All we need to know about existence is that it is. Whatever complexity it has, it still is. It isn't ever was, which is a most interesting thing about this particular nomenclature. There isn't any will-be-ness and there is no was-ness. There is simply Is-ness. Speak about existence, and people spontaneously add to it will-be-ness and was-ness. So existence is not the word we want. We want the word Is-ness. We want just the word we're using. We want that which is.

There are extremely elementary processes we discover could be designed when we look at the various factors in Scientology which we would call very upper echelon factors.

The Dhyana makes the error of "beginningless and endless time" but that's not really an error. Probably it is an error as far as the translation of the symbols is concerned. We don't know that the symbols that were used by Gautama to describe this manifestation add up into English as beginningless and endless time. We've already crossed one language jump and so we know that much less of what he was actually saying. But it was an interesting thing that you could represent this by a continuous line which joined itself. Any kind of a complexity of circle, in other words, would represent the fact that we had a beginningless and endless somethingness.

How much in the way of processes could we get just out of the concept of Is-ness?

Now, that is too complicated an explanation. In view of the fact that time depends upon a postulate you could say, yes it is beginningless and endless. You could say as well that it is linear. You could say, as well, that it is continuous. You could say as well that it is Eastern Standard, or Sidereal – it doesn't matter now how you qualify it, having once made the postulate, you can then go on making further postulates. Nobody is going to limit anybody in making postulates.

Just that one datum. Well, actually we could get a very great many.

But there happens to be, strangely enough, a truth lying back of time. Time is a postulate. It doesn't even have to be agreed on. You could have a time span all by yourself.

But let me call your attention abruptly to the singular fact that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is of minimal use. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it all depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

You could shut your eyes and say, "and now I've sat here for a million years".

An individual on one point, let's say the receipt point in the communication formula, would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point or was being the effect of existence would monitor his ability to make considerations.

"In the next two seconds", you could say, "I'm going to sit here for a million years".

That is to say: he would not feel then that he was free to make any other considerations above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. And all of his other considerations would fall below this level.

There's nothing unheard of about this – that's real time. Don't be too baffled if you dream for five seconds about a five hour time span. You've just repostulated some time, that's all.

The formula of communication – "Cause-Distance-Effect" is the most elementary statement of it – "and involving attention and duplication". We would discover that if an individual were monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his considerations would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

Unless you continue to postulate time, you haven't got any. And that's the first and foremost thing you can know about time.

A basic consideration could be "I am on an effect point. I am being the effect of many flows and messages and that sort of thing – and this is very bad. His considerations are various. "I must get off this point". Or, "I am on this effect point and I do not like this".

That fellow who depends on a clock up there to move time for him, is going to get in trouble sooner or later. He's going to get, "stuck on the track", and "out of pace with his fellow man", because he's depending upon their agreement on time to give him time. The only way he can have time is to continue to postulate time.

One of the roughest things that you will discover with anybody who is having trouble with his case is to have him put something on the future time track. He'll look at that and say, "OH NO!" You say to someone, "Let's make an appointment. Let's make it at 2.05 this afternoon".

Now let's take it reverse end to, and let's get an individual who finds himself on source point. There he sits on source point and he's being cause. He's being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect point. And then this individual is saying: "Well now I mustn't cause anything bad. I must cause only good things" and he must do this and that for this or for that.

Oh no. That's upsetting. That's why when you talk to somebody on the street, you don't tell him to come around to "see you later at your office". You've undoubtedly picked up somebody who has attention on the subject of postulating time. The thing for you to do is take him right over to your office right now, if you possibly can. Don't put something on the future time track for him any more than you can help, because the person here who is really in difficulty, who has all the usual human difficulties, psychosomatic ills and so forth, has stopped postulating time. And the moment he stops postulating time, he doesn't have any.

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, the fact that he is on a cause point. He's on a source point of a communication. (Synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt.) And if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt end of something, this fellow is really dismayed. Here he has this basic consideration that he's being cause point, and then all of a sudden he receives something! Now that would be a breakdown – basically and primarily – of his Is-ness. His reality.

Now, how much time has the fellow got and how much time is he rushing and how much time is he sitting still with – all these questions are very interesting except that it all depends on just this one fact: your individual is or is not postulating time for himself.

He then can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. You see, you could have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined-hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he is basically running.

Looking over a very busy career I can see definitely the speed factor of composition as derived from strictly one postulate. I used to write about 100,000 words a month by writing three hours a day three days a week. Now, that's a lot of words, but it never occurred to me that it was a lot of words. If you simply postulate that there's that much action and it can fit into that much time, you have postulated the time. There's nobody sitting there agreeing with you or disagreeing with you. Actually, you're just walking free. Well, one might as well postulate eight million words in one hour per month. This was just saying how much physical universe time could be allocated to the time span which I was using in which to compose. You get that as a difference.

He says, I am cause and I am being a good fellow and I am doing this and doing that – and all of a sudden he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting. But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

Let's take somebody doing a job of work – you will find something very, very peculiar. You find somebody who is working like mad, he's just working, working, working, he's just got to get it all done got to get it all done – and the end of the day comes and he's got nothing done. It's all in a confusion. He was awfully busy all day but nothing happened.

Let's take the example of somebody who is in a condition and who is trying to change this condition. Now we've entered into another level. We've entered into Not-is-ness and then we've entered into Alter-is-ness, you see. He has a terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says it mustn't exist. And in his next statement he says, All right now, don't exist.

And the next day he goes out and he's so busy, he's just got to do this and he's got to do that, and eventually you find him just sitting still, presenting a very funny and silly picture.

Well, what do you know, it keeps on existing. Well, all right, he says, I'll change it on a gradient scale. I'll chip away at the corners of it.

He's sitting still, not even moving, not even talking, not even writing, accomplishing absolutely nothing, and now he is telling you how awfully busy he is and how he hasn't got any time and he'll eventually collapse down to the point where he has no time of any kind whatsoever to employ on anything, and that's why he's sitting there. But that is perfectly reasonable to him. That's perfectly reasonable.

He'll at length decide that he can't do anything about it.

He'll get so that he can't start anything. He has no time in which to start it, much less to finish it. So he starts in originally by saying, Well, I haven't got time to finish it, then, I haven't got time to do it well, then, I haven't got time to do it, then, I haven't even got time to start it. Then finally, I can't think about doing it.

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the whole thing. That's one of the basic reactions of Not-is-ness. He says, Now, look, I can't change it at all, so he's trying to effect a Not-is-ness by using Alter-is-ness. Not-is-ness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered (or thought he discovered), so the basic thing he must do immediately then is start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say Alter-is-ness – and it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of Not-is-ness. His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he's there in the first place. You see that we're just proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a there for him to be at.

And that's what happens to a person's doingness. It's his ability to postulate the amount of time, and the only confusion that you get into about this is the fact that we have an agreed upon time span.

So we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. An individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition. It sounds like an idiotic little rule but it's a very, very true little rule. It will continue as long as he has a condition. So every time you find a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. So every time you find a condition there's a postulate.

But you might recognize that the time for an entire nation and an entire earth could thereby go awry.

In order to get over something you have to have postulated that you have it. In order to recover you must postulate that you have something from which to recover. In order to go through the actions of emptying a pocket-book you had to have postulated that it was full and should be emptied.

How much can you do in an hour? What's an hour? An hour is the length of time it takes for the sun to move fifteen degrees in the sky. Now the sun isn't doing anything.

One is all too prone to look at existence and say, well, there's existence there and now we'll make some postulates. No. This is not quite the direction of drift. You'd have to make the postulate to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there. And any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. There must be a time postulate.

What's this co-ordination? When a country can still postulate time or a world can still postulate time, then an hour would be a tremendous amount of doingness. They would have a festival at sunrise and a couple of games, and then along about noon, why, have a feast, and that leaves them all afternoon, that leaves them all afternoon completely empty and that would be a good time to go boating, and then they would have time to practice up for the dance they were giving that night.

And we find that an individual doesn't have time unless he continues to postulate it and ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

And then they would finish up about midnight and say, my, what an idle day! This is the amount of time they could postulate in terms of doingness.

When I say cease to postulate time, I wouldn't want you for a moment to get the idea that there is any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider-webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisker. There's no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It's simply this kind of a postulate: Continue: Just get the notion of continuing something and you'll have a time continuum. Get the idea of a piece of space out in front of you and have the notion, Continue, about this piece of space. That's making time. You've made time. That's all the postulate there is. There isn't even the words, "Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue." No, its just continue. You didn't say continue.

Do we have time to do it, or don't we? That is the question.

This time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it, but their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend on other people, finally, to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know, eventually they do just sit there. You'll find many a person in this state, simply sitting at home in his bedroom, just sitting there. Well, he couldn't have any motion, he says.

Now in view of the fact that time itself is merely a postulate this is very simple to understand. If it's a postulate – does it have an anatomy as such? Well, yes – it's a complexity of postulates, the way you look at it in this particular universe at this time, but not really very complex. Time depends on change. In order to have time, you have to alter things, because Isness has a condition following it called Alter-is-ness – which has to take place for something to persist. This is the way the postulates have gone together which make up this universe – not the theoretical way in which they could go together to make up a universe.

Motion consists of this: consecutive positions in a space. He'd have to conceive that he had some space, and that he'd have consecutive motions in it.

Get these as different things. You could go about this just all out in an entirely different fashion and postulate time and still have time, but it would not necessarily be the postulates which were made, and are made, and are in this universe right here and now. It wouldn't necessarily be the same set of postulates, if we suddenly just dreamed it up.

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge, just no more and no less than that, or if you asked him to go out and put pieces of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block every five feet – you would see considerable recovery in his case. Why? Well, he knows that he'd have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge, or he would have to come around to his door again in the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects that are already there.

So we have to subject the postulates of time to a little subjective proof, and get ourselves a test on it. And we find that we can make things persist by changing them. If we keep on changing something and change it and change it and change it and change it we're getting persistence. But actually, what we're doing is postulating the time for it to persist in.

You could just say to this fellow, Get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it.

And when an individual has stopped postulating time he has stopped perceiving. Perception and the postulate of time are identical phenomena. Perception and postulation are the same thing here.

Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you're going to move it to now.

You should recognize, in auditing, very clearly, that time is a postulate. When you are working with a preclear who is having difficulty perceiving, you know that there is something wrong with the time postulate. Therefore there is something wrong with change.

Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish, now get the place you're going to move it to, and move it. Surprisingly enough an individual will sometimes turn on a violent body reaction on this.

Alter-is-ness is that part of the time postulate which we can most evenly and closely observe. And we find that changing things brings time into being. It causes a persistence and the mechanism of Alter-is-ness gives us a perception of time.

What's kicking back there? It is the thetan's agreement with the body, to the point where he's saying he is the body, the body is himself – therefore everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself happens to the body. In other words, he's in a super-identification. And he would come through this to where he could have some future.

We find that somebody who is in a state where he believes he is about to perish will then try to change everything in his vicinity, right up to the point where he knows certainly that he is perishing, at which moment he will simply succumb, bang, and he will cease to exist or persist as that particular individuality and he as himself without that individuality will proceed on and pick up another body.

What postulate is this individual already riding with? Let's take a look at the Is-ness of this. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

We get the tremendous amount of change or accomplishment which has to take place immediately before death. Here we have people all around the place who aren't doing anything. Their affairs are in horrible condition.

And we get the salient and horrible fact that this whole thing is monitored by Is-ness.

If we were to carry a little black bag and a stethoscope (that's the Badge of Office – a little black bag and a stethoscope. One doesn't quite know what they do with the stethoscope but it's interesting. It won't detect even whether a person is dead or not. A stethoscope is actually a dramatization of the Serpent of Caduceus) and we walk up to somebody and say, "My dear fellow I must inform you," having tapped the stethoscope against his chest so he knows he's being hit by a snake, "I must inform you that we have just learned through this diagnosis that you only have three months to live." The odd thing about this is that you would see a busy man promptly. He'll really get busy. He'll sit down in a slump for a moment or two. That's just the impact. And then he'll say, Let's see. Time. Time. Oh. Alter-is-ness, Alter-isness, Alter-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, change, change, got to get my will straight, got to get this straight, got to get that straight, got to get Mary moved out of that house into the other house I'm having built. Gotta have this and that, and the months go by and the years go by and he's still alive.

No matter how much Not-is-ness is taking place, you see Not-is-ness always pursuant to Is-ness. No matter how much Alter-is-ness takes place – you've got an As-is-ness, then Alter-is-ness has to take place to get an Is-ness. Is-ness is something that is persisting on a continuum.

Well, he'd say the doctor was wrong. No, the doctor wasn't wrong, as of the conditions of that moment, the experience of the doctor demonstrated to him that people who had this illness (who had not been told that they had only three months to live) died in three months. What he's left out of it is the factor on people who have been told they only have three months to live. You tell somebody that he has only three months to live and he will throw into gear the only mechanism available to him to cause persistence in this universe. And that is Alteris-ness. And he would change, change, change. He right away has to change his condition. That is the first thing he thinks of. One might think that it is just natural that he would do that. No. We're talking on a higher echelon of philosophy. You tell him he's only got three months to live, this is an unacceptable fact to him you say, therefore he's got to change his condition. No – worse than that. Worse than that. If he has no time persistence he has to change his condition. The one thing he can do from which he can gain persistence is Alter-is-ness. If he would simply change the furniture around in his office because he can do that successfully, he'd live a little longer. It's unsuccessful changes which fixate a person and cause a Not-isness to occur.

That is our basic definition of Is-ness. As-is-ness is something that is just postulated, or just being duplicated – no alteration taking place.

Now unsuccessful and successful are themselves postulates. "I am this individual and this individual is supposed to persist" versus "I am this individual and this individual's not supposed to persist". You could make up your postulate that way just as well as the other way.

As-is-ness contains no life continuum, no time continuum. It will just go – every time you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything: same space, same object, same time – boom! If you postulated it all the way through, without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone and that's all there is to it. It would be gone for everybody else, too.

But the accepted chain of considerations which go to make up, for example, art criticism, appreciation, win-lose and so on – we just have a set of considerations. These changes are successful as long as the individual is doing it, and the changes are unsuccessful as long as somebody or something else is doing it. And that's very much part of the win-lose factor and also of the time factor. That's self-determinism. One merely has made the postulate that as long as one does it one is successful. As long as one is able to accomplish the postulate this makes up wins. I am now going to pick up my right finger. I pick up my right finger. I won. That is, I made the postulate good.

Now this, then, Is-ness, is your monitoring postulate. An individual couldn't possibly get into trouble with As-is-ness. Unless you considered losing everything trouble – but it would be losing things which you either now didn't want, or had just postulated into existence.

What has happened to the preclear is that he has made the postulate and then something has contraried the postulate to such a degree that he is fixed. He is fixed and cannot change.

All As-is-ness is doing is merely accepting responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That's all As-is-ness is, when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

It just works out that way in this universe – not necessarily the most optimum set-up that could be made. When you made a postulate and then didn't accomplish the goal postulated in that postulate (remember you were postulating time to postulate a goal) when you were unable to reach that particular attainment, then, of course, you hadn't changed anything.

There are two kinds of As-is-ness: There is the As-is-ness where you postulate it in the space and time – you postulate it right there, and there it exists.

Time is made by changing the position of something in space and so we get all of the neutrons and the morons vibrating at a vast rate of speed, but a uniform rate of speed, changing their positions in space. Well then we can look around at several of these particles such as the sun, earth and other things, see that they're changing their relationships to each other in space at a uniform rate, and having perceived this, why then of course, we are looking at a change in time.

And then there is the As-is-ness where you repostulate it. You just postulate it again.

There is no such commodity as time; it isn't anything that could be poured from one bucket to the other (actually this is also true of matter). Time does not take place until a postulate is made concerning it, and in this universe the postulate had to do with change of location in space. When it occurs, then time occurs.

The object already exists, there is an Is-ness being approximated as an As-is-ness, and then it becomes an As-is that isn't. It becomes, then, an actual Not-is-ness. So if you created it, if you just created it as an As-is-ness, unless you altered it rapidly you'd get this Not-isness. And if you exactly approximated an Is-ness as an As-is-ness, you would again get the same result. Same result both times – Not-is-ness. As-is-ness, perfectly done, if not followed by Alter-is-ness, becomes a Not-is-ness. Quickly and immediately. You've seen that as an auditor, erasing parts of the reactive bank – facsimiles, etc.

You could change – the location of something in space simply by lying about it. And you'd get a persistence. You'd come off of the As-is-ness. The moment you change something's location in space you come away from As-is-ness and it doesn't unmock and so you get persistence.

It hasn't occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body! Treat the body as an As-is-ness and go your way. Well, you say the body has a lot of facsimiles and so forth. All right, treat them as the same As-is-ness, all in one operation – boom. Of course you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly As-is it.

Now an individual is as well off as he can change things in location in space. Looking at the Pre-Logics, which precede the Logics and Axioms of Dianetics, we find that they have to do with an energy, and they tell you that a thetan is an energy-space production unit, that a thetan can change objects in location in space, and right next to that we have the fact that a thetan can create objects to change in space of his own creation. In other words, he can do all of these things and we get, in this universe (and this is pretty common in universes) those postulates as the conditional postulates upon the universe. Then one makes another postulate, that something can persist, and this postulate is represented as time, so when we locate something in space we are actually working with the time postulate. Persistence.

Now, existence goes this way – this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an Alter-is-ness. There is an Alter-is-ness right there between Is-ness and Not-is-ness. The moment you say, "There it is, now I don't want it and it doesn't exist", you've postulated that you're changing it. It's a very abrupt and particular kind of Is-ness – it's a Not-is-ness.

If you observe that somebody has failed often, then what do you mean by failed? He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. In this universe, that's the total anatomy of failure.

If instead of following Is-nesses with Not-is-nesses, we followed them with As-isnesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an Is-ness with a blunt, thud, Not-is-ness. (1) There it is. (2) I don't want it. (3) It isn't. Oh ho! What's the difference between these two operations? It's a very interesting difference: You've got an Is-ness. You have an ash tray, you don't want the ash tray any more, so the one operation, a correct one as far as you are concerned if you just really didn't want it any more, would be simply to do an As-is-ness. A perfect duplicate. Gone. You haven't got an ash tray any more. To follow an Is-ness with an As-is-ness, brings you into an actual Not-is-ness right there.

Of course, he could simply postulate that he'd fail and that's another anatomy of failure. He's always free to do that. You can yourself do that. Not to remedy anything as an auditing procedure or anything of the sort –simply say to yourself that you failed. Not for any cause, reason or anything else, just, "I failed and therefore I have to feel a certain way" and then feel that way.

Or, on the other hand, you didn't do an As-is-ness. And you've done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it, and you have said, Somebody else creates it and I don't want it. You've said somebody else. You've postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing and you've said, "Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don't want it, so I'm going to say that it isn't, but it really belongs to somebody else." We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refuse the responsibility for having created the object, before we can get such a thing as a Not-is-ness.

You could do that, or you could simply postulate, I've won, not I've won something, just postulate that you've won, and the conditions of winning are feeling good, which is part of the woof and warp of postulates, "And therefore I feel good" – giving you a reason to feel good.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we are looking at here, and of course, we had no serious intent with this phenomena, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done, would sooner or later perhaps unmock the Republican Party or Russia, leave a hole, and of course to do that, you would have to accept the viewpoint of 200 million Russians. You could unmock Russia if you did that, but you would have to take full responsibility.

Why don't you just postulate that you feel good? It doesn't matter where you enter, doing this. There is no sensible concatenation here, we are only talking about an agreed upon concatenation. This universe, and the postulates which formed it, is not necessarily the best universe that could be made. It just happens to be the universe we're sitting in and it happens to be the universe in which our postulates are being made and unmade and it just happens that it went together on these four conditions of As-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Is-ness and Not-is-ness, and these four conditions woven together make this universe act as it does and behave as it does and give you ideas of what a win is and what a lose is and it's all on a postulate basis.

What is full responsibility? Full responsibility merely says: I created it. When you ask somebody to make a perfect duplicate of it he's going through the mechanics of creating it, therefore it disappears. He knows, unless he throws Some other-determinism in on the thing, in other words practices some Alter-ism on its creator, that it's not going to exist at all.

But the most curious manifestation in all of this is the manifestation of time, and we have this matter of time occupying a considerable part of the field of aberration. And that is because time is the one postulate where an individual begins to depend on other-determinisms more than any other way.

The physical universe as we look at it right around us here is an Is-ness for one reason only. We all agree that somebody else created it, whether that is God or Mugjub or Bill. We agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence, and so long as we are totally agreed on this, boy have we got everything solid. And the moment we agree otherwise, and we say, Well, we made it – it starts to get thin. This will worry a preclear for a moment. It's just as if he feels he could never make another one. It'll get thin.

We see the sun moving and we take our cue from the sun as to how much time we have. We see clocks moving and we take our cue from them as to how much time we have.

In the processing of reality, then, if you handled Is-ness all by itself, you would simply have an individual start looking at what he considers to exist. And the most solid manifestation of that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, and so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. Just start spotting spaces and walls, and let what happens happen. That's all. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things, very permissively. Suppose he kept on looking at them with his physical vision – we find that he would get up to a certain level and then he'd start to have body somatics (Somatics: perceptions, stemming from the Reactive Bank, of past physical pain or discomfort, restimulated in present time) because making the body do this continually is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an As-is-ness. It's not bluntly or sharply in the direction of As-is-ness. It's just asking them to process it a little bit in that direction: 'Let's take the spaces around here just as you see them.' 'Take the spaces around here just as you see them.' 'Look at a spot. Look at another spot. Just take this things as you see them.' And of course after a while, the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and duller and duller and – gone.

And that tells us how much persistence we have. So we're being told by these objects whether we can live or not. And that's just the most curious of things in this universe, that one would take his cue as to whether or not he was going to persist, from whether or not the sun moved a certain direction and distance. It's idiotic. So the sun did a figure eight. If I'm not dependent upon sunlight I am certainly not going to cease to live just because of the sun. And a thetan is not dependent upon sunlight. Quite the contrary, a thetan is dependent for his wellbeing on manufacturing his own jolly old energy. He's not dependent on the sun manufacturing his energy for him. That's just an intricate hook-together. And that again depends on postulates.

Well, when they get brighter, that's all right. The body will still feel all right, but when it starts dulling down the body doesn't like this. It does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in a body-building magazine.

The postulate of time could be simply cleanly made, in some universe, saying "Well, there will now be a continuance for one and all", and that would be that. But that wasn't the way it was made in this universe. It was made on the basis that when As-is-ness is postulated, in order to get a persistence, we have to practice Alter-is-ness. We have to change the location of something to get a persistence.

Because the body knows it will fall if it stands in space. Therefore this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes, and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, O.K., if he sees a somethingness, O.K. Just get him spotting. We don't care what he sees. We might indicate various directions but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions. On your right. On your left. Above your head. Oh no, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, spot a couple of spots on it. Did you do that? Now something else, spot a couple more spots on that. Well, we know already that if we've run it permissively in the environment, he's had to point them out and walk around to them. He will obey orders.

People get inverted on this in this universe, so that they take an Is-ness and they change it in location and it starts disappearing.

Now that we've got him to a point where he will physically obey commands we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. We just simply keep on spotting them, and that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.

Suppose you have a person move a postulate around with a mass of energy. He starts moving it around – and the energy mass starts disappearing.

But what started disappearing was the energy mass, wasn't it? It was not the postulate, particularly. He just got used to that postulate and he finally took it over as his own postulate.

And a person could finally say, well if I move something around, it will disappear. He has made a counter-postulate.

He is perfectly at liberty to make a counter postulate, but this is not the postulate on which this universe is made. This universe is rigged so that that postulate will avail not, to an individual. That's part of the considerations that make it up. If you've got something and then you say it doesn't exist – you're stuck with it.

That's this universe.

Alter-is-ness produces a persistence, but then we get two types of persistence. We get persistence as Is-ness and we get a persistence as Not-is-ness. The fellow is persisting but he doesn't want to be there. Well, he's persisting because he doesn't want to be there. This, too, is a change, although he's fixed in a locale. And secondly there is the fellow who is persisting because he wants to be there and he's persisting because of change. They're both Alter-isnesses. An individual's desire to change continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he cannot move. But he had to postulate that he couldn't move before this could happen. And so we get the dwindling spiral of the MEST universe.

We sometimes see the manifestation of accumulating energy on a preclear. Every time a preclear has said, Now I am going to move, and hasn't moved, or has said, Now I am moving and I am going to continue moving, and he is stopped (walking down the street, walks into a lamp post) – any time this has occurred, he has lost, which is to say, he has got a counter-postulate. So he adds up loss as stationary.

This universe, you see, brands everything which isn't moving as innocent. And things that are moving are guilty, always. So he's lost. Well how do you lose, then? By getting fixed in a location. That's how you lose. An individual who is unable to move objects out of a certain location eventually gets to a position where, when he is trying to move these objects out of this location, he recognizes a failure and so he goes into apathy. He says, "I don't have enough energy to do this".

What nonsense! If he doesn't have energy enough to move energy, why doesn't he just postulate it some place else? But that's another thing. He could say it is as it is and it would disappear and then he could postulate its existence somewhere else, and then change that around so it couldn't be disappeared again and he'd be all set. What's he doing picking things up? A drill – simply in moving things and putting them back in the same place again – will resolve this consistent continuous failure and so you get a process such as Opening Procedure by Duplication and its tremendous effectiveness. If it is done with a little bit heavier objects than is ordinary then an individual recognizes very thoroughly that he can pick up and put back into place the same object and win, not fail. You've changed the basic postulate by which he is working in this universe, which is saying that if he can't move, he has failed.

However that may be we have these various conditions and the immediate point here is that time depends, in this universe, on Alter-is-ness. At least the desire to change. Anybody who is desiring to change is persisting in time, and people who do not want to change do not persist in time.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.