Okay, this is December the 13th, second afternoon lecture. I want to talk about the — about knowingness.

Okay. This is December the 13th, a special afternoon lecture — Sunday.

Knowingness is, of course, a remarkable thing when one considers that in English, its synonym [homonym] is "no-ing-ness." Of course, no one would ever try to fool people by making these two words the same word!

What I'm going to tell you today is perhaps going to upset you, from the standpoint of Book One and so forth. However, we're interested in getting individuals to function. We're much more interested in getting individuals to function than we are in being a consistent propaganda line. If you'll remember that and use that datum, why, a lot of things that have happened will be much better understood by you. Much more interested in getting individuals to function than we are in being a consistent propaganda line.

But do you know that that single fact alone is the biggest hurdle on the track as far as a preclear is concerned. He has all of his life been taught that he mustn't "no"; he must "yes." I mean, "noingness and yesingness" there. There — that's the dichotomy he's running.

The world at large deals mainly in propaganda, and it's often very difficult for an individual to differentiate, because he is so thoroughly indoctrinated in propaganda, between an effort to convince and an effort to be functional. And in Dianetics and Scientology, if nothing else, we've tried to be functional.

Now, when we try to instruct anybody, we are going up against his lookingness. Because he's going to try to run back the track, thinkingness in terms of circuits, going up into effort and going up into feeling, going up again into lookingness, and then finally, going into knowingness.

Now, in Book One, I said man was basically good. This is true, at such a terrible seven-league boot step from where you find him, that it becomes almost unattainable utilizing any earlier or, you might say, aforestated techniques. Simply because man has been fooled too often and because man is unable and incapable of differentiating between goodness, truth, decency, trustworthiness and evil, playing the "only one" and so on.

Now, you take somebody who is bogged down, you might say, in energy. He considers that he needs energy to fix an idea. An idea must be a thing — in other words, a symbol. An idea which is cloaked in energy of any kind is actually a symbol. That is the definition of a symbol: it's any idea which is fixed in any space, with energy. An idea which is not fixed in space in energy, but is merely fixed in space — understand, it's not fixed in space and energy, but is simply fixed in space — is simply an idea; it is not a symbol. And it is essentially very fluid. It is easily shifted and changed.

Anyone who is good — or the word good itself — defines himself or the word on the basis of how little harm he does. That's funny, isn't it? So here we have — earlier I talked to you about the redefinition of words: We take freedom — now freedom has become something that one has "freedom from." You know, I mean, freedom doesn't mean "freedom" anymore, it means "freedom from something bad."

An individual who has cloaked his postulates in a great deal of energy has made them, to some degree, immobile. And if he himself has thereafter chosen out energy for his randomity, then his postulates do not release; because all of his postulates are cloaked in something which he dare not touch, which is energy.

That's the way the US government started to redefine freedom not too long ago — a few years ago.

Now let's take up the problem of perception. Just completely aside from taking up responsibility and the other things which go along with this, because they all go along with the same thing, let's take up this thing called perception.

All right, good — let's take the definition of this word good. You were taught arduously, when you were very small, that good meant "not doing any harm." Well, if you don't do any harm to things that are harmful, you're in a bad way. A man who destroys harmful things is not bad; he's good. So goodness can be redefined as "weak," and any individual who is redefining goodness as "weakness" is not going to progress very far as a case.

Perception as you understand it, and as done by the mest body, and perception as it is in this universe, uniformly is a flow of particles and is done by a flow of particles.

Now, let's hit on to the basic consideration of bad and good, and we find out that is the basic consideration. And this basic consideration is extremely valuable to you as an auditor, and it includes such thing as "justice" and so forth, and it's valuable to you in the case. That is to say, what is bad and what is good to this case? Because those things which the case says are bad he has resisted, and those things which he has had defined for him as good, he has tried to be.

Thus, if an individual is avoiding force, if an individual is afraid of force, if an individual has eschewed effort, he of course has eschewed at the same time lookingness. He has become afraid of a particle. He's afraid of being hit.

Well, let's take "good and bad art." Nah. I mean it's balderdash. We can't do anything with such a definition. There isn't any such thing as good and bad art. The beautiful, the ugly. Well, it's interesting that the early Christian church redefined nearly everything in the Roman Empire that was beautiful as ugly. They just almost completely swapped. What became beautiful was sordidly apathetic, actually filthy, and what was ugly was glaringly colored and so on. There you had a redefinition of art itself. So there aren't any basic considerations here beyond the individual's own consideration of what he's considering.

He sets up many things as fixed ideas in space. And then to make sure they stay there and something else doesn't bother them, he begins to cloak them in energy to make other things unable to touch them. And he himself becomes able — unable to touch them by becoming afraid of particles. And thus we get the first entrance into "resist all effects," which we covered very, very early in this course.

Now, I refer to you, the Factors. It would be very, very well for you to look over those Factors, because it says the basic consideration. All right.

"Resisting effects" and "being afraid of energy" would thereby be rather synonymous: "being afraid of force" and "resisting all effects."

Let's find out what's holding an engram in. An engram is a unit of force which is held in because one has chosen force itself for his randomity. First one chooses space for his randomity and then doesn't know any place but where he is. And then he chooses force for his randomity and he starts making pictures of things by resisting things with force. And then finally these very force pictures which he himself made come in on him and begin to press hard against him. And so we have, in this instance, a man choosing force as an enemy.

Now, you actually can, after a preclear has been exteriorized, bring him up with SOP 8 - C rather rapidly into a point where he will handle force, and then get to a point where he doesn't have to handle force — where he can know without perceiving.

When you choose force broadly as an enemy, you have also chosen beauty as an enemy, because all beautiful objects are made of force. Just digest that for a moment and you see how far adrift somebody can go by eschewing all force. He will also eschew all beauty.

But you'd have to take him up through perception. And if you take him up through perception without trying at once to take him up through force, you're liable to fail. Because he is not going to go up against any particles, because he's too afraid of being hit. All right.

The sculptor deals with force. He deals with force with his chisel and his hammer, and he is working on a block of stone which is in itself force. Now, if he says force is bad, he is saying it is bad for him to grip his chisel and hit it with a hammer and to make statues out of blocks of stone.

Trying to get an individual to take responsibility, trying to get him up to a point where he does — where he can be ethical, is trying to make an individual go over a track which leads through force, energy. Now, that's a very sad thing. Because you try to teach somebody the whole span of Scientology, and it's actually an enforced sort of lookingness to teach him about it.

Because we have had the word force redefined for us carefully down through the ages: "Force is something bad." Oh no, it isn't. Force is simply a statement, a definition. It's just energy. It isn't bad, it isn't good.

The easy and kindest way to go about it would simply be to clear him, just like that, you see, and then train him. That would be the easiest way to do it. That way is not practical.

And they say, "It was a government that used force on its people," and that's a condemnation. I would like to see a government exist without using force. I would like to see anyone put on a play without using force. But force is something bad. And you say to most preclears, "force," they practically jump out of the processing chair. They don't want anything to do with force. "No, force is very bad," they know that. Force has been used on them too often.

It is better if individuals, as a group, can go through the data on the way up, because they will never, never, never understand anybody afterwards who is bogged down. And you've just created somebody who is up there without any experience of getting there.

And so out of this wilderness of bewildering words and definitions, we get a wilderness of mind. And an individual is at last incapable of knowing what he's for and what he's against, because he's had all the symbols redefined for him this way and that way, and easily, by gradient scales, pushed over into other definitions and so on.

You'll do that with preclears. And those preclears will, because they don't understand the universe . . . You've cleared them up, they're in fine shape, they'll remain stable and all of that. They're not sick. You've taught them a few tricks like fixing up their body and about this and about that, but they have no basic understanding of it. They don't know what space is, they don't know what an evolution on the track is, they don't know anything about what we've called the "God trick" (you know, you tell somebody his mock-up disappeared "because God's against him" and so forth), and you've merely set up for him to fall into, again, all of the mysteries which he's already fallen into.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with force, neither is there anything necessarily completely right with force. Force is force — force is energy, it's foot-pounds, it's effort. Anything you want to do — if you want to move your body down to the sidewalk, you will have to employ effort. That's sad. In other words, that — force is just another definition of effort, that's all. But because it has a specialized definition in terms of punishment, individuals become afraid of it. And the moment you can make a man afraid of something, you've made him choose it to some degree as his randomity. And when you have done that, you've collapsed every engram he has, potentially, upon him. In other words, you've collapsed his bank on him. You've given him no space because he can't hold out anchor points.

Of course, you've probably put him on the track and made him good for the next five or six million years, and that's good enough. But the point I'm making is, to get an enduring state, you've got to get a state which goes up there with knowingness.

Now, force depends, in space terms, on being able to hold two terminals apart. And the ability of an individual to hold two terminals apart determines immediately the amount of force which he can generate. I mean, this is the way he gets force. So, if he can't hold an engram off of himself, he can't hold two terminals apart. If he can't hold two terminals apart, he can't hold an engram off of himself. If he thinks there is something terribly wrong and disgusting and horrible about force, he immediately considers, then, that he mustn't hold anything off of himself. He can't hold two terminals apart, and he doesn't have any space.

So therefore, it's actually not kind to do it fast. Although it's harder to take an individual up and instruct him on where he's going — although it's harder to do that, although it takes longer for the individual to get there than you just as an auditor sitting down, and somebody who knows nothing about it will therefore put up no barriers to you, you just simply put him through the paces and he is stable. It's not kind. And the chances are, after he's up there, he won't listen. That's right, he's perfectly relaxed about things. You can't get an Operating Thetan worried about straightening out the affairs of this world or anything like it. He — merely amused. You take individuals up there who — show them how far south people are and so forth, after that they'll be able to do something for people.

Am I making myself very clear here? So when we say, "Man is basically good," we're saying, "Man is basically capable." You might as well say that word — that word actually means more than the word good. See that? He's basically capable.

So if you were to just make somebody happy, it'd be a very simple thing. All you'd do would just be to clear him, and that would be that.

Now, let's take the difference — and don't think that I'm comparing men to wild animals, I'm not — but let's take the most uninterfered-with thing on the evolutionary line, and that is a wild animal. He's not much interfered with except by the mest universe itself. In other words, there isn't a great deal of consideration, and there are no symbols pushed at him. There are very few symbols changed around for him. Believe me, no tiger has anybody standing around telling him, "The symbols mean this and they mean that."

If you're going to start any kind of a spreading, like a — rings, like a rock dropped in a pool that's going to go out, out, out, out, out, you're going to have to take people through the works. And those who have been through the works on it, they'll know where they've gotten to.

And we find out that a wild animal, although he may get vermin and this and that, he is still in pretty good shape psychically. That's a fact — he's in pretty good shape. You can say he's — he just meets the situation with its proper mood: He's mad all the time. He meets the mest universe — I mean, he expects it to be cruel, he is cruel and he dwells in a realm of certainty thereby.

But in the first moments of training, one should give out very basic terminology, and should define these things very closely.

Now, I don't know that you have had much conversation with wild animals. I might know a little bit about this. I have had quite a bit to do with wild animals. And when you compare a wild cat to a domestic cat, you're apt to find a domestic cat rather disgusting. When you compare a wild dog to a domestic dog, you get a picture which is very strange.

Every once in a while, there's somebody out in the field sounds off, says I change my mind all the time, I change my data all the time. You know, I often ask myself, how would they know? How would they know?

The wild dog has his self-determinism, he lives or dies by his own acts, he takes responsibility for what he does. He dwells in a realm of certainty, and that certainty is "Kill or be killed." That certainty is "Run with the pack, and you're as — you'll run with the pack as long as you are useful to the pack. You will run with the pack as long as the pack is useful to you." Terrifically, sordidly, you might say, blunt logic goes along with this.

Since, if you were to get people saying that and ask them specifically what some of these things were that have been asked of you the last day or so, they wouldn't be able to answer anywhere near as well as you were. They wouldn't — not even vaguely.

Let's take a pack of wolves, which is not too far from a pack of wild dogs, and we find out that the wolves will pause in pursuit — if they are starving — pause in pursuit of game sometimes when one of the wolves becomes injured. They'll eat him. Then they'll go on and pursue the game.

You'd say, "What's the definition of this and the definition of that?" They'd just be standing there — they wouldn't know anything about it. So how would they be qualified to say that I was changing my mind? You see, they wouldn't know whether I was or not. And actually, there hasn't been any large change of mind throughout these three years. What there's been is a consistent and steady plow forward on this problem called existence.

A wolf is safe in a wolf pack as long as he has force to contribute to the hunt. That's all. That's as long as he's safe. That's as much as he's good for. When he no longer has any force to contribute to the hunt, he's food.

The only considerations which have shifted, in the main, have been redefinitions of things — several things have been more clearly understood and have become refined. Amongst those is the word good. "Man is basically good." Yes, he's basically good. How much do we have to say about that, though, to make it a comprehensible statement? We have to realize that a man has to be unafraid to be good. Well, how does a man have to be unafraid? Well, he has to be up to a point where he can know without using space, to be totally unafraid — know without using space or particles — and that would be a serenity and an absence of fear which is unimaginably high. It's not necessarily true that man has to have action to be interested, for instance.

And the efficiency of the wolf is wonderful to behold. One of — the wolf is one of the most efficient animals imaginable. He is also, in the animal kingdom, the world's best father. A wolf father is a fantastic beast — I mean, he does more things for his family. That doesn't stop him for a second, as far as the family itself is concerned — once that family has run for a little while as a pack, he's finally gotten them up to there — his treatment of his family is just the same as his treatment of any other wolf.

But if you were to — merely to get an individual up above the level where he could handle particles and create space, if you'll just get him just that little notch above that, you would find that your individual had the patience and tolerance to be just.

You have to make a pet out of an animal in order to drive it mad. Now, remember that: You have to make a pet out of an animal to drive it mad. And as far as bodies are concerned, there is no difference — not one iota of difference — between the GE and any other wild animal. The GE is not even more intelligent. Man is not intelligent because of his great brain.

I'd recommend to you a very, very simple but a very great book which has been completely overlooked by this society, and that's Hendrik Van Loon's book Tolerance. A marvelous book. It just sort of appeared and perished on the stands. It's still available. It's been out many, many, many years. But his Story of Mankind became famous, and other things became famous, and this little book Tolerance was sort of lost. But it is a great book. If Van Loon ever wrote anything that was great — he's dead now — it was this book Tolerance. And the rest of it is rather childish compared to it, to tell you the truth. And his bestseller of all of these books, his last bestseller on the arts, was amongst the poorer books written, and yet it just sold madly in all directions.

We'll take the Cro-Magnon and we find out that he was much more stupid with his enormous brain capacity than the Neanderthal who eventually took him over. Brain capacity has nothing to do with this. The brain capacity of the dog, the brain capacity of the cat — these things are — have nothing to do with it. Just bluntly — I mean, so there's a quantity of neurons. It is a measure of how much beating in the head has had; that is a measure of that, because it's formed as much neurone shock cushion as was developed by impact. So we have a direct index between brain and the amount of blows something has had — which would be sideways, to some degree, an index of how much experience something had had — but that's not necessarily true either. You could make something develop a big brain simply by banging it in the head regularly, but it wouldn't make it any smarter.

This book Tolerance is well worth reading — well worth reading to you as an auditor. It has a greater sensitivity on the subject than any other similar work in English.

Now, we have this problem of the wild animal domesticated. And we findthat it loses its self-respect, a domesticated wild animal — I've had considerableexperience with these — not because they're caged up so much, but becausethey're taken off of a certainty of what this universe is all about, and they'reput on to a cert, an uncertainty that it might be some other way.

Now, to be tolerant — he doesn't say in that book what a man would really have to be, to be tolerant. The truth of the matter is that tolerance is mainly, by men, confused with apathy: "They don't care what is going to happen," that would be tolerance. No, tolerance would be something else. A great tolerance would depend also upon a great courage — one had the patience to be tolerant because he did not think that he himself or his works or beingness was going to be destroyed any moment.

All that's happened — it's not true, you see, that all things are uniformly bad. It's not true that all things are uniformly good. It's not true that everything is a game as a child understands a game, or that everything is work as an adult understands work. These are whole or absolute statements. These are almost arbitrary statements. Life is a mixture of all these things.

You take any being and convince him that he, at any moment, cannot predict what is going to happen in the next moment, and he then will become so afraid, that he will be tolerant of nothing. He will become a rabid fiend on many subjects.

But where this universe at this time is concerned, this universe at this time presents an aspect wherein the greatest certainty which can be realized by an individual is that it's a cruel universe. That he will eat as long as he serves, as long as his force is great enough to meet the situation, and he will die when that force is no longer adequate to the problem. And that is very close to the truth.

Way, way, way up above this, we get individuals choosing sides so that they can have a game. That's quite a remarkable difference between people being rabid on subjects.

Now, we take in this society a little child, and we raise them up on sweetness and light: that if you are a good boy, and do not employ any force, the society will take care of you and you will have justice, and you'll this — and it's all love and sweet sympathy.

Man, for instance, is suspicious with some reason, against people who wish to reform him. Because ordinarily these people who wish to reform him are merely trying to protect themselves against him — from him.

Now, just because this kid is living in the middle of a bunch of smoke-filled chimneys and narrow streets in something called "culture," does not for one moment remove his environment from the environment of the mest universe, which is essentially a cruel, dog-eat-dog universe. In other words, he's being falsely trained. He's being trained that he's living in some kind of a special strata.

The early West, for instance, was a very, very bold, big society — they had an awful lot of space. Of course, a lot of the people who came into the early West were themselves incapable of survival in the society they had left. But many of them went west simply to get some more space and get a place they could breathe.

Well, now let's take an extremity: Let's drop him into the ocean for a moment where we have sharks, and we will find out that not one shark present will ask whether he is sweet or full of light before he bites. The shark will bite regardless.

People of the frame of mind of somebody who moves into Texas and establishes a homestead and there — moves because somebody had moved so close to him that he could see the smoke from the fellow's chimney on clear days. That was too close. Neighborhood getting too crowded, so he went west.

Not one of the acts of charity of this individual will save him for a split instant between the teeth of that shark. What will save him — if he had the force of prying open the jaws of the shark and eating the shark, that would save him.

Well now, these men had a form of justice of their own which was brought into being later on, and when I say "later on" in Western periods, I'm talking about 1835, 1845 on. You see, there was an awful lot of "West" in the United States that nobody ever really looks at, and that includes all of the seventeenth and all of the eighteenth century, and half of the nineteenth century. All that is overlooked as "West." It's always been West. Two hundred and fifty years of it, before we first got Samuel Colt's little equalizer.

So essentially, man is impractical. In his effort to control his fellows, he has fallen into a very dangerous situation, and that situation is "that if one is good enough, and if one is sweet enough, and if one helps enough, he will then be repaid by endless adoration and survival." And this is not true, he will not be.

Now, at this stage — the equalizer, called by various names at various periods when different models came out — men could deal out their own justice. And we have this appeal so strong that the movies today play practically nothing, if they want box office, but Western stories. They're dealing in self-administered justice — the fellow who was fastest on the draw and so on.

A man is as good as he can use effort, use force and predict it. And he's as bad off as he cannot predict on his own part, or on the part of others, effort and force. And that's about all you can say about it.

Well, the West went by the boards, according to the old-timers, in the day when the reformers came. And the reformers came only for one reason, and that was to feast on the West. They came in and stopped all gunplay and made everybody hang up his gun belts in each successive area approached, so that they could set up an orderly method of extracting the taxes. And that's what it amounted to.

Now, it's true that if an individual — and I've said this often in lectures, but it's generally missed, mostly because I haven't immediately followed it by a process which remedies this — when an individual is way above the ability to generate almost unlimited force, then and only then can he afford the rather expensive luxury of sweetness, light, sympathy, kindness and forbearance.

The society degraded, actually degraded very, very markedly, because the men who were there at the beginning didn't care much about their own personal survival. They had no real thought about surviving; they merely were going to go as long and as fast and as colorfully as possible, and then hope that they died quick when the end came, and they did.

A man who has two guns strapped on can be sweet. He can be forbearing, and he can follow a noble code which denies himself certain rights. But as he degenerates from this situation of being armor-plated and possessed of unlimited force, as he degenerates from this, another factor enters in. And he has to be careful to be kind, so as to prevent other people from being cruel, because he can no longer defend himself. And cruelty, then, in various ways, becomes a sort of a covert proposition that runs around, and people eat each other covertly. And there's nothing understood or certain about it all, and man almost goes mad from this very fact — he cannot predict.

And then the reformer came, and after that and ever since, they've been dying slow with their boots off with everybody standing around being beautifully sad. And that is a fate I could hardly wish on anyone. But the reformer and the decay of the West were synonymous.

If you were to forthrightly consider, and if you were to know with certainty, that this universe was a cruel universe — that it was brutal, that it was possessed of potentialities of death and pain above anything that one could imagine — and if he could know that with certainly and count upon that with certainty, he would have a certainty, wouldn't he? And sanity depends upon being certain.

Men who reform ordinarily try to bring about this reformation solely and only out of their own fear.

The mind, because of the factor of time, is trying to predict actions. It can predict actions so long as it can be certain. Where does a sense of humor go, for instance? A sense of humor goes immediately when, "well, it's — it is possible," or "anything is possible."

An auditor who audits preclears merely because he is afraid of people and afraid of what people will do, will consistently fail and will continually be restimulated. He cannot go forward in life being afraid of people and trying to change them so that they are less fearsome to him, and audit; for the good reason that a good job of auditing done by him makes those people more fearsome. They become more ferocious. They go through periods of — go on up, they get way up Tone Scale to 1.5. They snap and snarl, they become antagonistic, they start to push around. And an auditor watching this who is afraid, of course cannot help but make a slight mistake. Give them a few things that they can't do, upset them one way or the other.

Now, somebody gets a frame of mind "anything is possible." Well, therefore, there aren't enough certainties left there, you see, so that you can throw some­thing ridiculous in as a certainty. And humor depends essentially upon surprises which depart immediately from the certainties on which an individual is engaged, and that's humor.

For instance, I took one preclear I had not too long ago, I didn't do him any real harm, but he was doing this — he didn't know this, but he was doing this to preclears. I never told him that he was doing this to preclears, but he would bring them up so long and he'd stop them. So I took him and snapped him out of his head and gave him a completely impossible task — just without any gradient scale, with nothing. Left him in a bog for about a week and at the end of that time, picked him up and sailed him right on up through it. I really didn't do it as an object lesson. I really didn't do it as a test. But the fact was thereafter reflected in his auditing. He didn't suddenly give people things they couldn't do, because he had enough experience with it to know that he could bog a case.

And yet, this individual has so few certainties, he considers anything's possible — just anything is possible. He's had so many shocking surprises — in other words, he's failed to predict so often — that he considers anything is liable to happen. Anything!

Now, this didn't necessarily make him a better auditor — it's just thrown in there as an example of what you can do to somebody. You can just give him something that's impossible, you can bog him and so forth.

Now, high on the scale, when he's able to combat this, that's just straight randomity — "Anything can happen! Whee!" Low on the scale — "Anything can happen. Lord help us all."

Well, you as an auditor, with any command of the subject at all, can actually send people down as fast as you can send them up. It's no difficulty to make some preclear dive or spin. Just sit there and say, "All right. Now, get the idea of reaching for something. All right. Get the idea of reaching for something. Okay. Now get the idea that you must withdraw from it, but can't. You got that firmly? Fine. End of session." (audience laughter)

An individual walks down those stairs and out into the street and sees a real live dinosaur out in the middle of the street eating up people. And do you know that there are a great many individuals who would simply look at the dinosaur and say, "Well, that's that." Anything is possible. They have had too many shocks. Their certainty is too low.

Now, when an auditor is doing this totally consciously, this is one thing, but auditors will do this unconsciously. In other words, they will do it because they're — they get afraid, and men who are afraid don't think. Deliver me from men who are afraid, because they don't think — they merely react. And there's the first entrance into stimulus-response.

Now, other people would walk down and if they were terrifically high on force, they'd laugh like the devil, because that's a real big joke, you see. And other people, in ratio, would express surprise, and people who were fairly sane would express fear or horror; because this is completely non sequitur — a dinosaur in the middle of the street eating people.

Now, an auditor who really knows what he's doing and really knows his subject, won't make this kind of a mistake.

But to an individual who is very bad off, it would not appear either ridiculous or upsetting. He would simply look and he would see a dinosaur and he'd know anything was possible.

Now, an individual who's using a — some kind of a rote process that's just going "one, two, three," you know, down the line, so on, who yet has no founding or experience in the rest of the line, can have an interesting thing occur to him. He can find this preclear getting savager and more savage and more disputive and so forth, and he can say, "Well, this isn't doing him any good at all!" And turn him around and make him run a good, solid, big electronic — "That's probably what we ought to be doing, running an electronic."

Well, why can he know anything is possible? It's because he can't predict. He doesn't dare predict. He can't know tomorrow. He can't know the next moment. Because there are no certainties. He knows this. And you can't get such an individual to laugh.

And that's why once I had taught people how to run engrams out of people, I couldn't make an awful lot of people stop. Because you can run those things in such a way as to really make somebody calm — you can throw them right into apathy.

Therefore, getting an individual to laugh was synonymous with curing a person of insanity in ancient Italy. They had only one type of insanity — it was melancholia. And if you could get somebody to laugh, why — eventually, why, he was sane, you see.

You run it through once, and then get at the start of it again, with it nicely in restimulation, and then dust your hands. Run it through twice — take a good heavy one like Fac One, you see, and run it through twice — and then go on off to adjusting some locks about their mother or something, see? Oh, boy. Wow, you can ruin people. You can really fix up people so you don't have to be afraid of them anymore. They won't move.

Well, look at the situation of a person who thinks anything is possible. You of course can't get him to laugh. And so they were on a very, very reliable basis when they said that insanity and melancholia were synonymous.

Now, there are other ways to do it, too. You can do it with a club. That's the way the police do. The police are afraid. If you don't think cops are afraid, I invite you sometime to go into a detective bureau sometime on some pretext or another — they are afraid.

Seriousness. An individual is serious for various reasons. One, he could only be serious because he's imitating his fellows. And on the other hand, he might be serious simply because he had to be very careful, because too many things were possible. And the more possibilities an individual has in terms of prediction, the less certain he is — the more factors there are in the problem. He can't handle any more than just so many factors.

They get afraid to a point where their eyes are rather — well, your eyes express this "must withdraw from but I'm going to beat them up anyway" sort of an expression. They go around wondering about what they should put into their black gloves in the way of lead reinforcers and so forth. You see, I know cops, I'm not giving you the television version of a police officer. But of course, these people have a perfect right to be afraid because they're dealing with criminals, and the criminal in this insanity-ridden society is normally insane. You walk up to one (see, this is just a question of prediction) — you walk up to one of these boys and you're going to merely tell him to move along — he draws a gun and drops you, just like that.

And if you run in on him this problem "anything can happen" — on any problem he has, rather, "Well, anything can happen"; if he's a little bit tippy to begin with, he will almost go mad.

The mayor's car is parked at the curb, and one of them gets in it and starts to drive off madly through traffic and runs across two traffic patrolmen en route to the nearest final wreck. These men are dealing all the time with insanity, with no understanding of insanity. And there, the prediction factor is so great in its disfavor — that is, the unprediction factor is so great — that they just go around, finally, in a state of "Well, anything can happen." Only, "We've got to do something about it," is the compulsion.

You can sit and tell an individual who is worried about the outcome of tomorrow's — oh, I don't know, court trial, tomorrow's examinations, tomorrow's whether or not he's going to get fired for having been late for work or something. And you wouldn't make — drive him mad by painting up to him how horrible it was to be out of work and — or how horrible it was that the court trial went against him. Why, you could just go on and on, on that same line of how dolorous and of how ugly and mean this whole thing was — you wouldn't drive him mad.

Now, a lot of other people get into a condition of "Well, anything can happen," but we — they don't think they have to do something about it. But you take a police officer, he's being paid to do something about a situation wherein anything can happen all the time — and he goes down scale.

But you could, theoretically, drive him mad by ... Let's take a court trial: You discuss for three minutes the extremely good possibilities of the thing coming out in his favor. And then discuss for a couple of minutes it coming out in nobody's favor. And then discuss for a moment or two the impossibility of its coming out in his favor. And then discuss the impossibility of its coming out in his opponent's favor. And then discuss the impossibility of its coming out. And then discuss the — how victorious the opponent would feel if he won. And then the possibility that the judge might get sick and it might not be tried, it might be dragged on for a week or two. See? Just keep feeding him factors, feeding him factors, each one of which is variable.

Now, how do you make somebody afraid? You make somebody afraid by unprediction. This is the whole subject of it. This is the way you make him get away from force, this is the way you make him throw away responsibility — because in essence, this is the only way you can make him wrong.

And if you do this rather consistently, he would practically go mad, you see? Because you have shown him anything is possible on something very serious.

He's figured out the situation one way, and it comes out another. He can't predict. And you show him consistently he can't predict.

Well, it's not true that anything is possible in this universe. This universe runs on a dwindling spiral. The thing that is possible is death. The thing that is possible is cruelty and pain; that's what's possible. That has a greater degree of probability than any other thing — that the outcome of any given situation is going to be bad.

Now, a man is a terribly hard brute to best or beat down. You would be amazed how tough he is! It takes sixteen years of school and family, it takes sometimes military unit training, and sometimes add to that fifteen or twenty years of prison, and just then the fellow starts to show some slightest signs of being amenable to society.

A wild animal knows this. He hasn't been petted as a puppy into believing otherwise — he hasn't been reassured and reassured and reassured and reassured. His own survival factor, then, isn't being betrayed. So he has the certainty that it's going to be bad. And believe me, that's a very low order of certainty, but he at least has that order of certainty.

Now, people have watched this continually. They don't realize that the fellow starts out in a fine state of unresponsibility, and then he gets all of these other unresponsibilities on top of it, and the next thing you know, he just keyed in across the boards.

Now, let's take and cut him below that level by shaking up the fact that it's going to be bad with a bunch of sweetness and light which won't work out, and then let's change his mind on that score every time we turn around.

The last thing — the best way in the world to key in anybody is to put him in jail. That's a wonderful way: Fix him in space as an idea that he is no good. Then you've fixed him in space, you see — the idea he's no good.

We find, then, that the individual is being crushed at every turn by the feeling that he shouldn't do it to other people because they don't deserve it — only he does. We can get somebody to repent — how could we possibly get him to repent? By teaching him everybody is good but himself. That's how we could get him to repent. "Everybody else is good and deserving and trying hard, and they're all loyal and noble and swell, and they're just fine people. And you, you dog, you come along and you eat one of them." And you tell him this and convince him of it after he's eaten one of them, and he's been wrong. And there's the finest way to make anybody wrong.

And, I mean — what would you do to ruin society? You would invent a thing called jail, so that no man would take any responsibility for the society — no man would.

It isn't true that everything has to be cruel and bad and evil — nobody's saying that. But at this lowest level that man is operating in right now, his certainty actually lies much better in the field: "People are mean, they're out for themselves, they're not going to give anybody any quarter. You give them a two-second chance to cut your head off, and they will." And if the fellow went along on that basis, he'd be about 80 percent right. If he goes along on the other basis, he'll be about 20 percent right. We mustn't overlook the fact that he can be 20 percent right by going along the other way. Somebody becomes, however, morbidly absorbed with this problem.

A criminal is only criminal because he has no responsibility for the rest of the society and has been thrown out of it. Any preclear has to some degree this same feeling. He feels he's been sort of cast out from the rest of society, mostly because he doesn't feel he can be effective in it, that he's of no great benefit to anybody and so on. But that's all significance.

And most preclears with whom you are having any trouble at all are morbidly absorbed in this problem: a problem of justice. The only thing that is wrong with the administration of justice is that you might administer it to somebody who was kind, sweet, loving and deserving. You might administer punishment to the wrong party. That's all that's wrong with it.

Now, let's get into the basic cause behind the significance, and we find out the individual has been made incapable of using force. If he is made incapable of using force, then he — first, he can't have space; second, he can't perceive.

Now, you go down the street here and you take out a Sten gun and you start shooting up every pedestrian that you meet. You say, "I'm mad at this town. This town is real mean to me," and you shoot up every pedestrian you meet. You might feel just fine about it, up till the moment you read in — tomorrow's paper, in which the husband of five children who were expecting him home for Christmas, and a pathetic picture of Christmas presents scattered across the sidewalk, met your eye. Your glory at having made nothing of all of these people would at that moment fade.

He can't have space because he can't keep two terminals apart. He can't perceive because he can't tolerate the contact of a photon.

So here we're looking at the raw, basic mechanism of regret, repent, and the imbalance of minds. We're also looking at how people are civilized.

His postulates won't blow. If he says, "I'm no good," then he's no good. His postulates won't blow, won't explode, won't release, nothing will happen to them because everything that he sets up is immediately attacked from all sides by the energy which has been set up prior to that.

They are taught that others are more deserving than they are, that people are good, that all things are sweet. And I point to a moment on the track, very, very early on the track, when the individual first met this. It's called the "Dear Souls" area for slang; that's just a slangy term for it. But they caught somebody who was a perfectly good wild thetan — he was a real tough, mean thetan, too. He was perfectly willing to give anybody quarter as long as they'd ride with the pack. He'd serve as long as they could serve, he would go forward, he would do anything constructive that was constructive, and he was running on the complete — running on the beautiful computation that he couldn't die anyway, so it didn't make much difference.

He is an endless mass of these automaticities, which counterattack one to another until he's so confused he doesn't know what he is doing. And this total of confusion is unconfused only — now get this — only by using things which make it possible for him to achieve greater force, greater effort. And if you neglect greater force and greater effort, and wonder at the same time why your preclear's perceptions aren't turning on, then you're being very foolish — because perception is essentially force.

And all of a sudden he got into the "Bubble Gum," and the next thing he knows, he was in the "Dear Souls" area. And everybody was so good — they were so good to him. They'd rescued him out of the Bubble Gum. They had rescued him out of the traps. They were sweet to him, and they had taught him the "good things," and what "good behavior" was, that they were all "nice" and they were "loving" — and they just laid it on.

Now, where do we enter a case to remedy some of these situations? Well, you'll find out Step I, as light as it is — Step Ia, as light as it is — doesn't bring any great amount of certainty to some preclears.

He eventually escaped from there. Almost anybody coming down this track has been through that area — that's the first indoctrination on the track in this subject.

Now, let's just — just look what I've been saying here about force and about effort and so on. This man is so afraid of force that every time he puts up, in any direction, saying "over there," he gets a tremendous uncertainty. He doesn't have any space.

And from that moment on, he was completely befuddled. He was really befuddled. What had happened to him? He had realized that everybody was good and that there was something missing in himself. He realized that he had killed a great many deserving people. His consideration of the universe had immediately become incorrect. He had assumed that everybody else besides himself was mortal and could be damaged and could be hurt irreparably, and that he alone had to go on and on and on, and bear it and endure it somehow. And not be cruel, and not be ugly, and never be mean, and never lose his temper, and never do a mean act, because the recipient of the act might be a just, deserving person on whom many sweet things were dependent.

If you ask him to do this with his eyes shut — his tremendous dependence upon his body, you see — you ask him to do this with his eyes shut, he gets an entirely different reaction than with his eyes open. If you drill him with his eyes open on these steps, he doesn't get better very much faster. The effectiveness of the technique is very slow, because you're validating the body — he's using body perception. You ask him to close his eyes and look around and see what he sees. He doesn't exteriorize, you see; however, if he does exteriorize without perception, same thing.

Now, that's of course a very, very low consideration. That's almost only visible with a microscope. It's very, very low. It's on the Tone Scale level that's down there, I don't know in what basement. But from there on, you have cruelty, betrayal, and most important, complete irresponsibility. Because an individual becomes afraid of force, and the second an individual is afraid of force, he can no longer be responsible for anything because he cannot protect or direct it.

Now, what he really knows at that point, of course, is in excess to what he's perceiving, otherwise he would not even vaguely be sane. He doesn't only know what he can perceive.

So, he goes wandering on. Your preclear who's in this state expects you, as an auditor, by some necromancy he does not mention, to wave a wand over his head and without any use of force on his own part, or responsibility or volition on his own part, to clear him. You cannot clear anyone who is afraid of force, because that person will not take the responsibility of being cleared.

But, he closes his eyes and it's all black or it's drifty white or something of the sort, and you say, "All right, tell me three places where you are not." He'll tell you, glibly enough, "Boston; Washington, DC; Savannah." He's not in these places. Why is he not? He can look around the room and see that he is in a room which he has been told is in your town as an auditor. He doesn't know this for certain. He doesn't even vaguely know it for certain that he's not in Washington.

Let's take the preclear who has stepped out of his head and has run into something, has bumped into something, has been frightened, and has ducked back into his head again. He has to be there, because only the body can be responsible — he can't be responsible. He stepped out of his body and immediately recognized that anything he did he was responsible for. He couldn't blame it on the body then. And so his recognition of that: He did make a mistake. He therefore banged back into the body, and since that time when that incident occurred, has been saying, since then, "The body is responsible."

Now, you're trying to fish up some certainty, and as I've said many times, his certainty is dependent upon this singular fact: that he has less — he has no way to gauge how certain he is, because he is only one pole, the way he's operating. So if he's only one pole and he's trying to get how certain he is, then it's in ratio to how certain he is, you see. Now, this is pretty weak.

We have a package which works this way — horribly enough, it works this way: A person who is not able to handle force or effort is a person on whom any engram can move in, because any engram or any energy or anybody else's wavelength is his own randomity — I mean, it's an enemy. So therefore he'll fight it, and it will cave in on him eventually. So we have a dwindling spiral right there, and the dwindling spiral is negation of the use of force and energy. Because it's a negation of responsibility, which is less and less space.

And you say, "Yes, are you certain?" Well, that's just a symbol and it carries no great weight of meaning. He's as certain of that as he is of anything else, but he isn't certain of anything. If you asked him real closely, he wouldn't be certain of a darn thing.

You see why it's less and less space? Because of the double terminals. He can't impose space on two terminals. All right.

So he says, "Yeah — no, no, I'm not in Washington. I'm not here, I'm not there."

Let's then look over our preclear and realize that he is as well off as he can take responsibility. But one cannot take responsibility unless one can take over, handle and direct force. You can't give a man responsibility for a car which he can't drive. I mean, he doesn't have enough strength in his arms to drive this car, and you can't hammer and pound at him and tell him he's responsible for its erratic course down the road. It's an impossibility, he sees it clearly, for him to drive the car. He won't be responsible for it — he won't even think of it.

And you say, "Well, now close your eyes — close your eyes. Now tell me the same thing — tell me where you aren't."

You tell some little kid — you can always get a line charge out of a little kid if you see an airplane pass overhead and the airplane swoops a little bit too low, and you stand the little kid up on a fireplug or something like that and just give him a mock bawling-out like mad for flying so low over the town. It's very funny to him.

You get an entirely different reaction. He'll say, "Mmmm."

A bus goes by and it fails to stop. You can turn around to some little kid standing there and say, "What's the idea making that bus go on by?" He laughs, it's very funny to him. He knows he hasn't got the force or — of command in any way, shape or form, to have stopped that bus or to control that airplane. But there is only a — too wide apart as terminals. He has some sort of a certainty just out of that. You give him a certainty. He suddenly realizes that he isn't driving that bus, and that makes this very funny to him. Maybe up to that moment, he was pretending he was a bus driver or something.

You've given him a new certainty — a reverse certainty. In many of these cases, he'll close his eyes, and when you really start plowing him toward certainty of location, he can't tell you for sure what room he's in. There is nothing to tell him. You see, there's nothing in the body that will tell him. And yet this person can be perfectly sane. You understand? You're not looking at somebody who's crazy. You just tell him to close his eyes, and he's lost in this blackness. And here's this blackness, and now you say, "Well, give me three towns that you're not in." Well, that blackness is engrams that have gotten restimulated in Washington, in Boston, in Savannah — it — part of them say "this is Savannah"; part of them say "this is Boston."

So force is not something which we must run away from. Force is something we must get the individual to assume to the end of permitting him to be good, which is to say, able. Permitting him to go his way without preying upon others. Because an individual will prey upon others as long as he does not think he can create havingness.

Another thing may happen: You say — he says, "I'm not in Boston," and he's got a picture of himself in Boston. That's funny. You see, he says, "I'm not in Louisiana"; he's got a picture of himself in Louisiana. So right after he said this to you with such certainty, an enormous doubt came over him. He never told you about the doubt. He just told you a certainty remark, and you — but you'll notice him gradually getting more bogged down. He'll get less and less certain of things in general.

And as long as individuals are disabused of their ability to handle force, as long as individuals think they can't create it, they will go on preying upon others. And there is cruelty, and there's where the game breaks down. That's why animals eat animals. They are parasites upon animals. Each one of them is too low on the Tone Scale to recognize his own ability to create force.

Well, you want to inquire for those — for automaticities. That's just an automaticity. Now, how do you handle that? You put him across the room, and then quick before anything else can, have him put his body there. Or if anything else puts his body there, have him put his body there too. You understand this? All these sudden perceptions and so forth, all they boil down to is how to handle an automaticity, and we've covered that.

And so we have all of the universe, at this time, devoted to preying upon all of the universe. And thus if you say . . . You can be sure that an individual who cannot handle force and will have nothing to do with force — you can be sure that he will either apathetically conduct his business and really be not responsible for any part of it, or he will conduct it in such a way or a manner, to prey upon people. He has to be capable of handling and using force. Capable of it — that's different, you see, than using it.

And the way you handle one is, anything that occurs, you make him do it, and then duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it, and this phenomenon will kick out.

A man who begins to use force has immediately admitted that he cannot control without force. When you first have to slug into a company of men or a squad with your fists to line them up and make them do right, at that moment you've lost, really, the largest margin of command over them.

Well, that's one of the things that happens when you ask him to do this. But if a person's going to do this, actually you're entering the case too high. This case has to have a lower level of entrance.

The day a society has to sentence a single man for a single crime, it has admitted its inability to handle the society. Therefore, a society is as bad off as it is court-ridden. It is as desperate as it is employing punishment against its citizens. It requires a society so capable of force that it never uses it.

Now, a lower level of entrance is "Where isn't your body at this moment?" That's a lower level of entrance.

If any nation of the world today were really capable of the use of force — that is to say, nationally capable of it, not did it just have bombs — if it were nationally capable of force, there would be on Earth today an honorable nation. There would be also peace on Earth; there would not be war.

But what do you know, you'll run into a lot of preclears who put on a very, very good presence to you who won't be certain of that either. They'll say, "Well, it's not across the room." To themselves privately they say, "I guess."

A huge stockpile of atom bombs is an enormous amount of force. But then, you can buy shotguns in any shop; that's an enormous amount of force, too. Nobody buys those shotguns to use against his fellow man. Nobody will ever use those atom bombs, really, until he is so depraved and so afraid, that he must resort to the use of force.

Now, so there again, you've entered the case too high. Now, let's get lower than this. And believe me, we can go way deep on this one. We have to start getting into significance in order to reach this fellow at all, because everything has a reason and everything is significant. So we get this low on it — this isn't as low as you can get either, but — "All right. Where isn't your body?" And this is really a wonderful button to run on a case that has black perception or unwieldy perception, is "Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?"

This is really a very difficult point for an individual to see who is indoctri­nated in a society where sweetness and light and "love thy neighbor" predominate over "get the show on the road." Very difficult to bring it across, because people immediately tell you right after a lecture or something like that, "Well, you believe everybody ought to be in a state of anarchism and everybody ought to be able to cut each other to pieces and everybody ought to be able to shoot each other and so forth, and therefore, this is real bad." Well, that person's really lost; he's really fogged up.

Now, this is very weird. Because this case wouldn't get out of his body, because then he wouldn't be able to have something to blame, which is the body. If he's got black perception and you start to run Step I on him, and you would — the guy's got black perception, you see, and you just go right ahead and run Step Ia — doesn't matter. But you have to use this judgment on it: You have to enter it at the level where he's actually certain. And you'll get this certainty because his face will suddenly become relaxed and he will be wreathed in smiles before he's done very much of this. You'll hit it at a laugh. You'll line charge it when you hit this level where you should be hitting it. And so we'll go down into that one. That's the first entrance into significance that you should have anything to do with.

He's depending upon the repression of force in the society to guarantee his own survival. How craven can you get? A person who is afraid of force and who has turned his force over to police, who has turned his force over in all directions, at once will get no justice, and eventually will be unable to forge ahead even through his own engram bank. His locks won't release, for one thing. That's your fastest manifestation on the case — the locks won't release.

"Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?" That's the first thing you would ask him. After you've asked him a couple of these other things, or you simply asked him — you've said, "Be three feet back of your head," he wasn't; you say, "Well, take a look around — shut your eyes and take a look around."

You say, "Now, do you remember — remember your mother saying that?" — his pat phrase or something; he all of a sudden says, "Yes! Sure! Ha!" Gone. The lock released.

And he says, "I can't see anything." They'll always say this. You could kick a preclear every time he says it. "I can't see anything," he says.

You say, "Do you remember your mother saying that?" and this individual is very low on responsibility, very low in the use of force, he's very incapable of going forward — he says, "Yeah, I remember." You'd have to get him to remember it a dozen times before it'd get beaten down a little bit. That's because it's composed of force. It's an idea fixed in force.

Yes, he can. He's looking at blackness or whiteness or something, but he's just overlooking that too, you see. And you make him look just to the degree of just insisting that he can see something while he has his eyes shut, and he'll eventually break down and give you, "Well, I see this shifting pattern of dots."

Now, an individual early on the track tried like the dickens to get his ideas fixed in force — you know, give them position. He put an idea up here in space and it stayed there. And then he got it to stay there by putting force around it. And then he got it to stay there and to be effective because it had force around it. And after a while, why, all of his ideas were coated with force. And that in essence is a symbol: It's an idea fixed in space coated with force.

Well, don't do anything more about it than that. You can handle it as an automaticity, but it'll take an awful lot of your time. Because his basic problem is, is that he doesn't dare be responsible; he can't handle or face energy, and therefore he can't look. And if he can't look, therefore, he can't know. So, let's just enter it in at the level which you can enter it in.

Well, the letter "A" in a book is fixed in space, in force — ink, paper, that's force. The walls of this room are made out of force.

Now, a lot of fellows, you just keep on hitting it, "Three places where you aren't in present time," he'll hit some terrific outspread area — "I'm not on Saturn. I'm not in the next galaxy," see — I mean, he'll come in. This'll work out. You could work it out either way, but it's slower. Now, let's get a faster way to do it.

Now, your individual who doesn't get out of his head has this first and foremost: His body must be there to be responsible for what happens. It's just a lack of force, you see. He can't enforce his own responsibility. He doesn't have enough force to enforce his own responsibility. But the body has some capability of doing so, so it's a better cop than he is, and it can be more responsible than he is. And it's visible to others and he isn't, so therefore, the body has to be there to be responsible. That's the first thing you run into in the case.

And this fellow says, "I. . ." He can't be three feet back of his head. You just ask him, "What can't you — what are you looking at?" and you finally get out of him the fact he's looking at blackness or something.

And the next thing is that the individual has been driven, if you please, rather completely mad with the idea that everybody is better than he is, and everybody is so sweet, and everybody is so kind, and everybody is so good that he wouldn't dare do anything to them. He is going on the 20 percent, compulsively.

He very often, by the way, can't get out of his head, and you say, "Close your eyes and tell me what you see."

No, he's trying to figure out in a wrong certainty: "It's all good; it's all ethical." Now, if you try to figure this universe out "it's all good; it's all ethical; it will all work out justly in the end," you're going to be 80 percent wrong. And yet if you insist on — insist on this as your only adjudication of this problem, that everybody is good, that everybody is so-and-so and that — so on, you're going to have 80 percent of your problems wrongly predicted.

He'll sit there for a moment, "Only see you."

The purpose of the mind is to predict — as far as circuits and thinking is concerned — is to predict the future. Now, if the service of the mind is to predict the future — the circuits there, the mind itself, is to predict the future — prediction with certainty is then the guarantee of the rightness or the Wrongness of the mind. That is the way the mind is measured. How certain is one's mind? Predicting rightly or predicting wrongly? If the percentage of predicting wrongly is too high, the mind becomes unwilling to predict.

Well, this is all right. I mean, the fellow's looking around the room. Then you just go right ahead and run the technique just as stated, see?

So in this universe, we have individuals trying to make other individuals wrong by making them mispredict. The way to make them mispredict is to tell them everything is good, and nothing is going to happen. This is essentially true, you see, way up scale this is true, but in the middle range it's not true — in the animal kingdom, living with a body.

But he's got this peculiar problem of blackness or something — he can't see, and this is his main trouble. If you were to go immediately and skip all further nuances into this one, you'd be playing it safe: "Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?" And you just connect those two things. "Give me three places where your body isn't being responsible now." Oh, he can tell you that. That's got some significance to it — it's less than position.

Actually, I don't care how many theaters there are or how many cops there are on corners, it's a society of animals. And the only way to really predict it 80 percent right would be to just bluntly measure it up on the basis that it was all going to work out wrong, and it was all going to come to disaster and so on.

Now, there's something else that comes in there: He says, as he looks — he finally tells you, "I have this continuous pressure across my eyes." You say, "Give me three places where you don't have that pressure. Three places somewhere in this universe where that pressure isn't at this moment."

That isn't being pessimistic, that's just being right. You don't have to be — put a sour emotion along with it.

You could expect, by the way, to go on for quite a while with that. You could have to ask him this in present time and past, and then in future, and it might take you about five hours of auditing, but you would get rid of his chronic somatic. You could say, "Where isn't the chronic somatic?" — present, past, and future — and it'd take you about five hours, but you'd sure as the devil be rid of the bulk of it by the end of that time. You'd run through all kinds of things in the case too.

You say, "What's going to happen to this city?" Well, this city will go into ruins. It will probably be betrayed. There will probably be a police state. One of these days, it will be atom-bombed. You don't have to be emotional, you know, about a decision. A postulate is one thing, and an emotion is quite another.

That's a — by the way, a side method of relieving a chronic somatic — a very good one, rather than try to run it out or something of the sort, to take the pressure off the case, to change the case around. Or this case that has this automaticity that he keeps talking to you about, and after hours and hours of auditing, he's still got this automaticity. Well, you could have gotten by that simply by recognizing the case was low on force, and all you had to ask him was, "Well, give me three places in the universe where that automaticity isn't. Three more. Three more. Three more. Three more." He'll eventually encounter this interesting one: He'll find out that if he looks straight ahead at these places, he puts the automaticity in them, and then can give you the place on either side where it is not. That, too, is a point of certainty. You get this?

And if you insist that this city is going to go on for the next thousand or two thousand years being untouched by any invader, remain uncorrupt in the face of any government, that it's going to go on protecting its citizens, that its taxes are all going to be just, that it's going to progress and evolve into higher and higher states — you're going to be wrong! You'll probably be wrong within ten years.

He's actually creating it. Any direction he looks, it's there. This you should recognize as a rather interesting condition. It's just an automaticity. So you've got another method of getting rid of one of these superpowerful automaticities that just has the fellow swamped all the time. Just "Give me three places in the universe where it isn't." You use Step Ia on the automaticity. You got that?

So how do you keep from being wrong? That's to make an accurate prediction. Don't be compulsively disabused of your own adjudications. Well, that's a lot of big words, but that's what happens to people. They permit themselves to be disabused of their own actual judgments.

There's a case level entrance which is lower than "Where isn't your body being responsible?" See, how far south can we go here? "Where isn't your body being responsible?" He gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that, and there's — doesn't seem to be very much happening in this case. Don't follow it down.

You can track back on any preclear and find out when he solidly considered that his life had certain enemies — and the enemies were probably, he figured out, Papa, Mama. These were enemies.

Let's find out what he's looking at, let's find out what's worrying him. There's something sitting on his mind, something visible, something he can feel — "Give me three places in the universe where it isn't." Because there's where his attention is fixed.

He had it figured out that — well, let's say she had it figured out that all men were going to be enemies, and that if she paid too much attention to them and didn't take care of her knitting, she was going to come to no good.

Now do you see what we're doing with Step Ia?

And then they got to work on her and "all men were good," and Papa and Mama were doing everything for her that they could, and they were doing everything for her they could, and they had no axe to grind, and they were — had her own best interests at heart, and no time did they mean to do her any evil. No, she came first where they were concerned, and Mama kept walking around saying, "You know, your papa is so fond of you." And Papa kept walking around, "You know, your mother has sacrificed so much for you."

Male voice: Mm-hm.

And after she got to be ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — probably the swan song of it was when she was about fifteen. She got into a real hectic state of "No! No! No! These things are not true," and then she kind of caved in and became an adult.

His attention's fixed on something; he can't get his attention off of it because it's going to bite him. Well, the final resort for you as an auditor, in handling it, is getting his attention off of it. But what's his attention on?

And after that, went along. Then she got to be twenty-three, and she'd married Raymond or somebody and she got to be twenty-three, and here he was. And she had a couple of children and he went off and got drunk — he couldn't stand the atmosphere or something, or he went to war, or something happened to him, or he stepped under a car, as lots of people do. And here she was left with these two kids, you see. And she says, "Well, I always have Papa and Mama." (I tell you, two kids are awful noisy.) She has them for about thirty days, and then they practically cut her throat. They're much more interested in her younger brother. They're just real upset by it.

Well, maybe his attention is merely being dispersed all over the universe as far as you can tell. He can't fix his attention on anything. This is the main thing that you're worried with and so on. Same thing, only you don't give it a tricky, "Where is your attention dispersed? Give me three places in the universe where your attention is dispersed." You can get that case on "Three places where you aren't thinking," is one of the lighter ways of going it. "Give me three places where you aren't thinking." That actually is in that step just so it'll never be overlooked by an auditor, because that is a very light case entrance — is "Where aren't you thinking? Give me three places in present time where you aren't thinking."

But they suffer along somehow and sacrifice somehow, and she's put in — more deeply in debt. And then they find out that Raymond has ten thousand dollars insurance or something like that, and boy, they really love her about this time. They really love her — really, she's really the star. And that gets spent, and they say, "To hell with her."

Now, an auditor before he's been too cleared himself, is liable to say present time, and then past time, and skip the future. He's just liable never to ask about it.

It's real remarkable. I mean, they're running on the same computations as a wolf — on, really, no other computations than the computations of a wolf — if there's prey, you eat it.

What's the lightest case entrance into the future? Well, the lightest case entrance into the future is getting the fellow real certain about something not being in the past. And what's the lightest entrance into something not being in the past? Something in the present. And the very lightest one I know, off-hand at the moment — that I have used, rather, on a preclear effectively — has been "Where isn't your body being handsome at this moment?"

Sometimes a person has to live fifty years to find out what the devil his parents really intended. Sometimes he just never finds out at all.

Now, this has a difficulty — it keeps making him make the postulate that he's not handsome. But it sure makes him feel better. That's true to a girl, too — just where she isn't being handsome. And you'll find out they aren't being handsome all over the place — past, present, future, noplace.

There are ten aberrative things. They are the Ten Commandments. Nobody's saying these are bad or good, but these are plenty aberrative. These are just fine.

Now, there's a bog spot here that I'd better mention to you. There is a theoretical technique — a theoretical technique which an auditor could get real smart and figure out and start to use, is "Where don't you know something in this universe?" Now, that of course, he would gunshot as knowingness, you see, and that would be very, very . . . He — if he's in present time only in the place he's in, and all other places are in past time, and he doesn't know about any of these other places, by theory he puts up space so that he can limit his own knowingness, so there's something beyond which he doesn't know. An auditor could figure out, "Now, look-a-here, we could just run this on the basis, let's see, 'where he doesn't know.' "An auditor can get really smart on that. "Where doesn't he know in present time?"

A society of giants — a society of tremendous people would dare adopt these Ten Commandments and consider that they were the things to live by. But what giants they would have to be!

It's a killer! I mean, it's a wonderful theory. The only trouble is, it's total significance because it adds a datum in on knowingness. It's trying to loca-tionalize knowingness, and to such a degree is validating for knowingness, space — which makes him "unknow" faster than he will know. And regardless of whether that is plain to you or not, just take it from me that the technique has a level of workability in terms of scores of hours. I don't say it isn't workable, I merely say it's one of the most arduously long, confusing and upsetting techniques which you would ever care to go in for, and will bog a preclear before it will pick him up. Because it makes him make continually this postulate, "I don't know something. I don't know something. I don't know something. I don't know some­thing." See?

Well, you can go at it several ways. You can either go on monitoring the society as a control unit, controlling it at all times by lying to it — telling it that everybody is deserving except the individual you're talking to, and he's scum, but somehow or other you'll get him through, because not everybody hates him.

"Give me three places where you don't know something in the present." Oh, boy, he can get good certainty on that. And you give him three more and three more and three more and three more, every time he's making the postulate that he doesn't know something. And he will bog before he picks up. So it is — it's a beautiful theory, see, I mean, it's just gorgeous. The only trouble with it is, it depends upon the symbol "know something" rather than the positional location, which doesn't have to be a datum.

You can control him that way, or you can control it on the highly sensible basis that the Roman Empire was using, which was strictly dog-eat-dog: a fellow was as good as he could produce and perform. He lasted as long as that.

So, let's look at that and realize that one could get too smart for himself on this technique. I know, because I already have gotten too smart on the technique, and as a net result, beat a preclear around wondering how long this would continue, because theoretically the thing was perfect. I mean, how do you get a person to know all over the universe? Well, get all the facts where he doesn't know anything in the universe, and it would all add up to the fact that he would eventually know something in the universe — only it doesn't. That's the difference between a tested and a theoretical technique.

There are tribes in Africa — people get up to a certain age, they simply knock them in the head and throw them back of the brush for the hyenas to eat. He — a fellow was just as good as he could produce. Well, that's terribly practical; it's hard-headed, hard-boiled.

So the lightest level that I have entered a case — not the lightest level you could enter a case — is "Where isn't he being handsome at this time?" and just got that enough so that he'd say, "Gee, there is something out there," and then knocked off of it real quick and went on to something much more important — "Where isn't his body being responsible?"

Kindness — a man falls by the roadside and he's generally left to die. I have seen this happen to people in north China. I would not say the Chinese were a terribly superior civilization or an inferior one. I've seen fellows who would simply stumble on the street from hunger and fall down. There'd never be a single pedestrian would ever give him a hand to stand him on his feet.

And that one does what it's supposed to do, rather than lay in new postulates. It demonstrates to him he's being carried around by the body, and it has the effect of kind of moving the idea of a body and responsibility all over the universe. And so he's kind of, to some degree, moving this and it does a lot for the case. He snaps right out of — to a marked degree — whatever he's gotten into.

You'd say that would be an awful society. And that society has been surviving now for about four thousand years. It's never changed this one. When a man's down, he's down.

So what level of certainty are you trying to get on this question? Now, remember, you could just start in and ask the fellow brightly, "Be three feet back of your head." He isn't. But you just go on and say, "Well, give me three places where you aren't, present time." He'll give you three. "Three more." Give you three more. "Three more." Give you three more. You haven't got any little yardstick, because there aren't two preclears sitting there, one measuring his certainty against the other one's — you haven't got any yardsticks which will tell you how certain he is except this one: After you've asked the question six or seven times, you don't get a smile and you don't get any relief and you don't get any change in the case — you're just in there too strong, that's all. So let's lighten it up, let's lighten it up.

I've seen soldiers who have fought to free their country from the invader in China and so forth, dumped on a railroad siding, wounded, and they just lie there and die without water, without food, with nothing. You can say this is cruelty that's utterly incredible.

Where isn't his body? Three places where his body isn't. No sense in adding significance into the thing if you don't have to. Let's get three places in present time where his body isn't. And he gives you three places. And three more. And he gives you three places. And three more. And he gives you three more. And he — you give him, "Three more, three more, three more in present time." And all of a sudden — (sigh) — definite signs of relief.

You ask a military commander, "Why don't you do something for those troops?"

But if you've given him that many and there's no definite signs of relief, you're just in there too strong. "Well, give me three places in the present time where your body isn't being responsible." And he'll give you three, and he'll give you three more, and he'll give you three more, and he'll give you three more. About that time, he'd say, "Yeah, that's sure true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." He's getting in there strong now, so on. That's okay, and then you just go on from there. And then you'd work it back to three places in the past where his body isn't being responsible and three places in the future where it isn't being responsible. Then you'd go around again to three places where his body wasn't in the present, his body wasn't in the past, his body wasn't in the — wouldn't be in the future. And then we work it around to where he isn't in the present, he isn't in the past, he isn't in the future, see. We just have to backtrack the same course that we sunk in on.

"What? Tie down a whole lot of troops to make those troops into cripples so that they can go out into the society and starve to death? No."

But let's make sure that we have a case entrance at this point. Well, we've got to get a change and relief from the case before we consider we have an entrance.

You'd say, "Well, you should do something about this here. You shouldn't leave men there to lie and suffer."

Well, supposing we asked, "Three places, and three places, and three places where the body wasn't being responsible," and we still didn't get any kind of a reaction on the part of the preclear? Well, let's find three places where his body isn't being handsome.

And he might think about it for a moment and then realize that, well, he had lots of extra bullets, and he'd walk over and put bullets in their heads. That would be his practical application to it.

Now, that's a very tricky one, because hardly anybody is here on Earth who thinks he's handsome or pretty. That's — it's a very, very unpopular thought. If anyone does think this very bluntly and continually and consistently, and dwells on it all the time, it's just a manic. He's just running a manic on the thing — it isn't because he thinks so. Because that's the main reason he got here: he didn't think he was beautiful anymore. He thought he'd better go hide, so Earth was as good a place as any, so here he came. And a body is a good thing to hide in.

And one can handle it that way. That's the way the animal kingdom handles it. Or one can simply go up to a height of being so strong that one can easily afford to be just. Now, that impossible dream, as some might call it, is yet the only place I can see anywhere where there's any entrance into the problem.

You know, there was a dog one time, a beautiful chow dog. He was a — oh, a lovely dog, and he lived in the neighborhood. And the summer was coming on, so somebody got ahold of an electric pair of clippers, you know, being humane about the chow, and they clipped his hair off. And that chow went and crawled under a bed in the upstairs bedroom of that house, and he would sneak out at night to get a little water, but otherwise, that dog didn't show his face outside that house — didn't show his face, until his hair had grown again — and boy, that was months! It broke his heart. He knew he was a pretty dog, and then he wasn't a pretty dog anymore, and that was the end of that. And he was much more sedate around other dogs after that, he was much more reserved.

I consider the forthright cruelty of wild animals unfit for man, but I don't see that there's any progress or anything else for man if he has to fall below the level of courage of a wild animal; if he has to be less sane than wild things. And there's certainly not very much hope for the 1.1 civilization — sweetness, kindness, all so somebody can cut your throat — in which man lives right now. And he certainly lives in that one right now.

That's all that happened to him. Nobody beat him — I mean, they just cut his hair off. Much more horrible thing to do to some person, to make them ugly, than to simply kill them or beat them. Anybody can understand killing or beating, but beauty is something everybody has considerations about.

The state will support you if you sign the right papers. Who wants to be supported by the state?

So where — three places where he isn't being handsome. Three places where she isn't being handsome at the moment. If you don't watch that one, he's liable to want to beat it to death. He's liable to just chew that one up from one end of the track to the other end of the track.

So we look at this problem in terms of practical application, and we find out we would have to take a little bit of a chance on the thing and try to get it up to a point where the society itself was sufficiently strong that it could be ethical and just, and would be.

Well, it's all right if it seems to be doing him a lot of good and he's going in there with enthusiasm in it, why just keep it roaring, if he got noplace on the earlier ones.

There is nothing short of the highest level and we can't go any lower than that level, because I think the beast of the field today has more honor in him than men. Remember, I talk from a lot of observation of Homo sapiens.

Well, you'll have a case that's just busted up for goodness' sakes, because he'll say, "You know . . ." Finally this will leak through his head, see, "Do you know, it might be possible that somebody someplace with his opinion of my handsomeness, might have been in error." That somebody who didn't consider him handsome might have been wrong. And when he hits that place — actually, if you've beaten it to death, when he hits that place, he will just sort of sit and think about it for a while and puzzle over it for a while. You've hit the first level of recognition on this case where somebody else might not have been completely certain. Because he's swamped by the supercertainty of all and the noncertainty of self, which means total other-determinism and practically no self-determinism. And the first place the case may break is at the point where he figures somebody else might have been wrong.

You and anyone has within him potentials of beauty, ethics, far higher than any philosopher has ever philosophized about. But in an environment which suppresses them, why, not only these can't endure, an individual can't endure either.

Let's say you were running Viewpoint Processing — just mobs of people being right. Let's take mobs of his mother being right, or mobs of his ex-wife being right, or mobs of her ex-husband being right. And you know, the case will sit there and run it sometimes for two or three hours? I — it's fabulous; I've watched this. They think other people are that right, and they're that wrong. They'll take somebody who has just butchered them, somebody who was utterly no good to them, somebody who ate them up and spitted them out about three times a day and so on, and they will just run thousands of those — that one person, you see, just thousands of mock-ups facing thousands of mock-ups of them — them thinking about each mock-up "how right they are," "how right they are," "how right they are," "how right they are." And it'll just run on and on and on and on and on.

Now, what's basically the point of entrance with a great many preclears — not all preclears, but what's a point of entrance? It would be to run, with one technique or another, out — "anything is possible." Masses of agreement on "anything is possible." And then "sweetness, light, we must all be kind, we must all be good." You just take this type of Viewpoint Processing, where you have masses of viewpoints and you mock these up in brackets or not in brackets.

And all of a sudden, they'll come out the other end of that: "Well, you know, there were times when my mother might possibly have been — well, not wrong, you know, but misinformed." So you go on running it from there — "how right they are."

And you use this to clear out of the way the first barrier against force. Usually, this thing called the Assumption gets into restimulation and won't get out of restimulation, merely because the individual feels that having stolen the body, anybody can do anything to him now. I mean, he's used up all his right to harm or injure people.

That's right and wrong on Viewpoint Processing; it's quite a technique. The only place where I would use Viewpoint Processing is on questions of rightness or Wrongness of somebody, or on straight-out sweetness and light. And if I did that, I would do it with dots of light — the opinions of other thetans. In other words, I'd run it that far back on the track. "Everybody is so nice and lovable. Everything is so sweet. Everybody must love everybody." Just run that "dots of light," each one with that thought in mind, just mobs of them. And then run this in brackets — mobs and mobs and mobs of thetans thinking this — "The universe is only good, it's only sweet, it's only wonderful. Nobody means anybody any harm."

The truth of the matter escapes him: that body would never function unless he seized it. And another great truth escapes him utterly, and that is, the things on which he preys cannot do anything but survive. That escapes him utterly; never gets into his computations. Everything gets so convincingly dead. It so convincingly convicts him with its stillness and its motionlessness, that he cannot think otherwise than that he has committed some horrible, great crime.

You know, that's a typical statement on the part of a tiger. I can just imagine some very large and hungry tiger saying to this little deer, "You know, I don't mean you any harm, it's only that I'm hungry." Chomp!

Nobody under any circumstances should deal along lines of vengeance and so forth merely for the sake of vengeance. Because if one has to exert vengeance, one first has to admit that he is afraid. If one goes out on a track of vengeance, he has to first start on a track of resisting something which he conceives to be dangerous to him.

Now, your preclear who is bogging in any way, is bogging on a feeling of force. And he's only bogging on a feeling about force — now get this, because probably won't ever say it again — he's only bogging on force because he believes that everything is sweetness and beauty and light in the part of everybody else's intentions but his, see. That everybody's got to love everybody, and there's got to be a friendly atmosphere — and there's a lot of these, see. But he doesn't dare use force against those factors. And he's so convinced that these are the factors which exist, that he doesn't dare use force. Now, the truth of the matter is, that the best armor in the world is love. That's the truth of the matter. But it's equally true that no weapon has been as thoroughly suborned to the evils of man as this weapon called "love."

The first step on any track of resentment, and on what we call "justice," is a cowardice. It's a cowardice. It's a fear of being destroyed by something which one must then contest. And there's your first entrance, and that first entrance is fear.

And there's hardly anybody in the societies of man today — hardly anybody — who sufficiently understands this word love to do other than use it as a trap. Love is either something a person has been convinced of compulsively by other-determinism, or it's something being used — love and friendship — being used one way or the other as a utility tool.

And one might say the first moment that fear appears, is the first moment when man becomes evil. So the solution is to go way up on this problem, not stay down low on it.

And now there are levels that are way on up from that and then there is no armor more shining and less dentable than an armor of beauty, faith, trust, love — but boy, you've got to be able to back them up with force! Rrrrowrrh!

Okay.

Any time when you think that you're perfectly free to use all things or that these things can exist and only these things, in an absence of force, you just might as well go cut your throat quick. Because the end product of that postulate is a strictly cut throat, and complete blindness. Blindness follows. Perception shut off because one can't face force anymore.

You'll find you will never love your neighbors quite so much as the day when you can throw out a hundred-thousand-watt lightning bolt. And you'll think, "Gee, they're nice people." You won't do anything to them. "They're nice people. Everybody's wonderful," so forth. Go down the street picking your teeth with a lightning bolt.

Nothing — there is nothing actually in beauty which can exist without force. There is no painting, no statue in all of man's creations, which exists independently of force. And the most beautiful of them all are those which deal directly with force or above. That's an interesting fact.

Now, if you as a preclear are having a little trouble, you just look it over as a problem of your own, you can undoubtedly put your finger exactly on the moment when you bought entirely, completely, very, very early in your life, how you had to be good because everybody else was so good, and their intentions for you were so good, and you had been wrong about them all. Your mother really did love you, she didn't intend to cut your throat, in spite of the fact that twenty years later she ruined your marriage and did this and did that and did something else to you, and at your death would probably be the first one in there to row over who got your best suit.

People are people. And when you say, "I have blinded myself to reality," then you have blinded yourself to the inevitable consequence of a society which sets itself up on the pretense that it is good, while wholly and fully intending to be nothing but evil. And when you get that one twisted, brother, that twists you up on force, it twists you up on justice, it twists you up on perception, on thinking, and nothing becomes predictable. After that anything can happen. And that's the other key that is run as viewpoints.

You just get large masses of these postulates sitting out there in front and let them discharge "anything can happen." Then get the preclear to move them a little bit from the right to the left and then get him so that he can move them around. He'll get sick on that one — "anything can happen" — but that's only when he's been so completely upset by his predictions. And that's lower than "nothing must happen," you see — way, way lower than "nothing must happen." "Anything can happen."

So your case entrance — your case entrance is balked on many cases, on a level of a twist of knowingness. They know the world is good, but there are so many evil things in it. They know the world is good, but 80 percent of all they've met is evil. So therefore their knowingness is twisted. And that knowingness inhibits them from employing any of the tools which would set them free, such as force. And your case will just stay bogged pretty well right there, in spite of all the mechanical techniques that you use — it'll just stay bogged because the fellow's knowingness is upset. He's been convinced that all men are good, and therefore, he should be good, even though their actions have been consistently and continually directed toward evil for him. And he'll get real bogged on you. He'll get real bogged, you'll get real bogged if you ever buy that one.

The time for you to be good and be just and so forth, is not while you have numbers of wolves pawing over your somewhat animate body. That's not the time to decide that. The thing to decide right at that moment is that you better have bigger teeth. The time for you to decide that all is sweetness and light is when you can be very nonchalant about a couple of billion watts; that's the time to be decided. And that's not because you have to protect yourself, it's because you have to be that big to grasp the concept of it.

Below that level, a man is afraid. And a man who is afraid and who is yet trying to believe in love and goodness, is trying to believe in them so they'll protect him. And it's like trying to put up a piece of tissue paper in front of a bullet. And just remember to yourself — if you ever want an example of how this works, just remember yourself that no wolf who is eating somebody up is going to be deterred for one moment by all the good deeds that person has done, or all the good, right thoughts he has thunk, or by all of the wonderful intentions that person had. That wolf is just going to chomp. And that wolf, in essence, is this universe the way it's running today.

Okay.