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.

The four conditions of existence are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence, and they are the basic attitudes about existence. Now we could include a great many more attitudes, and we would find that we were deriving them all from these four. But we could take these four and find out that we were deriving them all from one – Is-ness, or reality.

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.

There has to be an Is-ness before you can do an Alter-is-ness. There has to be an Isness before you can do a Not-is-ness – unless of course you want to postulate it in reverse.

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.

But we are talking now about this particular universe and how it got here and we discover as we look along the track, that these four conditions of existence, that all existence, presupposes the postulate known as TIME.

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.

Now time is just a plain ordinary postulate which says that out of a non-consecutive beingness, which doesn't exist forever, we would get then a parade of time. A time continuum.

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

There's no forever, it would just be there – no forever, no instant involved. There just isn't any consecutive existence at all. And then out of this we would have to make a postulate that there would now be consecutive existence, existences, or a consecutive series of states.

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

Now an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever doesn't have a good feeling about this. Without any space he could have a good feeling about it. No space, no energy, no continuum – he could have a fairly good feeling about this, but when he gets into the occupying of a space, now he has this feeling of foreverness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence. He can have a game. Space is necessary to start this game but when you've just got space and nothing else, it's rather unbearable. You're already occupying, so there is an existence there, but it isn't an existence which has any consecutive difference of state. And that's real poor. This is a kind of feeling you run into in space-opera.

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.

Here we have, then, a state of existence being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation, and this would be a simultaneousness.

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

There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time. There is no question of any postulate before or after because you have not postulated the postulate which causes a before or after, and that postulate would be time. So actually, to have a game, there must be a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space-energy-time – space, energy, continuous existence. Which is an As-is-ness of space – altered, energy – altered, time – altered. So these items have to have the time postulate with Alter-is-ness in them in order to get a persistence. That's how it's done in this universe. You don't "just have to do this all the time". But when those three consecutive postulates are made simultaneously, why we then have a continuum of existence, demarked by differences of position of the particle in the space and we have time being marked out for us very neatly. We have to alter positions in order to get a continuousness. We have to say it is here, now it's here, now it's here, now it's here.

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.

There's another way of making time come true. We say space, no space, space, no space, space, no space, space, no space. You're postulating, however, that you can do this before you can say space, no space, space, no space. Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his makeup. So we have before this an ideal state, that is to say an idealized or theoretical state. We have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a Static which has no space, no mass, no wave length, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider, and we are dealing with the basic stuff of life. Just by definition.

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".

It is very peculiar that: "We, mixed up in all of this energy and so forth and way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – do you see anything specious about the way that remark hangs together – "Way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – Very difficult and very strange that we could even discuss this higher state of existence which was made trillions of years ago? No. You see, it must have been concurrent with this, right here, and so we don't use the word existence, we use the word "is". We don't use the word "then" or "will be", we don't go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all. It just is.

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.

Now, in past ages it was just: "Well, reality is reality and you'll have to accept it.

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.

There's nothing more you can know about it than that." Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

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.

So, it is not a complete and embracive definition of reality. It's not complete and embracive because reality has a certain mechanical structure and that structure is composed of these four states of existence. And it would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We've always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

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.

Alter-is-ness and Not-is-ness, of course, are variations of Is-ness and depend upon Isness. But there is a fourth one and that is As-is-ness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation, yet it also can be made to exist again any time anybody wants to make it exist again, simply by saying AS IS. If anybody had truly and actually accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn't have any. But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else's. So this reality was actually another condition, other-determined As-is-ness. Other determined. Which is Not-is-ness!

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.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say "as is created by you". That's an awful one, that's a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It's an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn't an As-is-ness at all. It's a very specious As-is-ness, and naturally the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said "This is reality and this is As It Is and you'd better accept it." That's a Not-is-ness, isn't it? So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin – all transparent-but – they're-there, or, they're "all hung with black sheets" – you must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many As-is-nesses which somebody else created.

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.

Somebody else says, "This is the way things are." And you've had that. You get that operation in conversation: "And yesterday you said to me, just when I got up, you said to me, you never work, you are a dirty loafer, you remember that, don't you?" I think every familial unit of thetans should always have, not a Bible, but so and so's Rules of Evidence, lying right there to be resorted to at any time, and there ought to be a Court in every neighborhood to which you could repair and decide whether or not this was an As-is-ness or a Not-is-ness.

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.

Now what is a Not-is-ness? A Not-is-ness comes about in that exact manifestation, or simply by the separate postulate: "Well, it is and I regret it. It isn't." You know, you could have made it and then said it wasn't. Oddly enough, if you made it and you know you made it, you have a special case of being in a position to say any time, "It doesn't exist now," and it won't – if you have also accepted responsibility for having created something and said, "I made it." So we see that there are two different conditions of Not-is-ness.

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.

One is just vanishment.

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

The other one is an Is-ness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying "It isn't."

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.

A Not-is-ness, in our terminology, would be this second specialized case of an individual trying to vanish something without taking responsibility for having created it. Definitive, positive and precise definition.

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 the only result of doing this is to make it all unreal. To make it forgotten. To make it "back of the black screen". To make it transparent. To make it dull down. To give it over to a machine. To wear glasses. Anything that you could possibly do to get a dimmingdown of an Is-ness.

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.

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: "I didn't make it. It isn't." "I didn't do it, so it doesn't exist.', And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

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

"I didn't create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned." An individual doesn't have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they'll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He's Not-ised it and he's got it.

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.

Now he thinks the only way he can get rid of it is to dim it down, dim it down.

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.

You can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something – and this is of great interest to us – if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that "it was what your mother said". That wouldn't be far enough to go.

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.

This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

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.

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.) Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction, and you postulate the germ of your own destruction.

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.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was actually a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back, back, back, back, BACK, it was, "Oh! We're back to where the guy did it in the first place!" Well, that was very interesting, and one result was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms.[#bookmark10 1] The essay on full responsibility.

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.

Well, a fellow did. He created the condition from which he is now suffering, and he didn't even create it in other wise than he is now suffering it. But it has been keyed in and he has consented even to its being keyed in.

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.

Nothing, really is sneaking up on anybody. That's a horrible thing, isn't it? People haven't even made it worse. But we're having a good game. If that game is a game called psychosomatic illness, bereft lover, neglected baby, it's still a game. And as such, the individual is still playing all roles.

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.

Now what happens is that as an individual goes along the line, he starts identifying himself with the source point and receipt point of the communication line. As a child, he identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you discover a little child giving mother a good lecture. If you had, you probably would remember with great satisfaction, the good lecture you gave your mother.

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.

Here is a condition in which the individual has identified himself with a continuous effect point, or a continuous cause point, and having said "I am now on this point," he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. He has considered he is on that point.

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.

Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he's on the point, as long as he considers he's on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

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.

A process immediately occurs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over: "Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?" And you would just run a gradient

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.

1 Advanced Procedure and Axioms: Book by L. Ron Hubbard scale all the way back up the line, to the point where the individual recognizes, finally, "You know, I'm sitting right here!" There wouldn't be any mysticism involved in this.

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.

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place.

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.

It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

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.

A game is an Is-ness which is being handled by Not-is-nesses. A football game could be added up in terms of these conditions of existence. One side has the ball and the other side must Not-is the side that has the ball, and the side that has the ball has to win – in other words, has to arrive at a receipt point.

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.

We get the communication formula itself as being below the conditions of existence and we get affinity, reality and communication as simply being the methods by which existence is conducted. It is not the interplay of existences. So we're dealing with a higher echelon than ARC right now.

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.

Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it's going. In the agreement or reality itself we're talking about Is-ness and that is the corner where we enter this ARC triangle. We just slide into that triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communication on that Is-ness point of reality, and then it is modified by affinity and communication, which of course come in simultaneously with it. We discover then that these conditions of existence would add up to all manifestations of behavior. There would be a great many of them. There would be a finite number, however. It would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply, of these four conditions of existence. We get this individual who in only 75% of his life is trying to say Not-is to, another 10% of his life he's giving an Alter-is, one hundredth of one per cent he's giving an As-is, or trying to give an As-is to – and the remainder is Reality. Acceptable reality. And that would be just one makeup of a personality.

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.

If we say that there is a gradient scale of Is-ness, a gradient scale of Alter-is-ness, a gradient scale of As-is-ness (which there isn't) and a gradient scale of Not-is-ness, why we can see then that you could take these gradient scales and in one combination and another, have a character composited from them.

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.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness.

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.

We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn't be there.

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.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness.

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.

Therefore he will avoid duplication – he'll avoid all kinds of things. He's afraid he'll unmock.

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.

He's afraid he'll vanish. Here he is stuck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn't get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Betweenlives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A HISTORY OF MAN by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby.

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.

Silly, isn't it? But it doesn't matter too much. Any life or continuance, to him, has begun to be better than no life at all.

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.

You could say, well then why would you process somebody? Well, let's look at that. In order to accomplish a two way communication, just after the basic and most rudimentary chitterchat, I would start asking somebody why he was being processed. And you know, I'm just wicked enough to go on asking the person why he is being processed for hours. Until he can at least find one reason why he is being processed. It's a very interesting process. A preclear comes in saying, "Process me," and you have always supposed they knew. Well, at this point they don't have any idea at all why they want to be processed.

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.

A process which would be quite powerful would be: "What wrongness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?" or "What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?" and then "What wrongness could you accept from other people?" – back and forth and back and forth. Here goes the guy's manners, his social pattern, his behavior pattern, and everything else will just go by the boards running that process but he won't be able to tell you, first and foremost, why he's being processed.

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.

He won't be able to tell you he wants to feel freer. He won't articulate any of these things. He'll just sit there and want to be processed. What toward? Until you've gotten him to put a little time on the track, he will use "forever" in processing, because he's sitting in forever.

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.

He isn't moving on the time continuum. Well, if you can't get him processing toward some goal or other or in some direction, he just makes processing the end all of everything and he'll just go on being processed forever. But if he's going to be processed forever, he'll have to hold onto his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn't be processed forever, could he? And that's why some cases stay so long in processing. It's actually as elementary as that.

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.

So I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: "Well now, give me some goals you have in processing." And just keep it up until it's no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

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.