And this is January the 18th, 1954.

Amd this is the afternoon lecture of January the 18th, 1954.

The earlier lecture, which was a theoretical lecture on time, is actually necessary to this lecture. Time-time and havingness, time and particles.

You have some feeling, obviously, at this stage of the game and it’s very funny that I was going to talk about this very thing and it happened to come up at this very moment: as soon as you start running the processes which we’re running, an individual’s “time sense,” so called, starts having things happen to it. You can fully expect this to occur with your preclear. If it doesn’t occur, then you just aren’t auditing him on these particles and differentiations. Something is wrong-the way you’re auditing him.

You can get all fogged up about time if you want to, but about the only barrier that is the apparently untappable barrier is time. But an examination of this theory and practice will unbaffle you with great speed as far as time is concerned.

Communication lag and time sense are intimately connected and an individual who has a long communication lag can be particularly liable to this disruption of time sense because you’re directly mauling his survival pace. And his time sense starts to go off and it gets better and it gets worse and it gets foggy and it gets stretched and it gets condensed in various ways.

Time, the barrier. And, I repeat, you’ve heard this remark often. It is quite important: The MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. The MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. When all seems lost, for God sakes, look at that. When all seems lost, that one will bring you out of the wilderness. It’s a game consisting of barriers.

Now, you’re going to have to readjust somebody’s time sense and put him in—to a large degree-put him in command of time, for him to have a change of survival pace.

And at first, the individual consents to a certain series of barriers and these become very solid and very real to him and so he plays a game. Then the next thing that happens is he begins to conceive that there are more barriers than there are and he gets up to a situation where he thinks there are “thought barriers.”

Now, there are many ways we can go about exteriorization and better exteriorization. And most of these ways are infinitely tricky. They are very tricky. As a matter of fact, there isn’t anybody I can’t fish out of his head in a relatively short space of time. To expect him to stay there without an adequate adjustment of his time sense is asking a little too much, because he is unable to impose space between two terminals.

You know, “I can’t think about certain things because if I think about certain things, I would have to go out beyond that barrier” and, of course, he can’t go beyond that barrier because-he knows he can’t go beyond that barrier because there isn’t any barrier there. But that’s true of the whole universe: there is no barrier there. But the “thought barrier” is down there at the last stage after Effort, you know, that’s why Effort and then Think-why they come together in that order on the scale from Know down to Sex. There’s Effort and then, under that, Thinkingness.

Now, let’s go back to 8-80 and we discover that in 8-80 an individual is able to interpose, at will, space between terminals in ratio to how well-off he is. In other words, an individual is as well-off and has as much (quote) “force” (unquote) or (quote) “power” (unquote) or (quote) “personal magnetism” (unquote) or (quote) “competence” (unquote) or (quote) “confidence” (unquote) as he is able to impose space or delete space from between two terminals. Now, any particle is a terminal and so you see what the combination is there. You see that?

Well, all right, the fellow gets here, he sees this wall, he looks at the wall and he says, “That’s a fine wall” and so forth. Well, that’s the barrier he agreed upon and then these others sneaked in on him. And he begins to believe that any action or motion which he undertakes will find, intervening between him and it, a barrier-one of the several types of barriers which there are in the MEST universe.

Now, Change of Space auditing is far, far too drastic for a case of IV, V, VI and VII. It’s just plain too drastic. A person in his body, not exteriorized, holding on madly, that you start to run between points A and В in the universe, will to some degree go there. He will at least put terminals in these two places, he will at least reach for them, withdraw from them. And the next thing you know, you have some tremendous somatic turn on or the individual becomes frantic and wants to run away. And if you care to conduct this experiment, you will find that you can classify a group simply by running Change of Space Processing in this wise: “Be in the next room.” “Be in your home.” “Be in this room.” “Be in the next room.” “Be in your home.” “Be in this room.” And after you’ve run that for a very short space of time, your cases IV and below will have either left the group, become ill or will simply be sitting there in a dazed apathy. They want nothing more to do with this.

And those barriers are very few and they’re very specific and there aren’t any additional barriers to them. The first barrier is space and the second barrier is energy. You know, you could have an area so-space so flickeringly dangerous in terms of energy that an individual would not like to cross it. So that becomes an energy barrier and this, when condensed, becomes an object barrier. An object is a wall, a truck-anything which can stand in the road. And the next barrier out from this is, of course, time. And that is the hardest barrier to define, because it exists so that the playing field will continue and so that the events which have taken place on the playing field will no longer be on the playing field in that form. And so time, as an invention, is quite a barrier.

Now, if you persist and keep it up, you will turn on some of the finest somatics they have ever had and they’re liable to be chronic for two or three days. So obviously this process is not the approach for somebody who is not yet exteriorized. Because you’re asking him to impose space, one way or the other, between a couple of terminals-which is to say, his body and home, his body and the next room, even his body and this room. And as you ask him to do this, then, you’re asking him to generate power.

Now, the problem of livingness is an obstacle race with regard to these barriers. It is an obstacle race, really, in the sense of we’ve got to travel from spot A to spot B, but it’s one that must persist through time. So we get an almost indefinable barrier and then say that an individual has to tour through and cross this barrier. Well, there’s no crossing it, of course. You could just sit still in one place and if you maintained yourself in a state of sanity, you would eventually have crossed the time barrier. There’s nothing to this. It does not require travel.

Well, as soon as you start asking him to generate power, all he does is turn on the juice into his automaticities which furnish him somatics and so forth. You disarrange his power supply lines and he gets into some interesting states, to say the least. In view of the fact that he’s holding on very hard, this generally subsides in about three days, sometimes ten days. But this is merely a manifestation of imposing or deleting space between terminals.

Now, an individual will get confused on this and people have this: they think the future is over to the right, the past is over to the left, present is out in front of them and various combinations of this character. And they think time has direction.

Now, in view of the fact that time itself depends upon an ability to recognize the change of position of actual particles, MEST universe time is, then, to some degree, dependent upon this power ability. A person is unwilling to impose space between two terminals and yet, in the MEST universe we find space between those two terminals. And the individual then puts force and power of his own against these two terminals in order to crush them together or stretch them apart, as the case may be, and fails to do so. This leaves him stuck with a pattern of these particles in his own universe and in his own bank. You understand that?

Well, this is all very interesting, because time doesn’t have direction. And yet, by getting through time, they think that they should get across an area of space. And so we get a preclear being very upset about staying in one place or maintaining himself stationary or immobile. He feels, then, that he is not keeping up with the game because he is not going across something. So we get a very hectic state and the thing called time, according to one of the Axioms of the Logics and Axioms of 1951, is the single arbitrary that causes aberration. Therefore, any process which handles time is actually of great benefit.

Now, he has a bypass circuit which comes back to the MEST universe, by the way, but we won’t tamper with that just now. The point is that we’ve left him hung up on the time track. If you don’t believe this, you can take a small boy or a man and ask him to stand between the sides of a door and press very hard with the backs of his hands against the sides of the door and stand there for two or three minutes pressing very hard in that fashion. You see, his hands are down and the backs of them are against the sides of the open door and you simply ask him to shove against the open door. Now, you ask him to step out away from the open door and his arms will go up in the air. Well, that power that he put into it there must still be persisting. And if you ask somebody who has just done this to feel the pressure of the open door again, they can with great ease. In other words, there is, in small view, sticking somebody slightly on a time track.

An individual has to have some clarity on the subject of what is space and what is an object and what is energy, in order to understand what is time. But that you handled all the space on the case would not mean that you had handled all the time on the case. So, our ultimate in processing is to get this time barrier nailed down, so that time becomes a very important thing to processing. The moment that we had a direct process for time, processing itself became a very easy thing.

Well now, an individual can be stuck just endlessly, you might say-1 mean, that’s stated wrong, he’s not stuck-but an individual can put energy against things and pull energy out of things and in general handle energy indefinitely without suffering any symptoms whatsoever. And as a matter of fact, he jolly well better had handle energy of various kinds if he’s going to stay around this universe.

Now, when we speak of more obstacles, let’s look over the problem of knowledge. And we find out that an individual cuts down his knowingness, at first, by creating space and saying he doesn’t know what’s over there. Space is antipathetic toward knowingness because it requires lookingness in order to know. Before one has space, of course, one simply knows.

But it is only when he has recognizably failed and refused to fail, at the same time on the same line, that brings him into a condition where he has a number of patterns of particles which remain a duplicate of past forces and energies. And there’s just as much force and energy in his bank as he has exerted in the past that has failed.

Now, the low-toned case, by the way, can get into a beautiful state of confusion and get down there in thinkingness and start pervading energywise all over the place. And he gets buttered all over the universe and he thinks that he’s in a high state of knowingness.

Now, he has to be up above the level of failure in order for him to continue on down the track and exert a great deal of power and energy and force. It is his fear of energy and his fear of failure which in themselves are aberrative and the reason why he continues to keep these patterns around. You see, he tries to close terminals with them and they are not to be closed terminals with. And he resists them, he resists failure and finally becomes a failure. This sort of thing continues on indefinitely, but this individual is not in present time who is doing this. The concatenation of experiences has at last (quote) “taught him” (unquote) that he will do nothing but fail and so he keeps all his past failures around in a highly restimulated state in order to prove it. The highest level on this is “prove it,” convincing, so forth.

Well, he’s in a high state of guessingness, but he’s not in a high state of knowingness. This is the mockery side of the Tone Scale.

I received a letter from some ambulant escapee from a state sanitarium this morning who said that “Yes, the evident truth of what I was saying was very evident, but what it really needed was for someone to come along and prove it and for me to prove it very convincingly.” He didn’t happen to realize just exactly where he was dramatizing.

They got that way pretty badly in the East (I mean, by that, India) and it confounds a person very much that their knowledge is so uncoupled to certainty itself. Well now, certainty itself is an upper echelon of-а very high upper echelon of certainty. Certainty and knowledge are the same thing.

It isn’t up to me to prove it. And it isn’t up to him to sit around and wait for it to be proven. If he thinks he wants to make something better out of his life and the lives of others, then he’d really better get in and pitch, he’d better find out himself.

Well, this inverts to a point where an individual takes his only certainty in terms of a playing field. And a playing field is of the essence, he thinks, in terms of action, motion and continued interest.

But the level of knowingness of a person to whom something has to be proven is quite low, of course. Things are either true or they’re not true and when you start adding proof on top of it, you’re in a continuous “prove it, it’s true, it’s not true” and all of that, right on down the line. Well, time factors alter from case to case, very markedly, and it’s most observable in the communication lag. It would surprise you that some people who think they are talking-who are talking very slow, think they are talking quite rapidly. They think they are being pressured, they feel that they are being rushed in their speech and yet they are uttering speech at the rate of twenty-five, twenty words a minute. And they think that this is just a giddy speed.

All right When we have time as an obstacle, we of course don’t have a span. And time only becomes an obstacle because it confounds the individual who is having trouble with space. Individual has trouble with time, he has trouble with space; he has trouble with space, he has trouble with time. That’s because space is conquered by removing one’s self or his viewpoint between A and B. Space is conquered then by travel and time is not conquered by travel.

And other people who are speaking at two hundred words a minute feel they are talking very slowly. This is just a matter of speed.

In science fiction we have “time travel.” That’s terribly interesting and, in spite of any remark I might have made to the contrary earlier by a year or something like that, the past is not attainable, nor is the future itself attainable. But one can know what has been in the past and one can know what has been in the future, mostly because where pure knowingness is concerned, there is neither past nor future. And where the universe is concerned itself, there is only, in terms of time, a changing pattern of particles. And this changing pattern of particles itself brings about an illusion which we know as time and time is an illusion.

So slow and fast, like bad and good, are matters of consideration. That’s all they are, they’re just matters of consideration. A few years ago, somebody going down the road at twenty miles an hour in an automobile was considered a speed demon and was liable to arrest. Nowadays he gets cursed if he isn’t going fifty. Just consideration against survival pace: how fast do they think they have to go in order to keep on going?

Now, an individual can predict the position of particles as well as he can know. He can’t predict them any better than that. The problem of competence is, in itself, the problem of confidence. Competence is the ability to predict two particles, their position in relationship to each other-that’s two plus particles, more than two particles, at least two. One particle has no position. I mean, there’s just one particle and there’s no other particle to relate it to, so it has no position.

Well, you can expect your preclear to manifest various things, such as upset with the length of time he’s being audited-with the length of auditing sessions and so forth. The second you start to run these formulas here about particles, he will get upset. And I don’t mean that he’ll get mildly upset, he will get very upset sometimes. It’d seem to him as he sat there for an hour and a half, it’d seem to him that he was audited for ten minutes. Or it would seem to him as he sat there for an hour and a half that he was audited five hours.

Now, the first particle, of course, gets its assigned position just by simply saying it’s there and the second particle gets its position by saying that another particle is next to it.

A person who does not, by one session, get an upset time sense isn’t being audited well. Upset his time sense. And that is a little higher than communication lag. You better change his communication lag. Well, you don’t ask about a person’s time sense, you ask about his perception changes.

People get to believe that the universe, then, has a “prime post unposted”-they think there’s a basic particle to which all other things relate. They get this mixed up with God and we have a Prime Mover Unmoved. But the position of this particle and all other things relative to that particle would be a very orderly way of having a universal time and so forth. It doesn’t work that way, however. Every particle in this universe is in relationship to every other particle in this universe.

Therefore, an individual time lag and an individual communication lag are comparable things. But they are not the same thing. Time is the co-motion of particles and a communication is a uniform flow of an impulse or particle. Time is not composed of the co-action of impulses. It is composed of the co-action of particles.

Now, a thetan can simply step sideways from this type of particles, which you might say MEST universe particles, and create his own particles, create his own timespan and his own universe. And as a consequence, we have a problem in three universes, so we have a problem in three times. But the time in the MEST universe is a very simple thing. It simply depends upon particles moving in relationship to particles, without any particle being the prime particle.

An individual, then, can communicate instantaneously. And time can’t go instantaneously unless it itself is theta, which is a no-particle problem. Now don’t think, too, that the individual can’t manufacture particles. He can. And he can put them on a different time sense. And it’s quite amazing to some people in this universe to have some thetan figure something out, spend a long time doing it according to him, you see, test it in numerous ways and then give him the data, because in MEST universe time, a second elapsed. And yet the thetan went off and wandered around and thought about it and leaned against the molding and the Sun and did a terrific number of things, merely because he was flying free from the co-action of particles. So therefore, time was to him meaningless. He made his own timespan. He merely said, “Now, I’m going to take a long time,” did, and came back a second later.

Individuals, however, believing there is a prime particle, will conjure up one and say, “Well now, this is the particle by which I am relating all other particles.” And an individual can use-for instance, let’s take somebody who lives in a mountainous country and there’s a big, nice mountain up there and it’s sitting up there very, very visible against the sky and it seems to be utterly timeless. And the relationship of people to the mountain would be his concept of time and that would be his concept of position.

Well, time is an arbitrary of this universe or an arbitrary of any universe, which means “What is the rate of change of particles relative to my consideration?” You see, that’s “the relativity always comes back to my consideration.” “What is the rate of change?” A person says this to himself.

Now, there sits the mountain-that’s “prime post unposted.” And “Joe is gone” means Joe is gone away from this mountain. “Joe has been gone away from this mountain many motions of Mary,” you see. And that means he’d been gone a long time.

And then when he gets into interpersonal relationships, he says, “according to my and their considerations.” And then when he first enters into interpersonal relationships, it’s “theirs” compared to “their” relationships and he doesn’t consider that he’s being asked about it at all. He doesn’t care that he is or isn’t. And then that goes dwindling down to a point of where only he asks himself or in his own universe, he just asks himself. So you have comparable things here.

You know, Mary has been going back and forth to an office for two years, but this two years-we’ve gotten into the big trap of a symbol. What it actually is, is Mary has been going back and forth to this office so many times. See, back and forth to this office, all the time we’ve got-and the office is in relationship to this mountain, so her relative motion in relationship to the mountain... See, the office is transient, you can’t depend on that office, but you can depend on that mountain. So, we get Mary going back and forth that many times and Joe being gone that many times Mary has gone back and forth, you see? And so we get, then, what a person refers to and calls “a long time.”

Quite ordinarily, at this stage of a process, you could expect individuals to conceive themselves to be without sufficient time, for instance, to finish off a case or with far, far too much time to have to work at all. And you can expect this to shift quite uniformly, quite regularly.

But this thing called time is, you might say-there are several types of symbols and one of them is, of course, the undefined symbol. It’s a symbol which is a meaningless symbol, and it’s that which throws language for a loop. Language becomes aberrative to the ratio that it has in it undefined symbols, so nobody has defined this thing called “time.” Everybody kind of knows what you mean when you say “time.” And nobody came along and said what time was.

A fellow goes out and has lunch and finds out he’s occupied five minutes of MEST time in this and he can’t quite figure out how he ate lunch that fast because he’s never eaten lunch that fast before. And yet he distinctly remembers flirting with the waitress and distinctly remembers taking a long time to examine the menu and so on. And he glances at his watch and he’s taken five minutes to eat lunch. And this is very peculiar to him and he says, “Something is very strange here.” Of course, it depended upon the service. And then the waitress, of course, she took a finite length of time in order to have the order passed back and the cook took a certain amount of time to put it on a plate and they took a certain amount of time to bring it in. And all of this seemed to have gone off at a very, very slow rate, you see, it was very lazy and nothing to it and so forth. And five minutes later, he’s back out on the street again and he looks at his watch and he says, “For goodness sakes, what has happened to me?”

A physicist doesn’t know what time it is. If you want to see somebody rocky on his pins on the subject of time, you go talk to a physicist. You talk to a physicist about time and he immediately starts wildly chattering about space. It hasn’t anything to do with time. He starts talking about the speed of something and when it exceeds this constant of c, why, it foreshortens invisibly because of the common denominator of poop. Well, it’s pure balderdash!

Or he gets this terrifically rushed hectic luncheon whereby he didn’t have a moment to spare and he just pushed it all the way through and everybody was operating very, very fast. And everything was going very fast in order to bring about this condition of speed. And fifty-five minutes later, he walks out on the street again and with nervous indigestion over the terrific rush and how fast he had to eat his lunch-and fifty-five minutes has passed by and where could it possibly have gone? Because he rushed the whole time, you see, and everybody else rushed too! Rather fabulous.

A particle, by the way, gets up above c with great ease. That’s one of the most obvious things, because, you see, if a particle couldn’t move above c and couldn’t move at c-which was Einstein’s latest adventure into Alice in Wonderland’s wonderland—his latest adventure was that, “at the speed c, everything stopped forever.” He’s trying to get things stopped, he’s up there at Princeton and Princeton has got things pretty badly stopped anyhow. They have a lot of gray granite that sits around-it’s architecturally very perfect-but their idea of speed ends with trying to get somebody to class.

Now, where we depart is just in this thing: consideration. And it shows up nowhere as rapidly as it does in time considerations. Then somebody will be going along and he’ll get what they call-I think it’s called deja vu. (I interpret rather rapidly across the French line and I think it ought to be called the joie de vivre.) [laughter] But anyway, the deja vu is where the person knows, really, that he was right there before and he’s been there before and he seems to know exactly what is going to happen next because he remembers it all.

When he announced this, he announced one of the most idiotic things which science has been presented for a long time. But he’s a boy, he’s right there, you know, with the atomic wizards and all that sort of thing and they’re-all think this too. And they’ll speculate and talk about this and they get wilder and wilder and more and more symbolical and symbolical until they get lost.

Well, this is a very simple thing to do-it comes very close to discovering how you’re postulating the future. And you get a sneaky little creep-in toward that particular piece of automaticity and you get this deja vu.

Look, if 186,000 miles a second brought a particle to a full stop, the sunlight would never reach Earth. It happens to be traveling at 186,000 miles a second, so obviously it can’t move to Earth. And yet this terrific simplicity would just miss the boys entirely. Why? Because they’re wandering, see, into this vast morass of symbols which are undefined.

Now, you can turn deja vu on at will with a preclear simply by making him tamper with his prediction machine in this wise: He says, “All right, now I’m going to predict that a sunbeam is going to come down through the window and land on the floor.” (Of course, there is a sun coming in the window, see.) “Now I’m going to predict that another sunbeam... Now I’m predicting that a flood of sunbeams are coming down and landing on the floor.” And we go on this way and we take-just as though he’s putting the whole room and the whole system together.

A mathematician gets into beautiful condition-he puts down lambda and a half a dozen other symbols and then he defines them for you and if they don’t fit in his equation, he defines them some other way half way through the equation. He’s just as happy as can be to do this.

“Now I’m going to predict that Mars is going to swing a little bit further on its orbit and I’m going to predict that Earth is going to turn a little bit more on its axis.” And he goes on this way, see? You carefully make him, little by little, put everything together and he all of a sudden gets his time, his co-action of particle sense, so disrupted-and he continues this-that the world sort of starts to cave in on him.

Well, you see that, don’t you, that you’d never have sunlight on Earth if light stopped at 186,000 miles a second. As a matter of fact, in space opera, a ship is going slow at five light-years, that’s five times 186,000 miles a second. Otherwise, you’d just be forever between galaxies.

Now, it’s an interesting experiment, but conduct it just as an experiment. It isn’t good auditing, particularly. About as close as you want to get to that is letting the wall be a wall. And you’ll bring him back into a better functioning machine rather than knocking that machine out.

I’m not now talking and using space opera to controvert the great brains of atomic physics, but it seems like a few tubemen and so forth, up in space, could give them a lot of lessons. Because here is an idiocy that any child can see: that we’d never get any Sun shining on us if Einstein’s theory was correct-which it doesn’t happen to be.

Well, the fact of the matter is, as far as processing is concerned, an individual is in his head and is stuck and without extra viewpoints to the degree that he is unwilling to let particles separate or come together. He is in as much agreement or disagreement with the society around him as he is willing to let particles go apart and the society wants the same particles together and he wants particles apart and the society wants them together. By society, I also mean his family. For instance, the workman doesn’t want himself there at his workbench. But society in all of its facets seems to want him there at the workbench. In other words, the society wants to keep the body and the workbench together and the workman wants to get them apart. And so he’s in a continuous argument on the subject of work.

All right. This adds up to this fact that we have a Sun here which has a series of particles moving from it at such velocity and in such abundance that we cannot count them and you could not look at the Sun today and look at the Sun tomorrow and see any difference between the two Suns.

And this in itself is argument. And the basis of all argument has to do-whether or not two or more particles are apart or two or more particles are together. And if you’ll just listen to a few arguments going on, the worst arguments, you will get your cue as to the very fundamental character of particle positions.

Now, possibly by some very, very, very intricate system of measurement and with a great deal of equipment and that sort of thing, you could count the number of photons and probably find that it would change from day-to-day and time to time or you could measure sunspots and you would find that these, too, would grow and shrink. But snnspots are kind of funny. For a month, without alteration, I have watched a sunspot traveling around the Sun. The Sun moves very, very slowly, really. It has a period of revolution just like Earth has. And you can watch these sunspots and you can watch them travel across the face of the Sun, but they wouldn’t be very good to tell you what day it was because they themselves are changing at a vast rate of speed on the face of the Sun. In other words, here’s an indeterminate particle.

But remember this about this process: that as long as you’re processing it, you are actually processing the MEST universe, you are actually processing the Sixth Dynamic. And it’ll only take just so much processing without showing the strain. So remember to get it off a little bit closer to truth, which is to process some nothing. You can say that everybody who argues is arguing about nothing. All their arguments break down to nothing and a few months afterwards, if you made them go over the argument again, the chances are they would find that they had been arguing about nothing at the time. Because the truth of the matter is that there is a nothingness of particles. And of course, keeping particles and people apart and together and so forth makes an interesting game.

7 Well now, let’s take the Sun, however, and find that we have another orb going around the Sun, which is Earth, and this describes a vast orbit around the Sun and therefore we have two particles. And so the other particles are so small and so mixed up that we couldn’t tell by that exactly what time it was, so we have to look at the two particles-Earth and the Sun-in order to get some idea of time. But if you just had these two particles, you would have to add a lot of knowingness to know what time it was, too.

Now you think, possibly, that your postulates may occasionally override your concepts of spaces. You know, you make a new postulate and then you become very disappointed because it didn’t work. You know, you say such and such is going to happen now and now boom, that’s going to work. And boom, it doesn’t work. And boom, you feel you’ve made a big failure out of a postulate.

See, but you could observe something about Earth. You could observe from any given spot on Earth, a consistent look and you would find that there was a tilt going on. You know, as Earth gets around, it’s on a tilted axis and so the tilt itself would give us the idea that Earth was in motion with relationship to the Sun. And in addition to that, Earth has another motion: it rotates and so the Sun is visible and then not visible.

Well, the answer to this is, is can you out-postulate your own machinery?

If you were standing off in space someplace and looking at Earth and looking at the Sun, you’d never know what time it was. See, I mean, it wouldn’t tell you a thing. It takes a much more minute observation from the knowingness angle, that is, the data angle on the surface of the Earth, to use these two items for time. Because you have to be down there on Earth and notice the position of the Sun in relationship to the horizon on Earth in consecutive days in order to see that we were advancing in terms of time. Well, advancing and retarding and that sort of thing.

One of the quickest ways to get an Operating Thetan into a fine state of spiralism is to ask him to out-postulate a postulate he has just set up to “resist all effects.” Now he’s just set up this postulate to resist all effects: that everything he creates now in terms of a mock-up will be blue. And he makes this, he sets it up, it makes it very workable, he sets it aside, he hides it, he forgets about it and so forth and now you tell him to make a purple mock-up.

All we would notice, really, that the Sun and the horizon were altering position. Let’s take every day the Sun goes across, but that’s uniform, every day the Sun goes across. Okay. Well, is it higher or lower in relationship to the horizon? And that would give you time. So that time requires what? It requires a viewpoint, you’ve got to have a viewpoint in order to see this. If you didn’t have a viewpoint, why, you know, some scientist could come along and say, “Well, you look-a-here, you could get a viewpoint there, you could put a little recorder down on Earth and this recorder would take the angle of the Sun to the horizon and so forth and it would write it down right there what time it was.

And he says, “Well, all right.” And he says, “Now,” he says, “a purple mock-up will appear.” He gets one that’s part blue and part purple and the purple turns from red back to blue and so on. If he’s actually forgotten the thing thoroughly (and a good Operating Thetan should be able to forget his postulates in a hurry and dig them up again without any trouble), he will become very confused as to why he can’t make this mock-up. He’ll be in a fine state till you tell him to dig up the machine and throw it away, at which time he can make another one. Now he can make a postulate.

And you’d say, “Who’d read the recorder?”

But “prior postulate” is in itself a built-in automaticity which comes from an effort to agree with time. A person agrees that his earlier postulate is going to have more force and duration than his later postulate. He has to agree to this so as to have time be effective and for his machinery to carry along in the (quote) “time stream” (unquote) so that he’s got a senior postulate. He’s working on senior postulates all the time, above which he mustn’t tamper.

“Oh well, you could have a robot that would read the recorder and so forth.”

Now, people who say you mustn’t tamper with the human soul, you mustn’t tamper with the mind, you mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that, are just dramatizing like mad that they mustn’t out-postulate themselves. There’s two reasons for this. One is that if you started shattering all the postulates, if you could at a glimpse scatter away all the postulates you’d made in the past, just at a breath, rather than just take them up one by one or ten by ten or class by class, you would find yourself in a confused state. You would get a disorientation in time. And this threatened disorientation restrains an individual from suddenly saying “I’m Clear” or “I’m totally self-determined.”

“Who would wind up the robot?”

Because what is this? This is just a new postulate which is sitting after the machine which is going to make all mock-ups blue. We get the same thing.

“Oh well, of course, you could have these robots turned out...”

Now, the trouble with him is, is he gets excited and lays in postulates which are good for the moment but that he makes continue forever. For instance, the fellow who has just been left by a woman is apt to sit down and say, “Never under any circumstances, at any time, will I let myself be persuaded to be polite to, nice to or look at another woman!” And he lays this down with malice aforethought and he booby-traps it for himself and so forth. “Well, if I find myself looking at one, I’ll make myself so sick that...” and so on. (Now, maybe somebody here has made such a postulate about life or something of the sort.) Now, he seals that all in, he determines it like mad and then he goes down the street and he meets this beautiful girl. And he says, “Gee, that’s all right.” And a few days later he feels sick. And he says, “Look what the gods are doing to me.” The gods are always there, defenseless and ready to blame.

“Who would build them?”

All right. Therefore, we get back to the manifestations we had on Postulate Processing-remember old-time Postulate Processing. But we weren’t taking it apart as well then. You could make the fellow remember the time-first time he ever wished he’d get sick. The first thing a preclear always does, of course, is look at you and say, “Oh no, I never wished myself sick! I just got this way, I...” lots of causes.

“What do you mean putting this ‘who’ in here all the time. We hate people!” [laughter] That’s the immediate answer to that. It takes, actually, a viewpoint to measure this thing called time.

And you say, “Well, how about school? How about school?”

Now, the funny part of it is that radium does a kind of a cockeyed job of measuring time. It deteriorates at a certain rate of speed. But to have time, who observed its whole mass to get its half mass? Radium doesn’t care what time it is, nobody cares what time it is. The universe would just go run on and on and on and on and on and on and on without anything happening at all with relationship to time if somebody didn’t care what time it was. So, we’re just looking at it in a complete reverse when we say, “Well, matter establishes time.” It doesn’t. You establish time and you know what time it is because you know what time it is and there’s just about-that’s the end of it. And then you prove it to yourself by seeing two particles in position with relationship to each other.

“Oh well, that’s, ha-ha, that’s different.”

You should be able to have a time factor sharp enough so that you would be able to look at these two particles, one to the other, and tell what time it was in relationship to some other time. But a time is always in relationship to another time unless you simply know what time it is.

But of course he’s wished himself sick many times.

Knowingness itself is the only thing which can exist without a dichotomy. Certainty can exist without a dichotomy. A person can be certain without being more certain than and less certain than.

Now, in order to go along on the time stream, he, of course, plots his actions against . the motion of particles. And this is letting time be determined for him by some exterior determinism. So he lets all these particles determine the time for him. He lets the Sun tell him the time and the Moon tell him the time and whether or not he’s driving his old Ford or a Packard tell him the time, you see? Whether or not he’s an adult or an infant tell him the time. And for each one of these, he’s supposed to act in some particular fashion. Automaticity on the basis of: at five I am supposed to-at three, at two I am not supposed to.

So, we have walked out of the universe, because this is a double pole universe-two side universe-plus and minus. And we’ve walked out of the universe the second we enter in knowingness. And so, therefore, using this universe as a stopwatch or something to tell us what time it is all the time is kind of silly. It’s a rather large watch and wouldn’t fit well in your pocket at all.

The amount of machinery of this character which is kicking around the bank is fabulous. And you’ll find some of it get kicked in on somebody who’s forty or fifty and they gurgle and glog instead of talk. He’s got a postulate, set of postulates and automatic machines-an automatic machine, of course, is nothing in the world but a set of postulates hidden and forgotten, that’s all it is. And he’s got these postulates sitting there and “At one and a half I am not supposed to be able to walk or talk.” That’s what it says, right there. And so at one and a half he can’t walk or talk. Now, when he’s seventy-one he starts the cycle all over again and all of a sudden he can’t walk or talk. Well, he’s kicked in the wrong machine at the wrong place and there he goes. The people down in the sanitarium just simply try to outguess their old postulates and so forth.

These watches that you carry, of course, are set, wound up, taken care of, all in relationship to the position of Earth and the Sun. Well, the position of Earth and the Sun is so crude-Earth runs twenty minutes ahead and twenty minutes behind in its rotation. It loses a day on the swing. There’s an awful lot of odds and ends of disrelated data entering into time on Earth. Till somebody comes along and tells you very convincingly (he has to use a loud voice to be that convincing) that-he tells you what time it is, because he points to a clock face or a stopwatch. And you can laugh at him because the clock face and the stopwatch is set up on the most jerry-rigged time system you ever heard of.

But letting the MEST universe tell you what time it is, is of course equivalent to desiring the MEST universe to furnish you the materials of havingness continually. If the MEST universe always furnishes you the materials of havingness, it will then furnish you with time and it will, therefore, be able to dictate and pinpoint your actions exactly. See that? So that you’ve set up the bigger automaticity, the MEST universe, to tell you, the smaller automaticity, what’s going to happen.

If you wanted to get some historical idea of what time was all about in terms of watches, it would amuse you very much. If you wanted to look it over, you would be tremendously amused because the number of hours the day has been divided into and how many hours the day hasn’t and has and all the rest of that and how many times this has been done this way and that way, rather shakes one’s faith in that twelve-hour dial. This is a very silly gradient, by the way-to divide a day into twelve hours.

So a person doesn’t want to be able to out-postulate his own postulates. If he were able to out-postulate all of his own postulates, he’d find himself sitting in a vacuum. That’s all, he’d just find himself sitting in a vacuum. Be no air, be nothing, he’d just be right there. And this would be hard for him to get connected up again, because he’d take the whole universe with him. He’d just take one postulate, the entrance to the MEST universe: “All right. I’m curious about it, I’ll go in. And I am now in the MEST universe.”

There is a galactic time, however, in which this planet sits. It’s a galactic time which Ю is your navigational time for this galaxy and it has two binaries which are unmistakably shaped. That is to say, it’s a double star and this double star flickers around itself in such a way and the second star is so positively unmistakably shaped that-and so is the first one-that the two of them form many particle pictures as they travel around each other. And so this setup then gives you a very good idea-as a matter of fact, you could observe them, you could tell what time it was. It’s the time when the pole of one of them, which ordinarily is the pole, has turned over and is facing the other one and so on. And it’s very precise. They’re standing out there all by themselves, so that nothing is slowing down or fixing up their motion in strange ways. Well, now that would be a pretty good way to tell time and it’s . . . But it still depends on what? On knowing what time it is. See, you have to have some need for time or knowingness about time before anything happens with relationship to time. Otherwise it’s just a playing field.

Now, let’s just take that postulate and let’s throw it out. He would not any longer be in the MEST universe.

Did you ever go out to a stadium and look at a football field when there was no game, no audience, nothing? There’s just a football field and it’s sitting there with two sets of goal posts. And by golly, you could hold a stopwatch in vain on those goal posts and you’d never get a game going. You could do all sorts of things and you’d never get a game going there until you had players and referees and umpires and pieces and spectators and-oh gosh, all this tremendous thing moves in on the football field, immediately the football field comes alive, it has purpose, has meaning. And so it is with this universe.

A test of this: A person seldom will let you go forward far enough with his automaticity to kick it all out. And you as a auditor seldom go far enough to really totally kick out a machine. I mean by that, until a person is up along the operating class and then he’ll kick them out and kick them in at will. It doesn’t matter, he’s full of beans and feds good about it.

A person fighting time is the silliest picture, is you can’t fight time. Not only is it shadowboxing, it’s worse than shadowboxing nothing. You can go out and box nothing if you want to or you can step off the bottom step into what you thought was a solid floor and find that there’s another step there. You can do all sorts of things like this, but what you get down to is that time is a symbol and there’s not even a nothing there to fight See, you’ve got this beautiful symbol. But, however, the symbol does have definition. The symbol has the definition of havingness. Well, why does it have that definition? It’s because these particles move in relationship to each other on a very beautifully agreed-upon pattern. And from one end of this universe to the other end of this universe, they are moving at that patterned speed.

If you were just to have somebody say over and over-not with words, that’s the big blocker on the line... You can start making postulates with words or you start making them exclusively with pictures and they merely become another set of symbols. And they themselves, having mass, become barriers. You make a postulate on this basis of just sit there and think of yourself as “Now you’re in the MEST universe and now you’ve forgotten where you came from.” And if you were to do that and you were to put it on a thought level rather than a symbol level, you would very soon get yourself lost.

It is the most elementary thing you would do to have a constant playing field. You would get all the particles in the field rated in such a way that they would all move. And then you get all the players to agree on that rate of motion and you would have this beautiful picture of knowing how fast they were moving so they were moving that fast. And it’s very constant.

The thing to do, of course, is to tap the body on the head and grab the back anchor points of the room. You’ll be found again right away, because you’ve got enough of the machine still there to orient you.

Now, what’s present time in this universe? Don’t make a mistake on this one, by the way. I’ve said this before. Present time in this universe would be for the total universe in any given instant. There isn’t present time here and a past time someplace else. The individual sees that, but it doesn’t exist. You see, he’s in present time here and because he ate breakfast (as I covered before someplace else), why, he thinks it’s past time there now. Why? Because that’s where he’s having breakfast and he isn’t there having breakfast anymore. Well, there’s a present time for there, too.

All right. Enough of that. It’s just theory. But it’s more than theory, it shows up in a tremendous level of workability.

There’s this thing called communication time lag. Now, that means that a particle starts out from the Sun and travels for several minutes and gets to Earth. Actually, probably, no particle travels, but that’s beside the point. No particles travel anyhow, there aren’t any particles.

Now, an E-Meter, if you will notice, any of the meters have these two dials, the modern meter-processing with an old meter, you have a tone handle over here, it still tells you plenty. But with these new two-dial meters, this newer style, particularly the E-AR-400 (the first one of those was just delivered to me), it does everything but scream and in supplanting its screaming, it merely howls and cries. This meter over here tells you rather constantly what the individual’s tone is. And this meter over here, the one which is on as you face it, the one which is on the right-hand side tells you the surges.

But where we have a communication time lag, if you’re depending on particles to bring you a patterned picture of what happened over that-a-way, you’re always late. You see that? The Sun blows up and then you don’t know about it for several minutes.All right. Let’s say you’re looking at the pattern of particles coming from the Sun and then the Sun blows up. Well now, you look at the pattern of particles of the blow-up. Now, supposing you saw the Sun start to blow up and you had it in your power to reach out and put it back together again and keep it from blowing up. Now, if you were depending on photons and here you were standing on Earth and you saw the Sun suddenly blow up and you reached over there to stop it from blowing up, you know, and pat it all back together again and make a mass out of it, you would think you had failed. You think you wouldn’t have that much power or force. Why? Because obviously you must have catalyzed it or you must have done something desperate there or at least you didn’t do anything to help it.

Now, when you’re processing somebody on time-separation of particles or the connections of particles-you will find that the meter over here will either do tremendous rapid falls or rises, which is significant. That means, you know, he’s trying to get particles apart. That’s what we know as a dispersal reading-you know, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb, climb. He’s getting no place in tone because you look right over here on the other meter side or you look at your tone handle on the older meters and you’ll see that, although his climb-climb is going on over here, you’re not getting any kind of a sensible tone advance. You’re either getting a completely shot-up rocket advance, whereas your needle is just coming on over and they seem to be going right on off the top of the meter-you can get that effect-or it’s simply sitting there. Very silly, you see-it’s just sitting there, continues to read his tone. Well, that’s the dispersal reading.

Get the picture of present time in both of those places, see, you’d have to be instantaneously at the Sun and on Earth. And when the Sun starts to blow up, he’d have to be right there and know it was blowing up right there and smash it back together again at that moment if he had it in his power. He couldn’t sit here on Earth and wait for the Sun to blow up.

Now, the other reading of this is more important. The other reading is the stuck needle over here on the surge meter. On the right-hand side you see a stuck needle. You’ve asked him a couple of questions, you’ve asked him about objects and all of a sudden the needle is stuck. Before this the needle wasn’t stuck. It wasn’t doing anything in particular, it was surging and rising and theta bopping and it didn’t matter much what it was doing, because that wasn’t what you were doing right now with modern auditing. Take a look at it and we’ve asked him now about keeping objects together and so forth and we all of a sudden have a stuck needle.

And this, in itself, is an anxiety which people get into. They have had this sort of thing happen to them often enough. Soldiers are always getting into a backwards frame of mind when they’re shot. Of course, if there is enough battle noise and confusion, they can’t distinguish it one from the other. But in a skirmish or something like that, a bullet hits them and then they hear the crack of the rifle. That’s because sound only travels at eleven hundred feet-per-second-they never had any warning. And this universe is a playing field which never gives you any warning.

Well boy, you just go right to work. “Two objects which you don’t mind having apart.” “Two objects which you don’t mind having together.” “Two objects which the public doesn’t mind you having apart.” “Two objects which the public wants you to put together, wants you to keep together”-anything like this. And the first thing you know, why, you read a positive tone rise over here on the left-hand meter, you’ll see a positive gain on tone. And you keep this up and then all of a sudden the needle will come free. Well, you’re off the subject now, I mean, you’ve gotten that one cleared, let’s go back and now let’s work on people or let’s work on something else.

So, the thetan goes around depending on particles and trying to have a warning. And there is nothing sillier than that because he can’t have a warning from particles, any particle that arrives with a message is talking about something that is in the past. And this is reflected in a psychotic to making him believe that ‘‘all is in the past.” Has to be, of course, because every particle he receives is past. Any message he receives from anywhere in this universe is in the past, if it’s telling about an event.

As soon as we work on people, why, it’s all right. But we get into the subject of-you know, we’re using all the eight dynamics and people and nothing much happens and all of a sudden you get thetans, you know? Two thetans that he wants to keep apart. Well, he doesn’t know anything about thetans, he doesn’t know anything about spirits. You’ve phrased it as spirits or something of the sort and, by golly, you will run into something very complicated.

But present time for this universe would be accomplished this way: you’d just have to stop every particle-if you could stop every particle in the universe for a moment, you would have at that moment a complete pattern. Every particle has a present time and that would be present time for the universe. See, it would be-the position of every particle at any given instant would be present time.

“Well now, give me two spirits that you don’t want to come together or that you wouldn’t mind having come together.” “Two spirits which you wouldn’t mind being apart.”

Now, please don’t fall across this one, because you will if you’re not careful. If you stopped Earth and Sun at the moment of the explosion-you stopped all the particles and examined them, you would find out that there was a present time for each one of those particles and that it was the same present time. The fact that it is conveying a message from one location to the other has no bearing upon present time. Because a message is always after the cause and the cause is always before the message.

“I don’t know anything about spirits,” he says.

Cause-people who are very bad off keep coming around-in a session they drive you mad if you happen to be going into this with somebody who is completely looped off on an inverted 8, which is about as far south as you can get. They keep going into this one: “I know, but... why... why was it all built?” And they just keep going into this, you know-why? Why? Why?

“Well, just get a couple, anyway.”

Well, that’s another beautiful symbol: why? They’re so inverted by communication, you see, the communication is always in the past, so that they believe that cause is in the past. See? Cause, if anyplace, is in the future, it’s not in the past. Cause always precedes effect. If you had a stopwatch going and it hit at zero and you said, “I am now going to move this ashtray. Move-stop” and it now said eight seconds, well, by golly, if you look at the sweep second of the hand, it does look like cause was in the past. You see, because the past is eight seconds back of eight, see, that’s when you said it. Well, that’s just the standard way of looking at time and it’s inverted, that’s inverted.

First thing you know, a total background in the Roman Catholic Church shows up, just like that, boom! And your needle, then, is no longer stuck or is no longer just going crazy on just constant rises or constant falls. And you get it over here, you’ll get again another positive gain in tone. Now, most of the gain which you make in tone will stay gained, which isn’t true of just your typical dispersal case. It just goes right on off the top of the meter and then he’s off the top of the meter, that’s all.

Look, let’s string out the co-motion of the particles and let’s find out that here we are, saying, “I am going to move this ashtray. Now, I have moved this ashtray.” Why sure, you said cause was in the... Now, we look at it again and we say, “Well, cause was in the past then, wasn’t it?” The hell it is. Let’s take a look at this ashtray. Let’s not look at the statement, let’s look at the ashtray. And we find out, “I am going to move this ashtray” and we move the ashtray, we discover immediately that the intention to move the ashtray was in the future of the motion of the ashtray. See that? It’s in the future of the motion of the ashtray, it has to be.

A body in fairly good operating condition-I mean in pretty good operating condition-should read 3.5 to 4.0. When they start reading 5.0 and the fellow is up around Operating Thetan and so forth, there’s probably not quite enough mass there to keep the body running well as a Homo sap.

All right. And let’s run it so it’s backwards now and let’s move the ashtray. Now, I have moved the ashtray. Well, the thing that would straighten it out for you is cause and effect. You’re the effect of the ashtray. The ashtray has moved. Now you look and say, “Ha! The ashtray has moved.”

But now, of course, you start hitting the automaticity that makes the body almost nebulous and you start playing around with that, why, your meter just starts going through thin air. I mean, you’re getting into a different situation and a condition. And you wouldn’t be using a meter on this guy anyway.

Whereas, you say, “Now the ashtray is going to move.” And the ashtray moves.

You need your meter mainly to process, individually, a resistive case who isn’t exteriorizing well or if he is exteriorizing, isn’t exteriorizing stably. And that’s what you need a meter on. Look for the stuck and free it with “apart” and “together” and you’ll get a tone advance. Now, there are many ways of saying that, incidentally, “Give me three places where hate is not.” The guy has simply picked out three geographical locations. Now in all this processing, specific item and very, very finely precisely located points are of the essence. Big broad generalizations like “You get a cat.” Well, the fellow just gets an example of the class of cats.

Now, let’s look at it from the viewpoint of the ashtray and discover that the future is controlling the ashtray. Now, this is not too hard to get through your thick skulls, but you better get it through your skulls right now. [laughter]

You want him to get a cat in the form of a cat which has white spots and wearing a pink bow. You want him to get a cat, specifically a cat, or one that he knows. You don’t want to get an example of the class of cats. Well, as a case gets buttered all over the universe, they more and more tend to generalize and get terrifically unspecific. So your very action of making the fellow pinpoint, whether he likes it or not, is in itself resolving a lot of his trouble.

You say, “I am going to drink a cup of tea.” So you make a cup of tea and you drink it. What is cause of the cup of tea? It certainly has to be in advance of the cup of tea. Has to be. That it goes before the cup of tea is the use of one of these indefinite symbols. You say, “It goes before the cup of tea.” It doesn’t go before any cup of tea, it’s ahead of the cup of tea.

Now, when you’re asking for “three places where you are not” in SOP 8-C, you will find this manifestation occurring—this is how long you would run “three places—are not” in brackets. You would run it until the individual came down, very finely and very precisely, to exact locations well within perception range, because he’s liable to start out: he’s not in Universe 86 and not in Universe 16 and not in Universe 39.

Let’s drive an automobile down the street and say, “Now I am going to turn the corner. And when we have turned the corner, why, we say, “Well, cause was in the past.” In the past, we caused the turning of an automobile. No, this is the way cause would be in the past: you would turn the automobile around a corner and then say to yourself, “Well, now, I’m going to turn the automobile.” But, which is the effect there, huh? You were being the effect of the automobile if you work it that way. Most drivers drive that way, kind of. They get into more trouble and more accidents. They must lead. They must lead the action.

He’s liable to just start out just completely outside of this universe and then he’s not in the other end of this galaxy and he’s not in the next galaxy to this and he’s coming on down, coming on down, coming on down, getting finer and finer and finer and finer and the next thing you know, well, he’s not in Mobile, he’s not in Toronto. Now, as he comes on down the line, in brackets, why, you’ll find gradually that he is not in that end of town or this end of town and then gradually he’s not in that corner of the room and not in this corner of the room and not.over there by the window. He does this quite comfortably.

There is only one way to bull through it if you don’t understand it by this time. There would be only one way to bull through it and that is simply to handle Opening Procedure now on “I am going to,” until all of a sudden time goes flip on you. And you say, “For heaven sakes, a fellow is always riding way up the time track from the events. He is causing a cup of tea to be drunk and he becomes the effect of the tea.” And when you see it that way to, all of a sudden, why, you stop looking for cause in the past. Cause can’t be in the past of the event.

But mind you, as you do this, you are running into particles apart and particles together so that your individual may start out on something he’s holding madly together on something as idiotic as no bigger area than the ashtray.

What you’ve got there is the late particle. And you watch that particle travel and so you say, “All right, the particle was in the past, because the time it arrives is in the past.” It’s a past particle, always is. That’s because the Sun blows up and then several minutes later, you get the arrival of a message that the Sun blew up.

“Well, three places? Well, there’s that side of the ashtray and that side of the ashtray and this side of the ashtray.”

You experiment with it and it will be very clear to you. I’m not going into it any further, because we’ve got to talk about a process.

Yeah. That’s great, but he’s on a compression. And you can expect that compression to go through this cycle and it will go through this cycle: out, until he’s buttered all over the universe, and then in again until he’s relaxedly able to place things on that ashtray. He’ll run the complete curve.

Havingness would be masses of particles and objects. (A couple of you are chewing your fingernails.) Havingness is determined by masses of particles. That is to say, it takes masses of particles to make an object, it takes at least four particles to make a piece of space. You can arrange four particles in a tetrahedron so they will make some space. But any way you look at it, in order to have some havingness, in order to possess something, there’s got to be some particles, because this is, by definition, what it means. So that havingness has a lot to do with particles, then, doesn’t it?

Now, “three places where you will not be” becomes extremely interesting. Because if you continued it in brackets, you would pick up the ability of the individual to predict exactly where he will be for some time. And then again you will be knocking on the door of deja vu. Only this time, it isn’t deja vu, he simply knows that he knew he would be here. Which, of course, is the basic definition of deja vu.

And losing something would have to do with the particles no longer being under your-in your sphere or under your control or in your ownership, you might say. You’d lose something.

So, in processing of time, fully expect time sense to go out. We have no better index of the workability of this process than a meter. A meter is excellent with regard to this process. And you can test processes and the degree of workability upon the preclear by setting up the meter and having the tone needle-watching the tone needle more as you process him, much more than you would watch the surge needle. Watch that tone needle.

Something you’re trying to acquire would have to do with piling up a whole flock of particles slowly or predicting there are going to be a whole lot of particles there and then putting them under your control and so on. That would be havingness in the future. See that? So that in each way you look at it, you’ve got some particles there you’re accumulating or deteriorating.

With 8-C and these additional processes directly relating to time, in the formulas which I gave you this morning, you should see your individual rising.

Now, in view of the fact that all particles are in motion, at all times, you have the problem, staring you in the face, of things getting more massive or accumulating particles or things losing particles or things being static in the number of particles. But how long will something remain static? Well, sometimes quite a while.

For instance, I have a ring here, the gold of which is about a thousand years old and the stone, a carbuncle, is probably about thirty-five hundred years old. All right, this is a mass of particles that have stayed that way for an awful long time and Man has a tendency to sort of worship at the shrine of endurance of particles.

But if we look at this stone very carefully, it has a very small carving of Hercules on it (he is a very old deity) and we look at this and we see that his club-and it’s pretty worn, and it’s remarkable that it’s in this good a state of preservation, but we can barely see this symbol and we can barely see one of his feet. It’s pretty thin, in general. And we look up at it through the light and we find out that where it hasn’t really suffered very much in time, really, an opacity has set into it which shouldn’t be there and so on. In other words, a change has taken place. It took it maybe thirty-five hundred years to do it, but it did.

On the other side of it, here we have a scarab. There’s a little scarab-he’s pretty tough and some mummy had him on a string of beads around his neck back in Tutankhamen’s time or something of the sort and there’s a hole bored through the little scarab here. But here this-again, very old, but it still shows time, time has passed. By what? Its wear.

This gold-time has passed. You can tell very easily by looking at it. In other words, there hasn’t been a “no change” here. And we’re saying, “Isn’t it terrific that this thing could endure this long.” Yes. Yes, it’s just terrific, but it is enduring within our tolerance of what we call endurance. But I’m afraid the workman who made this would be very upset, if he could see it, because it’s nowhere near as nice as it was the day he turned it out. And if he’d turned it out like this on his bench, he’d probably been very upset and he’d probably have thrown it in the trash heap, because it would have been an imperfect carving to him. Of course, if this had been made in Christian times, why, everybody would have been very elated because they could have sold it then as a worn relic if it had been turned out that way. The biggest commerce of Christianity was relics.

However, this stone does show time’s passage and yet this is one of the harder stones, the carbuncle, and one of the-this scarab shows time’s passage.

All right. How do we know time passed? Well, some particles are missing, this thing is deteriorating, see, slowly, slowly, slowly.

Well, all right, let’s take some sodium and drop it in some water-boom! It deteriorated! In other words, we completed an entire cycle of the MEST universe there, from the moment we dug up and refined the sodium to the time we dropped it in the water. But this is a much longer cycle that we’re undertaking. And what makes it a long cycle or a short cycle, in other words, what makes it a time cycle? We drop the sodium in, we don’t have it anymore, do we? It went bang. We’ve got a nice memory of a bang, but the particles of sodium are now scattered all over the place. So our havingness is not in a lump. It doesn’t mean any particles have been destroyed, though, not a one has been destroyed. We’ve gotten a dispersal. Over this cycle, we have a slow dispersal-long time, short time, time. It has to do with the co- (hyphen) motion of particles. And that’s all it has to do with and plus your knowingness that it has been a short time or a long time.

And it’s only been a short time or a long time to the degree that you value the time, which is the amount that you would value the particles in their position, one to each other.

So, we get this deterioration of the sodium, boom! The particles of sodium are now scattered around.

But where is Columbus’s Santa Maria? Where’s that ship? Well, it obviously is 1492. And well, it’s long gone, it’s a long time away and it’s far from us and... Oh, balderdash. Why, one of the molecules of the Santa Maria might be sitting right here in this room. Because with the change and deterioration of all of the particles of that ship, we get them buried in the mud someplace and rivers washing them out to sea and we get the change of tides and the currents of the oceans and the evaporation of water and the kick up and wind of sand. And it works it around and little fish eat them and people eat fish and here we go, you see, these basic particles are still there. They’re still the same particles, they aren’t in the same pattern. The form is no longer there. You see that? No form.

So time is a matter of form. And form itself is a matter of knowingness. And we get back to, then, an individual-and here you better pick up your attention very definitely because this sits back of a process which you’re going to be doing for a long time and we lead right up to that-an individual which won’t let some particles disperse or who won’t let them accumulate must be braced against something else then: particles themselves.

He’s erecting a barrier against dispersal and a barrier against accumulation of particles. And his sole objection is that two particles are going apart or that two particles are coming together-two plus, you see, in terms of figures-but that’s his basic objection. His objection is that two particles are going to go apart or that two particles are going to come together. I don’t care if there’s eight billion particles-you see, the basic on that is that there are a couple of particles there. So, his total objection is dispersal or accumulation of particles and this is in terms of motion, too!

A fellow only objects to motion in terms of the fact that particles are getting together or particles are flying apart or particles are liable to fly apart.

And when an individual is braced against this shift of particles, he, of course, stops time. He can’t help it, because time is basically knowingness. It isn’t that he suddenly and mysteriously bases a couple of figures here, you see, and braces against anything necromantic that goes back into a central time machine that jams its gears. It’s nothing elaborate, it’s just the fact that if I determine that these two ashtrays will not come any closer together, that’s all right, they can sit right there. But now let us suppose that somebody else starts pushing these two ashtrays together and I have to hold these two ashtrays apart in order to keep them apart. I’m making good my basic postulate and that’s all an individual is trying to do.

And an individual who gets an anxiety about his postulates-his rightness and wrongness-of course is going to stop time because he continues to try to make good his basic postulates.

Somebody else starts to shove these two ashtrays together and I hold them apart. It’s completely unimportant, even vaguely, it’s completely unimportant that these two ashtrays come together or stay apart. And yet, because I’m holding them apart, somebody pushes them together and because they’re pushing them together, I try to hold them apart. And you’ve got the basics on a game called the MEST universe, right there.

You’re trying to hold up a certain piece of space, so, just because you’re trying to do that, somebody else tries to push it together and just because they’re trying to push it together, you’re pushing it the other way. And the second that you start to brace yourself against the “accumulation,” which is to say, particles staying together, or the “dispersal,” which is to say, particles going apart-as soon as you brace yourself against this action happening, you to that degree stick yourself on the time track.

Now basically all we’re looking for is present time, which is to say, “let be what is.” Let’s let the dead past bury the dead-which is to say, the thoughts and barriers of yesteryear-and go and let’s look and see what is the arrangement of particles which is now taking place and take an interest in that arrangement of particles.

If you were to make a clear statement in his level of understanding, a clear statement of his condition, to any preclear, you would make it in that frame of reference, probably not in those same words, but you would make it in that frame of reference.

And what is wrong with any preclear is the two particles-he’s trying to keep two particles from coming together or two particles from going apart. And any time he’s got himself entirely braced to prevent this, he kept on bracing himself. The particles themselves, God help him, have long since gone down the sewer and blown off the chimney and been wafted away by the rains of yesteryear. But he has a mental barrier now which is erected to brace against these particles. They’re no longer stopped, they aren’t even there. And yet, he’s all set to prevent these particles, which, themselves, are missing.

And here, then, is the problem of mental activity. In order to have a game, whether it’s a game of football or a game of business-any kind of a game-we have to control, which is to say, start, stop and change particles. The business of control is the business of starting, stopping and changing.

Let’s take commerce. The boys in Chicago make a terrific game out of taking the wheat exchange there-these grains of wheat-and they start them and stop them and change them in order to cause starting and stopping and changing of other particles known as dollars. And stomachs don’t even enter into it.

If you walked up to one of those fellows on the Chicago Exchange and you said to him, “Do you know that wheat is a foodstuff?” “Yes,” he’d say, “very valuable! People will pay anything for it when they’re starving. How can we make them starve?” He wouldn’t say it in that many words, but it would boil down to it after a while. “How can we make this stuff scarce, so that we can stop it, till its price goes up, so that we can then move it, so that its price will come in on us?” And that’s the game he’s playing.

Plus this game: “How can we make somebody else’s wheat get more abundant someplace or another and so cave in the price and so bring less money in on them, while wasting and sacrificing all their wheat? And in that fashion, then, we will have them broke and out of the game as competitors.” And the crocodile smilingly polishes his tail.

When you talk about hockey and when you talk about a love affair, you’re discussing, at once, time, of course, and the motion of particles.

Now, the motion of particles themselves cause emotion. And if you put a beam on the wall and then move away from it real slow, stretching the beam, just moving away real slow in relationship to the movement of the MEST universe particles, you get the emotion of “beautiful sadness.” So a love affair which has dragged out (which is to say, the motion of the particles, so on), it becomes very sad. [laughter]

Now, in this way, you get the behavior of these particles. Well, there’s two kinds of particles actually in action. There are the particles which you’ve just kicked together-you know, created up against the MEST universe-which you know are your particular brand of particle-and then the particles which you are probably making called the MEST universe. And that’s a different type of particle. Well, those MEST universe particles follow a law-oh boy, do they follow a law! They’ve had the law laid down. And they move in exact relationship to certain other laws, they obey the influences of other particles and so on. And it’s a very, very tight, well-modulated game, in terms of particles.

But your particles aren’t modulated by anybody but you-or somebody else. That is to say, another being like you can monitor your particles, some way, sometimes.

Volney was out to see me last night and again, why, his hair was standing on end. I showed him what faith healing was. [laughter] And proved it on his meter. Well anyway... I showed that I could lay energy down in him by touching him-not just by looking at him, that was bad enough-but by touching him, to the degree of lighting his whole cheek up, just by touching his cheek with my fingertip. And he said he’d known something about this and some people could do it and some people couldn’t. And “That’s right,” I said, “Well, that determines whether or not you’re a good healer or not, you see” and so on. All it determines, actually, is your electrical output.

Now, you can manufacture particles, but you’re not supposed to, so you have to get very covert about this. And your main object in life is “how covert do I have to be to keep on manufacturing particles?” We’ll go into this later.

So we have then-we have then, simply this problem: we’ve got this if we’re running competence, confidence, any one of these things which has any certainty in it. It’s just how many particles'is the individual trying to stop, in how many places which aren’t there anymore? And how many is he trying to pull apart that aren’t there anymore either?

And that’s all you object to in terms of sanity and insanity. And your index of this is how much is the fellow in present time?

You know, a lot of fellows are sitting around trying to pull future particles apart which aren’t together yet. And that in itself is anxiety.

All right. They’re also trying to hold future particles together that aren’t apart yet, they don’t exist yet. They’re trying to predetermine a pattern ahead of the forming pattern. And control, in itself, is this problem-and there’s nothing wrong with control, there’s no game unless you control particles-is you predetermine what their pattern will be and then fit the particles into this pattern. And that’s how you make a postulate stick with relationship to particles.

You can handle particles as well as you don’t use energy to handle them. That’s funny, isn’t it? As long as you use knowledge and not energy to handle particles, you can handle particles. As soon as you start using energy to handle other energy, why, of course, you’re just as good as you’ve got masses of energy to handle other energy. And it becomes an elementary problem in physics, but it certainly doesn’t become a problem in control of the mind.

Most of your boys who are bogged down, who ride below 4.0 on the Tone Scale, are trying to handle energy with energy and that doesn’t go.

All right. What’s “being stuck on the time track”? That’s a time when you have tried to hold two or more particles apart or tried to hold two or more particles together. And a fellow is as stuck in the past as he is still trying actively to hold these particles apart or push these particles together.

But sometimes he gets so bound and determined to handle and hold particles which are no longer there that he hasn’t any concentration on existing present particles. In other words, he can’t have in present time, which is to say, he can’t have time.

You talk about time, you’re talking about the co- (hyphen) motion of particles. If you’re talking about time, then you’re talking about particles. When you’re talking about particles, you’re talking about havingness, so time is havingness. And when you talk about the present, you are talking about the existing pattern of particles as of this instant. And when you’re talking about the past, you’re talking about the particle pattern as it did exist. And when you talk about the future, you’re talking about the particle pattern as it will exist.

Now, the past, present and future of this room hasn’t anything to do with a change in space, it has only to do with what is going to be the shifting pattern of particles of various kinds in this room which you recognize as change and the rate of change of those particles.