Some people who have exteriorized and have not gone any higher in processing are held down because the genetic entity in other words, the body itself — must be processed. A good process for the body itself is this process of Acceptance Level. The motto of the body is that it has to be acceptable, that other bodies have to be acceptable to other bodies, that other bodies have to be acceptable to it and that it must stay in a general state of agreement with the MEST universe. This tells you, by the way, that a country where equality was stressed would start out the bottom all in a mass and in a hurry once it began to go, for everyone being equal to everything and everybody obsessed with the idea of equality, as soon as the society discovered the existence of one psychotic, it would have to moderate itself to that degree in order to remain equal. This is a very hideous sort of an outlook, but is the end product of equality. There is a political creed known as Equalitarianism; a society adopting it would find itself caving in rapidly and all at once. Equality is a characteristic of cells, not of free beings. But you will see all this as you use Acceptance Level Processing.

Man is a duplicity. He is at once a body and a spirit. The personality which we know as the individual is a spirit by its contagion with the body. The body, as a very small amount of processing will demonstrate, is not the personality or the being, but a used thing.

Quite aside from the list of Expanded Gita, which is actually a list of buttons rather than a list of things, there is a list of the Acceptance Level run on a Resistive V by myself some time ago. I have kept this list against the time when I would release this technique, and I give it here. These items were run in this order on this case. The data was arrived at through E-Meter testing. I have no reason to believe that this Resistive V was really any worse than many who pass for higher on the tone scale. I have tested the list twice since without adding anything, although in the following two cases after the origin of the list, I had to put some of the things in worse form and had to change the order slightly. In the remaining cases where I have used Acceptance Level, I have worked straight from the Expanded Gita list as contained in 16-G. All the preclears on whom I have used this have been fascinated with the process and their interest in the world it opened to them has, so far as I know, not declined.

The body is a very craven and degraded thing in an unprocessed state and rather rapidly debases its spirit, so that when one first begins this process of Acceptance Level, it would seem to him that he, as the spirit, is actually at the level where he finds himself. True enough, he conducts his affairs at the level of the body, not at the level of the spirit. But the spirit can be freed, decontaminated, and the body itself, by this process, can be healed of its depraved thirsts and hungers so that it becomes almost fit company for a spirit.

Instead of Acceptance Level Processing, I might as well have labeled this short essay for the PAB “How to Make a MEST Clear.” This is the best method I know of to make a MEST Clear, and people who have an antipathy to discovering they are a spirit and people who are hanging grimly to earlier work or to P-therapy will not, I can guarantee, accept any faster route than Acceptance Level Processing in order to achieve the state of clear.

Acceptance Level Processing is that process which discovers the lowest level of acceptance of the individual and discovers there the prevailing hunger and feeds that hunger by means of mock-ups until it is satiated. The process is not a separate process itself, but is actually a version of Expanded Gita. It is, however, Expanded Gita used in a very particular way, and because one has successfully applied Expanded Gita, he should not think as well that he has a command of Acceptance Level Processing.

Self-audited — and I give you this purely as a guess — a very rough case would probably need a couple of hundred hours of this, but after only an hour or two of it, the case would have advanced remarkably, and it would be a continuing surprise from there on how high one can go, for there are very few people who have any concept at all of the higher range of sanity than those they have seen around them, and those they have seen around them during their lifetime have been, at best, meat animals, meat animals who wore clothes and who pretended they were not trying to make nothing out of every human contact and person.

The process is done in brackets. A bracket is very simply done. The pattern of the bracket is for the preclear, via the preclear for others, and via the preclear others for others. One has the preclear mock up, no matter how blackly or how crudely, items for himself to accept, then have others in his mock-ups mock up things for them to accept, and others to mock up things for others to accept. In Acceptance Level Processing this bracket, which is the technical name of this pattern, extends to having the preclear also mock up things for others to accept and others to mock up things for him to accept. Thus there are five stages in the bracket.

When using Acceptance Level Processing, please realize that it is a technique which cannot be audited indefinitely without interspersing it with direct perception technique such as the first five of the Six Steps of Beingness as given in an earlier PAB [No. 7], or at least Spacation as contained in SOP 8 as Step III. Any time the going gets too rough, if one is self-auditing this, or too rough for the preclear if one is auditing one, a shift into holding the two upper corners of the room behind the preclear for a little while will nullify the effect. Formula H applied to present time will also nullify the effect, but not as well as holding the two upper corners of the room with the eyes closed. You understand that the preclear closes his eyes and “finds” the two upper corners of the room behind him and holds these without thinking. There is no more to that process than just that. It will re-stabilize a case which has been thrown out of stability by this process.

Acceptance Level is what the preclear himself accepts, what the people around him in mock-up form accept, and what others will accept from others, and included as well what others have wanted him to accept and what he has wanted others to accept. Be very alert to this difference and to this particular phase of Acceptance Level: that people have wanted him to accept something does not mean that he accepted it, but it does mean that he will gain an insight into their motives.

You must realize that this process is strong meat and the things which are fed to the preclear to mock up and accept in vast multitudes must be stronger meat than you would occasionally encounter in polite social conversation. One of my associates — and I will not mention any names — published the Expanded Gita list from an early issue of SOP 8 and carefully omitted from it the most vital factors in it, because, I suppose, he considered these too strong for the American stomach. From what I know now in processing, I would consider them, if anything, too weak, for they are not in a depraved form as bad as they are themselves.

Acceptance Level is a voyage of discovery. It is the method of making a MEST clear. It is the method of clearing the genetic entity. There is no other method of which I know which will accomplish this. The running of concepts, the running of engrams, straight Creative Processing, will not any of them accomplish this clearing of a thoroughly degraded MEST body; and, so long as the body remains thoroughly degraded, the task of rehabilitating the spirit connected with it is difficult at best.

One need not expect that the preclear will immediately rush off and engage in strange liaisons because of this process. His morality level will come up to a point where he can be moral. Most of these people who worry about morality, particularly in others, are themselves so low morally that they could not find satisfaction in a society of cannibals.

The process of Acceptance Level can be combined with Expanded Gita, in which case wasting good things in brackets in the five steps (which is: what did people waste, what do people waste, what did the preclear want others to waste and what did others want him to waste) resolves the occasional stalls which occur; for it often happens that the preclear must waste something good for a short time to discharge an accumulated charge in the bank brought about by a continuance of “feeding by mock- ups.”

Here is the specialized list that was first evolved for Acceptance Level Processing. These items were fed in brackets. Large numbers of them were mocked up to the best ability of the preclear, even though he could not see his mock-ups for some time. They were mocked up for himself, others mocking them up for themselves, and others mocking them up for others, and others trying to get him to accept them, himself trying to get others to accept them, and, a few times, others trying to get others to accept them, and, occasionally, good items similar to these being wasted in the same bracket. Because this list worked uniformly on this Resistive V, it would be said immediately that the Acceptance Level of his body was this list. Running this list resolved hungers and cravings, blackness and somatics which he had long combated.

Nowhere in Acceptance Level Processing, except in the form of wasting, does one seek to eradicate an engram, a thought, an emotion or a circuit.

Most of these items had to be put into a depraved, diseased or decayed form in order to run them at all.

The entire process is built upon feeding the apparent cravings of the body. These have come about because of the mechanism of resistance. The MEST universe is built upon the theory that one must resist. When one starts resisting something, he engages upon it until it finally breaks down his resistance and he then goes into the cycle of actually craving it. A hunger is therefore created for various things which would not be suspected in the absence of this process. It is the object of this process to feed these hungers until they are satiated and until they depart.

Now we have the list:

A very thorough and strong warning must be injected here by calling your attention to this apparent law. ACTION IN THE MEST UNIVERSE DOES NOT RUN OUT ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE. THE ONLY THERAPEUTIC FACTOR POSSESSED BY MAN IS HIS OWN SPIRIT. ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE ARE ALTERED OR ERADICATED ONLY BY ADDRESSING THE MATTER IN ONE’S OWN UNIVERSE IN THE FORM OF MOCK-UPS DONE BY THE PRECLEAR.

A TERRIBLE PAST, A DANGEROUS ENVIRONMENT, A TERRIBLE FUTURE, A MISSING PRESENT, NO HELP, INDEPENDENCE, INABILITY TO ACCEPT PRESENTS, DEATH, KILLING, EATING, SLEEPING, ANAESTHETICS, AGREEMENT, DISAGREEMENT, LOW REALITY, LOW AFFINITY, LOW UNDERSTANDING, NO COMMUNICATION, CAUTION, LOW SPEED, SUPPORT, NO FALLING, NO LOOKING, REASONS, EXPLANATIONS, THINKING, NOT THINKING, TALKING, NOT LISTENING, SERVICE, CONVICTION, KNOWING, PRECISE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM, DESIRE FOR EXPLANATIONS, ANSWERS, REPLIES, TRUTH, NO LIES, SOLID MEST, NO SPACE, NO GEOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, NO CRITICISM, ABERRATIONS, SANITY, PERFECTION, HIDDEN ENGRAMS, HIDDEN BETRAYALS, HIDDEN RIDICULE, DEFAMATIONS, THINGS BEING STOPPED, CHANGE, HELP, CONSEQUENCES, FEAR OF CONDITIONS, AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF BEING ILL, AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF BEING CRAZY, THREATS, ARRESTS, COURTS, HONORS, MEDALS, IDENTITIES, FACES, POLICE, TORTURE, BACTERIA, SYPHILIS, GONORRHEA, BLACK PEOPLE, THINGS TOO HORRIBLE TO PERCEIVE, EFFORTS TO GET COMMUNICATIONS OUT, EFFORTS TO GET COMMUNICATIONS IN, FORGETFULNESS OF MEN, FORGETFULNESS OF WOMEN, FORGETFULNESS OF PAST, ACCEPTANCE OF WRONGNESS, THE GOAL TO GET BIG, THE NECESSITY TO UNDERSTAND, FATHERS (IN THE WORST FORM), MOTHERS (IN THE WORST FORM), ALLIES (IN THE WORST FORM), GRANDPARENTS (IN THE WORST FORM), FRIENDS (IN THE ACT OF BETRAYAL), BUSINESS ASSOCIATES (IN THEIR WORST FORM), BEING BABIES, BEING BODIES, TEACHERS IN FRONT OF ONE, LEARNED BOOKS, ACCEPTANCE OF AN IN-BETWEEN LIVES AREA, DEATH, FAILURE, BEING VARIOUS PROFESSIONS, BEING VARIOUS PARTS OF THE BODY, NERVOUSNESS, SERIOUSNESS, A GOOD JOB, WANTlNG THINGS GONE, HAS-TO-BE-TOLDNESS, TIREDNESS, ANXIETY, WANTING PEOPLE TO WORRY, LONG DAYS, FAST TIME PASSES, SLOW TIME PASSES, CLOCKS, SCHOOLS, FACES, LEARNING, MINDS, POOR MORNINGS, BAD NIGHTS, NO-TIME, ARRIVALS, COMPLETIONS, NO AFFECTION, LOVE, NO KILL, STOMACH TROUBLE, HUNGER, INABILITY TO EAT, WORK, FLOWS, INHIBITED SEX, CLOSED COMMUNICATION LINES, HATE, KILL, BOWEL TROUBLE, COVERT EATING, NO WORK, HOLDS, PRETENSE, ENFORCED SEX, LONELINESS, WOMBS, HOT WOMBS, BIRTH, KIDNAPPING OF BABIES, STERILITY, EMPTY WOMBS, BLACK WOMBS, ABSENT GENITALIA, FIGHTING SOMETHING, NEVER FIGHTING NOTHING, FIGHTING WORDS, FIGHTING DIRECTION, ACCEPTING DIRECTION, HATRED OF MUSIC, HATRED OF SIGHT, HATRED OF SOUND, ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF PAIN, NO PETS, BEING GOD, ASSOCIATING EVERYTHING WITH EVERYTHING, HATING TO BE REMINDED, SEMEN, EXCRETA, NOTHINGNESS, POVERTY, NO MONEY, NO FOOD, NO HOME, EXPECTING SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN, KNOWING IT IS WRONG, BEGRUDGED FOOD, THE WEIGHT OF OBLIGATION, NO RESPONSIBILITY, REFUSAL TO BE CAUSE, DESIRE TO BE AN EFFECT, GUIDING SPIRITS, STRANGE SCIENCES, FORTUNE-TELLING, CRYSTAL BALLS, DEMONS, STRANGE SEXUAL PRACTICES, SELF-DENIAL, WRONGNESS, LOSING, ACCIDENTS, AND BEING A HUMAN BEING.

By living a life of debauchery, in other words, one does not heal the debaucheries he has committed. By feeding his hungers in terms of the MEST universe, whether these be liquor or much baser things, one accomplishes only a further degradation and a further thirst. Such things are healed by the only process of healing which we have, which is the spirit itself. The spirit accomplishes this by direct address of energy as in the case of a Step I reaching in and patching up parts of the body or by mock-ups which themselves alter the condition of the body. More whisky can only make a worse drunkard out of a drunkard. A constant and continuous stream of mock-ups of bad whisky can satiate the craving and restore to him his ability to drink when he wants to drink or not at all.

The case was then run on the Expanded Gita list in addition to the above.

Basically this process is a learning process. It brings to the individual an understanding of the motives of himself and others who have been around him. These enter as sudden flashes of insight as the process is continued. They are not given to the preclear as evaluation.

Much of the auditing done on Acceptance Level Processing is done by the preclear following the procedure by himself in a room near the auditor, or simply by self-auditing. However, a very low-toned preclear is incapable of the persistence necessary to follow through the process and needs auditor supervision.

This matter of Acceptance Level is of far more use in understanding one’s past than one would immediately suspect, for one sees immediately that if something is being healed by the process, the hunger must have existed.

The ingenuity of the auditor lies in discovering just what the acceptance level of his preclear is. Persistence of the auditor and the preclear is vital to carry through the process item by item until each and every item is itself entirely surfeited.

Acceptance Level is also extremely useful in the MEST universe in evaluating and understanding the why of the actions of those around him. One can understand at last why cheap and dirty hotels are patronized, why in some cities garbage is not collected, why a person dresses as he does and acts as he does; and, indeed, an understanding of Acceptance Level gives one an enormous command of his fellow beings.

It will be found that some preclears will rise so rapidly in tone at the lower levels offered, that they do not find any area to “feed.” In this case, higher-toned objects must be fed to the preclear just as these low-toned objects are fed.

There is one thing you should know about ARC. The most ARC there can be is a complete identification: the person is the person with whom he has the ARC. One sees this in valence shifting. This goes down a dwindling spiral until the most complete ARC there is exists in the form of eight anchor points enclosing no space: in other words, a particle. Thus, trying to understand, purely as such, from data offered is in itself a perilous undertaking, for the end of the road is zero space, and that in itself is the opposite end of the tone scale. That is the end where MEST is. “Trying to understand” run as a concept — even that is quite startling. Knowingness has to do with certainty, and understanding which advances along the lines of certainty creates more space, not less space. Thus there is the low funnel end of ARC as well as an upper end of ARC. Trying to understand by reason of data before one looks brings about the vanishing point of existence. The psychotic often confuses his terrific stress on circuit-prompted thought as telepathy and thinking itself. Thus in running this process we are not trying to understand anything, but simply going through with the process to satiate hungers. One can very easily go off and plot the entire evolution of everything by running this process, but one should move along rapidly, gaining only his insights as they seem to apply to him. Only the preclear knows when these insights have taken place.

What we are doing here is “remedying the scarcity in all things.”

The process is best run on an E-Meter, for as long as the E-Meter rises slowly and gradually, further mock-ups are necessary; when the E-Meter sticks or stutters, a change in bracket is necessary or, in some cases, something good on the same subject has to be wasted before the process can continue.

The main thing the preclear will discover is that he has been carefully taught that certain things are bad and therefore not enjoyable and that he has set up resistances to these things and that they at length — these resistances — have become a sponge for the

The process works best on severely occluded cases — the case we have called a Resistive V. It works least on a Step I, and is, indeed, not needed in the running of a Step I save only to clear up his MEST body, in which case it is run while he is exteriorized.

things they were set up to counteract and the resistance caving in has created a hunger for the object which was at first resisted. This is the MEST universe at work in its very best operation: make one fight something, then so arrange it that one winds up craving for what one was fighting. You can use this formula in general on any aberration which the preclear has. If he is fighting something, feed it to him in mock-up form, done, of course, by the preclear. And then finish off the bracket by feeding it through the preclear to others, and others to others, and then going on getting the preclear to get others to accept this thing to fight, and then others getting the preclear to accept this thing to fight, and thus the item is discharged.

One can take the list in Issue 16-G of the Journal of Scientology of Step IV, Expanded Gita — that being the most complete list published — and pick out the most revolting items as they occur or the most dangerous items as they occur and have the preclear accept them, have him have others accept them, and others have others accept them until the subject does not have charge. One can take any of the good items of this list and, by prefacing them with no, attain an additional source of acceptable objects.

This is Acceptance Level Processing. You can, if you look about you, see acceptance level dramatized in every activity of life. You can understand now why so- and-so will not clean up a living room: a living room is not acceptable except in a cluttered fashion to this person. You can understand also why this fellow leaves a beautiful and helpful girl and runs off with a maid or a prostitute: his acceptance level was too far below the beautiful girl. You can understand, too, some of you, why you were not acceptable in your own homes when you were young: you were too bright and too cheerful and this was too high above those around you. You can understand, as well, why the newspapers print the stories they do, and most and foremost you can understand that everybody in a body is being subjected to the body’s craving to be acceptable, a thing which in itself will end one up at the bottom of the tone scale.

As soon as one starts to run this process (and it can be self-audited) he will wonder at first when he starts to mock the thing up for others what other person than himself could possibly have had such a hunger for the thing. After it has been fed into the space before him as destined for others, the personnel will come to view who had the acceptance level of the object; and when others run for others these mockups (via the preclear, of course), various groups and ideas will display themselves.

You might think that running Matched Terminals or Matched Terminal Brackets on being acceptable will remedy this; unfortunately, this is above the body’s level of acceptance. It is raw meat; it wants raw meat. Trying to run something out of the body which it craves is a difficult thing indeed.

In various instances, as in the matter of running blame, the process may stop moving, at which moment it is up to the auditor, or, if the process is being self-audited, to oneself, to begin to waste praise. One will occasionally be astonished when praise is wasted in the form of brackets how violent the wasting can be.

On lower-toned cases the reason Dianetics often worked was because instead of running through the engram, the case was permitted to go over and over some unsavory incident which it actually considered extremely savory, and so was able, by these repeated “returns” to this muck, to feed the bank to some degree and adjust and surfeit its craving for such incidents even when they had not occurred. Thus one was actually feeding the body numbers of mock-ups rather than running out engrams, even though at that time it was supposed that an engram was being run out.

In Expanded Gita, by the way, all the wasting and forcing upon and desiring, giving and taking, is done in brackets.

Where engrams were exhausted from the body with a betterment of the case, it was because the body did not have an extensive hunger. Where running an engram out did not remedy the condition it was because a hunger existed for that engram and it was being offered. Thus we have the case which insatiably ran engrams but which would not get well. That case had a level of acceptance of not-too-sick and not-too-well, the level of acceptance of the general society today.

The reason you had Viewpoint Processing in an earlier PAB was so that you could understand the source of evaluation and why evaluation was important and so that, even more, you would get the idea of mocking things up in masses. Just, then, as in the practice you got in Viewpoint Processing, you mock up in Acceptance Level vast hordes of things: for oneself, for others, and others for others. Large masses of others for large masses of others mocking up large masses of the desired thing is very good processing.

Remember that evaluation depends upon the preclear having been actually moved or directed from one space to another by something. Change in space is the basic on all evaluation and thinking as it is known to Man. Remember that change in space in geographical area is like an evaluation of those areas. Thus you will find the most aberrative people in the bank, those people who have most changed the preclear in space. In running Acceptance Level Processing, be sure to stress accepting exterior direction, and be sure to stress acceptance in various forms of those people who have greatly directed the preclear and who then created a scarcity of direction either by not being there or by stopping direction.

You must also be aware of the fact that this technique, this process, is to a large degree an informative process and is addressed to the MEST body; it does not dispense with or displace other processes we now have.

The bracket method of accepting is also the method of wasting which could be run in Expanded Gita. In other words, in running wasting in Expanded Gita one should waste in brackets and have material forced upon in brackets. Acceptance Level Processing is a variation of Expanded Gita.

As a note which may be of interest: Expanded Gita was developed from phenomena discovered after I developed Creative Processing. It was originally plain Give-and-Take Processing, hence the Gita. Acceptance Level was developed by observing Expanded Gita in action. Expanded Gita and Acceptance Level are in effect the same process and so we are not dealing here with anything new.

There are a great many of these levels and one could easily compose a chart— and, indeed, I have composed a chart — called Character Processing — which is as yet of no enormous value, which lists the following levels: Acceptance (Grasp), Determent (Withdraw), Deprivement (Let Go), Interest (Reach), Intention, Enthusiasm, Spiritual, Applause, Death, Sonic, Visio, Tactile, Friendship, Enmity, Physical Strength, Emotional Strength, MEST Aid, Obedience, No Sympathy, Fear, Propitiation, Grief, Apathy, Agreement, Communication, Affinity, and Responsibility levels, by which a character could easily be read. An auditor who knows his Scientology could without much trouble draw up this chart using as a guide the chart in Science of Survival or Self Analysis. As the use of these things comes to view or takes on sudden value, they may be included in later PABs. For instance, only somebody interested in control would be interested in specified levels; in processing we are only trying to raise the Acceptance Level of the individual high enough so that he can finally accept himself on all eight dynamics.

The apathy case resolves with this Acceptance Level, and much to many a preclear’s surprise he finds apathy on the road up rather than below his operating level.