There are two parts to Effort Processing: the part of making a preclear well and the part of ruining a preclear. I am trying to appeal to that minority who believe that preclears should be preserved.

There are literally thousands of types of somatics that can be turned on and possibly even turned off with a gesture or two. You have seen, in your own experience, how a facsimile can modify the structure of an individual. Thought alone can modify the structure of an individual. An individual gets the idea that he ought to be fat, so he gets fat — just like that. But let’s not play the game of the fellow who says “You can always make lead into gold providing you go up on a mountaintop and you mix these ingredients together. And if you’re careful not to think of the word hippopotamus, it works every time.”

I received an interesting question on the subject of prediction along with postulates. A postulate is actually a prediction; that is what postulate means. But let me tell you something, and you should be very clear in your own minds concerning this: When a person lays down a statement to himself about the state of beingness, he is doing it on an evaluation of the past in order to take care of a situation in the future.

You needn’t get this way about postulates, because the second that you start to control postulates you are controlling yourself from a new control center. Then it can do most anything it wants with postulates and it doesn’t have any trouble with the word hippopotamus. But you have in the past had some trouble with the word hippopotamus.

If you just have a fellow’s postulate — “I’m nervous,” or “I mustn’t get nervous” — it doesn’t blow if there was attached to it “I mustn’t get nervous because Mother will get upset.” That is the actual evaluation of the future situation.

It would be very strange if it suddenly turned out that we weren’t all running on the first dynamic. Everybody has believed this so implicitly; they have had such a good time with it and they have made a lot of money at it, like people setting up their little pitch stands down on the corner and selling neckties. I hope we are no longer in this strata of trying to “help” man. “Now, the trouble with you is you have a guilt complex. Now, if you stop thinking about yourself all the time and start thinking about somebody else . . .”

So when you are doing Postulate Processing, remember that there is an evaluation in it and that it is conditional, ordinarily. And to get the whole thing you just ask them why: “Why did you make that postulate?” “What would have happened in the future if you hadn’t made that postulate?” Ask them those two questions and generally you will get the whole thing and then it will blow. Otherwise, you will just get “I am nervous,” and the fellow will go on hanging on to it because he has to be nervous or he has to be not nervous or something of the sort, because of something. If the “because of” is missing, then the mind cannot do a complete evaluation of it.

That is what man is doing: he is so busy thinking about eighteen other people that he never has time to think about himself.

Now, I would like to review for you something which has not altered throughout Dianetics, and that is the yes/no/maybe condition of every problem. Every problem can have a yes, a no, or a maybe as its answer. Your preclear is as sane as he has yeses and noes and as he does not have maybes. The number of maybes which a preclear is carrying in his mind is directly proportional to the insanity which he is demonstrating. A fellow says, “Well, shall I go downtown?” If he says yes or no, he gets action or no action; if he says maybe, he gets turbulence.

You know these men that go around with paunches? You may have seen one or two. Those men are probably being a substitute for Mama. There was usually a second child in the family and something happened to it or Mama had to work too hard and there she was with that second child on the way. So for the next forty years the fellow busily carries this child for Mama. I am not kidding.

Life consists of action or no-action — just these two things. As a result, you get turbulence when a state of beingness or a state of not-beingness cannot be entered with regard to any particular subject.

It can also go this way: An individual looks at somebody and says, “They’re too fat!” so he gets thin. He gets thin so that they can get thin. If you run into a malnutrition case, you ask right away, “Do you have a sister or a brother, father or mother, who is fat?”

The thinking processes of the mind consist of handling numbers of facsimiles. These facsimiles are brought up to resolve a problem, quite normally. These are experiences of the past which are being compared one to the other in order to get an unbalance. It is said that some people are “unbalanced”; when people are “unbalanced” this would mean that they are sort of hanging up in maybes. But you don’t really want them to be “balanced” because this would mean they were dead center on all these things.

The fellow says, “Yeah, my father and mother are both too fat. My father is so overweight the fat tissue around the heart is building up and he’s probably going to die from it.” He is busy being thin for Pop. Interesting, isn’t it?

You have to have enough facsimiles on the yes side to conclude yes or enough facsimiles on the no side to conclude no. And whenever an individual says maybe he is saying at the same time “I do not have enough data,” and he will leave the whole problem in suspension.

If you start to get the slant on your own case, you will find out all of a sudden with what busyness you are busy fixing other people up by fixing yourself up, and actually how very little time you are spending on yourself. You aren’t spending any time worrying about yourself. You start looking it over and you will find out that is the horrible truth. You start running somebody down “his” time track — whose time track?

As he goes through life these problems in suspension become more and more problems. They go progressively into suspension, and then much more actively and continuingly he will start to show manifestations of very bad indecision and eventually may even start to disassociate, just because of this. He had a problem to answer yes or no and he couldn’t answer it; he answered maybe. And these built up through his life.

It is a good thing life isn’t serious. If it were, somebody could die from this And if one does, it is a good thing death isn’t serious either.

“Was it my fault or wasn’t it my fault?” is the toughest of those problems. Was she to blame or wasn’t she to blame? Was he to blame or wasn’t he to blame? And where a person hangs up on maybes on major problems, he becomes uncertain.

All of these activities of future goals for somebody else — trying to moderate or modulate somebody else’s existence by taking on the burdens of the world and that sort of thing — find their action in the field of effort. An individual just doesn’t think “Magic- — presto chango” in order to make somebody else thin by getting thin himself. He finds a facsimile of thinness — an action-effort facsimile — and uses it. That is what his thought does. It isn’t just a wish without anything else to back it up.

Anxiety is simply the state of maybeness; it is “What will happen if ...?” That is anxiety — ”What will happen if ...?” A person then doesn’t have a yes or a no. He has an inaction category which is a turbulent category. He does not dare act because he does not have an answer.

By the way, that is one little short circuit which might or might not be solved someday in the field of mysticism. There are a lot of phenomena that have not been tied down and have not even really been thoroughly established, such as a person looking at matter and the matter moving or something.

Answers are always held in suspension by two things: promotion of survival or the deterioration of survival. Anything which hangs up on maybe is more or less intimately concerned with failure or death. And what is the difference between extreme failure and death? No difference. So it is a gradient scale of death which hangs these problems up between yes and no, on maybe.

I saw this stuff when I was a youngster out in India’s sunny climate. Some of these things almost stood my hair on end. I don’t know anything about them. Probably it is all done by effort of some sort from some source. But I wouldn’t trust myself on that observation. I would trust a camera, but I wouldn’t trust me, because I have sat down with my legs crossed and all of a sudden been in Shanghai or Moscow or someplace — and I mean I really was there. Then I would wake up and there would be the old man sitting across from me grinning. What was it? Hypnotism. Hypnotism combined with astral walkingl — there are a lot of phenomena. It is interesting stuff. But it is funny how much of it we have solved. A lot of this stuff has solution.

There must be something fatal about one of these problems for it to have any impression or magnitude on an individual. There is something fatal associated with the problem which is the really tough problem that hangs in the maybe category.

A staff member was talking to me one day and he said, “Remember back in July 1960 when you ran me forward to the third of January, 1951? Well, it was a funny thing, but you know, I saw myself in the snow and so forth. Then all of a sudden on the fourth or fifth of January, I suddenly remembered that you had run me forward to a scene which was very similar to the scene I was in on the third of January. Of course, a lot of things were different about it, but there was an impression of that, and I wouldn’t have had any notion that I would have been there.”

So, when you are looking for problems you hang up your preclear, actually, if you don’t run an emotional curve. He is trying to decide something in the past — make a past decision. That is one of the hard things for a preclear to do sometimes. “Was I guilty or wasn’t I guilty?” He is hanging up on maybe: he doesn’t dare be guilty and yet he thinks he was guilty. One of the ways of resolving that problem is to simply tip the whole thing over by reducing the data from one of its facsimiles. You just run one facsimile and it will tip the problem over and it will fall in a yes or a no.

Maybe there is a future time track. I do know this about the future time track though: the future is pretty well in your hands. You can change the future. Lots of experimental work has been going on in this field.

The smooth functioning of a mind, a person’s reaction time and his ability to be decisive and therefore to be in action are dependent upon his capability of handling problems in yes or no categories. Fear of death or fear of having caused death or a failure leading to death is the only restraint on the resolution of a problem. There is no other restraint. So the tough problems on the line, you will find, are on the life-continuum level where you pick up this life-continuum curve and all of a sudden the person is hung up on maybe.

The only reason I am mentioning this data is so that you will not get it confused in Postulate Processing with what physically happens with postulates and effort. They are two different subjects.

This, by the way, is a mechanical method of hanging a person in suspension — a life continuum. He is hung in suspension by that mechanical manifestation. The facsimiles are all there. They are too heavy, you might say, or too painful to closely examine, so he just sort of solves it one way or the other. If he couldn’t solve this at all he would die. And a person who experiences a death near him very often feels himself sliding in toward death himself. He goes down the tone scale toward it.

A person doesn’t get thin on the direct route of saying “I will now be thin.” There are mechanics behind it, good solid mechanics, which you as an auditor can put your hands on.

So, in processing preclears, here is another process which you could use all by itself: just get him off all the maybes in his life.

A person says, “She is too pretty and it gets her into trouble, and therefore I will be ugly for her.” That is funny but you will find this computation in a few cases.

Now, if death continues to be a very, very serious thing to an individual, his maybes will be very, very serious. But if death becomes less serious to him, the maybes become less serious to him, too.

It isn’t that thought which does the work on the body. The thought picks up a facsimile which contains effort and circumstances in it which match up the desired situation. You see how that is? There is an actual mechanical line behind this: The person makes the postulate, the desire or the wish and makes it come true by picking up a facsimile which he then imposes upon himself.

Whether or not people live one life or many lives is actually a point of maybeness which an individual should resolve for himself. An individual very often loses his hope because of a maybe. He doesn’t hope for the future anymore and if a person can’t think into the future he isn’t very sane. If he can’t hope, he can’t think into the future. He doesn’t dare hope because maybe he will fail. There is only one bar on it, then. Fail? Well, that is just death, that’s all. He doesn’t dare do these things because he would die. That is the automatic response you get from preclears. “What would happen if you did so-and-so and so-and-so?” “Well, I’d die.”

It might run something like this: The person was very sick when he was young, and in effort to get a “thin” facsimile, he picks up that period of thinness in order to make somebody else thin. He then has to fail in order to really get the whole brunt of this thing himself. He sort of wishes that this other person would get thinner and he tries to coax the other person to diet; he tries to coax the other person not to eat quite so much, to take a little exercise and so forth, and he fails. He is busy using this facsimile for his design; however, he is not very closely associated with it. Then all of a sudden he fails and he gets the facsimile himself.

That is the big generality. He isn’t giving you any specific material at all. He means he would fail. Fail and die are approximately the same thing to him.

The facsimile of thinness might also contain several aberrations and he will get the whole package. “You pays your money and you takes your chance”; that is about what it amounts to.

So you take some of the weight off death. “Too much hope of living and too much fear of dying,” somebody said one time.

The efforts and counter-efforts of being sick and thin would be what? About the biggest counter-effort one would get would be the pressure of the bed in his back. Various other factors associated with this period of. illness might also contain the interior corrosive effect, perhaps, of bacteria (if it exists).

Take a pilot, for instance. A pilot gets married and becomes responsible for a wife and a couple of kids and he loses his elan. He loses that sudden dash, that sudden spurt that will get him out of danger and so forth, because all the maybes back down the line begin to be hung up. He starts to hang up on this maybe: “Maybe I will die.” Now it becomes important whether or not he dies because he has to live for somebody else and it is very important that they survive. If he died they would fail. So he gets hung up in a maybe.

By the way, I don’t mean for you to misinterpret anything in that last comment. I go right along with the boys on bacteria, viruses and all the rest of the stuff. You can see them in a microscope; they are in the real universe. You can inject them from one person to another. The only trouble is, a very large proportion of the people you try to throw them at don’t get sick. There are some wild variables in there that somebody had better take a look at before they think they have got the science of biology buttoned up — if it is a science.

You will find this sort of a situation in almost anybody’s life. You will find young children or teenagers not at all reluctant on the subject of suicide. But if you go back and examine some early suicide impulse, you will find out that it hung up on a maybe and the maybe was simply that it would bring too much grief and sorrow to somebody else and that would be very serious. It would be serious because it might cause the other person’s death. So it is fear of dying that causes the maybe line to hang up.

Anyway, he has an internal corrosive action which is cutting down the efficiency of his metabolism somehow. This ill period, which is the thin period he is using, would have many other attributes. So, he tries to make somebody thin; he fails, more or less, then he starts wearing the facsimile himself and he gets thin. But there will be other things that go along with it.

You will run across some preclear who doesn’t know whether he should go to the store on the bus or whether he should take his car or whether he should take a bicycle or how he should go to the store, and he sits there and worries about it. He has completely lost sight of the fact that the problem is to go to the store.

Therefore you have two ways of entering into this situation. One is to find the wish, and if you find the wish, find the failure. The easiest way to find a hope and failure curve is with the emotional curve. So you find out, more or less, the subject you are going after. If you don ‘t immediate ly find the wish and the failure, then you run an emotional curve on the subject of “trying to make somebody do something” — the emotion of perseverance or the emotion of carrying on somehow or the emotion of trying to get something done and how this drops off into the failure curve. You get a person to feel that a few times and maybe the postulate will drop out and all the reasons with it and the failure and everything else, and it will just blow off. All of a sudden the fellow says, “Oh, that’s why I’m wearing that facsimile.” That is all there is to it.

You just start examining his computations along this line and you will find out that each time he has a common denominator on the thing. When he gets indecisive he isn’t indecisive about the main problem, which is he has to go to the store. He becomes indecisive about whether he will go by bus or by bicycle or his own car or walk. There is a worry about transportation. So there is a big maybe hanging up on the line someplace about transportation. “Did he cause the wreck or didn’t he?” Run an emotional curve on it and it will fall right out in your lap. It isn’t the maybe on going to the store: it is the maybe on vehicles. Because you will find after you have asked him for unresolved problems and he has described many unresolved problems to you (they are usually very light problems; they don’t amount to anything) that each one will contain a common denominator to all of them. That is the big maybe. “Did he cause it or didn’t he?”

But sometimes individuals have failures of a much higher order of magnitude, like getting chopped up with an ax or something. Sometimes they try to do som ething an d prom ptly fai l with lots of effort a nd counter- effort . One of these situations is very peculiar, as the efforts and counter-efforts involved in that situation very often seem to swallow up the postulate.

He isn’t resolving that problem. You will find that he is stuck only in incidents where he is hung up in a maybe. So if you want to get an individual unstuck off the time track, clean up his maybes.

An individual thinks that he is capable of administering justice at each and every hand. You can’t be responsible, with action for responsibility, without the administration of justice, without constituting yourself a court of law. Actually, government and men’s groups are merely based rather badly upon man’s internal goals and governments. Someday when man really has them to compare we might have a real government. There is that possibility. But you would have to go at it about that way.

Now, there are several ways to clean up maybes. One of them is just to get him to face the problem with current data. Face the problem with current data and reevaluate and repredict from the point where he hung up in the maybe. He made a decision once: was it the right one or the wrong one? And that is the start of the maybes. Now he gets afraid to make decisions so he hangs these decisions up in maybe, and there is the anatomy of it.

Do you know about the crossover of the two control centers? The control center of the right side is located on the left side of the body and the control center of the left side is located on the right side of the body. You wouldn’t have any big squawk between Russia and the United States if you did that with their control centers. The body has already solved it some time since.

You will find that any place an individual is stuck on the time track (I repeat this because you want to know how to free individuals on the time track; this is how you free them), if you don’t immediately find the data which leads to a maybe — ”Was he right or was he wrong?” — you run an emotional curve on it or just run the “doubt” button or the “I don’t know” or the “I’d rather not decide” or feelings of indecision, till you get enough data to spot the place where he is stuck. This will tell you right away what this was. It is quite a valuable tool.

Now, in resolving a justice situation you are liable to run into lots of effort and counter-effort which swallow up the whole situation. The individual believes that somebody is doing wrong to somebody else so he mounts himself upon his white charger, puts his lance in place, puts on the battle helm and says, “Charge!” He has now protected the weak and punished the evil — only sometimes he doesn’t make the grade, particularly if it is Papa he is running up against.

Actually, this tool comes out of Boolean algebra. They work out their big switchboard systems in Bell Telephone and so forth on yes and no, yes and no. And all these machines have to answer in terms of yes and no, yes and no, yes and no. All of a sudden all the machinery stops someplace. Somewhere along the line it didn’t go into the slot on a yes or a no; it just didn’t go anyplace, and the whole circuit will break down at that point. This is the way they break a circuit. Instead of hanging up in a yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, sooner or later one of them is going to hang up in a maybe and the circuit gets broken at that point. They can set it up so that a circuit will break any time it hits a maybe.

I don’t think there is anybody who has not tangled with Papa, Mama and the other relatives by this completely, terrifically noble but magnificently foolhardy contest. The person is about three feet tall, he has no armor, no horse, no pennon, no lady’s favor, and Papa is doing something wrong to the dog or to Mama or the other child or something of the sort; so “I” says, “Nyaahh!” promptly gets aboard the saddle and charges down the lists. It is tough. You pick him up and separate him from his shield and stand him up.

This is very plain. This isn’t very hard to understand, although it is mathematics and Bell telephones and all the rest of that. It is very simple.

If he does that two or three times, he has to find a new method of administering justice, so he gets one. He figures out what will cause them the most trouble and what he can’t be punished for, and then he promptly uses it to its fullest extent. That is usually illness.

Here is your problem: “Is John Jones home?” The switchboard system plugs itself in automatically — rings, rings, rings, rings, rings. It is waiting for you to say “No, he isn’t home.” But if you won’t say that, then it will. After a while it will unplug on the line and it will find an operator. It will just unplug and hook into the operator switchboard. It can even wait. Some of these things can even unplug and then wait to find out if you hang up. This is how it keeps getting off its maybes. It keeps going on to a maybe and then getting off it again.

In other words, the last part of his justice cycle not only has, probably, a full curve of failure with effort and counter-effort at the end of it, but it also has the selection of a service facsimile, which is illness. Then it has a complete illness following it, and if this person really is going to do well or is doing well, there is somebody around that this person will pick up as an ally on the other end, and he will become new and powerful because he has an ally. But now he is convinced that he needs an ally in order to accomplish this thing.

That is the way the mind does its thinking. It goes on to a maybe and comes off it and it goes on to one and comes off it and on to one and comes off it. There is always an instant of maybe before there is a decision. Even though it might be just a millisecond, there is still an instant of maybe, because the mind, in the course of resolution of a problem, does a scan across its data. It scans both sides of the situation to some degree and arrives at a decision.

If, just a few days after birth, they would teach horsemanship and the use of the mace and broadsword, we wouldn’t have any aberrated people! But they don’t do this; it is frowned upon in the maternity wards. So you as auditors have to put up with these failed justice cycles in the past of your preclear, because you will find this kind of cycle in the past of any preclear you process.

You would be surprised how many individuals in a tough spot, just to get off a maybe, will make a desperate decision — really desperate. A criminal up for trial, for instance, would rather be found guilty and get electrocuted than to stay on that maybe. He will say anything, he will confess to anything sometimes if he is really restimulated, just to get off the maybe. Maybes are painful, somehow, because they hold all these incidents in suspension.

If this preclear says there never was this kind of a cycle, you can really count on the fact that the horse went down and busted his neck and they had to dig this fellow out of four feet of turf; the effort and counter-effort was that great at the end of this action.

[4 paragraphs with audience question are missing]

Papa starts to punish the dog, then he comes over to change the baby’s diapers and gets bitten. It actually is that early that one decides to be the champion.

[paragraph is missing]

After a while they begin to read hero tales, and writers like me can finance a tremendous amount of research by writing hero tales. I had to make a terrific study of this because you haven’t got much time to waste if you can only spend about three days a week, three hours a day, and you have to turn out a hundred thousand words a month, rates being what they are. So I made a codified study of this in an effort to cut down rejects.

[paragraph is missing]

What is common in interest to all human beings? The hero tale. So I figured out the hero tale and reversed the cycle on it. I sold 97.3 percent of my stories the first pass out, so it must have some validity to it.

[paragraph is missing]

I got very interested in that but I didn’t pick it up, actually, and start thinking about it until about four months ago, because it was just an effort in those days to get some more money to buy some more books, such as The Life of Torquemadal “covered in human skin, very rare, only copy in existence” and so on. But this turned up a few months ago and all of a sudden I said, “You know, I keep running into this confounded cycle. Every individual seems to have this funny cycle. How early does it go? Gee, Papa comes over to change the diapers and gets bitten. Or he has to come over several times after a while and change diapers.” Justice!

The point is that an individual goes through all of these various cycles of thought automatically when he is trying to sort out a problem.

Now, if you do an individual an injustice when he is administering proper and deserved justice and then somebody else comes along and ruins him because he administered justice, that is the nicest, squirreliest engram imaginable. You try to go into that with effort, you try to go into it with thought, you try to go into it with emotional curves and so forth. This individual has insisted so hard on the fact that this justice was just that he has hung himself up with it 100 percent, because nobody will believe him! Nobody is going to take that.

You take an accident after which a person has become very anxious, and you say, “Well, he became anxious because of the impact against him.” Rats! Individuals were made to be knocked to pieces. They can take a lot of that. There is a maybe in there someplace. You find that maybe and you will resolve the accident.

“You should not beat up your little sister. I know she’s three times as big as you are, but you are a little boy and you must not hit your sister, and you must not tease her anymore and so forth. I don’t care what she did.” That is the kind of affair you run into in that field.

Now, if you look at this as a thought proposition, you will find the individual going down scale, actually, with thought: “Yes, no, yes, no, no, no, not yes, maybe, did I? did I? did I?” You will find him worrying. What is worry? It is “Was it yes? Was it no? Is it yes? Is it no? Is it yes? Is it no? Is it . . .” Maybe you have a parent who used to do this, and who would then suddenly make up his mind, only to go twenty-four hours and change it utterly. “You can’t be right, you’ve got to be wrong,” or something like that is entering in there.

I did some work with a Koenig photometer about 1933 in physics class, in an effort to lay out a possible scale of sound response. I was working on the proposition that poetry is sound, and therefore is there an onomatopoeia which is exact and responsive in every human being alive? Is it the same thing? Because if you read Japanese poetry to somebody who doesn’t speak Japanese, he recognizes it as poetry. What is the onomatopoeia of various sounds?

You get somebody who wants to have his worries eased: You can just sit there and postulateprocess him on yes and no — just that, running it back and forth. “What problem in your past did you fail to solve?”

It was a very interesting project. Of course, everybody was bawling me out continually in the laboratory because I wasn’t supposed to be in that laboratory and that Koenig photometer wasn’t supposed to be used for that anyhow, and besides, it cost a lot of money for that film and I kept using up an awful lot of the film that went with the Koenig photometer. But I won.

“Oh, I didn’t fail to solve any of them. Not me, not me, not me.”

I ran into a problem of my own which, as a matter of fact, worked a little bit against us early in Dianetics. There is no common response to most words. But there is an emotional jolt on certain words in nearly everybody. There is an emotional jolt on the word wrong, the word fault and the phrase have no right in every human being I have ever laid my hands on. There are jolts on these things.

“Well, did you make a decision one time which you regretted afterwards?”

This presages the fact that either at home, in the hands of his governess if he had any, or at school the individual has been trying to carry out this justice cycle. This is a help cycle. If he is defeated too much in a justice cycle, he stops helping with action and starts contesting using illness and starts helping with thought and wearing the facsimiles himself. In other words, this is the source of the later business of “She ought to be thinner, therefore I will be thin”: “She ought to be thinner,” then so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, “but I can’t help her get thin; she won’t take my advice. Now I’ll have to be thin.”

“Ye-e-s.” You get an immediate response on that.

Or you can get the reverse of that where somebody else is much too thin and malnutrition has set in. For instance, I had a preclear whose weight had been coming down rather well and then stopped. The preclear was quite overweight. What had happened? Nothing. I really beat my brains out for a little while till I all of a sudden found out that a very thin person had moved into this preclear’s environment; this person was suffering from malnutrition. The preclear didn’t dare get any thinner: it would make this other person vanish. The other person would not respond to any advice and that sort of thing, so the preclear could not keep on reducing. The weight stopped going down right there.

“Did you make a decision one time which you regretted afterwards?” It is quite interesting the variety of answers you get to this one simple question. It makes you an awfully smart auditor.

A lot of these failure cycles — failure to administer justice, which is just failure to help, failure to help in other ways, failure to contribute (failure to issue a license to survive, in other words), here, there and every place — will eventually wind an individual up in a state of mind where he very easily fails. So at the bottom of every one of these thought channels there is not only the effort of the engram he picked up to use for this, there is also, down early in life, effort and counter-effort on justice and injustice, on aid and failure.

One of the manifestations of maybe is inefficiency and inaction. You get somebody who has gone into a great deal of inaction and you will find he is hung up on a bad maybe someplace, and you had certainly better process out that maybe as one of the first things you do with him. “When did you make a decision that you regretted?” Of course, to regret a decision is to hold it in suspension or try to put it out of time.

Those are the engrams you want. You don’t want to spend a lot of time on when the individual was merely wishing that somebody else were happy and so getting happy himself but not feeling very happy and then failing and getting very sad — going into the wrong valence on the thing. That is the cheer-up cycle; he tells the other individual “Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up” and then fails. Of course, where did he get it? He is using a facsimile of somebody cheering somebody else up. The somebody else who was being cheered up in the facsimile he is using was gloomy. So if you try to cheer somebody up long enough and they don’t cheer up, then you get gloomy — very simple. You just go into the other valence; you feel after a while that you ought to be cheered up, so you wear a valence that says that you should be cheered up. It sounds awful complicated, but it isn’t.

Then there is worry afterwards: “Was it right? Was it wrong? Was it right? Was it wrong?” But if it is irrevocable — he will never be able to get it back again — that is a bad one.

What I am trying to impress upon you is that a human being gets to a state where this stuff is almost an automatic response, where an auditor can sit down alongside an auditing couch and every time the preclear sneezes the auditor starts to sneeze. In other words, the effort to help and the failure have gotten so close together on this individual that he gets it almost as an automatic cycle. That is the mechanism of auditor restimulation. When a person has been badly impeded on some such line and he has turned on in full some of these counter-efforts and he is carrying them as somatics, that is a manifestation of a help-failure cycle and it isn’t anything else but.

“Did it result in . . . ?” Take a decision which resulted in a death. That one is very heavy. That is what went wrong with flight commanders during the war. They would keep making these decisions; they were called on to make decisions all the time and of course in highly active combat and so forth, practically every decision they made would result in a death. After a while these men would get really wacky.

A chronic somatic is this obvious demonstration of a help-failure cycle where the individual has used an effort to help, has failed and has gotten the somatic back — crash! You can find that situation on a case. If you just find that situation — the key situation on the case — and the thoughts connected with it, the darn thing will blow. I don’t care if it is a bump on the head or the second head of a psychiatrist or anything; it will blow. That is the straight of it.

The flight surgeon should be in there pitching with Dianetics. After he sees the commander getting a little bit indecisive he will recognize that this man’s next few decisions are going to be very, very sour and that he is going to kill a lot more men than he would otherwise. He is going to start making decisions not out of reason but out of desperateness. He is going to spend much more time thinking about how desperate the situation is than he is going to spend on how to get the men back alive out of it. He is hung up on too many maybes.

You want to know the anatomy of a chronic somatic: It is the anatomy of a person who has put forth an effort to help — probably not once, but several times — and has lost, with that particular portion of his body. Or, on a life-continuum cycle, this person has by sympathy and an effort to contribute — which is again help — turned on this facsimile of Grandma’s so that Grandma can be aided. Then Grandma up and dies, darn her soul; she up and kicks off, and of course that makes it a failure cycle. So this life continuum is just an expanded view of what can happen in a very short space of time. These two things are both the same curve.

At that time the flight surgeon should tell the executive officer that he had better take over because he is taking the other man off for a couple of days. He would give him some fast processing and kick him back in there again.

The child tries to help Grandma and then one day Grandma dies. This hangs the child with whatever he was trying to help Grandma with. Life continuum then says this pattern of Grandma will continue. When Grandma had an obvious psychosomatic illness, he got it.

In an efficiently run country such as this, naturally this is the condition which obtains today in all of our air forces! It sounds sort of ridiculous to you that it doesn’t obtain, doesn’t it? Because the lives of an awful lot of pilots in just straight operation have nothing to do with war or combat.

Now, what have you got to do to resolve that case? All you have to do is find out the number of times he was trying to help Grandma, the desire to help Grandma, the emotional curve of helping Grandma and failing, and the emotional curve of the failure at her death; a few things like that will disconnect Grandma’s death from these early attempts to help. But if you can’t find it, it is because there is too much effort on it, so you start running some Effort Processing on the thing.

You want to know why B-29s crash and stuff is going to hell in a balloon? We are getting terrific numbers of military crashes. It is not just the increased number of planes in flight nor the deterioration of personnel available; it is the continued utilization of operations officers who went through a war — operations officers who made a wrong decision once, twice, three times. After that they just make decisions — they have to. It says right there in the orders that an officer on this post makes decisions, so they have to do it. This will result in bad orders, bad routines, and the nervousness associated with this will go all the way through a squadron even to its maintenance and repair units. Everybody gets into a sort of an apathy about the whole deal.

You take this person’s obvious chronic somatic — the obvious one (I don’t care what you call it, service facsimile or what) — and you just start working effort on it and some interesting things will start to fall out of it.

“Well, so he didn’t put any propeller tips on number four. It’s going up today at four o’clock. Well, it’ll probably crash anyway; it doesn’t matter much.”

A person is deaf: you get the effort not to hear — because he turned off his own hearing! Nobody else did it. He did it in an effort to help.

[4 paragraphs with audience question are missing]

As a matter of fact, you could talk about all this so quietly and softly at about 0.5 that you could have everybody in an audience weeping if you were giving a lecture, because you would be hitting right dead center into every case there. You try to help, you try to help and you fail; you try to help, you try to help and fail.

[paragraph is missing]

Don’t be surprised as you are processing a preclear to have a chronic somatic turn on. But don’t quit at that point. What you did was bring him up the tone scale to a point where he could feel it. That is good; that is very good.

[paragraph is missing]

So there are several ways to solve these facsimiles. All you are trying to do is get rid of the facsimile.

[paragraph is missing]

Now, the running of effort for the sake of running effort is senseless. But you can also have an awful lot of fun with it. It is not particularly dangerous to run effort. The person has glasses on, so you just start running his effort not to see. And if you monkey around with it for a minute, the lights will blaze up on him or something strange will happen to him. He will think, “What’s this fellow doing to me?” It is a good convincer. He now has an awful ache in his eyes, and you say, “Well, here’s my card; my office is down this way.”

There has been a postulate for a long time in the railroads that when you get one train wreck, you get two more. So, a couple of engineers help out the human race — crash! This same thing happens in airlines and so forth.

This business of not seeing is a very simple affair. There are eight muscles which hold the eye in a spherical shape — just eight muscles. You kick a guy in the shins and, believe me, those muscles tension this way and that. Now if you hold him in the facsimile where he was kicked in the shins, his eyes will stay in that shape, and then somebody can make millions selling him glasses. But eyes come back; good heavens, there is nothing to it. They come back up the line as fast as you take away the facsimiles or as fast as you permit the individual to handle the facsimiles.

It is not safe, in other words, to have individuals around operations of any character who are hung up in very many maybes, because they don’t think. After a while they are just desperate. They say, “All right, bring in your executioner. It’s just going to happen anyhow. I can’t stop it from happening.” The fellow has sat there at his desk and sent these men out; he ran the whole mission and he flew them all the way back home again. He counted them when they came back home and there were three missing — he was not able to make the grade. He will become psychosomatically ill because he will turn on all the efforts required to fly that mission; he will turn them all on and he will start going by the boards.

And the only glasses that you can’t take off people’s noses are those glasses which they are busily wearing so that Grandpa can read better or something like that. You will have a little trouble with those glasses. But the only trouble you will have with them is just disconnecting all the facsimiles the person brought up as a little child to help Grandpa. You disconnect those facsimiles with an emotional curve or with the thoughts and he will start letting go. Otherwise he won’t let go; this is sacred. He went into the lists, he ran half the length of the lists and he practically got killed doing it, but nevertheless he is going to go right on helping Grandpa. Grandpa is dead but “it’s all right.” This is completely inane, actually.

One of the efforts you turn on to make other people do things is the same effort you make to get little babies to eat. It gives people ulcers. You are not accomplishing the mission.

This is mechanics, and it is actually a set of mechanics which was vitally necessary to thinking itself. You think with these facsimiles. If you don’t think you can handle your facsimiles, rats; you shuffle them around like somebody from New York on a Pullman car shuffles cards.

The answer to a bad maybe is double; there are two answers to a bad maybe. And don’t neglect the second one because this is life, living, processing: Go out and do it again, in action! The value of action is tremendous.

You always have facsimiles, not just one or two. You are using thousands of them all the time and doing it very well. You take the person who has a “bad memory”: it is amazing; if you start checking over the number of things which this person is remembering, you will find that his bad memory boils down to maybe fifty or sixty types of facsimile — practically nothing compared to the rest of his bank.

You would be amazed how much action anyone is capable of. When a person sits around and thinks too long he gets into trouble. The Indians used to have a name for it; it is called “the sickness of long thinking.” The person who starts dropping back out of action starts restimulating some old maybes — anything to keep busy. The next thing you know, the fellow is really enforcing inaction upon himself because of this restimulation. If he can just pick himself up by the bootstraps and throw himself willy-nilly into some kind of action — preferably dangerous action — he sometimes comes up right as rain.

If you could get a machine — any big electronic brain — to run as perfectly as the person with the worst memory you know, they would be hanging all sorts of awards on you. You would really be hot stuff. The human mind is running very close to perfect now.

Why is it that an individual wounded in the front lines does not show any war neurosis of any character whatsoever as long as he remains in the front-line first-aid-dressing station? There he is, all shot up; if he could be sent back to duty he would stay as sane as they come. But when you remove these men back to the field hospital and then back to the base hospital, by the time they get back to the base hospital they are all messed up. They start to demonstrate all sorts of strange manifestations. They have been taken away from action, away from the imminence of action, and this has changed their action goals. You change a person’s action goals and you have a lot of trouble with him.

Anyhow, with this mechanism in mind, do you see why running Effort Processing alone is not going to make a fast resolution of the case? Because the fellow’s problem is just a facsimile; he chose it of his own free will and he is using it. That is the way it is. You want to fix him up so he doesn’t have to use it anymore. He has lost track of why he is using it and that is really all that is wrong with him; he just lost track of the time tabs and the causes for the use of facsimiles. It isn’t because he is being victimized by his facsimiles. He has just lost the code number: “I think that was for Grandma, but I don’t know. Maybe that was for my little brother — I don’t know. Oh, to heck with it. It couldn’t have been for anybody; just must be for me. That’s a good solution to the whole problem — just throw the rest of the code file away. That’s just for me, that’s all. And besides, I’m getting along all right. I’ll probably be able to kill myself in a year or two and I won’t have to monkey with this anymore and I’ll go on and do something else more interesting. Didn’t like my parents this time anyway.” This is probably the kind of thinking process that goes on that makes an auditor necessary.

The trouble is, as I have said before, man was built to be struck at by boa constrictors or lions or something about three times a day. There is nothing like being struck at by lions or boa constrictors three times a day to keep you up in present time. As a result, your action then utilizes all the past counter-efforts. These past counter-efforts become left over, unused, the second that you go into inaction. You start into inaction and you get a lot of leftover counterefforts which you are not using.

After a while an auditor comes along, and what the auditor is doing is saying, “Well, when did you decide to forget all this stuff?”

The athletic heart is a physical manifestation of just this. The fellow has a lot of counter-efforts and he gets them left over, so he will exhibit them in some fashion. This is why the highly trained athlete goes to pieces when he is thirty. Bushwa! He doesn’t have to go to pieces when he is thirty; there is no reason for him to go to pieces even when he is a hundred. But he just stopped his action goals; that is all.

“Oh, oh, yeah. All right. That’s the thing to do!” (He makes the postulate again on you.) “That’s the thing to do. Put them all behind you; that’s all far away. Yes, I haven’t anything to do with that anymore (cough. cough) .”

You start looking down the track and find the action goals of a preclear and process these and you will get some interesting results on a case.

“Well, when did you want these things?” the auditor says.

As a person goes into life, he will make a bunch of postulates about how he is going to keep on going. He makes these postulates about what he is going to do, and then after a while he makes postulates that he is going to do something else. So between the postulate he makes when he is twenty-one and the postulate he makes when he is thirty-five is a disagreement.

“Oh, I never wanted them. No, not me. Nope. Nah, they just got hung on me. I mean, I’m just this way. That’s the way life is and it’s all forgotten and I’m getting along all right. (Probably be able to die in six or seven months if I really try.)”

Then he starts to compare all this data and he will all of a sudden hang up in a maybe, and that is another way to do it. He tries to find out what is going on; he can’t tell the difference between these two postulates as to which one is the most important. The earlier one to some degree has precedence. It has slightly greater precedence than the later one.

What the auditor has to do is get that out of the road and then somehow or other find this codefile system that says “Facsimile which appears to have a broken leg assumed on January 12, 1912, six o’clock in the evening; Grandma broke her leg.” There is no sense in trying to run out his broken-leg somatic. You know where you are going to find his broken-leg somatic?

So get your preclears off the maybe and you will have people who will go into action. But if people are kept in maybe they will stay in inaction. You should know this very well and you should understand it thoroughly because the manifestation of neurosis or insanity is completely undirected action or inaction, and these two things have to be resolved by the auditor. And if they aren’t resolved by the auditor, he might as well just skip the rest of the case, because the preclear will not go into action! The preclear will lie on the couch; he would rather go through Effort Processing or other kinds of processing ad infinitum than go into action, because action means he would have to make a decision. What is action? It is a continual running fire of estimation of effort — rapid estimation of effort. And action with good randomity demands all of the faculties and alertness of the mind.

This is what gets puzzling about it, and this is why in Effort Processing you could very quickly lose track of the whole case.

If you feel you don’t have time for processing, go out and get a racing car and drive it for a while. Drive it at 110 miles an hour if it will only go safely at 90. You will come up to present time. Go out and jump with a parachute or something — get into action, preferably dangerous action.

You can go on and process people with Effort Processing and they get well. They get well more than ever before, but we are trying to do a fast job on this; we are not trying to do any slowpoke job.

One of Hitler’s men observed this empirically, so they handed a motto out to German youth: “Live dangerously!” Oddly enough, the German youth bought it, and a relatively small army mopped up all the armies of Europe, England and Russia. But then America stepped in and finished them off.

You start processing out this leg with its efforts and counter-efforts, and where do you find the fellow? He can be anyplace! He can be hanging by his tail from a tree. That is a fact. He can be doing almost anything and he will obligingly run it. He will run the efforts and the counterefforts and the efforts and the counter-efforts and his efforts, and then the efforts not to and the efforts to, and the efforts and the counter-efforts . . .

[All available recordings of this lecture end abruptly at this point, and we have been unable to locate any recording or transcript for the end of the lecture.

He will run them all and he will get up off the couch with the same somatic, because he is probably holding it in trust right here in this life and he has thrown the code away. You find the code. And the way you find that code is by running emotional curves and looking for the thoughts of “helping people” and “failing.”

However, a very short tape recording was found of a discussion between Ron and the audience following this lecture. Ron spoke about plans for distributing Handbook for Preclears and ensuring its proper use in the field by restricting distribution to Foundation affiliates and those auditors who had attended the conference. He also discussed a prospective course for auditors so that more people could qualify to use the book, thus providing for wider distribution and expansion.

You can just run an emotional curve of effort to help and failure — effort to help, fail; effort to help, fail. Just keep running that on the case, one after the other, time and time again. All of a sudden, bang! — you will go right straight in to the first available moment of failure. That is all there is to it. Now you can run that one out by effort if you want to, because he really connects this as part of existence because it actually happened. He hung it on himself. All the others actually happened too, but this is sequitur. It is right there and it is easily read. He sees what he was trying to do. So you run this off, or you can just keep scanning the emotion through it up to the point when the ally arrives, because if the person won’t get rid of it there is an ally on the other end of it.

Ron spoke briefly of the need to produce enough miracles in Dianetics practice to really make an impression on the society. He then thanked the attending auditors warmly, and invited them all to a farewell and New Year’s party to be held that evening at the Hotel Lassen in Wichita. On the day following the end of the Second Annual Conference of Hubbard Dianetic Auditors, several of the auditors and Foundation affiliates — people who were running Dianetics groups or organizations in the field — gathered at Ron’s home for an informal discussion. In the following lectures we have reproduced all of the material which was recorded during the afternoon, including a lengthy talk by Ron on current theory and techniques, an auditing demonstration and discussion of the case, and a period of informal discussion during which Ron answered questions and clarified technical points for the affiliates.]

Grandma heard about it and came in from Poughkeepsiel three days later. She said, “What are you doing to my darling?” The marines landed!

Now, if you took somebody on a beachhead being attacked by twenty enemy planes and eight brigades of Japanese infantry, and he looked out to sea and he saw two squads of marines coming to take care of all this, and the marines were landing and you said, “Well, we’re going to take away your support of these marines. They’re needed over on the other island,” this fellow would object, wouldn’t he? That is about the same level of objection as the preclear has.

So, Grandma arrives and you are going to take away this whole sequence? No, you’re not! Because he became an effect then; he wanted to be an effect then and this is the best way to be an effect; and besides, he has tried to help Grandma and all of a sudden he is in need of help. There has to be an interchange of some sort or another, and there he is.

So are you going to run this thing all the way through and get Grandma? No sir, not unless you get some of the interchange on the whole subject of Grandma. Grandma will show up in that incident. But if he is doing a life continuum on Grandma later on, the life continuum has to be interplayed with this service facsimile. See? The two go together, because he is going on living for Grandma and therefore he is not going to give up Grandma in the facsimile. The ally is really buried.

Now, you get the lightness with which Effort Processing can be used. Effort Processing is a great technique. I thought of it; I ought to know. But after a very broad investigation of this technique, it was discovered that — just like it said in the Axioms — it could go on forever. The person would feel much better and it would solve an awful lot of things but it could go on forever. And you don’t want processing to go on forever; you want a finite end to processing. You want a person to get into action, efficiency and a good degree of health.

You keep on processing by effort and by more effort and by more effort and you are just being lazy. You are being lazy by being terribly industrious, and you should ask yourself who you are doing a life continuum for who was being lazy by being terribly industrious. “It’s all so much work, but I have to go on and do it anyway.” You have your perfect answer in Effort Processing.

You want to use Effort Processing to the degree that it takes you to find the code of the case: Who is he holding what somatic for? Run the emotional curve and a secondary if needful in order to get rid of that situation. Because it is a situation of help, try to help, try to help, try to help — fail! Try to contribute, try to contribute, try to contribute — fail! He sees he has to have approval from, approval from, approval from; he did something wrong — that was really a failure — and offended against this person; all of a sudden this person up and dies. That is a real failure. You start going through this and you will find out how the individual, two years old at the time, was completely responsible for his grandmother’s death. He will have it all worked out how it was his fault. That is the end of a failure cycle.

So, to run Effort Processing just as processing will pay you dividends if you go at it very thoroughly and you keep at it and so on. There are a lot of cases that don ‘t have a complicated code system , particularly the cases of children. All that’s necessary to find in a child is when he has felt sympathetic for the other child who was in the condition he is now in. Then you may find that birth or something is lying there to be run by effort. You run it and the child gets better and that is the end of that, providing you do get all of the code out.

Maybe the child seems to be sort of latched up in birth; birth seems to need to be run. Run it. There isn’t any doubt about that, because it is probably part of the facsimile. Birth was the handiest one he had. It contained coughs and it contained choking and it contained all sorts of things, so he could use this; it was very handy. Process it out, because he does much better after you do process it out.

You can’t reason with a little child. He will go on down the street after you have just got him well from a horrendous case of whooping cough aftereffects and so forth, and he will see another child on crutches. The next thing you know, he will come home and he will be kind of gimping a little bit. They just do it. It is very touching, actually. Children will really do this in a hurry.

After a fellow gets on a life-continuum basis, his concept of the other human beings around him is what he is continuing, not his concept of himself. So if he believes somebody was selfish and he is doing a life continuum for somebody who was selfish, he will be selfish. Out of great generosity he will be selfish.

This was a sorry tangle for somebody to come into and investigate if they were trying to investigate it scientifically instead of mathematically. The mathematics of the thing — and they are mathematics — were very interesting. For instance, Effort Processing, the emotional curve and selfdeterminism were each and every one of them worked out of a clear blue sky — just like that. They were not experimented with; they weren’t a discovery: they were predicted. All of a sudden the package was there. Then it had to be tested and tested and tested, and it kept on doing just exactly what it was supposed to do. It was quite remarkable.

But there are a lot of human beings and each one is wearing a life continuum or the burdens of the world, and now you take any one of these human beings and you try to investigate him as an individual to find out what a human being actually does. “Obviously” he is selfish, he is cantankerous, he is sick, he is ornery, he is this way, that way and so forth. And if you confidently went forward examining mice jumping onto electric plates or something of the sort, as far as human beings were concerned you would have found no source for this stuff. Because what are you looking at? You are looking at other people’s aches and pains, other people’s troubles. And this is an individual.

All these other people are dead, buried, failed and gone. And all you are looking at is his concept of those other people. So you are studying human beings by looking at this fellow’s concept of a bunch of people who aren’t there. You can’t even examine those people; you are just examining this one. What are you going to do with him?

The whole problem had to be taken up in such a way as to find where the real person was. There was a lot of evidence to the effect that man is good and that he is generous, and yet here we had some fellow walking through life being mean, ornery, snarling, screaming and so forth. Who was he being mean, ornery, snarling and screaming for? Not him. That was his idea of how somebody else should have gone on living. He forgives completely all of this screaming and does it himself so this other person can continue. But the other person is dead.

This was great stuff. It really made a complex problem. It is no wonder that everyone kept saying, “The problem is too complex. Dianetics has oversimplified it.” They took a one-power magnifying glass and took one look at it and said it was too complex and then they said it couldn’t be simplified. The people who were doing this were really protecting these life continuums, weren’t they?

Probably the most generous people on earth are the people in the insane asylums and the psychosomatic wards of hospitals. It is your job to dig them up, because they are interred there in the bones of their dead relatives. And when you dig them up, I am afraid you will find out they are going to do it all over again. But you can at least give them a little latitude to work on, and educationally they can see very well that it isn’t quite as grim as they thought it was. So you can straighten a human being out.

If you go on using Effort Processing and you are not straightening a human being out, you are trying to straighten out a person who is a facsimile of a human being that he has tried to help. That is no good. You want the preclear himself; you don’t want the person he has covered himself up with.

I think if you got all of the life continuums off an individual and had his case entirely resolved all the way down the line, you would find yourself looking at a person who was completely aware of his analytical mechanisms without any unconscious area at all. He would be acting on the control center which he is right now beginning to use to censure himself for making postulates. Isn’t that a laugh! “Now, I’d better not make that postulate because. . .” and so on. He is making his upper control center make the lower control center do things with postulates.

Effort Processing is relatively very simple. But what I am asking you to do is not do Effort Processing just for the sake of doing Effort Processing; I am asking you to take a case apart and find the person.

An auditor can even, if he is living the life continuum of Grandma, use Grandma’s authoritarian “Control yourself” on the preclear in order to make Grandma keep on living. Let’s do a double shift on that and let the preclear go on living. That would be smarter. That is why an auditor ought to have his case fairly well undone — so he won’t be practicing any lifecontinuum habits on his own preclears. Does that make sense to you?

All of this is why you find minimal Effort Processing in Advanced Procedure. It will still work out that you will go into a case every once in a while and find there is nothing whatsoever that you can do about this case but Effort Processing. So you ask, “If your head was being shoved at this moment, which way would it be resisted?” and he is off to the races. A somatic will turn on and he is all set. Sometimes they go into convulsions and froth and do all sorts of things.

But sometimes a case won’t present any other immediate and easy entrance. Of course, it is an awful temptation to walk up to any case and say, “What is the feeling in your right foot?” “What’s the feeling in your left foot?” “What’s the feeling in your back?”

All of a sudden the fellow goes “Ohh!” What you have done is take his concentration of attention in the facsimile he is wearing away from the spot where he is resisting it. A person becomes concentrated on these counterefforts. His attention units in the facsimile are being diverted, and there isn’t anybody around who doesn’t have a lot of his attention centered upon a counter-effort.

If you want to know what cuts down a person’s concentration, it is just that. Did you ever have a cut or something and have somebody trying to talk to you? You keep pulling your attention away from the cut, and how annoyed you get after a while at having to talk to this person! If you have a preclear who is very badly annoyed about you trying to process him or doing anything else, he has his major concentration on some somatic, and if he took his concentration off it, the somatic would hit him. It is just that simple.

But he will go in for this: he will feel the feeling in his right knee and his left knee and feel the feeling in his heart and feel the feeling in one foot. You say, “You can feel the aliveness of your right foot now, can’t you?” or something like that. This will do one of two things: either you will tend to open his communication channels internally and bring him out of that facsimile or he will just take his attention off that somatic and let it clip him.

The person in apathy actually has wrapped himself up in some kind of a somatic that works like this: “Any direction I move will hurt.” His only concentration is not to concentrate on anything except not moving. So you can come along to a person in apathy — a catatonic — and pick up his hand and his arm will stay up. By running one of these facsimiles sometimes you can see this happen. Eventually as a person goes down the tone scale and the curtains are falling and night is drawing on apace as far as that engram is concerned, he is being hit by various counterefforts; he is afraid to move. You try to coax him to move and he won’t move. He will eventually get down to that point. When you get him down to that point he is in apathy. Then you start running counter-efforts, because you have to exhaust these counterefforts in order to get the person up out of this apathy.

You could start running efforts and lay off without running out the remainder and leave a person in a completely exhausted state. What have you failed to run out? His exhaustion. So people come around and say, “You know, this Effort Processing tires people out.”

You say, “How about running the tail end off?”

You as an auditor must always use your common sense. If a person is dumped into an incinerator and is severely burned and so forth, you don’t just get him up to the point where he is being pulled out of the door of the incinerator and then drop the incident. That is what you would be doing in Effort Processing if you just dropped the incident at the last effort you picked up — if, at the last point you got violent efforts and counter-efforts, you said “Well, that’s that.” There is the preclear — exhausted! He is in a horrible state. “Well, that’s just the way they get after you process one of these incidents. It takes so much out of a person.”

Somebody saying that is really borrowing it off medical science. Medical science thinks a person climbs two or three mountains or develops a fever or something like that and gets tired — that it is a continuing process. Actually, most of a person’s physical manifestations, including tiredness, are just psychosomatic.

I don’t know how long the human body can run. I don’t know how good this engine is; neither does anybody else. But it is a lot better than anybody has thought it was. People think, “Well, if one works all day and he does a very active job of work all day long, then at night he’s tired.” Nuts. This is just the way he is “supposed to” feel, or this is the way Uncle Joe felt and he is doing a life continuum for Uncle Joe so he has to be tired every night when he comes home, or some such thing.

The proof of this is you do a little processing on him and the first thing you know, he comes home and he has forgotten he is supposed to be tired when he comes home. He comes in and he says to the dear little wife, “Let’s go out to a dance.” He finds out after a while that if he dances every night till two o’clock in the morning and gets up every morning at six o’clock in order to get to work, he gets tired. So you process him a little bit more and he can go dancing till two o’clock every morning and work all day too. Don’t think he can’t. I don’t even think sleep is necessary.

An algae lives on sunlight and minerals, so darkness is starvation; it is dangerous. It is also very tiring to be without sunlight when it is your exclusive fuel and you don’t have much insulation. Actually, it isn’t tiredness at all — it is dying!

Every algae or every organism like a photon converter died in regular cycles of twenty-four hours, or started to die, and then all of a sudden the sun would come up and recharge it with life. You can find this in preclears if you want to. That is lots of fun. Don’t leave them in it.

Sometimes people get very doubtful about the genetic line being there, so it is always kind of nice to have a couple of tricks. You say, “This is the way it is.”

They say, “Well, it’s probably attributable to something else.”

“What is the effort to attribute something to something else?”

“What do you mean, the effort?”

“What’s the effort to pick up a chair?”

“Well, it’s this effort.”

“Well, what’s the effort to attribute something to something else?”

“Well, I wouldn’t . . . You know, it kind of seems like I’d kind of move my shoulders like this.”

“Well, can you feel yourself moving your shoulders like that? Try it a couple of times. Move your shoulders; move your shoulders.”

“Ow!”

“Now, will we go on with our discussion?”

The extreme doubt which has been demonstrated toward Dianetics should have developed in you this facility of argument, and it is only your great humanitarianism which has spared the race. The truth of the matter is that, with most people, you can’t be argued with, because if you know your subject, you can produce enough phenomena to make it unprofitable to argue with you. It doesn’t matter anyway; it’ll go away in a few days — sometimes. And if the fellow “knows that you can’t do anything to him,” he can at least come back and have you finish the process. Then, of course, he will have admitted that you could do something for him. That is the way to win an argument.

I am not advising you, actually, to do things like this — like the last fellow I rolled up in a ball on the floor. This fellow showed a great deal of muscular tension. There was effort sitting right on top of his case — right on top! I was telling him some of the advantages of Dianetics — that it made people well and so on — but he wasn’t interested in this sort of thing; he was a lawyer.

So I gave him the little routine that put him back into a prenatal. I just asked him, “Well, just pretend. Supposing you had a witness on a witness stand. And supposing you could say certain things and the witness would curl up in a ball and fall on the floor. All right, now you be the witness in the witness stand. I’ll show you how this is done.” It scared him to death.

This gives you some sort of an idea of what you are trying to do with Effort Processing. You can do almost anything you want with it. Here is the discovery of the effort and the countereffort and the horrible discovery that in order to be human you have to be wrong; you can’t be right and be human.

That is something else you should know about Effort Processing. The efforts are the efforts not to survive. People are making efforts not to survive, and it is the nonsurvival efforts you are trying to get. You think you are making an effort to try to see; no, you are not. You are making an effort not to see. Actually, you have to make an enormous number of nonsurvival efforts or else you would just know all of this automatically. It would all be lying there. And that would be the end of that — you wouldn’t have any fun; there would be no randomity.

So, the answer is very simple: ARC. ARC is just as valid as it ever was. But you think you have to stay in communication with the human race, and as long as you stay in communication with the human race you have to be wrong. You want to indulge in action. Any time you indulge in any action of any kind, you descend down from “right” a little way. You descend from absolute right to get into any action, because full responsibility says that rightness would be full responsibility and that isn’t action. You come down the line to talk to people.

Now, just think of this society with its social structure of little fibs, its social structure of hiding the obvious, of being coy about various functions of the human body. You think of all of these things compounded up — they are all wrong in that they inhibit to some degree a person’s rightness. You figure out where these things inhibit rightness and you are all set.

A human being is down scale, and if he is in ARC with low levels and so forth, of course he is pretty wrong. How human can you get? Awfully wrong. An individual isn’t considered to be in particularly bad shape if he is as wrong as 10.0 or even as wrong as 4.0. But when a fellow starts to get as wrong as 2.0 he is so far down the line that he can’t recover by his own efforts, simply because his own efforts will inevitably be selected wrong. The efforts that a 2.0 will select to do to himself will be kind of wrong, so this processing normally had better be done by an auditor or the handbook. That should be of interest to you. What is behavior at 1.5 and below?

People are making an effort to be human; they are making an effort not to survive, they are making an effort to do this and to do that — all on a nonsurvival basis. And this nonsurvival is what you are trying to process out of them. You are trying to process out nonsurvival. So the things which you really ought to be hitting on the case with any of this line of processing are efforts not to survive, because the individual is actually making selfdetermined efforts not to survive.

If a person went all the way up the top of the thing and became completely right he would simply disappear out through the top of the static. He would be that right. He wouldn’t be human anymore.

How inhuman can you get? A person gets pretty inhuman when he gets down below 2.2. The preferred band in humanity is between about 3.5 and 10.0, 12.0 or 14.0. But those 10.0s, 12.0s and 14.0s get slugged around because there are too many people below 2.0 in this society. It is in a very bad state of imbalance.

You are trying to put a society back into a state of balance again. You’re not trying to make people step out through the top of static.

So that is the way you use Effort Processing. The efforts a person is using are the efforts not to survive.

I think sometime, when we have a quiet moment, I will try somebody on “Let’s get the effort to agree to be human.” I think we might find some interesting efforts.