And this is the first afternoon lecture of the 24th of November, 1953. And the name of this lecture could very well be "the death wish." We're going to talk about death.

And soon as we get down to technique level V, we have to talk about death — same with VI and same with VII,

It is very difficult for somebody to recognize the operation that goes on here with Earth and with life, so long as they believe that continuous and consistent, persistent survival is in itself desirable. Do you understand that?

All (quote) "thinking" (unquote) on this and many other planets is oriented toward a persistency of survival as a unit organism, and as long as one holds with that philosophy, one would never understand what is going on.

As long as one believes, for instance, that work and pain are undesirable, and that unconsciousness is desirable, he's going to stay in a very horribly aberrated state; because he's got his vectors reversed.

There are two conditions: there is the condition known as "reality" — that's the one you see on the bulletin boards and which is advertised in the public school, and which is carried out by the police safety campaigns and so on. That's reality, and that's a universe operation — persistence as a unit organism.

And then there's "actuality," which is that work is tremendously desirable, that pain is a sensation which in itself is desirable, and that persistence as a unit organism is almost untenably undesirable.

Now, looking at these factors, if we recognize these two things, we'll be able to (quote) "understand life" (unquote).

You're trying to understand life and you're trying to know. In order to know, you have to be aware. So, we have consciousness as being another thing which is tremendously important. And if you believe that unconsciousness is relatively desirable, again you're on a reverse vector. Complete consciousness is desirable. That's not ultimate consciousness — that's enough consciousness to know at least what you're choosing for randomity at the moment.

And we find that unconsciousness, however, in many individuals, is a substitute for the impossibility of fighting survival as a unit organism. One cannot fight this. It's enforced by the police, it's enforced by the church, it's enforced by the family, by the culture, by the mores.

One can even be arrested in this society for committing suicide. If you commit suicide and fail, they throw you in the clink. And all teachings incline toward fearing death — death is something to be afraid of. "After you die you go to hell" — that is simply a religious hammer and pound to get you to drop your nickel on the drum.

And so we have a person trying to be unconscious in order to end survival as a unit organism. Do you see that? It's a halfway end of cycle — unconsciousness. So unconsciousness itself is never desirable, except when one is completely overpowered by other-determinism. And then of course unconsciousness is a token of death, just a token. And then one doesn't feel or register — he says — what is being done by the other-determinisms.

All right, this is a terribly interesting situation. We have then the very factors of pain, unconsciousness, as being the aberrative common denominator of all engrams, for instance. One of them is an effort to die — unconsciousness; and the other one is an effort to prove to oneself that one is alive. And so we have a somethingness (the pain) surrounded by the nothingness (unconsciousness) which in itself made the aberrative characteristic of the engram. And much more important than this, however, to us, is it tells us of an end of cycle.

The first time an individual went unconscious he probably said, "To hell with the mock-up, here I go" and then had to come back. He's been doing this for trillions of years: Trying to get rid of the mock-up, trying to shove off and take another run at it. And somebody is always around insisting, and the automatic machinery of the mock-up itself and the automaticity of this entire universe, insist that he pick up the mock-up again. And he stays in a state of semicon-sciousness as a protest thereafter. It parks him right on the track. And there is the most significant parking place of your preclear on the time track, and there is the Resistive V, with this slight addition: The Resistive V went — normally somewhere on the track, he went, left a body, found nothing, and came back.

Somebody has a terribly "lost" feeling. They had a body somewhere else. There's this mechanism known as the "body in pawn" — there's all kinds of mechanisms like this all up and down the track, they've been all over the place. One doesn't have to go into the incredible at all, it's much simpler than this, but you should know this data.

And this terrible "lost" feeling that people get is proceeding outward from a body, and coming back into the body in pawn, and it's dead or it's gone. See, they — intention is to go back to the body in pawn, to leave the body which has just gone unconscious, or they just think is dead or is going to be too mangled up to make life interesting — not mobile, and they go back to the body in pawn area, and find the body in pawn gone.

They will thereafter go to psychiatrists and wander around and stumble and so on. The body they have, they don't want, here on Earth, and the body in pawn is missing. And it causes a considerable disturbance. Here again, you have location. They want to be located. The body in pawn is an anchor point which locates them. When they lose that anchor point they get nothing but blackness. They can't find their way. Because they're finding their way — if they have to find their way — between two anchor points: the one on Earth and the body in pawn. And they shuttle between these two, and if one of them turns up missing, then they have "prime post unposted" — no exit. And now you try to exteriorize this fellow and he knows he doesn't have anyplace to go because he's under the delusion that he has to have a body in pawn to which he must exit. So he pings, right there, and he stays put.

Now, the other part of it is, he gets hung up with the effort of trying to stay conscious while unconsciousness is pounding him from every side, or trying to remain unconscious while people are trying to make him conscious — and the last is the least kind.

He's left this body — this body, you say, is dead or near death, being operated on, it's just been run over or crashed in a plane or something of the sort, and he leaves this body. And on running engrams and so forth, of trying to find people on the track, you can overlook every portion of every kind of an incident except this one: Dead body — he shoves off, then comes back because he couldn't find the body in pawn, or if he did find it, the body down there woke up — somebody brought it back to life. And he's being forced to stay alive. And after that, he acts like it to the whole society.

Now, when he's trying to stay unconscious, he's actually not trying to stay unconscious at all. He's trying to find that point of death where he departed, you see, so he can depart again, because he thinks the exit is there, and he is otherwise lost. So he's trying to stay conscious and something is making him unconscious, and then it reverses. He'll protect the mock-up for a short time, and then when he gives up, he goes unconscious.

Now, if somebody revives the body, makes it conscious again, they snap him back into it. And there's all sorts of incidents occur, such as he can appear in a body-in-pawn area and it seems to be that whoever is there knows the body on Earth isn't dead, you see. And they just turn him around and give him an implant and shoot him back the other time, and he comes up at the other end of the operation having been gone during the entire operation. He isn't even in the operating room. You want to know what happens to people during operations — they generally leave.

Now, the first time this happens here on Earth, the more intolerably persistent this society gets. People are so careful — they used to say, "Well, if the bears don't get him, he'll live to be a fine young man. If he doesn't go out and fall in the river, why, we'll have him around yet." There was no great scarcity, you see, of the body, that sort of thing, and they — and in a relatively primitive society with lots of menaces and dangers, you had him able to get out and get messed up, and if he got too messed up, he didn't have any tremendous strings on him. That is to say, he didn't have this horrible, mawkish, "you've got to stay with us."

And then in this society today, with school programs for safety, with this, with that, yap-yap, yap-yap, yap-yap, the chances of getting killed are getting slighter and slighter and slighter and slighter.

With penicillin, with all of these other persistent drugs, we're getting a point where the individual is unable to get rid of a mock-up. Just that — he can't get rid of the mock-up. So he goes out in the war, and if he were fighting the war of 1610 or 1505 or over in Flanders, and he walked through the castle breach, something like that, and somebody took off half his face with a morning star, believe me, if the blow didn't finish him, the bugs would, and he'd be out of there in a few days, see?

But now what do they do? They pick him up and they give him sulfa, and they patch him up and they do some plastic surgery, and he's in the hospital being tortured for months, all under the conclusion that he hates pain and can't stand pain — he's already gone that far, you see. And he's patched up some more, and then older and less able, and with what beauty he has completely spoiled, he has to drag this goddamn mock-up around for the next thirty or forty years! See that? See the philosophy behind this "make him persist."

The unkindest thing you can do is to make somebody persist that way. That's the unkindest thing anybody can do, is to take serious battle casualties, for instance, and patch them up. Imagine the sadism of this universe when today they still have casualties, immobile casualties, from World War I in veterans' hospitals — no good to anybody, but still alive. They've got a thetan parked right there — boom. And boy, that thetan is really in apathy — ahaaa! Oh no.

Well, his knowledge of what he is, where he goes and what he does deteriorates because he holds on to that unconsciousness. If he could just convince them he was dead! If he could just convince this thing, this mock-up, that he was dead, it would let go of him, he thinks. If he could just kill it, some fashion or another, why, he could shove off. Because, you see, his perceptics aren't ordinarily bad.

Now, one of the most astonishing things that is — can happen to somebody is to go along a number of years blind and then get blown up violently enough to exteriorize suddenly with full perception. You generally will find somebody parked around about that point when they've been tortured too much in the life they're living about getting rid of the mock-up. They'll go back and find these astonishing moments, trying to reassure themselves that if they do leave the thing, if they do give it a swift kick, they can still see, still feel, and still find another mock-up. It's fascinating.

Here you have this — the whole of the universe sort of militating against good sense. And good sense is to live fast, live beautifully, and live dangerously. And if you get bashed in, knock it off! Get another one.

But the universe wants to tell you it's all scarce. "You can't get another body — no, you have to patch up that one you have."

That's why I've been telling people here for a year — psychosomatics, ho-hum. And if you as an auditor think you're going to do yourself any good by specializing in knocking out psychosomatic ills, you're going to go downhill. Why? Because you're creating and furthering this whole idea of superscarcity in this universe.

What is a solution to a nonsurvival problem? A solution to a nonsurvival problem is a thing which cuts out the randomity which proceeds from that moment because of nonsurvival. People who go around all the time figuring out how to survive longer are wasting randomity: they're wasting motion, wasting action, wasting adventure. And what do you know? It isn't that I'm saying this, or that this is a philosophy which I have invented for your delection, nor is it that this is — merely makes good reading or good talking, this happens to make excellent processing.

You must understand some of this material quite subjectively in order to recognize what the devil is wrong with a V, VI, VII; why don't these people, you know, snap to, and exteriorize easily?

Well, let's look at the case — just take any case and let's diagnose him. He's got a black field. That in itself is not important — it's not — beyond telling you that he's automatically unmocking everything before it can happen, and he's using the method used by the mest universe itself, which is black space. So he's unmocking things before they happen, which means he is planning for further survival continually — he's on an inversion. These people are very careful, they're very prudent ordinarily, and they're quite clever, and they certainly can make things persist, believe me. Whether it's an aberration or anything else, they'll just drag it out till the last dog is dangling by the neck.

This is the one thing — now, that's obvious about them, but there's something else you might not notice at firsthand. They have collapsed "know" and "not know" so that they are on a maybe. You see, "know" is always the cause end of a communication line, and "not know" is the receipt end of the communication line. And when "know" and "not know" — when the terminals collapse, and it comes right straight together, you see, why, they get on this tremendous maybe of "know-not know." They don't know whether they're there or not there, or so on. That's the appearance they give. But — none of these are important mechanisms, but this one is — this one: They get a mock-up, and you tell them to put it away, and they get it back. They put it away, and it comes back. Now, just watch this, watch this. For instance, how many here, once they've banished a mock-up, are very prone to have it turn up for a little while? Sure. Or when they banish it, they get a little shadow of it. They always have a little shadow of it — same thing.

Now, just go over this exercise:

Mock up a small ball and throw it directly away from you in front. (pause)

What does the ball do? What does it do?

Male voice: It comes back at you.

That's right. What does it do? Did you do that?

Second male voice: Uh, yeah, it's out there still.

Good.

Second male voice: Quite a ways out, though.

Good, fine.

Well, that time when the ball came back tells you of somebody being forced to continue his existence after he's already kicked it off. Just that little exercise tells you that. Just ping — just like that.

Anytime you tell some preclear "All right, now make it disappear. Make it disappear. Now, get another one. All right, now make it disappear," and they say, "What will I do with the first one?" — or if you're very, very clever and alert as an auditor you will say, "Did the first ones come back?" — you all of a sudden know what this case is doing. Same thing as the ball — you can ask this same case to throw the ball away from in front of him, it'll come back and hit him. Or it won't move at all, or it'll just go in random motion. When the ball just goes in random motion, that just tells you that they don't know whether they're there or have left or it's Christmas. The ball just starts whanging around, going into random motion in all directions and so forth, and they can't anticipate it. This is pretty grim.

This just tells you that — this is the reflex. That's "know" and "not know" collapsed together which is a communication line, and it leaves them hung up in the middle of the communication line. They obviously must be in the middle of the communication line if they threw the ball and received the ball, see? So here's a particle en route.

Well, how do they get the idea they're a particle en route? Well, a body almost kicked off, and they had this tremendous struggle: They tried to keep it from becoming unconscious, and then they failed to keep it from becoming unconscious, and being unconscious, tried to leave, and then they had to bring it back to consciousness again because others insisted. You follow that?

First they wanted to be conscious and that was defeated, and then they wanted to be unconscious and shove off, and that gets defeated. And when you get a mock-up which comes back after it's been banished — by the way, sometimes they don't come back for five hours. One guy I knew didn't get them back for about a week. He got them back, though, regularly and uniformly, about a week later. This was what's known as a communication lag. I would say, in such a case, that you have this person back on the track about umpteen billion years, see? I mean, he's been at this and doing it a long time. And don't think it just happens once; it'll happen a lot of times.

How many times have you read about or thought about or you recall, of somebody being unconscious and other people standing around and shoving ammonia at them and cuffing their cheeks and chafing their wrists and shaking them by the shoulders and trying to bring him to?

It even got to be a habit back in the days of Camille — you know, she was the one that made TB popular in America. And here we have this continuous dramatization — everybody's saying, "Persist! Persist! Persist! Persist!" And nobody — ever occurs to anybody he might not want to, except very sadly, "Well, she has ..." — oh, dramatic, you know, three-dimensional, eighty-five foot screen in full color, or back in Vitagraph, with a three-foot screen in full jerk — "Well, she has no further will to live. Send for her son and maybe he can bring her back."

Now, very often with this auditor-preclear arrangement where the preclear "does the bunk," the preclear can only be persuaded to come back for the auditor. But the auditor always persuades him to come back because the society does not permit him to have an inanimate mock-up!

The reason people love murder stories has nothing to do with loving police — there's at least a dead body in them. And the fellow who does an able job of murder writing, who knows that, just mops the field up every time. And he just ruins all his competition — just keep dropping the bodies, fellow. Don't put much mystery around about it, just drop the bodies. (audience laughter) Kill them quick and impressively — big impacts! Slow deaths don't sell well. You can see why.

But an entire society (I don't say this is one — it is, but I am not saying that in this paragraph), an entire society gets to a point of where it's begging to be unconscious. See, it's just dramatizing the organism. Just begging. And all of its mechanisms and everything else it's got set up to keep saying, "Live! Live! Live!" and pretty soon, the whole society is lying around just begging for death, actually. And robots, by this time, are the ones that go along and they do all the work, and they put the food into the mouths, and they turn on the heat at the right time, and change the ventilation systems and move the bodies elsewhere and so forth, ur-ur-ur-ur. That's the way it goes. The universe becomes more and more automatic. For one reason only, and that is, it's rigged to persist. It has no motto but persistence.

The very first fact a person learns when studying about matter — whether in chemistry or physics — is simply this: "it persists," only they call it "conservation of energy." I don't know how they get that fancy phrase out of the mere fact that this stuff can't be destroyed by chemical means — they never add that, you know. They had no proof that this was not true; it just never occurred to anybody to modify the statement to what they really knew. They know that this stuff cannot — they know this completely — that this material, this matter of the mest universe cannot be reduced and vanquished and made to disappear forever by chemical or physical means; that's all they know. See, they don't know anything beyond that.

They could surmise that there could be some kind of a machine called a disintegrator, but every textbook you see on the subject doesn't even permit the disintegrator to appear. So here's the universe dramatizing persistence.

It has a cycle. This is a cycle of this universe, it is not even necessarily the cycle. That's why we're studying this cycle.

And when you're processing somebody in this universe, you have to process time, because that is what is meant by persist. Time, persist, conservation of energy — these are synonyms for our purposes.

Time — any time you say time, you're just saying persist. That is the motto of time. That is what time is, that is what time means. Time means a uniform rate of persistence. And it gets so bad that people can't conceive of the fact that there is no time. And yet all they are is standing suspended, you might say — motionless, not moving, not going anyplace — over a pattern of shifting particles in which they believe. And so we have this incredible picture of a time taking priority, and time driving everybody in every direction.

So we enter into every step, wherever we can, the cycle of action; since the cycle of action is itself time. And we have two things with which we're dealing: We have location, and we have time. Knowingness is senior to both of them. But cycle of action, time, persistence . . . The prayer of anybody in this universe is — of course the ambitiousness of a thetan is fantastic, he's always trying to start something, too — but his prayer as far as mock-ups are concerned, is "My god, someday end it!"

There's Schopenhauer, The Will and the Idea — the "death wish." Men have written about this since man could write. He's written about this desire for death, and nobody has believed much in a death wish. A death wish isn't popular.

In my early studies, I couldn't see where the death wish fitted in, or what it was all about exactly — where it collided with logic and reason. Well, it doesn't. It just happens to be end of cycle, that's all. And if you name it dramatically "the death wish" it becomes incomprehensible to people because they look around and they say, "Well, I don't want to die. I want to live better."

And then you say, "Well, how about your teeth? Let's see, you've got several wisdom teeth, you've got some molars and so forth, and when they start to go to pieces what about that?"

"Well, I'll think about that when that happens."

And you say, "Well, now, you know, people get old, they have heart trouble and that sort of thing, you know."

"Well, no. Well, I'll get through that somehow, I guess. I hope."

They have no wish to go through that; I mean, it's nonsense. Why go through butchering up a mock-up? It's much more fun to be outside doing the butchering. (audience laughter)

But pain itself being scarce, they are on the basis of "they must persist because the pain is too great to die."

As long as death is considered painful, and as long as the soul can be conceived to be punished after death by going to heaven and sitting bored forever — what a wonderful invention! I mean that's the most wonderful invention of the early centuries of the last two millennia — gee, gorgeous. You sat on a cloud thrumming a harp, which was probably out of tune. Yeah, wearing a halo, lit by the courtesy of Yahweh.

Of course, this was an effort to keep people from dying. They painted this wholly colorless, grim, gruesome idea of being bored for an eternity; and they were always careful to say "eternity" too. Or they got burned, see, and burned to a cinder forever. That's real interesting, you see, how you got burned to a cinder forever. They had no slightest concept of the conservation of energy. No wonder a physicist despises some of the religious textbook, you see, because the idea of fire, unfed, persisting forever, is highly untechnical.

So, on the two sides, we have science and religion at war and both of them are not at war at all — they're hand in glove. I think they put on a huge show in order to have a dichotomy.

But when it comes to somebody being free to jettison the mock-up, this is a computation which is kind of new in this universe — kind of new. And it would help you a lot as an auditor to recognize that you could run mock-ups without being too closely associated with them. Not because it's dangerous to be associated with them at all, but they just aren't that — they aren't quite that interesting, and they don't produce enough randomity.

Now, this society is moving at a rate which — well, I'm sure that the rate at which this society is moving would make a turtle seem like a jet plane, as far as it's concerned. It is almost stopped, as far as randomity is concerned.

You can stand down there on the corner for hours and hear lots of fast cars, hear lots of perfectly savage, careless, stupid drivers and everything else. Nobody gets hit! You can stand there for hours — no randomity.

Here are police standing around everywhere — over here in New Jersey, by the way, they're very definitely dramatizing the Fifth Invader. It's just wonderful — you see these Jersey State Police? That is the uniform of the Fifth Invader Force. And "Friendship is dying together" from the Fifth Invader Force — it's gorgeous. I mean, I bet — every one of those cops looks sick; he looks real sick, see? Well, he's keyed in across the boards. But they're carrying this mock-up, and they got to make it persist and make everybody else's mock-ups persist. It is a religion actually — "Let's all get down and pray that our mock-ups persist." The arms fall off and the legs fall off and the eyes fall out and they develop psoriasis and syphilis and we still drag them along the streets, you see? "Make it persist."

What an enemy of beauty that concept is. The dramatization that only a good — the only good paintings there are, are at least three hundred years old is another symptom of this, you see? "All good paintings are old paintings." This is some kind of an effort on the part of an artist who is more sadistic than I care to have around, or an art critic, to make people recognize that it can only be beautiful if it's old or something. This is completely in reverse to the fact of the case.

Now, you go back and look at some of the bodies that have been around on the track — you look at some of these bodies. Well, you go back there about a thousand years and get a good look at it. And go back there a couple of thousand years and get some good looks at it, and they're very beautiful, very beautiful — and boy did they die young.

You know, it's only been the fashion to live for a while in this society here. It's only been the fashion in the last thirty, forty years, fifty years. They've only dragged in this carcass on this continent.

Male voice: How does India stack up on this?

They've got a tremendous philosophy on it: they just say, "Breed like hell, boys, breed like hell — and let the mock-ups fall where they may." Their god Juggernaut is interesting that way; they can always go out and throw themselves under Juggernaut.

Nobody ever objects to anybody in India being found dead. So they're dead. They're dead. They get married when they're twelve or fourteen, kick the bucket when they're twenty-one, twenty-eight — real quick.

The only trouble with the people is, it's too hot there and they key in all the prenatals they've got. It is about 90 — any time you get a climate which is approaching 98.6, you can get the whole prenatal bank keyed in almost perpetually, because that's the temperature in the prenatal bank — 98.6. That's why hot countries turn feminine, so forth, so it's not a hardy country. But way up north, those boys live with kind of wild abandon, too — they always have.

But you go around graveyards of 1870,1880 and start reading the tombstones and here is this old man of seventeen who kicked the bucket and left a wife and two children and so on. It's real young. And here's this old scrooge — this just completely worn-out dog of twenty-eight who lived almost forever — and gee, they were glad when he shoved off. Lived practically forever.

Once in a while somebody puts up his head with 101 years or 110 years old, he is — and expects to be congratulated.

Well, if you don't have the technology, if you don't know how to make a mock-up run pretty easily and how to patch its beauty up and so forth, the best answer — if you can't keep one running persistently beautiful, then the best answer of course, is to get another one.

But in a society where they keep them going regardless of how they look, what can you do? Well, it's as much as your life is worth to get born into this society. I mean you as a thetan — I mean, just as much as a guy is worth.

Boy, they even give him a machine now that chews his rattles for him. And he goes on up to about four or five, and they're going to — they've got all the space opera he could possibly manage, they're going to key all that in on him. And then they're going to — about the age of five he suddenly wakes up to the fact, "You know this stuff doesn't shoot! Huh!" He'll try it on his teacher or something of the sort the first day in kindergarten — it doesn't work.

And then they keep him in a cage for the next sixteen years — great society. Just the place we need for lots of randomity and action and sport and fun. So aesthetic, too. You turn a button and something goes myaah and a picture comes on, which is a horrible grade of picture.

Somebody televised a color program the other night — Donald O'Connor on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" — they did it all in color, but I noticed the set was picking it up in very poor black and white. I finally realized what they were doing with that; they had actually put some color into the TV set in order to televise it in color. It made the black and white pictures look very — really a lot better than they ordinarily look — you know, the black and white screen. It's not pretty, though. Television is just stinking as a picture.

Radio: They just got radio up to a point where it was worthwhile, with FM, where you got some kind of sound that was fairly reliable, and then knocked it out. They couldn't stand that.

So, now they've got movies up to the point, though, where you have — if anybody — an usher were to walk across the stage during the picture, why, he'd have the audience yelling at him for fifteen minutes to get out of the way of the screen. You know, they've got those screens up there now, and it makes the women — oh, about 40-foot amazons or something, they look like. They sort of lean over the audience as though they're about to devour the audience at any moment. And the men — the men there — they're sort of leaning over the audience too; this is tremendous. And trains come by eight times life-size and so on, and the audience sits there and realizes that it's awfully small. They've been told that all during school, and told it every place. And they're less and less significant, and that there's more and more significance to be found.

Anytime you get a society which does not permit anybody to jettison the mock-up, which has everything all rigged up automatically ... If you fell in a fit out here on the street, see, they've got it all rigged up; I mean, ping! ping! ping! you'd be in a hospital, and then you'd recuperate — brother, you sure would, see?

This is interesting, isn't it? That it doesn't — it just doesn't occur to a person that it's not a particularly desirable thing to have around — a society which just keeps on running forever and ever, no changing it, getting more and more solid, and people wanting more and more unconsciousness and wanting less and less pain. And no work — that's the big motto.

And on those gauges — you get with that gauge a pretty decent idea of what man is combating. He's running almost exactly backwards. The idea is if you've got a mock-up, let it be a beautiful mock-up and expend it, see? You can always make a new mock-up. But now, they've made it so complex to get a new mock-up, see? Oh, there's big systems, big communications systems.

You read all about it when you're a kid, you see, and then you're forbidden it all during school, and then you finally propose to the girl, and you court her for a long time, and then you finally marry her with all this and that.

They got this communications system of how you get a new mock-up, see? And then you have a baby and it's not yours. You're still running the same mock-up — what a gyp! You know, if you pry into cases, you'll find out that they're quite upset by this. Every once in a while, they suddenly realize they're not running this new mock-up — they don't have a new mock-up.

Well, all due respect to that, life is neither bad nor good; but it gets over­balanced once in a while, and then somebody gets hard to pry out of his head. Well, how do you pry people out of their head? Well, they certainly can't go on the idea that "everything's got to persist, got to persist, got to persist," and that they "must remain unconscious, must remain unconscious." I mean, you can't pry them out of the head — they're not happy about it either.

What happened to them? They died and they had to live. You can just count on that, see? They dragged around a body that was blind — remember that, in every black case; it's always there — they dragged around a body that was blind, they dragged around one that should have dropped dead, they were brought back into the land of the living. And even now as you process them, sometime in this present life they have been brought back into the land of the living against their will and they're still under protest; and they don't like people for making them do it, either. They'll go on, sort of soberly and somberly and with great protest inwardly, and they'll do some kind of a job outwardly and so forth. But to hell with it! They're still dragging that mock-up. And they want a new one.

Now, as consciousness deteriorates, a person becomes less and less aware of what has transpired. And during the last few decades here on Earth, con­sciousness has gotten so poor that there's been no spontaneous recall on earlier existences, and actually no great awareness on what a person was doing.

Actually, in this universe — those beings that have been in this universe the whole track — it was probably several trillion years ago when they first started to do a flip on real close remembrance of what they were doing, you see? Because the amount of consciousness which a person can have and the amount of consciousness which he has are two widely different things.

Now, "awareness" — consciousness is awareness. Awareness itself is perception. You want to know why this case is black — he's just unwilling to be aware. And he's using time to destroy it all. He's sort of broken down to the point of where he says, "Well, sooner or later it'll wear out." And sure enough, when you ask him to fix up a mock-up, he'll make awful sure that there's some methods of getting eaten up or chewed up or used up in some fashion or another, before he's really going to make a mock-up.

Now, if you were to mock up a big machine which guaranteedly would eat up his mock-ups, he would be very happy to make one. But you're not liable to get him to make one until you get such a guarantee across to him.

It isn't willfulness on his part — he's actually stumbling along, lost in this counterpoint of, one, "We must all survive, and the whole universe must survive, and you mustn't cease to survive at any moment."

See, there are many ways of surviving. It's all — you're all going to survive anyhow. But the point of it is, is somebody saying, "You've got to survive as a unit organism" — boy, is that introducing an arbitrary. I dare say, there have been — there are people right here who have been laboring under this as an onerous arbitrary. There must be at least four or five here. This is an onerous arbitrary.

So they picked the mock-up up out of the wreck, so they picked it up off the operating table, so they went on living. "The hell with them — kill it!" Nope, not against — it's not allowed. They know they're going to be arrested if they'd commit suicide. And they're not even supposed to appear in the between-lives area if they've done something like that. I mean, they're supposed to make it all persist. Rrrh!

Now, you as an auditor come along, and you take this fellow and you say, "All right. Be three feet back of your head."

He says, "To hell with you. You're a human being. You're making me do it. And I don't want it. I haven't got any other mock-up in the first place. I haven't got anyplace to go. I'm lost, like everybody else. So there's nothing you can do about me. (I'll make you persist, damn you — I'll make you persistently audit.) How long are we going to make you audit? Let's see now, uh, huh-huh, rawrrh." And they lick their chops hungrily, and start all out for a thousand-hour session.

Persistence! They're not doing it mean, it is just these factors which are adding up to this conclusion, see? It's just got to persist. All right, they'll make it persist.

Now, there's this one, you know: "Did you ever make your mother wrong by doing exactly what she said? Hm?" That's known as a "white mutiny" in the navy. Everybody does exactly what they're supposed to do, and of course the whole ship will sink, in fact.

Well, people are making people wrong. How are they making them wrong? Well, you go on living and you're making them dead wrong, because it's dead wrong for you to go dragging around the mock-up after a certain period of time.

When a mock-up loses the potentiality of high joy and sensation and high velocity, well, it's time to bury it with, preferably, military honors after some enormously grand sacrifice, you know? Bing! Crash! Boom! Skyrockets, you know? Bang! Lot of randomity, and then everybody says, "Poor old Bill. He served his country; he's gone. He rescued his whole regiment at the cost of his life. And got a 'posthumorous' medal too." (audience laughter) So there's Bill. Well, all right.

You'd be surprised how many times your preclear at the age of twelve, ten, thirteen, fourteen, started thinking: "Gee, if I could only serve my country with my life." You look a little deeper, and he's inquiring for the way out. That would pay for his jettisoning the responsibility he has to his friends and family. So he's trying to equate this. What's the basic solution he's trying to solve?

Every time he solves the problem on the basis of more safety, less death, and so on, he digs himself in deeper; because he is wasting, in the real universe, all future randomity. He's cutting down all car wrecks, he's cutting down all deaths by battle, he's cutting down all this and all that — he's just making randomity short.

It isn't that randomity is death, but you can't have much randomity if you're afraid of dying, and if nobody will let you die, you see? If — fear of death — 'Too much love of living and too much fear of dying makes cowards of us all," somebody said. The hell it does. The mest universe doesn't let you die. And so of course, if you have to be careful not to die, you can't have any randomity. So, boy, does it get dull.

And then they tell you, "Well, you'll be in heaven eight billion years," or an inconceivable time. You're in heaven for fifteen minutes, by the way, only it is not heaven — that in terms of mest time.

Well now, where do we have an entrance to the problem? What process do we use that solves this?

We have just straight, ordinary, routine duplication in Creative Processing. We just duplicate the incident. That's the most basic one we've got, see? And at V level, we can double-terminal it. You know, just double-terminal somebody trying to stay conscious while people want them to be unconscious. And then we double-terminal people wanting to stay unconscious while people want them to be conscious. We could just double-terminal this and get away with it, see? That's about the crudest process.

Well, in view of the fact that your pc doesn't have very much mock-ups or something like that, we could still get away with this. If he puts up his mock-up often enough, he'll eventually get one there. It's wiping out before he puts it up; because he's trying to wipe out a mock-up, and he is damned if he'll put out more mock-ups. They won't let him go free. So he's certain to have an "unmocker" before it's created — certain to have that. It's not too much action which is worrying him, it's too little. And so he answers this with no action. He's in full protest, resistance to the universe. All right, that's our first technique.

Well, what's our next technique? As I say, end of cycle, of course, is a finite stop. You'll find people who have not finished a spiral. Couple of hundred billion years ago, he was in some kind of a spiral, and gee, he was young and he was going to do so much, and they were on their way to attack . . . He had one small — he had one small rocket ship or something of the sort, and he was on his way to attack the main fleet as a complete sacrifice and his starboard tubes exploded because of an engineering error and it blew him up. End of spiral. See, it's just hanging there. He didn't get a stop action; he didn't complete the action.

That isn't a bad one. He'll bring that one out to you and show it to you like a kind of a medal, see.

It's that stinking one where he died in that tenement, without ever having lived. He went on for years and he never lived any of those years. That is the worst of it; he's always waiting for life to begin. And that's much closer to a start, so it's much more persistent and much more severe as a chop of cycle. Because he did get started, he did have a body, but then nothing ever happened. And boy, that guy is — that guy's stuck right there with getting the body. And you'll find people who are stuck in the Assumption have had this happen to them.

If you find somebody hung up badly in the Assumption, he just never considers that he ever got to do anything in this life, that's all. Doesn't matter what he has done — not in terms of action, of color, beauty and drama. He hasn't had these things, so if he hasn't had them, he's just stuck right at the start. And the start was when he was damn fool enough to pick up this particular mock-up and find out that Papa was safety-crazy, and that Mama wouldn't even let him burn his hands, and they put him in a cage and gave him a good education for just years and years, and this guy's just beat, that's all — he just never gets started. He'll be stuck in the Assumption. And you can just conclude, on any case that's stuck in the Assumption, that this is his course of action and he just never got it started — complete lack of drama.

Now, we've got end of cycle on this one. We mock him up trying to resist unconsciousness and succeeding and the other people trying to make him unconscious, perishing. That finishes the cycle of action. See, they're trying to make him unconscious and he kills them. That doesn't appear to be an end of cycle, does it? And yes it is. That's a reflex action.

See, he tried to be conscious, and he succeeded in being conscious. And we know that, because he put a period to the people trying to make him unconscious, see? Nothing to it. All right, that's not a strong end of cycle.

The other one: We mock him up as unconscious — mock up a body as unconscious, preferably two bodies as unconscious, and have him leave. And two more bodies as unconscious and have him leave. And then we're really going to have to complete the cycle of action on the next one, which is to mock up two bodies unconscious, he leaves and the bodies die. But you needn't add that in until you've done it a few times to kind of break him in. But that's the technique. Get them good and dead. Real nice and dead. You know, impossible to survive. You know, cut their throats and fix up their arteries so no blood will pump, and take — bring their heart out and cut it in half and mangle it up one way or the other and so, till we know there's an absolute period on that body.

When you've done this as a cycle of action — the body goes unconscious and he leaves, and the body dies — that's at least an end of a cycle of action. And you'll get some that show up: his dental operation, or an incident two hundred years ago, earlier incidents of when he ran into this planet. This stuff will start pouring off. Do you validate it? No. You just keep running end of cycle, end of cycle.

What's end of cycle? Dead. It's the best end of cycle there is.

The guy landing on a planet, dead. That's a good end of cycle, see? He tried to get to the anchor point, and he got there and he died. And some beautiful sadness of him having executed the mission is liable to turn on, but don't bother to rub it out. More important — end of cycle.

Now, let's run the rest of the end of cycle. He gets to the body-in-pawn area and finds a body. Now we run this one for a while. We get him coming into an area and finding the body alive, and taking it away. And we just keep running this in duplicate mock-ups — that is to say, just making them appear and dis­appear or throwing them away or something of the sort.

And at first, they'll come back like mad. He'll make a mock-up disappear and back it'll come again. And he'll make it disappear and back it'll come again. And if you run it for a while, if the case doesn't know what you're doing, he gets frantic. He just wants to rrrr! All these times when he's safely, carefully, shoved off and — mock-up's spoiled, so what? So what? He shoved off — gone.

Now you're only handling bodies, but you've ended enough cycles on the body that you've solved that problem for him. See, you've got time. He's got this stuff off the time track. He's not trying to finish this, which is in itself the key to persistence — "trying to finish." All right.

What's our next clue on this? You have to handle this as a thetan. Now, what's end of cycle for a thetan? As far as this universe is concerned, to be it and eat it — finish it — boom! That's end of cycle for this universe. Would make us process it out, huh? Just blow it up. Get the idea?

You'd be surprised — thetans would come along early on the track, they'd blow up a planet. Why? Just to put a finite end to something. But that's a finite end for the thetan in this universe. Have him eat it up, blow it up, smack it up, smash it up, expand it up. Do everything there is to do, one after the other — any way you could think of finishing off the mest universe.

Now, we're not teaching destruction or advising destruction, it just so happens we're talking about life and the spirit's action with regard thereto. And the second we study this, we find out that the beast of a jungle is a pantywaist. He's a punk.

It's a symptom of thetans, by the way, that their teamwork long ago deteriorated, and now it's come back together again as a body. And you will start pushing somebody up the track, and his own teamworkingness is liable to deteriorate, and then come back.

It is real rare, you know, that a thetan — most thetans that you see around, they won't talk to you and so on. They don't have anything to say, unless you're just hypnotically strong, as far as they are concerned. They just — you kind of trance them and then they chatter. Fantastic, but true.

They're quite scared; they're quite leery. That is, every time they have a mock-up, somebody's stolen it.

What's he trying to do? He's trying to put up a mock-up that is beautiful, that will produce some randomity and do something. And he's trying to keep others from interfering with the game.

Now, how many ways are there to stop a game? And one of them is "make it continue forever." And that's the way you really stop a game. And to my calculation this game has been stopped, on mest time for itself, about two hundred billion years. It's really been on crutches.

Why, you know, the fastest spaceships were going here a relatively short time ago, a million years or so ago — about the fastest they were going was fifty, sixty light-years. They just slowed down to a stop — hardly anything.

I imagine now if there's saucers out there or something like that, they're probably traveling at five hundred thousand miles a second, if that — slow.

Now, the point I'm making here is, how many ways are there to stop a game? Well, actually, for thetans, the best way to stop one is start one; that stops a game. There isn't any reason to blow up the playing field — no reason, no good reason, if you can just start a game for it. So you might as well set your mind to what you're doing.

If you continue to process on the basis that you think all of this super-survival, drag it out as a unit organism, is desirable, that pain is detestable, that unconsciousness is desirable, why you're going to have an awful hard time processing a V — because that happens to be a lie, those things happen to be a lie.

Unconsciousness is not desirable. You want better perception, you'll have to give him more consciousness. Pain is desirable, work is desirable, and end of cycle, always — end of cycle. And he's left and come back, and the mock-up which a V is running at this very second — this very second — the mock-up which that V is running ceased to serve him properly, according to him, many, many years before.

Now maybe you can process such a case with a little understanding.

That's all.