SOP 8. The reason why I’m giving this time to SOP 8 is I find that SOP 8 is relatively simple and, therefore, very difficult of course. And so, we have here lecture five – SOP 8 – and we start in of course with Step VII and go back to Step I.

The first talk today is entitled „Processing and Its Goals.“ You possibly know quite a bit about this already. But possibly new light can be shed upon it because it actually has been codified much more closely than ever before.

And the reason why I’m explaining it at this backwards level is because we want to take the most difficult case first, and then they’ll get easier and easier, and you can tell more and more about it. I see so many faces suddenly look up with a sharp expectancy when I say, „The most difficult case.“

Every now and then, perhaps, an auditor has said to himself, „Well, what am I trying to do with this fellow?“ He’s had qualms about it. „Supposing I free up the mind of this man? This man’s a criminal, he has criminal potentiality. Supposing I free up his mind, and then we just find that he goes out and shoots more people dead than before?“ There’s always this question. Perhaps until a person sees this dearly, there always will be the question: Is there any use in setting somebody free?

So I’ll say right here at the beginning that many auditors, myself included, quite commonly run a couple of concepts in brackets before they go very far with a preclear. They run „There is no remedy,“ „There is a remedy,“ with certainty. Don’t, by the way, go into „There is no solution“ because, of course, that just jogs into the middle of the reactive bank. It’s like a train at full throttle hitting its bumpers on the track. Because that is, of course, why the reactive mind got built is there is no solution to a being’s survival who can’t do anything but survive. There’s no solution, he has to survive. And so he has to convince himself that he can’t survive so that he can survive. I hope you followed me closely with that I don’t see many faces brighten up when I say that because if you have a life which is immortal, it goes right on, and if life, being immortal, is now forced to do what it can’t help but do, it’s going to assume that force is necessary to make it do this, and therefore, without force, that it would do something else. You follow that? It immediately draws this conclusion that there must be something else about it that it’s necessary to have force to make it do, you see? This is not solvable; that’s why you don’t understand it.

That many auditors seem incapable of really letting a preclear go-many of them, many of them will bring him up to a certain point and then immediately start to run techniques which won’t send him any further. They get up to a point where they’re free, and then they think that setting him just a little bit more free than that will make a superior wolf.

You see, it has to assume, then, that it can do something else except survive if somebody uses force on it to make it survive. And it assumes that it can do something else except survive, and this, of course, is an imponderable, because it can’t do anything else but survive. The answer is the answer. And we get a very silly situation of an entire computing machine devoted to solving a problem which is solved, but it can’t permit itself to know that the problem is solved without exposing the fact that it has no solution.

I’ve seen this. It’s not a very happy fact I don’t expect you to accept it unless you yourself observed it.

If you were to take a UNIVAC, an ENIVAC or an ESKIMO or some other kind of electronic brain that was built to multiply five times five, and then start to force it with all sorts of super currents and batteries and resistances and voltages to make sure that it always said five times five, you’d start blowing circuits someplace in the machine. You just overload the machine. It knows very relaxedly that five times… is five; it knows that And now you start piling up on its circuits, „Now, you’ve got to say five times five.“ It would immediately turn up a conclusion, naturally, a negative solution on five times five if you started to jolt its circuits too heavily, because something would start sort of giving way.

But in processing – in processing, our goal is freedom. The only thing wrong with individuals is their restriction. But actually, what happens if you go to the complete limit of freedom? Freedom would be restriction. And we’d have to define what was restricting life. Well, life is actually being restricted by MEST, and it believes that it’s being restricted by life. And life, dramatizing the restrictions of MEST, turns around and restricts life – which is antipathetic to the survival of all life. That’s not good.

And the next thing you know, if you kept insisting that five times five was five times five, it would blow enough circuits so that it would no longer give you the answer „five times five.“ So it cannot now answer the problem which it’s been set up to answer. It’s just as silly as taking an ax to the machine.

But life, to learn about MEST, approximates and imitates MEST. MEST is quite restrictive, it’s quite forceful, it’s made out of force. And so we get this imitation, and this imitation comes back into life, and then life restricts life.

Now, you have inhibited it from giving the right answer. You’ve overloaded all of its circuits so that it can’t give any answer, and so it can’t give the right answer, naturally.

It would only be in such a way that parents desiring the very best they could for their children would do the things to their children that they do. They do these things in the belief that they are preparing the child for life, preparing the child for better living. This is not true. None of these things that a parent does prepares the child for any better living.

Maybe you’ve still left islands of operation in this machine that will give answers of some sort or another, but these won’t be connected. Everything will seem different and disrelated, and the machine will sort of putter along and break down and be patched up again and break down some more. Because the one thing it can’t admit is just exactly why you look at me with blank faces. It can’t admit this: it’s doing exactly what it is doing.

Life itself, which is to say existence in the MEST universe – when you say life itself in this universe, that’s just what you mean: existence in this universe – has a heavy enough hand on a human being without adding and complementing that heavy hand with a parental hand. And when the parent steps in to compound the injury that the MEST universe can do, it makes an individual stand alone: He feels himself defied now on all fronts with no refuge.

I gave you, a little earlier, Q and A. Now, just in this exact connection I want to make another comment on Q and A. Q and A is interesting simply because the thing is it. There is no problem connected with it until a problem is introduced into it.

The moment he does this he starts downscale. And he becomes what is essential in MEST, which is the „only one.“ And he runs this computation, the only one, deeper and deeper and deeper and worse and worse and worse, until he practically is the „none one.“ The „only one.“ Now, we’ll cover that a little bit later in these series. But that is mainly what’s wrong with your preclear. It is not enough to say he is alone. If he were alone he’d be happy about it, but he’s the only one who can do it, the only one who can’t do it He is the single identity, which itself must face up to the entire existence.

Now, you can run concepts on Mama and concepts on Papa and concepts on self, on and on and on, when we’re dealing with the same thing as the Coca-Cola sign. Not that Mama and Papa are inanimate objects, but for all intents and purposes, really, all that’s ever been contacted about Papa and Mama was the physical beingness and existence and the space surrounding Papa and Mama, And the answer to running out Papa and Mama is simply Papa and Mama; not their emotional relationships, but just their physical beingness in terms of energy.

And most people go around carrying the idea of „I“ and „they.“ And sometimes his „I“ will include the two or three people present with him. But it is „I“ against „they.“ And the „I“ considers that all „they“ are collective and unified and working together and that the „I“ itself is separate. So to each individual you get these two pools: you get – [marking on blackboard] here he is, see, and he’s capable of just this little tiny bit of force. And here they are. See? That’s a sad frame of mind. Yet if he looked around and wished to examine it, he’d find something remarkable: He’d find out that all the people of a downscale culture think the same thing. This presents a rather funny picture, doesn’t it? It presents every fragment supposing itself to be the only fragment and that all other fragments are collected and unified.

Now, you see how far wide something like Self Analysis could shoot a person if he started in running concepts and stories – connected stories. Several people have come to me and said why, for children, don’t we put up the story of Little Hood Redding Ride, I mean Ride Hedding Rood – “Why don’t we put up this story consecutively with the big, bad wallop and so forth?“ And I say, „No, because the mind doesn’t happen to operate consecutively, unless it’s rather bad off.“ You don’t want consecutiveness, you want differentiation, because the mind is adding up on a gradient scale fact plus fact plus fact plus fact, and all these gradient scales of facts add together and connect and go together, and therefore, we reach an inevitable conclusion because of the identification of all of these – we’re trying to differentiate with Self Analysis, we’re not trying to identify. And each mock-up, then, is itself. And what is the answer to each mock-up?

And out of this sad picture we get anxiety. Because „I“ does not consider that he will be permitted to be happy. He can’t be permitted to be happy, because „they“ aren’t happy and he has to agree with them, and their collective mass is much greater than his individual mass, so he naturally feels that he is succumbing. It’s very elementary when you look at it this way.

Now, out of all the material that we have had, only one book is misleading and that is a book called A Key to the Unconscious. It is an interesting book, and was written in effort to demonstrate to the psychoanalyst or the child psychologist that if he wanted to plumb the depths of the mind, he could do it symbolically with great ease. You will not find many psychologists will buy anything closer to reality than an abstract symbol. And they wanted to think about the symbols, and that book was released for that purpose. The fact of the matter is it’s a bad book simply because it permits the thing to be computed upon. One sets up this dot, „Complete the picture.“ All right.

Truth of the matter is there is no body of „theys.“ You can go down here and take, one by one, each policeman on the Philadelphia police force aside and talk to him quietly by himself, and if you did that for two or three weeks you would probably finish off the personnel of the Philadelphia police force. You’ll find every one of them is hoping that the rest of the police force will go on accepting him as a policeman. And each one of them is convinced, you see, that if „they“ really knew, why, they wouldn’t be able to accept him as part of the police force. The police force to him is a large force, you see. It’s a large group. And this large group is built up of units and these units are not unified, not worth a nickel.

The fellow says, „Well, I see a railroad locomotive.“

Infiltrative sources, agitators and so on work upon this instinctively. They will go to workers and they will tell each worker how alone he is in the world, unless he unifies and unites. And they’ll get this big mock-up of a big unification called a union just so the agitator can act as a parasite on the worker.

At this moment the psychologist, the psychoanalyst can say, „Aha! What adventure on board a train are you trying to hide?“ He’s not trying to hide any adventure. He sees a train, reminds him of a train.

Now, this would be rather the wrong way to go about it to convince each man that he was offended – which is the standard operation. They convince each individual that he is offended and put upon, and the only way he can resist this hidden source of force is by unifying against that source of force. And therefore, the whole group is depressed in tone because all of them feel like they are resisting, that they have to stay together, and there’s enormous force available here. Now, to expect such a group to be happy or successful is almost impossible.

Well, the funny part of it is, is the mind, the reactive mind wonderfully enough can always come up with the most gorgeous reason as to why it made a dot into the headlight of a locomotive. Always has a reason, never without one. „Never be without a reason“ is its motto, because there isn’t any reason, you see, and so it has to have a reason, because it’s got its circuits overloaded in an effort to force it to have a reason, because it’s got a reason. So if you force it to have a reason, it’ll blow enough circuits so that it doesn’t have a reason. If it doesn’t have a reason then you can evaluate for it And if it can be evaluated for, then it can be enslaved. See how that works out then? You couldn’t make a slave out of a human being who said, simply, „Five times five,“ and then kept on saying, „Well, yes, that’s the answer. Five times five. Survive is the answer.“

Here, the worker is convinced that there are two bodies: here is the worker with himself here, see, and then here’s the rest of the workers here, and then here’s management up here as a separate body. And he looks at this as three groups now and he becomes antagonistic, as this group, toward this group and hopes both groups will assume that he’s a part of this group. And if he’s a member of management, he hopes that this group will assume he’s part of that group, although he’s really here too.

You’ve got to convince somebody one way or the other that he can’t survive in order to make him survive. And if you can’t survive and you make him survive, then you can say, „Well, the only reason you are surviving is because you are doing so-and-so and such and such in exactly this way or that way,“ and so the mind can become enslaved, and this is its trick mechanism. All right.

Now, there’s a rule of thumb used in the MEST universe which tells you at once what a facsimile is: If you want to trap him, make him resist it Make him resist it and you’ve got him.

Q and A, The answer to any object is the object. The answer to a lake is not how much it costs; the answer to the lake is a lake. „What is a lake?“

A thetan, a life unit, starts resisting something – a thing – and that, if it is a MEST object, of course will resist back, because it is following the laws of MEST which are Newton’s laws: inertia, interaction, acceleration. Life doesn’t have to follow those laws at all, but it starts fighting MEST and it resists MEST and then MEST resists it. And then MEST, being inanimate and unthoughtful, can resist much harder than the individual can resist, and the next thing you know, the individual has accepted what he has resisted. Insidious.

„It is a lake.“

Now, if you can get anybody to put up a battle at something, he will eventually become the thing which he battled. That’s a facsimile. Here you have a number of units of energy being shot at an environment Makes a picture. It takes it just as surely as though you had made a plaster cast of the environment. Just as though you’d taken a picture of a footprint The plaster particles in this case would be the units of energy shot by the being.

Now, this is the type of identification which brings about matter itself. If there weren’t this type of identification, if a person weren’t all smashed together with the idea of force, there wouldn’t be any physical objects, nor would there be a wall here, nor would you have a body.

Show you how that is. This is a facsimile. Here is the individual here, and here is another person here, and the individual puts out units of energy in this direction; and these units of energy are energy and they are capable of becoming compact and becoming matter. And these go out here. And now we have the person go away and we have „I“ here, and T has this picture.

This trick also works to give us objects. We take a great deal of space with its anchor points and condense it, and we keep condensing it and condensing it until we get matter. And you make matter that way. It’s very interesting matter; if you condense it enough, it really explodes.

This is the most astonishing thing to a preclear when he finds this out that his facsimiles don’t have guts or backs. They don’t, you see. They’re casts of the surface. And so he gets the idea he has to look behind everything to really find out about it, because he hasn’t got any of the behind anything. He only has the surface.

All plutonium in the atom bomb is, is too many spaces too condensed, and it can’t tolerate it and it’s just pushed past the point of tolerance. And you just add this little item of plutonium to this little item of plutonium and you put them together and now you’ve really got too much mass for that amount of space, and so it explodes. That’s all you make – there’s other ways of making explosions, but that is the most extreme one which we now have.

And these beautiful facsimiles which are put up, you take them and crush them together, you see, and they’re very light pieces of energy. But they represent patterns of very forceful energy sometimes, and so the preclear has the idea that he must be facing the thing when he is only facing a shell of the thing. A facsimile is a light – you might say – energy cast It is the imprint rather than the shoe. Fools one very much.

Just apropos of nothing, it’s quite amusing that an enormous amount of talk was given to whether or not the Russians had the secret of the atomic bomb’s trigger. That’s very amusing, because the trigger of the atomic bomb could be as simple as having a piece of plutonium at one end of a rod and a piece of plutonium at the other end of the rod, and then you just drop the rod vertically so the two ends collapse, and that is the trigger. I guess the Russians never would have figured that out. You’re just adding mass to mass beyond the tolerance of mass, and you get an explosion.

But why does he start to take pictures in the first place? Well, in the first place he could make pictures; he made them all solid. They were very solid, very compact pictures. And then he started to make them of things. This mechanism is still with him, you see, and he starts to make pictures of things, and he duplicates the force of them.

Now, possibly life hopes for this as its final release. It can do this, you see. And if it can just get solid enough and a person can just get impacted enough, he eventually figures out he’ll go boom, and then he’ll be free. I swear some preclears are doing this.

Why does he duplicate them? Just because he’s resisting them or because he wants them. But he doesn’t start out wanting them, he starts out resisting them. And then he resists and resists, and then he finally gets the idea that this thing is resisting him, and the vectors turn around and the facsimile starts to collapse upon him. And the next thing you know, this facsimile will accept a duplicate of this facsimile, so he feels he wants things just like the facsimile, mostly because the facsimile is an impression of something which is resisted. And the second you turn resistance around, you get pull. That shouldn’t be unclear to you. You just turn a resistance around and it’ll pull.

So you have all of this methodology wound around this obvious identification. And the identification of an object with an object is the question and answer concerning an object.

Now, you can take a preclear and have him look at Grandpa in a facsimile, and then just turn the facsimile around and you’ll get various combinations. But he’ll find that there’s a communication line there, there’s an energy line. He thinks it’s a communication line, and really I guess that’s what you could call it, but actually it’s just lines of force, resistance. And he’s looked at Grandfather and resisted Grandfather often enough so these lines of resistance have become very heavy, and you get this strange picture of the child who just has to have the ally that he hates.

Now, your mother came in and she said, „Why is your face dirty?“ Well, this is a silly question. She wants to put you into the past immediately. It’s a little method of control all of itself. The face is dirty because the face is dirty, not because one was playing in dirt. This is obvious. The answer to a dirty face is a dirty face. It isn’t even that a dirty face is something to be terribly resisted. There’s a fellow by the name of Al Jolson made a fortune out of it.

And you run some preclear along, and you try to run off the grief charge of Great-aunt Bessie. And you start in at the beginning of this grief charge and you start on through the grief charge and as you go on through… All of a sudden, „I really hated her!“ he says.

Now, identification of object of [with] object goes down in thinking to the extremity of the identification of similarities, and when you start to get an identification of similarities, you are already entering into a fringe of thought on the lowest scale, practically psychotic or a Case VII.

„Well, all right. Let’s finish it off anyway.“

That microphone is that microphone. You see, two microphones, you say one microphone is the other microphone. They have different serial numbers on them and as far as MEST universe is concerned, they are occupying different spaces so they are not the same microphone, but they are similar. But if you really identified the two of them, you would see only one microphone. You would just simply refuse to see the other microphone if you said, „All microphones are the same microphone.“ But still, there’s an answer to this microphone on the left, and that is the microphone on the left The entire problems connected with this microphone, as far as that microphone is concerned, is this microphone. You get the idea.

„No, dickens with her. I don’t care about her, I hate her! I’m not worried about her!“

Now, when it gets to a point with a person where this microphone on the left is the microphone on the right, and then when that microphone looks like it might have a head and this reminds one of Uncle Bill so that Uncle Bill is this microphone, and when we think of Uncle Bill we think of microphones, and we think of microphones we think of Uncle Bill, we have the reactive mind: A=A=A=A And it’s very simple, isn’t it? We got that in the first book.

So you run out how much he hated his great-aunt Bessie – and all of a sudden said, „Well, you know, she wasn’t a bad old girl, after all.“ And then if you don’t – if you returned into it a little bit deeper, you would find out a great love for Aunt Bessie, and here’s all this complexity.

He rowed a horse, r-o-w-e-d as in a boat, and he r-o-d-e a horse are the same remark to the reactive mind; it wouldn’t make any differentiation between these two things.

It’s just the matter of whether or not the facsimile is a collapsed line or still an extended line. See how that could be? He’s resisted and resisted and resisted. All right, he gets to the point of complete resistance and the point of complete resistance is an utter breakdown of all resistance, which results, then, in an energy deposit, which itself has attractive force just like gravity. And he’s got an energy deposit called Aunt Bessie, and now this will pick up other things like it and you get associative reasoning. It’s built on resistance: things resist him, he resists those things. And that thing which has resisted him harder than he has resisted it – but he’s doing all the resisting, you understand – but his picture is something resisting harder than he resisted it and he thinks it’s still there, only it’s resisted so hard that he is it Therefore, he has to accept what it wanted simply because of the lines of force involved therein.

The reactive mind states, „Mama is the wife. And everything that Mama did wrong, the wife is doing wrong,“ and doesn’t consult any further – A=A The actual identification is that Mama is Mama, and the wife is the wife, and actually, there is no relationship between. There’s no such thing as a similarity. A similarity is a pretended identification, so that we get two identities, and they pretend to be similarities. And what you straighten out with Question and Answer Processing is simply that.

This shouldn’t be very difficult to see. If you stand up and lean your hand against a wall for a few minutes – you just stiffen your hand against the wall, then you take your hand away. Even if you put your arm in your pocket, you’ll still feel your hand against the wall. I mean, this isn’t a matter of running the effort of it, all you’ve got to do is just lean on that wall for a little while and then stand back and try not to lean on the wall. Well, you can run it that the wall is leaning just that hard against you. And if you’re trying to push the wall away that hard, the wall is trying to push you away that hard, you now have an energy picture of the push of the wall. And that energy picture of the push of the wall would become a desire for the wall if it so happened that your pushing against the wall collapsed you against the wall. This is obvious, then, that you couldn’t resist the wall. So if you can’t resist it you have to have it. See how that is? There’s just nothing to this at all. If you can’t resist it, you have to have it.

This is so obvious to the analytical mind, to the thetan, that the second you run this he begins to see this. „There’s something very pleasing,“ a preclear will tell you, „about this. It’s very charming about this technique, I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s certainly pleasant“ It’s recognition of truth, and it does it instinctively. So Q and A is an interesting process.

And so the MEST universe gets them going and coming. And you start running Acceptance Level Processing and you find out that some fellow has been taught very carefully that he must detest flatirons. His whole family told him to stay away from flatirons; Mama told him and Papa told him, and his grandparents told him that flatirons were bad and that he mustn’t touch flatirons and he must stay away from them. (Maybe Mother worked in a laundry or something.) And he went on about flatirons and he knows he has to detest flatirons; that’s the whole point of existence. When he sees a flatiron, he has to resist it See, they got him fighting flatirons by warning him about flatirons, and so he starts resisting these flatirons. And then you find him at the age of thirty-two with a passionate desire for flatirons, he loves them; he keeps small gold ones around.

Now, in all of the work which has gone before, we have been trying to solve identification. That’s the truth of the matter. Things which are not similar become identified, one with the other, and this creates a thinkingness problem which is unresolvable because it’s not a solvable problem. Two similarities become an identity: „An apple is an orange.“ It’s not an orange, an apple is not even another apple.

Well, this happened immediately after the first time he was really seriously burned after having been very well indoctrinated about flatirons. A flatiron was senior to him now, so he wanted flatirons – it wanted him, he is a flatiron.

There is nothing as big a lie as arithmetic. „One plus one equals two.“

How many preclears have you ever found who wanted to be bedposts or who were trying to be plates or platters or the Sun or MEST objects? Well, if you’ve never looked for it, it’s possibly because you haven’t encountered it. But if you look for it, you’ll encounter it every time. You’ll find preclears are trying to be MEST objects. They’re not analytically trying to be anything; it’s just this matter of resisting something and the thing collapsing on them and then wanting it. It won. (And reference Book One, the winning valence.) And there’s the mechanism back of the winning valence.

Oh no. „One what?“

A person resists and resists until he can no longer resist and his resistance is overcome, which immediately results in „a need for.“ Well, the only way he can now go on resisting is probably to turn the facsimile around. (He does many things with it.) But if he turns the facsimile around to resist the other way to because it’s senior to him, you see that you could run this in such a way that if he resisted the flatirons long enough, that all the force of resistance for flatirons would be the flatiron resisting.

„Well, all right, a symbol one plus a symbol one equals two.“

A person would thus get very mixed up about it all. He isn’t carrying anything in his bank except his own energy and his own energy is a picture of those things which have happened to him. There isn’t any foreign energy in the bank. It’s all his own energy. Therefore somebody comes along, namely Mama, and says to him, „Well, it’s all your own fault. You know that you’re responsible for it“ He knows he is because it’s his picture made out of his energy. You see, he can’t say anything else, see, sure it’s his fault. You see how that is? Because everything that happened he now has in a package, which is made exclusively out of his own energy. So therefore he must have done it because he did the facsimile. And the facsimile is his. And if people keep caving in this and saying, „Well, you’re just pretending to be hurt You know that you aren’t hurt,“ he’ll get this funny idea of pretending that – well, he knows he can really help these things.

‘Two what?“

And I swear there are people going around with fractured skulls and all sorts of things that aren’t even vaguely healed up, knowing they have to have them because they’re their fault and they did it, and that they had nothing to do with. It’s not somebody’s fault that he happened to be sleeping in a bed when the wall fell in on him. And yet he’ll be convinced these things are his fault.

„Well, symbol two, of course.“

Then an ally will die that he has resisted and fought with a great deal, and when the ally dies his immediate assumption is that he killed him. Have you run across that manifestation? „Well, if I just had called earlier on the telephone, I would have stopped him from leaving the house and therefore he wouldn’t have stepped under the truck.“ You get the idea This silly line of logic, making oneself cause across the boards for bad things.

„His ones certainly don’t look like twos. Well, and that one is not the other one; they don’t combine, they’re two separate slabs of ink.“

Well, it’s not sensible, not even vaguely, because it isn’t true. But the facsimile pattern: They resisted the ally so there are overt acts; and the ally resisted them, so there are overt acts. And now every picture of the ally is being made to substitute for the ally that is missing. And the pictures are their own pictures, so the ally is now their person but the ally is now dead; so, of course, it follows out that if the ally was only theirs, only they could have killed the ally and that’s that, so the ally is dead. Here you get a confliction of the two universes. Here you have guilt, so on.

Oh, you have to really beat a kid up to get arithmetic in his skull He understands perfectly with his mind that you can say, „Well, I’ve got two apples.“

This is not difficult to understand in action. It is, perhaps, a little bit difficult to understand in words. But if you’ll just sit down and start to resist the wall with energy beams from yourself for a while, you’ll all of a sudden see the whole mechanism start to show up. You’ll find out that eventually you will feel, „Well, it’s kind of a nice wall.“

„How do you know you’ve got two apples?“

Now the funny part of it is, is you have to be very calculatingly precise to resist the wall. It’s quite a trick. It’s a much easier thing not to resist the wall. This stuff is so much space that if you weren’t very careful when you leaned on it you’d probably stick your arm through it It’s a very nice calculation of wavelengths and matched lengths and matched space areas and matched facsimiles and whoo!

„Well, there’s an apple and there’s an apple, and that’s two apples.“

You start running a preclear, by the way, as some of these Resistive Vs, you swear that if you moved one hair of his head onto the other side of his head he’d die from his conduct He isn’t going to move anything, he isn’t going to change anything, he isn’t going to let anything happen if he can possibly help it That’s his behavior towards you.

And this conveys the idea of two apples to somebody else, but mind you, it doesn’t convey an identification of those two apples. That is psychosis. When you say, ‘Two apples: one apple plus one apple, and they are the same apple“ – psychosis.

Well, that’s just this sort of thing. It’s such a nice, neat calculation to start resisting the MEST universe at just the right wavelength and get just the right facsimiles, that after a while, if a person were to think of it, he would realize that he’s doing something like walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls. But instead of that, he says, „It’s all I can do. I can’t do anything else, I am trapped.“ You see, he’s just done it so often, he’s so used to this wavelength. But if you just shift your perception a little bit…

Now, a preclear who has already left the world of the sane in trying to solve this problem that he can’t survive when all he can do is survive… You see, the answer to survival is to survive, and there’s no nonsurvival to make a dichotomy, so you have to pretend there is one. It’s a very interesting problem. You’ve got this identification sitting right there in the middle of the problem. And any way you go out from this to solve it, you are solving an identification. Grim.

One of the ways to shift your perception is just get the concept for a moment And by the way, do this, all of you, just for a moment here. Look at that wall back there and say to yourself very forcefully, get that concept very forcefully: „It’s an actual wall. It’s real and actual.“ (pause)

Your preclear comes along, and if he’s in terribly bad shape, he will have gotten to a point of identification where he’s crushing everything into a mass. You give him a symbol, it is a thing. You say „dog,“ this has no relationship to something that runs around with four legs and has fur and a tail. It is a thing that is „dog“ – that is what it is – and this „dog“ is an object And you try to plow the word dog out of his reactive mind, and you’d think you’d have to take an ice ax to it.

Do you note anything happening?

If you’ve ever noticed this, if you’ve ever run a preclear who was very, very bad off, these words are heavy, they have weight; you can’t take them away from him. Well, try and take this preclear’s pocketbook away from him, try and take their shoe away from diem, try and take anything away from this preclear. Uh-uh.

Audience: (various responses)

You say, „Now, would you please put your purse down over on the chair while we are processing?“

What happens? What happens to that wall?

Uh-uh. Right here, see.

You’re running half of the energy flow on it, and of course, during that moment the wall would tend to fade or disappear. And if you will hold that concept for just a little while, the wall will disappear. And if you hold it with your MEST eyes for a little while and if you run that for a while with MEST eyes, your MEST eyes won’t see it That’s MEST eyes. That’s very interesting.

„Purse is self,“ is what they are running. Well, we know this is not so; purse is not self. And yet that preclear, if investigated a little further, would inform you possibly that the purse was herself.

You want to run the opposite just to get yourself out of it, which is: „The wall is not there.“ And so I want you to run now – look straight at that wall and say, „It’s not there.“ (pause)

Now, you’ll find around a sanitarium that people are being the bedposts, literally. I guess nobody ever thought to ask people in sanitariums what they were being before.

All right, now what happens to that wall?

Here’s a rigid catatonic and you go up to this rigid catatonic, and you say, „By the way, what are you being?“

Audience: (various responses)

This rigid catatonic never talked to anybody before. And the rigid catatonic looks at you rather disdainfully and says, „I’m being a bedpost, of course,“ and goes back to being a bedpost. Why? Well, a bedpost just seems to be a good thing to be. They got conquered by a bedpost or something. It doesn’t matter how it came about, the fact is that this body is identified with a bedpost and the body can’t be a bedpost, and that’s insanity. All right.

Get more solid?

So we got – immediately we see in Q and A that sanity lies in Mama being Mama and Papa being Papa and roads being roads and microphones being microphones, and we see that insanity lies in microphones being Papa. And it’s just a little bit of a rising scale of insanity to have a bunch of gradient similarities whereby you can work up and prove absolutely the microphone is Papa by a series of concatenations which have plus and minus signs and which are taught in universities and called mathematics. It’s not quite sane because not any one of those symbols is anything in itself, and the second you start to break it out into the real world and hook it up here with MEST, you’ll find out it doesn’t work.

Audience: (various responses)

As long as mathematics compare exactly with the MEST universe or with some universe, as long as there is an actuality to it, as long as there’s space and as long as there’s action, mathematics is true. But mathematics is not true the second you add a symbol.

Move up to you?

Now we use words because they are convenient, but the translation is from a sheet of paper. That’s one class of words, it’s actually one style; from somebody’s speech, another type of word entirely conveyed by a sound wave. This restimulates a picture, one knows what the other person’s talking about.

Audience: (various responses)

You go to the university, they tell you nobody can exactly proximate what anybody else means, because words mean different things to everybody. Well, the next time somebody says that in a university and you hear about it, why, you just look at him with a deep sigh because he’ll be making the gate sooner or later for the little white men in coats. Because nobody has any quarrel about this. The mind in a good state of beingness doesn’t have any trouble when it says the word dog.

It’s dangerous to run those two things for a little while because MEST starts to disappear and you have to fumble. And if you had a few dollars on you, you wouldn’t want that to happen. So you don’t want yourself getting upset, so don’t run that concept too much because…

Well, of course we mean different kinds of dogs, unless we’re very specific about it, and when we say, „A Pomeranian,“ a fellow can say, „What’s a Pomeranian?“

But it’s really just like walking a tightrope trying to keep check on time, motion, and so forth, and these particles. And a person, to assist himself, can’t do anything else but make pictures, but he then says he’s doing it to assist himself. He starts to have reasons, you see.

And you say, „Well, it’s a horrible little beast. And people carry it in the lap, and it’s somewhat like a Pekingese, but it’s not a Pekingese.“ Well, you’re still not being very definite, because he doesn’t quite know what a Pomeranian is, but that’s merely because he has no pictures of Pomeranians.

Once he sees it, somebody points it out to him and says, „That is MEST.“ A little child, you say, „That is a rock.“ I swear little kids very often say, „Where? Where? Where? Oh, there. Oh, sure.“ Next day he falls over it and busts his shin. He goes through this cycle of resistance.

And you take people who have been raised more or less in the same area. When they say, „The town pump,“ they mean the town pump. They don’t even have to have a picture of the town pump to identify what you’re talking about They say, „Town pump“ and that’s a series of syllables that means the town pump.

Now, MEST is rigged with a gravitic pull when it’s in solid mass. There is such a thing as gravity – it is blood brother to magnetism – and the gravity of Earth keeps one down on Earth. But twenty-four hours a day there is a current of gravity going through your body. Does that stay with you? No. You can set that up on equipment such as a physics lab and you’ll find out that that gravity does not stay there. The gravity does not stay there, but a picture of the gravity stays there in you. It doesn’t stay there on MEST equipment; it doesn’t keep reading on a scales.

For instance, the whole communications system of Philadelphia came perilously close to ruin when they took up a station down here in the center of town, because everybody could refer to this station. It had horrible boards in it, and you walked across the boards if you ever went through it And somebody tore it down, I’m told, and made a parking lot or something out of it the other day. And nobody could ever refer to this anymore, and so a communications landmark was destroyed. You could always describe Philadelphia to somebody as a town which had this thing in it Now there’s nothing left except a statue of William Perm, which has its hilarious aspects.

A butcher’s scale is a gravity meter. And when you take the meat off that scale it ceases to weigh the meat right away. And when you take a man off the gravity level or move him on the gravity level, what do you know, he keeps on weighing the meat He’s got pictures, you see, and those pictures are pictures of the flow of gravity.

Now, when we are talking a language, we are talking about common experience. As long as we’re talking about common experience, we know all about what we’re talking about, and there’s no difficulty whatsoever in this communication. But when we begin to insist on an identification of the word with the object, we enter into the first stages of neurosis, and there you will find the first stages of neurosis entered by people who say to you, „Exactly what do you mean by that word?“

One of the weirdest things you can do to a preclear is to get the idea, in terms of effort and thrust and so on, that he is standing up and then that he is not standing up when he is lying down. And he will get some interesting flows in his body. He’ll find out that when he tries to put a force down or to hold down, he’ll start feeling like he’s going up. Well, this is because he’s carrying pictures. We can explain it that way: he’s carrying these pictures around of gravity, and the pictures, because they are consecutive pictures taken through time, when they run off, they start to run off consecutively through time. But it isn’t the time that is here, it’s the time that is in the bank. And all the force is there, everything he’s resisted is still there. Now, that’s a very provoking fact to most people, very upsetting.

And you say, „Well, I meant – I said, ‘Pekingese’!“

Now, there are tremendous numbers of conclusions that could be drawn from this, but life itself is not dependent for its ability to think upon force; it thinks it’s dependent upon it.

„Well, exactly what do you mean by ‘Pekingese’?“

You know, you yourselves have probably taught somebody to think it over by giving him a solid slap in the jaw. You probably taught somebody „a lesson.“ (That’s what it’s called.) And you’ve probably been taught a few lessons by MEST when it fell on you or you ran it into something. And this is essentially education as it is understood in the modern school system. You get an impact and the impact is a piece of solidity, and the solidity then has a certain gravitic component, and it will compare and match itself to other pieces of solidity in the bank; and so you get currents flowing, more or less automatically, and this is thought per impact And that’s stimulus-response thought impacts.

„Well,“ you say, „a little dog, a lap dog. It has long floppy ears and pop eyes and it comes from China. And they evidently were big once in China but they’re small over here, and you see them every once in a while riding around in Cadillacs being driven by chauffeurs.“

Life, all by itself, is evidently quite capable of thought independent of MEST. But it doesn’t think about MEST: it can think about anything. But you take somebody and bang them around and they will become thoughtful. They will every time, if not unconscious.

And they said, „Oh, you meant to say a Pekingese dog, didn’t you?“

And you have immediately, then, the gradient scale of unconsciousness, which ends at the bottom with a theoretical, absolute unconsciousness, very theoretical because it has no duration that you can determine. Upscale a little bit to very, very thoughtful conduct and philosophic reasoning, upscale a little bit to some practical reasoning, and upscale a little bit to doing something.

Now, you’re a very foolish person if you go on trying to communicate with that person, because it’s something like you sending International Morse to somebody who can only receive American Morse Code. His level of experience tells him that words are so dangerous – they’re so dangerous you have to be very, very careful of them. Well, that means his experience is such that he can’t put out anchor points or communicate. And there we have the answer to it he can’t put out anchor points.

The Indian, the Iroquois Indian, I think it was, had an illness. He called it „the sickness of long thinking.“ And this never was truer than somebody who has been seriously abused.

Let’s just go right back to this: We find out that everything is getting identified with everything. The objects are getting closer and closer together, and they are more and more matter, and we’re getting everything solider and solider. This is only because a person has his anchor points in closer and closer and closer and closer and closer, and he can’t put out anchor points. So a person can’t communicate when he doesn’t dare put a word out there three or four feet. When he can no longer put a word out there, there goes his space.

Now, very often this has operated to our benefit. We have H. G. Wells, for instance, talking his first departure from action after, I think, he had a broken arm. And he said the broken arm gave him an opportunity to read, and he read a great deal of things and he became interested in thinking and he started writing. He was just a little boy when this happened to him.

Well, how do we get somebody over this? Because that’s the first thing you’re going to find in a lot of preclears. You’re going to say, „Well, how do you feel today?“ (pause) Going to say, „Did you have a good night?“ (pause) „Well, let’s get to work, (pause) Now, we were talking about your mother last time, or rather, I was.“ And so you finally say, „Are you running that concept?“ (pause) The conversation is one-sided.

But you’ll find this history going rather thoroughly through the race: that illness is followed by thinking, and that a person learns from a number of injuries. This is stimulus-response at work, but this is one of the behavior patterns of life.

Now, there is a way you can make this preclear communicate; you can force him to communicate if you want to: Toss him a red-hot poker, (laughter) This has been done. It’s with great surprise every once in a while that you hear somebody telling this story about the fellow who was in fear paralysis in a hospital, and at the last moment the doctor comes in and he’s buckled on his gun, and the doctor says to him, „Well, the place is about to be captured, and we just don’t dare leave these poor devils behind in the hands of the enemy,“ and pulls out the gun, cocks it, points it at the guy, and the fellow jumps out of bed and says, „Don’t shoot.“ We put him into a state of communication, with duress.

It doesn’t follow, then, that a person gets sane because he has an impact. We’ve found this quite the reverse. But it does follow – something does follow there: that a person who has resisted and then begun to want things finds out that he should have energy.

Now, this is simply anchor points and it’s simply making space. Any time you can get someone to claim an anchor point, you are still getting him to make space one way or the other, or at least recognize the existence of space. Just let him claim an anchor point.

Now, you wouldn’t think, that sitting there today, you wouldn’t suppose that people think they have scarcities of energy in themselves. You wouldn’t realize it, unless you really looked, that in national magazines of a great country on the face of the Earth today there are ads which are calculated to save energy or to create energy from exterior sources. And you would hardly suppose that a great civilization has mechanized itself solely because it knows it doesn’t have enough energy to do it itself. No, you wouldn’t think that this had happened, because this is really insane. But that is the case. Energy, it must be saved. There are labor-saving devices. It’s wonderful.

Now how do we do this? The whole problem is to get him to put out an anchor point. He won’t talk to you very much, he won’t do this, he won’t move around very much. He wants to stay in one room or, if he gets out, his motions are completely uncontrolled. How do we go about this where it’s Level VII?

A man who has a labor-saving device would automatically – you’d say, to be sane about it – would have to, perforce, have such an urgent scheduling of all available energy that he bad to have something like that. It wasn’t that it was desirable, because having something to do gives one an opportunity to create and use and direct effort And in this universe that’s about all there is to do. And that is action and motion and enjoyment and sensation, and all the rest of them are in that same category: the creation and direction of effort And when you get a labor-saving device, it is something which creates or saves or directs effort for you – automaticity.

Very, very simple. We get him to reach out and touch something. That’s one of the most effective techniques. Every once in a while somebody writes me with great surprise and says, „You know, that Step VII technique that you say applies to psychotics shouldn’t be listed as applying to psychotics, because most of my preclears have gotten better with it.“ And these people obviously aren’t psychotic because they have some responsibility for their own actions.

So, let’s take a look at a society for a moment and just wonder what’s going on in a society which has, as its prime motive, the acquisition of labor-saving devices and the acquirement of money so that it doesn’t have to work. The goal of the society is retirement and the end of the society is obtaining equipment which saves it from putting out effort.

Well, certainly, this is a real good technique and it just happens that this one will follow all the way through, and so we can apply it to a psychotic. It’s also a very good technique. You’d ask somebody to find something real. „What is the most real object in this room,“ you ask him, „to you?“

We’d say, if we looked around real quick under the roofs of some of the state institutions, we’d find quite a few loops. I won’t say this is the case. But the common denominator of neurosis and psychosis is one common denominator that is so obvious, whether you talk to the person or not it’s „can’t work.“ That is the common denominator of neurosis, psychosis, straight across the boards: „can’t work.“ Because when a person no longer creates, uses or directs energy, he is no longer able to keep his facsimiles at bay! And so, they collapse upon him. And they go into restimulation and he only wants the bad things which he himself has formerly resisted And the common denominator of neurosis and psychosis is „no effort,“ which is to say, „can’t work.“

And he looks around, finally says, „The light switch.“

And if you want to know whether or not somebody was crazy in your family, just think it over for a moment and find out who it was that couldn’t work. And you start processing on that person, more things will turn up than you ever dreamed that were there.

And you say, „Well, go over and touch the light switch.“ It seems kind of silly to the fellow; he knows it isn’t there. So he gets up and moves over and reaches out, showing you that he is still able to take the shock of finding it’s nonexistent, so to speak, and he reaches out and touches the light switch. It’s there. Now, you say, „Withdraw from the light switch,“ and he does.

The people who worked, maybe they were mean and explosive and ornery and said terrible things and so forth, but if they worked they were not very aberrative. It was the person who didn’t work that did you in. Simple.

And sometimes somebody will say, „Well, the sugar bowl.“ (One case, to quote one exactly.) And the preclear goes over, touches the sugar bowl. This one case touched the sugar bowl, touched the sugar bowl again, touched it again and suddenly clutched it to her and said it was probably the first time she had ever felt anything that was really real to her. That’s the way it goes. She’d – made her claim an anchor point, you see. So that is the essence of any processing is getting people to put out their anchor points so they’ll make some space.

Very often these people go completely unspotted in a family. Well, that was dear old Aunt whatever-her-name-was – Abanapaca – and she never did anything around the house, she was a lady. „Oh, she never did anything to me when I was a child.“

And if they refuse to do this completely and utterly, you can be assured that they are completely and utterly out of communication.

„No?“

Now, you can get them into communication, possibly, by the use of a stimulant. And while they’re under a stimulant or something of the sort, you can ask them again to reach something, and you actually can pick them up this way. But now we’re talking about sanitarium cases. And you shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

„No.“

One of the fastest techniques on Step VII is something I shouldn’t have to stress at all. One of the fastest techniques when it works, and it works every now and then, is you walk up to the psychotic in the sanitarium and you say, „Come up to present time,“ and he does, and he’s sane and gets discharged. You would be amazed. This works. Every once in a while you can go down the corridor of a sanitarium, and just as the patients – you see them around, just tell them one by one as you see them, tell them in a pleasant voice, „Come up to present time.“ It’s an anchor point. They’ve been lost someplace and nobody has ever told them this, and they come up to present time. I see on your faces you don’t quite believe me; it’s too simple.

Put him on the E-Meter. That’s where your preclear got religion! That’s where he got scared of ghosts and things that go boomp in the night and why he can’t sleep now without a light on in his bedroom. That was dear old Aunt Abacanapoo. She was the one in the family that didn’t work.

Female voice: We think Ron could do it.

Because, you see, it just follows through: the person who is no longer able to put out effort is the person who has resisted so much with effort and has fought so hard with effort that the effort has at last caved in on them completely, and now they know they can’t create or use effort And such a person uses, for his own energy, impacts, past impacts. They’re energy-hungry. They get starvation on the subject of energy. No matter what kind of energy, any kind of energy, they’re starved for it and they can’t get enough of it. And so they try to eat themselves out of it in the MEST universe. But they can’t cure this in MEST, because what’s wrong with them is in their own bank, and their own bank isn’t the MEST universe. So they can’t just cure it up out here in the MEST universe and they’ll go through all sorts of gyrations of trying to get more energy. They don’t care how it’s evaluated, what kind it is, where it came from, whose it is, anything. More energy – that’s their whole plea. Kleptomania, sexual perversion, all of these things are just – no matter how bad they sound, they’re simply that trying to get a piece of energy, trying to get this chunk of energy.

But the percentage on this is not good, so we have to have a technique which has a very good percentage.

These people will actually argue with tractors and things and fall under them and surreptitiously try to acquire sufficient injury in order to have energy. „Now,“ you say, „why is it that these preclears can’t – some of these preclears can’t think of anything good. They always think of things that are bad; all their facsimiles are bad. Why is this?“ Well, it’s very simple. You see, the bad things are the ones that have the impact and they’re only bad because everybody said it was bad to get injured and he couldn’t have pain. But there are blocks of energy, and the preclear is starved for energy. And being starved, tries to pull in every piece of energy in the whole bank on himself, because it’s just the reverse of what I just explained to you at first you see: he doesn’t want that energy at all But he resisted having to have exterior energy until that caved in and he felt he had to have energy from an exterior source. You see? So he winds up trying to grab all the heavy pieces of energy he has in the whole bank, which means all the heavy facsimiles, packs them around himself very solid and drains all of the white out of them. And you have black. And your preclear gets resistive – Resistive V – to processing.

Now, if a person won’t put out an anchor point, then let’s let the person accept an anchor point. This person might possibly get enough blocks or something piled up that they’d throw one block away. This is processing straight in the MEST universe, which is about the only place you can reach a psycho, so just start giving him blocks. „Do you want this block?“

Well, what does this tell you, then, about processing and its goals? It tells you that today we are handling two things: we are handling geographical location of the individual (much more of that later), and we are handling a problem of the purest mechanics in the world, just energy, scarcity of. It isn’t even kinds of energy; just any kind of energy will do most of these preclears, anything.

„Yes.“

You wonder why this girl yelled and screamed at her brother, day and night, until her brother beat her up. And she didn’t learn anything about that She went right back and yelled and screamed at her brother until he beat her up. And instead of learning some more about it, she went right back again and yelled and screamed at her brother. And you say there is just something wrong between brother and sister. „Well, it’s because of the brother’s vicious temper that made him beat up the sister and this made her very upset about life.“ Oh no. You’re looking at the wrong side of it He’s in good shape; he’s the guy that’s delivering the impact See, he’s in real good shape. And she keeps asking for impacts. And the only reason she starts a fight in the first place, probably, is because she’s got to have some more impacts.

And you’ll find out they will probably accept an awful lot of blocks until you’ll finally get one thrown away. The second you’ve got one thrown away, he’s got an anchor point out there. You started to open up his space and you’ve started to put him back into communication.

You go down the highway here and when you find a wrecked car, if you find the driver and you give him a quick check on the E-Meter, you’ll find out he’s energy-scarce. You’ll find out that when he goes home, ordinarily in the evening he takes some pills he’s got – they’re gelatin tablets, they’re put out by Doctor Wolfits – and these gelatin tablets, he takes three of these gelatin tablets and he takes just so much vitamins and he takes this and that and he takes it in warm milk, and then he has supper and he eats just so many calories of this and that, and so on. He may be very careful about his food or he may be very careful about how many hours he works and careful he doesn’t get tired.

This sounds idiotically simple and it is, but sometimes it requires an enormous amount of persuasiveness on the part of an auditor foolish enough to fool around with a psychiatrist’s MEST. Nevertheless, it’ll work.

That’s the most remarkable thing of all: a person just really has to go through an enormous lot of stuff to figure out „being tired.“ This is the end-all of silliness. They have to sleep and they have to have a rest and they have to save their energy, save their energy and conserve and save and conserve; that’s the MEST universe: save it and conserve it. It says we can’t be destroyed, so you have to save and conserve. All right.

As a matter of fact, if all of us sort of as a crew suddenly waded in with what we know into the biggest spinbin they’ve got here in Philadelphia, we’d probably be able to clean it up in a couple of days. But that’s how sad it is that we don’t do that work I’ve been working on some mechanical aids, because it’s doubtful if psychiatry will ever adapt itself to anything but a mechanical aid and so I’ve said, „Well, we shouldn’t worry too much about the psychotics. Let’s see if we can’t work it out with a mechanical aid problem which will at least bring them up to a point of communication so that we can process them rather easily.“

What’s this tell you about the goals of processing? You want to get your preclear into good shape. But that’s too indefinite. What is good shape? Is it better moral conduct? Is it „Does he pay his quarter regularly into the poor box?“ It could be a number of things, you see. You could adjudicate this in all ways, shapes and forms. People have been doing this since the beginning of man. They’ve been saying, „I know you’re a good man, because you…“ and then they add their pitch.

But nothing will wear an auditor out faster than a psychotic, because the psychotic is what? What did we cover earlier? What is the single manifestation, as far as this psychotic is concerned, that makes him psycho?

The Indian, by the way, used to have a very strenuous code of training for children. The whole tribe would praise this child for a certain action. And they’d just continue to do it. Everybody would gang up on this kid, and this kid was really in the groove. (The Indians lost out in the face of the white man, by the way.)

First male voice: Dispersing all over the place.

Now, where do we have or how can we observe whether or not we’ve done anything for a preclear? Well, it would just be have we gotten him into more motion that he himself is controlling? (Many, many people are in motion that they aren’t controlling. It’s what you call a manic state or a frantic state or something of this sort) But is he in better motion that he himself controls? Is he capable of putting out more work? Does he work? Is he interested in handling effort? Now, let’s not use that definition of work the way it is used all the time, which is a crushing, boring, repetitive activity in which must – one must engage in order to eat That is not the definition of work. Work is foot-pounds of energy; creation and direction of energy and effort.

Second male voice: Energy starvation.

Well, will he create and direct more effort? Have we done anything for him if we haven’t made it possible for him to create and direct more effort? Obviously we’ve not done anything for him that we really could do. We’ve made his life a little less boring or we’ve made his life more interesting or we’ve made it flatter or less interesting or something, but if we haven’t increased his ability to create and direct foot-pounds of energy, we’ve done nothing for him.

Energy starvation, regardless of whether he’s dispersing or not He’s obeying energy if he’s dispersing, implicitly obeying energy, if he has an energy starvation.

And what is the best representation of that? The best one – talking now about Homo sapiens in particular – the best one is changing his communication condition. If you see an alteration in his communication, you have done something for the preclear. And if you don’t change his communications, you have done nothing for the preclear.

And he will sit there and he will actually create a sort of a vacuum in front of you. I don’t know what he does to MEST air or something of the sort, but he does something to it. And he actually has some kind of an effect on it, there’s a sort of a vacuum sitting in front of you. If you don’t watch it, you’ll start to do mock-ups that fill in the vacuum. The next thing you know, you’ve got the psychotic there in front of you solid in your bank. It’s real fascinating. He’s just like sitting in front of a vacuum cleaner. This is where they got the idea of vampirism.

Now, the truth of the matter is you very often will process a preclear who is on a hectic, frantic level of communication which appears, at first glance, upscale. And you start processing him and the next thing you know, he doesn’t anymore talk like this, he’s starting to talk like this. You changed his communications. That’s all you were trying to do. And because they slowed down did not mean that you worsened the case. They might have slowed down, you see, and gone under his control. That would be the test.

Anybody that wants to fool around with a psychotic is quite welcome to fool around with one, but he shouldn’t use techniques which have anything to do with thinkingness. Let me repeat that A person processing a psychotic shouldn’t have anything to do with thinkingness. He should keep himself right there with techniques which are tremendously simple and very obvious, because he might ask this psychotic just one little simple question and have the psychotic spin again, all over. He might ask the psychotic to run this concept. He knows the psychotic is better now; now is the time to run a concept on the psychotic. So you run the concept, „I have to be crazy.“ It’s too much for him, that’s all.

Now, it would take more processing to speed them up under his control. But there’s the test of whether or not you’ve done something for a case. Not because communications are sacred, but because communications are the best representation of the handling and direction of foot-pounds of energy. That’s the number one index right there, because it includes perception and it includes force.

Now, any such statement has to be qualified. I make that statement, so if you want to be on the safe side, never run a thought concept on a psychotic if you want to really play it safe.

So all of a sudden your preclear says, „You know, I’m seeing better!“

If you want to be a little less cautious (don’t ever get as adventurous as I get; I get in more trouble), you’ll find that the psychotic is locked in one exact concept He must reach but can’t reach, or its reverse, which is the same concept: He must withdraw but can’t withdraw. And those two locked together just right produce a thing called the glee of insanity, but they have to lock together just right. And if you can get into communication enough to get this psychotic to run that concept just for a moment or two, his psychosis will sometimes stretch apart to a point where you can then follow forward with great ease on mechanical techniques. That’s touch and go, because he might be just on the other side of it, you see. It isn’t quite as bad as it might be. And you get him „Must reach but can’t reach,“ and he runs just this and locks up on the heavier side of the incident And he’s, of course, got the glee of insanity even more. It’s a compulsion operating with an inhibition simultaneously, and these two things together give you an emotion. And this emotion is the emotion expressed by the insane, and it’s a gradient scale of it.

„End of session.“ You’ve changed his communication level.

At one time or another in any preclear, you could find every manifestation of insanity that had ever been cataloged anyplace, just for a moment or two in some cases and sometimes for a couple of hours and sometimes for a few days. You just trip into something, and on it goes. And he’s obsessive or compulsive or something of the sort, because you’re handling the stuff of which this is made.

Next time you see him it may have slumped. Very often, a case goes over a sort of an up-down curve; it improves and then sags a little bit and then improves a lot and then sags quite a bit and then improves some more. And it’s always on a higher high. That’s quite normal in processing. It isn’t a smooth, upward curve, it’s a jumpy one. But processing should occasion a communication change.

And so, you can run almost any preclear awhile on „must reach but can’t reach.“ And if you run yourself on it for a little while, you will understand psychosis and exactly how a psychotic feels, because it’s that glee, that horrible feeling, that awful indecision of a maybe lockup on the two things that theta does best. And that produces this emotion called insanity.

Now, how do we tell, then, whether or not a person’s going to work? All right, let’s say you’re hiring a janitor and you want to know whether or not this janitor is going to keep the building clean. It’s very easy for you to establish whether or not he’s going to keep the building dean. You say to the janitor, „How long have you been working?“

The best technique for this, however, is simply one way or the other to get the person to put out his anchor points. Now, with this technique you can process a cat, a dog. You could probably even process a psychiatrist, and that would be a hard trick for you to do, by the way – process a psychiatrist. You couldn’t get him to listen long enough. He’d want to argue about it and think about it, but he wouldn’t test it because he’d have to look at it. A psychiatrist hardly dares realize what he’s doing, because he hasn’t got a solution. And if you walk down the sanitarium walls, you will find a lot of ex-psychiatrists inside. That’s not a very unhappy thing. It actually would seem to make these people very courageous to go into this work at all, but they don’t even dare admit to themselves that there’s any such danger.

He says, „Well – uh – I first – uh…“

You, with techniques, don’t run up against this, but they do. And this is this technique. It’s essentially getting him to put out an anchor point or receive an anchor point gracefully. You base it on a man’s health is proportional to his belief in his own dangerousness to his environment A man’s health is proportional to his own belief in his dangerousness to his environment.

Fire him. Don’t hire him. Fire him first Reverse the cycle, because he’s not going to keep the building clean the way he should. And you say, „Well, how long have you been working?“

And one does it this way: Here’s this cat, see, and this cat’s a real timid cat, let us say, or just a plain cat You know, people don’t have to be crazy to be processed, and cats don’t have to be crazy to come upscale. So you go into this cat, and you put your fingers down near the cat’s paw. And the cat just simply can’t resist sooner or later reaching out and touching your fingers. If it’s a very timid cat, it will just touch your fingers. And at that moment you withdraw your fingers an inch or two. Not too suddenly, because you’ll frighten the cat, but just withdraw your fingers. A cat will look at that hand and touch it again. And withdraw four or five inches that time, and then the cat says, „This is too good to be true,“ probably and quits. So you put your fingers back near the cat’s paw again, and the cat says, „Well, I drove that hand away once. Probably I couldn’t do it again. Well, I might as well try.“ And so he touches the fingers again. Immediately you withdraw four inches and say, „Ow.“

And he says, „About ten years,“ hire him. He’ll keep the building clean.

He didn’t claw you. The cat looks at you kind of startled. „That hurt you?“ he says. Well, you just keep this up for a little while, and all of a sudden the cat will be sitting there looking very, very proud.

It’s just one of those jackleg tests. What’s his communication lag?

I had a little kitten about early 1950 that had a very beaten spirit, and I worked it up to a point where it would claw an editor. And this editor used to come down to the house – gee, his ankles were in horrible shape always.

Now you’re going to hire a secretary, and you say to this secretary – you could say – you could look her over and take micrometer calipers and find out the bicepulary distances and all sorts of things, but it isn’t necessary to do that. You just sit her down to a typewriter and you put some copy up in front of her and you start a stopwatch and she does sixty-five, seventy words a minute, hire her right away, quick Does it accurately, sixty-five, seventy words a minute accurately, bang. Because the accuracy shows control. If she does it inaccurately, very inaccurately, she’s just in a hectic state of motion. Sixty-five words a minute for a secretary is phenomenal. A really good secretary would do about eighty accurately on a typewriter, consistently.

I tried this technique on a dog that was quite neurotic. The dog would jump up on people, and people would slap the dog, so I simply got the dog to put out anchor points just on the basis of inviting the dog to walk forward. And the dog finally would walk forward and snarl. Gee, that got to be a cocky dog, „Gosh, rrrff! Bring on your lions. I can drive anything away.“

Would there be any sense at all in hiring somebody who made thirty-five words a minute? You don’t want them in the office. It would be one less person, you say, so that would be one less person doing the work. No. She’ll take the people around her down at least two persons apiece.

Now, this is a mechanical approach, and you should know this because it is the only technique I know of which is very, very effective on very small children. A child with whom you cannot easily communicate, yet may be brought to reach out and touch your fingers or touch something which you are holding. You reach down with a bright toy – you will assume immediately because you have been educated that way that a child always wants toys. It’s not the case, they throw them away faster than they accept them. So you’ll reach down there with a very bright toy or a bright ribbon and the child reaches for it, and not aggravatingly, you just bring the ribbon back with a little jerk, and the child reaches for it again, touches it (remember, let the child touch, let the cat touch, let the dog touch) and you pull it away again.

And yet, in business colleges they turn people out like that People just can’t go any faster than that and they turn them out like that and they go out and they go into offices and they lose the papers and they fumble and they lose the mail and they hold it up and they get that big order that – they hold it up long enough so that it is cancelled and so on. And you can’t quite spot where all this is happening in the office unless you know something about the mind.

And the child may either decide that it wants that ribbon, at which time they’ll rip it out of your fingers, or that they’re very tough and are driving the ribbon away, particularly if about the third time you do it, you say, „Ow!“ But don’t take a little child that is very timid and say, „Ow“ too loudly or too painfully, because the child will be quite dismayed and look at you and say, „Did I hurt you?“ You know, that sort of a look. „Gosh, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Don’t beat me, don’t shoot me, don’t eat me.“ You just keep that up day after day and all of a sudden, why, you walk in and this poor neurotic little kid that you first ran into says, „Hmmm!“ Mama, by the way, is feeling the effects of this, too.

If you wanted to know what was wrong with an office you would simply walk through and give everybody a communications-lag test and fire all the people who had a lag and the office would straighten up. That would be all there was to business efficiency if you used this point Now, this is a horrible fact.

And so it is with a psychotic. Your psychotic doesn’t have to be made to talk in order to be processed. You reach for the psychotic’s fingers and wait till the psychotic touches your fingers and then withdraw them a tiny bit, the same way you process a cat And the first thing you know, the fellow will start to exhibit some signs of sanity, unless you are going to be very, very clever, and the moment he says, „Gee“ or „Gosh“ to you or something, you’re going to immediately run out birth. You just, with a psycho, leave thinkingness severely alone, to be on the safe side. Don’t run out birth, don’t run out any anything, don’t ask him about anything.

But in treating preclears, this is of the greatest importance to you. Because if you haven’t changed the communication lag, you haven’t done anything for the case.

This psychotic, you will find, is usually in contest with spirits, even though he doesn’t say so. That’s because he’s gotten down to the last ditch as a thetan and is trying to waste Christ or waste God so as to save himself. We’ll get into wasting when we talk about Expanded GITA, but there at Step VII, you will most commonly find them trying to waste in the material universe. They always try to waste in the material universe what they have to waste in their own mind in order to get well. As an immediate diagnosis, they have to waste in the material universe what they should be wasting in mock-ups in their own mind in brackets to get well.

Now, why is their communication lag going to stay slow? Is it just willful perfidiousness on the part of the preclear? No. Is it just the orneriness and meanness of the MEST universe that would make a person into this condition? No. What is it? It’s a scarcity of energy: they can’t put out any space because any energy that comes into the space is immediately drawn up into the bank at such a rate that the space collapses. And so they don’t have any space. And out in front of them, if you ask somebody real quick, you’d say, „Whose space is it in front of your nose?“ – flash, and they’d say, „Other’s, somebody else’s.“ They’d say, „George’s“ or „Bill’s.“ Yet a person ought to own at least a foot in front of him. Very few people do. A great many people don’t even own their noses. And a great, great many more don’t own anything in front of their ears, nothing forward of the ear. They haven’t even got this space; this space belongs to somebody else.

And so, you will find people around worshiping Christ, madly worshiping God, madly going around with voices of angels and God and so forth talking to them and having a dreadful time about all this. And they’re being terribly respectful toward God and respectful toward Christ and so on.

Why is that? It’s energy starvation. Now, a person has gotten a lot of impacts at some time or another in his life, and these impacts act as a sponge for further impacts. And the person has begun to believe that he himself cannot create energy.

This is not a talk on religion at all; I’m merely telling you an actual observation. And that’s because the last thing they can be, you see, the collapsing environment has finally gotten down to them as a thetan. And to save themselves as a thetan, they have to waste admiration of Christ and God. And therefore, you find these things in an insane asylum all the time. All right.

There’s only one thing for which the whole universe punishes, there’s only one punishment, one crime and that, in its fullest sense, is communicating. That’s the one crime. Putting out an anchor point. (That’s essentially communicating.) Putting out an anchor point is the one thing for which a person could get punished, which tells you why the people that get to the rank of general and admiral get there. It’s traditional in every army and navy of a conservative country that a person is advanced in the ratio that he doesn’t do anything. If he commits no crimes, he gets there. And this isn’t a criticism of it, it’s just the way things operate. It’s just the way things operate. It just happens that that’s the way it is and they don’t want to get well, and so we can’t do anything about it, can we?

When we’re dealing, then, with Step VII, we are dealing with a problem which is basically anchor points, and which will manifest itself either by an inability to accept a single anchor point of any kind from anybody, or be unable to put out an anchor point of any kind or borrow or recognize an anchor point of any kind for what it is. And all this is so clouded with thinkingness and misidentification that these two things must be left severely alone. And you must remember that all you’re trying to do is get them to accept a little anchor point, put out an anchor point; that’s all you’re trying to do. If you can get them to do that, you’ve got them on the way, unless you turn around and wreck them by running a complex thought therapy upon them, because that’s what’s wrong with them: the Iroquois Indians’ sickness-of-long-thinking.

Well anyway, the only thing that is punishable is putting out an anchor point. And so, you can tell how often this person has been slugged, slapped, hit by the reluctance he has in putting out an anchor point But there is another thing here at work: it is the remaining, the residual potential a person has in creation of energy. Some people have a tremendous energy-creation capacity. And these people can take an enormous slugging around without altering their communication level. That’s because they’re still up above that break on the Tone Scale. Although the energy-creation potential might be different – isn’t necessarily, but might be different – for every individual on Earth, there is this similarity amongst all individuals: There is a point above which they create, manufacture and direct their own energy, and below which they depend upon energy from exterior sources before they can operate. That would be the make-break line.

Now, they’re below the level of scarcity of energy which anybody can bear, and they’re really starved. They won’t eat, they have to waste food. They have to waste motion so they don’t move, or they move too erratically, so they have to waste controlled motion. And in this way, they’re cut out of the strata of communication with their fellow man, and that is really what a psychotic is, he’s a fellow that’s out of communication with his fellow man, or out of communication with the MEST universe. And remember, is unable – and this definition follows – is unable to resume of his own volition communication with his fellow man or with the MEST universe. Remember, of his own volition.

On our Tone Scale I would hazard that this is well above 2.0. Because it is above eating. If you want to run shame out of your preclear, just run „the shame of eating,“ „the shame of having to eat“ Because a being in a very cocky state of mind knows very well he can create enough energy to run this motor. And it’s only when he goes down Tone Scale that he has to start eating. And he gets hectic.

In other words, you could be above communicating and still not be psychotic if you could resume of your own volition, with great ease, communication. That’s obvious, isn’t it? All right.

You see, eating is getting the mock-up of somebody else and crowding it into close confines so as to drain the energy out of it That’s eating, that’s stealing somebody else’s mock-ups in order to go on living, and it’s exterior energy. So there’s a theoretical line above that – theoretical line above that by which a body would create enough energy to keep on going without eating. And I think the stomach feels the main shame about that, because this is where shame on eating shows up very remarkably. And I have run into little children that as soon as I processed out their general parental behavior around them – the behavior of the parents – particularly parents forcing them to eat, why, the child ceased to have any stomach trouble and also ceased to eat to amount to anything at all. You’d say, „What a tremendous efficiency rise this body has had. This child is now getting along on two glasses of milk and a couple of pieces of bread a day.“ Well, you figure it out chemically and you say, „Well, there’s that many calories and there’s this and if it were all drained down – there must be a lot more energy in milk than we thought there was, so that proves he’s still getting…“ But you see, there is a theoretical point where eating doesn’t exist Well, a person would be very high-toned, he wouldn’t be desiring somebody else’s mock-up.

So from Step VII we go immediately into Step VI. We run this technique, you understand, from I to VII in that order; I’m explaining it here from VII back to I to give you the strata of cases.

All right Now, the make-break point is actually the point where the person begins to eat And anybody who is eating is then, to some degree, subject to the liabilities of having to receive energy exterior, rather than energy created, in order to develop and direct energy. You see? He’s dependent upon exterior energy if he’s eating.

In Step VI, you have an acute state, very acute state of energy starvation. And it is a starvation which is so bad that you would find the running of concepts upon Step VI almost fatal. In other words, here you have the neurotic who is at the critical point, and who can be very easily tipped over into a Step VII by much more abuse by life. (Not by you as an auditor; you’re not going to tip these people over.) Preclears are quite resistant, they just talk a lot and complain a lot.

Now, we get to the second break point below that. It’d be where he is no longer capable of producing independent and dear thought but had to depend for the generation of thought upon former impacts, which themselves were storages of energy. Their impact was a certainty, and so he relies on the certainty impacts in order to get his data. And a person in that shape will only look for data, they will never look for truth.

Step VII is waiting for Step VI, and that’s the definition of a Step VT case. This person doesn’t think dearly about a lot of things, and is barely able to keep up with the more evil aspects of present time. This is the way they’re identifiable. This person is able to keep up barely with the more evil aspects of present time and doesn’t go into the future at all about anything. And they show emotion about present time only when confronted with something horrible. Or they merely consider everything in present time is horrible.

Now, some of you might have thought that I meant psychology, but I don’t. Psychologists have their own troubles. That’s why they’re in psychology: they hoped they’d be solved. All right.

Well, this is the neurotic, this is the person who is nervous. You can tell this person. When this person holds a coffee cup, the cup chatters against the saucer. This is the person who, when he has a drink, has a hangover for three days. Or when he has a drink, has to have another drink and has to have another drink and has to have another drink, because, you see, the drink runs him out of energy. And the only way he can get to the state he was in before he had to drink was to have a full glass in front of him. So he’s trying to run back on the track to the time before he had the first drink, and he can’t get there.

The goals of processing, then, should become very manifest to you. They should be the restoration of the ability to create and direct energy. Now, to direct energy, one must have a good sense of location. And so the rehabilitation of location, as well as the rehabilitation of the ability to make space, as well as the rehabilitation of being able to create particles in that space all come under the same heading.

So, here is the person who, given any sedative really or given any stimulant, will carry it through to its final addiction if given any chance at all. The problem of dope, drugs, which results in the regimen of prescription, does not lie in the dope and the drugs; it lies in the neurotic or psychotic inability to restrain oneself from continuing with anything which will deliver a sensation, because these poor people are completely out of sensation. And then the government comes along and says, „You can’t even have the sensation of opium. What you’ve got to drink is alcohol.“

How do you know if the preclear is in better shape? He’s in better communication.

The last survey I read on this subject, by the way, alcohol was much more harmful than opium, but I don’t think they can workably collect adequate taxes from opium.

Now, don’t think he gets into better communication because he starts to read people’s minds. It’s very possible, it’s very easy to read people’s minds. I wonder why people try. But – there’s hardly anything there.

Anybody who is going to become an addict would become an addict of soda pop just as fast It isn’t so much, then, a study of the drug as it is the study of the mind. And this is adequately demonstrated if you’ve studied anything about alcoholics.

It’s very simple to go over the plan of creation and see that theta – mathematical symbol, not a mystic one – must impact with something and withdraw from it in cycles to operate with and know anything about the interior material with which it’s dealing. So the cycle of life would be impact-withdraw, impact-withdraw.

Well then, what do we do with the alcoholic? He’s right on the borderline of a psychotic; he starts something, and we get into our Q and A. What do we do with this alcoholic? What kind of a frame of mind is he in? Well, let’s look at Q and A. The answer to being drunk is, of course, being drunk. That’s what he thinks. The answer to raising the dickens and stealing money from the family is raising the dickens and stealing money from the family. The answer to being nasty to Papa is being nasty to Papa.

With what we know today and what I’m talking about today, we can turn a cycle of theta, where it has gone in just a little bit deep, and bring it back up again with what it knows. Just because it disentangles itself from MEST does not mean that it becomes, then, blank and ignorant of MEST. So what you’re trying to do is turn that cycle: You’re trying to kind of pull the preclear out of it.

Children play this, by the way. A little child gets into some bad frame of mind about life and he decides that this is it and he’s acting that way and the answer to being that way is then to be that way. And so you get a continuous persistence of this condition. It’s only interrupted when you vary the energy pattern, and you only vary the energy pattern when you vary the admiration available in the bank. In other words, you vary the energy pattern when you vary the energy, and the only thing that will dissolve energy is another kind of energy. All right.

Now, if your preclear, immediately after you process him, goes out and buys a lot of heavy MEST, you may have processed him so far that he’s quite willing to enter a brand-new cycle. Or you may have simply deepened his thirst for chunks of energy. Don’t cure every preclear’s thirst for chunks of energy or people like Ford Motors and so forth will go broke. I won’t go so far as to say that that is the only reason people have cars, is they just have this energy hunger and there’s a big chunk of heavy MEST and they sort of acquire it – or it acquires them, low on the scale.

Therefore, we need a consistent and continual technique which will resolve for this person, very easily – not extreme, not Explosion Processing, that’s too tough for number VI – but very easily and very pleasantly will resolve the scarcity of energy in the bank and mind itself, and that is best answered by something like Self Analysis. And there isn’t any better technique for it.

You’re trying to bring the preclear up past these break points, in short, where he is no longer compulsive, obsessive about masses of energy. And you know that he is no longer compulsive and obsessive about it at the moment when he is able to communicate better. You see?

What do you do for the alcoholic? You give him Self Analysis in large quantities. Preferably make him make two of them out there. You’ll find out he’d be making them here first, and he eventually gets so he can get those mock-ups out there pretty far, preferably two mock-ups at a distance from him.

So what’s the goal of processing? You could say immediately „Restore and better the communication of your preclear.“ And you would have said, shallowly, the whole thing.

How many hours does it take, then, to get that bank up to a condition where – well, it’ll take more hours than you as an auditor would care to associate with a psychotic or a neurotic. But at the same time, with all of your skill and with all of your knowledge, and however easy it may look to you, to reach in and touch that button and cure that fellow, and just zing. You’re dealing with quantity of energy which he himself and he himself alone can furnish and replenish! It can’t be shot to him with a needle; we’ve tried it.

How do you do this? By remedying, mechanically, the scarcity of energy. One does that with contacting the MEST universe, showing he is not dependent upon the body, or by simply feeding the body, with mock-ups by the preclear, enough chunks of energy so the energy is no longer obsessively absent. You have to cure his scarcity of energy either way by showing him there’s an awful lot there or an awful lot here.

The answer to an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sexual pervert is a very easy answer: it’s lots of Self Analysis. So you get somebody to work with him on the subject You get somebody to work with him to help you out Or you just make up your mind to sit there and slug it through. How many hours is it going to take to bring him up out of that state? Well, that depends upon the deficiency of energy in the bank, as he conceives it to be deficient.

And that’s the goal of processing.

Of course, he first had to get the idea it was deficient before he could get a deficiency of energy, but unfortunately, having gotten the idea the energy is deficient, it now becomes actually deficient And just by flipping that postulate out, you have not remedied the deficiency of energy. The postulate will turn up in the process, but only when you’ve given enough so the postulate can be given up. So what do you do? Self Analysis, Self Analysis and more Self Analysis.

Let’s take a break.

How long? Eighty hours, two hundred hours, if you can get volunteers. How soon will the case break down and show improvement? Maybe fifteen minutes. Is that good enough to prevent a relapse? No, it’s not.

And the main trick that you have is to discipline yourself to give him enough so that they’ve got enough energy replenished into the bank in order to stay where you want them to be in a stable state, and the only mistake you’re going to make about this is being superambitious about these very low-toned cases, and you say, „I’m just going to spring this case, and he’s going to go on his way happily, because it’s been done before.“ Yes sir, it’s been done before, in a minority of cases by a lucky thrust And I’ll tell you something dreadful that my reports show: They didn’t stay stable. I know the ground I’m walking on when I talk to you about Self Analysis. It’s good solid ground. It’s so idiotically simple that you as an auditor are very liable to say that it’s beneath your dignity. Don’t, because it is the remedy for the neurotic.

Let’s take a break.