& ... and that is the structure of effort and counter-effort.

If one examines the structure of the physical universe, he will discover that it is composed of matter, energy, space and time, and that matter and energy changing position in space and time then manufacture motion.

As a matter of fact, it may be matter and energy changing place in space and time which make space and time. It also may be that space and time in operation together produce matter and energy.

This is sort of a circular computation, but it works out very observably into the fact that the physical universe has force as its common denominator. Motion is the real basic common denominator to all things in the physical universe. But force is the first common denominator characteristic of motion.

No motion can be engaged upon which does not contain a potential or existing force. Now, this - you don't have to be very complicated on this. You ought to know your term though. Force is simply foot-pounds in the process of being exerted or to be exerted, of energy - some such unit of energy - capable of being exerted or being exerted.

Here, for instance, we have a vector [marking on blackboard]. We have a vector here and let's say that this vector is a symbol which represents foot-pounds of energy. It just says that's x foot-pounds of energy. Now if I had that vector in my hand, it would be something that could be released or was being released and it could be released, however, in any direction. That's force. That is force.

Now, the second I say it is going to be released straight ahead, it becomes effort, because effort is force with direction. And as soon as your mind takes up the subject of effort, it adds to it intention, and that is reason.

So we have here a vector which we are going to release; exert a vector which is going to be exerted or is being exerted, for instance, against that pillar over there. It's just a push against the pillar of one foot-pound of energy, let's say.

Intention: Well, present intention with it, is to demonstrate force and effort to you. But there's an intention with it, don't you see?

Another intention: We exert it against a door. To do what? To close the door. So effort plus intention is reason. Reason has to include the thought plus the effort. Don't you see? Thought plus effort is reason.

&& I'm to do something, to be somewhere. If you're just driving out for a drive, you see, you're still driving out for a drive. I mean - and so, thought plus this effort is your reasoning.

I'm afraid you find that terribly simplified but it happens to be all there is to it.

It's like this. When you drive down the street, you are driving down the street. You are directing yourself and there's so much force which is being directed by you. Now, directed force is effort. So you're exerting an effort as you drive down the street.

Now, people just don't just drive down streets. They drive down streets to go places, to do something, to be somewhere. If you're just driving out for a drive, you see, you're still driving out for a drive. I mean - and so, thought plus this effort is your reasoning.

The intention with relation to any force, the intention relationship to any force, gives one both data and evaluation. What is evaluation? It's an estimation of effort. A value. When we say evaluation or value, it means how much effort. It means now or in the future.

And by the way, this applies to imagination. It also applies to aesthetics. How much effort?

A person, by the way, who sits around and daydreams all the time has an effort just to daydream. But the daydreams are toward a goal. They're always toward a goal! So this effort [tapping on blackboard] is the estimations of this and that.

"Well, let's see, I'll think of myself as uh, being a very rich girl and uh, I have uh-uh, I'll - oh, yeah and I meet this fellow and he's got twelve Cadillacs and so on. We walk in the store and I'm buying this diamond ring and uh..."

You know? I mean, it's daydream, daydream, daydream. Well, it apparently, you see, is aimless. Only it isn't aimless at all because its first goal is to keep one amused so that one will stay in motion. So the daydream, you see, is keeping one in motion, keeping one alive. Or it's just a goal; it's something to do. It's action of a sort because one has not been able to achieve real action. So it becomes symbolized action and that's what symbols are, by the way. They're just pieces of something - of thought - which represent action or states of being in the material universe. Those are symbols.

All right. Here's this girl daydreaming. Of course, she is actually practicing the estimation of effort of what does it take to get a husband. And she's getting this thing into the future, and she's trying to figure out "Now let's see, what would I have on when I meet this fellow?" and so on. She's doing test situations; test situations continually. She's estimating future efforts because someday she may make those efforts.

Now, a person to think does not have to commit the effort necessarily. But the thought is concerned with estimating them. "How much effort is going to come in against me?" "How much effort am I going to have to put out?" "In which direction am I going to have to apply this effort, and so on, in order to continue in existence in this material universe along all the dynamics?" "Now, what - what am I going to do about this and about this and about that?"

People who are worrying are estimating counter-efforts.

People who are just a little bit better off in any state - a chronic or a temporary state - they're estimating the balance of their efforts against counter-efforts. They're estimating how well balanced these things are; how well balanced are they. "Do I have enough?" "I'm making sure that I have enough." Counter-effort, effort, estimation, estimation. "Do I?" "If my effort is so-and-so, their effort is so-and-so," and very, very definite, hard application of estimations of what is coming in and what is going out.

But mind you, right away there is something going out. They already have a concept that they have effort which can face up these counter-efforts.

Now, you see, we're drawing the Tone Scale again.

In apathy all that can happen is counter-effort.

In grief, one can at least protest against the counter-effort; in other words, put an effort of protest back against them.

In fear, one is definitely estimating counter-efforts in the hope - that - and fear has hope in it, to this degree - in an effort to hope that one may be able to dive in some direction and avoid them. And fear is a condition of alertness for counter-efforts which threaten survival. And a person becomes alert in fear. And they're saying, "Mm-gu-gu-gu, gu-gu-gu, what am I - just what am I going to do? What am I going to do?" and that's always bordering. Fear is inaction to action, inaction to action, action to inaction, so on. It's a vibration of indecision but it's - it's got a hope in it: "I may be able to dive." Because if there's no hope in it, it's apathy.

All right, we go up higher along the line then, and we see this - the counter-efforts are coming in - this fellow is estimating how he's going to hold them, hold them, hold them, hold them back, hold them back.

In antagonism, a person is estimating "How am I going to estimate this counter-effort?" or "What is the estimation of this counter-effort, so I can somehow or other turn it around and get - send it back where it came from, as damagingly as possible? Brrr-rowrh!"

Yes, that's resentment, antagonism, overt hostility.

Now, in boredom, you're getting this same balance again. The counter-efforts which are coming in are not necessarily seen to be threatening, but they're not helpful. And it's a problem of, well, why estimate any efforts against them? It's a better estimation than it is below 2.0, because they see these counter-efforts are not terribly bad off. But that's mainly the trouble with them.

One of the ways to get a person out of boredom is to pull out a .45 automatic and shoot at him a couple of times (laughter). That, by the way, provides enough counter-effort so that they immediately can estimate an effort of their own and they go out of boredom. Oh, I don't recommend this.

& But it gives you an idea.

& Female voice: How about CO2 therapy? You'll have to see Dr. Winter about killing patients.

& I don't mean anything catty, this has got to come off the tape.

& CO2 therapy - I'm not giving this talk to idiots. Where was I?

& Male Voice: About handling somebody in boredom.

& Yeah, boom!

&& But (laughter) you have to see doctor Winter about killing patients (laughter). I don't mean any [unclear word]. This is got to come off the tape. Well, bad remark, might get off. Seroto-Therapy? I don't give this talk to idiots (laughter). Seroto-Therapy! Where was I? (laughter) [LRH is making some jokes with the public] Boom!

All right. Now, at 3.0 a person is being careful or cautious, careful or cautious to shoot back the proper effort to balance these counter-efforts coming in. And if one is very careful to watch for the counter-effort and estimate it correctly and take his own effort and estimate it correctly he can hold a whole thing in a status quo. And that's good and safe and reasonable and one has to think quite a bit to do this, and we mustn't make any sudden moves because it might open a channel where an unseen counter-effort can come right on through.

Now at 3.5, we again have a condition whereby the counter-efforts are being pretty well estimated for what they are and there isn't much reason to keep driving efforts back in there. Well, you can just hold them more or less, and so on. It's boredom again, actually - a boredom of sorts - but not anywhere near as bad as 2.5.

We get to 4.0 and we find the individual doing something interesting with counter-efforts. The guy is saying, "Hurrah, hurrah! Somebody's attacking me. Something's happening." And he's very cheerful about the thing.

"Well, let's pick up these counter-effort vectors and let's see what we can do with them. We'll tie a couple of bowknots in them and we'll throw them back. Now, let's see, how can we fix these counter-efforts?"

Now, if you take a tennis racket, by the way, as an example, and if you receive the ball with the racket just slightly slanted from the perpendicular to the ball and roll the racket as the ball hits it, the power of the ball coming in sends the ball back. And it doesn't take any effort really on the part of the player at all, they - he just rolls the racket and the ball goes back. And a good tennis player really knows how to do this.

Well, that's a fellow who's very cheerful about the thing. He takes these counter-efforts and he uses them as fast as they come in. He uses counter-efforts and he just turns it right back - wham! He employs them.

And as you go on up the Tone Scale, a person gets to a point where eventually a counter-effort doesn't even come near him.

There is a theoretical point on the Tone Scale where the individual would make a Mack truck bounce. Theoretically? That's a theoretical point, you understand. But that's what you're extrapolating toward.

So at the top of this band that concerns itself with counter-efforts and efforts, you have somebody who could stand in the middle of a highway with a Mack truck coming at him at sixty miles an hour and could go right on standing there, and the Mack truck would either jump in the air or fly into the ditch or do something like this. In other words, a counter-effort does - won't come anywhere near him. It's as though he's wearing a force screen or something of the sort.

And by the way, I've seen it happen. Very remarkable. There are lots of people around that just nothing can happen to them. That's all. Lots of them. Just how it comes about you're never quite sure, but for some reason or other, why, anything that starts to break or starts to fly loose or starts to hit them or something of the sort will suddenly suspend action. It just sort of does something very completely unexpected. And it, by the way, never hurts anybody else in the vicinity.

Now, for instance, there were certain people through the last war. They go into an area and there's no activity - I mean, everything stops. Things stop.

This ship has, let's say, been getting hot and heavy and it's been getting slugged all over the place and all of a sudden it gets a new exec or something like that. And the exec goes aboard and after that for the next year the ship is in combat areas, it's in contact with the enemy, not a single shell is thrown at it and nothing happens to this ship - nobody gets hurt on board, nobody goes psychotic on board, nothing happens.

And, by the way, this is very disgusting to people who are very low on the Tone Scale. And this, by the way, is the problem of the accident-prone. But this is just a theoretical problem. This is a theoretical level to give you some understanding of the two possible extremes.

Now the bottom extreme, of course, is where any counter-effort of any kind or description would - if it is even vaguely capable of direction at the individual - will hit him and go through him; that's apathy. If anything could possibly happen by stretching every law of coincidence, by making the most cockeyed positions for individuals to be in at this time, most unlikely circumstances will be posed so that this individual will be hit. So that this straw which blows down the street - it won't hit anybody else on the street - but somehow or other its velocity is such that it goes into his right ear and deafens him. I mean, this is the sort of a thing that you have at the lower part of the tone band.

These people are very dangerous to be around, by the way, if your own tone is low. They're dangerous to be around anyhow because they'll sort of change factors on you a little bit and drop the factors down.

I knew one person, by the way, that no matter where he walked, no matter what he did, he and people around him got hurt. It just didn't matter much what was going on, somebody would get hurt. They'd just manage to get hurt somehow or other or he'd get hurt. That's accident- proneness.

National Casualty Company will demonstrate the actual existence of accident-proneness to this degree: An insurance company keeps close check on the books of corporations to make sure - and, by the way, I don't suppose it's supposed to be known, but I was never put under secrecy about it - checks these books to make sure that well-known accident-prones are not employed by certain corporations which they have under insurance. You could call this almost a labor blacklist. But it is death to have certain people in the shop. And they've just empirically noticed this and they've kept a record of it. And so that's in the cold, hard figures of the big office that computes these statistics and compiles them in New York.

Now, when it comes to your liability in the society according to the Tone Scale, you can measure an individual's worth or liability just by measuring his counter-effort handling. What efforts of his own does he employ against what counter-efforts?

Now, let's put this in a very, very, very mundane sort of a thing. Let's take boxing. Here are two boxers. We will assume boxer A is in apathy and boxer B is just a boxer. Boxer A is hit by boxer B. The counter-effort comes through; it finds boxer A with no guard up. The blow hits him, knocks him down and he lies there. That's apathy, you see.

Now, the odd part of it is, strangely enough, that boxer B has a tendency to hit boxer A much more often and much harder if boxer A is in apathy.

Now,we go up the Tone Scale a ways, and we have boxer A in the position where he is sure he is going to be hit. And he's lost, maybe, his championship anyhow, and so forth. And he'll hit and more or less fend back to the position he was in, but he'll just keep on taking punishment, punishment. Grief is what he's in, but he's actually sort of inviting these counter-efforts from boxer B.

All right. Let's take fear. Boxer A boxing in there. He knows these counter-efforts are going to come through. He knows they're through. He's in a point of agitation and the counter-efforts come through. Now, all boxer B has to do is to feint with the right and hit with the left. He - all he has to do is make boxer A estimate that the blow is going to come from the wrong side and he's got boxer A. Because boxer A will fixate the second he thinks he knows where the counter-effort is coming from. Actually, fear is sort of a state of not-knowingness with regard to counter-efforts.

Now, let's take boxer A at 1.5 on the Tone Scale. Slug, slug. He wants to destroy boxer B, and he goes about it by putting up no guard whatsoever. He will use his full body to stop the blows, he will hold every blow that is hit at him and his entire effort is devoted upon destroying boxer B, so that he will continue to more or less hold a same level of motion throughout the thing.

Now, let's take him at 2.5 - he's bored - boxer A is bored. Boxer B keeps tap, slap, tap, slap and so forth. And this fellow just keeps knocking these blows away. He knocks the blows away. He's not interested. He doesn't hit boxer B. He just knocks away these blows. Tap - boxer B comes in - strike, strike, strike and boxer A in boredom keeps fending the blow, that's all; rather carelessly, by the way, and so, we can see there's - I'm using boxer B, you see, as counter-effort and boxer A is effort.

Now, you take an individual at 3.0: he's boxing cautiously. He does not want to lose the fight. He's boxing efficiently. If damage is done to him, he'll fairly well do damage to the other person, almost in the same ratio. If the other person doesn't fight very hard, why, the fellow at 3.0 will tend to not fight very hard. He wants to hold a status quo with the thing. But he will continue to hold a status quo.

At 3.5, again we have boxer A in a situation where he will not particularly win. What he will do is flick off these blows as they're coming in, and so on. And, by the way, there is a little bit of insouciance or a capriciousness at 3.5 which would occasionally cause - you see, he's picking up interest in life, even though he's doing the same thing of being kind of bored about it, and he's actually doing something covert - he's doing a covert 4.0. He's just below that, he's doing a little bit of covert, and he will sometimes hit boxer B to be funny or in a funny place or in an unexpected place. Boxer B puts through this terrific haymaker, and boxer A at 3.5 fends it off. And as boxer B goes by, boxer A could very well by that - at that moment, probably, have planted the haymaker that would have ended the fight. And he won't do that. He will step back lightly and tap boxer B on the top of the head lightly and watch him go on by. You know, that kind of a reaction - that is the action of there. You find a 1.1 will do this on a very forced level for humor but a 3.5 will do it actually.

Now at 4.0 you're liable to have this situation: every time - boxer A is at 4.0, you see, now - every time boxer B strikes hard and heavy, he will lunge forward. And you will find boxer A waiting for boxer B's forward lunge. Boxer A will take boxer B's forward momentum and use that as the bulk of the blow. He will put his fist in the right position so that boxer B will hit himself on the jaw, don't you see? He uses boxer B's motion to lick boxer B. And that's 4.0.

Now, it goes on up on this same harmonic, right on up the Tone Scale, to a point where, I guess on a heavy thought level, boxer A - if at this theoretical level were boxing there - boxer B would start to come into the ring to harm boxer A, would put his foot in the water bucket before he got into the ring, would turn upside down and miraculously wouldn't be hurt but wouldn't be able to continue the fight. And then the judges, in some peculiar fashion or other, would adjudicate that the fight had been fought and award the championship to boxer A, who of course didn't earn it at all, everybody could be expected to say, but at this theoretical level everybody would cheer and think this was fair.

Male voice: Very true.

Now, there is, again, the Tone Scale in terms of effort and counter-effort. I hope you understand very clearly now what I mean by counter-effort. There's no sense to dodge around and call it something else to make it simple or easy. It is the effort which counters one's survival.

One is making an effort to survive and he runs into things that are motionless in his road or runs into things that are in motion that don't want him to, particularly. Because those efforts which the individual picks up and utilizes for his own survival are, of course, really not counter-efforts. They're efforts.

This fellow goes out and grows a vegetable garden. Well, those vegetables coming up out of the ground aren't counter-efforts to the gardener. They're his efforts. Even though he's not even there and the vegetables are growing and so on, why, every effort being made by the vegetables is being made for the gardener, so they're his efforts. So you see you have extended efforts.

In the old day, psychoanalysis used to talk about alter egos. Well, let's put it on a little more comprehensible line for our purposes and say that the efforts of - let's take Mother and Jimmy: Jimmy is Mother's boy; he's a very bright boy and he goes down and he wins the state polevaulting championship. Well, what do you know - that's Mother's effort.

She says so to herself. It's just as thoroughly her effort as though she went down there and took that pole in her hands - having doffed her lace collar or something of the sort - and gone right straight on through with the pole vaulting and won the championship herself. Unless she's low on the Tone Scale, and this will be too much motion for her and she will elect Jimmy at that moment a counter-effort and treat him as such.

This is also responsibility, isn't it, when you get down and think about it for a moment.

How much counter-effort or how much effort in the universe do you presume is serving you, or is yours? Not yours as a 1.5 "I am," but just yours as an individual. How much effort in the universe are you willing to accept as yours? The more you accept as yours, the less will hit you. And that, pure and simple, is responsibility - the level of responsibility. For how much effort are you willing to take responsibility? Because you will get as a counter-effort any effort you don't take under your responsibility.

Let's take A and B, and they're not fighting for money - they meet each other in the street and A is challenged by B because of something A is imagined to have done. If A refuses to accept responsibility for this, he simultaneously accepts B as a counter-effort, at which moment B will hit him or strike at him, push at him or move him around one way or the other.

Quite in reverse - let's look at it on the reverse side - we find out that if A accepts B's protest as A's own protest and A suddenly says, "Gee, that is pretty bad; we'd better do something about that," all of a sudden B is off guard and finds himself as an ally of A exerting effort against the counter-efforts of the environment. And no fight's possible! This is responsibility. The column of responsibility which you'll find in the handbook is strictly that estimation of effort, estimation of counter-effort and the acceptance of ownership.

Do you realize, for instance, that an individual who nails down a piece of real estate, yard by a yard or a mile by a mile, and says, "That's mine," the moment he puts a fence around it, he has disowned all the efforts outside that fence and they will immediately hit the fence as counter-efforts.

So that the basic law of earth happens to be concerned with water and land and fencing it off. That's the basic of all law: water rights and land rights.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

In other words, the acceptance of an individual of the efforts of the MEST universe determines directly the amount of counter-effort which the individual is going to receive from the MEST universe. The degree to which he accepts the universe as his own effort is the degree to which he will not receive counter-efforts.

And this is very interesting on this basis. This is quite conclusive as this concept is very solid; it's not very nebulous. One day a fellow had been - oh, had been just in terrible condition and he'd been threatening around and so on, and he was going to do so-and-so and so-and-so. And somebody had told me he was on the phone, and so I - "Oh, so-and-so. Oh, yeah. Well, let's see, I think I will accept him one hundred percent as an effort." I'll take full responsibility for anything he does and says, in other words, and postulated this, picked up the phone and talked to him. Didn't even say anything very sensible to him and he cooled off immediately, and within twenty-four hours had accomplished a couple of items that I had been wanting to get accomplished, without my even bringing it up. Now his anger just went by the boards.

Now, if people desire acceptance - you see, a desire for being accepted, that's a very nebulous thing; it has not been defined.

Accepted. Well, accepted by society. What's society supposed to do? Write you a license to survive or something? What do you want the society to do to accept you? You want the society to use as their effort your effort. That is acceptance. The acceptance of an individual, then, by a group is the group's signification of its willingness to employ the efforts of that individual as a group effort.

And by the way, almost the whole field of group management grows out of that law. The whole field of contribution, and what you do about contributions, grow out of that.

One of the primary things wrong with early organizations with which I had any vague connection at all was the fact that their management did not accept the efforts of others but contested the efforts of others, even to a point of violence. And so nobody was accepted by these organizations, and their management, and so on, rather caved them in in this fashion, because they got the counter-efforts.

What do you do to a revolutionary? If you were a government and you were beset at every hand by wild revolutionaries, how would you handle them? Would you shoot them? Mm-mm. Would you reprimand them? Mm-mm. Would you put out a lot of propaganda against them? Mm-mm.

You find out exactly where they're located and who they are, and you publish a public proclamation to the effect that you're terrifically anxious to contact them because they might have some ideas and can be of some help. And then you explain to these people what your problems are and ask them to look it over, look over your situation, and see how their ideas can forward the general good of the entire group. And having received their ideas and having them now with a clear view of what you're up against, you take an area of action and give it to them. And there would never have been a revolution on the face of the earth if management or government had always done this. You see how this could be?

Of course, when one is below 2.0, one desires to succumb. And what is the fastest way to succumb? To select out all one's potential efforts and elect them counter-efforts, and one will succumb in a hurry. That's a speedy process. Anybody who tries to help you, don't let them; anybody who comes up and says a kind word to you, make them understand that it was an unkind word; anybody who wishes to use the same things you're using, make it clear to them they can't.

And if you go into this thoroughly enough and if you did it very broadly and very suddenly, you could probably manage to succumb in a matter of an hour or two. I don't know why people use pistols for suicides. Once you know this law, you can commit suicide almost immediately. Of course, you don't determine how painful it will be, but you could actually elect out enough efforts all around you to generate sufficient counter-efforts. You see, all you're doing is you are taking those efforts and you are making counter-efforts out of them, and of course they'll fly right back at you the second that you've twisted them around. Bang! And then you're in horrible condition.

What does the body do when it starts to disintegrate as a person goes down the Tone Scale? Little by little and piece by piece and organ by organ and joint by joint, the individual stops accepting the activity of that area on behalf of the individual and elects it to be activity against the individual in that area, one way or another, and so this part is no longer part of the group and it'll start to work right straight against the individual.

I imagine you could school somebody into this whereby he could create almost any disease at will. You could keep saying, "Well, my left ear doesn't belong to me. My left ear doesn't belong to me. My left ear hurts me all the time. It's got a buzzing in it and I don't like it; it's not shapely," and keep on making it very plain that your left ear is not your effort but your counter-effort, and it will develop abscesses and rot off and give you brain fever, or do most anything for you.

You see how this is? This tells you immediately something about the physiological state of individuals. An individual handles himself much as he handles his environment. Because himself, meaning his body, is also part of his environment, is also part of the MEST universe. And an individual handles his body and its actions much as he handles the MEST universe. So you can watch an individual handling things in the MEST universe and know how he's handling himself.

If, for instance, he wrecks all the cars he drives and he ruins this and he ruins that, you know that he's also potentially sick or he is already sick, one way or the other, from something or other. If you look at him and you see how he cares for himself or how he grooms himself or how he doesn't groom himself, he will do the same thing as that to the MEST universe around him, because he'll handle it as he handles himself. Therefore, you can make an estimation of how the individual will handle something for you by watching him handle himself; because he will handle it just the same either way, because we're on the principle of how you handle efforts. Do you elect them as efforts? Do you elect them as counter-efforts? Does this individual elect his clothes as counter-efforts?

You know, nearly everybody in the society, by the way, in his - any early childhood of his life has - in any early childhood has had the adults around him electing clothes as a counter-effort to the child.

You know, "You can't wear your shoes today, you have to wear those other shoes and those are the shoes which you wear Sunday; and you must take care of your clothes and you keep getting the knees knocked out of these breeches; or you keep tearing your dress, and you must take care of that dress," and so on and so on and so on. And they're saying, "Your clothes, your shoes are counter-efforts, your shoes are counter-efforts, your clothes are counter-efforts, your clothes are counter-efforts." And all of a sudden the individual gets the idea that clothes are counter-efforts. And after that he sort of fights them. And you'll see him wearing collars which are much too tight for him. You will see him wearing shoes which hurt him, and so on. He's elected them as counter-efforts and they'll act that way. He says, "My shoes hurt me," so he'll make sure to buy shoes that hurt him. He's got to prove it.

Because the factor standing behind this thing is he - no one can be wrong. You can't be wrong - the mind has got to be right; it's made to be right and so forth. So if the individual has elected his shoes as a counter-effort, now he - if he's done that already, now, when he gets comfortable shoes they won't be a counter-effort, will they? So he'll be wrong.

It isn't whether he'd be more comfortable or less comfortable, or better looking or less looking, it's just will he be wrong or right? Well, he said, "My shoes are counter-efforts. Nobody ever let me own my shoes and nobody ever did anything for me with shoes. And therefore, these shoes are counter-efforts."

Well, the way shoes are counter-efforts is they hurt you. Well, so the only kind of shoes you can buy are shoes which hurt you. Now, this is obvious, isn't it?

And then because you don't want anybody to suspect to any degree that you are worried in the slightest about whether you're right or wrong - since that in itself is a confession that you might not be right - you have to get up a big explanation of why it is that you wear these shoes that are too tight.

And you say, "Well, there's a gangster in New York that I admire very much who wears shoes with these double-pointed toes like this and they're very stylish and so on, and that's the style and that's why I wear them." Which is a cover-up and an effort to get away from having to say, "I'm wrong. I may be wrong because I may not be right concerning these shoes. Therefore, I've got to have a big explanation; therefore, I have to have justification for having elected something to be a counter-effort." And follow that very closely. Now, get this next step.

When the individual elects a counter-effort, he has to have a reason to keep from being wrong. Of course, it is basically a hundred percent wrong to elect anything to be a counter-effort. But to keep from being wrong one has to have a reason. So what one does is claim that the shoes have committed an overt act against him, so that he's justified in committing an overt act back against the shoes by electing the shoes as being a counter-effort. Well, you see, it's a circular problem.

So, when an individual goes into a fight with somebody else, he becomes very concerned with the fact that he did not elect this counter-effort to be a counter-effort of his own volition. Somebody else elected it as a counter-effort and now he has to suffer for it.

In other words, he is receiving an overt act - he's proving that he himself is receiving this overt act. Therefore, he is justified in fighting back against the shoes; he's now justified in anything he does to the shoes. He's justified in electing them a counter-effort; he's justified in fighting with an effort the counter-effort.

Now, this is - should tell you a great deal about the human mechanism - mental activity with regard to the MEST universe. You see, unfortunately, if there were no counter-efforts of any kind whatsoever, you wouldn't have any action at all. You wouldn't have a bit of action.

And so, what would you do for action? What would you do for it? There wouldn't be anything for it. You'd have to go find another universe.

But what would you do with that other universe? You'd say, "Well, it's a counter-effort to this universe, so we'll have to lick it."

Now, when you say, "All these counter-efforts around here are my efforts," you will actually cut down your own level of action - necessary action. Now, it's by the way very desirable to cut it down in order to go up Tone Scale to a certain degree. But above that level you've got to be in a position where you are free to elect your counter-efforts.

What do we elect as a counter-effort? Do we elect another man as a counter-effort? Do we elect animals as counter-efforts? Do we elect the effort of life in surviving as a counter-effort? It's all very irrational, isn't it? No, about the only safe, really safe counter-effort to elect - only real safe effort to turn into a counter-effort - is the MEST universe. And if a person will fight the MEST universe and bring alignment into the MEST universe, he can have lots of action and stay way up Tone Scale because he's only down on one dynamic, which is not, strictly speaking, a dynamic of thought but is a dynamic of the material universe. So he is at liberty to fight the universe.

And as a matter of fact, an individual who will fight the universe and bring enormous alignment into the forces of the universe, who will bring things into being - orderly, helpful being - out of the physical universe, is generally in pretty good shape. And he's generally accepted as doing something good.

Now, whenever your physicist goes to work along this line and he triumphs along this line, everybody says, "Three cheers, three cheers, three cheers," and then somebody else comes along and elects this effort of the physicist as something to be used against life. And everybody says, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no." You see, that's wrong.

What you should do is take the atom bomb and turn it around against matter, energy, space and time. And you can do a lot with it. For instance, you could - oh, I'd hate to go into the number of things you could do with an atom bomb. But the last thing you want to do - very low Tone Scale - is to blow up other men with it. See, that's wrong.

Now, the physical universe is chaos, and you bring alignment into this chaos, what are you doing? You're doing the basic action of life and that action is picking up pieces of force - bits of force, which might or might not be headed at you - and lining them up to hit more force in the physical universe, which might or might not be headed at you; to pick up that force and align it.

Now, what you're gaining there, is at first there's this random vectors of action around you - the chaos of the MEST universe. Now, you pick a little bit of that off and you say, "This force - this chaosness is a force and I am electing it into an effort. And now here it is as an effort."

By the way, you do this by making a theta facsimile of it. Therefore, you get enough theta facsimiles of this and you know all of a sudden the basic law of it. Now you've made that into an effort. Now, you've elected a whole lot of other things out here as potentially counter-efforts, but you make them strike this effort which you have in such a way that any time they hit it, they come around and become from a counter-effort into an effort. So your effort gets bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger and more and more aligned.

An engineer can whip a river if he uses the forces of the river to lick the river. But an engineer can't whip a river by destroying a river, because that wasn't what he was trying to do in the first place. He was probably trying to make a dam or he's trying to do something else. But if he uses the force of the river to lick the river, why, he will win. But if he uses the force of the river to drown men, he won't win. And if he uses the force of the river to fix it so nobody can ever fix the river, he won't win.

For instance, if he starts a war in North China and lets the dikes out of the Yellow River to drown Japanese troops - and incidentally a few million Chinese civilians - nobody, not even the fellow who did it, thought it was a good action. The Yellow River went whipping across North China and wrecking enormous areas because the Yellow River had to be very carefully diked - very carefully. It was flowing many feet above its - the actual level of the plain around it. It was depositing silt until it had climbed into the air. And it was an artificial river, actually, flowing way up there in the air, carefully sandbagged.

Japanese troops start in. The first thing anybody can think of, of course, is "Let's drown them all." So they knock out the Yellow River and, in addition to that, don't bother to repair its dikes again in any way, shape or form. And for years that Yellow River went whipping back and forth across the plains of North China, not settling down into anything.

It didn't do anybody a single bit of good. The Japanese empire is whipped where it needn't ever have gone to war*war in North China; reference to the war between china and Japan that began with a Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and ended with the World War II defeat of Japan in 1945. The United States supported China's position in the war, and publicly protested Japan's air raids and bombing of Chinese civilians. Yellow River; a river (also called the Hwang Ho River) in north central and eastern China. The river gets its name from the yellow silt it picks up along its course. Silt deposits also elevate the river bed (in places sixty to seventy feet above the countryside) and necessitate raising the river's dike. If the pressure of water in the channel becomes abnormally high, the dikes may be breached and masses of water cascaded over a large area; this has happened so frequently that the river is called "China's Sorrow." Its course has shifted many times through the centuries, vitally affecting thirty-five million acres of rich farmland. In June of 1938, the dikes of the Yellow River burst, causing catastrophic floods. Among the hundreds of thousands of people drowned were 6,000 Japanese troops, part of a force that had successfully invaded and occupied several major Chinese cities. The Chines were accused of blasting the dikes to stop the Japanese offensive, a charge which they denied. The course of the river changed as a result, and did not return to its previous bed until 1947. and the United States government has lost a great deal which it never need have lost if it had ever talked to the Japanese government about it, instead of electing the Japanese government to be a counter-effort; and as far as China is concerned, her surging effort against the Japanese laid her wide open for the communists, and she lost everything.

So, you see, stemming out from this irrationality of electing man as counter-effort, you lose control of the physical universe; because it takes the aligned vectors of all men to lick the physical universe, so it's a laudable goal. But man fighting man, we know that's wrong because you go back downhill. Using the physical universe's laws to fight man is aiding and abetting the physical universe against man - no matter which side you're on. Can you see how that is?

Now, you can see how far conceptually and how much you can understand and know about behavior from the standpoint of effort alone. What is effort? What do you elect as effort? What is going to be your effort? What are you saying is counter-effort?

Your goals, and the whole problem of goals, is actually nothing more than your or your preclear's idea about which efforts he is going to elect as counter-efforts and which counter-efforts he's going to make into efforts. And that's goals. And there's no more to goals than that, by the way. That is the common denominator of all goals.

And you're going to get some preclear to straighten out his goals? All you have to do is start out with him and start asking him, "Let's see, what is bucking you?" "What may get in at you?" and "What can you do to fight back at this?" - will make him realize, on an evaluation level, of what to do with goals.

But there's something more important than that. When did he first elect of his own free self-determined will to have his present enemies as counter-efforts? His recognition of this, by the way, is likely to clear up his whole problem of goals and will certainly clear up his uncertainty about present time. He realizes all of a sudden this horrible, insidious fact - as I'll cover in a later talk - he did it himself.

You elect these things to be counter-efforts when you should have elected them to be efforts, and sooner or later they're going to cause you trouble.

Now, on the very technical application side of effort and counter-effort you will find that you are working with, in facsimiles, the facsimile or the picture of old efforts and counter-efforts as they were exerted on the individual. And this is very, very easy to understand.

Here is the individual standing there, trying to remain at a state of rest, and a baseball hits him. And the baseball tells him he's got to move, but he is determined to stay in a state of rest, so he doesn't move, so the baseball hits him, and because he doesn't move, the baseball doesn't go through him - he gets a black eye. The baseball was a counter-effort and his effort was to stand still when the baseball hit him.

And when you run the facsimile, you'll find this: you'll find his effort to stand still and the baseball's effort to knock him out. And you will find something very interesting, his determination to stand still happened a little bit before the ball hit him. But it certainly was reconfirmed the second the ball did hit him - for the first moment.

And though he apparently was hit in the eye by a baseball and fell down promptly and will tell you that he was knocked down by the baseball, what actually happened was this: the baseball hit him and the first instant of impact he leaned into the baseball! He actually hit the baseball with his eye. And he hit it hard. He leaned right straight into the baseball, held on with every fiber of his being, trying to vanish the baseball, and went down Tone Scale on the whole thing as he realized that it was a counter-effort. But he tried to make it into an effort one way or the other or get ahold of it or assimilate this thing hitting him, and as a result there we have a black eye.

And when you run this black eye, you will find out that the individual is tending to remain at a state of rest. He's doing one of three things: He's tending to remain at a state of rest no matter what hits him, and the first moment after something tries to keep him from being at a state of rest, he will try to keep on being in a state of rest.

If you don't know this little point, you're liable to miss the first of a facsimile. And it will be the most important part; it'll contain most of the pain. It didn't hurt him after he went along with this force of the baseball. But when he's tried to say, "There is no baseball" and completely vanish a baseball with his right eye, he wasn't going about it with the proper mystic symbols or something (laughter) and he got a black eye; he failed.

All right. Next step: The individual is trying to remain in a state of motion. He's walking down the street, let us say, and somebody has laid a two-by-four across the sidewalk at shin height. And he continues on walking down the street and he hits the two-by-four with his shin. He tries to keep on walking for the first moment after the - he hits the two-by-four. His shin tries to keep on going into the two-by-four. The two-by-four just didn't viciously hit him and knock the shin back and his shin was completely innocent, and so forth - that sort of thing. What he's got to do is go right straight on in and he's - tries to go straight through the two-by-four.

And he finds out he isn't quite up enough on his going through holes in space or something. And at this moment he conceives the idea that he'd better have a somatic - a pain. And then he'd better get his shin back away from that. And then he elects the two-by-four as being at fault and says "that two-by-four," then he says "the guy that put the two-by-four there," and then it's the world in general and the universe in particular, and he just spreads this whole thing out as a counter-effort as his tone comes up again, and then it comes back down again after his shin stops hurting and he's all right.

So you can see an individual through one pain of this character go through the whole Tone Scale and up again. Now what happened then was the MEST universe, or some part of the MEST universe, or some other - any counter-effort, was in this case motionless and the individual was trying to move. And the motionlessness, relative motionlessness of this two-by-four disturbed the individual's self-determined effort to keep on moving. So an individual's tendency to remain in a state of motion was upset by a motionlessness in the physical universe.

Now, an individual is walking in a certain direction and some - a snowball hits him on the shoulder and tries to make him walk in another direction, you see, tries to curve him off. The first thing he will try to do is keep on course. And his effort to keep on course compounds with the effort to resist this snowball, and you'll find him actually backing into the snowball for the first moment. He'll get a reaction toward that snowball.

Even if a person's in apathy, there is still enough residual cellular tone to cause him to resist the snowball. And that's what pain is. It's the individual's unwillingness to be changed from a state of rest to a state of motion by a counter-effort, or an individual's unwillingness to alter his state of motion into a state of not motion because of a counter-effort, or an individual's effort to remain in a steady course despite a dissuading, disturbing or otherwise "uncoursifying" effort. Do you get this whole idea? That's all there is to it.

When you run out these counter-efforts, you'll find that the counter-effort is a distinct effort. And you'll also find out incidentally that your preclear can go around and be the counter-effort. He can be the snowball. He could actually go to this point - you never ask him to do this - but he could actually be the snowball flying through the air and hitting the shoulder. He can be the snowball, hit the snowball and he can get the snowball's somatics? Of course, he's never basically responsible for the material universe. I mean, he could have never been an effort of the physical universe at all. Nonsense!

That is a ridiculous line to go down on, but I want you to realize that the individual can be the counter-effort. You don't have to keep him standing there in valence - don't keep insisting he stay in valence and keep getting hit by this snowball. Bring him around and let him be the snowball's effort. Let him have the snowball. And you'll see an individual after a while after you are running this snowball hitting him, he says, "Well, I - it tried to turn me."

And you say, "All right. Now, let's get the force turning you." If you were to say, "Be the force turning you," he would actually sit there, and you'd see him on the couch doing little shoves at the shoulder - shoves at the shoulder. And he's getting the somatic in the place where he was hit. But he also has some kind of a strange concept of being what hit him.

If you were to develop that up in full, you'd find out he really was all the time anyhow, so it didn't matter.

Nothing equals infinity equals nothing and we all agreed on it a long time ago that there was something, so you see, it's very simple. Of course, I'11 let Einstein do the mathematics on it (laughter). He's welcome to them.

All right. That is, in effect, the whole subject of effort, and actually about all you need to know about it.

You'll run some simplicity, some simple efforts, and you will find out very soon the varieties that I've named are the varieties. There's just those combinations of individuals trying to remain in a state of rest or trying to remain in a state of motion, the counter-efforts trying to remain in a state of rest or a state of motion and these conflicts produce - with those additional two change items - these conflicts produce all the pain and the somatics and the conflict that an individual is capable of having anywhere in his entire bank.

Okay, let's take a breather on this.