I think we have a technique in embryo. We have the possibility of being able to knock out chronic somatics selectively. This is just a possibility; two weeks from now it may be a concrete fact. We have never been able to do that before.

This would mean that we could put into the field a little manual that would say, “You tell the preclear to wiggle his left toe, you tell him to wiggle his left ear, and after you’ve told him to do this for a certain number of hours he doesn’t have his chronic somatic anymore.” It would be very simple. A fellow could practically run it by following directions, like the ones you read on a can. Of course, one mustn’t be too optimistic about this. If you have ever gone around in kitchens and seen how cans have been opened in spite of the directions on the face of the can, you know there is always this limit of liability.

This would make a person who could work Dianetics by handling this little manual — like Self Analysis delivers Straightwire. A person who could follow this little manual, without knowing any of the principles, particularly, could knock out a chronic somatic.

There would be that person and then there would be a Dianeticist. Don’t think for a moment that the data contained in Science of Survival, Self Analysis, the textbook of axioms and so forth would not be necessary to the knowledge of a Dianeticist. There is such a tremendous quantity of phenomena which a person who didn’t know this material would start encountering — phenomena which would be irrelevant or pertinent to what he was doing — that a failure to know all the phenomena which we know in these various things would really wind a fellow up if he were trying hard to work in the field.

Furthermore, somebody using this little manual would have no knowledge of groups and communication systems, no knowledge of how to treat a psychotic, really, or how to do these other things. But he would have this one technique on chronic somatics.

There is no coincidence in one of the patent-medicine companies going broke and Self Analysis being published. But, believe me, there would be a coincidence if such a little manual existed. It would be very pleasant if America had a little package whereby you did this and that and all of a sudden the person became well. That would be wonderful. That is what we are trying to get. I don’t say that we are going to get it but we hope to have it here in a couple of weeks. It won’t take a long time to get this all buttoned up; it has taken weeks so far already.

Now, I want to tell you a little bit about the tone scale that is not evident and which will probably clarify that chart for you. It has to do with motion, inhibited and impelled.

Life depends upon a certain tolerance of motion — that is, there is a certain band of motion in which life can survive. If you start to examine life you will find that that band is pretty narrow. The motion which supports life falls into a very narrow band.

For instance, take heat. A human being runs from about 95 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit as the whole tolerance band of the engine. Anybody who starts running at 110 or at 91 is pretty sure to turn his toes up. On the one hand, the 91 is too little thermal vibration — too little motion, too little heat — and on the other hand, 110 is too much thermal vibration.

In such a wise, a pursuit pilot is able to withstand, without much trouble, 9Gs of deceleration without completely going out. But he can’t stand it very much or very often; the-tolerance of the body is really well below that. He pulls his plane out of a dive, it squashes him into the seatand all the blood rushes out of his head and so forth; if he doesn’t do this too often he can withstand this amount of force. But that is a force tolerance. The tolerance of centrifugal motion is also a very narrow band.

Gravity is a narrow band. We are built to withstand the gravity of Earth. If we suddenly started walking around on Jupiter we would go squish; its gravity is too great. This is somewhat similar to centrifugal-force tolerance.

We could have also too little gravity. If anybody started floating around in space with no gravity at all he would eventually run into some difficulty. There is a valve system, a blood- valve system, built into the human body, which makes it pretty difficult for a fellow to stand on his head more than an hour or so at a clip. The valves all go haywire. His body is built to withstand horizontal or vertical positions on its valve systems, but not being upside down. Also, if you took all gravity off a person, he would get an interesting shape. He is built to withstand a certain amount of tension, in other words, from gravity.

Now, a man can run at a certain speed. I don’t know how fast man can run, but if a man were to run fifteen miles an hour for half an hour, I think you would probably bury him. In addition, a man doesn’t want to stand still for too long a period of time. It is very nonsurvival to stand still. Mobility is everything in survival. If you stood still in one spot for a long time the environment could shift on you, and the second it shifted, standing still in that place would be very dangerous indeed. There has to be a certain amount of motion. A man has to make a certain amount of motion to eat.

So there is “over” and “under” motion: too much speed, too little speed. There is a very narrow band of optimum motion, and it has tolerance bands on either side of it which are quite narrow.

Man has to have oxygen at the content that we have it here on the face of the earth. He works best with an oxygen and nitrogen mixture as it is, at 15 pounds per square inch; he is built for that. Cut him down and let him try to operate on 10 pounds per square inch and he has a bad time. Send him down to the bottom of the sea and let him start operating on 150 pounds per square inch and he has an equally bad time. This is what I mean, then, by a tolerance band of “over” or “under” motion.

Now let’s take efforts. Effort is motion with direction. A fellow doesn’t have any difficulty lifting a table, but suppose he tries to lift a great big safe: he can’t lift it. He can, as many people do in the moving business, lift himself into a hernia. His physical body will not tolerate even the application of the effort of which his own muscles are capable. In other words, his muscles are more capable of effort than his body tissue can withstand.

You could also figure on something being much too light. Have you driven a Model T lately? A man tries to ride in one of these things and it bounces all over the road; it just doesn’t have enough weight to make it ride smoothly. But with almost any car, if you take a few pigs of lead and throw them into the rear end of the car, you will find that you will have a much easier ride. In other words, here is a question of overweight and underweight.

Utensils and this sort of thing also can have too little weight. You can undoubtedly think of a few examples of where something can be too light.

I know that at sea the heavy crockery is much too light.

I felt very sorry for a bunch of boys on a destroyer one day. I went aboard this tin can in harbor alongside of the dock, and the men were all sitting there with their arms wrapped around their plates. They were sitting alongside of a dock and they were eating, holding on to their plates. I said, “Why, you poor guys. You birds must really take a kicking around when you’re out there with this tin can.”

And they said, “Oh no, this is because of the mess attendants. They take the plates away before we’re through eating.” (I wanted to show you how non sequitur you can get!)

But I was down in the Tasman Sea one time, and the wind blows at seventy miles an hour down there and the waves are all seventy feet high (that is really no exaggeration), and the last two feet on the top of every wave blows into the air in a horizontal stream. The ships bucking into that go down into it and they get stuck in about every third wave with their propellers out in the air — and these are ten-thousand-ton ships. These new welded ships are very flimsy, so the center of the decks in the holds would drop way down because of this welding and so on. There would be a Sherman tank or something sitting down there and the deck would come out from underneath it and come back up and hit it again.

But that was nothing compared to what happened to our own crockery The table would drop away from the plates and the plates would be suspended in the air. Then the plates would start to fall but the table would come back up again and splash the soup in our faces.

Anyway, things can be too heavy, too high and too rough for men very easily. Man isn’t particularly weak but he does have this tolerance band on motion.

This motion applies to most anything. For instance, take a boxer who hits too lightly. On the other hand, you would think you couldn’t hit too hard to be a boxer, but you could; they could keep taking your opponents out of the ring as corpses. This would be unpopular with the boxing commission and the sports writers would be snide about it. In other words, the tolerance of the body in withstanding force is also a narrow band. The amount of shock per unit of time which the human body can withstand is relatively slight. We think of it as being tremendous, but in terms of foot-pounds and in the field of physics it is a very small amount of force. If an individual receives in a small unit of time too many foot-pounds of shock in any part of his body, it will kill him. That is “over” motion; that is “over” counter-effort; that is too much force in too little time. And in such a wise there could also be too little force.

Now, this can be graphed. You would think, arithmetically, that motion would go up on one steady line — that is to say, there would be motion and then there would be more motion, more motion, more motion, more motion, more motion — and that the tolerance band would be a section marked out in the middle of it, that above that band would be “over” motion and it would keep on going up from there. That is not the way it graphs. That is just arithmetic, and arithmetic is sort of a phony brand of logic they torture kids with.

The way this graphs is from death to death, as far as we are concerned. We are only interested in the tolerance band and a very short distance above or below that tolerance band; we are not interested in the whole band. So it is graphed from death to death.

We start at zero, curve up with the amount of motion to an optimum and then curve back down to zero. You are looking at the tone scale on edge. The tone scale is laid out vertically — tone 0.0, tone 2.0 and tone 4.0. You are used to looking at the tone scale as a straight vertical line; you read it off that way. The tone scale, when turned and looked at this other way, does not have a single view, it has a double view. There are two tone scales. One goes from optimum motion through higher and higher vibrations till it gets to zero. Above-optimum motion, in other words, snakes an individual dive off toward death. And on the other side we have motion getting less and less from the optimum level till the individual is dead. That is all we are interested in from a standpoint of tolerance of motion.

At the optimum level, an individual is running at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit; he is using vehicles and his own body to walk at fairly brisk speeds but not beyond his ability to be tolerant of those speeds. He is being subjected to an optimum gravity which gives him pound mass, and he is being subjected to no more stress of weather than he can well withstand. His understanding — and here we get motion again — of the physical universe and so forth is such as to keep too much motion from hitting him. In other words, his skill in handling himself and so forth all comes up at tone 4.0 on motion.

As a fellow falls off toward death it can be on the route of increased motion or decreased motion. Let’s take the fellow who has heart trouble, and his heart starts beating at over 175 — or at 209 or 612 — beats per minute: he is dead. And the fellow whose heart refuses to beat any faster than 30 beats per minute is pretty badly off. As a matter of fact, he will be dead after a while. So that is too slow and too fast, just on one thing like a heartbeat. There could be too much or too little blood pressure. There could be too much or too little tension.

You wouldn’t think offhand that tension was necessary; you would think that if randomity — that is to say, random vectors and so on — makes up tension, you wouldn’t want tension. No, you have to have tension. If you haven’t got tension in the body, how can you balance or withstand gravity? How does your head hold up at all if you haven’t got just so much tension?

As a matter of fact, you have probably seen fellows walking around all slouched over. They aren’t capable of enough tension to hold themselves upright. And then there is the fellow who is too tight, too ramrod-straight. That’s too much tension; he has got too much residual tension.

Now, there are two kinds of crimes: one is the crime of omission, the other is the crime of commission. The service and governments invariably overlook the crime of omission by tacit consent. But everywhere else in rational spheres of activity, omission and commission are equally destructive as crimes. The person who neglects to act is as guilty as the person who acts wrongly.

In the navy all you have to do is neglect to act and you get to be an admiral. Every once in a while they will catch up with somebody who has done a crime of omission — they remember that this is in the regulations — and they knock him out for it, but not often. Crimes of omission are usually hard to trace.

There is the fellow at 1.5 on the band who destroys by commission. We are used to him. Psychiatry had him spotted a long time ago; he was hard to keep from spotting. He is the person who blows up and throws everything in all directions and stamps on your new hat and takes a knife to your dog. This is destruction by commission.

It is wonderful how people can overlook the important and stress the dramatic, because the fellow who doesn’t feed the dog or the fellow who won’t get up and pick up anything is just as destructive as the fellow who picks up things and knocks the dog out. What is involved here is an increment of time.

I wish to show you that the time increment follows motion. Omission is a slow process ordinarily and commission is a fast process at 1.5: The dog starves to death slowly when he isn’t fed and he dies fast when his brains are knocked out. So as you increase in motion on the side of too much motion you get a lessened time increment and as you come back from the optimum on the side of too little motion you get a lengthened time increment, but you get the same position on the tone scale.

The person at 1. on omission just never does anything. And for the things that person doesn’t do he has reasons why they are not done. That is a covert hostility.

And then there is the person on the too-much-motion side who does things but has reasons why he didn’t do them. At 1. on the too-muchmotion side, he does things but has reasons why he didn’t do them, and on the other side he doesn’t do things but has reasons why he did them, ordinarily. Every office has seen this person, I’m sure.

At 0.5 a person slacks off on the side of too little motion to no tension — “I’m not going to move. I’m not going to do anything. I’m not going anyplace,” and so forth. This is grief. But over on the side of too much motion the tears fly eight feet. It is the same point on the tone scale. This person on the too-much-motion side is a raving, hysterical 0.5.

The person on the too-little-motion side goes slowly toward death and the person on the other side goes fast toward death. Suicide by overt self-destructive action is on the too-much side of the band and suicide by starvation of self is on the other side of the band — or suicide by not putting any water in the canteen and then walking out across the desert. That is the same thing; it is an omission, but it is slow. So you get your “over” and “under” motions.

Now, I am going to give you a little point of human behavior that you might find fascinating. Individuals and groups are concerned with the rate of motion of others. Life is trying to obtain this optimum motion and hold it. When they do not find parity in the motion of another, they seek, by any means, to accelerate or decelerate that motion to their own rate.

Association by an individual with individuals or groups of a slower rate of motion than his own will result in the deceleration or acceleration of himself. The basic conflict amongst individuals is “Are you moving faster or slower than myself?” ARC is obtainable straight across the band of the tone scale. The tone on the too-little-motion side is a harmonic of the same tone on the too-much-motion side. But you can best obtain ARC in its initial primal thrust with someone at your level and on the same side of the band. That is to say, an individual who is running too slow to the degree of 2.0 will find himself most comfortable — most in affinity, most in communication and most in agreement — with individuals who are running at 2.0 slower than optimum. Individuals who are running 2.0 faster than optimum will find the greatest ARC with individuals who are running 2.0 faster than optimum. The funny part of it is that you can get a harmonic between these two things, and the “fasters” and the flowers” do have a tendency to mesh. This is an interesting observation that many auditors have more or less watched without defining it clearly. We needn’t even concern ourselves with a harmonic, though. If you really want to establish ARC with a person who is 2.0 on the slow side of the ledger, you have to establish it at 2.0 on the slow side of the ledger.

When people don’t have ARC they are dealing with somebody faster or slower or a group faster or slower than their own rate. There are three things they can do: (1) slow down themselves, (2) speed up the group to their own rate, or (3) find out what the rightness speed is for the given situation and then try, by reason, to demonstrate that this speed is necessary. Any effort being put forward by a group of two or more has a rightness speed; it has to be done as well as and as fast as it will produce the optimum result for survival.

Individuals don’t estimate this without a great deal of argument; a lot of argument will come in on it. Individuals on the slowness side at 2.0 will try to speed up anybody slower than 2.0 or slow down anybody higher than 2.0 on the slowness side. And they certainly will go into conflict on the other side but will do something about the harmonic.

What I am showing you is that domination, whether direct or by nullification — carpings, hostilities, antagonisms — as well as happy association, is based upon this graph and this formula. People who move faster than you will try to speed you up, and people who move slower than you will try to slow you down, by whatever means possible — words, symbology, actual injury, anything. They will try to slow you down below your speed or speed you up — above or below, over or under.

There is a rightness point for every situation and it is at the optimumspeed band. What is the optimum speed of traverse? How fast does this thing have to move? How fast do we have to move to accomplish this thing? You are going to get arguments out of people who naturally move slower and arguments out of people who naturally move faster, and the arguments spring solely from speed of motion. That is all.

Should this acceleration or deceleration be well beyond the limits the individual can maintain, a confusion or randomity between the forced rate and the self-determined rate deteriorates the individual physically. In other words, if an individual is bound to travel at 2.0 on the slow side and somebody continually comes along and says “Faster, faster, faster, faster,” then because he is fixed there by the counter-efforts (which are actually motions) and other things which have slowed him down to there, his effort to go faster than the counter-efforts contained in him

(the engrams contained in him, more familiarly) will actually shake him to pieces. And a person who is traveling at a higher rate of speed, when influenced by those who seek to bring him down to a lower rate of speed, will himself be shaken to pieces. Experience in the physical universe and his inherent structure establish for him a certain rate of speed, a rate of effort; these things establish for him a certain motion — which is graphable on this graph. He has that motion established and when somebody tries to slow him down below that speed of motion, the counter-efforts he has received — which have a part in establishing his motion — will take it out on him. He could receive an awful lot of punishment in life and stand up to-it if nobody ever tried to get him to readjust from the point on the tone scale where this punishment put him.

Take a person traveling at optimum speed. He receives force efforts which are speeding him up — they happen to be in the direction of speed — and these efforts can be as random as can be. But these efforts happen to speed him up, so this individual aberratedly goes up into something you call a manic. (This doesn’t rest on a phrase, it rests on an actual motion.) So he speeds up and he gets to be a 2.0 manic and very antagonistic. Things have to move fast; he is mean. This is where the army finds its first sergeants! As long as he is permitted to go at this rate of speed, he is all right. But then he gets an officer who doesn’t want him to do that, who tries to slow him down. You might think offhand that slowing him down would bring him back toward optimum, but it doesn’t. It always brings him down.

If a man is traveling too fast, new counter-efforts will bring him back down the tone scale. In other words, if the effort is already saying “Go faster than optimum, go faster than optimum,” people’s efforts to stop him from going faster than optimum only make him go faster than faster. He is moving at a certain fast rate of speed and so he is going to move faster and faster as more things try to slow him down. All of a sudden he will just take a dive right on off. People like this can be brought down the tone scale in an awful rush.

On the other side, similarly, if anybody tries to coax the person to go faster and faster, he will move slower and slower. Why? Because counterefforts are being applied to the individual which just accelerate existing counter-efforts or decelerate them, exactly in reverse. This is where you get the reversal on the band and that is what the reversal on the band is.

So this is looking at a tone scale on edge. Look around you in your life and apply this to the real universe. Do you know anybody who is running slower than you? Do you know anybody who is running faster than you? What is either one of these people trying to do to you?

What is the optimum rate of speed for the problem at hand?

We look out across the countryside and find that we have an atom bomb and a lot of other things. What we are trying to do is take the first hump in Dianetics and get Dianetics up to a point where human nature can be handled by very inexpert and clumsy hands. But when we have that, we still won’t have any leisure time on our hands because we are still trying to tackle groups.

What is the rightness of our speed of advance? If we measure that and agree upon it, we get into a higher level of agreement. But at the same time, the people who are traveling slower than that are going to start to get badly shaken. And if people are traveling faster than that they are going to start to get shaken up too. This isn’t then an effort to get individuals to travel at the speed we are traveling at; let’s try to get the speed of advance at an optimum rate for all hands.

What is the correct speed? You will find that individuals will settle down on any given problem at its optimum speed if they are capable of aligning their own forces. The way people get off the optimum is from counter-efforts impinging upon them from the physical universe. They come off of optimum effort and optimum motion. They get engrams and these engrams speed them up or slow them down. As engrams speed them up they go over one way; as engrams slow them down they come back down the other way. But they more or less start out at an optimum level.

This should clarify a lot to you on the tone scale. It also should clarify to you the behavior of individuals in your vicinity. You should know quite a bit more, if you know this, about people with whom you are associating; and you should also know what they will do to you.

Take an adult who lives in a family and has a bunch of children. Here these kids are — motion: in the house, out of the house, slam the door, downstairs, upstairs, won’t go to bed, won’t get in the bathtub, won’t do this, won’t do that, and so on. And the adult keeps saying to them, “Please, please” (you are not traveling at my rate of motion, you are traveling at another rate of motion). The more the adult tries to slow these children down, the more hectic they get, till they get in real bad shape. What the children are trying to do is say “That slow old fogy has got to move faster!”

Whenever you demonstrate to another human being that you want to move him faster or slower, you demonstrate to him simultaneously that you are moving slower or faster than he is. That is all he absorbs.

You say, “Come on, speed up, speed up, speed up! Hurry, hurry, hurry! Let’s go, let’s go!”

The fellow doesn’t say “I ought to hurry.” People have been happily going around thinking this was the result of that kind of activity. He says, “Gee, there’s somebody moving awful fast,” so he tries to set a better example by slowing down. “We’ve got to keep parity in this universe. You’re moving too fast. I had better move too slow. Let’s balance the whole thing.”

If somebody is saying “Oh no, you’re taking it too fast; it’s too rapid,” and so forth, then the person he is saying this to is merely seeing a picture of somebody who is too slow, and he says, “Gee, he’s slow! He’s too slow! We’ve got to speed him up. We’ve got to do something with this guy. We’ve got to speed him up.” This is self-determinism at work.

When we get aberration at work, we really get a very funny-looking picture because we don’t have people sizing up what are survival and what are nonsurvival motions. So they pick up these things and they just get them all figured out backwards and upside down. A little child pokes across the street, with cars rushing by, and his mama says, “Hurry up, Johnny, hurry up!”

And he says, “Why?”

Now, an individual receives efforts continually and utilizes those efforts. As a matter of fact, when you eat a piece of beefsteak, you are receiving the effort that was put out by a cow. That is pretty good effort that you are receiving. But when you sit down on the car seat and go over a bump and it is a hard jar, that effort is a little bit too much for you; that is nonsurvival effort and you don’t want that one. So people go on making better car springs.

Just as there is “over” and “under” motion, so there can be “over” and “under” on what we are calling randomity. Randomity is simply randomness of vectors. One vector which is going out wholly in one direction is not random; that is a force vector. It is a force which is being exerted in one direction. It hasn’t split. But when you have these vectors as arrows facing themselves, that is randomity.

The less directive a force is, the more random that force is. There can be as much assembled force in this same spot but it is more and more random.

There is a little randomness necessary in life at the optimum level. There has to be randomness; it can’t be the-sameness. It is when force exerted by the physical being of the individual — either to remain in a state of rest or to move — is countered and overwhelmed by a counter-effort in his environment that you get unconsciousness. That is unconsciousness.

For instance, an individual is trying to remain at a state of rest and somebody hits him over the head with a sledgehammer. The sledgehammer tries to drive him down; he tries to remain at a state of rest. The randomity impressed upon him turns all the alignment vectors (which, in the final analysis, become “I,” or are “I”) around and he gets this suddenly introduced randomity, and you get an overwhelming of the individual, or unconsciousness. Furthermore, the cells are trying to remain in a state of rest and trying to remain in a state of their own sphere of motion simultaneously — that is to say, in space positionally they are trying to remain more or less at a state of rest and they have a motion in themselves at the same time. The sledgehammer hits and displaces those cells and this creates randomity; that randomity in the extreme is pain. Pain is simply the misalignment of the molecules and atoms of proteins, minerals, vitamins and carbohydrates — organic and inorganic chemical products, in other words. Sudden misalignment of this creates randomity. There is where you will find pain.

Pain comes into existence because theta can make a facsimile of it. Theta makes a facsimile of it. Therefore, later on, that same pain can reimpose itself as a facsimile and throw all these molecules out of arrangement again, and so there is pain again and there is unconsciousness; you have the same thing all over again. This is not very complicated.

Let’s postulate an experiment. If we could take a live mayfly and put this mayfly in an electron microscope, we would see waves coming through and see the molecules and atoms of the mayfly in alignment as it lies there. The mayfly lies there and we see the waves coming through and we get a picture, let’s say, of one section of one fiber of that mayfly; the atoms and molecules are lying there just as neat as you please. Now if we could reach in with a pin and touch this mayfly, we would suddenly see those molecules start to lose their force alignment, and we would start to get a scattering — random vectors.

Then the pain dies away as far as that mayfly is concerned, and we would again see, in the electron microscope, a realignment. These molecules haven’t been injured. They might be scattered around a little bit and a few rings broken down here or there, but that is about all.

Then we touch the mayfly very lightly, nowhere near enough to cause the earlier randomity; we just touch him in the same place we touched him before. In other words, we restimulate the engram we gave him, and we see the molecules go all out of alignment and into randomity again.

Somebody someday will do this experiment and they will undoubtedly see this sort of thing taking place, because this is approximately what it is.

Now we stop restimulating the thing and again the molecules go into an alignment. But it has been restimulated a little bit; the engram might still be superimposed over these fibers, so there is a little bit of out-of-alignment. This alignment, then, can result in too little tension in the nerve fiber or too much tension in the nerve fiber, either one resulting in nonoptimum tension in that nerve fiber, nonoptimum alignment. That is pain and reimposition of this pain, however it may be done.

I give you that as an analogy. I merely postulate that this is what would be seen, because this particular experiment answers all the conditions that we have found in the processing of preclears. This is evidently what happens. It isn’t happening on the level of the motor-control switchboard, that is a handy analogy. It is on the level of the rearrangement of molecules and atoms.

You might try this experiment: Take a fellow and get him revivified at a moment when some army surgeon was sticking him in the arm with a hypodermic needle. Get him revivified at that moment and watch a sudden indentation in his skin there as you go through that moment. You would see his skin flick as an indentation; this is an impossible thing from the standpoint of muscles.

Have you ever lain on the couch running an engram and felt your back thrust into the couch? Have you ever seen an individual’s feet suddenly start to swing sideways as you run a sperm sequencer with him? He is doing motions for which he hasn’t got muscles that balance up well.

You can get repositioning of atoms and molecules in a being to a point where you can reapproximate these things with great speed; there is no difficulty with that. In other words, you don’t have to figure it on the grossness of the body. That is the only point I am making. And you do achieve a certain result by feeding a person up on proteins and vitamin and mineral molecules; you give him more to be aligned or misaligned. -

What I am trying to show you is that there are theta facsimiles of this sort of thing which are filed against time, in present time, all over the shop; there are lots of them. A chronic somatic is simply one of these areas of randomity — a theta facsimile of past pain, effort-counter-effort — that has swamped the individual at one time or other. He has this area of effort and counter- effort, randomity and so forth, and it gets reimposed upon the individual; it throws him all o’ut of whack as far as his atoms and molecules are concerned. He suffers pain.

A person with a chronic somatic simply has one of these theta facsimiles superimposed upon him. The question and the contest is in how to get rid of it. How do you exhaust it as a theta facsimile? You find something very interesting the second you begin to examine this. What we are examining in the first place is effort. The second you start to take effort apart, perceptions start coming out of the effort areas.

You know that the reason you can’t really process a person who has no high level of reality or anything is that the engram has no high level of reality. There he is with no high level of reality or anything and you are trying to process an engram, and he isn’t going to get it up because it doesn’t have enough reality. In other words, you are in an endless circle. If you unwrap the effort from this area, you start watching the percepts come out of it. The effort is wrapped around the perceptics that would make it real. So the thing to do is to undo the package and the reality turns on.

The other day a salesman came to the door, very foolishly. He was sitting there trying to sell me something and he asked me what I did and all that sort of thing, trying to make salesman- wise conversation. So he lay down on the couch and I started working him with a little bit of Effort Processing.

Now, Effort Processing doesn’t consist of sending somebody back on the time track or anything like that. You don’t have to send people around on the time track or process out phrases or snap fingers or anything. So he was perfectly willing to conceive or imagine what I asked him to imagine, and all of a sudden the reality of the thing turned on and the visio on the incident in which he had been sitting for a long time turned on, and he lay there looking at his stomach arching up in the air from the pain. He was wearing a Confederate belt buckle. He remarked on this fact that he was wearing a Confederate belt buckle. It never occurred to him till he got up, so great was the reality of the incident, that there was anything strange about seeing a Confederate belt buckle on himself. Then he suddenly realized that this must mean that he had lived before sometime. He wasn’t questioning if he did, he wanted to know how it came about that he had. Here was a man with reality zero and we turned it on with Effort Processing, and out of the effort we suddenly fished up a sudden perceptic: a visio.

Olfactory starts coming out of these areas too. You could start fishing around with this and turn on the sense of smell all up and down the track in the most unlikely places.

The point I am making is that the percepts are wrapped up in effort. This is quite something. It is randomity of effort; it is the effort of the individual opposing counter-efforts. And what you are trying to do in Effort Processing is differentiate between the individual’s effort and the countereffort being opposed to him, reduce the counter-effort and knock it into limbo, and rehabilitate the individual’s own effort. That is all you are doing.

There isn’t a person sitting around who isn’t opposing some countereffort in the past, whether he knows it or not. And there is nobody who is self-auditing who isn’t in another valence inflicting on himself the countereffort of the past to some slight degree.

Attention is opposed to past counter-efforts or attention is a past counter-effort opposed to “I,” and these past counter-efforts sit in present time. Most everyone has one of these areas and his attention is there. The second you throw his attention off on to another area, he can get a flick of the counter-effort. And all Effort Processing consists of is getting the person’s attention elsewhere in his body than at the point of opposition or the point of effort.

In other words, if a fellow has a stomachache what you want to do is get his mind off a concentration on his stomach. There are two ways of doing it. One is to do it “back on the track” — get what his hands were doing at the time this thing happened to his stomach. Every time you get him concentrated on what his hands were doing when this happened~to his stomach, his stomach somatic will turn on — maybe just a flash — because his attention will immediately come back and say, “Ah, there’s a countereffort there; therefore I’ve got to oppose this.” Then you transfer his attention to his foot, he feels this stomach effort for a moment and his attention comes off his foot. Actually what he is doing is skidding out of valence; the pain is kicking him out of valence. But you get him back into valence again, because the only thing that was really out of valence was his stomach.

Practically every cell in the body is resisting one of these imaginary efforts from some direction or another, but selectively these old efforts can be processed out in this fashion. They are the most important thing in processing.

Another way this can be done is when you do have a preclear back on the track you make sure he gets the effort when he is running the engram — the devil with whether or not he gets sonic on it.

The research team took one case and ran an engram which had been run before; they ran it on effort — ran the effort out of it. The effort was still there and it was probably about 80 percent of the engram. You can run an engram and run the perceptics out of it and you can run the anaten out of it, but if you don’t run the effort out of it, you still have about 80 percent of it left. So you could just run out engrams all over the track and you would get nothing but a restimulation of this effort. Yet effort is the easiest thing to get and the perceptics will unfold out of the effort.

This is a highly experimental technique, but I want to show you how it works. I trust this will take place and that nobody will roll up in a ball or anything.

LRH: I want you to concentrate on how alive your right foot is. (pause) How alive is your right foot? (pause) Concentrate on how alive your right foot is. (pause) Okay. Did anybody get a somatic flick? (pause) audience: Yeah. Hm-hm.

LRH:Anybody get a somatic flick? audience: (positive responses)

LRH: All right. How alive is your left arm?

Just figure your life is suddenly resident in this left arm. Let’s calculate this left arm as being very alive; let’s feel how alive your left arms are. (It’s my right, it’s your left.) (pause; coughing in audience)

All right. Now let’s feel how alive your right arm is; feel the aliveness of the right arm, how alive this right arm is. (pause)

Now, how alive is your throat?

Can you concentrate on the aliveness of your throat, how alive your throat is? (pause)

Just as though you were suddenly resident there in your throat. (brief pause)

All right, how alive are your ears? Can you feel how alive your ears are? (pause) All right, how alive is your left foot? (pause)

Your left foot — how alive is your left foot? (pause) Now, how alive is your right leg?

Can you feel the aliveness of your right leg? (pause) Now, how alive is your stomach? (pause)

Can you feel yourself sort of alive and very resident in your stomach? (pause) Now, how alive is the back of your neck? (pause)

Can you feel the aliveness of the back of your neck? (pause; some audience reactions)

All right. How alive is your right hand? (pause) How alive is your left index finger?

Your left index finger — how alive is it? (pause) How alive are the cells of your eyes?

Can you feel yourself resident in your eyes, how alive this area is? (pause) Now, how alive is your left side?

Can you feel the liveness of your left side? (pause)

All right. What’s the aliveness of your right big toe? (pause)

Now, what’s the aliveness of your mouth? (pause; coughing in audience) Now, what’s the aliveness of your throat? (chuckle in audience)

Now, can you perceive the aliveness of your back? (pause) Now, can you perceive the aliveness of your chest? (pause) All right. Can you perceive the room? audience: No. (LRH chuckles; audience reactions and chuckles)

LRH: This would be an Effort Processing method of bringing people up to present time.

Now, here and there you might have felt a flick. Particularly if you have a chronic somatic, you might have felt the flick of that chronic somatic. You might have felt it. And you might have noticed this (correct me if I am wrong): when your attention came off the area of the chronic somatic by being addressed to some other portion of your anatomy, the chronic somatic would go on but your attention would flick right back to the chronic somatic. Is that the function of it?

LRH:How many people felt any chronic somatic on this? Could I see a show of hands? (pause) Okay, thank you.

Now, let’s just try this one for a moment. You understand you don’t have to do this; I don’t guarantee anything out of this at all. But this is Effort Processing; the other was more or less trying to extrovert an individual, bring him up to present time and make his body alive. This one is trying to pick up the effort wherever it lies on the track and knock it out where it sits on the track.

Now, I’m talking about then: Which direction do you have to hold your head up against?

Is there any force which is seeking to move your head away from the normal? I’m not talking about gravity.

Is there any extra little force that seems to be moving your head away from the normal? (pause)

All right. Is there any force that seems to be moving your right leg away from the normal? (pause)

Which direction would your right leg be moving, if it were moving? (pause) All right. Which direction would your left leg be moving? (pause)

Now, would you be trying to move these points or would they be in the process of being moved by some counter-effort? Which is your effort and which is the counter-effort in these things?

LRH:Now, I’ll ask you more. What position was your right hand in then? (pause) Which direction was it trying to go?

Which direction was its effort? (pause)

Now, where’s your left hand in that? Which direction is it trying to go? (pause) Now, were you trying to stop these motions or were you trying to start them?

Was something moving you and you were trying to stop it, or were you moving something and it stopped you? That’s what you have to decide at that moment.

Now, where were your hands at the time this took place?

Where were your hands? Can you get a feeling of which direction they were moving? (pause)

Can you get a feeling of whether you were trying to stop the motion or start the motion, whether you were doing it yourself or it was being done to you?

Which direction was your stomach moving at that time?

Which direction was it moving at that time? (pause; audience reactions)

Now, can you see how your hands would have been moving at that time? (pause) Now, you see where your elbows would have been going at that time? (pause)

Now, where would your knees have been at that time? (pause) Which direction would they be moving? (pause)

All right. Which direction would your arms have been moving? (pause)

What would have restricted your arms from moving — what is the effort restricting the motion of your arms in there? (pause)

Now, would you have been trying to move up or down at that time? (pause) Would you have been trying to move to the right or the left at that time? (pause)

Would you have been trying to remain at a state of rest at that time, and something moving you? (pause; coughs in audience)

All right. Now, let’s see how alive your hands are in present time. (pause; cough in audience) How alive is your back in present time? (pause)

How alive is your left foot? (pause) How alive are your legs? (pause) How alive is your head? (pause)

You feel the aliveness of your hearing? (pause) Feel the aliveness of your body in general? (pause)

What is the realest thing around you right now? (pause)

Now, can you recall a time when you were in good communication with somebody? (pause)

Recall a time which is really real to you. (pause)

Can you recall a time when you were performing an exuberant action? (pause) Recall a time when it was very pleasant to be quiet. (pause)

Recall a time when you had really accomplished the conquest of some part of the physical universe. (pause)

Now, can you recall a time when you were trying to stop time? (pause) Recall a time when you were really trying to stop time? (pause)

Can you recall a time when you were trying to extend time? (pause) Can you recall a time when you were trying to expand space? (pause)

I’m talking about just with thought alone — a time when you were trying, by thought alone, to expand space. (pause)

Can you recall a time when by thought you were trying to contract space? (pause)

Now, can you recall a time when you were trying to increase with thought — trying to make some energy greater?

A thought of that is riding in a train that you want to get there faster; riding in a car, you want to get there faster.

Energy — you want a greater expenditure of energy, you’re trying to increase it with thought alone? (pause; coughs in audience)

Now, when you were trying to decrease energy with thought alone.

Concentration on your decreasing energy with thought alone, just trying to decrease some energy around you with thought alone. (pause)

You’re trying to inhibit some action with thought alone. Trying to keep somebody from doing something just by thinking them into not doing it. (pause)

Now, do you recall a time when you were trying to stop time, when you didn’t want the next moment to happen? (pause) Now, you recall a time when you were trying to extend time, when you wanted it to be a long time before something happened? (pause)

Now, you recall a time when you wanted something to continue happening for a long time — trying to extend time, wanted it to continue to happen for a long time? (pause)

Now, do you recall a time when time was just about right? (pause) Recall a time when space was about right? (pause)

Recall a time when you were very, very happy? (pause)

Recall a time when you were permitted to contribute? When you were very glad to contribute? (pause)

Recall a time when you were really appreciated. (pause) Do you recall present time? (audience reactions)

All right. This series of questions I have been giving you are MEST Processing for the most part, but I wanted to demonstrate to you with this Effort Processing — not seriously nor thoroughly enough to coax you down flat, since it requires a very close attention to one’s preclear in order to make this happen — that when your attention went off on a then, you may have found a little somatic. Then what were your hands doing? Did you find any somatic at all? Could I see a show of hands on how many got a somatic to flick on during that? (pause) Thank you.

Now, attention goes right to this because a chronic somatic is chronic, and therefore something can be done for it. If it is right there, an auditor shouldn’t have to look anyplace else. The problem is how you process one of these, and I have given you, just in vignette, what Effort Processing around and about a chronic somatic would be.

This technique has to be worked out quite a bit and it-has to be observed quite a bit, but you have its rudiments. Usually where a chronic somatic exists, the individual is trying to make an effort and the counter-effort is swamping him. He is either trying to move or stay at rest and he is being balked.

The handiest example I know of in this whole business is a thing children play on each other. Do you remember anybody ever playing a game with you called “Why are you hitting yourself?” — ”What are you hitting yourself for? What are you hitting yourself for?” — where somebody was moving your arms and hitting you with them? That is the nicest little aberrative game that I know of. The person’s motor controls are wholly out of his own control. He tries to arrest these large hands that keep smacking his own hands into his face. He is obviously punishing his own body and he cannot arrest the motion, and somebody at the same time is accusing him of doing it himself, convincing him that it is his own effort that is doing this when it is not. And there you have approximately what a counter-effort does and what unconsciousness is. Actually that little game is the whole picture of what lies down deep in an engram: Are you doing it yourself? Is it being done to you? Which way is the effort going? What is the magnitude of effort? Why can’t you make yourself behave?

Somebody in an operation is trying to go in eight different directions. He is trying to get out of there. He tests all limits of action. He tests, trying to find some way out. Throw him under anesthetic and all of a sudden every single one of his efforts is blocked. Then they wonder why people~have groupers in the middle of operations. The person goes up but he can’t go up — he has to go down. He goes sideways but he can’t go sideways, so he tries to go the other way and that is blocked. He tries to go all these different ways simultaneously and sort of explodes, and he is blocked in all directions.

Now, when a person is caught on the track in one of these he has a chronic somatic to go along with it and he may not even realize that he has a chronic somatic until he shifts his attention off.

With this little exercise that I have given you about “How alive does my hand feel? How alive does my foot feel? Try and make it feel alive,” and so forth, you could sit down by yourself and just ask these questions of the various parts of your anatomy and you would probably get off a little boil-off; you would probably yawn. But the possibility is that you would find a somatic turning on and off.

If you were really down in the psychotic band, you would say, “I wonder what phrase goes along with this?” and start to repeat the phrase. If you do that, before you go completely insane please send for an auditor!

The point is that if you just try to ask various parts of your body these questions — try to be resident in them one right after the other — you can develop in yourself a considerable awareness of being alive. What are you trying to do in Dianetics?

Every time you turn your attention to some other part of the body where the chronic somatic is not being exerted, you are liable to feel it. What you should not do there is then go study the chronic somatic, because the second you do, you just go out of valence. Find out what your forehead thinks about it, what the cells at the end of your nose think about it, and you will feel this thing turn back on again. The second it turns on, your attention goes back to it, but every time you let it turn on it will be a little less intense, and you can actually knock out a chronic somatic on this line. Colds, headaches, lumbago, foot trouble, tiredness and so on are all chronic somatics of one sort or another. And just trying to bring yourself up to present time by being alive, one part after the other, has some slight benefit in knocking those things out.

Effort Processing addresses itself evidently to the time when it happened. But you don’t send a guy there, you just ask him to put his attention on his hands then, his feet then, and you start finding out where this chronic somatic is and then you just start working it out till you get it all desensitised.

You are liable to get an enormous amount of boil-off. It may take many, many hours to accomplish one of these reliefs. But when it is gone, I think it will be fairly well gone.