Okay. This is the 4th of February, 1954, and you won’t like what I’m going to say this afternoon.

Female voice: No?

No. Your ability to follow simple directions is horrible, very horrible. Now, I have given you a lot of processes. You normally take the last thing I have said and apply it to a preclear, I suppose. That’s all right. But during this Unit I have not been giving forth processes which were invalidated by tomorrow’s lecture. Things I’ve been giving you, such as validation of life-and I thought I covered that fairly well and showed you the liability of validating a part of life too thoroughly.

Let’s take Courage Processing. Covered that rather widely and demonstrated to you and gave you examples much earlier in this Unit that if you were to get somebody to put fear in the walls, who was occluded-just put fear in the walls for about forty hours or something like that-weird, strange and terrible things would happen to his case. As a matter of fact, we’ve gotten some good exteriorizations just on that.

So we do Courage Processing, which is the upper bridge to fear, and “wasting courage in brackets” does considerable for a case. It does strange and terrible things to a case. It gets him over this supercontrol mechanism. When you have a supercontrol case, he’s got hold of the body so hard, he’s afraid it’s going to flip-flop in some direction.

Now, how do you get rid of his flip-flops? He can’t turn on nerve enough to exteriorize or nerve enough to turn the body loose, or so forth, without driving it even further toward the flip-flop. Now, I thought you could see that rather plainly.

You start running courage on somebody-wasting courage or running courage in some other fashion, and serenity- and you drive the body across that bridge of pain into fear. And the body starts to feel like it’s going out of control.

Now, one of you just a couple of days ago put on a terrifically frantic exhibition out in the outer office and so forth, when it’s quite obvious what had happened. It should have been obvious, if not to the person, certainly to an auditor, in time to grab it. And that was the fact that somebody had run courage on this case, had run him into a flip-flop-you know, franticness of control-and had then never run the franticness of control.

See, obvious that it must have-the Courage Processing was the one that was being run currently and this person all of a sudden is frantic. Now, why is this person frantic? Well, the person is frantic about control or state of beingness.

What made the person frantic? Running courage, of course. Because they’re holding on to the courageous ends of incidents, preferably. And you run a little bit of courage and, zing, in they’ll go to the rest of the cycle. Flip-flops. All right?

Now, I talked to you some time ago about certainty. I’ve talked to you often about certainty. I said there wasn’t very much you could do with an individual unless you could get him certain about something.

Now, if a person wasn’t certain about something, well, the only little reservation is this: if you can get him to pull any kind of a mass in on him at all, it will, for a short rime alter his beingness. But, i£ it doesn’t result in a higher grade of certainty, you’ve done nothing. If it’s resulting in more uncertainty, you certainly better get into some certainty.

Now, there are cases walking around-please, please understand this-there are cases walking around who would feel marvelous if there was just one thing in the whole condemned universe of which they could feel entirely certain. The entrance of the case is obviously some certainty on something. Here we have a tremendous vista of life consisting of maybes-maybes in all directions.

Now, what I’m trying to teach you, if I’m trying to teach you anything, is that the “maybes” of existence are the things which upset existence. The mind does not work well on “maybes.” Must at least have a “yes greater than no” or a “no greater than yes” to function at all. And this principle in Dianetics and Scientology goes back three years, with the first graphs I used to draw you on the board.

You remember those graphs? It showed how an individual would plot data from center. And you had, to the right of that, Infinite Rightness and, to the left of it, you had Infinite Wrongness. To the right of it, you had Infinite Survival; to the left of it, you had Infinite Succumbness as unattainable absolutes. You remember this?

Well, until you can push the boy a little bit further from center toward rightness, he isn’t going to do a thing. Agreement with the MEST universe would be this sort of a thing: agreement with all those things which can be read out of the MEST universe in terms of behavior. You know, life versus the MEST universe. Life versus the MEST universe gets into this uncertainty: it can’t even have MEST.

Now, I was talking to you about that this morning. It can’t even have MEST. It’s got to eat something that ate something that ate something that ate something that ate something that sometime or another might have spit on a rock. And so we get this way off.

Well, where is it drifting into? It’s drifting into an infinite maybe. This is riding center. What? What’s riding? Well, the fellow is alive and he wants something, but maybe it’s this and maybe it’s that and maybe he’s alive and maybe he isn’t alive. And we’ve got this total dependency for every breath of his livingness upon long suspended chains of life and death and “Maybe I’m surviving” and “Maybe I’m not” and so on.

“Maybe I’ll get something to eat tomorrow-maybe.” “Maybe-maybe if I tidy myself up a little bit, why, some nice guy will look at me.” “Maybe if I mend my manners and my personality a little bit, why, that girl will be up in the bedroom with me.” The factors with which Man deals ordinarily and commonly are factors which are endless maybes.

Now, out of this tremendous fabric of maybe, we have factors which are plus and minus. And the plus and the minus are desirable and the center line isn’t desirable. A fellow is either going to have something or he’s going to have nothing. The “maybe he’ll have something and maybe he’ll have nothing” is what’s driving him mad. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. “Maybe they’ll kill me, maybe they won’t.” “Maybe I’ll have an accident, maybe I won’t.” No certainty. Plus and minus certainties.

Certainty itself is knowingness. When we’ve abandoned certainty-you got it there in 16-G - when we’ve abandoned certainty as a concept, when we’ve abandoned this graph and we’ve abandoned everything in relationship to this, we’re doing what? We’re just floating down the stream with the rest of life in maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Now, how do you get out of that stream and sit on the bank and catch your breath? By getting certain of something.

And yet you guys, customarily-I’m sorry if I wrong one or two-customarily process individuals without any regard to certainty of what’s occurring. Preclear isn’t certain he put a mock-up there.

The auditor says, “Put another mock-up there.”

So he puts another mock-up there.

Now, does the auditor at any moment say, “All right. Where is the mock-up? Are you sure it is there?”

The preclear, after fifteen hours of endless, pointless auditing, says, “Well no, I’ve never been sure of that mock-up or mock-ups. Or occasionally, once or twice, I’ve had a feeling there might be something there, but I didn’t know because I wasn’t sure because maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.” You might as well have gone out on the front porch and whittled a stick for fifteen hours.

The clue of all auditing is the certainty of the individual and a technique which picks apart the uncertainties and establishes some certainties with the individual is the senior technique.

Now, how do we select the technique the case needs? We select it by finding what the case is certain of. We can enter certainties in some of the most remarkable ways. We can say, “All right. Look around you and see if you can find an area of nothingness.”

And he finally spots one.

Now you say, “Certain it’s there?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

The guy has a certainty of nothing. “Let’s duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate ...” We found something he was certain of. Let’s make lots of them.

All right. Now, we’ll say to this preclear, “Now, give me three things that aren’t giving you orders.”

And he says, “Oh, the lamp isn’t and the floor isn’t and the desk isn’t.”

And you say, "All right. Now, get somebody else and get three things that this person...”

Yeah? Is that What you say? No, that isn’t what you say at all. "Give me three things which aren’t giving you orders.” If you’re suspicious of your preclear, you say, “Give me one thing that isn’t giving you orders.”

And he said, “Well, the lamp isn’t giving me orders.”

“All right. Are you sure the lamp isn’t giving you orders?”

“Oh, well no, no more sure of it than anything else. It’s all a fog, it’s all a fog, it’s all a fog.” What are you doing as an auditor-sitting on your hands, looking out the window? Here’s a character that is ordered around, obviously, day and night by everything he sees, everything he perceives, everything he feels. If he looks at the wall, the wall is giving him orders. To do what? He doesn’t know. It’s just kind of giving him orders.

The whole universe is battering in on him at all corners, saying, “Do this. Do that. You’re supposed to be elsewhere, you’re not supposed to be here. You can’t go through me. Be here. Be there.”

What a tremendous bombardment this individual must be experiencing and yet you don’t see in that single little thing there-you said, “Give me something that isn’t giving you orders.” And he says, “Oh, the lamp.”

And you say, “Are you certain of that?”

“Well, no more certain than anything else I’m ever certain of.”

“Well, find something else in the room that isn’t giving you orders.”

“Oh, yeah ... Oh, the desk isn’t.”

You say, “Well, now are you certain the desk isn’t giving you orders?”

“Well no, no more certain than I am of anything else.” Boy, you better get in there and pitch. You better find something he can be certain of-darn soon.

Now, by the way, there’s always something he can be certain isn’t giving him orders and that’s the nothingness of something. I’ve run a preclear for two hours of solid relief-of just gasps and relief and sighs and coming up all the time like he had a Caterpillar tractor dragging him straight up the slope-surge meter on the Tone Scale going up, up, up. On what?

Just having him-“All right. Now well, if the desk isn’t giving you orders, what could you get about the desk that isn’t giving you orders?”

“Well, nothing.”

“Well, tell me, if there was a nothingness of this desk sitting alongside of it-you know, another-a nothingness of it sitting alongside, would that be giving you orders?”

And the fellow says, “No! It wouldn’t be.”

And then we just keep that up. We get a nothingness of the lamp not giving him orders and a nothingness of windows not giving him orders and a nothingness of floors not giving him orders and a. nothingness of his mother not giving him orders and a nothingness of that not giving him orders. And we just go on and on and on and on and on.

And the first thing you know, the guy says, “You know, you know I... there... there’s a thumbtack over on the wall there and, you know, it isn’t giving me orders.”

And you finally entered him into MEST. Run it for a couple of hours on a preclear and then finally gotten him up to that point.

Well, where you don’t enter a case anywhere-you just kind of pitch in, you know, and run scales or something-you’re not playing any concert. You got to pitch in there someplace. You got to enter a case somewhere. A case isn’t entered until you’ve entered it. Where do you enter it? You enter it to the highest level of certainty the preclear can attain and you open it on the highest level of certainty. The second he finds something of which he’s absolutely certain, his case is open.

I don’t care if it’s just an absolute certainty-he’s just completely certain, a big surge of certainty that “force does no good.” That’s one you run into occasionally. More often, you run into “Words and talking to people and arguing with them does absolutely no good at all. You have to have a rifle or a shotgun or an ax before you could make any impression on them.” And the guy is real certain of it.

Well, what is this certainty? Well, listen, it’s a sort of an emotion, if you want to call it that, but it doesn’t have particles in it. It’s a hard thing to describe because we’re not running a dichotomy of anything. But it is a matter of a relief. It’s a feeling of “Boy, there’s one thing that we can just nail on the time track and skip. We’re sure of that. We cleared up that problem.”

Well, what’s the symptom? This means that an enormous number of communication lines, like balled-up telephone wires thrown in the middle of the table here-that a whole communication problem (you know, a whole communication network which applies to one problem)-has cleared. And you just start doing amputations of these circuits.

Here is this tremendous bundle of wire lying here. What’s the preclear been doing? He’s been going into one end of it and he tries to come out the other end of it and he’s going across the top of it and he hits other C’s and other E’s. And he’s going up and down and back and forth and around and round through this wire.

That’s the bullpen manifestation I used to talk to you about years ago. Bullpen. You know, you park the datum in the bullpen. The thing didn’t clear anything, you know? You ran into this a lot of times with a joke with somebody. And very often an auditor is quite startled to have a preclear suddenly say, “Gosh, ah-ha, yeah. Yeah.”

“What’s the matter?”

It’s not in reply to anything the auditor was doing. If he inquired a little closely, he’d find out that the preclear had just cleared a joke. He had decided it was funny or wasn’t funny or related to something or something. He’s decided on this joke. And it seemed to him like all the years of his life-ever since he was four and he was told this joke by his mother, as a joke—he’s been pondering that joke. And it looks to him for a moment as though it’s been foremost in his mind ever since he was four.

That’s because he’s taken a straight look at one of these circuits, you see. He’s found out where the joke fitted or didn’t fit and he’s been able to reject, throw it away, vanquish it, swallow it, eat it up, do something with it besides let it wander around through a whole bunch of communication lines.

People have more jokes wandering around through communication lines. They have more darned things going on that are in the bullpen-that is to say, awaiting solution. These big electronic brains have things called “bullpens.” And every time the electronic brain can’t solve anything or it thinks it’s going to have to wait and use this data later, it’ll park it over in the bullpen.

And as the machine begins to work poorly, if you look into the bullpens, you find out they’re getting awfully full. Similar to any thinking machine, the more data it has there that it might relate to something, but doesn’t know whether it should or not (you know, “Does this datum relate?”), why, the harder it is for the fellow to think. Because his circuits are occupied with all sorts of data on which he’s keeping attention until such time as he may need it.

What’s certainty? Certainty starts in on a case as this manifestation of clearing a line. You’ll clear up just bundle after bundle of these communication cables. You just throw them away. Why? Because he hasn’t got anything wandering in them anymore.

And so you begin to string tighter and tighter, shorter and shorter communication lines in terms of cause to effect. And finally you just get a definite cause to effect and what have you got then? You’ve got the thetan exteriorized, running the body.

So if we got a gradient scale of certainty and just kept doing that, the next thing you know, why, all of the fellow’s bullpens would be cleaner than a whistle. In other words, he wouldn’t be hanging up on all these “maybes”: Does the data relate or doesn’t it relate?

Now, when you say, “Get a nothingness of this desk. Now, is it giving you orders?” And the fellow can say for sure, “No,” he’s found something.

Well, in the machinery there’s a tremendous amount of orders parked. He must obey all these orders. He must obey all these people. The whole universe and every form of life in it is apparently giving him some kind of orders. And he’s all of a sudden found a nothingness of something that isn’t giving him orders and it mechanically will clear out old desks across which an enormous amount of stuff has poured. It mechanically clears out all those data banks-boom, boom, boom, boom.

How does it do that? Well, the desk is gone. And if the desk is gone, then a nothingness of a desk must remain. And the nothingness of the desk can't give him any orders anymore, so of course that clears all of the stuff that was on the desk giving him orders. See, nothingness of the desk can’t give him orders, so there’s no desk there then.

It cross ... On Boolean algebra-“yes greater than no,” “no greater than yes”-that’s Boolean algebra. That’s how these thinking machines work. They simply work and go into function by unbalancing the “maybes” toward “yes” or “no.” You got a “maybe” there, so you just keep feeding in data until the “yes” becomes greater than the “no” or the “no” becomes greater than the “yes”; so it is true or it isn’t true. And out goes large chunks and segments of lines.

Now, what are you doing to a preclear that you keep auditing on uncertain things? Oh brother. You just keep filling up his bullpens, of course. Hour goes by and he’s got some more data for the bullpen. “Well, was I really giving myself something or wasn’t I giving myself something?” Another hour goes by, he’s got another binful. And another hour goes by, he’s got another binful. And your case is getting tougher and tougher to work, if the truth be known.

You keep working on uncertainties. Because uncertainty itself is not a commodity and never will be and never has been. Uncertainty is the result of, or the condition resulting from, two certainties counteropposed. You don’t have, in an uncertainty, an item or a commodity. You have two communication lines fronting each other in such a way as to impose a block on each other’s flows and there it sits. Now there are two lines and no flow. Now, the individual is going to try to make those things flow because it’s apparently some sort of a barrier.

You ask somebody to put uncertainty in the walls, he might do it. And he might. Won’t do him any good, though. You’ve got to put certainty that there is something and certainty that there is nothing in the walls in order to put uncertainty into the walls. See that?

Now, if you don’t learn this lesson about certainty in auditing a preclear, then you haven’t learned what livingness is composed of. Livingness operates best when an individual knows what he’s doing. He can’t know what he’s doing if he is mainly involved in combating past uncertainties, particularly to the extent where he can’t look at present time.

Livingness would be a horrible mess if all you did was go over whether you were right yesterday or wrong yesterday when you did so-and-so or didn’t do so-and-so. If you’re in this kind of a condition: somebody leaves your presence, you’ve been talking to him, this person walks away finally and you say, “Well, did I act foolishly or didn’t I act foolishly? Or did I say the right thing or didn’t I say the right thing?” and yakety-bow-row-row, back and forth, knock, knock. Well, it’s a hangover of the conversation.

When a conversation is done, it’s done. If you didn’t do it right and if your presence wasn’t acceptable at the time, the time to worry about it is at the time. You’re not going to rehash or change the conversation by thinking about it afterwards.

You might be able to say, “Well, I made him mad. I’ll go around to see him tomorrow and make it all right.” If you’re in a good frame of mind-that is to say, if you can get your certainties up, if your computations run out straight and so forth, it would be enough for you to say, “Well, I made him mad. I’ll have to go around tomorrow and straighten it out,” to clear the circuits.

If you could see these thinking machines which you use-they’re thinking machines. You made them. See, they work, just like thinking machines. If you could see them in operation, you would see them getting “yeses greater than noes,” “noes greater than yeses,” “yeses greater than noes,” “noes greater than yeses.” And then every once in a while, “yes/no.” And you’d see the machine stop, see? “No” is not greater than “yes,” “yes” is not greater than “no.”

The problem of thinkingness is a dynamic problem. It has to do with impulses or particles.

It’s a problem wherein two communication lines so flow as to flow or so blunt each other as to not flow. You’ve got stuck data all over the track, in terms of thinkingness, where communication lines are interposed.

Your father told you you could go to the show, your mother told you you couldn’t go to the show and neither Father nor Mother has the last word in the family. The kid is sort of halfway out the front door, but he’s in the living room, but he should be in the bedroom, or ought he go play? And you’ll see all of these other computations adding in: should he go play or should he go press it harder? Or maybe if he went and asked Aunt Agnes, maybe she’d say he could go or say she’d take him-his parents never objected then and so forth. And he should go, but if he does go, will he get punished when he gets home?

What’s all this extra data? Where is it coming from? Well, it’s coming from what you might call a shotgun of energy which is unable to pass down its normal lines of action. It’s blocked action. So you’re dealing with a barrier. And every time the flow of thoughts hits one of these superbalanced yes equals noes, or nearly so, it just shotguns out around it and starts flowing down lines all over the place.

Now, to give you sort of an idea of what this is, let’s take the case of the fellow that- one day I started processing a preclear that I had supposed to be in fairly good shape. And I was processing him for a very, very short space of time when I suddenly realized that this guy was in terror, which he was barely controlling. I processed him for maybe a minute to realize this.

And I asked him what was wrong and he thought, well, his business was going to fail and he possibly thought his wife was going to leave him and he possibly thought that this was going to take place and that was going to take place. And away we go, see, round and around and around and around.

And I say, “Well, that’s all very good.” He’d just given me so much data, you see, that if you’d started to process the engrams individually which underlay each one of these, you would have been swamped, but promptly. It would have been a couple hundred hours’ work at least.

So I said, “What’s going to happen to you tomorrow?”

“Well, it isn’t tomorrow. It’s Thursday.”

“What’s going to happen to you Thursday?”

“I’m going to have out two molars.”

“Well, do you want to go to the dentist?”

“Well, I don’t know. I can still cancel the appointment, but I really ought to go.”

What did you hit? You hit a big pain barrier there, you see? The pain is inhibiting his going to the dentist and he’s trying not to go to the dentist, but he knows he’s got to go to the dentist. And you’ve got two immediate problems superimposed: The problem of how do I keep the body from receiving pain and the problem of how do I get the body into some kind of shape so it won’t have excess pain. See, two communications, two impulses, two intentions directly opposed.

So what was happening? All the individual’s energy was bypassing this problem. It was hitting this problem and spraying, you might say, through the entire bank and was energizing all the bad news there was. And that’s what we can call a block. We can call that a mental block. Nineteenth-century psychology tried to and they didn’t know what was blocking, but they kept talking about mental blocks. A person couldn’t think about something and they figured this was a block. Okay. That’s too elementary to be of any use.

What’s happening is, is the individual has two dynamic impulses, two impulses which are counteropposed in such a way as to cause a stoppage or barrier against further thought on the problem.

“Joke. Is it funny or isn’t it funny? That’s good enough. I mean, am I supposed to laugh?”

Now, the fellow who is deeply involved in significance will tell you, “Well, it might be true, you see. I mean, the fellow, when he walks into the restaurant, you see, he might really have sat down and said-when the waiter brought the bowl of milk for the dog and the waiter said to him, ‘We don’t have any apple pie. Will peach pie do?’ Well, I don’t know. In Boston, it might be a brothel. They might call a brothel a peach pie or something. I, of course, don’t know the other data that would go to this and I don’t know whether that joke is funny or ...”

What’s he doing there? It’s whether he should laugh or not laugh and there will be some kind of a block way back on the bank where he laughed and he ran into a barrier promptly. He made fun of Papa when Papa fell downstairs or something of the sort and ever since that time he doesn’t know whether to laugh or not. So every time he hears a joke, why, it says in the bank “joke” and the pinball machines start lighting up, you see. And all of a sudden-and then this one, see? Bullpen. Doesn’t go anyplace.

What’s happening? Well, the energy does go someplace. It shunts on down the lines and starts going into deeper significances. A half an hour after he’s been told a joke that he couldn’t laugh at and he doesn’t know whether it was funny or not or had a point or not, he’s just hung up. On what? On jokes?

No, you’ll find him out here trying to start his car and not knowing whether he should start his car at that moment and go home or whether he should simply wait there for a little while on the off chance that his wife has been shopping. You’ll find him on some big maybe-no action, see. And he’ll drive down the road.

And how does an accident happen? Normally, accidents happen because a fellow sits too long to see what’s going to happen. He’s inactive when he should be acting.

Now, here you’re just hitting at one block, it shotguns through the bank and starts jamming everything. A preclear who’s in bad shape is not necessarily hitting a present time problem but very well might be, of some magnitude. And unless you unbalance it as a-I told you earlier, remember? Present time problem on a preclear. Unless you ask the preclear whether or not he has a present time problem, why, he’s not liable to tell you, because he doesn’t think he has. You know, he’s just shotgunning all over the place. He doesn’t really recognize his present time problem anymore.

What is his present time problem? Well, you could, with great ease for five minutes or so, simply ask him what’s his present time worry? What’s he worrying about? What’s got him stopped one way or the other? And he’ll answer right up. Something has.

Funny part of it is that it might sort of just fall apart. It’s had him stopped for so long that something must have him stopped in present time, you see? He’s hit some big ones. But the funny part of it is, these really don’t catalyze violently unless there actually is some kind of a present time upset in his existence, which is balanced so that the “no” equals the “yes.”

Do a little Mock-up Processing, run a concept, run Certainty Processing in its most elementary form-“I have to go to the dentist. I do not have to go to the dentist”-and you will upset the “maybe.”

Just say, “Now, sit there a moment and get the idea now that you have to go to the dentist.”

“All right.” “Now get the idea, ‘I do not have to go to the dentist.’ ”

Now, that’s one way of handling it. Might take a little while to do that. It’s a very elementary way of handling it. I mean, it’s terribly crude.

All right. You find out that the preclear is in violent trouble with his wife. Let’s take this Unit. He’s in the class and his wife doesn’t want him to be in the class. And every time the auditor audits him, why, energy starts going around in the lines and so forth. And the person doesn’t quite know what’s wrong, you see, but we’ve got “I should be in the class, I shouldn’t be in the class,” see? “I need my wife, I don’t need my wife.” “I want to stay married, I don’t want to stay married.” Anything like that is liable to just take the problem and go bzzztt and break the communication block.

Why do you break a communication block? Because it locks up one of these thinking machines so that any energy thrown at the thinking machine then starts passing through all significances.

What’s significance, anyway? Significance comes about because somebody was afraid once. After that he has to know everything before he goes. He has to know before he goes and so forth, because something bad might happen to him.

This is elementary auditing. It is also, by the way-it’s also, by the way, very good auditing. You handle the preclear. You say, “Now, look. This guy, obviously-he can’t be three feet back of his head. There’s something on a cause-effect problem here. There must be a lockup on the track.” All right. Let’s take out the first uncertainty that we can get our hands on. Let’s just amputate it from the bank, boom! Let’s use Concept Processing, nothing more horrible than that. Guy can’t get mock-ups. All right, just use Concept Processing. We’ll unlock a problem, one problem.

The fellow has said, “Well, I don’t know this. I don’t know that.” Maybe some problem-“I don’t know whether I can have a baby. I don’t know whether I am sexually potent.” “I don’t know whether I will be able to afford eating,” you know? Might be some problem like this. It’s got the bank locked up. Some elementary problem, you know, an elementary problem-by an elementary problem, I don’t mean a simple problem, I mean a problem dealing with basics. A problem with basics would be on communication or it would be on the dynamics-very definitely on the dynamics. It would have to do with survival and creation, destruction.

You just unlock it as a problem and you just start tearing the preclear to pieces. But you better not use Concept Running very long because you just start gunshotting the bank. It’s a very limited technique, but you’ve unlocked a problem.

Now the fellow says, “Well, the truth of the matter is...” Now that you’ve handled this problem, he’s going to give you another one because you’ve just got through giving life to problems. You get what a little trip there was in the track there, see? You’ve now validated his problems, so you’ve got the bank alive. Everywhere it says “problem,” there’s a pinball light has gone on, bong!

All right. He says, “I’ve never been the same emotionally so far as the opposite sex is concerned”-now that you’ve unlocked this problem of, in present time here, “I’ve just never been the same since Gertie left me.”

“When was that?”

“Well, she was my eighth wife and that was about twenty years ago” or something on this order.

By the way, an auditor never fails to be surprised when he runs into a tough case-he’s U always surprised that there’s so much action in the person’s life. A tremendous amount of action has gone on in the person’s life. There are very unusual situations in this person’s life. And he never bothers to ask for them, I guess because he considers the person is-you know, he just—I don’t know, I guess he figures out the fellow got that way by sneezing.

You suppose that? He sneezed five times once in a Safeway store and he’s been aberrated ever since? No, no. No, you just don’t write the plot of life well if you think that. This person has run head-on into tractors, dynamite, automobile accidents, miscarriages, eight illegal marriages, sixteen store robberies. Oh my God, no telling what the hell you’ll run into in a person.

But if a person doesn’t respond immediately to auditing, they’ve got a past, believe me, right away. You say, “Be three feet back of your head”-doesn’t mean that if people can be easily three feet back of their head, don’t have a past either, but it does mean that the past is pretty boggy on the individual that doesn’t. All right.

You say to this individual, “Be three feet back of your head.” The individual is three feet back of the head. You go on and you audit according to rote. You have him be in this planet and then exteriorize and interiorize out of Jupiter a few times and you go on and it’s all running very smoothly and Change of Space and so forth.

Boy, you just haven’t taken a microscope to this preclear and looked at the kind of lock that is flying off of that preclear. But you can get rid of these things with that preclear and you’re processing a hell of a lot of significance and it’s going by the boards in all directions while you run this process.

Now, the next fellow, you say, “Be three feet back of your head.”

And he says, “What head? You three feet back of your head?” Or “Head. Let’s see. Head, head, head. Now, the naval use of the word head ...”

Let’s not suspect that the fellow is simply stupid or something of the sort or something strange or that he’s a peculiar breed of cat. No, I’m afraid he’s just had a little bit more than his share of livingness and he’s taken it hard.

Well, let’s investigate, then, in terms of certainty. And we find out that if we investigate in terms of certainty, he’s riding a “maybe” that’s bigger than the biggest nightmare black horse you ever saw. There’d be some big “maybe” sitting there. Oh, I don’t mean that you have to probe deeply. You don’t even need an E-Meter to find that out.

You ask the fellow, “Now, what are you most worried about in life?”

And the fellow says, “Oh, I don’t know. Um-um-um-shoes. I’m worried about my shoes. I’m ...” He’s-just nonsense, you see.

“No, no. Something more important than shoes. What do you think might happen tomorrow?”

And the fellow sits there for a moment and he looks at you. He says, “Tomorrow? Hmm. [sigh] God knows. Tomorrow. I don’t know. Why? Is something bad going to happen tomorrow?”

You just found out your individual probably didn’t have the next thirty seconds of time track. He had no security on the next minute or so of time track. It just isn’t there yet, see? It’s just sort of happening as he goes along.

He might even be stopping time, second by second by second by second. Everything might be a time stop. That’s the funniest situation to be in. It’s not necessarily a psychotic situation. A psychotic situation is a reach and withdraw situation, must reach-can’t reach, or must withdraw-can’t withdraw, in high restimulation. That’s psycho.

The other of “stop time, stop time, stop time”-is just sort of a lethargic “I don’t dare go anyplace or get out of anything. And the MEST universe isn’t going to be here in the next couple of seconds, anyway. I know that. I don’t know anything else, but that one I know.”

This kind of a situation is compounded by some immediate problem. And he says, “Well, the truth of the matter is I have to write a letter to my mother. And every time I write a letter to my mother and tell her what I’m doing, I get a nasty reply. But if I don’t write her a letter, I’m not going to have the twenty-five bucks I need next week.” Well, that is certainly a communication lockup. You see, the uncertainty situation is always a communication lockup. “I don’t know whether I ought to tell them or not.” It’s a communication lockup.

“Let’s see. If I tell them, they won’t ever speak to me again. I know that. But I’ve got to tell them because every time I’m talking to them, I kind of feel it coming up in my throat. You know, I’m liable to say it at any moment. You know, I-I’ve-I-I’ve tried for years to keep it a secret, but I chew tobacco.” You know, communication lockup. Now, that’s another type. There’s various kinds of communication lockups.

Then there’s the communication lockup inside of the bank of “Should I do it or shouldn’t I do it? Or “Should I have it or shouldn’t I have it?” Or “Is that space tenable or isn’t it tenable?”

You find this person is about to rent a new apartment, [sigh] See, is it tenable? Can he occupy that space? No, he knows he can’t, because he gets kicked out of all the spaces he occupies, but he’s got to occupy some place-he can’t sit on the street. Of course, the apartment isn’t very good.

Well, this is handled in a very elementary fashion. You can get a case entrance just boom, just like that, just by finding out what kind of a problem the guy is wrestling around with. And you just-should he do it, shouldn’t he do it?

Now, one chap that certainly all of you know of, not in this Unit, one time I asked him to do something. He’s connected with the HAS, and I asked him to do something. And a long communication lag immediately ensued. It was over the telephone, see. Long-yet it was something rather simple. And he said, “Well, I’ll call you back.”

“No,” I said, “you’re not going to call me back. You’re going to run, at this moment, Tm certain I want to do it.’”

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Well, ‘I’m certain I don’t want to do it,’ then.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m certain I don’t want to do it. All right. I’ll just hold that concept for a moment.”

And I said, “Run the concept ‘I’m certain I want to do it.’”

“Okay,” he says.

“Now, mock yourself up dead because you did it. Now mock yourself up dead because you didn’t do it.”

It was a most elementary thing. It was something like calling somebody up and cancelling something. It just stopped him. And all of a sudden pyrotechnics set in. The guy had me mixed up with his own Papa and we had been getting a communication block on everything I had been asking him to do for a long time-although it was rather simple and elementary things, it wasn’t anything unroutine. And we were just getting more and more block, till all of a sudden he was hung up on inaction. He couldn’t even talk about doing something. And it blew on “Certain I don’t want to do it. Certain I want to do it.”

Only I wouldn’t let him tell me then whether he would do it or not. I said to phone me back in about six hours and give me the answer. Well, he phoned me back in six hours to say that his case had blown up, as far as he was concerned. We’d just unlocked the lines this much.

Now, what’s the essential difference there between giving somebody orders and a communication lag and a bank lockup? See, these things are all tying together in a bundle of what? Certainty.

Communication lag. How can a guy possibly talk fast if every communication he’s got goes down line, hits shunt 62, goes off into bypass 34 ... Why did it jump off of line 1? It’s because there’s two dynamic impulses directly opposed, each one of them completely certain but both of them together compounding into an entire uncertainty. And that’s a thinking machine.

If you took a dog out here-do you want to drive a dog kind of nuts? Just grab one by the collar sometime and say-well, a dog that’s been trained, particularly-and say, “Run” or “Beat it” or “Go” or “Go fetch it” and keep holding him by the collar. Nyyaaooww. He’ll go into apathy. You’re going across his training impulses and you’re locking his bank up. And you can lock it up just tighter than-though it’s nailed down to go to the bottom of the sea, like Beebe’s bathysphere. That dog will come out of it after a while, but he’ll be in kind of dopey condition.

Now, another thing you can do to an individual is run him off into a psychotic pattern by forcing him to reach for something and then inhibiting any reaching and then insisting that he reach and then keep him from reaching. You see that again as a communication setup? Well, that one is the batty one because it turns on the emotion that is insanity itself. It’s frenzy.

Well, you better take a look at your auditing and find out if you’re trying to make a preclear more certain or if you’re playing a mouth organ. Well, now the one thing that keeps an individual from being certain, of course, is fear, which is why I gave you a lot of talk about courage. And every once in a while a preclear will say to you, “Well, I don’t know whether I’m actually putting it out there or not. I think I am drinking the bank dry. I think I just must be taking the energy out of one part of the bank and putting it over into another part of the bank. I’m just sure I must be doing that.”

Well, let’s just jump that objection before it ever occurs. You get a preclear that isn’t three feet back of his head easily, let’s recognize he must be drifting on down toward the finishing end of the MEST universe cycle-of-action.

There goes a door, [bang] I told you a door was going.

All right. This preclear’s worry is then represented by this curve. The individual can’t be three feet back of his head and his occlusion is bad, so he must be somewhere on the late end of this cycle-of-action. He must be somewhere over there between survive and destroy. See, he’s not dead, so he can’t be all the way down to destroyed. And he’s afraid he won’t survive, so he’s past survival, so he must be somewhere between survive and destroy. Right?

You ask him real quick and he’s either getting no mock-ups or the mock-ups he’s getting are two-dimensional. And either one of those manifestations puts the individual past survive, en route to destroyed, and that’s where he is on that cycle-of-action.

Well now, of course this individual is going to say to you, "Well, I don’t know, but I think I’m probably draining it all out of my bank. Actually, I’m not creating new energy, I’m just taking it out of one part of the bank and putting it in the other part of the bank.”

Why does he know this so well? He knows it, because he knows better than he knows anything else, that he can’t create.

Well, I could sit here and give you a very, very long list of processes which you would run on create or creativeness, but the foremost of them and the most effective of them would, of course, be to waste creation in brackets.

You would be amazed at the difference of working concepts in brackets, or pluses and minuses in brackets, and wasting in brackets. Wasting goes straight into havingness, you see. And wasting in brackets, then saving in brackets-and normally, when I say "wasting,” I also mean saving in brackets-accepting in brackets, desiring in brackets and being curious about. You could put another one in there: enforcing things on people in brackets.

Now, you’d be surprised at how much more workable it is to waste than to run these things otherwise. It’s very workable. There are many other processes and this process is not an unlimited process. But you certainly better pitch in with such a case and immediately realize this individual must be late on that curve of action.

So what are we going to do with him? He’s obviously not going to be certain that he’s creating any of the mock-ups because he isn’t certain he’s creating the energy. The energy must be coming from someplace else. You find a person who’s gone into mysticism thinks the energy quite often is being granted him by Vishnu or Kreda or a shredded wheat biscuit.

Now, our problem with this case, then, is to get him into the field of creation. Well, if we just wasted creativeness in brackets, round and round and round and round for a while, you know, several times around, and just wasting, without adding the rest of it particularly, this first time-only we’ll have to finish it up later. And then were to run courage around in brackets (wasting courage around in brackets, you know), then wasting creativeness and wasting courage, and then wasting enjoyment and then finish up by wasting a bracket and saving a bracket and so forth of creativeness and courage and so forth. And we’d get him out of this sup er certainty that he can’t create, it’s the easiest way to get him out of it.

I said you could handle it plus and minus and get him off the line, but if we waste it, we’re also processing havingness. He obviously can’t have creativeness and he will find exactly why he can’t have creativeness that will satisfy him. And he will upset the devil out of those communication blocks he has, the second you ask him to waste creativeness.

You find out that he was so hammered and pounded on the subject of sex, for instance, that he couldn’t possibly, really, with any aplomb at all, ever have anything to do with sex. He’s been so pounded around about eating that he knows he has to eat to have energy. All sorts of things will turn up like this.

And maybe if he was in an artistic line or something on that order, people pounded him around about creating until he’s just groggy. He’s finally succumbed.

Engineers quite commonly have bought conservation of energy to such a degree they realize there’s nothing in the universe that can be created. You know, it’s all got to have been done before. The motto of engineering is “It’s all been done before. It’s all been done before.”

You can tell somebody who’s in bad shape, just instantly. You know what kind of a condition the guy is in, who says to you, “Well, they did that a long time ago” and so on. You’ve just given him an idea and he says, “Well, we did that a long time ago. You know, it’s been done before. It’s been done before.” The rest of the statement is “because there isn’t anything original in the entire universe.”

This is quite remarkable. That’s a sweeping statement if I ever heard one and yet it’s made by the most conservative fellows, so they evidently don’t think of it as a sweeping statement. That’s a real wild one. Nothing original in the whole universe? You mean, it never got created? Oh boy.

Well, now how do we move in on such a process on such a case? Well, let’s waste creativeness, of course. Let’s just waste the early-not because it has any other significance, that we want to waste the early end of the cycle, because he can’t have an early end of the cycle; in other words, he can’t start.

The individual who can’t arrive, by the way, can simply get arrivals better by wasting arrivals. I mean, we can change his bank around just by wasting arrivals, wasting stops, wasting death, wasting destruction.

Let’s say an individual is fixedly, compulsively on the early end of the track and he can’t do anything else. It’s a sort of a manic. He’s got to create, got to create, got to create, got to create and can’t have anything that’s been created. Well, boy, that’s another kind of an activity. The guy has been stuck on the early end of the track, similar to somebody that’s stuck at the age of three on the time track, see? And here’s this proposition. Well, you’d better waste some death on him and then he can run a full curve.

You could understand by that, that the ability to run a full, complete, smooth curve is one of your goals in processing somebody. Get him to a point of where he can run a full curve. But that’s been said too many times. Create and Destroy Assessment and Create and Destroy Processing, very early material and so on. It should be obvious to you that you’re trying to get an individual that can start and stop and change.

Now, you can waste any of those things and you’ve got something about this.

Now, I gave you Courage Processing, not to get more air in my lungs, because there’s more air about ten thousand feet up than there is here, not in terms of density but expansiveness. And I didn’t give it to you for you to forget about particularly, because the fellow who is stuck, is stuck in a flinch of one kind or another. Remember, I told you those three categories of flinches? All right. If he’s stuck in a flinch someplace, then he’s of course scared of something.

Well, a stuck-flinch is really scared. Now what do you expect this fellow to do? Now, you just sail in on him and you run some process like-well, I just said something about-well, a black case, you put shells over their heads and so forth. Yeah, that’ll fix up a lot of black cases. But if he isn’t certain he’s putting a shell around his head, the process won’t work. If he isn’t certain it’s there, it won’t work.

Mock-up Processing, pounded and hammered long enough, maybe would get a guy up the line. Actually, pounded and hammered long enough, it does get a guy up the line, just non sequitur processing such as in Self Analysis, just because he keeps adding particles and adding particles and adding particles. And after a while he gets the idea, “You know, I couldn’t be getting this much energy from the bank, I must be putting some there myself.” You know, big thought.

Sooner or later it will hit that one, will hit other computations. Furthermore, you’re making space for him all the time. Furthermore, you’re giving him mass. And there’s all kinds of things occurring with that process, but that’s a long, arduous process. And boy, the guy who isn’t certain of those first few mock-ups he’s putting out is going to be on that process a loooong time. And you don’t want to be on a process a long time. You don’t want to be on a case a long time.

So let’s just short-circuit the whole thing and let’s just sail into the case and something he can be certain of.

So we say, “Well, all right. Put black shells around your head.”

And the guy says, “Well, yeah.”

“Put another one around and look through the first one at the second one.”

And, “Okay. Uh, all right.”

“Now put a third one out there and look through the second one to the third one.”

And the guy says, “Okay.”

Just because you’re telling him is no reason he’s doing it. You say, “Well, did you put a black shell around your head?” which would be a routine auditing question after he said, “Yes.”

“Did you put a black shell? Are you sure it’s there?”

Fellow says, “Oh no. I’m never sure it’s there. I’m never sure of anything. How should I be sure of anything?” Something on this order.

Well, you’d just better back off of that process right then-not an hour from then. The process won’t work if he’s not certain about any of it, because you’re obviously hitting a plugged communication line. The line must be plugged. It’s bypassing, so he’s got uncertainty of some sort or another. You must be running down a whole chain of “maybes.” Must be just going right straight through this chain. So how do you handle it? You get another process.

Now, there’s one last-ditch process that I gave you all here one day. When a fellow just starts to get uncertain, uncertain, you just can’t get him certain of anything, get the most certainty he can get on the First Dynamic, the Second Dynamic, the Third Dynamic, the Fourth Dynamic, the Fifth Dynamic, the Sixth Dynamic, the Seventh Dynamic and Eighth Dynamic-the most certain datum he can get-and you’ll unbalance the bank. You’ll unbalance his communication system. And all the time you’re validating certainty, so it’s a good process. You’re giving life to certainty.

Well, in the “net aggregate,” to coin a cliche-I always wondered what that was. The engineers have aggregate they make concretes out of, but they don’t carry them in nets. It’s a very puzzling thing, [laughter] I thought of it for many years. I’ve had the datum parked over there at the side and someday I’ll solve it. And I don’t suppose it has anything to do about the fact that I had to go to class but didn’t want to go to class and that’s why all the engineering I had is hung up on a “maybe.” But anyway, I... [laughter]

When we get a preclear who is working well or working badly, he will work better on those things and in those areas of which he’s most certain. And certainty, when it’s validated in processing, is a continual, expansive thing. It’s expansion, when started. It begins to get more certainty. You could say that certainty breeds more certainty and uncertainty breeds more uncertainty.