There is much more to this than appears on the surface. There is a cause without motion, influencing and interplaying in motion. Therefore it works out that theta has only this type of function: to start or stop these influences on motion. It starts or stops motion. And this is the primary, most basic tenet that you can get at the moment in processing.

There is a phenomenon about which you should know: the epicenter. Epicenter is taken, in its derivation, as meaning something approximating a center off the center — ”other center” or something of the sort. It is a center on the center, technically, accurately. And it is a study of the successive command posts of a human organism.

When a person comes into a field of belief without understanding, for instance, he is in a static. A static has been stopped; one has to be stopped to be in a static state. There is only one way to stop somebody, actually, and that is to kill them. As a net result, then, you will get all the moments when the organism supposed itself to be approaching death or was in death or something of the sort.

Now, “everybody knows” that the genetic line contains within it inheritable and inherited responses. Nobody has ever bothered to inform us as to how, when, which, why or what. All they did was look at a cat washing its face, which had never seen another cat, and immediately see that the cat washed its face. Obviously, this cat had learned somehow to wash its face, and it had inherited a conduct pattern genetically. Nobody explored this very far; they just said, “. . . and the elephants stand on a mud turtle, and it’s mud from there on down.”

Belief is just being stopped. Being wrong is the same thing. When the calculation of effort is in error, you get a tendency toward a stop. You walk up to a door and try to open the door; you have calculated that you are going to have to use 150 units of energy in order to open this door. You put out your hand on the doorknob and it sticks — stops. Or you calculate that you are going to have to put out 10 units and actually you only needed 1 unit, so you throw this door open and fall flat on your face, and you have stopped. It is the same thing. Did you ever reach the bottom of a flight of steps and try to take another step? You sort of feel stopped. And did you ever reach the next to the last step . . . ? Once more you feel stopped.

There is some interesting data lying back on that track. We have, by empirical observation, the undoubted fact that conduct patterns are inheritable and inherited. They certainly don’t come across the bridge from generation to generation in a bunch of genes and chromosomes — those are too small. And we find out that if there is anything to be remembered it is obviously a theta facsimile. This is just genetic line, so you have a genetic line of theta facsimiles. At the very least, you have a genetic line of theta facsimiles from the moment of conception to the moment of procreation for each generation — conception to generation. That is the very least explanation you could have in view of these inherited characteristics.

Now, all life entities are involved in initiating survival actions and in inhibiting non survival motions. Therefore they are also involved in inhibiting an expanding periphery of non survival motions. When an organism really feels in good shape — doing everything it should do and so on — it goes out on an expanding periphery of stopping non survival motions and at the same time it goes out on an expanding periphery of starting survival motions. It does those two things: it stops counter-efforts which it can’t use and it uses and starts counter-efforts which it can use. In other words, it handles these on an expanding periphery that goes out along the line of the dynamics.

Just why anybody thought this had to come along the protoplasm line is something I am not quite prepared to state at the moment, because that is an incredible amongst all incredible’s. That strains the imagination — except that people are used to looking at MEST, so they say, “Here’s a little thin thread of protoplasm traveling through time endlessly. Therefore we’ll blame everything on it. Let’s not worry about the fact it’s too small to have recordings in it. Let’s not worry about anything else to do with it. Let’s just say, ‘That’s it and it’s mud from there on down.”’ And that is approximately what has happened, and that is how we got this genetic-line postulate.

The individual starts operating, evidently, on the theory that he has the whole universe to start or stop. Then something comes along — a kindergarten teacher, maybe — and says, “You won’t be able to stop the moon,” or something of the sort, and this is borne home to the individual. The next thing you know, he is down to a point where he is having a hard time starting and stopping his parents, his more intimate environment, his own playmates.

This genetic line, at best, could be a theta-facsimile line: theta facsimiles of experience recopied and available to each succeeding generation. You can prove that; you just go down and look at a cat. Any time you want to take a kitten the moment it is born and blind, and put it by itself and raise it, you will find that the kitten, without ever seeing another cat, will wash its face. That is just one example.

He is a causative point operating out of himself toward the environment, so every time he miscalculates — he is wrong in his calculation, in other words — he will start a non survival motion of some sort or invite a non survival counter-effort, and he will fail to start a survival motion. He will fail on those two points, and it keeps marching back to himself. He has had trouble holding, handling and changing his environment — starting and stopping in the environment around him — and eventually he has tried so hard to start and stop the environment that he begins stopping and starting himself in his own body. His own body,for your purposes, is merely his environment; it is part of the environment of his own self- determinism. And he will try so hard to stop something at a distance that he will stop himself.

But there are much more pertinent examples. Horses, when they are born, generally have four hooves. This is some sort of a facsimile in operation. This is a facsimile of blueprints; that is all. You find that these theta facsimiles come along. Just why anybody thought they had to hook up to a line of protoplasm is more than I know, because they evidently, onevidence, do not hook up to a line of protoplasm; they hook up to a theta-facsimile generation line.

If you investigate the phenomena of death as it is approached in the middle of an operation, or death as it is approached in past deaths (whether you buy those or not, if you haven’t run one yet), you will find that the individual quits; he stops time right there and he hands out a new postulate. He thinks, “Well, I’m not here!” and he stops the organism. You can see a person doing that in the middle of an operation. You will find points in the middle of operations where he is trying to start a motion to get the organism out of there and where he is trying to stop the motion of the counter-effort.

Actually, if we have theta facsimiles and they are observable, then it is simpler to say “Well, here is something in existence; therefore it exists, as it goes along, as itself,” than it is to say it converts into something else and becomes something else. That is a complex way of thinking about it.

Engram restimulation in the form of psychosomatic illness and aberration is simply the organism holding on to efforts which it is still trying to stop, which it failed to stop.

Therefore a theta-facsimile track seems rather obvious for any organism. I don’t care whether you hook it up with genetics or anything else. And I would like to bring home to you the fact that there is no proof of any kind that it is a genetic line, beyond the fact that it takes a certain amount of protoplasm to manufacture a new organism. That is an observable fact. It is simpler to consider this on a theta-facsimile line.

So you have starts and stops.

Now, this theta-facsimile line starts in with something that probably converted photons — a theta facsimile of photon conversion — and goes right straight on up to a highly complex organism as one line. That would be one track of possible evolution. You see an individual during his lifetime accumulating these theta facsimiles. That is one track.

Now, if you want to get all the times a person believed something or was forced to believe something, just get times when he was stopped and you will get the same thing.

There is another track, and I am talking empirically; we have phenomena about this. There is a theta-facsimile track for one individual, and it stays with a MEST body. Then after the bulk of the theta has disappeared out of the body, there will still be some with it. The first time I ever started running an individual I ran into this phenomenon, but being surrounded by authoritarians, I said “All right” and went into apathy about the subject after a while, I got so much cussing around. The whole point was that I wasn’t supposed to observe that. We can take almost anybody and kick the phenomenon into existence, but we are not supposed to observe it. It is not quite clear to me, though, why we mustn’t observe a phenomenon as obvious as this.

You can clean up a man’s whole environment with great ease simply by picking up those people who have had a tendency to stop him in the environment. You will find those people are at 1.5 or 1.1 on the tone scale. A gunshot method of getting these people out is to knock out all the ARC he has in the whole bank. This makes his new understanding fluid. It picks up all this anchored data, because part of his data in the understanding is simply ARC with other living organisms.

If you want to look it clearly and bluntly in the eye, you get the situation of a body running along somatically. That is to say, there is a pattern of cells — a cellular pattern. And there are theta facsimiles of the cellular arrangement of the organism. Those facsimiles persist beyond the death of the full-unit organism.

So as a result we have, as our central operational mechanism, moments when the preclear was stopped, when he was balked from starting something, when he failed to change a motion and so on — just these combinations. You say, “Now, let’s get your effort in this engram to stop it” — bang! You will walk him right straight through into the next moment of pain, because he has been sitting right there, holding and refusing to record that next incident of pain. You pull up the stop at that point and the engram will slide right on through.

There is also a theta facsimile of the individual as an individual and it goes along the track, so the whole individual is traveling along the track as a personality.

That is what nervousness is. If you collected together the books on the subject of nervousness, worry, “Do you have B.O.?” and all this sort of thing, you would probably have a nice stack of books; just the leading ones would probably be a good-sized stack. But you can take all these books and throw them away, because there is only one thing that is happening: the fellow is in present time under the delusion that he is stopping a contra survival motion or that he is unable to start a prosurvival motion.

It is as though there were a colonial aggregation of cells which then attracted to itself a new force of theta. So you would have the life force of each one of these cells, the theta of these cells, and then when they collected together as an organism you would get an additional supply of theta which would pop in from someplace or other and make a full picture of the whole thing and carry right along with it. You could say, then, that an individual is composed of these two things: cellular facsimiles and organism facsimiles.

So when you start processing a preclear. you will find that his failure to keep the organism running will result in his postulating being elsewhere. If you really want to turn on reality with an individual and turn it on high, just start knocking out some of these stops with Straightwire.

This is observable in the formation of groups. A number of individuals get together, form a group, and immediately the group has a life of its own. Try to dispose of groups and you will find out they don’t die easily. Any time a group forms it seems to attract an additional theta facsimile to it.

It is an interesting thing that ARC requires motion to be in existence, and a causative point — a static — requires motionlessness to be in existence. So the individual is fluctuating between motion and no-motion, and what you are doing in processing is trying to get him rehabilitated into being able to carry forward an optimum motion.

There would then be the cellular line and it would be carrying along with the theta facsimiles of the whole organism, only this cellular line keeps on going. At the moment of death, we get facsimiles of the moment of death and then all of a sudden this line sort of disappears out into nowhere and comes down into another cellular line. Hence, this first cellular line keeps on going as a cellular line until it really falls apart. You will find this in individuals.

That optimum motion has a much higher velocity, actually, than we conceive it to have today. Just watch some of your preclears when you start to swamp up all these stops out of them. They start to move faster in many, many ways.

I won’t apologize for what Dame Nature and the rest of the universe has done with its phenomena. These phenomena exist. Don’t be too surprised, then, if your preclear is running himself 150 years in the grave and is running the theta out of his bones. Don’t be surprised. As a matter of fact, be rather amazed if, without telling him, he never hits this phenomenon, because if he doesn’t hit it he is missing someplace down the track. It is a form of static which is very interesting, and it sometimes produces an aberration and a case will only resolve when you hit that particular line. The statics aren’t resolving well on the other line, then all of a sudden you get on this line, and you will find them.

Now, the effort to stop things starts on the very furthest outside perimeter. I found in one preclear a little bit of grief charge from when he was just a little child standing and looking at the stars, and he all of a sudden realized he couldn’t do anything about them. They were completely beyond his effort and control. He felt tinier and tinier and more and more insignificant. We picked up this moment and he had sort of gone into apathy right there. He couldn’t stop or start the stars.

In other words, there can be a theta line running in actual MEST space on four or five different divisions simultaneously. The fellow is in four graves, one disintegrated body and himself, all at the same time, concurrently. You get a little child who dreams of skeletons but who has never had any experience with dead people or skeletons, and you have one of these cases. There are undoubtedly individuals around who have some slight abhorrence of death, who have had nightmares on it.

It goes right on down the line. If you have somebody who has been living in the vicinity of people — like sergeants — who cannot be started or stopped, you have an individual going into a bit of apathy. That is why military service is aberrative: one is unable to start and stop so many organisms in his vicinity. The whole thing gets up to this insane velocity of “It’s all got to be this way because it’s always been this way, and we’re not asking you anything about it. You’re just MEST, bud, and you’re going to be eaten.”

This phenomenon exists. Please don’t take my word for it; please just look. If you don’t find it, write me. If you do, don’t think it will be news to me.

Therefore, any miscalculation of effort brings about a halt in some degree — any miscalculation of effort. And being wrong is being stopped. Therefore people cannot be wrong! It isn’t that people have an innate wish to be right; it is simply the fact that they can’t be stopped. If they stop completely they are dead! And here you have the gradient scale of wrongness which ends in death. You look at this gradient scale and it goes over to wrong, and the wrong side of the ledger means stopped. You actually have an infinity going in a circle on this, because you are trying to meet up with a moment when an optimum velocity is reached. You can get a faster velocity than that, which again brings about a stop.

Now, with Effort Processing, you are not asking a person to winnow out his beliefs about anything. You just tell him, “Get the effort,” and there he is. As a consequence, it is not necessary for you to argue with preclears concerning this. They either land in this track or they don’t. That is one level.

You should keep that very definitely in mind. As a matter of fact, in processing there is no more important point than this theorem. You want to mark it with about five stars, because this is right where you are operating. As long as you do this with a preclear. you are really going to produce some results with him.

Another level of operation, of course, is this main line — the whole organism theta facsimile.

Now, there has been some talk about ARC. The only thing wrong with ARC, as far as ARC with Homo Sapiens is concerned, is that it is too low, having too many statics in it. Homo Sapiens has been too wrong for too long. Therefore, it isn’t that you want to cut off relations with the human race; you would just like a person to be able to get into his own self-determined relationship with these people, let him make up his mind. So what, if your preclear starts walking down the street with his lip hung up over his left ear, as far as people are concerned! That is all right. Is he healthy, effective, efficient? Is he living the kind of a life which he ought to be living? You will find out he is of more benefit to mankind.

There is a genetic line-up — though it is not genetic particularly — which would also explain these phenomena.

To free an individual from ARC with individuals who are-too low on the scale permits him to attain a higher level of ARC. You are giving him more motion simply by freeing him from individuals who are too full of statics.

By the way, the book of Axioms, when it is published for scientific use in universities, is going to skip this whole subject. We will just let them run into this like a freight train head- on. It will give people nightmares and other people will go around and invalidate them. It will probably spin a few professors.

I think Homo Sapiens has been pretty full of static!

You could take a cadaver out of the vat in the dissection room and carve it up, and you would find the epicenter evolution of the brain demonstrable in that cadaver. I took occasion to open up a physiology book recently. I looked it over and I found a remark in it which was very interesting: It seems as though there are nerve centers and crossroads throughout the body. That book abandoned the subject there and went off on how you feed people Brown’s Mixture’ to cure them of tuberculosis. The point is that it had been noticed in cutting up stiffs that there were new nerve posts. We ran into these things head-on.

Actually, it is a necessary step to clean up statics, just as it is a necessary step to clean up a person’s education. If you want an individual to get into really good shape, don’t just worry about the physiological aspects of starting and stopping; get these as they applied to his education too, because people are educated in a static state from an authoritarian point of view. That has a tendency to bring them down in terms of motion.

What is the evolution of the command center and control alignment center of the human mind? You can take a preclear and run him right straight back down this evolution line from epicenter to epicenter, one right after the other.

An engineer who has had to be motionless for about eighteen years while he got his education then goes out and tries to handle motion, and what he does is sit at a desk and fiddle with his pencil, and we get an atomic engineering project. We get all sorts of odd things in the society which are practically stopped when they really ought to be going at a high velocity.

You should know about epicenters because you are going to be running preclears and you should know where they will feel the next effort. You don’t have to tell them where to feel the next effort; you can just give some attention to it if they start to get disoriented. They will tell you various things which might worry you unless you know about the epicenter, and that is the reason I am telling you about the epicenter. It is phenomena which you are going to contact, willy-nilly, so you should be prepared to brace up to it instead of going into a spin concerning it, because it can be very, very interesting.

Any factor in the society which tends to slow an individual down slows down his ARC and it keys in as well the real physical statics on the case. It does both.

How did the human mind, the brain, the body, evolve? You will find this if you continue processing. Also, you can install the epicenter effect in an individual — create a facsimile of the epicenter effect — very easily. All you do is have him sit down in a chair; tell him to sit down rigidly, to hold himself very rigid — brace himself and hold himself there — then you hit him alongside the head. Hit him with the side of your hand, but don’t hurt him very much. If you bring your hand in so that the contact is slow with his head but the jerk is sudden thereafter, he will get that effect.

An effort to believe is an effort to be motionless. In addition to that, a discovery that one is wrong also adds up into an effort to be motionless. A person who is wrong too often will stop; he will not initiate action.

He will also get mad because, as we will cover later, motion and emotion are identical — the same thing. Emotion is a glandular manifestation of motion so as to speed up the carbon- oxygen engine and make it do various things.

This is the curse of the examination in educational systems. One of the handiest and most terrible mechanisms of control ever invented was the examination, which at once invalidates the student and says, “We are going to have to find out if you know this. In other words, you’re still our MEST. And if you don’t put it down right on the paper, then you’re wrong.” Go around a university and start checking over students and you will find most of them are highly nervous. It is nothing for students to pick up an enormous number of psychosomatic illnesses around examination time. It is very interesting.

The point is that after you have smacked this individual on the side of the head, he has a new epicenter and he is groggy. If you were to give him an intelligence test or something right after you had given him a new epicenter, you would find out he wasn’t so well off. His IQ would have momentarily dropped. Now what you do is start running him through this epicenter; just scan him through the moment when you did that and he will see the new epicenter. You don’t have to tell him; he will comment that there was an instant when he knew he was really in the original position, but then he appeared to be there and in the other place — where he moved when you hit him — simultaneously. He has two positions simultaneously. Position number one is the moment before the impact, and position number two is the moment at the end of the impact. Position number two is the epicenter of position number one. In position number one, he is sitting rigidly. You hit him alongside the head — bang — and he isn’t recording because of the jolt, as far as the awareness-of- awareness unit is concerned. But a theta facsimile is made of it. There is a moment of unconsciousness where his center of control moves over and it appears to be now in the new position.

So, any interplay which tends to result in “stoppedness” or in too high a velocity — either one — aberrates the individual. You start analyzing the aberration of individuals from this point of view as an auditor and you will know more in less time about your preclear than you have ever known before. What part of his body is moving too fast in relationship to the rest of his body, and what part of his body is stopped in relationship to the rest of his body? The one moving too fast has a counter-effort against it which is trying to speed it up too fast, and he is trying to stop that counter-effort. The other one has a counter-effort which is so heavily against him that he can’t move it, so he is stopped by trying to move this counter-effort. In one he is trying to stop a counter-effort and in the other he is trying to move a counter-effort.

As preclears are running effort, you will find them in dentist chairs, in automobile accidents and everything else, where they are apparently facing one way but their faces are ninety degrees out. Or they will apparently be standing in one place but they will be standing over to the side simultaneously. You can ask a lot of individuals and you will find they have a sensation of being in two positions at the same time. That is the most rudimentary manifestation of the epicenter.

You can just observe a preclear or you can talk to some individual and you will find he is stopped on certain subjects. Take someone from almost any field of learning which is authoritarianly taught and you will be talking to an individual who is stopped. A completely stopped individual is either dead or insane, since the facsimile of being stopped can be restimulated in him while, at the same time, his heart continues to beat and his blood continues to flow through his veins. But he is stopped, he is dead, though there are various random efforts at thinking going on. This person is insane. Your task is to start him again.

It has an evolutionary purpose that has to do with self-determinism and counter-effort. You can put this down as a little law: Each new generation has as its new center the common denominator of position of the last generation’s epicenters.

There are two methods of starting him, of course. One is to do it on a command basis — but a command basis will stop him. And the other is to do it with ARC, which has in it motion, and you impart the motion and interplay of ARC to this individual who is stopped. He will start to shake out some of his psychosis and all of a sudden start to come to life again.

The individual’s center of control is in the region of his head, where his nervous system hooks up and over which and around which theta facsimiles seem to center; this is his control post or control center over the organism. From this point of emanation, theta facsimiles translate into MEST action, more or less centralized in that locale. It is an imaginary point, but it actually exists neurologically.

If you don’t believe that the insane are dead, sniff one sometime. They carry the odor of death about them.

Now, this fellow, in one lifetime, gets hit and knocked around from various points and in various directions. The common area of these epicenters becomes the new center. So people’s neurological centers really wander all over their heads. But the center point itself is the only place where the perceptions come in and coordinate and become facsimiles.

Axiom 15: Lambda is the intermediate step in the conquest of the physical universe.

So the fellow gets a few epicenters; his organism goes on recording at the center — all the recording is done at this center point — but all of a sudden he isn’t at that point anymore in that generation. He has been hit often enough before he is through with that generation to become occluded.

That is quite an obvious axiom. You have a causative point and it is traveling through something that is in motion — a living organism — in order to effect this conquest.

This is an analogy, but it is demonstrated neurologically. He becomes occluded; he can see things coming in and perceive fairly well, but he can’t recall very well. He has to recall back to this center.

Axiom 16: The basic food of any organism consists of light and chemicals.

Let’s take a little boy whose mother is fond of pushing him around. Mama, in his case, is counter-effort. The boy is trying to be self-determined, but Mama hits him into new positions — over and over, hitting him into these new positions. This individual in one generation will get an epicenter as the center of operation for himself, and when you take him back on the time track he will be looking at himself from a circle which is formed from all the positions from which he has been hit. Anywhere on that circle he is out of valence, and the reason he is out of valence is he has taken the point of counter-effort because it is too dangerous to be self-determined effort.

It is very interesting that a person can be all upset on the subject of what hours he should sleep. The reason one has to sleep is that the basic units are monocells which feed on sunlight and minerals. When the sun is up they are alive and in good shape, and when it is dark they don’t eat. Therefore, dark is terrible to most organisms; it is unknown and so on. However there are organisms which use this factor in order to survive, such as owls and so on; they have reversed themselves so they can survive. They prey upon other organisms’ inability to keep going or do the right thing at night.

The next generation of this individual’s theta facsimiles will probably come together so as to form a new center from the combined counter-effort. With a new organism, theta can come in and superimpose and resolve the old counter-effort into a new center. The person is not out of valence at the beginning — but then he starts getting a lot of new counter-efforts and he starts getting this epicenter effect again, through his life, and all of a sudden his visio starts off and a lot of other things start off.

It is also interesting that human beings die most frequently at two o’clock in the morning. This is when the chronometer in the body says, “We’re all out of fuel, boys.” All you have to give a person is a little vitamin D and some protein and he will snap out of that. People don’t have to die at that time in the morning; they just aren’t fed. That is a fact. There is a monitor system running on the thing. Of course, people have lots of facsimiles of being dead at two o’clock in the morning, too. Their first facsimile says that if the amoebae or whatever is going to die, it will die when it is dark, or when it is too light — same thing.

Agreement is just being oneself, to a large degree, with oneself. One goes out of communication with oneself and one isn’t in agreement with oneself and one isn’t oneself, then one doesn’t have any reality on oneself. And when one gets knocked around and given too many epicenters, one ceases to be oneself but starts to become the counter-effort and goes out of valence.

You can extrapolate the food of an organism from the highest, most complex levels straight on down to the bottom level. We have an evolution, which has been overlooked, which is progressing right along with us in present time: higher organisms are feeding on lower organisms. The only reason that we as human beings can survive is that we are being supported by lower forms which are converting energy into a refined level from lower forms, which are converting energy from even lower forms. Our food is being manufactured for us — it is being processed through a lot of organisms — from sunlight and minerals, right this minute.

You take this person back on the track, he sees himself lying there in terrible apathy, and he says, “Oh, yes.”

Axiom 17: Theta, via lambda, effects an evolution in MEST.

Then you ask him to get an effort. What is his effort at this point? If this poor fellow ever starts self-auditing, all he will do is punish himself, because that is what the counter-effort did. So the self-auditing individual goes on and punishes himself just as the counter-effort punished him, because he is occupying the point of the counter-effort. He is out of valence, therefore he is the exterior force hurting the individual. He only gets these counter-efforts when he is being hurt, so the only thing the counter-effort really does to him, when it really starts operating on him and he starts trying to audit himself, is hurt him some more.

This is mostly just a comment of some interest, but not entirely. You will find out that the cities on the face of the earth, ruined cities, ancient forests long since buried under lava beds — these things are all changed MEST. If you want to go out in any graveyard and dig it up you will find that there is a lot of MEST there that has been changed.

Anybody using E-therapy, Q-therapy, G-therapy, R-therapy, bean therapy, black-snake-oil therapy, the-preclear-will-now-step-off-the-timetrack-and-waltz therapy, l is hitting epicenters galore. He starts getting into this common denominator of the epicenters and his perceptics and so on go off. Why? He is a static. These counter-efforts have made a static out of this person. They have said, “Obey, obey, obey,” and so he has gotten to be a static.

Actually, the physical universe is undergoing an evolution. Someday, perchance, the physical universe will be almost entirely converted. Who knows? But not if the boys in governments keep playing around with atomics.

The old self-determinism has to go into apathy before a person goes out of valence. Do you see that? An individual goes into apathy, and the second he goes out of apathy, he moves out and becomes the counter-effort. The counter-effort was hitting and punishing the individual, so he starts treating himself in just that fashion. He will give himself accidents and do all sorts of things to himself.

Axiom 18: Lambda, even within a species, varies in its endowment of theta.

So the process of going out of valence is a very, very precise one: The individual goes into apathy, assumes the static of obedience because of applied force, moves out of himself into the area or perimeter of the counter effort and then regards himself from this perimeter as this perimeter of counter-efforts regarded him. The perimeter of counter-efforts is probably in disagreement with him, but it is still ARC. In order to have any motion at all, this individual has to be on the perimeter, since the center has become a static.

You will find this in examination of preclears, one way or the other; you will find that there seems to be a different energy potential inherent in different individuals. You will find an individual, for instance, who hasn’t enough horsepower to stop himself even in a severe operation. He won’t even postulate stopping himself. He just keeps on going. These people are pretty limp, and they are not much use to anybody either.

So the person is handling himself from an actual new epicenter and he is saying, “You do this and you do that, and I have to talk myself into it, and I have to go there and I have to do that, and, you know, I’m pretty mean to myself.” This is all the epicenter effect. Also, a person can get five or six new epicenters, group them, and you get a schizophrenic — a multivalent personality.

An organism with a high level of endowment will try to stop itself, even at fancied efforts to act against it, and the fellow will eventually just start shutting down and everything will start shutting off and he becomes very occluded.

Here, then, is something you are going to work with continually, and this is terribly important in therapy because a lot of your cases won’t resolve unless you know it — this cycle of self-determinism goes into apathy, and the existing ARC is low-tone-scale counter- effort. The counter-effort is disagreeing with the preclear. who is in apathy. Do you expect this person to have perceptics?

There is a third condition which happens: Someone with a high endowment of theta gets stuck in some operation or some moment of high stress, stops it and postulates that he has a time track and that he is running on it. You give this individual something to read and then recall and he will recall some fragment of it; he won’t be able to read the whole thing. He is running on a not necessarily illusory track, but certainly it is a dub-in track. And a lot of auditors have fun running “wide-open” cases which are actually skidding along a merely postulated time track.

What I am actually telling you here is how to turn on sonic. He is out of valence. Even if he is slightly out of valence in any theta facsimile, you are not going to get good communication — particularly because he is a static and communication requires motion. Even agreement requires motion — all of these things. He is in a point of having been stopped; this is all the times when the forces of the MEST universe and other organisms made him obey — in other words, reduced him to a static. He operates from that point on as the counter-effort.

Now, there is much more to this subject; there is a lot more data inside it. But if you will take that as working data, you will find that you can understand some of these so-called wide-open cases that appear to be nuttier than fruitcakes. This person “obviously” is not stopped anyplace. But let’s go back and get the postulate of “I’m not here, and I’m going to keep on going regardless,” and the person will have a time track and have an awful lot of theta wrapped up. And he will be the most surprised person in the world when he suddenly sees his time track filling out, changing, expanding and altering rather markedly and considerably, because obviously it was a time track.

You have to get his effort — which is no effort at all. Apathy is zero effort. A static is zero effort. The preclear who has no perceptics is in zero effort with regard to himself, and he is running and motivating himself by counter efforts. If you start to run his effort exclusively, you will start to run counter-efforts even though he is so occluded he can’t see that he is out of valence. He is out of valence (you know that mechanism exists) if he is occluded. The wrong way to do it is get him into valence. The right way to do it is to have him run no- effort, pick up locks off the case and then run some more no-effort, and all of a sudden he will start to receive counter-efforts.

You get an occluded case and start it going, however, and it doesn’t run on a postulated time track; it runs on an actual one.

Now, his ARC has gone on from a static position and will start up into the area of agreement. But it has to go through disagreement.

Of course, the postulated time track is just running parallel to an actual time track. The time track is actual, it doesn’t collapse or anything like that, but an individual thinks it does.

On a low level of ARC, what is communication? It is practically zero, isn’t it? What is reality? It is practically zero. And of course the preclear doesn’t have any reality about himself or existence or anything else as long as he is in a static state. But you start having him run no-effort and he starts up the line: “Now, how do you feel about your mother?”

Axiom 19: The effort of lambda is toward survival. The goal of lambda is survival.

He tells you apathetically, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I feel good,” and so on.

The penalty of failure to advance toward that goal is to succumb.

“Well, now, let’s feel this no-effort,” and he suddenly will pick up some kind of a counter- effort.

Definition: Persistence is the ability to exert continuance of effort toward survival goals.

Sometimes you can get him early on the track and he will really start picking up a little self- determinism in himself, which is not a no-effort proposition but just a little bit of effort. You start multiplying this and he will come up out of the static. The second he comes up out of the static he is into ARC: “Now, how do you feel toward your mother?”

If an individual is lacking in persistence, he will also be lacking in responsibility and other things, and you will find that he is stopped somewhere. He is stopped very thoroughly. But if you start getting an individual moving again, his level of persistence will come up — even in a low-endowment individual.

“Well, I disagree with her.”

Axiom 20: Lambda creates, conserves, maintains, acquires, destroys, changes, occupies, groups and disperses MEST.

“Good. Get the effort to disagree, the effort to disagree. Get the effort not to love her. Get the effort not to communicate with her.”

Mark that one with about four stars. It is very important. Out of that axiom you can derive MEST Processing. You can resolve an individual’s skittishness about the physical universe.

This is why this error was made recently on ARC being no longer used in processing — because it merges from a static into the lowest area of ARC. It doesn’t graduate from complete ARC into no ARC into ARC. It goes from a static — reverse ARC — into ARC. The effort to communicate is actually his first effort, but that is just a tiny bit above a static and it is an obedience effort and has nothing to do with understanding; it is just parrot- wise. You will find that earlier on the track, too.

An individual has postulated all sorts of things about the physical universe. He has had various unfortunate experiences with such things as cats, kings and coal heavers, and he decides, “It’s dangerous but it’s not dangerous. So I better not have it, so I’ve got to have it,” and he gets into a state of anxiety concerning this.

Get that effort to disagree, the effort to refuse communication, the effort to refuse affinity, and all of a sudden he will start building up and start to get motion on the track. The only reason the fellow could be in apathy is that he is stopped. You have to get him moving in order to get a flow of time so that you can get communication.

This all extrapolates out of the basic axiom of motion, but you are a little closer to the core of the thing when you realize that the handling of motion and the handling of an organism are the same thing, because the organism is a motion — with the difference that an organism has a static in it, as parents sometimes discover in trying to train children. Children will step back against this static and can not then be budged out of a certain activity.

This is all so darn mechanical. You will see it in yourselves. If you can find a moment when you were disagreeing with a parent and then get your effort to disagree, you will find that the incident will turn up a bit. When you are running this, don’t expect the whole incident to turn on at one fell swoop, because you probably would have to get a lot of these incidents before you could start to get the person into view. Then suddenly the person will turn on and then the rest of the perceptics will turn on. If you use this and fail to turn the preclear’s perceptics on in a very short space of time — if you go two sessions and you haven’t got his perceptics on — you ought to quit.

You can take that formula — the axiom is really a formula — and you can write down all of the items and objects and spaces and times you can think of, and then take the individual, the individual’s group, the individual as part of his family and all the dynamics and start playing him against this. When you get all through you have Self Analysis questions. That is the basic formula on Self Analysis.

That is the mechanism of valence, the mechanism for perception, the mechanism of obedience, and the mechanism of how to get a person up the tone scale on ARC. And it is this epicenter effect.

Or you can make up a deck of cards that work this way. On your deck of cards you just write various action verbs on one pile and various objects and actions on a second pile, and then in the third pile you write down various entities — such as the individual, the individual in his family, the individual in a group and so on — and just deal the three piles out. And you can read out your questions, one right after the other.

I will tell you something more about this epicenter effect. Once upon a time there was a photon-conversion unit — a theta photon-conversion unit — and it grew and grew and it multiplied and multiplied. And one day there was a little cell and its name was Algae. Algae got there as algae from less complex forms in the same way it gets from algae onto higher, more complex forms.

Axiom 21: Lambda is dependent upon optimum motion. Motion which is too swift and motion which is too slow are alike contra survival.

We are talking about cellular alignment and coordination — the cellular body. We are not talking about the overall personality theta line which I mentioned; we are talking about the somatic-strip theta line.

You can take the tone scale and turn it on edge, and it doesn’t look quite like you think it looks. The tone scale which you know, you have been looking at from a different viewpoint.

Anyway, the waves come along and start beating Algae to pieces, then more waves, too much sunlight, too little sunlight, more waves — in other words, counter-effort, counter- effort, counter-effort. He incidentally probably gets driven ashore and gets a few death engrams on the beach and so forth, and all these things add up to counter-effort and more counter-effort. Algae says, “We’ve got to do something about this.”

Apparently, an individual slows down as he comes down the tone scale. However, the truth of the matter is that going either too fast or too slow puts him at the same position on the tone scale.

By the way, this is a missing bridge: Evolution couldn’t take place unless it stepped across the bridge of death, because there never would have been an educative cycle whereby the organism could have found out that it had to avoid death. It never would have had any experience with death, so never would have advanced to prevent death or to do these other things.

You turn that tone scale on edge and you will find it looks different.

So what Algae does is postulate a tougher shell for himself. He is then in a tougher envelope. He finds that he has to have a tougher envelope, and he gets the physical force to make a new envelope simply by using counter effort. And he makes a new epicenter for himself and says, “We have to operate from this new epicenter.” Algae’s first epicenter is pretty small, and then his next one is a little bigger. In other words, there was new structural data. Every time Algae gets a new cellular facsimile of something happening to him, he gets new data which is installed on a counter-effort basis.

The scale runs from 0.0 to 40.0. Down at 0.0 the person is dead, and then as you go up, the levels are pretended death, apathy, grief and so on, up to 2.0, and then straight on up until you get into the band of 4.0. On one side of this scale we have the band of too little motion, which runs down to death. But if the individual is being forced too hard into too much motion, he is shaking himself to pieces and he is halted just the same. So you can see that too much motion and too little motion are alike susceptible of producing no motion.

But we are dealing with a basic organism here, and it is not particularly necessary to go down this low. Let’s look at the first organism form, the first colony. We can say that Algae, finally, through counter-efforts one way or the other, finds out he has to string himself together on beads and hook himself to the ocean floor — which they do. Then the colony gets a lot of new counter-efforts coming from here and there and all over. The next thing you know, it grows an envelope around itself, sort of a leaf of some sort, formed by the counter-efforts of waves and rebuilt out of theta facsimiles. The odd part of it is that this is starting to work up to a point where it is getting a common epicenter. This colony has to have a control post, and it Can be beaten around until it actually has to postulate a central post of nervous command where it can pull the switches for the rest of the organism. So it goes ahead and builds one.

This can be shown with vectors. Let’s take a vector toward survive, a good long arrow at

Then it finds that it isn’t so good not to be mobile and decides it had better float for a while, so it builds itself into some kind of a jellyfish.

40.0. Now, when we start breaking it down, we get down around 2.0 and we have two arrows of the same length confronting each other. This fellow is antagonistic, he doesn’t know quite which way to go. But as you come down the line, this arrow toward survive gets shorter and shorter, and a few more random efforts start impinging on it till you get down around anger, and at this point the forces are going in all different directions. We are breaking down the same force vector — the same length — but we are splitting up the arrows. Gradually, as we get down to 0.0, all those force vectors have resolved to a point — they are one point long. A point has no length, so you get 0.0.

After it has built itself into a jellyfish it is quite happy. But one day it starts to run in toward the beach, and there are rocks and caverns. It goes in there and hits, scrapes and gets killed. Then it goes out and makes another jellyfish someplace with new cells, a new genetic line. It is all working out very beautifully when, again, it drifts in towards the rocks and hits rock formations and gets killed.

The vectors come more and more into conflict. The vector toward survive is opposed by the vector to succumb. The force to survive, the will to survive, is being opposed by the will to succumb. So as the fellow gets down the scale, he doesn’t know which way he is going, he doesn’t know what he is doing and his goals are all upset. He gets into this situation, and finally that breaks down and the vectors shorten down to just a point.

It gets a few dozen of these facsimiles and says, “This isn’t so hot. Every time we turn around, we get killed by a rock.”

You can also do this simply by taking off the length of the vector. The vector gets shorter and shorter and shorter, so there is less and less vector and all of a sudden there is no vector, which means no motion, no force applied or, over on the too-much-motion side, it means so much random motion that again you have no motion.

The modus operandi now becomes very plain. You can trace back earlier than this, but it gets very plain now what is happening: Every time this jellyfish comes in and hits those rocks it gets a counter-effort against the command post of the organism. So what does it do? It builds an organism from the new counter-effort perimeter and it winds up as a shellfish. It starts as a jellyfish, without a shell, and the counter-effort’s force is always coming from a certain area. The organism has really got a new post of command; it puts its new post of command right down where you would expect it — where there are the toughest counter-efforts of all. As the waves drive this jellyfish in on the rocks, it gets tougher and tougher until it forms a shell.

The individual reacts the same way. Whether he is on the too-little motion side of the tone scale or the too-much-motion side of the tone scale, he is evidently manifesting more or less the same, with this exception: an individual on the fast side of the tone scale below 2.0 generally talks too much, and the individual on the slow side of the tone scale below 2.0 won’t talk. So you get “over” action on one side and “under” action on the other side. But that “over” action is really over.

So naturally the shellfish says, “There is the new post of command.” But it still has the old post of command. You start carving up animals and you will find these command posts. You start carving up preclears and you will find them too!

Now, when you look at how far you have to go to get up to 40.0, it means just that; it can go up that high. It may be that the human organism actually levels out and has a tolerance band which is really as good as that. And maybe you would move on up into pure theta of some sort, so that you would be into the field of motion on the other side of a static which we are considering the point of origin at this time.

It is very interesting that the organism postulates, evidently, at that point, the fact that it needs two command posts. Maybe it starts with one, but it will wind up with two. The bivalve system is worked out of command posts. Why? The counter-effort which was tough now is operating on an old command post, so there are two of them. Then it goes on, gets washed ashore in the surf and gets a facsimile of being smashed up in the surf, gets washed ashore in the surf and gets a facsimile of being smashed up in the surf, has a facsimile of animals trying to get at it, has a facsimile of something or other happening so it has to hold itself shut and open itself up, and it is really in a mess because this is the most static form of life. You can run this out of preclears; you will find them in it. Don’t tell them, just run them for a while. You start running those new centers of effort — the roof of your mouth, the bottom of your mouth, and your jaw formation — and your preclears are right there in them.

So, both the “over” and “under” manifestations are aberrative. And you can look at it on the face of the tone scale.

The dentist comes along and he starts to chew you up and open your jaws and close your jaws without your will: that is the animals getting it, that is the surf busting it up and so forth. And the dentist will restimulate these old centers of effort. You can run them out if you want to — it will scare the preclear to death, too. You will find him running sonic on surf and all sorts of interesting things. The theta facsimiles are there, and there sure are plenty of them.

An individual is pretty badly off until he gets up to 3.0; he is very badly off till he gets to

It is quite common to find preclears with lots of strange jaw somatics. Of course, “everybody knows” that if a person has a jaw somatic (a theta facsimile influencing him with this effort), the thing to do is to have a tooth pulled.

3.0. It is hard to conceive how much better off he can get, so you can carry it from 3.0 to

Actually, what happens when you have a tooth pulled? It is the easiest and simplest method known to establish a new counter-effort, which will give an epicenter effect that will move the preclear out of contact with the theta facsimiles which were influencing him. You run people through dental operations and you will find that the jerk of the pulling of the tooth will give him a new epicenter. This puts him out of contact with the old pain area. So “obviously” pulling the tooth was what fixed it up. And it was “obviously” the tooth.

4.0 as a desirable band. But that doesn’t mean that 4.0 is the lowest band of desirability. It means that 4.0 is the lowest band of desirability which would be within the compass of understanding of Homo Sapiens. He might get frightened at anything above 4.0 and think, in his slowed or accelerated state, that it is too much motion, too much action, too much harmony — too much something.

Now, a tooth will get a hole in it or something of the sort and restimulate one of these old epicenters, and the next thing you know, the toothache goes clear around the jaw on the fifth nerve channel.

As a consequence, you can talk to people about the tolerance band for an aberree. He can see somebody being excited about some idea like haying a new car; he can understand that. It lies in that tolerance band — ”acquisition of MEST.” That is a very “MESTy” object, an automobile — he can understand that fine. He can get up to the point where he will understand somebody going out and taking up a collection for the YMCA, but he starts to slack off right about there. If you go any further than that on a dynamic outward thrust, he starts to get suspicious and he will start to fight. If you suddenly tell him that you have a small crew, and you aren’t going to get anything for it, but you think that there are a lot of things in the human race which could be catalyzed, sped up, and that you are seriously thinking of throwing this or that force into action and you think this is a desirable thing, then his tenuous grip upon his own organism, the number of times he has been stopped and compelled forward against his will, will multiply into a quiver of fear.

Every one of these epicenters starts to get a nerve system mixed up with it. If you look over the brain connections which are postulated to exist in the motor switchboard of the mind, you will find that the tongue and the hand are terribly exaggerated. It is odd that the tongue would be, isn’t it? That doesn’t make sense for this generation, but it does for this system.

You say, “Now look, let’s get together a little organization to stop this war between the United States and Russia,” and people look at you and say, “Well, that couldn’t possibly be done.” It is out of their reference of motion.

Now, where is your new center of effort? This is all you have to keep asking of the preclear — the new counter-efforts that he is trying to face and his efforts against these counter-efforts.

Actually, the only way you possibly could stop a war between the United States and Russia would be to make a postulate along the line of “Let’s just get in there and stop it,” and then apply enough motion to the subject of war and pull back enough motion on the subject of war — treating particularly the emanation points of war. You would get a collapse of the subject of war. You would stall it or speed it to death as a subject. This can be done.

The new counter-effort is all around this shell perimeter, all the way around it, and that is going to form up a new circle of counter-effort. And as that body evolves it will take up new command posts on this perimeter and start to grow in various ways. It will grow legs and get up on the beach and become a crab or something of the sort.

I was always intrigued at the fact that individuals almost always will overlook overselling as one of the highest levels of defeat that you could hand out to a company. I remember a German agent down in Santo Domingo — poor fellow. He was in there spreading around Nazi propaganda and everybody was very happy and cheerful about reading this Nazi propaganda. Then, all of a sudden, duplicate folders just exactly like he was issuing started to appear in his immediate periphery, and they oversold Nazism just that much. And the Latins got mad at him and killed him.

As you trace it up, though, you find a cycle in operation in the physical organism — a cycle of obedience and suppression. In order for the new counter-effort to become the new center of control, the old center of control had to go into apathy. It did that through successive deaths caused by the counter-effort forcing itself on there. Then the new center developed; next life, the old center really obeys that new center, physically. You get obedience of the mechanism; it is a forced MEST obedience, MEST-force obedience.

So, there is this “over” and “under” proposition of speed. It also depends on what you are addressing the speed to. You can take a person on a very low band of the tone scale on the too-much-motion side, feed a couple more dynes of energy to his speed, and he will collapse on you. You can take a person on the other side on the same level of the scale, just take one one-thousandth of a dyne of energy off him, and he will collapse. He can’t run any slower, and this other fellow can’t run any faster. The fellow on one side gets in conflict with the fellow on the other side and they shoot each other to pieces — and you have a government!

As you go on up the line — no matter what the complexities are — you get these counter- efforts hitting the old self-determinism one right after the other, right through to present time. The old self-determinism gets beaten into apathy by deaths caused by these counter- efforts. And then finally the body will overcome this, the theta facsimiles will combine, and it will build a mechanism to fit the new counter-effort.

The point is that you don’t try to take a fellow on the too-much-motion side and make him slow down, because the reason he is traveling at that speed is he has to maintain that velocity to stay out of his own stops. The second you say “Slow down,” he will speed up — he has got to. And this is the reverse character of the tone scale. You notice with people low on the tone scale, when you say “Be good” they are bad, when you say “Be serious” they laugh; if they think they are telling the truth they are lying, and vice versa. This is what happens on that lower band.

As a matter of fact, don’t be surprised at almost any evolutionary step you find along the line. It is remarkable that preclears when you start running them and they start describing themselves, seem to show that some of the data collected by Darwin is absolutely correct. The preclear doesn’t have to know about it; he tells you what kind of shapes he is in. But you watch the preclear: He hits a death and — bang! — he is out of valence. All the way down the track he keeps going out of valence at every death. But it is out of valence into the new counter-effort. So you can keep picking this up and running this back. If you start back on the track with Effort Processing, he will be out of valence and disagreeing with the body, then into valence and disagreeing with the counter-effort and up the line from apathy, and you will wake that center up. Then you will go down and you will be waking up the next center, and you just keep on going down and knocking out a facsimile and waking up the next one and the next one and so on. If you start tracing back on Effort Processing, I don’t care how many prayers you pray, you are not going to be able to stop the preclear from going back into this stuff. He will arrive there willy-nilly.

You tell this person who is going too slow to speed up, and what are you? You are a counter-effort which is doing just exactly what all the counter efforts are doing against him — trying to speed him up. And that is the one thing he mustn’t do, because the next instant of wherever he is stuck, in however many other places he is stuck, contains death or pain, so he can’t speed up. You might as well go out and plead with the waves to stop, because if he is at all sane he isn’t going to listen to you. He had sure better not listen to you — unless you can give him processing.

How far back it is desirable to go is a question that has not been particularly codified. I know that the photon converter is not reducible. That is a funny statement to make, isn’t it? But somebody may be able to come along and reduce it; I hope somebody does. There must be some trick of reducing it, maybe unburdening it and reducing it in some fashion or other.

That is something else. You give a person processing, whether he is on the too-much- motion or the too-little-motion band, and he will start to maintain an optimum motion.

It is also interesting that the photon converter’s self-determinism is really self-determinism. It wants nothing to do with anybody. That is to say, it wants no ARC or anything, because it is a static. It is a static among statics. The second you get back into the static, you find that its effort is static. But there should be some way to do something about it. I think that is the moment, if you unburden the track above it, when the preclear goes pow! and disappears. So let’s work on that and find out — all in the name of science.

Axiom 22: Theta and thought are similar orders of energy.

So, there is the mechanism of valences and self-determinism. Please get that cycle down pat. You will see that cycle in action and you will watch it behaving. You should try to run out the incidents you contact just like you used to try to run out engrams.

This simply says theta, thought and knowledge, theta facsimiles and so forth are all of a similar order of “energy.” The reason I am using energy through here is so that it will be comprehensible to people, without talking about cause. Actually, theta, thought and so forth are statics. But a thought becomes action the second it gets mixed up with motion, so you have to have an interplay of understanding on the subject of thought to have any movement in the organism. In other words, thought itself is static, but it is full of postulates of the physical universe which are themselves in motion. So thought appears to be in motion because it contains facsimiles of motion.

If a preclear really gets into valence on some of these earlier forms, however — if he is in valence and running them — you will find them appertaining to some particular portion of his anatomy. You will find him operating out of the old control center, because the engram was received by the old control center. And that is what you have to run out. He will be very curious to have somatics turning on elsewhere when he is obviously in this old control center and the other things didn’t exist. That is fine, but there are sure a lot of locks on top of something as early as a piece of kelp. And running this will turn on locks, because all cells are the great-great-great-great-great-great — and so on — descendants of these early forms.

Now, the organism is capable — being already possessed of many of the forces of the physical universe — of reaching out and taking these theta facsimiles and laying them down across actual motion and causing that physical-universe motion to take form and shape. Do you see how this is? Thought itself is not in motion, but thought can be applied to the physical universe, which then goes into motion.

Evidently, a theta line keeps right up with the genetic line, but it follows through in extremes. Theta lines intertwine with these genetic lines, but they track their own genetic lines very nicely. This doesn’t particularly upset people, not when they watch it work.

We could figure out what we are going to be doing eight months from now, and between now and then we could actually lay thought all along the time track clear up to eight months. This would not be any trouble. Thought hasn’t got any time in it; you can put it up as far forward as you want to. So you could lay thought along eight months and the only thing you would have to do is sit back and wait for MEST time to catch up with it so these thoughts could go into action. But they wouldn’t go into action until time came along.

I am not going to spread this around particularly, merely because most people haven’t got much reserve about understanding it, and they certainly wouldn’t be good enough auditors to find the effect, when they haven’t even been able to locate some of the most obvious phenomena that exist. How anybody could possibly miss a phenomenon as marked as returning, 1 I don’t know. That is so elementary — how could they miss return? How could they miss the significance of recalls? These things have been studied exhaustively.

The thought is static, but the second that the static can impinge upon the physical-universe motion, physical action can take place. And only then does understanding take place.

There is another aspect of this which you should know. We start with self-determinism, the current effort which is being self-determinism in the organism, operating from the control center of the body. Then there is the switchboard — you might say the motor switchboard of the body.

Understanding, then, is something which is in motion. It has action. The second it is codified into a belief, it is a static.

By the way, we are into structure now in Dianetics. We are deep into structure. We can de- structure more structure that has been postulated in the past than you can shake a stick at. For instance, the way they “cure” a toothache is just to move the fellow’s epicenter over so he can’t feel it. And his teeth keep on decaying and now he has another reason for his teeth to decay, and they all say, “Well, that’s the way it does.” The only way they know to help somebody out is kill them — introduce a new static.

Axiom 23: All thought is concerned with motion.

Now, waves are running through this switchboard — theta impulses translating into MEST impulses. The theta facsimile is translating into the MEST-impulse motion. This is the center of operating motion, and you can find such a center in the body; it operates the center nerve control system. Then there is the motor strip, which has been sketched out in the brain.

Axiom 24: The establishment of an optimum motion is the basic goal of reason.

It is very important for you to know that a person is as self-determined as his own theta facsimiles of his self-determinism are in control of his motor strip, and he is as aberrated and as interrupted as his motor strip is controlled by the environment. Does the environment control this strip or does “I” control the strip?

The consideration of walking up to the door, the little child daydreaming and so on — all of these things are in the direction of doing things with MEST. They will be lined up with knocking out things which the organism considers contra survival and with putting into existence things which the organism considers prosurvival. And if you do this well, and if you juggle well the theta facsimiles of the past data which you have and use that to manufacture other theta facsimiles in the form of imagination, then you have all the operation of reason there is, evidently.

A psychotic’s motor strip is controlled 100% percent by the environment and other organisms in the environ, if he is really in bad shape. And when the psychotic is no longer in motion, the physical universe is in control of the motor strip and that is all there is. There is no theta there, except that which is stored and inoperative and is only operating on the cells. That gets stored in the body and they have to bury it. And you will recover this by scanning 150 years out of a preclear!

The odd part of it is, though, that this reason does not normally seem to include anything like extrasensory perception, intuition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and so on, and yet these things seem to be in existence.

You want to remember this principle; this is an important principle because it will resolve for you a lot of cases, and it will let you extrapolate new techniques: Self-determinism is the effort of one’s running one’s own switchboard. Restimulation is the willingness of one’s self-determined effort to hand over the control of the switchboard to the environment.

What are these things? They are evidently theta interactions of some kind. You can take a causative agent, a static such as theta, and you can juggle that thing so many ways that I am surprised the boys haven’t found more than merely clairvoyance, clairaudience, intuition and so forth. It looks like they are playing in the bush league. If Rhinel started figuring with theta as an all-pervasive (since it has no space) point of causation, and started figuring out what could be done with that, he would really be going somewhere.

Therefore, if you take a psychotic and give him orders, you are just introducing more statics because you are not touching “I.” All you are doing is operating the switchboard. And you can make him do anything you want to; you can hypnotize him or anything.

Why worry about whether or not clairvoyance exists and so on? Theta is probably laying up the track and down the track and all over the place. It is all over the place because it is no place. We should be able to figure out more manifestations for it. For instance, because theta is a point which doesn’t have any time or space, you don’t get a collision of ideas. An idea can be originated in one place at the same time it is originated another place; the theta facsimile congeals simultaneously in two places on the face of the earth, but actually in one place. This is very easy to understand. Bessemer, in England, invented the process of making steel practically the same day that Kelly, in Kentucky, invented the same process of making steel.

What you are trying to do is hand his self-determinism back to him. That is what you are trying to do. To do that, you go into communication with him any way that you possibly can, and you establish affinity and agreement with him by mimicry or whatever means.

We got to rolling on these axioms and the boys were experimenting down here at the Foundation; I would come down and I would say, “You know, we could do such-and- such,” and they would say, “Yes, we have been doing that for twenty-four hours.” This is traceable to reason. Here is the tool of reason — extrapolation .

One of the means of going into communication is, of course, by tactile communication. As a matter of fact, you can hit old epicenters all over the body: the cords in the back of the neck, all up and down the spine, in the elbows, in the tips of the fingers — all over the shop. You will find proceeding from each one either muscular tension or too great a laxity, one or the other. You will find areas on a preclear’s body where you can go into almost direct contact with some old epicenter and wake it up. But all you are doing, remember, is establishing communication. You can’t talk to him but you can hit through the motor strip and the old epicenters.

But you can do some very fascinating things in this field by just looking at someone else’s theta facsimiles. He has a flock of theta facsimiles and you have the ability to look at theta facsimiles, so why can’t you see his theta facsimiles too? Actually it is very simple.

This is not chiropractic or anything of the sort, but there was more to chiropractic and osteopathy and Swedish massage than one, at first glance, would suppose. They do produce results; they have produced results. They best produce the results when they can knock out of restimulation an old epicenter; because, remember, the human being does not restimulate all in one piece, he restimulates selectively, and the old epicenters are still in control of various portions of the body. Although they were put into a lower echelon of control by being knocked into apathy, when they are restimulated into apathy, that portion of the body gets sick. The body has learned to work together with ARC, although it was knocked together with brute force.

I had an FBI agent going around in a squirrel track one day. He was at a party and I was telling fortunes.

Of course, you realize that by picking up old epicenters and influencing these old epicenters, you are actually going to make it difficult for a person to evolve into a policeman or something of the sort. You are actually interrupting an evolution-chain mechanism when you are doing this. But that is for one generation.

It is very easy to tell fortunes. All you do is get a set of fortune telling cards and you just read off to the person whose fortune you are telling exactly the way you deal off fortunes. There is a book on the subject and it’s all according to the book, so you just deal them all off.

So remember this principle of restimulation. The person goes out and looks at the street, at cars and so forth, and he gets short-circuited. But the self-determinism, the control center, has consented to that short circuit! “I” in each case has consented to the short circuit taking place with the environment.

Of course, you don’t want to spook the individual. Let’s say you are sitting in front of him for about twenty minutes dealing these cards and saying, “And there’s a dark-haired man going to come into your life, and I see here that you’re going on a trip....”

You want to pick up hypnosis? No, don’t run hypnosis ad nauseam, ad infinitum; just run the times when the fellow agreed to be hypnotized — when his self-determinism stepped in and said, “Okay environment, there you are.” Only the person’s self-determinism could hand out the control of this motor strip to the environ. The effort of self-determinism says to the environment, “Go ahead, handle my motors.” The same mechanism, self determinism, says, “All right, I can’t stand the pain, I can’t do this and that. Go ahead, Papa, I’ll obey you.”

He says, “It’s to my uncle’s house, out on a farm.”

Then Papa is monitoring this fellow’s switchboard — “Run here, run there, do this, do that, stand on your head.” There he goes.

And all you have to say, of course, is “I see wide, spacious countryside.”

There is something else equally interesting: When the organism goes unconscious in one position and wakes up in another position, its switchboard points and tabs are out of kilter. The grogginess resulting in the return of consciousness is simply “I” trying to find his own switchboard tabs through these epicenters, through a new epicenter and so on — they have been all messed up.

“Oh yes, my uncle’s house.” “Thank you.”

All you would have to do to drive a dog crazy is put him to sleep, give him a kick in the slats, move his joint positions all in different ways, take him a room away and stand him on his head. When he woke up, he would be crazy as a coot. That would just be treating him like people treat human beings.

You just read these high-level generalities, deal them off, and this fellow will spark up. He is concentrating on what you are concentrating on. At the end of twenty minutes, if you can’t keep on looking at the cards and tell him age, name, serial number and the rest of it, you ought to quit, because you have invited this person’s interest to an enormous extent. His interest is just pouring at you and if you can’t read what is in the interest, you ought to quit.

This mechanism, then, is something that you should know about. And you should also know this, as auditors, about this switchboard: A fellow gets an epicenter of some sort — he is running down the street, he falls, he hits and crashes. The sidewalk is now the counter- effort and it jams part of the board. The person now feels rather uncertain about running down the street. If someone comes along and tells him “You poor little boy, here is a quarter. I’m sorry you fell down. You want to be careful running down the street,” and if this little boy is fool enough to accept the quarter, he has agreed to hook that in solidly.

It is just exactly as if you as an individual had interchanged the ability with him to read theta facsimiles. If you look into the basic construction of the brain, I think you will see exactly why this is so simple. There is nothing much to it. As a matter of fact, you can lay out the rules by which you make it possible to read somebody else’s mind. You can actually look at him and say, “Well, you recently were out on a farm. You were trying to buy this farm, and it had a nice big back pasture. And there were some horses down in the corner of the field, but there was a train that went by and your wife didn’t like the train.”

Mama says, “You mustn’t run that fast, you’ll fall, you will hurt yourself,” and so forth. At the moment he agrees, that will stay solid. But if “I” says “Get in there and repeat the effort: run down the street, run down the street, run down the street; this is present time, go ahead and run. So you busted your nose, go on and run. So you crashed the plane, go on and fly tomorrow. So you had an automobile wreck, go on and drive!” — if “I” does that — this counter-effort unhooks from the board.

You just get an impression of the kind of life the fellow is leading, so you just tell him about it — nothing very fancy, just reading present-time stuff — and you let him extrapolate the future for himself. You can read what he is extrapolating the future on and then you tell him this. It is simple.

You mustn’t overlook that as a therapy, because that is essentially what you are doing. You are making the guy fall and bust his nose on the sidewalk and then fall and bust his nose on the sidewalk again until the motor switchboard can no longer be influenced by busting one’s nose on the sidewalk. But you are doing something more than that: you are taking the punch, the actual punch, out of the statics of theta facsimiles.

This FBI agent in Washington got into this because he stood back and watched other people’s fortunes being told, over and over, and he finally got to the point where he had to have his fortune told. So I told his fortune.

This is a therapy, and don’t neglect it as a therapy. If somebody says “I can’t walk; I hurt my leg in the war and I can’t walk anymore,” you would be very much out of order to go in and say “Well, you’ve got to walk,” because you would be just more environment taking over from “I.” What you want to do is find out when he agreed not to walk. At that moment you can cut loose the bar to the switchboard. But don’t expect him, necessarily, to walk in the next five minutes, because he won’t. What he will do is be uncertain about it for a short time until he works those centers out. This is a simple physiological arrangement.

The next time I saw him he was so badly off on this subject that I helped him out. I read his fortune face down for him without looking at the cards, and then called off all the cards and read them perfectly, without missing a single lick, through the whole deck of cards. I never looked at them. Then I handed them to him and showed him that it was a deck of readers — they were marked cards. This was well within his frame of understanding and after that he was happy. It never occurred to him that this trick had nothing whatsoever to do with the trick which was being pulled off the former time when I read his fortune; he just invalidated both of them. Of course, that man never thought in identities!

Axiom 25: The basic purpose of reason is the calculation or estimation of effort.

As already mentioned, you find that effort is the middle of all of this — it is motion, force with direction — and you as a computing machine keep computing these efforts. You have to make innumerable computations, but you are so used to making them that you don’t quite realize you are doing so. That is why when you go out and ask a golfer how he hits the ball to get those beautiful fairway-long drives, it gives him a jolt. All of a sudden, you have pried into his automatic effort postulator. It is all figured out and postulated and it is in beautiful condition — he hasn’t examined it for years — and it is in an automatic-response category, all laid aside on the shelf, and you just tell him, “Take a look at that.” The fellow sees nothing wrong with taking a look at it, but the second he looks at it he just throws a new scanner beam into it, so to speak, and all of a sudden his theta facsimiles get all stirred up on the subject, and he doesn’t know which hand goes on which side or whether he is supposed to put the golf ball in his bag or the hole.

You can actually throw a person this way if he is to any degree concentrated unknowingly upon a lot of counter-efforts. You couldn’t do this to an individual who was not opposing invisible counter-efforts. You have asked this man to shift his attention, and his attention is in balance to take care of the physical universe around him. The second you take off one beam it throws out the balance. It actually isn’t so much that it messes up theta facsimiles as it is that it lets a counter-effort in on him.

You can do the same trick by asking him to pay attention to his left foot and then pay attention to his right foot. The next thing you know, he has a somatic or something and then he goes out of coordination. So you infer that the reason he is out of coordination is that you have asked him the question of how he does it. He gets a new datum on this; because he is already upset, he agrees with you, and then he is done for.

This is the way to handle salesmen who are playing golf with- you. But if you are a salesman, this is not the way to handle the person you are playing golf with.

Axiom 26: Thought is accomplished by theta facsimiles of physical universe entities or actions.

A theta facsimile is a still picture which is in motion, without wavelength, which exists everywhere but nowhere, on a film which has never been manufactured and which has never come into existence. It is really a fascinating gimmick, this theta facsimile.

Theta facsimile is a descriptive statement of a phenomenon. The phenomenon demonstrably exists. There are theta facsimiles. They evidently stray in from someplace. Where they are filed, you don’t know. You keep looking in space and time, and theta isn’t in space and time. So they are not filed in space and time, and therefore it kind of looks like they don’t exist — but people do think. The thing is full of paradoxes, but what else is a static but full of paradoxes, since a static is all motions resolved into no motions from which all motions are possible? That is a static. In the science of physics, a true static does not exist. You can look over physics and you won’t find a true static. In Dianetics we have a true static. Man has suddenly decided to brave all of this talk about having to walk wide of delusions, illusions and so forth, and just say, “All right. So it’s zero.” And out of this answer of zero, we are getting an enormous number of answers. These are useful answers. People are getting well, they feel better and so forth.

That would be a true static, even in physics, but physics doesn’t have a true static. Every static they have postulates motion, whereas this static can exist without any motion.

A theta facsimile could best be imagined, however, as having time and space, since every theta facsimile contains a facsimile of time and space as well as of motion and entities. It is a full picture. What it is impinged upon we do not know, but what it looks like we certainly know. If we can remember anything, it is by a thought facsimile. However they are stored doesn’t matter; you can get these things back. They are filed in relationship to time because they all contain time.

You take a picture of something which includes time, and it now appears to include time. But it doesn’t include any time — otherwise, you could never go back on the time track. However, you get the feeling that you can go back on the time track, so it includes the picture of time, which you use. That is a theta facsimile.

Don’t run off the rails as far as I have from time to time when I have been pushed by biology and the rest of the boys, and say memory is in the cells. It is not in the cells. Cells are not that big. There are a lot of other reasons why theta facsimiles aren’t in the cells. One of the best reasons for saying they aren’t stored in the cells is that if you keep your eyes open you can see a theta facsimile causing distortion of the body without a muscular response. This is a very fascinating thing.

This theory of theta facsimiles explains why an individual can go down the time track, come back up and be tired out, and then when you have run him through another incident he is fresh. It is quite remarkable. I have almost caused a doctor to blow his stack on several occasions just by taking a preclear down the time track, turning his temperature on to 101 degrees Fahrenheit, making him look haggard, old, exhausted, worn, torn to pieces, beaten up, and making him turn red and get measles spots.

The doctor said, “He’s sick!”

“That’s fine. Now, let’s run through this incident four or five more times. Now let’s run through several pleasure moments as we come on up to present time.” No spots, normal temperature and so forth, just like that.

A theta facsimile evidently operates on the level of atomic and molecular activity. A theta facsimile evidently can take atomic and molecular particles and align them or misalign them, form them or re-form them.

But the particle has to be there for the theta facsimile to operate on. If it isn’t there, the theta facsimile will not exhaust across it. If you are really running out an engram full tilt with a preclear. you had certainly better put enough stuff in the body to get aligned with the engram. You just put in enough random odds and ends and the theta facsimile can then twist this stuff around all it wants to, and you get boil-off and the individual can go ahead with it. Whereas, if the theta facsimile hits him when he doesn’t have enough materiel to move around, it will start throwing out of alignment this paucity of materiel in his system and he will get pretty badly off.

A psychotic will spin. There is a borderline across which he doesn’t have enough atoms and molecules for a theta facsimile to work on. So, the theta facsimile moves across these, takes the existing molecules, throws them all out of alignment, and the psychotic spins. Now you start feeding him a lot of protein and vitamins and minerals and so forth and stuff him full, and all of a sudden he stops spinning. A theta facsimile can twist those around now, if you have really got one in tough.

It is fascinating that a theta facsimile does not have size. This would follow, of course, because it doesn’t exist in space and time. It doesn’t have size.

Have you ever run a sperm sequence? It doesn’t have any energy in it either but it has all the energy there is in it. Have you ever seen anybody lying on the couch in the sperm sequence, and seen his feet start to swing sideways in an impossible motion? He says, “What am I doing?” The energy which is generating that was of the magnitude necessary to wiggle the tail of something which is only visible in a microscope. And yet this fellow is wiggling his whole body on this tiny, tiny amount of energy.

You could say it is all done by a system of triggers — a central trigger system in the mind which aligns everything and makes the body work this way all the way down to its extremities, and therefore you would only need the stimulus of this little trigger, and that could be stored as an energy. That is something like saying, “Well, it’s God’s fault,” because you get up to the point of this little trigger and you have to have a theta facsimile manipulating the trigger.

You start running somebody through a prenatal and he says, “I don’t know why it is, but I’ve got to curl up,” and he promptly curls up, and he really curls up tight! Try and get a preclear to straighten out when he is in the middle of a prenatal sometime: he is in the grip of something which is catalyzing his own energy levels.

It is a wonderful piece of stuff, a theta facsimile. It has motion in it, but it doesn’t exist; it has wavelength but no weight, yet it doesn’t have wavelength because it hasn’t got any space. It is truly a static which can take the form of any motion, but it is not the motion although it can take its form.

I am telling you this so that you can tell a preclear every once in a while and explain it to him. You can even demonstrate it to him: Make him run down the track and change a piece of MEST while he is back there. You say, “Go back on the time track; you’re driving your car in my driveway. Now, back it out again and park it in front of the house. Come up to present time.” When you have gotten him up to present time you say, “It’s still in the driveway.”

“Yes, so it is.”

“Therefore, you must have been running through a series of pictures of running it in.” “Of course I was.”

“Well, how come those pictures are in present time when the MEST isn’t in present time? There couldn’t have been any time in those pictures then, could there? But there must have been time in the pictures, because you went back in time.”

And you can say, “Now you see, this stuff isn’t inside your body and it really isn’t inside your head. Everybody has been telling you all your life it’s inside your head. It couldn’t possibly be; it’s exterior someplace and all you’ve got to do is throw it all away and you will be well.”

So that was Axiom 26: Thought is accomplished by theta facsimiles of physical-universe entities or actions.

Axiom 27: Theta is satisfied only with harmonious action or optimum motion, and rejects or destroys action or motion above or below its tolerance band.

This is very simple. We have already covered that in other forms. Axiom 28: The mind is concerned wholly with an estimation of effort.

Definition: Mind is the theta command post of any organism or organisms.

Axiom 29: The basic errors of reason are failure to differentiate amongst matter, energy, space and time.

That axiom might possibly be shifted to read, The basic error of reason is failure to estimate effort. That is the same thing, because a failure in differentiation amongst space and time and so forth is actually a failure to estimate effort. A failure to differentiate is a failure to estimate.

Axiom 30: Rightness is proper calculation of effort. Axiom 31: Wrongness is always miscalculation of effort. Axiom 32: Theta can exert itself directly or extensionally.

Now, let me go over that for a moment, because we will need it in the second part of this lecture. Theta can say (as a postulate out of the old postulates), “I am going to lift my hand,” and the fellow lifts his hand. Or theta can say, “In two seconds I’m going to lift my hand — one and two.” Or it can say, “Sometime in the future, I’m going to lift my hand.” That is extrapolating action against time. It can do the same thing with any motion or structure. It says, “Sometime in the future, I am going to build a new table.”

The organism observes that when it postulates a physical action now, action takes place. And it is actually handling an organism action outside the command post, so it says, “This can continue to exist.” It will accept and deliver extensional action commands. It will accept symbolism of action. It will tell another organism to move and that other organism will move. And because the other organism tells it to move, it will move.

But all of these things are based upon a former action. An action has to exist before theta can pretend to extend an action. And in this wise, theta can say, “Well, I can extend this thought, actually, to conquer MEST — just extend the thought itself, in its pure state. I don’t have to figure out anything about the thought. I don’t have to reason or calculate in other ways. In other words, I just extend a pure thought toward some portion of the physical universe and it changes matter, energy, space or time. It will change if I do that.” It says this.

Obviously, this is an extrapolation which is possible from observing that when one says to his hand to move, his hand moves. Then he says, “There isn’t any reason why I have to be hooked up to this thing. Why can’t I just take pure theta and look at something and say ‘Boom’ and have it move? Why can’t I do that?”

Faith will move mountains. Faith is a static of pure theta. Why can’t we direct this? I do not know that we can or cannot. I merely know that it is extrapolatable .

The body figures out this can happen and it gets so confident about this, it gets so cocky about this — it says, “I’m going to move my hand,” and the hand moves. Or it says, “Bowser, lie down.” That is interesting; though there is no great energy in the throat, Bowser lies down. The fellow really starts to feel pretty good. He is really causing motion just with his voice.

That is one of the most beautiful tricks a man has: causing motion with his voice. He thinks about a motion, expresses it in some way, and it happens.

But animals do the same thing. An orangutan swings out of the trees near a bunch of little monkeys running by; the orangutan says “Hhrooff!” and all the monkeys go zing! He causes motion. Or an owl hovers over a mouse runway and screams most hideously, and the mice all congeal and then scamper. The owl starts or stops motion. And if the owl comes down and screams loud enough over the top of a rabbit, the rabbit will stop running and the owl can pick him up. By symbolizing an action, then, he is causing the action to take place. That is very, very neat.

That is language. You codify something, the action takes place. It is just hocus-pocus.

The body has experienced the fact that it can postulate something now, and it can postulate it in the future. So why can’t it postulate it extensionally? And it does. Because it can do this, it knows that other things can do this, and then it becomes convinced that others can do this.

Little Willie runs in and he says, “Mama, can I have — ”

“Shut up! “ And he says to himself, “Look at that. Her voice stopped me.” He does not know that two years before, when he was smaller, every time he started to run into the house with muddy feet or something like that he got whacked across the backside. What he is running into is the spankings and now it looks like he is running into words. He thinks, then, that words stop him. But they don’t! Words don’t stop him, but the physical action did.

Force can then be postulated by theta, particularly — and I am afraid, on lower levels of the tone scale, only — when the entity receiving the postulate of some other theta entity has first been handled by physical-universe force. Physical-universe force handles the organism, and it can thereafter be handled by a symbolism of that physical-universe force.

If you take the language of animals apart, you will find that animals frighten each other by approximations of animals that eat them. All sorts of various symbolization’s and camouflages and mock-ups take place in the animal kingdom on this line. In man, we have the beautiful extrapolation of language. It is really a very nice magical trick.

This is extensional force. Let’s say we have an organism — a dog — and we say “Sit!” and force him to sit. All we have to do after a while is say “Sit” and he gets the force, because the counter-effort is still there. Theta does not move; the counter-effort is still paused there. So if you want the counter effort to be active, you just give some symbol inside the counter-effort or some actual content of the counter-effort such as a sound, and you will get action, because when you start to let loose the counter-effort the organism will dodge the existing counter-effort. Theta-wise, the counter-effort is still in existence. That is language.

The organism, however, is so many, many generations old and has survived through so very much in the way of experience that its genetic endowment is very heavy. It has a lot of endowment, a lot of information in the past, in force terms. Therefore individuals can use these old forces to bring about new actions on the part of organisms in their vicinity, through this theta mechanism. That is language and that is theta extending itself. It says “Move,” without pushing, and it gets motion.

Magicians capitalize on this. They stand on the stage and they have a hat and they say, “Hocus-pocus, abracadabra.”

By the way, those things are wonderfully old. I talked to a stage magician one day, and I asked him a few basic questions about real magic. This fellow was a good magician, but he was just going “Huh?” He didn’t know what the score was; he didn’t know where he had gotten his wand or why he used a hat, he didn’t know why he had a rabbit, he didn’t know the basic laws of magic or anything of the sort. He was just creating illusions.

The whole field of magic degenerated; it was a secret cult once. It was hiding a lot of axioms about the physical universe. Amongst those axioms was the idea of “cause and effect, but do not become the effect of your own cause.” People become awed by your postulation of a cause and their observation of an effect which apparently is not accomplished by physical means. If you separate physical means out as the intermediate step, everybody becomes overawed and amazed. They are watching what in essence is the operation of God: static without motion causes effect.

So the magicians prey upon this. It is a wonderful bit of business. The symbolism’s contained in magic are all wrapped around this.

This material, by the way, has been coming down the time track now for about two thousand years. It is very, very old.