I would like very much tonight to tell you about some various techniques, and I am sorry that I am not going to be able to tell you about the technique in which I am sure most of you are most interested; that's 88.

How do you vanquish an opponent? You hit him so hard and so fast, so suddenly, that you drive him into apathy quickly. He won't recover; he's close to zero.

The reason I'm not going to tell you about 88 is 88 requires a lot longer buildup than three days. It actually is much simpler. It's a brand-new method of running, but it requires an enormous amount of preparatory survey – reorientation.

How do you not discover a secret of existence? Well, the best way not to discover it is to back up from it and sit still. If you are going up toward infinity, for heaven's sakes, examine infinity. Infinity would consist of everything, wouldn't it, just at first glance and first analysis. And so that would mean sweeping action, it would mean sweeping decision, it would be "to be." But in order to be you have to have willingness to be, and as you go up the line – all angels have two faces: one white, one black – you have to be willing to destroy as well as willing to create. "To be" is everything, and therefore as you go up the line, you have to be willing to risk, to dare.

So instead of that, as preparatory to 88, I'm giving you a technique – Technique 80 – which, by the way, you will be able to use on the general public.

There is nothing to be gained by backing up from life. That isn't the way out, except through the bottom. If you want to become MEST, back up from life and say "The material is no good. We must now codify our behavior so that we have to take eighteen sacred glances at the whopajug every day, whistle 'Yankee Doodle' backwards six times and go through the sacred ceremonies of turning off TV. And then we will become holy and part of all and godly."

You can't use Technique 88 very much on people. You try to persuade them as to what you're doing, and one of them is liable to say to you that you have to be a mathematician in order to run it. This isn't true. It just happens to be a little bit out of their common run of understanding of the MEST universe.

That was the biggest control operation that anybody ever put across in the course of this human race! That's really a wonderful control operation, because it takes any one of you who wants to be, who wants to get into action, who wants to control life, who wants to assume an allness and an intimacy with all of creation, and it says gladly and happily, "Here's the route, fellow. Here it is. Here it is. You sit down with your flanks of your legs flopped out for eight hours a day and you do the Ibis. And you stand up and bow down before this altar sixteen times, and you count your mouth organs or something and say 'Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum,' and you'll get there."

And furthermore, when you talk about Technique 88 it makes people feel just a little bit strange, and they're afraid to stamp on something or something like that, because they're afraid their foot will go through. It makes the whole universe look sort of like a thin piece of Czech glass and makes you feel like a very small child playing with it.

It's a dirty trick! It's as dirty a trick as taking some little kid, and he's walking down the street and he's all happy and cheerful and he wants to go to the movies. He wants to go to the movies. And you know that off on this other street down here they're fumigating – they're fumigating a house – and it's a dirty, narrow alley. And this little kid can't read, and there's a big sign there, says Danger, Stay Out of This Area. So you carefully tell the little kid, very gently – you say, "Well, sonny, I tell you how you go to the movies. You go down this alley and there's a red and white sign down at the end of alley. And you can't read, but that sign really says Movies This Direction. And you go down to the other end of the alley and you stand there for fifteen minutes, and they'll open the door and you'll get in the back of the theater for nothing." And then you smile very happily and sweetly to yourself – little Audrey just laughed and laughed. And you go down a little bit later and stir the body up with your toe and say "Ha! Ha! Ha! What a big joke!"

Because the truth of the matter is, actually, with 88, theoretically – just theoretically, fortunately – you could go far enough with Technique 88 not to just have the preclear go poof! but to have the room go poof! And this is hard on rooms and so on.

Well, that is about as big a joke as has been put across on the human race. They tell you to go down that alley through the phosgene gas, and that's the way to live. Well, it isn't. The way to live is to go to the movies – the other route.

I don't think anybody actually will apply 88 to the point where this solar system will go poof! like that and so forth, because I'm asking everybody a favor that I run on 88. I say, "Now you have to do me one favor." And, of course, when they all get through - they don't know this yet; I won't tell them what the favor is – it's leave the solar system! Well, they're committed to this one favor, so you're safe. Anyway. . . Actually, that's not the favor I'm going to ask them, but...

Now, here was a crossroads for man. Here was his chance to get up again, to be, to be constructive, to exist in groups, to cooperate with his fellows, to be above the need of law and order, to assume an ethical level which was so natural and so well understood that at no time would anybody need to moderate it – there's a natural ethic – and because somebody wanted a body to control, they turned them down the other street and they said, "Be quiet."

Now, what I am going to talk to you about is Technique 80, which is actually preparatory to 88.

And therefore Technique 80 can be summed up very quickly. Technique 80 is summed up simply by practicing beingness successively through all the dynamics on up the line, and of carefully taking each rampart of beingness as each dynamic approaches.

Technique 80 can be used very widely, and it is very close to the ultimate in ARC – affinity, reality and communication. So in these three lectures I am going to develop affinity, reality and communication for you as far as I can so that you can use it and use it very, very well. And I will give you, with that, this technique.

The dynamics are eight. Before you hit two, be one – really be one. And before you hit three, for heaven's sakes, be two. And before you hit four, you sure should be able to be a group, to be a part of a group or all of a group at will, and so on up the line.

This technique has to do with a progress up the dynamics to a point where you are, theoretically, in contact at considerable distance and can be almost anything. And when I say be almost anything, I mean you could be an icebox or a Cadillac or anything while you're still being yourself. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

This includes, for instance, number five. Now, it seems rather strange to you to say that you could suddenly be a cat. Well, there's a cat over there and all of a sudden, how does that cat feel and think? Now, how does that cat feel? What's that cat all about? See, we're not talking now about not having any body; we're talking about you've got a body, just like you are now, and you suddenly say to yourself, "Well . . . Ha, it's very amusing to be a cat, thinking about mice. Well! well! Hm-hm. Slpp! Good mice. Yeah." Of course, you sit right now and you think of biting a mouse. You think "Mice have mites, you know, and lice." And they're not very cleanly gutted down at the slaughterhouse, and not laid out in a butcher's shelf with artificial red coloring on them and so forth or anything.

But it's very, very fascinating that you are highly individualized and you will never be more than yourself, but your self and your individuality can get up to the high point of your own recognition not only of a brotherhood with the whole universe but a sort of a recognition of yourself as the universe.

And if you could face being a cat and enjoying biting a mouse, you've learned how to be on the fifth. But don't think you can be on the fifth or even begin to approach infinity unless you can do such things. And it's very easy to do, very easy to do.

This is very dangerous for people if they are low on the tone scale, to get the idea that they're the whole universe. I've been around in institutions occasionally and run into fellows who thought they were God, and other things. And they weren't well, because they tried to reach it by the reverse route. And they backed down tone scale to get there, and the only place a fellow gets when he goes down tone scale to get there is dead.

Now, supposing you started to do this, supposing you started to be on the fifth dynamic-which is the dynamic of life, includes all species – and you hadn't bothered, ever, to be your right hand. Just like that – you never could be your right hand, but you go over here madly and you say "I'll be the fifth." Your right hand will say to you "(whistle) – me." You'll be very aware of that right hand.

Well, in this series I'm going to tell you how to get UP tone scale to get there and still retain your potentiality of action.

Try it just for a moment. Try it just for a moment: Be that car for a minute. What pulls you back from being that car?

The most important factors involved in thought or the material universe are the subdivisions of thought itself. And these subdivisions are affinity, reality and communication. There are three parts of thought; there are three parts of life; there are three parts of living. And it makes a very interesting triangle. And we don't have a blackboard here. Do we have a blackboard? So you'll just have to paint this in the air.

Female voice: Well, because the car is very depressed.

Oh, it's black behind me, so it's very easy, you see, to just paint this in the air. [See diagram one in the Appendix.]

The car is depressed? But do you get any feeling that you are too aware of being where you are to be anywhere else? Do you get that feeling? You are very aware of being here in your body. Why are you aware of being in your body? Well, it's because you've never become aware.

Boy, you're low on the tone scale if you're aware of being your body. To work for awareness, just awareness all by itself, would be practically nothing.

Imagine a circle, a circle up here. You talk about a symbol; this is a timeless symbol. And by the way, although Dianetics has never existed before on the time track evidently, this symbol has existed there. And that symbol must come from practically the beginning of all time. And this is a circle and inside the circle is a triangle, and inside the triangle at the top is the figure infinity and at the bottom is a zero.

You could be aware of the body. What you want to be on the first dynamic is to be so aware of the body that you then rise up, pass through that and become never aware of the body.

You should remark that symbol fairly well. The big circle could stand for the universe, perfection, completion or the continuation of time after the end of time. In other words, time ends and begins at the same point.

Did you ever see a ballet dancer who was aware of his feet? No, not a good one. Nor have you ever seen a tennis player who was aware of his racket.

Now, here you have the triangle. And at the top of this triangle we have affinity, over at this corner of the triangle we have reality and over at this corner of the triangle we have communication. And then we have the infinity mark up at the top, and at the bottom of the triangle we have a zero.

You know how to win a game of tennis over any opponent? Just before the game you say, "How do you hold your racket, George?" A wonderful technique. "Teach me that backstroke" – great, nothing like it. It's not sportsmanlike, but in the whole business of beingness you have to learn to be not sportsmanlike too. All right.

You all remember Shakespeare's quotation "To be or not to be, that is the question." The infinity is beingness or "to be." The zero is "not to be." And zero and infinity, so far as the thought and the universe are concerned, are the same thing.

You get, then, roughly what we're tackling when we tackle beingness, and you get a fair idea of what Technique 80 is. Technique 80 is the practice of beingness on each dynamic successively, and the practice of beingness on a dynamic until you can be that whole dynamic. Technique 80 doesn't have very much to do with facsimiles or their erasure or running on a time track or anything else.

Thought is all or thought is nothing. A facsimile or an independent thought could exist on the head of the pin.

Technique 80 uses the principle that you are a built-in disintegrator. You have one, you are one, and there's actually a way of agitating an area with your thoughts: going brrrrr over something that just fries it down.

Now, the problem is, here, that a thought can exist on the head of a pin. Let's say all the thought that went into the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so far as shape and size is concerned, as thought is concerned (thought itself, not words written on a page), you could put it all on the head of a pin. In other words, it's just symbolizing for you a zero. Or you could take the thought, just this one small thought "cat" (you think "cat"), and that thought could be as big as this universe or all the island galaxies. You see, it just doesn't matter, then. It's that big or it's that tiny; all that thought can be that tiny or that little thought can be that big. These are interchangeable.

You know these Buck Rogers ray pistols, all this stuff in space opera, and so forth? The original ray gun, you see, is you. You ever walk into a room and know that people were talking about you? Just been talking about you just a moment ago. You know that. You know, you say – feel that? All right. Very simple.

Now, we talk in Advanced Procedure and Axioms about the state of beingness, the prime thought – the prime thought. That prime thought is "to be." And that prime thought is infinity, because when a person decided to be everything he could be, he is of course deciding to be infinity. That is the most he could decide to be. So there he is, clear up, the top of the tone scale – infinity. That is ultimate beingness. But what does that mean? That means that he would be not only himself but could be or would be everything. That's an ultimate in beingness.

There is actually an output, and it is an energy output. And if you had a sufficiently sensitive oscilloscope, you could measure it-not only that but you could get its wavelength.

Now, at the bottom you could have a prime thought of not-beingness. Well, how not-being can a person not-be? Well, that's zero. And so you have the two decisions, the two possible decisions in the business of living: infinity or zero.

During this series I am going to tell you the wavelengths of these various things. They are rather fabulous wavelengths. You will really blink when you think of wavelengths of this character, but these things have wavelengths – people have wavelengths, in other words. Not much to it. Emotion has wave-lengths.

Fortunately, most of us exist somewhere on a gradient scale. That is to say, from 0.0 up we decide on just a little more and a little more and a little more beingness, until at last we have decided to be quite a bit – at least ourselves. And then up we go a little higher and a little higher along all the dynamics. And when we have gone out on all the dynamics and have at least developed the capability of being all the dynamics, we have arrived at ultimate beingness. But of course, you get to the beingness of infinity, it could just as well be zero, because when you are that high on the tone scale, you could simply re-decide. So it would be one or the other.

You can take a person and shoot him with a certain wavelength and he will experience that emotion and so on.

Gradient scale of beingness. Now perhaps you understand a little bit better what is meant, then, by this zero and infinity. And perhaps you understand a little bit more what is meant by "to be." This is quite important. Just to say "to be" is to utter only a verb.

In other words, your beingness extends from a zero or an infinity, which is the basic "youness," and that is the static called theta – theta as a static. But as we proceed from that static, we go immediately into energy, wavelength. And the wavelength becomes more and more gross, more and more gross, more and more gross. It enters into the top band of radio, it goes into all the bands of electronic flow, and finally congeals into the band of matter. And the matter gets denser and denser and denser until you get to plutonium. And the second you get to plutonium you get to zero, because the second it comes into being it blows up. Okay? You go from zero to zero.

We are not addicted to uttering undefinables if we can possibly avoid it. So let us examine what we call the dynamics in this business of beingness. There are eight dynamics. Dynamic one, as far as beingness is concerned, would be to be oneself.

There's one or two beyond plutonium that the boys haven't discovered yet, and I have a little joss stick burning to the effect that they will be struck dead in this life or something before they invent those. Because we've got a certain use for a very short time of the physical universe here, and I hate to see people fool with it.

Now, you understand that you have in all existing volumes before this date the eight dynamics described in terms of survival. I'll give you that difference in a moment with what I'm telling you now.

And this disintegrator technique of which I speak actually only treats engrams.

There's the beingness of one, and that's a great deal different than the survival of one. There's the beingness of one, of yourself.

I'm really not joking when I tell you about a Buck Rogers disintegrator pistol. What's a disintegrator pistol? That's you!

And then there's the beingness of the second dynamic, the beingness in the sphere of creation, children, future, or (and get this one) illusions. That's the second dynamic. Illusions comes in there. And Frank Lloyd Wright down here building a town is just creating an illusion by that definition, you see? That's what I mean by an illusion. Constructive line comes on the second dynamic.

Why do you think a facsimile reduces – an engram, a thought reduces when you go over it a few times? Just think of that. It's not because you are rubbing it against anything or something like that. You're actually going thrrrrrn; thrrrrrrr. Why do it slow? Why not do it pyeww! Same process.

Now we take the third, the beingness of a group. Around here, the people who are here have begun to experience, to a very large measure, this beingness of a group. A group becomes its own life, and each one becomes the life of the group. But anyone could detach himself from the life of the group and you'd still have a life of the group. Even if all the members of a group disappeared, there would still be a record of an existing group. It's very interesting; it's almost mystic, but it becomes very unmystic when you experience it. It becomes as solid as this platform.

Really, it's not the same process. Because you take a person who is very low on the tone scale and he isn't putting out much in the way of disintegration. He's putting out practically nothing. So you run this engram and you run this engram and you run it – nothing happens. He's getting worse. So you take a light lock – that is to say, a little experience: he went out and he found out he'd left his car keys in the house. You know? This to some people would be a terrible experience. They practically couldn't recover from this. And you take that experience, and you can take him back on the track and actually run through that experience with him, and you run through it maybe fifteen or twenty times and it finally reduces a little. This guy is practically MEST; he's in bad shape. And by the way, he'll look that way to you.

Now there's the fourth: that is the beingness as a species – one single species. And I won't say man with this new definition of the dynamics. I don't mean just man. I mean the species to which one belongs. Fortunately, many can expect to get out of the rut of being a Homo sapiens. I say that brutally, because Homo sapiens today isn't doing too well. I'd hate to think of a dynamic being devoted wholly to Homo sapiens as he acts.

Now, when a person is well up the tone scale, he thinks of a whole chain of locks and they go pyew! He says, "Well, worried me for a long time. Well, its..."

Five would be all life.

And you get a person high enough up the tone scale, working him like this, the next thing you know, he looks at a physical-pain engram, a facsimile, a thought – that is to say, it's a recording, recording of an actual pressure and injury – and he takes a look at this thing and it reduces right now. He just looks at it and it goes whshooh! "Well, well, so that was why my arm was hurting. Let's go on to something else."

Six would be the MEST universe – the material universe. But remember, in each case it's the beingness of it.

What's the difference here? As you come up the tone scale you get to be a better disintegrator pistol, that's all; that's really all there is to it.

And seven is the beingness of all thought, any thought.

Now, we can demonstrate to you very adequately that by going over and over an incident of any kind it will eventually reduce. The speed of its reduction and how fast a preclear can reduce it depends utterly and completely on how high he is up the tone scale, because this determines how fast his own thought can disintegrate and degenerate other thought.

And, of course, the eighth dynamic is merely an infinity turned on its side; eight turned on its side gives you an infinity. And so you have, there, "beingness of all." And most creeds and so forth, when they say "beingness of all," they codify this and they say God, and then they put God up in armor or something, put him on a pedestal and reduce him down to a very finite affair. They're very quick to depart from that infinity. So let's not confuse a religious symbol for an infinity of the eighth dynamic, because the infinity of the eighth dynamic simply means, in our terminology here, the "beingness of all." It has no other codification. It doesn't say that all is good, bad or indifferent; it just says it's all. You say an infinity – infinity of beingness.

Now, you know people when they come around and invalidate you: they say, "Oh, well, it wasn't so-and-so and so-and-so." You know people that you don't pay any attention at all. They can come around and they can tell you "Well, you're flatfooted and you're this and you're that" and so forth, and yap, yap, yap, yap, and "Your ideas are no good and you just didn't have anything to do with school" and so on – yap, yap – and it wouldn't have any effect on you at all. You'd say, "Ah, so what?" You know such people. Their disintegrator mechanism isn't good.

Well, now, there are the eight dynamics.

But you take a person up the tone scale and he says, "You know, that idea you had about a book. Well, I was thinking, in chapter two ..." What happens? Your whole idea about the book goes wsheeww! And you say, Where's my book?" In other words, this person at one glance actually is capable of destroying your illusion.

Now let's take up this factor: Low on the tone scale, at about 4.0 on the tone scale, we have survival – in its crude definition we have survival. Now we go up the tone scale to about 8.0, and we get into the realms of beingness with identity. And then we go up the tone scale again and we hit about 32.0, something like that, and we're starting to get into the beingness along all the dynamics. And actually, you can plot this tone scale by starting in at the bottom with one, and as you go up the tone scale, plot the rest of the dynamics in: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and eight is 40. These things will occur, more or less, in that staggered fashion up the tone scale. [See diagram two in the Appendix.]

Illusions are way up the tone scale; they are very easy to destroy, you see? So your erasing an incident in yourself is merely a disintegration of an accumulation of effort, counter-effort, emotion, counter-emotion, thought and counter-thought. You're disintegrating a unit: the facsimile of this unit is what you're disintegrating.

Now, you as an auditor are working on a preclear who is lying on a couch: you're disintegrating his engrams just as much as he is. And if you're really up the tone scale, you can do faith healing. He walks in the room, you say, "Go thou and do likewise," or something, and he immediately loses both legs. By the way, that's too high up the tone scale – I beg your pardon-too high up. He just loses an engram.

But when we talk about survival normally, we mean survival of a body, we mean the survival of one lifetime, we mean the survival of a very finite, specific thing, and we only mean that it must continue to exist at any cost through a span of time. Well, that's sort of silly, because you actually control, command and create time. So as you go up the tone scale, you're not asking for anything to survive against a span of time. You want something to be, and to be does not include time; survival includes time.

This principle – you see it as I talk to you here; you see what it amounts to. You see, there was a little secret on the line and it said, "Well, you run an engram over and over and over and it reduces and goes away. You run effort and counter-effort, and emotion and counter-effort [counter-emotion] and you re-experience it, and the re-experience of it is sufficient." And you considered that an explanation. It's not an explanation at all. It tells you an application. An explanation of the application is that you actually disintegrate these things. And the speed of disintegration depends on the height on the tone scale. In other words, what is your ability to disintegrate?

Now, you notice as you come down the tone scale, you get into more and more and more and more time – more and more and more time till you get down to 0.0. And that's all time – is in any instant, in death. You take the death of a body, or apathy, just above that level: An instant of it can be an eternity. It can be an eternity.

Now, an auditor works for a while, and he's rather – gets rather dull on blowing things to pieces. Because he's unable to blow to pieces at a glance the preclear's engrams, he gets the idea he can't blow his own. And after a while he will be running on the bank and he'll find out he can't blow a lock. And this is very silly.

You'll find the engrams that people are dragging along the track with them are engrams which have that eternal factor of apathy in them. Here is one instant of not-beingness so low that that not-beingness becomes, in itself, a survival along all time. A person can get an apathy engram a trillion years ago and still have that moment in existence today. I'm talking now about the span of all lives. It's very simple to see.

Now, the best state for you to be in is to blow every facsimile you have at any time you want to blow all of these facsimiles – and I mean all your facsimiles.

But up here at the top of the tone scale you have the reverse. You can put a complete universe or the span of all lives into an instant at the top. What you're doing is reversing it, so that as you go up the tone scale you become more and more and more capable of action per given instant.

And so, your disintegration of a facsimile – one facsimile, you see – could be understood if you disintegrated every facsimile you had. Supposing you could disintegrate them all at will.

Of how much action are you capable in one second? Well, at the bottom, you're capable in that one second of complete motionlessness, and at the top, you could live a whole lifetime, theoretically, both sides. In other words, you go up the tone scale, you get more and more and more and more time, actually, because you get up the line to where you are time and then you're controlling time and then you create time.

And by the way, you don't need experience. That's another operation. There is no sense at all in your having to remember having been taught how to do something or other. There is no sense in that. You should be able just to suddenly be the thing, and therefore you can do it.

Now, if you see somebody who is flying around like mad, and he just seems to get all sorts of things done, he never complains about the fact that he hasn't any time; sometimes he looks around rather puzzled and wonders why somebody else isn't moving as fast as he is. And he just keeps getting these things done – brrrrrr! And comes four o'clock in the afternoon and he figures he's loafed all day.

To be is to know.

And there's somebody else: They get up and they walk around and they work real hard, and they got one envelope addressed at supper time! And yet they think they've been moving all that time. They think they have; they have a concept of it.

You should be able, by the way, not ever to have to remember an engineering formula or anything like this. You don't go back down the time track to look at the book in a facsimile. That is a secondary operation and not an optimum one! What you do is go to the library and look at it and go so fast and come back so fast that you don't even know you've gone!

Now, just a little bit higher than that, the person senses his inability to control time or realizes time is whipping him, and so he starts in with this kind of thing: "But I have no time to do anything." And he'll sit around for hours and tell you how he hasn't any time to do anything. "Why, I couldn't even start it – I mean, I wouldn't have any time to do it if I did start it." And so on, "There's no use to do it anyway, because – I mean, you couldn't hardly get it finished; there's just no time." That's at 1.5, by the way. 1.5s are wonderful at this. They will explain to you for hours how they haven't five minutes. Usually they haven't got five minutes to themselves, they have to do so much for others. (You never notice them doing this, but they tell you.)

Somebody walks up to you and says, "What is the wavelength of sputter-guffs?"

So anyway, as you go on up the scale, you have more and more time. Now, isn't that peculiar? It simply means that at the bottom of the scale your capability of handling MEST has dropped to the point where all that happens in your interaction is that MEST handles you.

And you say, "Well, it's 8216 to the minus umpf." And they say, "Well, how did you know that? My, that was bright! How did you know that?"

And if you ever see somebody laid out on a bier (b-i-e-r) – if you ever see anybody laid out that way – you will know instantly that they have inherited all of the universe wrong way to. That is to say, they are now in possession of the whole thing – dead. Actually, they have completed what could be called a cycle, but it'd be a mistake to do so, because what's really happened is the whole universe suddenly inherited them.

"Well, I just knew it."

They are owned now. How much owning can there be? Well, the ownest owningness that you can do, as far as owning is concerned and so forth, would be at that level of 0.0. That's what makes MEST so attractive; MEST is dead. Even though it has joints in it and moves and wheels turn and belts spin and so forth, that thing is still a dead thing. You know that very well.

And if you check this over very often, you'll pick up your knowledge in your environment, in your immediate environment. You see, that's another operation. Because you've been taught that you had to learn all the time, well, you just didn't have a chance.

Female voice: “MEST?”

Now, theoretically, then, you should be able to blow every facsimile you've got, just disintegrate them – wshew!

Yeah. M-E-S-T.

Technique 80 is the cultivation of disintegration of engrams. And you've got this picture that just keeps hanging in front of your face and you're not sure why. Well, instead of going over it and over it and over it this way, you just simply go rrrrr! and it's gone! It's a development of that facility. It's a very interesting facility.

Female voice: “What's that?”

You could actually look at a facsimile and have it go whooh. Now, maybe that sounds pretty high up on the tone scale to you, but it is.

Oh, I beg your pardon. That's such a coined word in Dianetics; I beg your pardon. M-E-S-T: It means matter, energy, space and time.

How do you get there? How do you get there so that you can do this? Some of you all of a sudden have been carrying this picture around of Agnes' face or something of the sort, and you got annoyed looking at it all the time like that, and so on.

Female voice: “Oh, okay.”

The way to live is live; the way to be is be. So be where you are! In order to be where you are, of course, you have to get rid of this facsimile. So the way to handle Agnes' face and this picture thereof is just go whssh. You're just perfectly willing to be in the spot where she was in. Because if you're backing up from Agnes, you're not willing to be in the spot she's in. You see? You're saying "There's poor Agnes' face." You see, "I have done something – overt act; I wasn't willing to do this, and I distinctly remember all the horrible things about Agnes," and yap, yap, "and so therefore I can't get rid of her"- big computation going on about this all the time, so there's her face.

M-E-S-T. It's the first letters of it. An old engineering trick of taking the first letters of something and getting some things that sound like "ENIACs" or... The most wonderful words are being coined these days in engineering.

Well, if you're willing to be and to have done everything that happened, anyhow, and so forth, you get an automatic disintegration – pshewww – and the picture is gone. That's the way you ought to be able to run an engram. That's also the way you ought to be able to run your arthritis. Arthritis – whooh.

Now, here then is this gradient scale of beingness: not-beingness is dead; beingness is full life. And those are the two ends.

How do you do it? Not mystically. It's actually by a facility which you have which you speed up, so if you learn to speed up this facility you will be able to do that. I am not asking any of you to do this, because that is an ultimate on Technique 80.

So we take this symbol; we take this symbol of the circle, the triangle and the infinity and the zero, and we can behold, in that, something which would symbolize all you need to know about anything, anywhere, to accomplish anything that you want to accomplish. Of course, it needs a couple of billion words of explanation, but it's been there for an awful long time and it's a very good symbol to remember.

There is the low-level part of the technique, which consists of ARC on each dynamic. And you can carefully plot up and pick up ARC on each part of every dynamic and go over that carefully through the line, till you will key out or partly disintegrate out each and every bar there is to your state of beingness.

The circle: The universe and the continuum of time; the beginning is the end of all.

But this is done as a present-time technique. And Technique 80 is 100 percent a present-time technique. Its capability is to bring you up to a level where – while still in a body – you are capable of being, and experiencing with, every part of the universe while you're still in that body. That's 80.

The triangle: That means thought. And the three corners of the triangle are affinity, reality and communication. And they're the three component parts of thought (I'll explain to you why); ARC, they make up thought.

Now, in order to achieve this, it's only necessary that you know A, R, C, in all their ramifications – the component parts and how you apply them.

And there's the fact that you mustn't overlook, is this triangle of thought is imposed upon and becomes the circle of the MEST universe. The triangle is one end, the high end of the tone scale-all thought. And the circle is the bottom of the tone scale and it says all MEST – the universe, the circle, circular time, so on. And there is thought impinged upon the universe.

Many months ago we had a technique of getting into communication with various parts of the body. Well, it's not a solid technique because it doesn't have too much behind it. And you notice that as you try to do this – try to get into communication with this part and that part and so forth, a cross-communication that sometimes it'd only last for a few hours, or maybe only last for a day, and then there would be the fellow right back again out of communication with that part of his body.

And that combination, then – the circle and the triangle – is exemplified by infinity (the allness of everything). And that is how much you could be: you could be both the circle and the triangle, or at the bottom, zero, which means that you could actually be neither, nothing, and that's not-beingness.

Well, there is a special way of getting into communication. And just in passing, you don't have a telephone lineman monkeying around when he's going to string a telephone line. He strings it! He takes the truck and he takes the wire and the reel and cuts through the brush and knocks down the trees and chews up the ground and puts up the posts and nails the wire in place – bang! Good, solid, ornery sort of an operation. You see? Determination that this is going to happen.

Actually, all a person would have to do theoretically is simply decide to be. I stressed that in November and a lot of the boys really strained at it. I said there's no reason you had to go back on the track and erase engrams. Why don't you just suddenly say "I'm going to BE"? Of course, if you felt this violently enough, you'd of course disappear and swell up and be the whole universe. But it's unhealthy, because the fellow decides this and he decides at the same time that he probably can't be this, and he decides that this can't be because it isn't, and so forth. And so instead of going up the tone scale like a WAC Corporal (that's a rocket, by the way), he goes down the tone scale and out the bottom, because he gets the sensation of running head-on into MEST.

Well, you can get into communication on a determination angle with any part of your body. You can suddenly determine to get in communication with your big toe and instead of fishing around for it and monkeying around with it and so forth, just knock it through the line. That's all. Just hook it all up and there you are.

But there you have the triangle of thought on the circle of the material universe, and the decision: the circle, the triangle, the decision.

And there's two other parts of it, you see? And you have to rehabilitate these two other parts and then you find out you can rehabilitate the C. And then you rehabilitate the two other parts and then you'd rehabilitate the C again, by which I mean communications. And you rehabilitate the two other parts and then communications again. So it's a gradient, step-by-step procedure.

Actually, that's all you need to know. You should take that and you should figure and you should say to yourself "Gee, that's true!" and say, "Zip!" There's only one trouble with saying "Zip!" Too many other people trying to say "Zip!" at the same time, originally on the time track, made a sort of a collision. And some of the people who were zipping this way ran into some of the people who were zapping that way, and it became a little bit confused on who was zipping and who was zapping and some of them became MEST. And becoming MEST is a very bad thing to do.

And the two other steps I mentioned, of course, are affinity and reality.

Homo sapiens is just a hair above MEST, just a hairline above it. Pretty grim. He's running on the first dynamic; he makes a complete practice out of going around and saying "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not being. I'm not being. Yes, I'm not," so on. "Well, I'm not so good at that, but uh. . ." and "What is your opinion?" and, "Do you approve of me?" and "Do I have a license to survive from you?" and so on. And he just is going around all the time making up this business at zero. And somebody who comes along and says to him all of a sudden ìI amî (something or other). They say, "Oh, he's opinionated, he is. Ha-ha. Huh! Huh! Invalidate him! Nullify him! Kill him!" because he's liable to upset this zero. And this zero is so easily upset that-do you know that Homo sapiens can only survive about sixty-nine years? Imagine, sixty-nine trips around the sun, that's all he can survive. It's hardly worth paying a nickel for. Well, it's a ride you get, sixty-nine round trips.

So, the way you get in communication with any part of the body is first just slam a line through, any way you can, and then pick it up on the A, then pick it up on the R. Then get the line through better; then pick it up on the affinity, reality. The line through better; affinity, reality. And eventually, doing that step by step, you don't just simply hook up a communication line and there it is. No, it gets better than that. You start up here and by the time you've run the first ARC, you've brought your level up a little bit with regard to that part of the body; then a little bit more and a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, until, oddly enough, you are no longer in communication, particularly, with that part of the body: you are it. You become completely unaware of it. It just vanishes as far as you're concerned. It's in perfect condition – perfect. You practically couldn't hurt it, by the way, after you do that.

And then what do they do with him? They take him and his education and everything else and they bury him. I don't know why they bury him. They don't even make a practical use out of his body! It's very remarkable. The only ones that profit by the body is the florist.

And your extension of ARC goes on out into the environment. Therefore, what 80 does is hook-in a gradient scale-ARC up with every part of you and beingness of you until you don't even know you're you. And you're so at ease, as far as being your body is concerned, you can do anything with it.

Although I did hear about a battlefield one time in France where ten thousand men – knights and yeomen and so forth – had been killed, and it'd been nice and green ever since and the wheat grew well there, so it does have some advantage.

Now, your next step, of course, is to go on up the rest of the dynamics the same way. But there's a very, very basic step that you must not overlook: Find Out who you are first. A lot of people have a lot of trouble with this.

But what I'm getting at is he's trembling right on that zero; he's making a cult out of not-beingness. And any time you do that, watch out, because the fellow's just wshhh-wshhh!

But before I talk about it very much let's take a little breather, and I'll talk to you a little longer if you want me to.

Now, the state of beingness up here would be a very interesting one to reach, particularly if you could reach it with such full determinism that you could be any part of it at will – any part of it – of the gradient scale between zero and infinity. If you could be any part of anything at will and really be that part of that thing at will, on any dynamic, you would be attaining toward the potentiality of zero to infinity at your own decision, in other words. You could say, "The third dynamic. Well, I'm not going to be the third dynamic right now, I'm going to be the fourth." And you could make up your power of decision on the line. Or you could simply go up tone scale and say, "I'm infinity." Be an interesting experiment.

How do you get there? What do you have to do to get there? We have this symbol of the circle, the triangle, infinity and zero. It actually tells you all you need to know with a few dozen more lines and a lot of explanation. How do you get, then, up toward infinity? And how can you monitor and modulate your own existence and your own conduct in such a way as to be anything you want to be?

Tell you how low this society at this time is: The biggest ambition of everybody seems to be "I want to be myself." The poor guys, they haven't even gotten to the first dynamic.

Okay. Let's take a break.