This is December the 16th, the first lecture of the day.

And this is evening lecture of December the 16th.

And today we're going to take up, on theory, assignment of cause. And I want you hereinafter as aforestated, whereas and wherein (we've just had an HAS board meeting) as in hereinafter and aforestated, pursuant to any condemnations, to recognize that you have something by which you can evaluate a technique without coming around and asking me about it. And this we will call assignment of cause.

This evening we're going to take up the facsimile, its origin and behavior, and some more about this communication line. Actually, those two things should be in reverse, since first we will talk about C and E and the communication line.

A technique is as good as it does not assign cause too thoroughly to something other than the thetan. Now, you understand that just the principle of assignment of cause itself will pull somebody, now and then, out of the soup. But every time he assigns cause other than himself, he goes into a little bit less of a self-determined condition. You see this?

First thing I'm going to give you is something which is the overt act-motivator sequence, where you will see very definitely that theory is practice, but in this case theory and practice, while they make a technique, create too much of a severity for use.

Now, because he's done this all the way back on the track — he's assigned cause and assigned cause and assigned cause — we have a problem which is undone by permitting him to assign cause lesserly. I hope that's comprehensible, but it's — see, we have then, we let him assign cause to — on a big scale basis, and then we slow that down, we get them to assign cause a little less exteriorly and a little less exteriorly and a little less exteriorly until he's cause. And that's how we get him back into a state of responsibility.

Now, I gave you, a few lectures ago, the graph there of C to E, cause to effect, the gradient — not a gradient, but just that communication line. Person is at C, and then puts his communication at E. We depend for the receipt at E, effect, of a duplicate of what has been put out at C. A good, reliable communication system is one which receives at E, that which was put in at C.

Now, you understand that a person will continue to assign cause as long as he cannot himself create. He'll assign cause elsewhere so long as he can't create. So long as he remains convinced that he can't create, then his assignment of cause goes elsewhere.

Well, this is source and it's a lot of other things, and you could go on talking about theory here for some time. This is also duplication, I point out. And so we've tied cause and effect to duplication and a communication line, and why people don't receive well because they're trying not to be a duplicate of the cause and so on.

The big trick in the whole universe is leading people to assign cause. Now, we — they have assigned cause first on a good basis, and then they assign it on a bad basis. They will assign cause exterior to themselves for good effects; they say, "Well, so-and-so did that and that was a real good effect and so on."

Well, now let's put in the overt act-motivator sequence into this, and the first part of this is an exercise which is for investigation only. It's not a process.

Well, this gets them into the groove of assigning cause. And now, when they have hit that groove, they plow in a little deeper and they start assigning bad cause exterior to themselves. And then they assign good cause and bad cause, and they assign it more broad and more broad and more broadly, until at last, God has created all space, completely independent of anything anybody else had to say about it, and nobody has any part or parcel in it, and the society itself is cause. And this is cause and that is cause and something else is cause. And the preclear's not cause, but unfortunately at the time he assumes that he's not cause he's unable to generate any energy of any kind. And he just bogs right there and that's the end of him practically, for all forceful purposes.

You see, almost anybody can create an effect with Scientology, but to create a beneficial effect is something else. You'll find people running around very often saying, "I've just invented a new technique." Well, they don't know any of the old ones, much less invented a new one, and then they suddenly shovel one out which is an incredible piece of stuff in that it produces an effect all right, and bogs the case down with rapidity.

So what is this problem in terms of Dianetics and Scientology? You'll find out the three-year stretch which you can observe, as witnessed by lectures and writings, is a narrowing perimeter of cause, which crossed — just after Science of Survival, probably with AP&A — which crossed the border and took up full responsibility. And for the first time said that self-determinism had a great deal to do with it.

And it's very easy to evaluate a technique — after it's been run for a few minutes and the case doesn't feel better, that isn't the technique to use. I mean, that's — yeah, that's the most elementary sort of thing. Well, cases don't feel better after they've run this one, so I just give you warning on it. It's not a process, this is an investigatory technique.

Narrowing perimeter of cause. The first book, for instance, is — permits people grandly to assign cause to the family and the whole universe and to engrams and everything else, and never even mentions that the person himself might be cause. That book sold a hundred thousand copies. Assignment of cause. Okay.

You just have the preclear mock up a line. And have him have — call one end of it A, and the other end of it B. And then have him put the A end toward him — put this line in front of him and have him — the A end toward him, and the B end away from him.

Now, we notice that we're getting very much better results by bringing up a preclear into a level of cause itself, and we don't have the same public. We've got lots of public. Don't ever think we've got as little public as the medical profession would like you to believe, but — we've got lots and lots of public. The difference is that the public we're getting is now much more the responsible level of the public than the irresponsible level; it's a better public. All right.

Now have him turn the line around so that the A end is away from him and the B end is toward him. Now have him turn the line around so that the A end is toward him and the B end is away from him. In other words, you just make this line swap ends.

Let's look at this, though, in terms of auditing. And we find out that the auditor is there and is a vital part of the session, so that the preclear can assign cause. But he can assign cause now to something very specific — an auditor. See that?

You have him do this for a while, and what do you know — the overt act-motivator sequences, in great number, show up.

Now, he can narrow down the assignment of cause to the auditor, and go through his various drills, and then get up to a point where, in terms of assigning cause to engrams and energy and other things, he can have less and less assigned cause, and be more and more himself cause. And at length, when does he get rid of the auditor? Well, he gets rid of the auditor at the time when he himself is capable of being, to some degree, cause. And the problem was never resolved in earlier work by man.

The reason for this is the most elementary reason you could imagine: He has been at A as cause, and has been unwilling to be at B as effect. And this is the line, and there is a communication line present in the action, and so we have the graph suddenly coming to life and being about the most horrible thing you could do to anybody. That's why I say, I call to your attention, that theory and practice are just that close together. Theory is practice. But this you are trying to solve. But that is too tough.

As early as man had any tales that were going by word of mouth down through the tribes and so on, the assignment of cause was the primary function of the witch doctor, of any medicine man and so on. He existed there to assign cause. And everybody assigned cause to him so that he could assign cause for them. And this cause went out into the base — "Well, the explanation for why the lightning bolt hit your wigwam has to do with . . ."

Now, you take some case that's down there around IV, V, or VI and try to get that case into some sort of a frame of mind that he can be audited to get him over a little fright. Well, the way to not go about it is to run such a technique on him, because immediately all the things of which he's guilty will show up.

And now we go into the gods of the streams and the woods and "The reason why you didn't get any game today in hunting, is because by tripping over that log and not spitting the proper ritualistic spit, you were offensive to the god of that glade. And for a small fee, I can intercede for you and make this straight. Now, this is the spitting ritual, and you must go over there now in the dark of night and if you don't get et, you will come back forgiven." Well — the assignment of cause.

Now, if Freud was ever sincere about wanting to get everybody's guilt out of the road, he certainly had his opportunity — all he had to do was invent Scientology. Because, believe me, this is the last ditch on investigatory procedures. And we find investigatory procedures so arduous, so heroic, that a IV, V, VI is made very ill with this technique — not even vaguely ill, just very ill. And you can get away with it with a I, you can get away with it with a II, but anything works on Is and IIs.

Superstition is a grand, wide assignment of cause. Very indefinite, without anything specific, but tremendous amounts of imagination in it, you see. The fellow, he eats overripened whale down on the beach and he gets a stomachache, and so the god of stomachs, of course, are then cause. And he can give you one of the wildest explanations for this, you see. He says, "Well it's this way: At the confluence of the full moon, I failed to bow thrice to the right and twice to the left, and so one of the minor gods who lives in the upper tumbrels thereby took offense and has been patiently waiting since that time to incorporate my gastritis." And he's got this all worked out. Highly personalized, isn't it? So the fellow really must think of himself as quite important for gods to take such an enormous interest in him personally.

It's — this is just a demonstration technique of the exact theory of cause-effect, communication and duplication and inversion and overt act-motivator sequences and guilt and refusal to receive communications and inability to give communications and compulsive agreement. That's just the complete package there, you see, right there, and it's just this line.

In other words, even — in spite of how bad this looks, it really isn't a negation of being cause. The fellow thinks of himself as quite important; he thinks of himself as able to offend; he's dangerous — he's even dangerous to gods and so on.

Funny part of it is, the line is more important in investigation than the terminals. This is a curious thing. Now, you can audit terminals for quite some time without getting any particular effect, but if you'll just have somebody put up a line and audit the line, you'll get more effect than you wanted. You start putting up the line to somebody who is interiorized and you have him start stringing lines around, and you're liable to encounter the things the GE fondly hopes are his genetic line. He's got them, no kidding. He has these lines, they run in all directions. And if you start disturbing them very much ... I mean, they go out into the past and the future and to Mars and all — they're all — it's just weird. And the next thing you know, you have him wound up in something that resembles taffy. So you start having somebody who's interiorized handle lines too much and push lines around, and they get into a lot of trouble.

Now, when we get into logic, the assignment of cause by means of logic is the most hidden — the most thoroughly hidden and insidious method of not being responsible, known. A fellow can logically work out by gradients — gradient scales — how he himself is not even vaguely responsible in any direction, and so you get an electronic society. It is the electronic society which is in itself the most overridden by religion, since the religion is so, so well worked out. You see that? No amount of logic can replace some good, solid, imaginative superstition. Good old superstition!

Well, that's beside the point. The point here is that we have theory and practice the same, as far as what we're handling. But now if that theory and practice is so close together and this is too tough for 50 percent of the cases that you're going to operate on, why, naturally you have to use a lighter technique — and there are many, many of these.

You say, "Well, not going to have good luck this next month because when I first looked at the full moon — or when I first looked at the new moon, I saw it through the branch of a tree. And the branch of the tree made the sign 'Y' and that means Yamlicla, the Queen of the Underearth and so — she is not in agreement with the projects which come forward — and so we're just not going to be very active this next month." Chief of the tribe telling his tribe this sort of thing, you see — or the witch doctor and so on.

But there — when it comes to space, when it comes to delivery and receipt of messages and it comes to any type of relay system, so on — there is the basic, there is the fundamental. You're operating from that fundamental. That is the fundamental of communication as applied in this universe, and that's it. If you think you're going any further than that, you're going to have to go out of this universe. Well, you can go out of this universe and go further than that, but not in this universe. When I tell you, then, we're there with SOP 8, that is — that was what came into view in the Factors, and that's what starts the Factors. And this investigatory procedure demonstrates it very rapidly.

Well, so they don't do anything very much. And then they're going to have a big battle, and the chief witch doctor shoots down a bird and slits it open and throws its entrails out on a rock and by George! what do you know? You talk about omens — real good! And he tells everybody, pounds the drum and so forth, and he says, "Look at that bird. Look at those guts. Come on, get in there and pitch. We can't lose today!" Swish! They don't!

You take somebody and tell him to change — interchange those A and B points on that line (don't tell him so much A and B points, you just get him reversing that line, one way or the other) and if it's a man, dead women show up and mangled corpses. And then all of a sudden at his end, why, his mangled body, and blown-up countries, and — all these overt act-motivator sequences show up. It's any time that he was unwilling to be an effect, he put on resistance to being an effect, which stopped him halfway down. See, so it locks him up in the middle point of the line which gives him no distance and no space eventually. He's unwilling to be out there, you see, because he's been a bad boy.

Even the Roman Empire ran on augury — as glorious an empire as that.

Now, it's all right for you to feel sympathetic for IV, V, VIs and VIIs. And I'm not putting this in there just to make them feel bad, but the truth of the matter is, is you're looking at a pretty wild boy when you're looking at anybody from IV down. Any gal, any guy — even in this lifetime. Not necessarily bad, you understand, but darned active, real active — pretty ornery about a lot of things. And you're also looking at the more active sort of individual. They have to be fairly active to louse themselves up this thoroughly. That's the truth of the matter. And all that's really wrong with them is this overt act-motivator sequence coupled in with the automatic facsimile-maker.

Well, logic won't figure it out for you, fellow. You might as well just take some kind of a beautiful, broad, grand slam against the universe, and say, "Well, the two stars which are the guardian stars of the opposing corporation happen to be in confluence with Saturn, and they're going to lose on the stock market this month. So the best thing for us to do is just make a solid push in their direction, because we can't fail. And the chief witch doctor that we've employed up there on the third floor, Room 221, has worked it all out there," and so on.

Now, there isn't any facsimile in past time. We'll just talk now about facsimiles. There is the thought-pattern automaticity: the postulates which furnish to the individuals those pictures of which one thinks.

Honest. Honest. It's eight times as good. Because it is an admission of man's inability to assign cause. It's a sort of a "ha-ha" on the subject of cause. I mean, it's not a solid, known fact that he can assign cause by logic and thus predict consequences.

Now, the funny part of it is, the automatic machinery is so good that it only furnishes to the individual those pictures which he actually has observed. It's real cute. Automatic facsimile-makers. And the automatic facsimile-maker is a piece of automaticity that you'll have to know a lot more about.

You get what the trick of logic is? It says, "Now, look. You, you dog, have sufficient computive ability (whatever that is) to calculate mentally the consequences of your own actions, and therefore your logic must be" — you see, he didn't have any in the beginning — "your logic must be faulty, and something must be wrong with you, because you didn't predict the house was going to burn down tomorrow, and yet you could have predicted it. I'm sure that if you'd had an electrician around to look at the wiring and somebody to hook up the baby properly, it wouldn't have burned down." And you can just go on this basis. Well, what's this? This is really crowding somebody's space. That's crowding in on him very close; that's pressing him from every side, saying, "Look, you have something known as brains, why don't you use these brains? Why don't you use this logic? You're wrong! You're to blame!" And it'll drive somebody out of responsibility. And so we get, in a modern society running on logic, less responsibility than you ever heard of in a tribe or in a great former nation.

Because you see this character, you know he's loused up because he's in Fac One. He keeps wearing these big horn-rimmed glasses and staring at everybody and so on. And if a girl's doing it, why — if a man's doing it, you know he's a "Monitor" in a Fac One. If a girl's doing it, why, you generally call her a "Merrimack." Anyway . . . (audience laughter)

The amount of responsibility found within the halls of a large American or British corporation — the amount of real responsibility, the willingness to take initiative and action found there — might possibly be visible in an electron microscope if quadrupled in size. They don't take responsibility.

For the sake of the English, those were two famous — the two first ironclad vessels. Anyway, the — when we have a ... (Those were the two vessels that reformed the British Navy.) Anyway, we have . . . (They didn't fight the British, though.) A facsimile . . . (The British stole the whole idea from us. After it — invented first in Scotland.)

You go up to one of these modern (quote) "captains of industry" (unquote) and ask him to give a command to the helm. He won't! He won't give a command. He won't do anything, he knows he can't do anything about it. He'll be impartial. And he'll hem and he'll haw and he'll twist his finger, and . . . Honest. You say, "Here is a man that — this man could take action." He's totally capable of bringing about certain effects, and yet he won't bring about any of these effects. He won't give anybody the word, he won't speed anything up. He sits around and waits for the union to argue with the personnel chief, and somebody or other.

There is an automatic facsimile-maker at work. It's a gag, I'm just giving you a gag, but I'm showing you. You see, it's a demonstration of what happens on a thought pattern.

If he went down himself, probably, and talked to the strikers — you know, I mean got out from behind his barricade, one desk — and went down and talked to strikers and say, "What you guys mad about, or who's telling you to be mad?" He's supposed to be the captain of that ship. Well, a strike is in essence a mutiny. The workers have no feeling that management has any responsibility these days — they don't do anything. They'd say they've got to push management around somehow or another or make it take responsibility.

Now, there is stimulus-response at work. Fellow gets off the groove by thinking of something peculiar or getting interrupted in some way, and he sets up that chain of thought and he keeps being presented with new ideas on that line, see? That's life. And that's how a fellow starts going off the deep end.

The workers go out on strike mostly because they see everything so darned inefficient and everything running sort of downhill, nobody taking responsibility for them or their welfare.

How does this come about? Well, he sets up a communication system. He's talking, let's say, and he says the word cat but he says it in relationship to a whip; he says "a cat-of-nine-tails." And having said it in relationship to a whip, he yet said cat, didn't he?

Well, evidently it's quite valuable to have somebody take some responsibility and leadership in a group; because people used to work a lot harder, and they used to work with a lot more faith and a lot more enthusiasm than they do today in this society of logic.

Well, if he were observing real closely this beautiful automatic machinery he has, he would find that he had presented himself automatically with a picture of a cat. But he doesn't want a picture of a cat. So he doesn't look at this picture of the cat, he puts that one aside. And the horrible part of it is, by that same act, you see, of getting the picture of the cat and then putting it aside with effort, he puts into the statement "cat," putting the cat aside with effort; because that goes into the machine, too. That's what it's going to make next time.

Now I, maybe, am driving this point a little far from home. I'm trying to show to you that condemning somebody because he didn't figure out the future consequences of his action is actually a very dirty trick. Because it's based upon the premise that you can compute, with the factors available, a future consequence. That is the premise. Well, it'd take an actuarial mathematician to demonstrate this adequately — that it's impossible.

He says cat next time, now he gets "cat, put aside the cat with effort," that's going to be what the picture is. And in a very short time he becomes occluded, once he starts working too heavily with this automatic picture-furnishing machine — that's occlusion.

The number of factors involved in the next twenty-four hours of any day, go beyond the ability of an adding machine or a Marchant calculator — they just go beyond it. I mean there's so many factors can come in from so many directions, that to tell somebody it's all predictable and force it into his cognizance that it is all predictable when it isn't, is another kind of trick which is sort of like the early trick the thetans used to play called the "God trick." You see? You hang somebody for not using something he doesn't have. You hang somebody for not using his brains, and he's completely convinced that he has brains, and he's completely convinced that these brains will, if permitted to do so, figure out the entire future for him and just predict everything.

The time track actually is a track in terms of cause and effect, message emanating or action emanating, and action received.

They have set up brains, in other words, as a crystal ball. And I assure you that a crystal ball is a lot better. Because it at least permits the thetan to sit there relaxed and know the future, rather than figure it out.

And so if we have a duplicator going full blast on every message which is started, and if it is going harnessed to the postulate that it's only going to present one with what is exactly true, it must then present one with whatever is true. And when the machine goes out of whack, the fellow individually (I mean, he just got too much this time; I mean, he — too many of these things have come up as associative ideas; it's the machine doing this associating for him, you see), why, he'll just cover it all with blackness and skip it. He's afraid to get pictures anymore, because there are just too many pictures come in — he starts looking at pictures, and pictures come up, and pictures, so on.

Soon as you try to put significance into data, significance into data, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, you're assigning cause then to an infinity of confusion. Nobody ever figured it out this way.

Now, many people don't do this at all. You see, they don't think a thought and get a picture. But — many people don't do that, but once they have started doing that, then about the only thing you can do is to wipe the slate or knock out the automaticity. You wipe the slate by running engrams selectively, but of course this validates the machine to some degree and really lays in, to some degree, wiping engrams as part of the true picture. So let's handle it as an automaticity.

If anybody ever used data to figure anything out, you — it runs something like this: here's the United States and here's Russia. These countries both have atom bombs. It is quite obvious that they are both full of people. It is equally obvious that sooner or later somebody is going to get mad at somebody else and they're going to start throwing these atom bombs around. And one has learned during a recent conflict that when you give men explosives, it's odd, but occasionally somebody is hurt.

Now, I — the terriblest quiet seems to be settling over. Are you following me? Or is this — is this too horrible for you to contemplate? (audience laughter)

And this sort of follows. I used to tell people during the last war, "Well" — they'd be complaining about the war — "what do you expect? You let fellows play around with explosives, and somebody gets hurt. And nobody ever thinks anybody will get hurt, but they put all these explosives out, and then somebody does, and everybody's very surprised."

Well, now, for instance — I'll give you a demonstration of this.

Well, the point I'm making is, the logical conclusion is that there's going to be an atomic war. Also, the logical conclusion is that the central plains of Europe are going to get run over.

Now, right now, think a thought.

If we were running on logic at all, none of this would ever have happened. This would have gotten stopped in 1918 at Versailles. We had the power to do it at that time; everybody did, everybody could have gotten around and straightened it up. And as a result, they set up Germany so Germany couldn't do anything else but rearm, and then because Germany rearms against Russia because they want to get rid of Russia, they get rid of Germany.

Now, connect it to an object.

And this is all done by logic. See, this is all logical, and this is the result of logic. See, it's man's insane conviction that the data will deliver into his hands sufficient material for action on his part and then that he will then take that action. But a person who continually uses data does not have sufficient energy to take any action.

Male voice: Mm-hm.

And so the — everybody might know all these facts, and they act like a bunch of stuffed dummies sitting in a canoe that is drifting down a river — it just keeps drifting. Everybody figures it all out, but nobody has enough responsibility to do anything about what they've figured out. You see that?

Now, think another thought. All right.

The great military leaders of all time, by the way, have been noted for never, at any time, using anything even vaguely connected with logic. They either got hold of a good soothsayer who could say his sooths smoothly, or they went over to Delphi and asked the oracle there, and some girl stand over the crack of smoke and get a little bit drunk and quote a riddle, and everybody'd say, "Well, what do you know, there's a riddle there, we'll figure it out as we please now, and off we go." That was what Delphi was for.

Think of another object.

And as recently as Hitler, we have things running off according to this kind of a schedule.

Now who's getting pictures shoved at him automatically?

Well, it's not true that sanity and superstition are opposing. And neither is it true that sanity and logical arrangement of data are similar order of things. You see, sanity — if it depended upon a person's being logical all the time, a person wouldn't be sane at all. Because that's the most insane thing you can do, is use logic to predict the future. Now, that's really nutty.

Male voice: Yeah.

The only way you'll ever know the future is just sit down and know the future. I mean, it's one of these Q-and-A propositions. But if you use data, data, data, data, data — and from day to day you use data and data, you'll eventually not be sane anymore. Because you will have told yourself all the time, "Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out." That's what you've kept saying to yourself all the time, and so you've immediately said — after each one of those, you've said, "Look, I can't figure it out. So there's something wrong with my knowingness."

Yeah. And who's refusing the pictures which might come up?

So the dependency upon data comes about to the highest level of aberration there is. It makes the thetan wrong. See the big trick there? The thetan becomes wrong because of this use of data to predict.

See that? What are you doing?

Now, it may sound weird to you at this stage of the game, that superstition is a higher order of civilized state than a logical, mathematical order. That happens to be true, because superstition has just slumped out of the level of "Well, everybody knew if he'd just sit down and know."

Male voice: Oh, I thought of — you was just talking about a cat a while ago, and I thought of cathead, which was an oil derrick, and the cathead safety devices which I used to put on them, and why they were put on them, and how people got hurt in them.

Now, if you run this "where you will be" and "where others will be" present, past and future, and "where objects will be" and "who you aren't" and "who other people aren't" present, past and future, and — you know that you eventually get more and more relaxed and more and more relaxed and more and more relaxed. Well, one of the things is, is you go into the future. You begin to know where you'll be, you see, and you know where things will be, and you just know.

Mm-hm. And here we go, see?

And now the big trick is — and this is the earliest trick after the "God trick," the earliest one — you don't have to prove it. See? You know there's no data going to be standing there to prove it for you. And the essence of mathematics is "prove it."

Male voice: Shucks!

Well, "proof immediately introduces nontrust, and the first level of nontrust that the thetan reaches is proof. And I said the highest order of aberration in the Doctorate tapes is "convinced," you see? Well, that's proof — "convinced." That's still true.

Well, when a fellow is blanking the picture, this gets desperate, because he starts presenting himself with consecutive thoughts. Now, I just gave you an example of having gotten off track with a consecutive line of thoughts, how far off track you can go, you see?

So mathematics sits out and uses some kind of a system other than the thetan to prove that such and so is going to happen. It uses data to arrive at a conviction, and this states immediately parallel to it, that one has to have impacts in order to be certain, because the data, in essence, is a series of barriers or impacts.

Associative logic comes up and suddenly crosses back past what the individual is doing or saying, and he is no longer really following his thread of conversation at all. Now, it's doubly confusing due to the fact that it is really wonderful — the idea of following an associated line of thought. This is triumph itself. It can only really be done adequately by a wide-awake thetan. He's really got to be wide-awake. He's got to find facts which just — very similar to the facts just uttered. And he can go on with these similar facts — and we just had an example of it — the gradient scale, see. The next fact must be very similar to it, and it sounds very logical to everybody, you see, merely because it's a gradient scale. Everything is very — nearly like the thing which was just there.

So, knowingness doesn't happen to depend upon the time stream and it doesn't happen to depend upon data and it doesn't depend upon geographical location and it just doesn't have any dependency. Because highest-level knowingness and highest-level causativeness are the same statement.

Now, when things get more nearly like, and more nearly like, and more nearly like, all of a sudden they become the same thing. So logic in essence becomes a complete identity. So a person says identity, identity, identity. He'd start in, you see — we'll talk about this cat, see. All right, he's — "cat, cathead, oil derrick, people getting hurt on them," and so on. Well, that's a perfectly logical, clear view. Now, a person who'll go on like that forever, doesn't mean that his reason deteriorates to this point.

The best way to know any future is to cause one. And that's why, you see, when you start consulting the oracle at Delphi, you've taken a step downhill. You've assigned cause to the future — for the future elsewhere.

But the next step down from any associative reasoning — no matter how logical the conversation sounds or anything — is, of course, that the cat doesn't remind one of a cathead; it reminds one of "cat" which reminds one of a cat, which reminds one of a cat, which reminds one of a cat. You see? We don't get associative logic then, what we get is identity. And the difference between logic and identification is — well, it's a pretty wide bridge to cross in terms of sanity, out it's actually — they're first cousins; they're right there, you see. There's not much difference between somebody holding forth logically, and then condensing the logic down to tiny gradients which become indistinguishable, and then eventually just saying, "cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat." Now, or ironclad ships: ''Monitor, Merrimack, ironclad ships — British, made in Scotland," and so forth. This is a pretty jumpy band. See, that's a pretty widely associative band.

And when you get down so mean and impoverished imaginatively that you start to assign prediction of the future to data — oh boy, is that debased. You see, you don't even give it the color and aesthetic of an oracle at Delphi, you see? You don't have this beautiful girl standing over the volcanic fumes and consulting with the gods and getting drunk over the fumes, and going and quoting some sort of a riddle. And the oracle doesn't get a big costly present of ivory and gold or something of the sort and there aren't — oh, and see, there's no color to it at all.

Eventually, you'd come down to ironclad ships and then we'd go into counting the number of the rivets — this is, by the way, the way logic does deteriorate. Then you count the number of rivets and start thinking about the number of rivets in the turrets. And then you wonder whether or not they had that many rivets and you decide that better be truer, you see, and better check on that. And then you — ironclad — whether or not the iron was really around the ship or not. See, it's getting very identified with the symbols.

The fellow says, "Now I'm going to be logical." You know, he sits down and chews on a cigarette or something of the sort and he says, "Now, let's see, let me figure this out." What a conceited fellow he is. Anybody that'll sit down and say, "Let me figure this out," admits he's trapped somewhere.

Well, the end product of all this is you would think of an ironclad ship just by getting the symbol "an ironclad ship," see. Pardon me — you think I mean a picture of an ironclad ship. I don't mean that, I mean i-r-o-n (hyphen) c-l-a-d (capital) S-H-I-P. See, one would think of "ironclad ship." Not even by getting the picture of the ironclad ship — he would get "ironclad ship."

Well, cause must be all around him — he must be surrounded. He is, too — right in close. He's right there in a very, very narrow piece of space. He can't figure it out.

Well, to avoid this kind of nonsense happening to him, the best thing to do is just to ring down the curtain. And so he just lets everything go black, and after that to hell with it. And after that he can operate — as long as he doesn't keep his space as too big, he operates fine.

If he said, "All right. Now, let's see. Now I'm going to know about it, and I'm just going to know what all these factors are going to amount to," he actually will come up with something like a solution. No matter how strange the solution may sound, that's probably what's going to happen.

Well, now, in view of the fact — I was running a fellow back down the track one time (to run some para-Scientology in here) and I was trying to find states of sanity from life to life, and I found out that he was following a very different pattern. I mean, one life to the next — consecutive lives — had very little to do with the sanity of the life before. That's mostly because he'd just jettison it, you see, and have nothing to do with it and not even fight it. It just never occurred to him there was anything there to fight. And way early on the track, we found a "schiz tape." Now, where I — what I say, "schiz tape" — that is this thing i-r-o-n clad.

But now let's go a little bit higher, and instead of saying, "Now, let's see, how can I figure this out so I know what's going to happen?" supposing he says, "Now, let's see, I'm going to accomplish end goal." See, he says this, "I'm going to accomplish end goal." And that's all he does, and he accomplishes end goal. And that's very simple. Then he really has predicted the future, hasn't he? Or he says, "I'm going to undo end goal." So he does. He's really predicted the future then.

You get somebody who is a bit balmy or is on his way — I don't think there's anybody here even vaguely in that condition, by the way — whereby they get everything they're just about to say presented to them with a tape. Or you have — they have little railroad trains — little model trains that run around and the words appear in the cars, and they read them off the cars. Oh, yes, fantastic things. Ferris wheels going around with a — and sometimes flashing lights tell them, and stockbroker ticker tapes that are going clackity-clack and all sorts of things. Or they have a sonic gadget that tells them. And these sonic gadgets reel off the whole thing for them before they speak. That's — people that want people to "think twice before speaking once" are actually trying to set up such a gimmick. It's an interesting gimmick.

So one predicts the future as much as one is cause. The future isn't a pattern laid out to abuse and bully you. The future is a beautiful playground that nobody happens to be combining. You talk about virgin territory — the most virgin territory there is, is the future. You can do anything you want with it. Nobody's doing anything with it.

Well, there — we call that a "schiz tape." Now, that doesn't mean the person's gone — don't be alarmed about that. It just means that this automatic machinery that has gotten down into mental imagery or eidetic recall, has gone to the point where it's awful solid.

I mean, everybody's just kind of drifting along, saying, "I'm not cause and I'm not going to do anything. I'm not going to change any particles. Let's have a board meeting. Let's have a this, let's have a that. And let's not have any cause here anyplace. Let's just drift along and skid along and go along. And somehow or other we're going to wind up somewhere or other on the track, and we'll find a future waiting there for us. Isn't it nice that we're so logical that there's always a future waiting for us."

Well, this schiz tape I found in this individual, about umpteen lives ago — way back — was in Arabic. It was Arabic script. He couldn't read it, it just went on by, but he could give me the thought impression of what it was saying — and he was very, very mystified about this whole thing. He had been pretty batty in that life, really pretty batty. And he'd still left — the ridges of education of that life were still being mocked up. You talk about the fantastic capability of the individual; they were still being mocked up.

And one day they get up out of bed and put their foot over the edge of the bed and there's no floor. And they say, "Ulp! There's no future waiting there for me." They say, "Gee, that's funny." And they feel around for the floor and hit the ceiling and — gee, it's all disarranged. Isn't it peculiar? The barriers are all upset. And they don't know which direction south is or why George isn't. They just haven't got any of this — and so on and so on and so on. They just didn't put enough future there for them to have a future, that's all that happened to that thetan.

How an individual ever has any thought energy — that is to say, how he ever manages to emanate any energy at all that he can see or salvage is sometimes a wonder, when he's got it all thoughtwise diverted so that he is even constantly mocking up or paying attention to patterns which go back just thousands and thousands of years, and reactivating them and rebuilding them and — oh, boy. You just stop and think about how complex it is to have these postulates countering postulates and everything fixed geographically and ideas fixed here and ideas fixed there and ideas that are supposed to move over to there and replace those ideas, and the little wheels are supposed to click this way and that, and he has to put up enough energy to mock up enough energy to make enough wheels that are supposed to go there — rrrrr!

Now he's depending on a GE to put a future there for him, see? So he leans out of bed and can't hit the floor with his hat because there's no floor there. He has to put a floor there for a floor to be there. He has to cause a future playground in order to continue to have a future playground for himself. And that's what — about what it amounts to.

Well now, this fellow who gets this eidetic recall is in the same shape that most children are in. This is pretty good shape, by the way — a person who gets perfect mental imagery. He has converted his knowingness into the same facsimile pattern as he perceived at the time he knew. And if he is convinced that what he says must be the truth and nothing but the truth, then the machine will only present him with actual pictures which were taken at the time. Now, he knows how to make the picture and he has set it up automatically. You see this? He knows how to make it, he can make it, and it is presented.

So we get assignment of cause, then, as the dwindling spiral and so on. Because as one assigns cause, he's all right until he assigns something to resist. And there is his single error: He thinks things are resisting him or he is resisting something.

Now, we needn't go that far into theory about simultaneous — I mean, consistent and constant mock up, in order to have any mest universe at all. We won't bother with that. Let's just take it in its accomplished fact: When he thinks of a chunk of energy, he has that chunk of energy. When he thinks of a picture, it's just as reliable as when he looks up at the wall, he has a chart that is on the wall, and when he looks at the wall, there is a chart on the wall. In other words, he has a chunk of energy which is a facsimile, which is a thing, which has mass, and which, when he energizes it, after he has presented it to himself — when he energizes, it spits back. It reactivates. It has some fifty-some perceptics in it, it's got everything in it imaginable, and it can be erased and so forth.

You know, a very laughable thing: The only thing that is totally baffling to a thetan, when he finally works this out is, you know he isn't pushing on anything? I mean, he isn't pushing on anything inside the body. He isn't even connected with what you call flesh and blood.

Well, all right, after he's erased a few of them, he is — finds it safe to live through these experiences again because he's lived through them again. You see that?

He can't resist if he tried! What can he resist? It's the most nice balance. It — he has to be so careful to get his wavelengths in there just right and to match up everything just right so that he will get a counter-impact. Oh, what a neat job! He just has to work all day and all night and on Sundays too, in order to get into the state of mind where he's actually resisting something and something's resisting him. In other words, so he can feel things and have impacts against walls.

Erasure, in essence, is a knowingness process rather than an energy rub-out process. It teaches somebody that he can duplicate the experience and is still alive. Shows him he can duplicate it. It's the same way with Creative Processing.

Well, now one day he discovers that he isn't resisting anything one way or the other, and he puts up some force and impact into a wall and it goes kawap! see? And the wall that he's put up there, he can just see that wall cave right in and fall down. And its impact he puts into another wall, and that wall goes down and other walls go down and all the machinery he's been putting up just starts to explode.

Now, people get worried about making their mock-ups disappear for fear that they will then have on their hands a mass of energy. They aren't going to have a mass of energy on their hands. All they've done is feed a new pattern into their automaticity. And it will now mock up, but gloriously. It'll mock up this new pattern, and it'll mock up newer patterns.

Why? Because he's been resisting himself and that's the only person he can resist. And all of a sudden he decided — he elects to let it go. And then he starts getting mad and upset. And, as somebody said, "You — there's enough impact — you put up some of this impact, why, now every time I put it up, it takes down half of Camden." It just knocks everything flat, you see?

How many patterns can an individual mock up? How many patterns can be fed into an automatic piece of machinery? Well, it probably goes into a number which we could not write if we started with zeros at the top corner of the room and wrote very small, and we wrote all the way around the walls of the room, and then we wrote down — still with our zeros, see; 1,000, that's the way we started this thing — and we went all the way around the walls of the room once, and then we dropped down a little bit diagonally just so we could continue the number, and we went all the way around the walls of the room twice and we dropped down just a little hair or so there so we could continue, then we went all the way around the walls of the room again, and we went all the way around the walls of the room again. And if we were writing in six-point type, this room is not high enough to hold the number — it's a big number.

In other words, there's a tremendous native resistance and counter-resistance. The fellow is putting up the counter-resistance himself.

It's no wonder that individuals balked at the idea of trying to do anything with the human mind — if they themselves were bogged down at the thought of quantity or complexity. If something should be shied away from merely because it was complex — if the individual wouldn't move a trunk just because it was heavy, he would shy away from the problem just because it had quantity. You know, there isn't any quantity about it, it's just that. But it is terribly complex — oh, but thoroughly complex.

Now, did you ever see anybody use muscle-building exercises whereby they — what they call "dynamic tension," I think it is. So that you carefully — you put out your hand or something like that, and you get half of the muscles to pull back against the other half of the muscles, up to a point where you're pulling in against your own muscles, and then you go back out the same way, see? So that you're fighting your own arm up here, and it comes up here — and we go real heavy — and then you turn it around and you fight your own arm back down and so forth, so there's lots of latent stress. Boy, you develop the biggest muscles you ever saw. They won't lift a thing, but boy, you sure develop muscles. You can stand up there with a leopard skin on and they sigh worse than they do over Perry Como. Anyway . . . Although I think all those girls are hired by his press agent. Anyway — I keep seeing the same girls in the crowd.

What we've tried to do is reach the basic simplicities — and what we've evidently succeeded in doing is reaching these basic simplicities — which untangle the rest of the complexity. Not necessarily in terms of an earlier moment in time, but in terms of an earlier common basic to each process.

Anyway, dynamic tension is an example of this. Here is this thetan — now, let's just take it on an energy basis: Here's this thetan carefully pushing in against himself so that he can hold out against pushing in against himself, see, and he eventually gets into a terrific muscle-bound effort. And you say, "Be three feet back of your head."

Now, if we had in each one of the things in that which we were representing with those numbers — in other words, the number of factors and facsimiles and machineries and so forth that could be activated — if we had one common denominator to each one of these and we just sort of pulled the thread, why, you see, the rest of it'd sort of go. We'd be left with a clean slate.

"Can't. I'm held in."

Thetan is unwilling to do this merely because he considers that havingness is a very difficult thing to achieve. And so he holds on to the inability to create — he holds on to the inability to create because he can't create. That doesn't make sense, does it? But that's exactly what he's doing. He's holding on to all the things which make him — it impossible for him to create, because, you see, he can't create. And so therefore he has to hold on to all of these things which he can't create, which include the inability to create. And that's because if he then took away all this sort of thing, his havingness would disappear, and he doesn't consider that his creativeness would, of course, return immediately and he could put the havingness back. No, he sort of likes the randomity of all these patterns.

He's held in, huh? I mean, I'm afraid that I have to repress myself while I'm auditing to keep from laughing, quite often. Because you just look at the fellow and very often he has a big, black hairy arm — a third or a fifth arm or something — out there wrapped around the outside of his ridges, see, and he's just pulling in like mad against himself, see. And then he's in here again, and he's pushing out like mad against these ridges, and then he says, "The body's got hold of me, I can't move."

A fellow can be pretty batty, and you ask him to part with one single tiny object — you ask him, "What will you give me? One word — zum. Give me a broken pencil, you — anything — a scrap of paper, a tiny little piece of lead or a piece of dirt on the floor, or . . ."

The trick as an auditor is to make him let go of himself. That's the only trick there is in auditing.

And he — boy, he'll just think it over for a long time before he'll push that over to you. So — he's so convinced that he's unable to create, therefore he has to hold on to and have everything which comes in. He's got a life, he's living it consecutively, he's being a good boy, he thinks, and so forth, and he's not going to fool around with all this stuff.

He says, "It's Papa that's holding me in and it's Mama that's holding me in and it's this and it's that and it's other things and it's the atmosphere, and it's the walls and the barriers, the barricades" — assignment of cause, assignment of cause.

Well, what's the first thing he learns about a facsimile? How is it that everybody learns about one of these facsimiles and everybody's got the same piece of automatic machinery?

So we get this business of restriction; he feels restricted because he is resisting. And if we can get somebody to resist something — resist evil, for instance — he will eventually resist evil until he has no space left. And then he'll have to become evil to have any space, so then he resists good until he has no space left, you see? And then he has to be good to have any space, and then he resists being good, now he has to resist evil until he has no space left. It's resisted him clean on in, you see — only he's doing it to himself, you see. You get what the inverting scale is? How we invert all the way down the line.

Well, it's because the making of a facsimile — it's almost impossibly difficult not to make a facsimile if one is a fairly live thetan. Oh, very difficult not to make a facsimile.

The fellow resists — he is good, he decides he is good. Now hereafter, he's going to resist evil. He defines what evil is — I don't care what evil is. You make evil almost anything. You can make eating ice-cream sodas evil — eating ice-cream sodas and dropping bus tokens in gutters, that's evil. And the next thing you know, the fellow does nothing but eat ice-cream sodas and drop bus tokens in gutters. And we come along as an auditor, and we find out he has this strange obsession. Well, he does these things. Well, you shouldn't pay any attention to them, it's just a symptom of this inversion and counter-inversion and inversion and inversion.

Well, let's say we push against a wall. We're taking a look at a wall and there's a wall up there, and we push against this wall. And we push against it with merely the thetan-emanated energy and it goes against this wall and it makes a pattern, of course, of the wall. That's all — you've made a facsimile; that's it.

See, he resists that. Then after a while, after he's done that for a while, he resists what those things would resist, and then they swamp him out and he's — back and forth, back and forth. Each time he has to take other space — and that's the only thing wrong with an inversion, he's taking other-determinism and other space as the pattern for his own action and motion.

Now, facsimiles — very funny, but facsimiles don't have backs. And mock-ups have backs, but facsimiles don't have backs. And the fellow who's mocking up three-dimensionally is mocking up three-dimensionally all right, but if he reaches around kind of quick to the other side of the figures — even though they're in three dimensions and so on — he'll find they're hollow. That's because they've been made from a certain angle. Well, if he's mocking them up, he'll mock them up solidly, but he has to do this consciously. Well, very well.

So we have this fellow creating enormous quantities of effort — oh, just enormous quantities of effort — and saying it's others' effort. "It's the effort of others," he says. So that all of his own strength thereby and therefore passes from him forever (unless he gets some auditing) on the basis of effort and counter-effort. There goes his strength, there goes his energy — what we were talking about yesterday.

If one tries to pull away from something, one will also make a picture of it; and he'll have a momentary pattern. Now, he knows what this pattern is. This is fabulous. The ability to duplicate to such an exactness these patterns, and then not store them, that is the wrong word — merely to know the pattern, and then to know one doesn't know the pattern so one can surprise oneself with the pattern — that's fabulous.

What absorbs this person's ability to handle or create energy? It's very simple what absorbs it — he does. Well, how does he absorb it? He absorbs it by saying he isn't doing it, that something else is doing it; something else is doing all this resisting or all this pulling away. See, the other side of resisting, of course, is pulling away. People hate to be pulled away from, worse than they hate to resist, by the way. They hate to have things taken away from them.

Now, one of the ways to do this is to know without looking. Now, undoubtedly somebody could master some exercises of knowing without looking; undoubtedly this could be true. I — in various studies I've made of Indian lore and so forth, I've never run across any effective ones. But now we know what we know here, possibly you could make up one of these things of knowing — you know, I mean knowing without looking.

What do we have, then, in this? We have a problem where somebody who is actually eight dynamics starts to play and counter-play all the dynamics within himself to his own loss. And the only one that loses is himself because that's the only one that's playing.

But a person who has become convinced that he has to look to know, then furnishes himself something to look at so that he will then know, which gives him a reason to know.

Now you start getting him out of his body, some fashion or another, and you'll find he's pushing and he's pulling and he can't do this and he can't do that. Well, let's say he got out of his body and he couldn't get a beam off of a bedpost — just like that, he couldn't get the beam off — and this made him sort of frantic. What's holding the beam on the bedpost? He is.

"Well, how did you know that?" somebody says.

Well, how does he get into such a condition that he can't put the beam on the bedpost and get it off? Well, he puts a beam on a bedpost and then he, without knowing it, holds the beam on the bedpost, which scares him into confessing that he can't do anything about bedposts or beams, so he says, "I have no force or power."

Well, the fellow early on the track could say, "Well I've got a picture of it right here. And this is an exact picture of the scene." Well, he mocked it up consciously and looked at it and then said to the other fellow, "Well, it exists because it's here."

How does he get into that frame of mind? Well, he gets into the frame of mind by being made to assign cause. He starts doing it himself and assigning cause and saying somebody else is doing it, and we're back to the fellow playing chess with himself. So we're back to the basic tenets of automaticity and randomity with the assignment of cause. So he says, "The assignment of cause is somebody else, it's somebody else, it's somebody else," and he just keeps on doing it for automaticity and randomity until he gets a very involved thing. He gets way out of his own location, his own personality and everything else. He can make any personality he wants to. But one of the ways to do this is to keep him from actually duplicating anything and then enforcing the fact that he must duplicate something. But you say, enforcing him to do so, or so on, would be — that's — that looks like there is something outside him which is forcing him to do it.

And, "Well, that's . . ." The other fellow had to say, "Well, that's all right then. Okay. If that's just exactly the way it was."

Well, you've got his basic wish in there to have some randomity, to have some action, and there's a button that goes with this, it's "I've got to have enemies — just got to have enemies." You'd be amazed.

Now, somebody comes along and says to you, "All right. You tell me all this stuff about you going fishing and catching that fifteen-pound bass, and so forth. Well, I was kidding with one of the boys down at the office yesterday and they said, 'No fifteen-pound bass ever came out of that lake, and you possibly couldn't

"I've got to hate." And just statements like "I hate you" and so on, put up into the walls one after the other monotonously. "I've got to have enemies" as a postulate, moved around. "There always has to be another side," moved around. This sort of thing. Because his own action and counter-action is built out of these factors, that there — he's got to assume there is something else in operation before he can operate.

You whip out of your pocket at that moment a picture of the bass, a picture of the scales, a picture of you standing there triumphantly leaning upon your trout rod or something, and he shuts up.

Well now, the truth of the matter is, he can go into communication with something else and he can go into communication with others. But they're doing the same thing he is. And they're only pretending that they're in agreement with him so that they can continue in resistance with him.

They still dramatize it. Anybody can make a picture of a fish, by the way, that makes a bass look taller than a man. They never think of that. You can make pictures look any way. The touching faith and confidence of people believing pictures and statistics is not just a marvel to me, but is probably a marvel to people who take pictures — all people who take pictures, and all statisticians. Just exactly what holds everybody into an agreement on the honesty of what he's mocking up is very interesting.

If a big bully is going to stand him up down on the corner and hit him in the nose, why, by golly, he'll get hit in the nose and his nose will bleed. There's no doubt about that whatsoever. You can observe that immediately. But don't fall into the trap of assuming just because MEST will impact against mest, that mest is — is. That doesn't prove that it is. All it proves is that mest can push against mest. That's not much of a proof.

Well, let's not linger too long on how that facsimile is made, beyond — take another example: A fellow is being sprayed with energy like sunlight. He's being sprayed with this energy and as it comes in he resists it. As soon as he resists it he gets a pattern, a picture.

You apply that to other things: You say, "Well, now if one fairy came up and hit another fairy in the nose and then they both flew away, you'd have to assume that there was interchange of communication amongst fairies."

Now, a thetan does something else: He puts out some energy against a thing and then brings it in and takes a look at it; that's another trick he has. It's amusing that there isn't a single individual in this room who cannot do that. That's very amusing, because you go and you slug and stress and so forth, and "I haven't got any pictures" and "I don't see anything" and that sort of thing.

And the fellow would say, "What the devil are you talking about, there's no such thing as fairies!"

Well, actually, all you have to ask them to do is, "All right. Get the idea of pouring out a lot of lines of energy away from yourself. And now get the idea of pulling them back in, and what kind of a picture do you have?" And they tell you.

And you say, "Now, just a minute, we said if one fairy hit another fairy in the nose and knocked him down and then these two fairies flew away, if this happened, then we would have to assume that there was communication between fairies."

It's very — it's a very simple exercise. You did that, sure. I mean, there's nothing to that. It's just that an individual doesn't want to do that. He thinks it might be dangerous or something. Quite often when he brings them back in he says, "It's a black picture."

"Yeah," he says, "what are you talking about? There's no such thing as fairies."

And you say, "Yeah. Well, why don't you turn it around?"

And you say, "Now, wait a minute, let's go over this real slow. If there is such a thing as a fairy, if two fairies met, and one hit the other one in the nose and the other one fell down and they both flew away, then you'd have to admit that there was intercommunication between two fairies."

He turns it around and looks at it, and tells you what it is. It's quite routine. It's a black picture. Sometimes it's a picture of the darnedest things. Quite often it's a picture of something radiating, because the thetan in doing this, of course, is paralleling the action of suns and other things in this universe.

The fellow would say, "But there's no such thing as a fairy." See? That's because he's made a prior postulate. He says, "There's no such thing as fairies." He just tells you what the prior postulate is each time. He's trying to argue with you. He isn't arguing with you. He's merely telling you that he has never agreed in this lifetime to the existence of fairies.

This type of radiation — a thetan doesn't necessarily radiate all the time. That's quite a bore, radiating continually, going around with a big halo plastered on top of your head or some such thing. But anybody who is alive can do this. And it's beneficial to some degree, but mostly beneficial in pushing out these energy waves. Just a big — you know, just like you were a glowing ball or something, you can put out all these — this "flitter" is what it is, and bring it back in and take a look at what you took a picture of. That's the way a thetan takes pictures, if he wants to take pictures. It's kind of a gyp, he really isn't taking pictures. But they're more real to him quite often than a photograph would be; they're — because they're his. Well, that is picture-taking equipment, that's facsimiles.

So, now let's put it this way: "If one prizefighter — if prizefighters exist, and if one prizefighter hit another prizefighter in the nose and knocked the other prizefighter down and then they both got up and walked away, you'd have to admit that prizefighters had communication between each other."

Now, they take a picture of sound — if an individual will resist sound, then he'll get a picture of the sound, then he can unravel it and let it play again. But, what do you know, anybody who's heard a sound can mock it up and hear it again; that's much easier.

And he'd say, "Certainly, I know. There's — well, there's — Joe Louis hit somebody or another, sure he'd knock him down, so forth. You know, he used to pack a terrific KO" and so on. That's perfectly Jake with this character.

Now, most people who are having trouble trying to run facsimiles, have either completely keyed out on their automaticity or they've been so swamped by this automaticity that they've blacked it out — this picture-making automaticity. They just black it out, and after that they won't look.

He's completely overlooked something; he's just overlooked something beautifully.

Well, now, you ask this individual — reference here is the Philadelphia congress tapes — you ask this individual to put a sound there so he can hear a sound. And he tries this a couple of times, all of a sudden — and he looks pretty suspicious about the whole deal. He expected all this to be automatic, he expected everything to run off just according to Hoyle. He was supposed to run through an incident, and he was supposed to lie there and the incident was supposed to parade past his face like a motion-picture screen, you see. And he gets very confused by this, because he realized he's got to put the picture there before he gets a picture.

You've again said, "If prizefighters exist."

Well, if he is — has a black field, his automaticity in putting the picture there has overweighted to a point where he has destroyed it by hanging up some curtains. He doesn't want it anymore, it's too much for him, and so he's quit using it and he's hung up these curtains. Well, now in order to get this started again, he's got to handle it just the way you would any other automaticity — but why start it again? Since the direct method of use would simply be to know everything that had ever happened to you, why look at pictures? So his fixation is looking at pictures. He thinks he has to get a picture of what happened to him before he can believe what happened to him.

Well, he's already accepted the fact that prizefighters exist, so the fact that one prizefighter can hit another prizefighter in the nose proves the existence of prizefighters? Oh no, it doesn't. It proves that he has agreed to the fact that prizefighters exist.

A preclear will go on this, and he'll get the foggiest, filmiest notion of what has happened to him — oh, real foggy, thin. But he'll be sure it happened to him if he has a picture of it. That's not valid at all; that's not even vaguely valid. He can take pictures of other thetans' pictures — he gets thought impressions of thought impressions. If a thetan is holding up a picture, if he resists that exact impression, he will get it back again. I mean, he can get the picture, in other words — that's a "borrowed facsimile." The experience didn't happen to him, but he can show people the pictures of the bass afterwards anyhow.

Now, you can take mathematics and do almost anything with them, but there happens to be such a subject as an obvious truth; and that happens to be one of them. If fairies exist, and if they did hit each other then, then you'd have a communication.

Well, this society at this time permits an individual to get very occluded. In the first place, it sprays printer's ink into his face. In order to read, you have to suppress white. You do not read by suppressing the blackness. You want the letters in and the whiteness right where it is. And so to read, you suppress the white. So an individual who does a lot of reading suppresses white, suppresses white, suppresses white. And that was why I wanted that run on some of the people here today, so you'd have an example of what happened when you just weren't. . . This — "Give me three books that you are not. Three pictures you are not. Three movie actors you are not," and so forth, in brackets.

Well, if you've agreed upon the existence of fairies, you'd certainly then find an impact between the two of them. If you hadn't agreed on the existence of fairies, you'd play the devil.

Here we have the suppression of white and the effect, actually, is — of a lifetime of reading and study — is when run, getting a face full of printer's ink. And a person will even taste it — nyahh — mouthful of printer's ink; because they've really absorbed it in tremendous quantities. And the suppression of white has become automatic, so that in order to know, one must suppress white. Well, if one is to suppress lightness in order to know, a person trying to know will wind up getting blackness. And this goes back into early explosions; the earliest incident of this is the explosion. A thetan's standing there and something goes boom! and the big flash goes up, and his immediate response is to push out against this flash in such a way as to repress the flash. Of course, the second he represses it, he gets a patch of blackness.

Now, anybody trying to find an impact — has anybody been out of his head and had a little bit of difficulty trying to find the walls? You know? They weren't there quite and the body kept disappearing and everything kept disappearing?

Now, in order to know what it is, why, the thing to do is not to let the flash come and hit him and knock apart everything he has — the thing to do is simply to repress it where it is and then move it aside and take a look at the picture he made of it, and he'll find out what it is. That's one of the ways of doing it.

Well, he's just agreed so hard, that he's anxious to find it. He isn't putting it there so he can find it, you see? You get the weird trick he's doing? He thinks something is going to be put there for him to find.

But white flashes are followed, in terms of an explosion, by a very great blackness. If you don't believe that sometime, get a flashbulb to explode in your face or — like I did during the war — have an aviation gas tanker blow up in your face. There were several gallons of gas there and it made a big flash, and the night was red and green and pink and purple there for a second afterwards. And then, boy, that was the blackest night you ever saw; and it just stayed black for about a half an hour. That was remarkable. That certainly put out the lights quick. So the deepest blackness you get is after the highest whiteness. Well, that's all over the track — people suppressing explosions.

Well, there isn't anything there for him to find except his own agreement that there's something there for him to find. And if he agrees to this too heavily, then he doesn't ever put anything there to find, so he won't find anything. The automatic machinery runs down, in other words, and keys out and clips out. And after a while, he hasn't got any modus operandi to put anything there, because he says it's got to be put there for him. He's assigned cause to something else to put everything there for him. You see how he does this? If he keeps assigning cause to everything else to put something there for him, why, he will eventually not find anything, anywhere; and that's what happens to perception, essentially.

So they're into space opera. You know, you get a preclear — oh, they got lots of space opera on the bank, and — they always have. And you get some preclear that's been stutter-gunned and bapped and so forth. No, no, he isn't — he doesn't like flashes. He's gotten to a point where he isn't in favor of them anymore at all.

Now he says, "If I..." If he assigns cause to other things to give him energy, you see, he never puts any energy there. So eventually he says, "I have no energy, therefore I am weak, degraded and have no self-respect." Well, how's he get there? Well, he gets there on logic. There's where he arrives. It's very logical. Things keep pushing against you all the time, there's something pushing against you. That's logic. That's all there is to it. And there's nothing you can do about it either, because it's so logical.

Give you some idea of why this is, the "stutter gun" — it just threw out great big gobs of jolt, one right after the other. When it hit a man it didn't penetrate him cleanly or anything like that, it just beat the flesh off his bones, and then beat the bones off the other bones. You know, it'd — he'd get a glancing blow from one of those stutter guns, and it'd spout the blood up through the pores of the skin. I mean, you'd just get — one would explode near him, you know, it'd be enough blow, enough impact, to just knock the blood right straight out through the skin. Possibly stutter gun and birthmarks have some connection. Well, anyway, the ... As impossible as it may seem.

And people are always assuming this one — they assume this, and it's a hidden factor in all logics: "Well, it's logical so there is nothing you can do about it." "It's logical" and "we're helpless" are synonyms. Logic is what you make logic. It's what you have agreed to will be logical. So we get agreement on a higher level than logic any day of the week.

You get that sort of thing — an individual sees this big white flash in terms of a gun or he sees a gunshot of any kind or he's in a war (he gets mixed up with one of these rather minor parties they throw down here on Earth every once in a while) and he, of course, is repressing whiteness, he's repressing yellowness and greenness — whatever's in that explosion — redness.

Now, you might think that we're utterly mad to keep on talking here about superstition being senior to logic, and this is an age of reason. Let me tell you what they did in the last age of reason: They cut off the heads of every reasonable and educated man in the entire nation, i.e., France — Revolution, end of the eighteenth century. That was the great "Age of Reason." Hardly anybody's mentioned reason since.

And then you set him down and give him a book to read. Oh-oh. Because you have enough associative logic on the bank so that his automatic machinery will promptly go into line, and explosions are things which mustn't happen again very often, and so it handily goes into work and doesn't let it happen again. And there he sits with an explosion on his lap every time he reads a book — and he wonders what's wrong with his eyes.

You know, you'd be surprised, you ought to look over their works, I mean that's all they talked about — this was the Age of Reason. Everybody had a reason. What it all boiled down to, it was a problem in havingness. There was — too many people agreed they didn't have something and there were too few who had, so that by mob rule, it would overturn. This was the fraternity, liberty and equality. You see, the peasant had, as long as he didn't get out of balance with his — the aristocrats, the peasant still had.

Well, your eyes would be in bad shape too if they were looking at an explosion all the time. Did you ever blow off a firecracker in somebody's face, something like that? And did you notice that they had a slight tendency to recoil with their eyes?

And evidently the peasant had agreed to put himself into some kind of a slavish role somehow or another way back, so he'd lost his independence.

Oh, let's take a more graphic example. Let's take a fellow and let's put three hundred pounds of TNT two feet from his face and let's light it off and get it properly exploded. Well, do you suppose at the moment it went off, just before the full import hit him, that he might have a sort of a flinched feeling in his eyes? Well, this is the feeling in the eyes of somebody wearing glasses — it's a flinch. Comes from books — this is the key-in. Ah, sit there reading books, see, suppress the white and get in the black, suppress the white and get in the black, suppress the white and get in the black, word after word after word after word. The first thing you know, they'll tell you the future is slightly to the right and black. Why is that? It's simply because books read from left to right and deep. See, they go down — books go down on the right side — they go away from one on the right side, and the end of the book is in the future. So this puts the future over to the right and black. That's all the significance there is to it. But you can get anybody to look at a piece of blackness and get "What is the significance of this blackness?"

Didn't happen in England, by the way. The English yeoman maintained his independence straight through. And then one day, he picked up and got very expert with a longbow. Now, that's back in — about a thousand years ago, not quite a thousand years ago. The English yeoman got very expert with a longbow, and this longbow had a very high penetrative power on armor. And so they had liberty, fraternity and equality in England for a long time before they got mixed up with it in France.

Now, you told me about that the other day. You said you wanted a — saw this big blackness and the postulate that went with it was "must have a teacher." Well, that's very parallel to this, because any postulate connected with blackness wonders what that explosion was.

But there were no longbows in France. I don't quite know why, because they grow yew trees over there too, but it's just the way the civilizations went, is "Who could use the greatest reason?" Well, the English yeoman was very reasonable — two hundred and twenty paces worth. I don't know what the penetrative power of a longbow is, but it's getting up there close to a .22 bullet. It's — certainly did keep things nice and equal, though.

Now, if you want people to ask the question, "What was that?" If you wanted five million people right this — in the next couple of minutes to ask the question "What was that?" you would throw up into the sky, just a little way from here, a tremendous white flash. And all the people of Philadelphia and the Camden area and so forth would immediately ask each other, like a flock of monkeys or parrots, they would say to each other, "What do you suppose that was?" And then you would get the more imaginative ones around them theorizing on the subject: "What is the significance of that flash?"

They didn't have this over in France, or they had basic agreements on impacts that were different than this. But the great "Age of Reason" was the great age of failure, and France has had a hard time picking herself up ever since. They had a kingdom later on. They immediately hired an emperor after they got rid of the aristocrats. They made aristocrats out of shopkeepers. Now, they — like Napoleon's family and so forth. They got an emperor because they were now all liberty, fraternity and "'égalidad." And after they got through with that, they got another king or an emperor and he built some wide streets in Paris — significant contribution to the world. And now they got some plains with some cows on them — not very many cows, though. The curve of civilization in France has not gone down since their Age of Reason, it has been in a full power dive — vertical. Fortunately, there's no bottom for them to hit mest, by the way — you reach — you arrive, if you're thinking in terms of theta and MEST . . . Talking about this last night, we're — the end of the product in theta and mest is you go halfway each time, see? If you're studying simultaneously theta and mest, and if you're trying to make all of your applications be theta and mest — neither overweighting one nor the other — you only get halfway to the goal each time. You split the remaining distance in half.

What is the significance this boils down to which gives you printer's ink — what is the significance?

Now, you know the old problem of the fellow who starts out from town and he's going home, but he travels halfway home and then when he's halfway home, he travels the next halfway home — you know, half of the remaining distance. Now he travels half of the remaining distance, now he travels half of the remaining distance and half of the remaining distance and half of the remaining distance — and he never gets home. He never will, theoretically, he never will get home. He can't arrive.

Now, if you really wanted to revolutionize a whole reading public, you would print your books in yellow on red paper, and believe me, the people would feel like they were having their brains blown out by the words written thereon — I may be doing this one of these days. Because they'd suppress the red in order to get the flame. Huh! Those words would burn themselves in! (audience laughter)

Well, that's the Tone Scale, actually. Finite death is a nonarrival point. One never gets down there if he's handling equally theta and MEST. He just goes down halfway toward zero. Each time he goes halfway toward zero, and at the bottom of the line there, you get all those jammed-in inversions and so forth, right down at the bottom of the scale there. Everything is inverting and inverting and inverting and the inversions are inverting and inverting and inverting and inverting and inverting, inverting. It's always halfway to it — no death there, it's just halfway to it.

Well, this blackness is actually something which is used to protect himself, and you're not going to get a case that is black very far out of it unless he has some sort of a guarantee that he'll be protected. And so he wants to be pretty sure. He wants to know before he goes. Before he backs up any distance or goes anywhere, he wants to know that he's fairly safe, and that the explosion isn't actually happening.

Well, looking over this problem of assignment of cause, to be a little more intelligible, you have an enormous range of things to which your preclear can assign cause.

Well, the — one of the first things that upsets him is this automaticity. This automaticity comes about when he, early — early in his life, he's thought of a thing and gotten the picture, and thought of a thing and gotten a picture, and thought of a thing and gotten a picture, and he's tried to get a picture of a thing and he thought of seeing something, and he saw it. And after a while, this got damned annoying to him. He didn't like this. A lot of other things happened to him and mainly — just thinking in terms of associative reasoning — he's gotten interested in associative logic, and then all of a sudden he lost something.

Now, if he has to take all the cause himself, he has no game at all. You merely get him to play the "only one." And if he's still superconvinced that there are other things fighting him all the time, then, if he's superconvinced of that — "they're all against him" sort of thing — then he does wind up as the "only one."

Well, of course the earliest thing on the track that happened — I mean, one had lots of blackness and very little lightness. He'd have to make the lightness. Well, when the lightness would go out, he'd leave blackness. So a person has the idea that if he loses something, it's all going to go black. And sure enough, you can get anybody — anybody to get the idea of losing something, and the field in front of their face will turn black. Naturally, it isn't anything very alarming. It just simply means that if they had a mock-up that somebody swiped or wiped out or played the "God trick" with, they immediately had a problem of blackness. You see, they — bang! everything went black. And that is loss.

So, we'll turn around and look at it the other way and we find out if we make him take all cause, then he has no action at all.

Now, there's something else involved. When they lost a terminal they were depending on to continue to manufacture energy — they'd already gone into the point of using terminals to manufacture energy, this is real silly — when they've lost this terminal, of course, they got no further energy. So when they lose a person whom they have been using as an anchor point, the energy is no longer manufactured, so they feel dead and tired and everything's black; because that's a terminal gone. But that's just one step down from losing, actually, a mock-up.

Now, if we make him take cause in the form of blame, then he won't want cause at all. We show him he's all bad cause and so on.

Anybody who is — actually sets up two terminals and thereinafter gets his generated energy from these two terminals going back and forth against each other, he's into the use of motors and automaticity already. And when they lose one of these terminals, why, they feel like part of the body's gone and the whole field is black and that sort of thing.

But we let him blame all of his troubles on this, and blame all of his troubles on that, and blame all of his troubles on something else, and then blame all of his troubles on something else, and blame all his troubles on something else — we could just keep going this way, by the way, if this investigation hadn't been done. If it had been done compulsively, you see, or on a stimulus-response basis, this would be exactly what would have happened. That isn't however, what happened. It follows somewhat that pattern because there's a change involved.

Well, these manifestations all center around pictures and they center around views. Because the whole field wouldn't be black, you see, unless he had a picture of things being black. This is real simple. Almost anybody who has an occlusion, an occlusive curtain and so forth, tells you this.

Well, what happens is — entirely different thing: you get lighter assignments of cause. The assignments of cause are lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter. And finally, a fellow just stands there as cause. He's saying, "Gee-whiz, how'd I get here?"

But the problem is one of pictures. What he's complaining about is an absence of pictures. What he's complaining about is an absence of receiving those impressions coming off the walls which permit him to see the mest universe. This is blindness, you see — no picture. So, everywhere we look on this problem we find no picture.

And that's the investigation; that's the track of investigation. It's toward making the individual be cause for himself, and all of its techniques are involved directly with this goal.

Well, above no picture, we had knowingness without any pictures, and we find out one has to know like the dickens before he can get a picture. So we'll find the occluded case trying to know like mad in the absence of pictures, and then complaining at the same time because he doesn't get any pictures.

Now you understand how to evaluate a technique? Any technique has the liability of assigning guilt or cause or bad cause broadly to a single object — any technique does this. A technique is best which does it the least, and which most validates the individuality and causation of the preclear himself without blaming him.

Well, in order to know he has to repress the pictures, because you have to repress the white of a book, you see, in order to get the printer's ink so that you can know. And so we go round and around in this dizzy little squirrel cage: "Well, you can't have any pictures because we've got to repress the white so that we can know, and we can't see it because it's all black because we've got a curtain of blackness hanging up in front of all the pictures."

Now, a technique is also as bad as it lays the blame on the preclear and as good as it permits him to assume causation without having to have blame. There's no discipline involved in processing. In this, I mean there's no punishment involved in processing. A person doesn't get well because you have punished him through something or other. That's demon exorcism. They used to think people got well because they were whipped — whipped until the demons left. They put the body into such a horrible condition that nothing could stay in it, you see, and then the fellow was well.

Well, the grim and dismal joke is, there aren't any pictures beyond those the individual makes. And he makes them from the patterns which he knows exist.

Probably about the first thing they chased out was the thetan. That left a lot of entities that — and the entities have the sole operation of assigning cause to everything else. All they can do is withhold information, an entity. They can't cause anything. All right. That's mostly because entities themselves are caused by the thetan, of course. They're deposits of energy and ridges operating. Okay.

Now, here is one of the lowest level drills that remedies this situation: You cover a desk with a number of objects, throw a black curtain over them and tell the individual to tell you what was there. And theoretically, if you drilled him long enough, he would no longer bother to look at it the first time with his mest eyes — when you uncovered it and let him have a glimpse of it and then shut it down again — so that he could see it. You'd no longer need this. What he'd have to do, he'd just look through the cloth at it — if it was a problem of lookingness. But he wouldn't go to this degree. His knowingness theoretically could be drilled up to a point where he would simply know what was underneath the cloth. Not by seeing it — just by knowing it was there. You see, knowingness is so featherweight it's very hard to understand. It's so lacking in significance.

A fellow always is setting up some sort of a "yes man" in — just to the right of him or left of him or back of him or something of the sort, to agree with him or disagree with him. You know, so he'll have some communication in case he's lonesome sometime.

Now, that'd be about the crudest kind of a drill you could do. It isn't a recommended drill, I mean, that's just a crude drill. There'd probably be a lot of them like this, which would have a tendency to remedy blackness.

You ever hear an old desert rat talking to himself? "Well, think I'll walk over to that cactus plant. No, I guess I better not, it's pretty hot. Better stay here in the shade of this one. Well, but the sun's getting around to the back of this one, and it won't be in the shade very long. Well, I guess I better walk over to that cactus plant there, it's got a broader lot of shade. Well, you always was a durn fool anyway, never could make up your mind."

But let's take somebody who doesn't have sonic recall and is complaining about not having sonic recall. Well, unless he puts the recall there, he's not going to have any sonic recall. For this reason: He's going to object putting it there. He's going to say, "It ought to be done for me automatically." In other words, he's telling you, "I have a machine out there that does all this for me and it's not working, and you're supposed to fix it."

If you listen to one of these fellows, you'd swear there were eight or nine guys there having a terrific conversation one with the other, and arguing about everything they were going to do.

"All right," you say, "fellow, we'll fix that machine for you. Now, the way we'll do it is to make you put there all the sounds which I am now going to give you, one after the other, and you hear them back after you have put them there." You make him take over the control of his sonic machinery. Now, people who run around telling you, "Don't have sonic," it's just that they don't have the automaticity of sonic recall repaired — because it's an automaticity just like any other automaticity.

They talk to their burros, and then talk back for their burros — and just as though their burro was talking. It's a wonder one or two of them don't take up ventriloquism and really fool themselves. But they're quite happy doing that.

Now, how do you do that? And how would you repair that? You would say to an individual, "All right. Now, you don't have sonic? All right, do this now. Now, I'm going to snap my fingers and I want you to get the sound of that finger snap, and I want you to repeat the sound of this finger snap immediately afterwards. All right, I'm going to snap my fingers. (snap)"

It is supposed to be a symptom of insanity, the fact a fellow talks to himself — "I'll be talking to myself next," somebody will be saying, you know? Oh no, it's only the guy who's afraid of talking to himself that goes crazy. Fellow resists talking to himself until he talks to himself and he can't stop what's talking to him.

"All right. Now, I'm going to snap my fingers again, and you repeat the finger snap. (snap)"

I ran into a fellow just the other day, about three weeks ago, who had a compulsive set of circuits which were vocal circuits. And there was a man and a woman and so forth. And they were making him miserable, they'd made him miserable for years.

"All right. Now this time I want you to do it again. I'm going to repeat this finger snap and I want you to get again the sound of this finger snap. (snap)"

He told me, he says, "I've got all I can do to keep them quiet." And the thought of making one of them talk was — would have been too horrifying to him, so I played it real smart. I had him set up a baby going "goo-goo" at him, way out in front, see — no great significance to it. And then had him set up another circuit elsewhere — vocal — doing something else. All of a sudden they — these circuits just went ping, ping, ping, see, he just blew up his resistance on them.

And you just keep that up, little while, and some of the cases will all of a sudden turn on their sonic and say, "The heck with it."

He's busy talking to himself on a compartmented basis, where he isn't supposed to know that he's talking to himself, and then he starts resisting talking to himself, and then he represses it madly, then he lives in fear that he'll start talking to himself. You see? You get the anatomy of demon circuits? That, incidentally, is the anatomy of demonology. You want to study demonology, you just study that curve of operation in terms of circuits.

Other cases that don't come in, you say, "Keep putting sounds of various kinds out there for you to hear." You, in each case, will recover the automaticity.

To amuse himself, the fellow starts talking to himself, then he finds it more amusing not to let himself know that he's talking to himself, so he puts up a wall, some sort, and guards against knowing this fact, and then he — then the circuit will talk to himself self-determinedly. Might not make much sense, but it still talks to him so he can't predict what it's going to say. And we have our entrance into randomity.

Now, here's the way you do that. You say, "Put the sound of a bell out there. (pause) Now put the sound of a gong out there. (pause) Now let's put the sound of a doorbell out there. (pause) Let's put the sound of a cow mooing out there. (pause) Let's put the sound of a sheep baaing out there. (pause) And let's not worry that these things might remind you of things you have heard before. Let's not worry about that. Let's not worry about whether or not they're a good sheep. Let's not worry about whether or not they remind you of an incident. Let's just disregard all of that and keep putting sounds out there."

The next thing you know, why, this starts bothering him because it's giving him bad advice and he's starting to have to abide by its advice, so he says, "This is horrible" and he shuts it off and gets afraid that it'll happen again, and you've got a character without sonic. That's all nonsonic is, is the fact that one's circuits might start talking. Or somebody might start screaming; that's — I've heard — run into, rather, as a sonic shut-off. The preclear is afraid he'll start screaming or afraid somebody else will start screaming or ...

And by the time you've completely neglected this poor automatic machine that you've thrown back into restimulation, see — and then you neglect it. And you keep the preclear putting sounds out there, he keeps himself putting sounds out there, regardless of what sounds come in. And you start making a liar out of this machine — it'll go goofy and that piece of knowingness will straighten out with nothing in it. In other words, it's gone. You'll key out the machine.

Now, very often people go into operations afraid they'll say what they know. They don't know anything. That's what's fantastic about that case.

What do you do with a facsimile? Huh-huh? What do you do about pictures then, huh? Well, this is the way you handle pictures — and this is not an inves­tigatory technique, this is the way you handle pictures with somebody who still complains about pictures. Get him to get the thought "chair" and then get him to get a picture of a chair, no matter how bad. He'll sometimes tell you, "I got a picture of a chair. As soon as I said 'chair,' a chair sneaked in."

I was hanging around a VA office one day and a fellow was saying, "Well, they tell me I've got to be operated on, but if I'm operated on, I just know I'll talk."

And you say, "That is not the chair we want. We want the chair that you're going to pick up over on your right side and put in there."

And I listened to him for a little while, and I finally leaned over and I asked him very politely and kindly, I said, "If you talk, what will you talk about?"

Now he says, "All right."

He just sat there dazed, looking at me. He said, "Well, that's just it. I don't know." Finally made him — he was afraid he'd give himself away. Possibly he's afraid that he didn't have anything to give away and his imagination wouldn't be fertile enough to furnish something that would interest the nurse, or — I don't know. You get multiple conversations going on with the same individual.

And you say, "Get a picture of a saint."

Well, after he can't duplicate himself anymore, it gets harder and harder for him to do this.

And he does. He gets an automatic picture of a saint.

So, when we talk to a preclear, we don't evaluate in such a way as to lead him to assign large cause, nor do we persuade him to assign cause. Patter, in other words, is monitored to some degree by this: "Well, you say it was your father's fault." This would be about the most destructive thing you could do: "You say it's your father's fault. Well, he probably had his reasons, too." That'd just be murder. You don't deal with this thing of assignment of cause, you're just careful to steer him off of heavy assignment of cause. You don't give him lots of reasons and talk about it, but you just figure out, "All right. Now, look," you say, "we're running all this space . . ."

You're just — started to work his machinery. Make him put another picture of a saint in place of the picture of the saint which did come up — if none came up or if one came up, regardless.

Now, we're running space in such a way as to make it look like all the space is against him. That is, we're assigning other space, other space; space is others', others' — others' space.

Now, we have him get the idea of an object and then promptly and immediately put an object there before it can be presented. And you'll find out that the automatic machine, no matter how fast it is, isn't as fast as the thetan; isn't as fast as he is. Actually he can, at any time, be faster than any automatic machine which he has. But, you'll find that machine in there for a first few licks — boy, there, it's really trying to get it in there quick, see? Bzzzt! It's not trying to get it in there any quicker than it ever did, it's getting it in at its routine speed because it's not sentient. It's just doing what he is doing back of his hand.

What we're doing is validating or permitting him to assign cause for his trouble on the space which surrounds him. And he assigns this to the space around him so long that he eventually — you've confirmed the fact that the space around him is the cause of his difficulty.

But what you do is, you say, "Get an idea of a clock now." And he puts a clock there.

If you go on using space, then, as other-determination, you have assigned cause to space, you see. So you balance the thing as a bracket. You start hammering and pounding too long upon one thing without bringing it back so that he's cause too, you don't balance it by letting him be cause too . . . We run a bracket and omit him — it's happening to him. "Wasting something for himself," is the one we omit. See that? We just omit that and we keep on: "All right, others wasting it for others, and somebody else wasting it for himself. And then others wasting it for others, and somebody else wasting it for himself. And others wasting it for others, and somebody for himself," and the next thing you know, this fellow will say, "Well, gee, the total thing that's wrong with me is because these others are wasting it for others and somebody else is wasting it for himself." You never let him get in on the act.

Now, he'll get another impression of another clock. If he got another impression of another clock, have him put that there three times. Handle it just like you handle any other automaticity. Make him get the impression he thinks ought to be delivered to him — make him get it himself. And then make him duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and believe me, you'll turn on his pictures. He'll go right on straight through.

You'll find a case is always unbalanced somewhere, on the first time you start — run "wasting" brackets; he'll have a little more difficulty with one part of it than another.

In order to get anyplace in Scientology, the shortest route is usually through it.

Ordinarily "others for others" is inconceivably distant for a case that's in terrible condition. He just can't get "others for others," he can't get the idea of "others for others." Eventually as he runs along he will get it. Well, he's unbalanced to that degree. He thinks anybody that exists, actually is confronting him, and that other people don't confront other people. He has a very personalized look at the universe, believe me. He thinks this is the way it goes. See that? All right.

And there is how you cure the automaticity of facsimiles.

Assignment of cause, then — if a person assigns too much a cause, he won't communicate. You see that? He says — if he assigns cause to something, cause to something, cause to something, he finally says, "Well, the space will have to talk for me — why don't you consult God? See, I — there's no reason for me to talk, the space got to talk." Anything he has assigned cause to too long, he expects then to communicate for him. So he assigns cause to the body, assigns cause to the body — well, he expects the body to communicate for him. He doesn't ever think of communicating himself.

Okay.

I had the weirdest thing happen. I was doing a little bit of very fast Straightwire last night, and a fellow threw the — this person communicated very poorly ordinarily, but he threw a postulate up against a wall; just in clearing up something, he threw this postulate up against the wall — because I told him to, you see — and he phrased it quite differently than I had given it to him. And for the first time he broke into actual communication.

The first actual communication that he did was that postulate against the wall, because it talked. It was real loud, but it wasn't loud to the ears — that's depending the body doing that. It was just real loud, see, and he used quite strange wording when he put the postulate into effect. It was quite legible. The fellow was really in communication. In other words, we broke his communication lock right there. Because we made him put up the energy, instead of the energy being put up for him. That was just running that, and that's the way it worked. Okay?

Therefore your talk to the preclear, your communication to the preclear, shouldn't continue to validate other cause, other cause, other cause, nor validate him necessarily as blame, blame, blame. Just keep it even and keep it sailing along.

Okay.