in which to work, why, we of of auditors. And you’ll have perfectly cheerful people. | |
as old and hasn't been kicked in as much. | Now, I seem to have covered an awful lot of ground here, one way or the other, and I'm going to cover some more in just a minute. | |
But this would admit something very unusual: it would merely say the longer you’ve stayed in the MEST universe, the worse off you’ve gotten, there’s no salvation for it of any kind whatsoever. And that was the kind of an absolute that nearly every preclear enters into his case sooner or later and which isn’t true. | ||
And you know, there are actually preclears that can tell you that ten years ago they were so damn bad off they didn’t know whether they were going or coming? They had lost everything, they had gone by the boards in all directions. And then all of a sudden, they got up one morning and they said, “To hell with it.” And they’ve been going on living ever since. Maybe they’re tougher or more determined or less happy than they should be, but they’re living! | ||
And then there’s some fellow who went out one morning and lost a straw out of his hand and caved in and perished. And he comes to you a crawling psycho and you don’t know what the heck is wrong with him. He’s perished, he’s dead. He’s gone. | ||
Well, we don’t care what the difference between individuals is, we are looking at the difference you’re going to find showing up. And it all centers around two things, which are both the same thing, which is: the potential ownership of the individual is how much can he potentially or natively own and, two, how much does he now know he owns? What’s the ratio between his potential Ownership and his actual ownership? And that’s all we’re looking at in the preclear. | ||
When we say “perception,” yeah, he’ll perceive as much as he really owns. He won’t perceive any more than that. | ||
Be wary of processing a blind man. The guy doesn’t own anything. He owns a piece of blackness. Nobody wants the night, he can own that. Tisn’t his. Nothing is his. There’s the darnedest things happen with blindness. And you’ll find a blind case, sometimes, remarkably easy to process. Eyes all shot to hell, you know? I mean, he’s had a shotgun blast in the eyes or he’s gone blind from some horrible disease or something terrible has happened. And you exteriorize him or you just pep him up a little bit and his sight seems to come right on back. Well, there is a big potential ownership, you see, which has been suddenly upset and which you have recovered easily. | ||
And then there’s the other fellow who is also blind who has a small potential ownership, you see? And then he went blind and got disenfranchised of that and you’re working with no power to turn on. You’re trying to tinker around with a crystal set. | ||
Now, this is a damning thing and a big escape valve for an auditor and a wonderful source of alibis. But remember, as an Instructor, don’t kick out all the alibis. That’s a dirty trick. Always let a guy have an explanation for why he failed. Let him be able to say, “Well, the guy... the guy just didn’t want to see. He’s a crystal set, you know?” Don’t throw them all away. Because how do you know that there aren’t a few outs like that, see? If we’re not positive and absolute that there are no - if we could say, “There are no outs of any kind and no excuses, there are no alibis, we will not tolerate failure of any kind whatsoever” and if we say this - we can say it all right but we’d sure be better - awfully sure that there isn’t. See? It’s a kind of an absolute you’d be chary of announcing. And it’d also be very tough on your auditor. Very tough on him, all the way along the line. | ||
You keep telling him, “Well, there’s no excuse for your failure. You’re responsible, nobody else is. You’re cause. All right, go on, be cause. And the preclear had nothing whatsoever to do with it, you must have processed him wrong.” | ||
You know, the preclear will tell him that all the time? Leave it to the preclear, the preclear will keep him in line. The preclear will tell him at the end of every session, “No. I’m no better.” Preclear, by the way, by this time, you know, his nose is straightened up and his two front teeth - he didn’t have front teeth at the beginning of the session, he’s got them now. [laughter] | ||
Preclear will say, “Nothing happened. And besides, I have a bad somatic and you’re a bad cause.” Preclear will tell him that all the time, so why cap it over? The truth of the matter is that this is what preclears do: they try to maintain their self-determinism by failing to admit that somebody else helped them. If they think they can say, “Nobody helped me, I did it myself,” why, they feel that they have captured and held on to a shred of their determinism. Well, they’re - just a determinism, saving grace. | ||
The auditor, then, has got to be able to look at actual conditions. And the actual conditions are these - the case is never complex, it is never difficult outside this framework: the person perceives as much as he can own, he is trying for a change in survival status. And the auditor will turn up his perception and give him a change in survival status to the degree that he can give him back or make him take back some part of the three universes—his own universe, the MEST universe and the other person’s universe. | ||
That’s about all an auditor is doing. And it’s a very simple statement that one can make of it. How much will he take back? Well, you can explain it variously. You can say, “How much is he willing to take responsibility for?” | ||
But that’s a bad way to explain it, because all of his life everybody has been hammering and pounding him and saying, “The trouble with you is you won’t take responsibility for your own guilt. And you know you’re guilty. You know you’re guilty. You know it, you know it and you know it. You’d better repent, repent, repent.” See? I mean, hammer-hammer-hammer-hammer-hammer, in an effort to keep him from owning. Because if the society had just left him alone, he would go on owning the whole society and this is an intolerable thing, isn’t it? For a fellow to own the whole society and to own the whole of Earth and to own the entire firmament and to be perfectly comfortable about it - wouldn’t that be horrible? It would not! | ||
Do you know that a fellow, when he’s in that condition, doesn’t have to have a deed of title or kick anybody else out? Think of that one for a minute. Where’s all your trouble come from? All your trouble comes from a contest of “who owns it?”— | ||
All games resolve down to “how much of the playing field are we going to gain?” Well, then a game must start with the assumption that somebody else owns some of the playing field. So essentially, any argument is a serious game. See that? I mean, any contest and so forth, as it gets more and more serious, develops into arguments, it develops into war, it develops into serious brutalities, cruelties, criminalities. I mean, you’ve got a gradient scale of contest._ | ||
And when you have a look over this gradient scale of contest, we find our first instance of it between the: (1) the Instructor and the student, (2) between the student and preclear, Those are contests in the first analysis. They’re sort of an argument. The Instructor is arguing against the student’s background. The student has certain conceptions and preconceptions which make him to believe that the problem is terribly complex and that ® he can’t know it all and that the Instructor can’t know it all either, because that would fix him up, see? That would put the Instructor in the form of owning everything and the student in the form of owning nothing, so we’ve got to counterbalance this out. | ||
And then, we get into the term of auditing and the auditor versus the preclear. Well, the auditor is trying to return to the preclear some self-determinism. And the auditor very often starts doing this by sacrificing some of his own determinism so that he can return - to the preclear some self-determinism. And then, this kind of winds up in a reduced auditor, so the auditor thinks he needs auditing. | ||
So we have, in an Instructor in a class, he’s the fellow who stands up there and he insists he knows everything, see? I mean, he sounds that way, he sounds certain. There’s no 9 positiveness greater than the positiveness of an Instructor. He just knows everything there is to know. And this leaves the student nothing to do but either fall into that bin of knowing everything there is to know... You get that? I mean a student has no other choice, he has to know nothing. | ||
Well, this leaves the whole class sitting there trying to understand, which is one of the meanest buttons I know of, because it’s a directly downscale button. Here’s a whole class sitting there trying to understand, trying to understand, trying to understand, which puts knowingness out at an immediate point in front of them, which, in itself, is how you hypnotize people. | ||
You put knowingness out in front of a preclear and hold it there and insist that it’s knowingness and the preclear must concentrate on this point. And the first thing you know, why, he’s willing to grant other-determinism to his knowingness. So we’ve got a problem there, don’t we? Got a problem there. | ||
Well, maybe the Instructor - been more places than a student, maybe he’s seen more. There’s nothing wrong with experience, experience isn’t necessarily data and it’s certainly not necessarily bad. Experience hung up as a facsimile and remembered as a facsimile, which is pulled iii against the chest so nothing else will happen, that’s bad. But experience is a knowingness of how the particles change. What are the conditions and changes of particles? What are the conditions and changes of knowingness? And that, in itself, is knowingness, in terms of experience. It’s not bad for an Instructor to be experienced. You’d listen any day to a - if you were going to learn how to drive a car, you’d listen any day to a fellow that had been driving a car for about fifty years and knew a heck of a lot about driving cars fast and knew conditions of roads and things like that. | ||
Well, why would you listen to him? Well, you would listen to him, in the first place, because he’d met an awful lot of conditions, hadn’t he? And you kind of want to get a leg up and after a while, you’ll get your own experience. But while you’re going forward getting your own experience, it’s awful nice to have a couple in the bank there and to be shoved off, you know, to be given the torch, you might say, for a little while until you know, by experience, your drivingness. | ||
And do you know, life, in its construction and evolution - even a thetan in terms of his knowingness ... You might wonder sometimes why a little baby acts so much like a little baby. He’s just a thetan, you understand. He has been disenfranchised of all former knowingness and so he comes down to a no-knowingness until somebody gives him a leg up, nicely, gives him a little torch to carry along, gives him a hand, tells him where to walk and how to walk. And after a while, he revolts against this and he decides he’ll walk where he pleases. But he wouldn’t be ever able to walk where he pleases unless somebody had helped him to take a few steps, first place. | ||
And that’s the way life and livingness continues. And that is how it rises to higher states of beingness. And that is how we have, today, achieved Scientology. It’s not because, in a terrific burst of brilliance, one LRH “thunk himself some thunkingness” and looked himself some lookingness and, in this terrific burst of this and that, codified everything and dropped it in your laps. Life and livingness itself has been building up to this on this planet for about eighty-two hundred years. And it’s gone out of sight and fragments of it have reappeared and it’s gone out of sight again and it’s reappeared and it’s gone out of sight again. | ||
The only thing that I did, which was probably peculiar, is I probably went further, in terms of actual distances. You know, I don’t mean I just carried the proposition further or thought further. I mean, actually traveled a little further and bumbled into a little bit more and got into, probably, a little more hot water and got out of it with a little more luck. And was able to pick up, fortunately, enough leads from enough fellows and was able to be humped over enough humps, to a point where all of a sudden I was on a high road, see? And being on that high road, could continue at a fairly fast velocity. Because I brought together, for the first time, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, in terms of knowingness. | ||
And if you just think of it for a moment, the West, you see, with all mechanic, all mechanics, all mechanics, inevitably, when combined against the nothingness of nirvana and no-materialism of the East, certainly something is going to bang someplace. If you get a good understanding of both these halves of the same problem, you get an understanding of both halves, why, you’ve got yourself a really gorgeous setup to either go mad or solve something. | ||
Well, the results which I get and which you get and have gotten, actually, on preclears, demonstrates that I probably didn’t go very mad, because we did get some results and we got someplace. | ||
All right. Now, let’s take a look at this. Is it a greater sensitivity of knowingness or a greater stamina or anything? Well, those factors don’t matter. The factor which matters is, is when you learned how to walk, you got yourself a little hand along the floor and, after a while, you began to walk very expertly indeed. And you didn’t need anybody helping you out and, as a matter of fact, you’d get real antagonistic toward somebody helping you out. | ||
Well, life has been doing this to life and livingness has been doing this with livingness and thetans have been doing this with thetans, up to the point of an enormous accumulation of potential. And right now, the truth of the matter is, life has enough leisure to do something like this. | ||
It didn’t have, a few years ago. There wasn’t enough food being provided. You and I and so forth, we wouldn’t be thinking about thought. Ha! We sure wouldn’t. We’d be жout here scouting across this plain with a carbine looking for an antelope so we could eat. That’s right. But we can buy it at the market right now. See, they can make more | ||
antelopes. You see that? So everything sort of combines fortuitously to a leg up. | ||
Life gave me a bit of a leg up all the way along the line. And I can give you one. And, sure enough, just like one of the best auditors we had there in the First Unit: by the time he had gotten two weeks out of the First Unit, believe me, this fellow was walking on that floor by himself and you certainly better not put a finger in his direction. As a matter of fact, I have scars at this moment on my second knuckle down, of my left hand, from being “bitten” by this fellow, [laughter] Having tried rather gracefully, I assure you, to tell him that he would get real good results by using SOP 8 after he got somebody exteriorized - after I’d seen him stall on a case a little bit. | ||
Boy, his level of knowingness, as far as he was concerned - his level of walkingness - was way above needing any help. As a matter of fact, he was going along on a pair of rather rickety crutches. But he had reached that point of where he must throw away all assistance and travel on his own. | ||
Well, life does that every time. That’s one of the natural phenomena. You see kids in their teens, no matter how their parents have been to them, they’ll find all manner of things wrong with their parents so that they’ll have the right to be themselves. That’s the way life divorces itself from its past track and carries on its own determinism. And that’s the way the preclear will do to you and that’s the way the student will do to you. | ||
So let’s look at this actual phenomena and soften it a bit if we can, but thoroughly expect it to happen. And then we won’t be so surprised. Nothing hurts us, actually nothing can hurt us that we can predict. Nothing can hurt us that we can predict. So we’d just better learn how to be wingdingers about prediction. | ||
And we get real good in terms of knowingness about the future, there’s no pain. You’ve solved it right there. When your knowingness is so good about the future that you can predict anything, nothing will surprise you. This is not necessarily undesirable. | ||
All right. What’s our problem then, Mr. Anthony, along all this line? I’ve tried to show you here, in vignette, very briefly, terribly briefly, all too shortly - confuse you a little bit in the process - that we are going along a line which is going to assume a simplicity. That is, the state of survival of the individual. We’re going to change this. We’re going to change this in terms of bringing him up to a level of knowingness and let him walk by himself. And toward the end, this terrific thing called nuclear physics (all this mystery, all this sort of thing) more and more and more of it will be - drop away, drop away, drop away until you’ll be saying, “For heaven’s sakes, for heaven’s sakes, what are we trying to monkey with that for?” | ||
This thing is a terrific simplicity sitting out here in front of us and we’ve been overreaching it in all directions. And it was our overreachingness which was accounting for our inability to understand it. And we’ll get down to the end run of where you yourself can walk as an Instructor, as well of course as an auditor. | ||
It’s something more to be an Instructor than an auditor, believe me. That may not be true of biology, but it’s certainly true of Scientology. | ||
Okay. | ||