Here we take up the various reasons why.

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.

We have in Scientology a lot to do with reasons why, but the fact is that a fellow who goes around always looking for reasons why is usually not in particularly good shape.

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.

But there are a lot of reasons why the states of existence and conditions of existence are put together the way they are in this outrageous fashion in which As-is-ness followed by Alter-is-ness gives us Is-ness, followed by an Alter-is-ness, or desire to, which brings us into Not-is-ness, and which then brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-is-ness which brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-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.

There's a good reason for all this. An excellent reason for all this.

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.

We are talking right here about the fundamental of all aberration, which is incidentally the fundamental of all existence.

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

There is found a strange condition here. If a thetan were to remain with an As-is-ness, he would thereafter have nothing. Therefore, immediately after the postulation of some object, it is necessary, by mechanics, and it is just happens to be so in this universe (it's not reasonable, it's just the way it is in this universe – which puts you right in the field of mechanics) that the As-is-ness must immediately be altered in order to become what we call a reality. And thus people attempt various mechanisms.

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

One of those mechanisms is the device of God. Now then, we're not saying that there is not a God. But if there were never any type of alter ego of this character there wouldn't be any permanent reality.

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.

It's one thing for there to be a God and quite another thing for everybody to blame everything on him. The most barbaric manifestations that we have, generally includes a deity.

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

The savage out in the Gullaby Isles is practicing this – he says that the fault is the trees and the River Sprite and so forth. I'm talking to you now about the mechanism of use of, rather than the identity of, when I mention God.

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.

All right, God, then, is to blame. If we make something and have some hard luck, something like that, the way it looks to us here at this stage of development, we can then say, "Well, God did it to us and He has afflicted us." Quite in addition to that, every primitive people has the legend of a creator. They have to have a legend of a creator, otherwise they would never have anything. The immediate and intimate use of the legend of the creator is to continue an existence.

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".

Whether you built it or not, you can cause something to vanish simply by looking at it as it is. Somebody else can put up a mock-up of one kind or another and merely by your perceiving it and making a perfect duplicate of it, you can vanish it. It is not necessary that you exclusively devote yourself to the vanishment of those things which you yourself have made.

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.

That is not necessary in order to carry through this cycle. Somebody else could have made it and you could have made a perfect duplicate of it – an As-is-ness – and it would have vanished.

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.

Now we are talking about something which is very easy to work with and which can be put to objective proof. I can ask you to make a perfect duplicate of something, which is to say, get it in the same space, same time continuum, using the same mass, and your perfect duplicate will cause it first, probably, if you're having a hard time of it, to brighten up – and then it'll fade. Well, the next thing you know, even though you've made very poor perfect duplicate, why, you sort of get the idea, of looking through this item – and so it is with all of existence.

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.

Unless, in other words, there was a legend of other creation than your own, you would not at any time be able to have anything.

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.

The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is: it must have been created by somebody else. And thus we get Is-ness. When you ask a person to remedy his own havingness, this is perfectly all right. You're asking him to make nothing of something. He actually can. But the reason it does him so much good is he's forgotten that he can.

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.

In a Remedy of Havingness you ask the preclear to mock something up and pull it in. In other words, you ask him to mock it up and alter it. Why doesn't it remedy a person's havingness simply to mock something up – just get a mockup? It doesn't remedy his havingness because if he leaves it there, it will simply disappear. Many a preclear gets very upset because his mockups all disappear. He puts up a mockup and it disappears. Well, that's because he doesn't alter it in position. He puts the mockup up and leaves it right where it is and of course it dissipates and disappears. Now those preclears who put up a mockup and leave it in the same place, which does not disappear, are working on mental machinery which does their mockups for them and for which machine they have "No responsibility". He's doing them with a machine not because he's crazy but because this is the only possible way he could make them persist. The machine changes them and he himself knows that he did not put up the mockup. He knows this. If he didn't know that, the mockup again would disappear.

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.

So it is not a very undercover fact with which we are working.

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.

Let's take this legend of the creator. We discover that it is quite uniform. It is found in every savage tribe. It is found across the face of the world. And it is found throughout this universe. The legend of the creator. Very well, we can say there was a creator and he created everything and that's fine. And if this were the case, why, that's fine, too, because it wouldn't unmock. In other words, things would not disappear if there were a creator who made everything. You could even use this as a tremendous argument to prove that there was such a thing as a creator and he made everything, just by the fact that it's here and if you had made it and continued to accept your responsibility for it, it wouldn't be here, so there must have been a creator. You could go at it with this type of logic. However, it works this way: if somebody else, other than yourself, made a mass of energy, all you would have to do would be to come along and fish around for its approximate moment of creation and duplicate it and it would then disappear. So whether the creator created everything or not, it's a certainty that you, in order to continue with a physical universe, have to, to some degree, lay the blame on some other identity.

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 this postulate, whether created it or you created it, does not enter the question at all. If you duplicated it, it would go away regardless of who created it. We're talking now about a very basic fundamental, that it is necessary for you to carry around the postulate that somebody else created it in order for it to exist.

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

Now it's a little bit difficult to prove this. You have to work with a preclear for a short time. But the main difficulty of proof which lies on this track is simply proving who made the mockup in the first place. You see, if it disappeared because you duplicated it, why then, you probably made it. But it doesn't matter then whether we use this one way or the other. We don't have to admit that you could make anything disappear whether you made it or not. We don't have to admit that, to continue along with this proof. What we are coming down to here is this matter of responsibility.

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.

We learned in Dianetics that people would not accept responsibility for their own acts, and actually they're as bad off as they will not accept responsibility for their own acts. And individuals are other-determined to the degree that they will not accept such responsibility.

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.

As a matter of fact, you discover a complete dianometry, scientometry, anything you want to call it, a complete set of tests, which will demonstrate that there is a direct ratio between the health and ability of the person and his willingness to accept responsibility. But the funny part of it is, this only goes up to a certain point and when you achieve that point of acceptance of responsibility, then havingness as such, and the universe, or that part of one's interest in the universe, would vanish.

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.

Now here is the Bodhi. Here is the individual who aspires to the attainment of perfect serenity – he can't have perfect serenity and have something, because he'd have to give away a certain amount of his responsibility in order to continue it in existence. Havingness would only persist so long as he felt somebody else had had a hand in creating it. And the moment he said "I created this" one hundred percent all the way along the line, he wouldn't have a thing.

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

The perfect duplicate here is what we are looking at, again. Therefore, the condition of becoming a Bodhi is the condition of having nothing.

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.

A thetan is very able to have something or nothing at will. But it happens that he is appealed to very often on the basis that all somethingnesses, including space, would vanish.

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.

He thinks this might be a good thing. The only protest a thetan has, actually, is somethingness.

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.

If you want to say what is wrong with a thetan, you'd say, "somethingness", and you have stated it. He has something. There is something in existence.

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.

He is perfectly willing to have many somethings, but after a while, the communication formula comes into effect, and he becomes frantic about it. This is something that is terribly elementary. In spite of the fact that it is as deeply pervasive as it is in life and existence, it is terribly simple. It is one of these idiotically elementary factors that everybody could have overlooked forever. They would have had to have overlooked it. They didn't even dare tread on the edges of it for fear that everything would blow up or disappear.

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.

All right. A thetan makes something, and he himself natively is a Static, capable of consideration, has no mass, no form – as a spirit he has no form – he has no wave-length, he only has potentials. He has the potential of locating objects in space, and the potential of creating space, energy and objects and the action of locating those objects in that space.

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.

And with this as his potential, the moment that he makes something, he violates his own communication formula.

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.

A thetan in excellent condition is able to communicate easily with something. He can simply change his mind about anything and work it around. But the formula of communication becomes native to the creation of space, energy and mass, and that formula is, of course, Cause-Distance-Effect, with a perfect duplication taking place at Effect of that which emanated from Cause.

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.

That is the Communication Formula. And that becomes the formula the moment you have space. Up until that time, you have all cause and all effect capable of occupying exactly the same location, since there is no location.

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.

So a thetan is perfectly able, way up the scale, to occupy the space of anything, and so duplicate that thing. But his formula when he's doing this is not cause-distance-effect. It's just cause, effect. That would be the formula he's operating with because he wouldn't communicate across a distance to something, since he wouldn't be occupying any cause or effect points.

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.

But he can't have a game if he does this. He can't have mass if he does this.

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.

If every time he selects out an enemy and then communicates to the enemy and simply becomes the enemy at that point, he couldn't have an enemy very long, could he?

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.

If he said I am fully responsible for everything and I will now make a plot of land, and he mocked up some space and a plot of land, and he's fully responsible for it – what happens?

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.

It's gone. If he had mocked it up and altered it or changed it, he could then bring about the phenomenon of persistence, which is itself time.

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.

When you say survive, you're saying time. Just put those together and make them synonyms and you understand all you want to know about time. It's a consideration which leads to the persistence of something, and you can enter all the mechanics into time that you want to, and you can paint it up in any way you want to and you can write textbooks on it and test it and buy very fancy watches and chronometers and set up observatories to measure the movement of the stars, and you still have "Time is a consideration which brings about persistence". And the mechanic of bringing about that persistence is, by alteration. And so we have Alter-is-ness taking place immediately after an As-is-ness is created, and so we get persistence. In other words, we have to change the location of a particle in space.

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.

Let's get back to this communication formula.

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.

A perfect duplication would be cause and effect in the same point in space, wouldn't it? So communication as we consider it through space is not a perfect communication system.

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.

You on one point in space communicate with something at another point in space and if you continue to interpose a distance in between the things or space in between the things, you get even then the basic of persistence. All you've got to do is get that distance in there, and we have this taking place.

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.

A thetan cannot duplicate a mass. That is to say he cannot himself actually be a mass.

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.

He can conceive that he is by saying now look at all this mass that somebody else put on me. I didn't create this mass.

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.

He can conceive himself as mass. But he starts to get very unhappy about communicating with somethingnesses because here is this distance factor and he is a nothingness. Now if he can be the somethingness on the same point in space where that exists, then he feels very, very good about things. He feels all right simply because he's occupying the same space. Well that's perfect communication for him. That's a perfect duplicate. But if he totally occupied it at its instant of inception it would disappear.

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.

So he gets caught between not wanting to communicate with something and wanting to have something. You see that to really have something he would have to occupy the same space. To communicate with something he has to stand off at a distance and pretend to be a something. Communication, as we know it in this universe, is cause, distance, effect. Perfect communication, like a perfect duplication, is: the point, the point, there's something on this point. The thetan can also occupy this point, therefore he can have something, he can communicate with something, but if he says it belongs utterly to him and he's occupying its basic point, it will disappear.

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 has to have another creator. He has to have some other author of the universe. If he doesn't have, why, it will disappear.

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.

Now, we could enquire at some length into the tremendous complexity of this and why this is. A thetan should simply be able to say by postulate, well, it's as it is, and it's going to persist as it is, and we'll just make this postulate and that will be that. But the funny thing is that it just doesn't work this way, and it looks here as though we have an arbitrary which has been entered in from one quarter or another, which we don't fully comprehend even at this moment. But this universe went together on this basis of: As-Is equals Vanishment.

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.

You make one just as it is – all you have to do is pretend as if you were making it at this moment – and boom, it's 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.

You then see the necessity, at least in this universe, to have another determinism at work. Well, that's just one point. We see it in terms then of the Creator. That's fine. This does not enter the question of whether there is or is not a God. We are talking about whether or not people blame God, or why they blame God, or why they put things onto God.

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.

Well, if they didn't they wouldn't have anything.

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.

The other point involved here is people blaming each other. They stand there and one says: You said that, and That's your fault, and this is why we have this fight, and so forth.

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.

And the other person says, No, that wasn't the way it was, that's an entirely different situation, you actually were the one that started all this.

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.

We talk to a preclear and we want to know what's wrong with this preclear. Well, it's "what Mother did" to him, not what he did to himself. We can't conceive that an individual could actually become aberrated without his own consent, and sure enough he can't. He can't become aberrated or upset, or thin or lean or fat or thick or stupid or anything else without his own consent because he is part of the agreement pattern, and unless he has agreed himself to other entities of agreement, why he won't get stuck with any kind of a pattern.

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

Now let's look at how that adds up. We find that if an individual to have something went into agreement with other determinisms and said these other determinisms caused all this, he could sit there comfortably with something persisting. But what did he have to do? Basically he said: in order to have anything I've got to go into communication with these other-determinisms and blame them or fix the responsibility of causation upon these others.

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.

So the child blames his parents. He gets up into the age of puberty, he runs into sex, sex tells him he can't survive – that's the basic manifestation of sex – tells him he can't survive and he begins to worry about this fact. Why, here he is all equipped to make another generation, he's hardly started living this one, and that's a confusing and upsetting fact. He's already warned in advance that some day he's going to die. To see something really morbid, read some teen-age writings. You never saw such complete sadness anywhere. Well, they've been told they can die, and the appearance of sex, physiologically, told them they could die.

That's this universe.

They become anxious then about surviving, so they have to turn around and blame somebody for something, anything, and simply by blaming somebody they obtain a continuance of whatever condition they are in at the moment. In other words, they can continue to survive simply by turning around and saying, Well, the trouble with me is all what my father and mother did to me. So if you were to take somebody and bring him very, very close to death and cause the chilly breath to draft down his neck, you would find him very shortly blaming something else but himself. But he runs in a cycle on this. He discovers that the situation is untenable. Then he'll blame himself.

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.

Why does he blame himself at that point? He wants to unmock it. And he actually has forgotten the mechanisms of unmocking.

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.

By blaming himself, by taking it upon himself, by holding it all close to his own bosom, he thinks: Now that it's my fault it will all unmock, and he's a very surprised person when it doesn't unmock. He merely gets upset. And the other one is, he finds his condition of survival desirable, and when he finds it even vaguely desirable – it doesn't matter if he's a slave in the bottom of a salt mine working out a sentence for having voted, or whatever – the fact is that this individual obtains continuance by blaming others. So he goes through a cycle of Blame somebody else, that means I've got to or I want to, or I haven't any other choice but to, survive, and the best answer is survive, therefore I'll just blame everybody else.

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".

And the mechanism of blaming oneself is unmocking oneself. Unmocking oneself and the mass with which he is immediately and intimately surrounded. People go through these two cycles and they invert, and that is the basic inversion. They start in by saying, Somebody else was responsible for the creation of all this. They're quite happy about all this and they stand off and look at it and then they begin to get tired of communicating with these somethingnesses, because they cannot enter into a perfect duplication. They are nothing, that's a something, they begin to get impatient about it after a while, so they decide to unmock it.

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.

They look at it and say: I did it. Well, there's something wrong here. Come on, come on, come on. I did it. It goes right on. They don't mock it up in the same part of a space in which it was initially mocked up, they don't try to duplicate it with its original mass.

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.

They omit some of the basic steps of saying I did it and they're trying to go up against the postulate with which they did it.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.

Having made this postulate and said already that it belonged to somebody else, now they try to take it back, and their next move is to try to squash up these energy masses, use more force in order to flatten force, and he is on his way, this thetan, right away, you see, he's on his way. Because the more he tries to use energy to knock out energy, the more energy he's going to have, and the more dislocated the basic particles of that energy are going to be, and he'll just get more and more and more persistence, and if he keeps on protesting all the way on down, it will just become more solid, and more solid and more solid, and more solid, because he's protesting that it's other-determinism then he protests by saying it's my fault.

Now I'm going to disappear and die and that will make you sorry. But again he's entering a protest into the line.

So we get this basic thing of other men's responsibility, or "God is responsible", as the fundamental of persistence and survival. We have to have other-determinism at work or we get no persistence whatsoever.

And so we get these postulated other-determinisms, and when you recognize this clearly in your preclear and in creation itself, it will cease to be as entirely baffling as it may have been in the past.