Now, would you give me some account of what - what you did yesterday?

Male voice: Did yesterday?

Mmm.

Male voice: Well, about all we did yesterday was get things all assigned and straightened up and ready to go for this morning, which we did auditing this morning.

Did auditing this morning. You got teams, auditing teams all straightened out? I suppose probably everybody's unhappy with these teams.

Male voice: Oh, sure.

Everybody's probably very miserable with the whole thing.

Now, with team assignment you did run „Something you wouldn't mind remembering. Something you wouldn't mind forgetting?“

Male voice: Oh, yes.

If I had a simpler and yet slightly therapeutic process believe me we would be using that right at this moment.

Okay. Now, we got this far. What we are learning here is auditing. Let me make that a very, very clear thing; we're learning auditing.

Now, in the old-time, training pilots, you know, they used to learn to fly by the seat of their pants. And very often years afterwards, why, you'd get one of these pilots on the airmail or something and the errors he had learned to fly with, he was still busily flying with. He would fly with his left wing a little bit low and he would land a little unbalanced the other way. And this was routine, this was the way he flew. Well now, that is all right; there's nothing wrong with a pilot flying with his left wing a little bit low. But it's our job here to get straightened out whatever bugs one may have picked up along the line. The essence of auditing today is an ability on the part of an auditor to carry through with a process no matter how much it is changing the pc. Now, this - this is a weird thing. This is real weird. You will discover that an auditor in the old days doing a duplication back and forth with the preclear, would get into the most interesting type of setup you ever saw. The preclear would change so the auditor would change the process. In other words, he'd duplicate the preclear. Preclear would start to change, you see, so the auditor would change the process. This happened all too many times, but remember this horrible thing happens to have some truth in it - that the process which turned on a somatic will turn it off That's a gruesome fact.

So we have a situation where an auditor has - may have picked up this - not this one but he may have picked up certain observational points. See, he may have picked up certain things in observing preclears and so forth. And he may be - all unknownst to himself, after he's done an awful lot of auditing - inclining in some direction of a process shift or some favorite activity that he would engage on at a certain moment when the preclear was doing this and that, which are not necessarily bad, but they may not necessarily be good.

Now, the essence of communication lag is the first thing we've got to get very, very thoroughly. Now, although Peggy is a good auditor and I love her very, very dearly, she told me yesterday noon - and didn't realize she had told me and so therefore I shouldn't tell on her in front of all these people - she pulled a boo-boo of considerable magnitude without realizing she had done it. She let a preclear talk to her day and night on an obsessive comm lag without recognizing that this preclear really had no need to talk or anything else.

I know this preclear. I know this preclear vividly well and in two hours of auditing I was able to get in three auditing commands. Talk about an obsessive communication flow, see? Obsessive. It's not particularly sequitur; it's not particularly related to anything. And to let this preclear get away with this for three days and nights is a very, very poor auditing show - it really is.

One should not go to the lengths of strangling the preclear if this preclear keeps on talking obsessively, but let's look at it, let's face up to the fact that a communication lag means the length of time intervening. You see, there's distance on communication. Well, there's also time between cause and effect, you see. And the more time, the less A - the less affinity, you see. The more time, the less reality. The more time, the less communication.

So when we get that factor of time in there - time being the single aberrative factor - the definition is: The length of time from the moment that the auditor, or you as a person in conversation, ask a question or request some data and when that exact question and the exact answer to that data is forth coming from the preclear. Now, it's the length of time between those two incidents - question, answer. And it doesn't mean an answer off to the side. That's not an answer, see. It doesn't mean a lot of cross backflow to find out what you meant by the question. See? That's all time. It doesn't matter what goes on between the moment the question is asked and the moment it is answered. It just does not matter what goes on. If the preclear goes out and climbs the Alps in the interim that's still comm lag.

You walked up to this taxi driver in 1930 and you said „Where is the city hall?“ Now, this taxi driver may since have driven all around the town, have been fired, have gone into other employ, may have become a streetcar conductor, may have become a cop, may have become president and so forth. The truth of the matter is he never told you and has not told you to this date where the city hall is, so that is all comm lag. We've got fourteen years here, let us say or twenty-four years or thirty-four years or forty-four years. It just would not matter, if the question hasn't been answered, it's all comm lag. We don't care who this taxi driver has talked to, if he has written you letters in the meantime, if he's given evidence before the grand jury or McCarthy - it just doesn't matter. It is still comm lag. That the question never gets answered still doesn't alter the basic definition. This fellow is then comm-lagging.

All right. Now, let's get an example of it. Here - here's an accident victim on the street. You walk up to this accident victim you say, „How do you feel?“ The accident victim is unconscious, lying there bleeding, all pushed in from all corners. Never answers your question. Kind of obvious, isn't it? Never answers your question. Yet you asked it. So from that moment, from there on to the end of this universe that is still a comm lag in progress, isn't it? And that is why a phrase gets hung up in a reactive bank. There are no phrases that simply miss the reactive bank entirely, see. It's never resolved, it's never answered.

Now, do you see what the content of an engram is? It's total comm lag. Everything there is in the engram bank is a comm lag. So you ask this person, „How do you feel?“ Do you know that question will go on from now till the end of this universe as part of some engram?

Now, therefore there's some responsibility on the person asking the question. Isn't there? Then we go out and we ask this bright young girl who is selling soda pop or something of the sort, we say, „Where is the city hall?“ And she says, „Well, it's two blocks down the street and turn to your right and it's one block and that's the city hall.“ No comm lag there. It isn't aberrative, either, to you or to her. No aberrative factor involved in it whatsoever. See, it cleared the computer.

All right. Now, we say to this bright young girl, „How do you feel?“ She says, „Oh, I feel okay today. I know I've felt a lot better sometimes. I had a big party last night but I feel okay.“ No aberrative quality whatsoever. None. You follow me?

Now, supposing we said to this young girl, „How do you feel today?“ And she says „Well, I don't know, I - aahhh - I think it over, stand here selling soda pop. Sat here - . You know my family - my family uh - objected to me selling soda pop. I know when I was at Vassar, I know my father wrote me a letter and he said, 'Grace,' he says, 'soda pop - soda pop and you just won't ever mix.' That's what he said. Aahhhhh“

What happened to your question „How do you feel?“ What happened to your question?

All right. You walk up to this adding machine and you punch some buttons - bong, bong, bong, see? You don't pull the handle. You go off and leave it. Leave the whole thing alone, see? And this poor accountant who is stupid enough not to pull the handle before he starts accounting, he walks over and he's got the company vouchers for that month and he goes ping-a-de-ping-a-de-ping, ping-a-de-ping-a-de-ping, bang-a-de-bang-a-de bang, bang-a-de-bang-a-de-bang, bang-a-de-bang-a-de-bang, cronk, cronk, bang - wrong answer.

And he says, „Hey, wait a minute. Here, now what's this all about?“

Okay. Tell you what it's all about. You asked this person who is lying there unconscious after the street accident you say, „How do you feel?“ You've walked up to an adding machine, bing-a-de-bing-a-de-bing, bing, and not pulled the answer. See, you've not pulled the totaller.

And she's selling soda pop on the street some years later and somebody walks up to her and says, „How do you feel?“ And she says, „Duh-duh-duh - aahhhhh - uh-da-da-dum -. Pop said to me when I was at Vassar - . I remember it very well, he wrote me a letter and he said, 'Grace, soda pop and you will just never mix.'„

Well, years go by and somebody walks up to her in the sanitarium - because you see you're totally responsible - walks up to her in a sanitarium and says to her, „Grace, how do you feel?“ They're still adding figures into this column of figures, see. They're still trying to get this thing to multiply everything by five or do something, you see. And it just - the computer doesn't work that way. Understand this a little better now?

What is this thing called an engramic phrase? Why is it aberrative? Well, we get this fact. Life is a peculiar thing. The one thing that cannot as-is in life - . Now, you listen. You guys remember this because I'm never going to tell you again, I'm sure, because it's so damned obvious. This is one of those horrible obvious things, you know, that just sort of flies by and you never pay much attention to it. But do you know what - there's only one thing that cannot as-is. When we say as-is we mean erase or disappear or have nothing made of it. What is that?

Male voice: Pleasure.

Nothing. That's very close to it because that's one of the factors involved with it - nothing, see. Freedom won't erase. Now, we can look all we want to at this dwindling spiral and say aren't these people awfully bad off and everybody's going to the dogs and they'll all wind up in the dregs. But the funny part of it is that the only thing it'll erase there is the entheta. The freedom will not erase. I almost went into convulsions one day - freedom. Now, let's take this and we say - all these good qualities, actually good qualities: freedom, presence, demonstrated abilities - actually the - what happens is, is they don't erase at all. An individual simply turns away from them and starts looking at mass and entheta. And as long as he's over here looking at entheta, any freedom or courage or anything else that he has that he considers to be a good quality, is simply going begging, because it is not a quantitative quality. It is simply qualitative. It's not quantitative. Freedom is not quantitative. Mass is quantitative but freedom isn't.

Thus you get races of man always going forward toward higher levels of freedom. Thus you get all kinds of activity on the part of man to be better, to make things better. You get activity in general on the part of life to go on, coming on up the line, making things squared around a little bit better. There's only one thing that functions anywhere and that is life. The only thing that can happen to life - even though the individual is actually totally free, even at the moment he's telling you this he is actually totally free, he has courage, he is able to do a tremendous number of things - the only thing that he can do is in that freedom turn around and fixate his attention on something that is not free, that is not courageous, that is not many other things.

See, he fixes his attention on some kind of a mass. You understand? And then he can say, „I am part of that mass.“ But why does he do this? Because he wants it to be free too. And that is the pathetic part of existence. The only traps that can possibly exist, exist because of a desire to further free or further help things that are in trouble, things that are in mass.

Now, if you actually do have a key that opens traps and locks you are perfectly at liberty to go over and open all kinds of traps and locks. But as anybody knows, to rescue his liege lord from the castle while armed - while beautifully armed with a skewer taken out of the cooking fire and while faced with a moat, bastions, Greek fire and very well accoutered and plated archers is folly. Like love's folly. And if you want to - if you want to define folly, it is - it is somebody coming up to set you free.

Now, a little child sees another little child that's had polio. And this little child says, „Well, it's too bad. That person shouldn't have polio,“ see, and goes over and - . You see little kids do this. And one day you're processing a cripple and you want to know when this person first got crippled. And you say to him, „Som-mm-mm.“ All of a sudden sympathy, feeling of rapport with, effort to help this other little child. Well, they didn't have the clue did they? They didn't have the information - they did not have the data. They - there is a gimmick involved in entrapment. You have to know how to as-is a problem. You have to know how to as-is mass and space, too. In other words, when I say as-is it I mean - hhhwt! - make a perfect duplicate of it. You have to know how to do that.

All right. So we look over this business of life, this game called life, and we find an individual if he were totally free would have no game. So he actually has to actually consciously step down from a higher activity of freedom in order to have a game or have any mass around at all. You see, the existence of the smallest piece of mass would be a barrier, see. Just to that degree a pebble out here in the street here is a barrier, but you wouldn't think of it much as a barrier. The next thing you know the pebble is the size of the castle wall. See, it's a real barrier. The next thing it's the size of the universe.

Being trapped in this universe is something on the order of being caught in a matchbox. You know, here's this huge, powerful individual and he's standing there outside the matchbox looking at the matchbox saying, „Boy, I wonder how I'll ever get out of that matchbox.“ This is the silly aspect which life presents to individuals.

All right. We cannot erase or as-is, make a perfect duplicate of freedom. You make a perfect duplicate of nothing and you will of course still have the same thing you started out with, nothing.

You make a perfect duplicate of no barriers and of course you have still no barriers. So the only thing you can as-is are barriers, actual barriers. You can see a wall, you can make a perfect duplicate of it and therefore you can vanquish it as a wall. What do you mean by having a wall around there? You've got a wall around there in the first place because you wanted a game.

All right. Let's take a look at this whole problem of communication lag and we discover an enormous drive on the face of life, everywhere it's seen - to free. And of course that includes computers, doesn't it? That includes computers. Free a computer. This thing has got a datum jammed in it. Somebody walked over to it and punched on it while it was unconscious - „How do you feel?“ You get the idea?

Now, the person to whom it was asked will suddenly notice the existence of a former computation, a former figure on the machine. You as an auditor would notice this former figure on the machine. And you would say, „Hey! Let's free that computer.“

It is a handy, jim-dandy little mechanism built into every computer, that life has to be present somewhere in its vicinity for any mass or computer to exist. If life to any degree is present then it will try to free the caught data, the untabulated, unsolved (you get it) datum - the unanswered datum, unsolved datum, same thing - in that computer. See?

And so up it comes through the engram bank. So we ask this person, „How do you feel?“ They tell you about soda pop and Vassar. What's happening here? This person started in to free the computer and suddenly hit too many points that had never been tallied. See? And they just stopped right there.

Shortening a communication lag is the manifestation of actually freeing out of the computer all the jammed data in it on that subject. And that is what is shortening a communication lag. That's why a short communication lag is something an auditor works for and watches for He sees this communication lag, goes in, gets shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and all of a sudden, ping! What's happened here? The individual has simply as-ised out of the computer, one way or the other, all the data that was jamming the computer. And so in Straightwire you are unjamming computers. Don't think you're doing anything else in Straightwire. That's all you're doing. Unless you give it some very fancy wrinkles, it's a very simple process.

You can give Straightwire some very fancy wrinkles, still legitimately. You can ask a fellow, „Tell some lies about your past.“ You can ask him to mock up an action in the present, then put it into the past and then recall it. He will be deluged instantly with data that he has long forgotten. You can do all kinds of things. I mean, computers can be handled in the most remarkable ways.

Talk about human memory - phooey. I mean, there's no worry about this at all. The only reason a person cannot remember is because he is facing a computer that he expects to remember. He will know the computer is fixed when it remembers. You see? And then he'll say, „See, I fixed a computer. Ha-ha. Pretty good.“ He never gets it through his skull that what you're asking him to do is actually to know the answer. Because, you see, he doesn't have to have the answer out of that computer at all. He doesn't have to have the computer tell him a thing. It's just a gimmick, a gadget.

It has no more importance than the vending machines down at the Greyhound bus station. I mean, are you terribly concerned at this moment over the vending machines at the Greyhound bus station?

I'm sure you're not but believe me if you had a job filling them and keeping them running and so forth, why, boy, you'd sure be happy every time somebody called up and told you - . You'd be real sad if they called to tell you your vending machine number sixty-two is just not working today. You'd go rushing down there and you'd fix the gimmicks and take out the old slugs and coins from some bygone age and the chewing gum that people had jammed in the slot, you know. And you'd free up the levers that were jimmied by the kids trying to get a second bar out when the first was delivered. And you just fix it up and you drop in your nickel and it gives you a candy bar, bang! just like that. Nothing to it. Put in another nickel, give you a candy bar, nickel, candy bar, nickel, candy bar, fine, fixed. Oh, we're all set and you feel real good about the whole situation. So would the person who called you up.

There is something horribly frantic about a machine not doing what it's supposed to do. You see? It's not free to that extent. It is enslaved in some fashion. All right. Now, let's look at this communication lag and look at the engram bank and so forth and just add this up. You know a tremendous amount of data about this. Let's think it over for a moment.

Whatcha thinking it over with? I asked you to think it over for a moment and you did. Now, what are you thinking it over with? What are you thinking it over with, Mary?

Female voice: I'm not certain.

Well, we'd say the first thing you were thinking it over with was an uncertainty.

Female voice: Mm-hm.

Is that right?

Female voice: As a matter of fact that was exactly what I was working on as I thought it over saying - well, in some banks the uncertainties are much bigger than in others. Groupers are more powerful and cover more space and time. Right. Mm-hm.

Female voice: So that was partly it.

Sure.

What did you do?

Male voice: I sort of - . „Hey, I know something about this and uh if I fiddle around with it I'll start - I'll start some - . Something messed up here so I'll just uh - let it go at knowingness,“ and things started to come in.

You just let it go at knowingness.

Male voice: - and uh - things started - .

Well, I want you to look over something: That the power of interest, the ability to compel interest by one of these circuits, is a fabulous and wonderful thing. One of these computers is set up basically to be interesting. So when a person starts to think with one, it's a very interesting operation. It is actually - a computer itself places a communication lag into knowingness. Do you see that?

All right. Now, let's say that you were a Japanese mathematician (I've known some of these boys; they're fantastic) and you could look at a column of figures and write down the answer. You know, you look at the column; you write down the answer. Just fascinating. They're actually trained to do that in that they've been told that this is possible and then they stand around and work on it and look at columns of figures and finally they develop the facility. Or do they simply become free enough as people to simply look at a column of figures and know the answer. You get the idea?

There isn't any reason why time has to intervene at all. What's mystifying about looking at this column of figures and writing down the answers is the fact that no time has intervened, you see. Bang! - he's got the answer.

Well, we think the nice thing to do, the pleasant thing to do, the polite thing to do and the time-tracky thing to do - and therefore we can get mixed up so it's the survival thing to do - is simply to look at a column of figures, you see, and then take some time and go through some sort of rote process, you see, by which you will arrive at an answer at the bottom of the column. All right. We arrive at this answer very nicely at the bottom of the column. Now, what are we using to arrive at that answer? We are using something which isn't really made out of machinery. It's called mathematics. It is a system of vias by which you can derive the answer without having to know it. Something by which you can derive an answer without having to know the answer. You don't have to burden yourself or make your game liable to your total knowingness.

See, if you got up toward total knowingness you'd know what the enemy was doing and what you were doing and what all of the - . You could know all these things, you see.

But you also have to figure out that there's something to know. That's the other gimmick. People go around - go around working harder to get something to know, you see. A fellow builds up this tremendous structure, a pyramid, and has labyrinths inside of it and sliding stones and all that sort of thing. Just for what? Let's add it up this way: It's something that somebody's going to know eventually - in other words, a secret. So people will actually manufacture secrets so as to invest knowingness in them, you see?

I was quite struck by this one time. Bacon is supposed to have left some cryptograms of one kind or another, and I had an officer one time who spent all of his time trying to figure out one of these cryptograms. And I asked him one day, I said, „Well, you're figuring out this cryptogram,“ I said, „How do you know there's really an answer to it?“ This assaulted his whole game, you see; it utterly dismayed him - the idea „How do you know there's an answer to this cryptogram?“

So, actually we had some machines there. We were doing some cryptography, one kind or another. And I added it up. It was ornery of me but I was feeling overt, and we added it up and any message has certain repetitive indexes, regardless - you see? The symbols are going to represent something in terms of meaning but if you write a message it will have so many articles and so many pronouns and so many this and that in it if you've got much of a message. Demonstrated quite completely that this cryptogram could not possibly have had any message in it. The reason why it couldn't have had any message in it was very easy: There was insufficient repetitive quality to the symbols. Utterly insufficient.

Now, here's another example. Somebody - Adams and somebody or other wrote a book on space, visitors from space or something like that. It's around in the bookstores right now. And on the back page of this thing, on the back of the cover, it has a message from space and this is a diagram of the workings of an engine that was left by these scientists from outer space with this fellow and scientists are now busy trying to figure this out. So I was interested enough in figuring this thing out to take a look at this and recognized something quite cute about it. It has no repetitive cycles.

Let's look at a mathematical formula and realize that if you're doing it in calculus you're going to have a summation sign. It's going to repeat itself. An equal sign will repeat itself. In order to have any kind of mathematics at all, you've got to have repetition of some sort or another, otherwise, there's no R in it at all. See, no duplication. And if there's no R in it whatsoever, it's just not real. It's just made up. There is no secret there to be learned.

So here is this vast number of cockeyed symbols none of which repeat. As a result, the thing is simply a cooked up message. It has no secret in it.

Now, much more significantly in life at large, actually life at large really has no secret in it. However it has a system it is operating with. Let's look at that. It has a system with which it's operating. Why does it have an operating system? Well, it has a game. There's a game quality involved in the thing.

All right. In order to have a tree, there have to be certain secrets that aren't secrets. So we get the big secret that there are no secrets. See, that's the biggest secret of all: there are no secrets. So we have to manufacture enough secrets into this computer so that it will run in the proper vias and go on being a tree.

Now, we get the secret of osmosis, the secret of seed regeneration, the secret of this, the secret of that. Something will go on compulsively and obsessively setting this thing up and making it go through its paces. It's quite interesting that it does this. Very interesting that it does this. But the secret involved with it - the secret involved with it - is that there's no secret involved with it.

But something around there thinks there's a secret involved with it and is trying to solve that secret. The effort to solve it is the entrapping mechanism. To look into the workings of a machine in order to erase or vanquish the machine is about the silliest thing you can do. The answer to the machine is the machine. Q and A. An ultimate solution is the perfect duplication of the problem. Is it or isn't it?

So a partial duplication of the problem will simply cause a lot of the problem to keep on surviving, won't it? But if you made a perfect duplicate of the problem, you would then have its solution. It would disappear. It certainly wouldn't be a problem anymore. Isn't that right? You wouldn't have any mass either would you? You get the idea?

All right. If we're trying to solve problems, then, it must be that we are trying to bring about a vanishment of the complications of the problem. And the only way a total vanishment, an ultimate vanishment of all of the odds and ends of the problem, so there'd be no further answers necessary. You know, ultimate solution, crunch! See there'd be no further problems out of this automobile. Well now, you know very well that if you fix the ignition, you fix the spark plugs and so forth, you know you're going to have future problems with that automobile - you know very well you're going to have. You run it at the reductio ad absurdum; run it a hundred thousand miles and if you don't at least have a tire problem with that car it would be a very silly thing, you see.

Now, therefore, if you were trying to solve all the problems connected with this car, the funny part of it is the answer is no car. You see that?

Now, oddly enough, here you are in a body. Now, let's just go into this very sharply here. Here you are in a body, at first walking from place to place and wishing you had a car so that you wouldn't have to walk. So you get a car, you see, and then that pulls your body around so that you don't have to walk, and you say, „I have solved a problem.“ Have you? No, a great many other problems will immediately come up, not the least of which is the finance company. There's the finance company and then there's - there'll be the slight problem of the fact that you won't feel so good because you're not getting any exercise. You see, your legs now are dependent upon a car, so they aren't getting used, so they don't feel important. And you pay - put less communication to your legs, so the next thing you know you've got arch trouble or something. Nobody ever got arch trouble through walking, by the way. They only got arch trouble through not walking.

You'll find the only engram that is aberrative is the engram which didn't include any action but included energy. You had the machine and you didn't use it. That kind of thing. So you really put up against it this way: you either - you either solve it or you use it. There's no other compromise with any gimmick that you have. Either solve it completely or use it. And if you have something you're not using, why, throw it away for heaven's sakes. Run it in the ditch. Give it to somebody else so he'll have a problem.

But if you're not using a body - such as some catatonic or somebody in a fit someplace in a hospital; you're not using this body. What are they doing there? What are they doing? Well, they've got something, they didn't use it, and now they can't. See, decrease of ability. Not using one's legs brings about difficulties with one's legs. In other words, not handling it, not managing it, not keeping it running. What it does is hang up in the track in a - in an approximation of nothingness again.

„No-ness,“ see. Only in this case no doingness is the only no-ness about it. So there is - there is a gradient scale here, descending into heavier and heavier mass of nothing. See, this gradient scale descending into heavier and heavier mass? Well, it starts - the very top lines of it that we would be most acquainted with, and before you get into actual mass, you have the Know to Mystery Scale or the Know to Secret Scale. That is the top crust of this gradient scale. Actually repeats itself as itself as you go on down. Mass - heavier and heavier. Now, all this is - looking, you might say, is a condensed knowing-ness. You put out something there to look at so that you can, by looking at it, know about it.

Now, we go into emotion. We are beginning to use particles - you are knowing with emotion. Now effort - you know with effort. Now thinking - then you're figuring with computers. You're not knowing any longer. You're using computers, a brain, something like this. And then in order to give it energy - this is the silliest thing of all, to feed something energy - you eat. And then to get further on the track and so forth, why, you get into sex. And then, of course, sooner or later everything is going to get to be a secret. This is the most obvious conclusion you can reach.

But here's the commonest manifestation: Let's say you have a big car and you set it in the garage and you didn't use it and it sat there for a couple of years. You go out and you step on its starter. You know very well it won't start. So you go out and get a new battery and you put in it, and then you start to start it again and of course it won't start. The rubber is pretty shot. And so this and that, and you practically rebuild this car that's been sitting in the garage for a couple of years but it still won't start and that's the secret. That's the ultimate secret. We don't know why this car won't start. It's a secret. Well, the solution to the car was an as-ising of the car, of course.

Now, let's see how far down a guy goes. He goes down this scale from know down through secrets, you see, just in a very heavy plunge. He gets down into the - into the secrets band. And then it's - his identity's a secret and everybody else's identity is a secret but everything is a secret, a secret, a secret. This guy is stupid. He at last can't find anything anyplace. You know? The whenness and whereness of everything is lost. And that's the definition of stupidity. The only real thing about stupidity is that the whenness and whereness has disappeared.

Did you ever lose something? Makes you feel good and stupid doesn't it? „Where the devil did I put that?“ Big comm lag. „Where did I put that?“ „When - when did I have it last?“ Where, when, where, when, where, when. Well, maybe you have just - maybe you do not have much money; maybe you are in a strange area and you don't have much money and it was all in your wallet and your wallet disappeared. It just disappeared. You reached into your pocket to pay for your breakfast or something and your wallet was gone. And you go back and you look in your room and it's not there. And you haven't talked to anybody recently. You'd feel sort of disturbed and stupid wouldn't you? You'd feel sort of disturbed, upset. You'd have an anxiety about something. You'd want to know where that wallet was. You would have problems right away wouldn't you? Hm? Right away you'd have problems. But you'd feel kind of stupid.

Do you realize there are people around that have that as their common feeling about life? I mean, they got that all the time, see. It's all lost. When and whereness of everything is really gone. You're standing right in front of them and you say to them, „How are you?“ or something of this sort. They don't know you're there. They give you some long comm lag. They're way off the beat, way off. „How do you feel?“ And they say „Pop bottles.“ They hardly know you're standing in front of them.

All right. You're lost too. And if they had to consider people, they would say, „You really ought to be very suspicious of people because they have a tremendous number of secrets and they - you don't quite know their intentions and you get - „you know, you have to be very careful of people because of uh - .“ This all comes out of whenness and whereness - something you should remember in auditing people.

Now, you get them going around and you at least find where and when the walls are and the spots in the room. You would just be utterly amazed how this will snap somebody up scale. What you're getting there with 8-C is the whenness and whereness. Now, you ask somebody Straightwire; you want to know the whenness and the whereness. Even though you're asking him to tell you lies - you know, you've asked him overtly to tell you lies - you want to know the whenness and the whereness, the whenness and the whereness.

He says, „Oh,“ he says, „I uh - the reason I got a broken leg is because an elephant trampled on me.“

And you say, „When?“

And „Well,“ he says, „it was last night. Last night about ten o'clock.“

„Where?“

„Aahhh. At the uh - down on the corner.“

It's upsetting to him. You're asking him to be responsible for the positioning in time and space of an incident. He has comm lags because he can't place the missing lines, he can't place the missing things. Now, the solution to the problem is the problem. That's the total solution. Let's see if this works out.

All right. A fellow has an automobile, it's giving him a lot of trouble, he's got a lot of problems with the automobile. Let's say he simply throws away the automobile. Let's say he as-ises it, just as-ises it where it was created, and the automobile simply disappears in every last particle right where it is, boom! There's going to be no further problem from this automobile. You have given an ultimate solution to this automobile. But you say, „Now I have to walk every place.“

Okay, now let's take a look at this. This, then, is a problem. It's a problem and it would not have been a solvable problem if we didn't have a little more knowingness on this.

We know an individual is an awareness of awareness unit, and as an awareness of awareness unit, an individual, then, really doesn't need a computer. All right. He doesn't need a body to move around unless he wants a game, you see, and so on. Actually he can manufacture enough sensation, he can manufacture enough of anything if he wants this, but he wants a game. But he's got a body there. We're trying to solve the problem of having gotten rid of the automobile. Got rid of the automobile - made a problem right away because you had to move your body around. Let's as-is the body - just make it disappear right where it is. And what would you discover?

You'd find the individual, probably his perceptions cut down one way or the other. He would be being asked to move his machines around. What you're doing is looking for him. Let's as-is all these machines, bang! You know, they're a thetan's machinery. Let's as-is all those machines, bing!

Do you realize that you have a completely free-moving, freely-perceiving, can-be-anyplace-it-wants-to-be individual. Do you see this? Well, you can work it out by test. Processing demonstrates that.

Anytime you have mass, you have a problem. Anytime you have any mass of any kind whatsoever for any purpose whatsoever, you've got a problem. Mass is a problem because mass is a barrier. The only real problems are those which barrier against freedom. Freedom won't erase. See, the basic problem is a matter of barriers. Any mass can be a problem. Why does a thetan want these problems? Whee! That's an interesting thing, isn't it? Well, he wants a game. He wants to have somebody else. He wants to have a playing field. He wants mass. Gives him something to be interested in, things to be active about. He can build things. He can do all sorts of things.

A tremendous - the entire array of life lies out in front of you. What can a thetan do? How many problems can be - he have? Well, how many spaces are there in all the universes there are? Lots of spaces? How many objects are there in all the universes there are? Lots of objects? How many particles are there in all the universes there are? That's a lot of particles. Well, add to it how many considerations can a thetan make? And how many considerations could all the - all of the awareness of awareness units in all universes - how many considerations could they make? Well, add all those figures together that I've been telling you and you'll have the answer as to how many problems there are.

Any descent from freedom will bring about problems. As long as the individual is competent of his ability to handle problems and to resolve them in finer parts of them - you see, take a big problem and resolve some fine part of this problem - as long as the individual can do this, he can go on looking forward to other problems and stay interested in life and a lot of other things. He can communicate, he can have masses and he thinks this is fine, you see.

If we were to take everything away from him, he would be a very unhappy thetan. Now, he'd be totally free but he'd be very unhappy. Why would he be so unhappy? Wouldn't have any problems, wouldn't have anything to solve. And this is what we run up against in every preclear we process. The first and foremost thing we run up against is no matter how bad trouble - .

Once in a while, by the way, I have seen an individual who considered himself to be in a sufficient amount of trouble. Ran into a fellow in a jail one day and he was really convinced that he had enough problems for the moment. He was totally convinced. I know because I tried to run problems on him. „I got enough,“ he says.

„Well, that's an automatic answer,“ I says. So „Well, let's - come on, let's get some more problems.“

„Well, no kidding. I've got enough. Enough problems.“

„Well, what are some of these problems?“ He did, too. He had enough problems.

First place, he was there because of a crime he didn't commit, but the moment that he confessed to not having committed this crime he would have been jailed for a worse crime which he really had done.

Furthermore, his mother was quite upset and quite ill, and his wife didn't have any money, and he had a couple of kids - they didn't have any food. He had no bond he could post of any kind at all. He was not very healthy himself. He had enough problems. Funny. Do you know that was a very immediate affair. Do you realize he wouldn't have been sitting there in jail if he hadn't been trying to make problems for himself? See?

One time I was at a court martial. I was a summary court's counsel for an enlisted man while I was in the hospital. And this summary court's - was meeting and convening upon - in fact, I think he'd been found without an ID card or something of the sort. But he had really messed himself up. He'd started to fight the Shore Patrol. And he'd - oh, mopery and dopery on the high seas, strictly. They had him. They had practically thrown the book at him and I was his counsel.

In looking this situation over - because I was tremendously interested in human reaction and how this all worked out and so on. I was - this was very early observation of this, very early, in 1945 this observation was made. This fellow had been brought out of a war zone and had been placed in the hospital. He had argued with the doctors about being placed in the hospital but they had merely assumed that he must be nuts not to want to be in a nice hospital. And so they had given him a bad time, but he had lain there for days and days and days before all this occurred, realizing that there was nothing for him to do, nothing for him to think about, there was nothing on the future track, there was absolutely nothing for him to worry about and he had entered into the state known as 2.5, boredom. And he was very solidly bored.

He was actually achingly desperate because nothing was going to occur. And then without letting his right hand know what his left one was doing, he left his ID card - for being a very punctual sailor and so forth - left his ID card in his locker, very carefully, went into an out-of-bounds area, managed to make enough noise and confusion so the Shore Patrol would come up and then beat up the Shore Patrol and then had quite a few problems right away.

I got him off on the basis that he'd been returned from a combat zone and probably was not quite right in the head.

Actually, he was quite right in the head. It is just what you can expect an awareness of awareness unit to do - given minus problems to find plus problems quick.

Now, here's this fellow, he exteriorizes - by the way, this happened to me one time. Long time back on the track. Had a - seemed to have had a penchant for bombs blowing up in my face or something of that - happened in the last war, has happened here and there. But in trying to look over all the stacked facsimiles which were on this - . I found it's too many; I got weary on the whole subject. I found out that in a moment of upset I had a bomb pitched at me which caused plus randomity - really plus randomity because there was already a lot of excitement going on and there was no intention at all to make the world rougher for the people who tossed this nice little grenade. And it blinded me, very perfectly. This was a long time ago. Blinded me.

So I went around playing the beautiful sadness for about seven years of being very, very blind. And this was a very, very interesting state, I'm sure, trying to carry out campaigns and maps and draw fortifications and so forth without any eyesight was about as many problems as you could handle.

So I was having a good time doing this. And then some son of a gun tossed another shell into the middle of the command post and that was the end of that body. This body got draped on an electric fence, a high-voltage electric fence. And all of a sudden I was about, oh, I'd say twenty-five feet behind it with complete, full, bright visio. It was a beautiful, beautiful, sun-shiny, snowy day, and there were green - small green trees growing on the other side of this fence. And there I was. You never saw such scenery; it was just beautiful. And the situation that I had just departed from, however, was quite hectic but it was utterly beyond me to do anything about it then because this shelling of this command post was the finish of the war. And that was the end of that.

And no problems left, all would be peace after that on that planet - it's a cinch. And beautiful, clear, so on. I enjoyed it for a while, went off and lived in the woods for a while on my lonesome and finally got acquainted with some rabbits and deer and - you know, it was just a nice sylvan existence. No problems.

Thought it over for a couple of hundred years or something like this but pretty soon got pretty bored, pretty bored. And the next thing I did immediately after that is I found a nice upset, sad, plus randomity individual and put a beam in the center of his head - boom! See? In I went. Of course, managed to forget all the rest of this very nicely, and, boy, did I have lots of problems. Lots of problems right away, plenty of problems.

Well now, in writing the history books we would think of something as being „bad luck“ or „He had a hard life.“ Well, why do they write so many books about people who have a hard life? And I dare say your interest in or your ability to find a book about somebody who had a soft life from one end to the other down at the local library would be unattainable.

We look at a book with no action, no motion. This guy was happy all of his life, he had a nice family and everything was happy, enjoyed things, everything was fine. There's no books like that down in the library. Not enough problems.

Well, what are we up against, then, when we start to work with a preclear? What are we up against? This person is causing more randomity or upset for others around him than is necessary, and he has reduced his ability far below what it would have to be to have problems. So his problems have become petty and internal and to that degree the society at large and its ability to progress and so forth is interrupted to just this degree.

This fellow has deserted the upper dynamics. He's gotten down to first dynamic problems. Then is about the time that you and me ought to really get in there and pitch. Why? Because this individual is going around offering himself as a problem to everybody and they don't particularly need him as a problem. Follow me?

Another thing, an individual can be so immersed in his problems that he entirely loses, entirely loses, any fun in having them. And about the only crime that you and I could possibly object to, knowing what we do about problems, all the rest of them - and that life is a problem and many piece of mass is going to be, is or is composed as and was born as a problem - knowing this, then the only thing we could object to even vaguely is no fun. See. That's the one thing we might object to. And as we look out in all directions in life the one thing that an auditor legitimately, right there according to his own feelings and according to his own theory and his practice and everything else - the only thing he'd really object to is the fact that no fun is occurring. There is no sport, there is no joy, there is no feeling of enlightenment or glee or anything else by the reason of being alive.

When a whole society gets to the point where it's all a working proposition and there's no fun to be found or undertaken in it, well, somebody ought to take a hand.

As far as I could see in existence, as far as randomity is concerned, it is a very bad thing to approach any trap if you don't know anything about traps. See. You say we have no know-how on the subject of how to unlock computers, how to speed up comm lags, how to get these things out of the machine, how to get the machines out of the guy. Let's say we have no knowledge of this and then we start to fool around with it. That's going to wind up in no fun, isn't it? Very definitely going to wind up in no fun.

Ordinarily in the absence of know-how a person has a tendency to become what he fights. For instance, if we ever wanted - really wanted communism here, lock, stock and barrel, the best way in the world to get it would be to fight Russia. Even though we won the war, see, to some degree - because you never win a war; they just make more problems - why, you'd really see communism here.

Capitalism has fought communism until the US government now uses as its textbook Das Kapital. I imag... - I don't imagine anybody in the government knows that the principles they're following are the - contained in Das Kapital. But they are. The basic Marxian principles of taxation are uniformly used now by the US Bureau of Internal Revenue, Treasury Department, and so forth. They don't even know whose they are.

They would be the most upset people you ever heard of if they were to have Das Kapital shoved under their noses and those lines pointed out to them that they were following this. I don't say they should or they shouldn't. But the main - the main thing about this is that here they are in an unknowing sort of way fooling around with - and they're trying to fight against communism, and yet here some of the dearest principles of communism in full action right here in these United States.

All right. If this is the case then a person can get into a relatively stupid, unknowing, lost state about this whole thing, and he can get down to a point where he doesn't even know it's a game. And when he gets down to the point of where he no longer knows it's a game, why, then he has no fun. Well, if you know how to unlock traps, you can successfully and safely fight the gloom and unhappiness of Earth. How could you successfully fight it? Well, you can successfully fight any trap that you can completely unlock.

Therefore, an auditor not winning in processing preclears, you see, but failing in the processing of preclears could lose and accept some of the philosophies of all the preclears that caused him to lose, you see. See, he could do this. But if he could unlock these things successfully, he would be doing exactly what life is trying to do - bring it up to a game level, keep it there if possible. And let's not get so horribly dull about this that we believe that this - it is gruesome and grim and we should all be glum and so on about existence.

All right. Another thing about this is an individual still has enormous quantities of freedom, he still has enormous quantities of courage. Courage itself is a very, very tiny particle but it is so close up to the top of the band that the idea of erasing a person's courage is an almost impossible thing. What you can do is make him fight something which is cowardly and then take its aspects, you see, and get him to pretend he is not courageous in this fashion. But you back him out of this and you'll find him natively courageous just like that - boom!

So we had a student in the Advanced Clinical Course who came around to me after a session of auditing and he - we were working with courage at the time - and he says, „All that's happened to me is we have erased all the courage in my bank.“ We were having him put courage in the walls. This was very, very funny. We'd erased all the courage; he had no courage left. Damn fool had been putting courage into walls. Up to that time he'd sat in the back of the class. He never said anything. He'd never said a word during the whole class from beginning to end. He wouldn't object to an auditor if the auditor had walked all over him while he was on the couch with muddy feet. And he went up to the Instructor, he bawled out the Instructor; he came up and saw me, he bawled out me, telling us that we had erased all of his courage. Ah, me, it was very funny, very amusing. We seldom laugh along such lines because it gets so desperate with people sometimes, but that is one of those very funny ones. Lack of courage - that was his trouble now.

As we look over the field of auditing, we discover that the only thing that might be wrong with auditing would be failing in auditing, and we know this by experience. And that is - that is the main reason why it's wrong. An individual has failed to unlock the computer, has failed to unlock the trap and so forth.

Now, an auditor can get so discouraged about life that he'll stop flattening comm lags. You know, he'll get desperate, you know? And the preclear will do this and it doesn't seem to work in the next five minutes and so he doesn't pay any attention to where the comm lag is and he runs another question and he runs another computation. The auditor actually is running a cycle of failure.

The first and foremost thing we've got to learn, then - whatever else I've told you today - the first and foremost thing, you've got to learn to repeat that command and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, with perfect equanimity whether it's getting any results or not. See, completely aside from its application, just you as a person in action, has to be able to tolerate the repetition of the command, even though you know it isn't getting very far. That's a tough thing to learn sometimes.

It'll keep you, sometime in the future - when a preclear is jumping off the couch, is - needs to be excited by something more than what you're giving them or needs this or needs that, is in a very desperate state, when the whole family is telling you what a desperate condition this preclear is in, how it's all desperate, how it's all emergency and so forth - keep you from sitting up all night long trying to figure out this preclear.

You know that you will be able to sit there with perfect equanimity and be able to utter an auditing command and make it stick with this preclear and flatten that comm lag, despite the family, despite his jumping up and down off the couch, despite this, despite that, you'll go in there and you'll flatten the comm lag. And you'll find out that no matter what you did if you succeed in flattening just one comm lag on the pre clear he'll get better.

Give you an example of that - interesting example of that. We had a boy around here who was in the foulest shape you ever saw a body in. He's not in bad shape mentally, he's in bad shape physically. He's really beaten his body up most terrifically.

We did an awful lot of processing on this boy, and you know, we were never able to flatten a comm lag. Why weren't we able to flatten a comm lag? Didn't matter how long a question was run, the person still comm lagged on it. You get the idea? Didn't matter much what question.

Well, this went on for an awful long time. We were giving awful simple auditing commands. Believe me, they weren't the kind of commands you'd think you would expect a comm lag on but they were comm lag on everything. Comm lag on 8-C, comm lag on everything; you just couldn't flatten a comm lag. And we weren't running process after process, you understand. We were running some very basic processes and we had to be satisfied with this kind of a flattening: one minute. We would bring it out to an even lag of about one minute. Can you imagine this? And we had to consider this flat.

Kept this up for eighty hours of auditing. Awful lot of auditing. Remember this person was in bad shape, in a wheel chair - was, by the way, whether he knew it or not, dying of a very, very bad disease. You know, nothing left there to work with, no circuits to patch up you might say. Might as well have just as-ised the whole situation.

Now, to get him to flatten one comm lag - pretty rough. And finally the auditor with great inspiration asked him this question, after we'd - you know, of course, all this was doing him good - with great inspiration - simplified Elementary Straightwire. This is - takes some doing but he simplified it. He asked the fellow to remember something. Then he asked him again „Remember something.“ And he asked him again to remember something, and the next thing you know, by asking that question over many times he had a flat lag. Completely flat. It was fantastic. And he asked him to remember some men - flattened that lag. Asked him to remember some women - they flattened that lag. Asked him to remember some plant life and then flattened that lag. Fabulous! I mean, this thing was going along at a terrific rate. And that night, for the first time, both the preclear and his attendant were witness to the fact that something terrific had happened.

Something terrific had happened in this fellow's case. Up to that time he was very frantic. He had to perform certain body motions before he'd have the least idea that he had been benefited. You know, walk around the room, wave his arms, something like this. For a totally paralyzed case this is quite a way - . He'd completely changed his goals after that processing session. In other words, with everything that was being worked with right up to that point we were always flattening, to some degree, existing comm lags - to some degree.

But it took that sheer inspiration on Elementary Straightwire to get, for the first time - . You talk about physical comm lag - this person's physical comm lags were such that we didn't dare run a physical command on him, see. It would just have been comm lag from here to the end of this universe. There wasn't anything you could adventure on. So 8-C was out. This was in paralysis. But as I say this other - this other „Remember something“, „Let's see if you can remember something. All right.“

I think the first time he tried this, his comm lag on this thing was probably something - manner - the manner of about ten, fifteen minutes. Quite curious. And that shows you that the fellow had a memory computer, that the computer was completely dead.

But in order to get to this case required enormous patience on the part of the auditor - enormous patience to just sit there and ask as unsignificant, as meaningless, actually, a question and yet snap this case out of the hobbles very easily.

You cannot underestimate the importance of being able to sit there and keep cool in any case. Most of us can do this with great ease. But I am sure even at this stage that some of us present would feel a certain dragging, nagging impatience if we had to repeat an auditing command that we didn't think was getting anywhere, over and over for about four hours - the same auditing command - and each time have one's voice be just as interested as before, be just as alert, be just as aware of the preclear's reactions, be just as interested in his answer and carry forward the session in such a fashion.

That's a little piece of skill, isn't it. All right. We're just going to make sure right now before we get any further with this that we've got this skill. Okay.

Thank you.