And this is January the 12th, 1954. And this morning we are going to go into some more methods of exteriorization.
Now, yesterday we talked about materialization. Right? Difference between materialization and moving something-mocking something up and unmocking it-and just having something appear. The difference between that-you know, the MEST universe method, you might say, of making something appear and disappear at a great rapidity and so persist and the other one is simply making something materialize.
Well, there’s a slight difference between these two things. One is a complete materialization. Materialization is just a postulate working without any modus operandi. And the other is a terrifically agreed-to automaticity. Outside of that, there’s no difference between them.
Now, when these two things cross up, your preclear gets a bit crossed up. Now, it isn’t that you are suddenly and inexplicably going to find yourself in these two bins, all mixed up.
The fact is that most preclears have them crossed up. As a matter of fact, it is idiotic that I would have to stand here and tell you that they were two-these two different manifestations in this universe. It is really idiotic that I would have to tell you this. It’s something like explaining to you that your shoes are on your feet and your hair is normally on your head. I mean, it’s just that silly. And you will see this as you go on and it will, one of these days, turn out and turn up with a lot more data than we have on it now.
But you see that this MEST universe is an agreed-on situation-is a long and arduous chain of agreement which includes a bracket which overlaps with agreements on other people’s brackets and everybody is fitted to everybody else in a very nice, smooth way and it’s very wonderful to behold. And that is the mock-unmock at speed of light at work.
Now, what I’m talking to you about is theory. We’re not interested, too much, in this from a standpoint of going down and getting an ice-cream soda. The ice-cream soda will be there and you will eat the ice-cream soda without much trouble, although it is appearing and disappearing at the speed of light.
It’s still going to be there, but what do you know? It won’t taste so good if you are totally dependent upon this MEST universe getting it there for you. If you’re completely and totally dependent upon the existence of an ice-cream soda as an other-determinism and an exterior fact, why, it won’t taste so good to you as if you are helping a little bit as you eat it.
Now, the first manifestation of this is in the matter of-and though this is mixed company, I’m afraid, and although we’re not even vaguely interested in psychoanalism-I’m afraid I’m going to have to bring the subject up.
It’s a wonderful subject. It’s kept people engrossed and has spoiled more writers for the last sixty years, than-kept more people engrossed than a lot of other things I know of. It, as a matter of fact, has been one of the favorite indoor sports of Homo sapiens and has been one of his favorite stumbling blocks here for a number of thousands of years. And do you know that, oddly enough, the amount of pleasure in sex is directly proportional to the person’s ability to put a Second Dynamic sensation there. Not inversely proportional, it’s just directly proportional. In other words, the amount of sexual pleasure derived from the sexual act is directly proportional to the man’s ability, or the woman’s ability, to throw sexual sensation, for instance, up into a wall. If they can do it well, why, sex is whee! And if they can’t do it at all... “No, no. Let’s try something else like psychoanalysis.” [laughter]
Well now, psychoanalysis will not lead you into a heightened sexual pleasure. It’ll probably make you go into complete apathy on it and leave it alone utterly. That’s by clinical case history.
Now I, unlike many people in America who call themselves psychoanalysts, I do know something about psychoanalysis. I studied it-Freudian psychoanalysis. I seriously doubt if the analysts in America have studied Freudian psychoanalysis, because I can’t quite find out what they’re doing. I was talking to one, one day, and I said, “How do you carry on your trade-your racket?” (It was more acceptable to him, by the way, when I called it a racket.)
And he said, “Well, it’s very easy. Patient just lies on the couch and talks.”
I said, “Well, gee whiz, huh. Gosh, you know, you mean that’s all you do? You get twenty-five dollars an hour for that?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Well, do you ever ask them any questions?”
“Oh, once in a while, to wake them up. Interested, ask them something or other.”
“Well, what do you get out of all this?”
“Well, I’m not expected to get anything out of this.”
“Well, what does the patient get out of this?”
“Well, sooner or later-sooner or later, they experience, a catharsis.”
And I said, “Is that so? But tell me, wouldn’t Ex-Lax do as well?” something like that.
And he says, “Well, between ourselves, most of the patients I have don’t want to get well.” And he said, “It really doesn’t matter whether I probe into their psyche or not.”
And I said, “Well, do you ever probe into their psyche?”
“Well, very often you find something interesting to probe into, you know, something that assists you in your work-you know, a little investigation.”
“No, no,” I said, “for the patient.” You know, “Do you ever probe into the patient’s psyche to find something there that...”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “every once in a while I can find something that I can explain to him.”
And, in other words, this was just getting more and more idiotic until I came to the point, and I said, “Well now, how many of these people get well?”
“Oh,” he says, “you can’t expect that!” And he was very put out with me for asking him the question. Because the truth of the matter is, he gets no people well.
Well, that doesn’t happen to be Freudian psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis is not as permissive as what they call “superfree association.” And the way old man Freud was getting an occasional release over there in Vienna was first. . . His best results, by the way, came when he was using hypnosis, and his case histories on that were pretty good. But when he got into a patient’s psyche, he was looking for some association, some unreasonable association. And that’s what he was looking for.
And in 1894, he decided that all the unreasonable associations he ran into that did anybody any good were sex and so he issued the libido theory. But he was looking for some kind of an unreasonable association. For instance, “Mother is a stove.” Or “I don’t like Father because he has intercourse with Mother.” An unreasonable association which he would steer a patient toward. And he’d do a very, very light job of steering and all of a sudden, the patient would realize that there was something very silly about this association. In other words, he’d just work around until he finally had a recognition on the part of a patient whereby the patient saw that his idea was nonsense.
He, in effect, was to that degree depending on the early Italian school of psychotherapy which admitted only one psychosis and this was melancholia. The Italian-you’ll read this in the Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile and in the-Boccaccio’s Decameron. That’s wonderful to be able to remember that, isn’t it? (I didn’t remember it, I’m looking at it on a library shelf.)
Melancholia was their chief target in psychotherapy and their total belief was that if you could make somebody laugh, you would then release a melancholia. And so you get numerous stories built around this, whereby the king gives half of his kingdom and his daughter and so forth to the goose boy and so on because he came down the street with all these ducks and people and things following him and it was so hilariously funny that the king’s daughter, who had not smiled for many, many years, suddenly broke into hearty laughter. And this cured her, of course, so the goose boy got half the kingdom. Well, you’ll run into this rather continuously. Melancholia-if you could just make somebody laugh!
Well, we examine the mechanics of laughter and we find out that laughter is rejection. Any way you want to look at it, it rather adds up that way, that laughter is rejection.
Well, this means that you have to have an individual in some kind of a condition of mind whereby he can reject, before laughter will prove curative. You see that?
Now, what is reject? Well, we’ll just admit this definition of laughter is rejection without any further to-do and let’s take a look at reject. And we find out that rejection is pushing something away.
Well now, this becomes very elementary and we push something away and therefore it won’t bother us. Now, let’s compare this in the animal kingdom and with little babies. And let’s find out that if you take a melancholic cat, that’s right, I mean, you take a cat that is real sad, a real sad cat that never gets any fun out of mice and so on. He goes around sort of apologizing for his general existence. And we take this cat and in order to administer a psychotherapy to the cat, it is only necessary to make little tiny motions, very slow motions, by the way, at his paws, until he will finally reach out a paw toward you.
And when he does that, you, slowly at first, pull your fingers back until you get the cat to associate the motion of his paw toward you with your withdrawal. And when you have had these two things associated, you begin to pull your fingers back more rapidly. This I am giving you, by the way, is a valuable psychotherapy.
Sooner or later, you’re going to have a melancholic dog or a baby or something or a deaf-mute or somebody who has very little understanding and you are going to be called upon to do something miraculous here.
Well, this is how you do that miraculous thing. You put your fingers close to their hand or something like that and get them-however you may, without use of too much duress-to reach at you so that you draw back. Now, it may only be that you walk in to shake hands with them and you put forth your hand to shake hands with them and the second that they make the slightest gesture toward your hand, you withdraw your hand and say, “Don’t!” This works.
You could build a cat into the most towering mountain of conceit about his prowess. He becomes a proud cat and he begins to keep himself clean and imperiously hunt down mice. And he begins to have a tremendous effect upon his environment-he tears guests up and things like that.
Now, a baby lying ill is quite often ill-and I would say most often ill-by reason of an idea malassociation. Something has occurred to this child which the child cannot assimilate or understand and he has, to some degree, quit. And various things like leukemia, things like that, find their root evidently in such a condition where the child does not any longer believe he can reject or accept at will his environment.
And you can put down that as a very crude, low-level definition but a very understandable definition of what mental misconception, what mental stress consists of. It is the person’s inability to accept or reject his environment at will. And if you were to work with that definition alone and if we were to talk about nothing but that, we would be very successful because we would be dealing entirely with something that’s quite comprehensible to the public at large.
And we could go ahead and probably have a tremendous reformation in the field of psychoanalysis and so on because even a psychoanalyst could understand this. Because we have taken what? We have taken the early Italian school of psychotherapy and we could point out to that as a classic example of psychotherapy and we could come forward from that and define laughter for what it is. And then take Freudian work and demonstrate that a release would be something which lessened the restriction of an individual.
And it could be said that his ideas were restricting him and therefore when you released-that a malassociation was something which was too constricted and that in order to bring greater freedom to the individual, you gave him a greater expanse of association and-rather such a narrow association. In other words, the idea itself as a symbol could be rejected and we would have added to it with Freudian psychoanalysis the fact that ideas are similar to MEST objects in the mind of the mentally deranged. See, we could have added that very smoothly and could have said that, “All right, what we want to do is lessen the restriction of the individual.” In other words, permit him to reject or accept ideas at will. And the second that we had said that, we would get an enormous flood of agreement in the field of psychoanalysis. They’re just, with us, right down their groove, you know.
In other words, you would have told this analyst who just sat there and listened to a patient babble, you would have told him that he could have a goal in relationship to the patient, that it wasn’t just a matter of apathy, he was actually trying to do something. And you could have explained very quickly what Freud was really trying to do and he would have understood this and understood Freud all of a sudden and they would be using Freud, which they are not today. They’re not using Freud. They don’t understand him, he’s over their heads.
And the fact that Adler and Jung, for instance, could come along and propound something which would be widely accepted becomes idiotic because if you read Adler and Jung, you see a couple of boys who got an awfully skittish horse, each, and rode off wildly in twelve different directions at once.
7 Now, you may think that there is a hue and cry on the subject of past lives, that many people are upset about past lives. Well, they should know their Jung. Because Jung was not just talking about past lives, he was psychotic on the subject. Druidism. And his methods of handling it and detecting it were so crude that they admitted, actually, no great tool to psychotherapy.
Now, the test of this is I have examined twelve patients who were handled with this past-life slant of Jung’s-all of them very thoroughly and a very representative strata of people, by the way-without one single iota of release of tension or any other manifestation that you could account as a benefit derived from psychoanalysis. And yet it was all very interesting and I’m sure the analyst was fascinated with druidism and so forth.
But Jung had all this nailed down as a psychotherapy-except that it didn’t work. What was missing in it? Well, the basic definition of what he was trying to do was missing in it, which is he was trying to get the patient into a condition where the patient could reject or accept ideas at will. And that would depend upon the patient’s ability to accept or reject-and this is the bridge between the mental and the physical-for the patient to reject or accept the MEST universe at will. These two things are parallels. And the truth of the matter is that when a person cannot have the MEST universe, he mocks it up in chunks of his own energy. That’s why he has chunks of energy, that’s why he has ridges, is because he can’t have pieces of the MEST universe. So we get an ownership entering in. But that is beyond our scope right now. What we’re trying to do is integrate psychotherapy, just for fun, here this morning. And we find out, then, that a person who is very bad off, theoretically, would be unable to shove a chair away from him or pull it toward him.
Now, when we put this little theory to test all up and down the track, do we find that it holds good? And we find out this is true. The individual will actually sit and look at a chair which is oppressing his knees, for instance, without even vaguely trying to push the chair away.
Now, we look at the little baby, the deaf-mute, the cat, and we find out that if you will back up and make the cat or the baby or the deaf-mute believe that he has made you back up, this will strike him as a sudden and appalling idea. And he’ll at first be a little bit frightened at the idea that he is actually causing you to back up and then will become very cocky about it and then will become well. And we can put that to test any day.
Now, there isn’t, by the way, one of these 22 percent processes. This process is not 22 percent effective, this process is effective every time you can find a cat. You can always build a cat’s ego from where it is and you can always build a man’s ego from where it is by ... Let’s make another phrase, which is not quite as technical but is quite comprehensible: His ability, you might say, his reaction time has to do with his belief in his dangetousness to his environment. As a crude observation, you could say that an individual is as well as he believes himself dangerous to his environment and is as bad off as he believes his environment is dangerous to him. Now, this is a tremendously workable little law-and it is a law.
Now, how much more might be contained in that I do not know, at this time, except that that law came into existence in 1938.1 was working on a book in 1938 on this subject-a book called “Excalibur.” I called it that to have a working title-rather fanciful-but it contained in it, actually, much of the top echelon material which we had in Scientology. But it contained it in a highly comprehensible form without any real connecting bridge between what we know in Scientology and the rest of livingness. In other words, this was just a high flight, this was superstratosphere flying. And that phrase occurs in that book several times: that a man is as well as he is dangerous to his environment.
I have never, by the way, seen any reason to change that phrase. Because it explains a great deal and actually embraces a great deal more than it might seem to. So we’ll just keep it as a phrase and not try to relate it any further. But let’s add it up to psychotherapy and we find out that “dangerous to his environment”-in other words, will his environment run when he barks? And that’s about all there is to it, you see. Can he reject?
You understand that isn’t all there is in dangerousness, but let’s just take and add that phrase in along this line and can he reject his environment? Well, can he reject his ideas? Well, your preclear makes as much success and forward motion in processing as he is able to reject his ideas. And a man-you might say, a preclear-is as healthy as he’s dangerous to his own ideas. That makes a little more sense, you see?
Well, melancholia, laughter, rejection, free association . . . The only excuse there would be, you see, for free association would be for the analyst to be able to discover where the individual could not reject an idea. That would be the only real excuse for the analyst, sitting there at all. An audience is all very well and that he is admiring the difficulties of the patient might do some good, but these would be sleepers.
And what we would want would be a very positive approach and that positive approach would-“Let’s see what idea this person cannot move away from him.” And this would tell you that the analyst had an immediate-an immediate therapy. All he had to do was mock-up the idea and move it from left to right and then finally have the person move the idea away from him. And what do you know, the person would feel much better. I mean, there’s Step VI at SOP 8-C explained for you. That’s what that does and that’s all.
The idea-of course, it’s actually based on a much higher echelon of reasoning-it’s change in space. That which changes the preclear in space, consistently and continually, can evaluate for him. Because evaluation is basically, in terms of space and so forth, is being changed. That’s what evaluation is, changed in space.
So he takes those things which have been changing him in space and he changes them in space and we have a much broader definition of this rejection-acceptance of ideas and material objects.
Now, do you think with this little half-hour talk that you could make a good analyst now? Well, the truth of the matter is-the truth of the matter is, you could be a fantastically successful analyst. Boy, they’d walk in the front door in bad shape and they would walk out the other, “Well, what do you know, I don’t believe my father’s trying to kill me after all.” Because this is, in essence, their strata of patient. There’s psychotherapy. If you wanted to improve psychotherapy, if you want to practice psychotherapy, if you just practice it along those lines, it would be terribly, terribly successful.
Now, let’s go into it, however, a little further and a little more comprehensively and let’s get this matter of exteriorization. Ha-ha. This is more important to us. The only reason I’ve been talking about psychotherapy is not because we’re practicing psychotherapy but just because we can include it too.
Like somebody was asking me the other day about this announcement about the Church of Scientology and so forth and I’m rather startled that anybody would be startled about this, because as I’ve told you the other day, there would be the various branches of Scientology. And I can’t see why-I’m not proud-I don’t see any reason why we should avoid also having the religion of Scientology. And Burke has advanced the political theory of Scientocracy. He now has its slogan. Did he tell you what the slogan was?
Female voice: No.
Well, it’s “Government of the people by the thetans.” [laughter] That’s Scientocracy.
So anyway ... And so we develop.
Anyway, we have our finest examples of success in Scientology where people are already in good condition. You see that? So, we’re actually not working in a psychotherapy, we’re working in a band which just includes everybody that’s walking around. But we’re not interested in a classification of people which “these people are bad off and so we’re going to help them,” we’re interested in a much broader band. So we find out, immediately, that about 50 percent of the people walking around are in a state of mind of “What fog?” by our own definitions, because we say, “Be three feet back of your head” and they aren’t. The other 50 percent of the people are when we say this.
But what do you know, the 50 percent of the people who are, are able to reject an idea. You know, we say, “Be three feet back of your head” and the fellow is. Well, the fellow who is, is able to reject his ideas at will. He isn’t particularly bad off or bright or able or anything of the sort, I mean, he just has this one factor.
You say the person’s ability has a lot to do with rejecting ideas? Yes, there’s an index. But let’s take this fellow who has been surrounded all the time with eight-ton and 2,785 feet-per-second-muzzle-velocity ideas, you know. And he can reject them sometimes and most of the time, but he occasionally runs into one he can’t reject.
Well, let’s take this other fellow that’s running around with beanshooter-velocity ideas, you know, all the time. He doesn’t have any trouble rejecting his ideas-well, he doesn’t have any trouble stepping out of his head either. But, of course, don’t give this fellow one of these 2,785-per-second ideas, because he just not only wouldn’t handle it, he wouldn’t know it was there!
So you get the idea now of the relationship between laughter, rejection of MEST objects, dangerousness to his environment and exteriorization. Just add that one.
Because you ask most thetans-you ask him-you know, you say, “Well, now be three feet back of your head.” The fellow is and now you say, “Now push the body away from you.” “Dur-rur-ruh.” He’ll be upset. Because he went away, the body didn’t. His mobility is greater, but every time he pushes on the body, he moves, the body doesn’t move. You got that? Well now, that’s true of the bulk of the 50 percent that you get immediately out of their heads.
Now, a thetan in good condition would follow it this way: you’d say, “All right. Now push the body’s head.”
He wouldn’t move backwards. If he was in real good condition-Operating Thetan-the body would go crunch, just like that. The fellow would say, “What you want me to push the body’s head for, huh?”
An Operating Thetan remains stationary when he pushes something and it moves. In other words, he can stand there and reject a material object while standing in the thinnest of air. And so he’s in tremendously good condition and я he dangerous to his environment!.The only trouble is he is so unthreatened by his environment, so utterly unthreatened, that his elan and aplomb and his sense of humor are of a caliber where you can’t get him serious about the problems of Man. He doesn’t get very serious about these problems, these problems are no longer life and death and so forth.
So you say, “Well, what about you going over and straightening out Russia and taking Malenkov and blowing up the atom bomb arsenal?”
And he says, “Blow up the atom bomb arsenal. What are you talking about?”
And you say, “Well, you know, straighten up Russia. And there wouldn’t be any atomic war and civilization would be saved and everything.”
And the fellow says to you, “Well, whose game is that-civilization must be saved? Oh, you’re trying to prevent motion.”
Did you ever run into a little kid who was idiotically direct? You know, you gave him a tremendous number of reasons why he should do something. “Oh,” he says, “you want me to leave while your boyfriend is here?” Well, this is strictly conversation with an Operating Thetan unless he’s decided to play the game of being obtuse and then you’re in bad shape.
You could get more and more obtuse and he can rationalize that breakfast tomorrow morning depends utterly upon whether the next car that goes down the street will turn the corner at twelve miles an hour or at thirteen miles an hour. He can get these two data connected so convincingly that you would be completely overwhelmed. Now, there is tremendous ability to associate and tremendous ability to reject, which adds up to no worry. No worry.
Well anyway, whether we know what we’re talking about or not, we can get results on this level. I add that because every once in a while somebody says, “Gee, you know, all this theory and I’m still stuck in my head!”
Well, that’s true. But let’s look at and find out why the fellow is still stuck in his head and we find out there’s a tremendously good reason why: his head’s moving him, he isn’t moving his head. That’s the first and foremost of these reasons. That’s because he believes that he, as a thetan, is not even vaguely dangerous to his environment. He believes that he cannot move MEST objects. And he believes this because he’s so degraded. He’s powerless. He cannot hold his position in space when he pushes on things. When he tries to hold his position in space and push on something, why, he either can’t push on it or he moves.
And so you ask him to move out of his head, why, it’s-I don’t know, you just might as well ask a straw lying on the ground to roll over and stand up on one end. It knows it can’t push. He just knows he can’t do this, that’s all. You’re asking him an impossibility.
And when he does get out of his body, he grabs hold of something and he does things like-he is not able to let go of them. You know, he tries to move the beam off of them and so on. It never occurs to him, for instance, just to get the idea of letting go and letting go. He’s trying to handle energy-there’s a specific difference there-he’s trying to handle energy with energy. He isn’t trying to handle energy with postulates. And this is why a fellow gets into the effort band.
But when you say somebody is in the effort band, well, he’s in the effort band merely because he’s trying to handle energy with energy. For instance, when he tries to let go of a wall, he actually pulls back from the wall, you see? In other words, he tries to use force to separate his connection with the wall. And of course, that isn’t ever going to work. It never a>///work for the good reason that the way you get a beam off of a wall is you tell it to come off of the wall. It’s very simple.Here you get directly into direction of things. And you’ll find this person is unwilling to direct people and unwilling to be directed. Why? It’s because he doesn’t use postulates. He has to use energy or force to handle force, see?
In order to move a ball across the table, he believes that you would put the ball at one side of the table and then you would push it to the other side of the table. That’s really all that’s wrong with the GE-he’s sold on this entirely. And we see this as the common modus operandi of existence and it adds up to a lot of automaticity and so forth. And it’s not unusable, but at the same time, it doesn’t aid a person’s ability any. Because what he should be able to do is put a ball on one end of the table and say “Roll” and it rolls. That’s all there is to it. And he’d say “Stop” and it stops.
Well, this becomes mysterious to some people. They think, “Well, gee. Now, how does a postulate and so forth operate in that fashion?” Well, the person to whom this is mysterious has got a postulate mixed up with a symbol. They think if you said to this ball and it heard you, “Now roll,” then the ball would be obedient because you used the English word “roll.” Well that’s not right. All you get is just the idea of the ball rolling and it rolls, see? And there’s no articulation that goes into it.
Now, a person misses that point and you get a person all confused about postulates, he thinks a postulate is—something of the sort. That person who can use the touch of a feather to accomplish the disintegration of a pyramid is in good shape. But the fellow who’s in bad shape will take a pile driver and a rock crusher out there to disintegrate the pyramid.
Now, the difference between being in bad shape and good shape is believing you have to have the rock crusher or the pile driver. If you believe you have to have the pile driver and the rock crusher to help you disintegrate a pyramid, why, you’re in pretty bad shape. If you don’t believe this-in other words, if you’re not depending on assistance to accomplish these various disintegrations on MEST, well, you move MEST around, you see? It’s not a matter of whether you want it or don’t want it or need it or don’t need it, it’s just this matter of: are you sold on having to depend on secondary agencies in order to accomplish something for you? See? Do you have to have a body in order to hear?
Qne of the most astonishing things that happens to a Theta Clear is in the hearing-when you start handling remote hearing points. And you throw one down in the middle of town and you bring one back here and you put them on his ears and you take them off of his ears.
One of the exercises is you take a chair or something in the room and you rig it up as his hearing station and you put two or three hearing points on it and so forth. And then after that, when he’s got this in pretty good shape, you talk to the chair, you see, and he can hear. But when you talk away from the chair, he can’t hear. See? If you were to go and talk in an opposite direction in too soft a voice, then he wouldn’t be able to hear you.
And you put the chair in an opposite end of the room so his hearing station is over there at that end of the room and you come over to the far-other end of the room-although he might be in the center of the room, he’s depending on the chair to listen for him. And there’s nothing unsells him on a body like that little exercise. He sees clearly that he doesn’t need the body for communication.
The funny part of it is, is he has remote viewpoints over his eyeballs and he has remote hearing points over his eardrums, and the eardrums and the eyeballs aren’t really doing a thing. He’s using these remote communication points to do his communicating.
Now, as far as the voice is concerned, I don’t know whether the voice actually puts out any impulses or not. It’s like the boy in-it was a young boy that was born, I think it was down in Texas the other day and, as I told you, the doctor is having a terrible time because he hasn’t found out yet he’s blind in his left eye and he’s seeing out of it. Well, he would have a viewpoint there, you see. Now, if his agreed-upon universe has to be a universe where if you don’t have an eyeball you can’t see with that eye, well, he’ll eventually decree that he has to agree with that universe and he won’t be able to do that.
Well similarly, you’re in a universe or in a society right now where you’ve agreed thoroughly that you have to have a lot of other things to do things for you. Well, when this is absolutely necessary and you can’t do without many of these things and you must have their assistance, that’s one thing. As opposed to: we’ve got all these things as toys, which are very interesting, and they work. And if it really came to an emergency or push, however, we wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of these toys-such as automobiles and electric lights and things like that. If we really had to see in the room, we’d simply light it up, so on. But you see, the difference of the frame of mind is a dependency. Must we depend upon the lights and must we depend upon the car to transport us through space and so on? Do we have to have things to perceive for us or assist us in perception and so on?
Well, let’s look this over in a problem of exteriorization rather than a problem of theory. And we find out that the individual who can reject MEST objects from his body with great ease, who can push things away from him and hold them away from him and who has some belief in his own dangerousness to his environs-and we find out that this individual can exteriorize easily. So it’s up to us, actually, to put an individual in the condition where he can do this. That’s really about all there is to our difficult exteriorization.
Now, you think that you might feel let down or you might think that this really is a much more complicated problem, but it’s not a more complicated problem than this. And now, one of the ways you do this is-oh well, there’s so many covert ways to do this-the most direct way to do this is to have a fellow put a chair in front of him and give it a kick and push it away, till he really finds out that he, as a thetan, is causing the action which pushes the object away from him. And you know, it might take five hours for him to find it out.
I had a fellow, one time, kicking chairs and a small medicine ball I had around for the purpose-kicking them around and pushing them away from him and moving up to him and pushing them away from him again and so forth and he kept telling me, “This isn’t doing anything for me.” And he didn’t notice it though, but he was getting sadder and sadder and sadder-you know, it wasn’t doing anything for him.
“[sigh] Isn’t doing anything for me. Oh well, hell! I can push the things if you insist. Well, I can push them. Well all right, I’ll push them!” And he got tougher and madder and meaner and more antagonistic and more enthusiastic and he almost broke the medicine ball in half, finally, and he . .. All of a sudden, he looked at me and he gave me a grin and he said, “Hey, you know-you know that’s me doing that!”
If I had let him go halfway through the session when he was merely in anger and so forth, why, he would have gone home and probably beaten up the family and run over a couple of traffic cops on the way. I mean, he would have been in quite a condition-dangerous to his environment. Animals will come up to that because it’s their highest range of expression, but a man will go much higher than that.
Now, what are some little processes that are quite interesting on this? And you find an individual is concentrated upon certain automaticities. And if he’s continuously concentrated on these automaticities, his attention, you might say-there isn’t any finite quantity of attention-but his attention is being absorbed by some of these automaticities. And what are they? Well, there’s the automaticity of the automatic flinch. If a person has an automatic flinch, he of course has given up his self-determined “removal from.” He expects things to flinch away from him.
I have actually seen some fellow who was in a lot of crashes and things like that expect objects to move out of his path, instead of avert an accident, and just go right on and hit something. He expects the object to do an automatic flinch and when it doesn’t do this-the last rung, you see, on this breakpoint we were talking about of the thetan-and when the object doesn’t move, why, he gives up, he quits. And after that, why, he’s afraid to drive fast and so forth. In other words, he has kind of refused to do one of these automatic flinches, but he expects everything else to have it installed in it and he gets into a very goofball sort of a frame of mind about the whole problem of livingness.
You see, if he has an “automatic letting-go mechanism,” if he expects the object to tell him when to let go-for instance, “The stove burns me and then I will let go, pain will tell me when to let go, the amount of force or contact in the object itself will tell me when to let go”-he’s being evaluated for on the idea of letting go, as well as the idea of simply moving. “Now, I expect this to move me and I expect that to move me and ...”
Now, all of that leads us into a tremendous number of skills which can be applied to a case with considerable helpfulness. But in the final essence, we’re dealing with knowingness. Does a person know he can tell an object to move away? If he doesn’t know he can do that, then he won’t be able to.
Well, there’s a tremendous number of exercises which get a person into the frame of mind and in the clear frame of knowingness. And I’ll give you just one of these to be used by you liberally. And that is “Clean up the automaticity of finding things wrong.” Now, I’m not kidding, you’ll probably half kill a preclear doing this. Don’t underestimate the technique, because it’s a vicious one. You clean up the automaticity of finding things wrong.
A fellow expects to be told by the environment what is wrong in it so as to be given warning before something falls to pieces. In other words, he has handed knowingness and then communicatingness over to such things as trees, cars, houses, sidewalks, so forth. He expects the ocean to make a certain sound before it engulfs him with a tidal wave. He expects things to tell him what is wrong before . .. And, you know, that’s a pretty bad frame of mind. Because the truth of the matter is a thetan in a healthy condition doesn’t have to be told when something is wrong, because it doesn’t matter too much whether it’s wrong or right. It’s a totally relaxed fact that at 11:32 there’s going to be a tidal wave, so it might be a very good thing to have the boat up off the beach.
Now, he goes into a spinny frame of mind on this when he’s too often invalidating himself. He invalidates himself. You see, the only person that can invalidate you is you. Although you blame it on the auditor, he’s just merely using an automaticity that you set in so that you wouldn’t be right all the time. If you’re right all the time, you don’t have any randomity. In fact, if you don’t understand this thing about randomity, you won’t understand what a game is. A game is some unpredictable motion-what you want.
All right. When we examine knowingness, then, we find out that a person’s attention is largely absorbed by automaticities which will inform him and cause him to move before he finds out. And when a boxer sets himself up that way, he’s done. When a race driver sets himself up that way, he’s done. A fellow should know before the race which cylinder is going to go bad. And he should also know, just as well, what cylinders are going to go well. But when an individual gets only to know what cylinders are going to go bad, he no longer knows what cylinders are going to go well and it’s the wellness in the individual which you’re trying to recover and validate, not the unwellness. So if you take some individual whose entire attention is absorbed in the fact that things are wrong and then you do nothing but find things that are wrong on an automatic basis, you’ll kick his automatic machinery into gear that discovers wrongnesses for him.
Knowingness divides, in its first artificial echelon, into rightness and wrongness. That’s a completely artificial division. It has to do with intention. What do you intend to do with this machine? Well, if you intend to do something with the machine, then there’s something right about it and possibly something wrong. But if you don’t intend to do anything with the machine, there can’t be anything wrong with it. So it has to do with intentions and goals and so on. These things are what back it up. See that?
So the exercise is simply to get the guy determined to find something wrong in an environment and then to actually find something wrong in the environment-discover it for himself. And you just have him walking around and walk him around the block and then just have him “Now I’m going to find something wrong.” And look around and “Now I’m going to find something wrong in that yard.” And minutely inspect that yard until he finds something wrong in it! And I’m afraid that this is a long process.
This is a process of an hour or two hours to get that keyed-out, because you’re going to turn on some somatics whether you like it or not. Because that automaticity comes in, because every time the earth smoted him-in other words, closed terminals with him-every time that occurred, it was because something was wrong which he hadn’t scented before. So he decides that there’s a superior automaticity involved. In other words, every time he got a closed terminal, it was because something was wrong. So he sets up this tremendous automaticity to discover things that are wrong, which, of course, keeps all the terminals closed because it closes terminals with every incident of the past which mustn’t happen again.
So you just try this and you’ll see it working out. And I recommend it to you as an exteriorization process, as one of the early steps on exteriorization. You just have the guy go around-now, you don’t do this in an auditing room-you walk around the block, you could drive around and you find things that are wrong. He just determines to find something wrong in a certain area and then discovers something wrong in it. Rather than having something wrong in it, you come up to a point after a while till he actually has to put trivia into an area because things are getting less and less wrong to him.
You could take him over the same course the second time and the same things are wrong and even more flagrant things than he noticed the first time, such as there’s three lug bolts missing from the wheel of a car that is parked at the curb. And well, he could see that, but he doesn’t see anything terribly wrong in that. In other words, he finds less fault with the universe in which he’s living in. In essence, what’s wrong with somebody-that’s what’s wrong with them, is they find fault with the environment that they’re living in. They just don’t live in it, they find things wrong in it. But they’re doing this automatically and they’ve closed terminals with every wrongness, so they never see all the rightnesses.
It never occurs to anybody, for instance, when he’s reading a story or listening to a symphony, that there are, literally, tens of thousands of rightnesses in a novel or a symphony and there might only be one wrongness. And yet, if you listen to the boys in the lobby, after the piano has been played, they say, “Did you hear when he struck A major?” Ooooh! The guy was ten thousand times right and he was once wrong and there we find the audience sitting.
Well, by the time you have avoided-any time you’ve chosen wrongness for your randomity-you see, you’re avoiding being wrong all the time, which means to say, you’ve chosen wrongness for your randomity, which of course means it’ll kick your teeth in. So we’re right there in about the highest echelon of knowingness and beingness and doingness and so forth. It’s right up there on rightness and wrongness.
Now, how do you do the technique? You just have the guy walk around and postulate that he’s now going to find something wrong in an area and then he finds something wrong in that area. And then he postulates he’s going to find something wrong in another area and he finds something wrong in that area.
Now, there’s a method of running it in a bracket. You have him postulate that somebody else that’s in front of him is going to find something wrong in that area and then he lets this other person find something wrong in the area and so forth.
But actually, in its most elementary form, you will find it quite workable. He just walks around and he decides he’s going to find something wrong in an area and then finds something wrong in the area. And after a while, his vision will probably go out of focus and all kinds of weird and peculiar things will start to occur. And then everything will get kind of dull and flat and he doesn’t find anything really wrong in the area.
And don’t make the mistake of trying to get him to find something right in the area-the devil with the dichotomy. You could run him to death because you pay too much attention to dichotomies, you know, you get a guy into flows-because flows go both ways. The dickens with flows, let’s just invalidate that fact.
And the other thing is, as you go on with this, is to have him find false wrongnesses. Have him decide unreasonable wrongnesses rather than reasonable wrongnesses. Sooner or later, he will gradually work into where he’s discovering unreasonable wrongnesses-you know, it’ll become funny to him after a while. He can get so he can reject a wrongness. But every wrongness moves in on him, and the symbols which he cannot reject are wrong symbols.
And that’s all psychotherapy is trying to do is to get the wrong symbols out of somebody’s mind and get him to reject these wrong symbols. Do you see that? He’s trying to reject the wrong symbols which have moved in on him. You know “Mother is hate” or “Mother is sexual excitement.” Psychoanalysis. Well, you’re trying to move this symbol out. All you’re trying to handle is wrong symbols, so make the guy find them. Make him postulate he’s going to and then make him locate them.
You could carry this psychotherapy on, by the way, for fifty hours. Never without benefit to the preclear-always with benefit. You’d just be fascinated with it-how much he can go. And there we have not only covered psychoanalysis, we’ve given you the entire solution to psychotherapy. So you practice it and you will find that out.
Okay. Let’s take a ten-minute break.