Okay. And this is December the 14th, the first afternoon lecture, first lecture of the day of this date.

And today we're going to take up a higher principle of existence than we had with survive. And we're going to take up a higher principle of existence because we've — about time we explained survive, huh?

And it's very interesting that SOP 8 has not had — I have not put on any of the SOPs, the eighth step. But today I am describing Step VIII of SOP 8.

Now — because we have to take up perception, we have to take up postulates, we have to take up the failure of perception, the failure of postulates, and we have to take up why agreement with the mest universe is so difficult — pardon, not so difficult, but it's so deteriorating on a preclear.

Now, the principle of survive is the most prominent of the principles which are listed in the early Vedic hymns. This principle survive comes out of the Vedic hymns, and is a word used to describe the middle of the band. Life is trying to survive, and that was Dianetics.

Now, in the early Vedic hymns, we find the curve of life, which is birth, growth, degenerate and decay. They do not specifically remark upon survive, but it is understood, you might say, in that curve. And that is the earliest philosophic writing of which we have any record here on Earth — and is, incidentally, throughout, the truest — the Vedic hymns.

There are successive writings of the East which more or less evolve out of the Vedic hymns, but which are not themselves in a sufficient state of purity to cause us much interest. But when we have the earliest of the Vedic hymns, we have something which came down a great many years to the first writing. They were in existence probably thousands of years before they were written down.

I have heard them described as very simple. I have heard the remark said that the simple, pure and childlike glory of the Vedic peoples had long since perished. I have heard that said. And also that life, by the time men had begun to write things down, had degenerated into a very serious affair.

Well, it's interesting that people call simple things unimportant things. If something is simple, it's supposed to be unimportant. That is the first trick that one runs into.

It is only the simple thing which is important. The complex thing is never important. Just that — it's just never important. And the fact that people think the complex thing is terribly important permits them then to become involved in a chain reaction of worry which winds into a dwindling spiral and goes on down the line.

Now, we want to investigate what the single factor of — above all other factors which we can locate at this time, what the single factor is that causes the dwindling spiral in this universe. And by isolating it, demonstrate that it can be remedied by a simple, single technique on a preclear.

The goal which we have of a simple technique on a preclear is a very worthwhile one for this reason: The auditor tends to run — this is just one of the reasons, a minor one — the auditor tends to run upon the preclear that which should be run upon himself.

Theoretically, then, that technique which was the most common difficulty to all people would be one which would be readily accepted by auditors and which would be used consistently and continually. We have such a technique in Step VIII of SOP 8-C. And the name of that step is "Duplication."

Duplication is, itself, the first and foremost necessity of a thetan. He is compulsively dedicated to duplication. And this universe obsessively prevents him from duplicating.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

The thetan has to duplicate, he thinks. He is not content — the thetan is not content at any time — to remain a unit. It's not interesting to him to be a unit, because there's no motion, no action, no time, nothing. It would just be a continuous eternity of "I am a thetan."

His first moment of duplication comes about with what I have spoken of many times here — the chess player. He goes on both sides of the board to play a game of chess. Well, he has to duplicate in order to be on the other side of the chess board.

Well, so we get our first entrance into automaticity and randomity. And that first entrance is with a duplication.

He duplicates himself in order to be on the other side of the chess board and to have a player. Now as he continues to do this, he has more and more opposing players. And he can have also more and more of himself to oppose the more and more players.

Now, this universe, with its fixation on all dynamics on "thou must not duplicate," opposes this principle of "must have another chess player," so that an individual becomes more and more and more and more and more covert concerning the second chess player. And this very covertness eventually evolves into a very complex, aberrated system. It evolves, amongst other things, into complex communications systems which do not readily unravel, because behind every communications system we have duplication.

Duplication is the soul of a postulate. Why is it? Because a postulate is laid in so that something else will happen. Therefore something else must duplicate the postulate. Any order given by the captain of a company is expected to be duplicated by the sergeants. You see that?

Anytime a carpenter sets out to make a bookcase, he is demanding that the mest universe duplicate his postulate in energy. He has to have a communications system to do this, in order merely to say, "There will now be a bookcase." He has to have some space in which to do this. He says, "All right, there will now be a bookcase." Bing, poof! There's a bookcase.

Well, that's all very well, but one immediately becomes rather unvalued — that is to say, items and objects become rather valueless. Why would he say, "There will now be a bookcase," except to create beauty? But he wants attention because he has an interchange — if he's going to duplicate himself to be another self, then he wants attention from the other self. And we get the attention interwoven with the duplication, so that the basic background of attention is duplication.

A postulate duplicated in mest forms would be to make pieces of wood or metal form in such a way, and stay in such a way, as to continue to form a bookcase. So in that communications system we have a more complex communications system only because of one thing: The basic postulate that goes behind these walls is, of course, "resist effect."

But there is a higher postulate in every piece of space made. Every piece of space, every space and area, has a higher postulate in it, and that is, "I mustn't duplicate." In order to resist effects, in order to stay as it is, it of course must not duplicate.

Any time you say, "This must stay as it is," you must, of course, understoodly say, "This mustn't duplicate now," unless you are throwing out large quantities of raw material which are expected to duplicate something. Now, that would be something else, wouldn't it? But then you would say exactly what they were expected to duplicate.

But the earliest cast-about of raw material in this universe took place in space, which already had the postulate in it, "mustn't be duplicated."

A god of this universe — an anthropomorphic god . . . And I hope that you understand me very clearly when I use this word god loosely and even blasphemously, for the good reason that this thing g-o-d is something which man has set up in his image; and it is merely an ambition on the part of a thetan, it's an effort — a co-effort on the part of thetans to have a playing field and so on.

And there is, actually, beings above the beingness of this universe. There are beings, but they are not this anthropomorphic thing who is the jealous god, who has hate and vengeance and so forth — that happens to be above that level.

And the jealous god — the most jealous god there would be, would be a god who would insist at all times that he must not be duplicated, even to the point of not using his name in vain. He mustn't be duplicated. No graven images. His space — it's all his space and so forth. And we go on this way.

Interesting, isn't it? We have a "no duplicate," in other words, in the space. You mustn't duplicate this space. You mustn't compete with this space. This space is here, there's only one space.

We find a scholar of the level of Count Alfred Korzybski, for instance, writing an entire text and an entire subject — general semantics — on the premise that two mest universe spaces cannot concur, and they cannot be in the same space. It's interesting to the degree to which this can go. This is not even vaguely true. It's just space. I mean, you can do anything with space — unless you were convinced that space will not duplicate you, and that you mustn't duplicate space. If you're convinced of that, then you mustn't duplicate. That's your first level: You'd better not duplicate space — not this mest universe space.

In the first place, any one of you are capable of making this much space. But if you mustn't duplicate this space, if you must back up from such a duplication, then you will have this playing field in common — the mest universe — with others, if you don't duplicate it.

But all sorts of weird things evolve immediately that you start to duplicate space which others can use. You've set yourself up, for one thing, as God. We mustn't do that! There's all sorts of provisions against this.

Now, anybody who is afraid of space has discovered long since that the space will not duplicate him. And that he, perforce, must at length duplicate the space. And so the thetan becomes nothing. Because he has to duplicate the space in terms of "be this space." So he's driven to the point of either "I can't be" and "I won't be" this space, at which moment he becomes nothing, at the same time not making any space of his own. If he refuses to duplicate the space continually, why then, of course, he stops duplicating space. Because space is just space, it isn't anything very, very strange.

This mest universe space just happens to occur here. Well, other spaces can occur here, too. And — but if you drive it under cover that other spaces can occur here and convince everybody that no other space can occur here, then you have only one space here.

Now, this space won't duplicate you. Therefore it won't carry your orders. It will do all sorts of things, but it won't duplicate you. Not directly, on a postulate basis.

In other words, you say, "All right. This space — this space will now be twice as big," and it's right there, the same size. But that's only because you've agreed to it. You've agreed on a no-duplication with this space, as I remark again, even dramatized to the extent of Alfred Korzybski's general semantics. All through that book you mustn't duplicate space. You mustn't put space within space and mustn't do all sorts of things.

That's a very ironbound system. Now, we needn't go into this too far because, by the way, this will show up with you, on the process of it. All this material will.

But let's just take it by dynamics: "mustn't duplicate." All right. First dynamic: You mustn't duplicate yourself. If there are two of you, you're kind of outside the law, right away. As a matter of fact, you've immediately exceeded every police record there is.

You could go out and kill somebody and then the police could take one of you and execute it, and the other one would go out and kill somebody else. And about the time they were executing it, there'd be another one of you walking out the front door, tipping your hat.

Fingerprints would be of no use, so identification and identity itself would be of no use. And you would have immediately escaped every consequence of this universe, the second that you can duplicate yourself.

And yet, to have any power in this universe, actually there must be two of each of you. Has to be two anchor points. The most basic kind of terminal imaginable is two terminals. You see that?

You've got to have two terminals. If you don't have two terminals, you don't have any exchange of energy. Did you ever see an electric motor with one terminal in it in this universe? It doesn't function. So, if you knock out one terminal, that leaves somebody playing the "only one." And the way you do that is by convincing him he mustn't duplicate.

But you give him a system by which he can duplicate, and so we get the second dynamic. Now, as we start on out the second dynamic, we find out that he can duplicate himself by use of certain symbols and activities, and that he's even paid for it in terms of sensation for doing it this way.

And we get the act of duplication, the sexual act, and we get the result of this sexual act, which is children. Well, somebody not thinking very far and without the keys to this problem in their — terms of basics, would stop right there and say, "Well, look, there's something wrong with this system," and spend his entire life trying to tear the system down somehow or another in somebody's mind. But if he didn't have the key to this system, he would never tear it down.

Yet Sigmund Freud made a very bold effort to do so. And everything he said about it's — happens to be true, but it just — too complex and doesn't go far enough.

Sex is terribly aberrative, but it is not even vaguely the most aberrative thing on the dynamics. Just let's take number one — you. Let's take something more aberrative than that. Let's take you, all the time putting out postulates, orders, commands to things that won't duplicate you. You don't believe it? Just tell this wall up here to be some other way. Because the basic postulate in that wall is "I won't duplicate you." You have to go through all sorts of weird commu­nications systems in order to get it to fashion. But that's clear on up to six.

Now, let's take the third dynamic. The third dynamic means a group consisting of separate individuals. Well, what would happen to the third dynamic if you were able to say, and everybody had to accept at that moment, "There is now — there are now eight hundred thousand of me."

You're a third dynamic right there — boom. This'd be very, very destructive in terms of armies. The enemy has to keep recruiting, recruiting, recruiting, recruiting and bleeding the nations of everybody who is playing the "only one." And you would appear on the field of battle, you would say, "There are now eight hundred thousand of me, and there's only five hundred thousand of him," you'd hardly even need weapons. You'd just walk at him — he'd be swamped.

And then after that eight hundred thousand was dead, all but one, or something like that, you could say, "Well, now there's two million of me."

Only you could even go this far — you could say, "There are now two million in his rear." So you see, you'd play chaos with the game immediately that the third dynamic permitted a duplication. So any group in this universe dramatizes "this group must not be duplicated."

Actually, the universe lays down the law that it mustn't — a group mustn't be duplicated. People try, however, to get groups to duplicate. And there again, underlying each one, is this big effort on the part of the thetan to duplicate covertly.

In the Constitution of the United States it is clearly stated that competition is the heart of all trade. Very clearly stated. In other words, let's duplicate every company so that it can have a competitor. It says let's play a game; let's duplicate. And you have monopolies continually coming forward trying to break that law down, each monopoly trying to be the "only one."

So we have groups. We have the group the United States, trying to make it legal to duplicate. And we have the thing that's being duplicated trying to make it illegal to duplicate and be a monopoly. The cartel system, and other evils which have arisen in recent decades and so on, are based upon the insistence of a few that they be not duplicated.

Now, we go on up to the fourth dynamic, and we find that man would be very upset — is very upset, or is made to laugh, by monkeys trying to duplicate him. It's another species. He's very intrigued with this, or he's insulted by it. And if Martians were to come down here and say they were men, and let's say that Martians were the cartoons of Martians — which they aren't — if Martians were these cartoons, then man would be, again, very upset.

These things are not men. The only sentient species, of course, must be man — the fourth dynamic. We mustn't have another sentient species suddenly appearing on the scene with similar capabilities, claiming unto the same rights man would have. A Martian trying to get rights under the Supreme Court of the United States would not get them.

Now we get to the fifth dynamic and we find that all life is in a wonderful contest, and it's running madly in one direction on the second dynamic to duplicate tremendous numbers. Or, on the first dynamic, to remain and survive as long as possible as one animal. We find the whole animal kingdom's doing this.

Let's take the method the herring uses. The herring survives solely by duplication. He wants to duplicate enough and far enough and so many that not all the herring can be killed, and one herring or two herring or three herring or something like this will always be left after every attack. And so he builds, as a fish, tremendous capabilities in each herring to produce enormous numbers of herring. And so it is with all fish. They have taken this system of duplication as a rote procedure.

Now, when man himself begins to starve as an individual, instead of simply duplicating the food or duplicating himself, he starts down the sexual track which runs along coordinated against time, and we get in India — we get personal survival of very little moment. This is true in China too. And yet, duplication in terms of sex as the big answer. He must go down the track, then, in terms of that.

But because they've already surrendered to such a communications system, we don't find mest duplicating the postulates of the men very well. They don't make things into things — it more or less runs along and decays.

But right with that, they are sold so thoroughly on the seventh and eighth dynamics, which we'll get to in a moment, that they have a wonderful time. They just have this fabulous time with the seventh and eighth dynamics; because they feel they can't duplicate, so therefore something else is duplicating.

And you get a Hindu slavishly following orders. He is doing the one thing he can do, which is to duplicate the orders of another, which is other-determinism. And that, in essence, is the definition of other-determinism, is to duplicate something else rather than to duplicate yourself.

Well, we get up to the sixth dynamic, and we find out that the entire background of the sixth dynamic is "we mustn't duplicate you." Space, energy, matter, time — none of these things will duplicate you, it says. And that's the prime postulate in them.

Now, we get the seventh dynamic, and because of the mobility and the postulate ability of a thetan who is mobile, of a spirit, of a saint, of something else — we get this — a body duplicating the spirit. The body duplicates the spirit because the body is immobile, it's tied down into a communications system, and it is on a communication line which is the genetic line, and so forth. So it will obey a spirit. But it won't fully duplicate the spirit. It only partially duplicates what the spirit says.

And now we get up to God, and we've already said something about God — God is the one thing in this universe which mustn't be duplicated and which is playing the game, the "only one." And it — fortunately for this universe, as far as this universe and intimate interest in it is concerned — it doesn't exist as a god. There is a god above this universe, but this is not a god intimately connected with this universe.

This universe is normally — could be routinely considered from one moment to the next, as simply a playing field which is co-created by those thetans which are within it.

Now, where we have no duplication and the impulse to duplicate, we get a failure. You see that? That should be very clear. We have this tremendous obsession — everyone knows that the answer to every problem is duplicate. No matter — let's take the game called traps — "caught in the trap." That's this universe patly — it plays the game "caught in a trap." Nearly every child's game has something to do with this — caught one way or the other.

And we take an individual who's caught in a trap. All he has to do is duplicate himself and he'd be outside the trap.

But as the cell goes down through the cycle of one lifetime in a body, it starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It's losing something all the way through. Well, the main thing it's losing, of course, is its self-determinism — its tremendous dependency upon the energy furnished it in terms of food. So it starts duplicating, is the factor. And it starts duplicating the energy activity of combustion, and so it loses its own self-determinism. Combustion enters in.

Now, most of the people who can't get out of their heads are relying very heavily upon energy produced by the body, and they're duplicating this energy action of the body rather than furnishing energy. And they get away from the body and they're very weak. That's because they're not making any energy — they're depending on the body to make it.

In other words, they've gone to a point of — this is the cycle they've run: They've given orders and postulates to the body, and orders and postulates to the body, and they've insisted, "Duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate," you see. Every time they say, "Walk," then the body is supposed to duplicate this action. And now they throw up a mock-up in the body which is walking, and the body walks. And the body walks, that's all. You see? I mean, it's so simple.

But they've kept on doing this. Now, there have been many times when they told the body to walk and the body didn't walk; in other words, didn't duplicate. So at length, you get the thetan duplicating the body, not the body duplicating the thetan.

So the thetan begins to take orders from the body, and orders from the body would be merely a sort of a flotsam and jetsam carried along in society — really stimulus-response — because the body doesn't give anybody any orders.

So you would get then the society ridges or the ridges of the body, earlier installed by the thetan, giving the orders back to the thetan. So the thetan is in — actually in terms of time, giving himself orders over a big breadth of time. And as he gets worse off and worse off and worse off, he gives himself orders on a shorter and shorter span. He's giving himself orders all the time.

You ask some preclear who's having a hard time of it to throw a ball out in front of him, it'll snap right back at him. Well, that is giving a postulate and then the postulate coming back.

He has to duplicate his own postulates. This is in terms of a failure. Now this is way high on the track, too, you see. He wants everything to duplicate his postulates. And very low on the track, he's found out that nothing will duplicate them, so he has to. Low on the track, then, he's duplicating his own postulates because of the failure of other things to duplicate his postulates.

He's told walls to be red, and they kept right on being green and so forth, and he's done this often enough so that he eventually becomes red. Something is going to give way, see? Something somewhere is going to give way, and what gives way is himself. You see that?

Now, when it comes to duplication as a system for use in processing, we can see immediately that almost any preclear — this is on the shortest test imaginable, just a test that'd only require five minutes — will go more or less the same curve.

You ask him to duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, it's all right. But don't ask him to duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Now, don't even do this to him: "Now get that spot..." I say don't — the fact of the matter is, it's the technique. But if you want him to remain calm, don't do this to him. If you want him to get well, you do this to him.

You just tell him, "Pick out three places. All right. Now get the fact that there is no duplicate in each one of the three in rotation. Now get the fact that there's no duplicate in each one of the three in rotation. Now no duplicate in each one of the three in rotation. Now no duplicate in each one of the three in rotation." And just to vary the technique, now get him to get no duplicate in each one of the three in rotation.

And you keep that up for about fifteen or twenty minutes — on some preclears, they'll tolerate it that long, but not much longer. And the bulk of your preclears will probably blow up very early.

Now, they can't do that. They just start getting bored. They'll get too tense. They just get rrrum! No, they don't want to do that! "Well, what's the matter with you?"

You've run them straight into the central obsession-compulsion that is the mest universe underlying basic. You've run them straight at it. And the strain gets a little bit too much for them after a while. They get sick at their stomach and they get tense and they get upset, and after they go over the peak on it they say, "That's all right."

And what do you know, they'll do something after you've done this which they could never do before — they will go to a movie they have seen before. Just that. They'd just as soon go to a movie they've seen before. They would just go — as soon go to it about ten times (it's film going through a camera), because you've spoiled their anxiety which makes them think that movies are entertaining, which is "can't predict."

Now when something won't duplicate, they can't predict it. Do you see that?

Let's just get something else. The fellow says, "It must never happen again." You know, see, he's had some terrible experience that practically wiped him out. "It must never happen again," he says. That means it must never be duplicated.

Oh-oh. The second he says it must never be duplicated, he sticks himself on the track. Because obsessively, he must duplicate. And the only way out of the incident is to duplicate it.

If he were to duplicate it four times and just hold it there, it would discharge. If he'd duplicate it just twice and hold it there, it would also discharge. Matched terminals. If he'd just hold it there long enough, it'd discharge.

So the only salvation he has in the face of a very, very heavy incident or experience is to duplicate it. And yet, his postulate, just as it's happening is, "It must not happen." Mustn't happen, then must have it again, and so he doesn't duplicate it, so he's got it. And you've got your dwindling spiral.

When he says, "It must not happen," he means it mustn't duplicate. There must be no reoccurrence of this.

Now, the overt act-motivator sequence gets into restimulation because it's an imperfect duplicate. This fellow is shot in the chest with an arrow, so he turns around and shoots somebody in the chest with an arrow, but he misses and the arrow goes into the shoulder. That's an imperfect duplicate.

Matched terminals. Two different places on the time track. He'll try to get those two incidents parallel with each other on the time track, and they just don't parallel and they don't discharge because they're not the same incident. But this is a covert effort to duplicate. An overt act-motivator, a ded-dedex incident or sequence is a covert act to duplicate.

Now, his going out and shooting somebody in the shoulder, trying to shoot somebody in the chest, is a covert effort to duplicate. He knows he mustn't duplicate, see. But he can now have a good reason why he has to do this, you see — some other reason and so on. And a reason — a reason is simply this: It is an effort to escape the consequences of duplication because one feels one mustn't duplicate.

Because if one duplicated, he's always up against this: If one duplicated continuously and forever, and duplicated himself on and on and on, there would be no game as far as he's concerned. The game would be gone. This universe would be gone, and that's that. You turn a key in the door and you open the door, and after that there's nothing but emptiness there.

But this is predicated on this fact: that there couldn't be another universe. This would only be sad if there couldn't be another universe. But if you've opened the door on duplication, of course there can always be another universe, because you can always duplicate it. So, one locked the door on something where the door needn't have been locked.

Time, essentially, has as its effort, "duplicate the last instant as closely as possible." And the only reason you get time in walls is because they change very, very tiny gradient. Very tiny. I mean one molecule wanders from one corner of the wall to the other corner of the wall, and it's just those new spaces that are making new times.

But this gradient is so tiny and the progress of those changing anchor points is so slight and so on, that you get an endurance on the part of the wall which is very long, that you wouldn't get in terms of a gas. Because a gas set up in that fashion has very swiftly moving anchor points. But again, swiftly moving only in relationship to something else which is moving.

And if you have established some arbitrary sequence, like the beating of a heart, as time, then you can measure time as it occurs around you, and things can measure time against the beating of that heart.

Life, in the essence, is the thing which can duplicate.

Now, I said one time that the chief observable difference, and I stress that — the chief observable difference — between life and mest is that life had ideas. Now anybody can see that very quickly without any further philosophic wanderings. I mean, mest does not get ideas and live things do get ideas. Even a cherry tree will get ideas. It'll sit there and change its direction of growth and so on. You tie a couple of branches down so they've got to grow in a certain way, it'll grow some other way. It'll figure something out.

Life can get ideas. And mest which is not being utilized in growth and not being utilized by life, is very, very chaotic. Completely unorganized. It just isn't, really.

So we get the chief observable difference is that life gets ideas and mest doesn't. But now let's see the difference between the chief observable difference and the technical difference between these two things.

There's one thing that mest doesn't do: It doesn't duplicate. And the technical difference between life and mest is that life can duplicate and mest can't duplicate.

If you've ever seen a wall grow eight other walls, you know what I mean — I mean, you've seen something there that nobody else evidently has ever seen, as far as just the mest sitting there and without any influence on the part of any life organism, you — it starts growing new walls.

Now, some chemist will come along and show you a crystal — virus. He'll show virus growing. Yawn at him when he does that. Yawn very widely. Because he's demonstrating that crystals, behaving under his ideas, will change from one part of a glass of water into another part of a glass of water as long as he wanted them to. And they will.

But he will say, "Well, this goes on happening in the bottom of the sea with­out anybody looking at it at all."

You say, "How do you know it goes on happening, then?"

And he'll say, "Oh, see here, come off, don't get on to any of these philosophic conundrums."

You say, "Well, don't pull any of this scientific balderdash on me, that everything keeps up in all directions and at all places at all times whether observed or not. You can't prove that, and I can't prove what I said," you say. "You can't prove that it keeps on happening, I can't prove that it doesn't keep on happening."

He'll say, "Well, see here, now, we'll set up a motion-picture camera, we'll set up a sound-recording apparatus, and we will show that the virus does do this anyhow."

You say, "Sure. You want to demonstrate that it does, it probably will." You can be very maddening, anyway. (audience laughter)

This is a terrible thing to do to anybody, but the point is, it's about time somebody did it to science. They're so cocksure that all these phenomena go on when not observed and that nobody is pushing it around.

Truth of the matter is, if a virus does form into a cell, and if the virus does come out of mud, there has to be a thetan impulse to start that gradient going.

You could see immediately that, however, any crystal put in a glass and permitted to form into something like the "subvirus life form," which is what they call it, will only grow so far and will then become motionless till life comes along or until something else comes along and drops something in its road to make it grow or change it again.

Now, this universe starts to chaotize around and drop on its own head and fall on its own feet and slop around one way or the other, life comes along and starts organizing it. All right.

Well, don't for a moment overlook one fact about Scientology, is nobody is trying to tell you, bluntly, and for you never to think about again — trying to tell you that we have utterly and completely solved, to the end of all time, the origin of the mest universe.

In the first place, anytime somebody says "origin," he is presupposing that time is senior to him. We don't know that this is true — a lot of things that we don't know is true about the mest universe.

All we're trying to tell you is that this is wide-open, and that you can demonstrate by various means that an individual need have no — he need have no registry of walls in the mest universe. He needn't register at all.

'Tisn't whether it keeps going on or not — what's important about the mest universe is your effect upon it and its effect upon you. And when we have walked away from that point — honest, there isn't any use in studying the problem any further unless somebody likes to play games with problems. And a lot of guys get stuck on this. They just want to play games on problems.

And then the mest universe is serving another thing — it's furnishing them ammunition so that they can have a game called problems.

But where we go on studying the mest universe beyond the point of your effect upon it and its effect upon you, we are just walking off the edge of the cliff. I mean, when we go beyond that point, why, we're just noplace. And I guess that's where a scientific mind intends us to be — just noplace.

What — we're studying the mest universe not in the relationship to matter to matter to space, as space affects matter, as matter affects space, as space affects — yammer, yammer, yammer. That's physics. That's physics, and you can go study that all you want to and you can get acceleration of gravities, and go on and study these things as problems on and on and on and on and on.

But that's physics, and we're not studying physics. We're studying Scientology, and that is the science of knowledge. And knowledge begins and ends with you and those about you; it won't sit for a moment in a piece of mest. A mest won't even hold a fixed idea and give it back again, unless it is mechanically tailored so that it will do it, and unless somebody understands the symbol that is put into it and brought back again. That's very important. Most people overlook this.

Now, you can get an answer out of mest as long as you know the symbol system first. Well, physics is a symbol system to some degree. We're not interested in mest for the sake of mest. We're just interested in its effect upon you and your effect upon it, and you needn't bother yourself with it any further for our purposes — to make men well, to make societies and civilizations. You needn't go onto it, it's a fruitless chase. It has proven itself so, because we have been chasing it now for twenty-five hundred years, and they have finally evolved bodies which are not as good-looking as before, down the time track, and they've evolved a type of civilization which denies the human soul and sticks the thetan in a head. That's — that's real great. I mean this is progress.

And yet, they say, 'Why, sure we have progress. Look at those automobiles."

And you say, "Well, you go ahead, look at the automobiles. You realize this whole highway out here could be parked full of automobiles from one end to the other, and if there wasn't one living being to enjoy one, it would strictly be, 'So what!' And yet there could be the dirtiest cow track out there with one kid's scooter on it and a kid to enjoy it, and that would be more important than a whole road full of automobiles and nobody to drive them or enjoy them."

And the fellow might possibly get the point. But he won't if he's an engineer who is very snarled up and plowed in.

Because this stuff, mest, plows people in exactly in this fashion — now we'll talk about the dwindling spiral: It won't duplicate you. It won't duplicate you. You can't say to it, "Now be me," and it will be you. You can't say — and that's basically what's wrong with space. Now, I'd better mention that specifically, because you as an auditor are liable to overlook this before you've had it run on yourself, and you're liable to miss this.

You can't say to this empty space out here, "Be me," and have that actual space which you're regarding be you, you see, if you believe it is a thing which is there forever. But you can have that space be you if you haven't accepted its basic definition of conservation of space. You get the difference between these two things? All right.

Remember to include space in these processes. It's more important than walls. People who are having trouble with havingness will always point to the walls, and if they've long passed beingness at all, they'll never touch the space, you know? They won't have the preclear look at these three spaces and have these spaces duplicate them. Well, that's the basic failure.

And so what's an inversion? An inversion is, a person has tried and tried and tried and tried to get others and to get mest — and particularly mest — to duplicate what his ideas are. He's tried and tried and tried, and failed and failed and failed and failed. And after a while, it gets on an inversion. Just like the thetan gives orders to the body, orders to the body and then begins to take orders from the body.

So, in such a way, an individual starts taking orders from mest because of its continuous refusal to take orders from him. Now, it has obeyed him to some degree. This success is the hope which leads him on. It does obey him to some degree. And he always has the hope that it'll obey him a little better.

Well, that's madness itself because he — his idea of this is "Now look, we made this into a wall — bricks, and we made it into a wall. Now we might be able to calcine the bricks a little bit better and get them a lot smoother and polish them a little bit better and hang them in thin air and do this and that with them," and you've got Arsclycus, where everybody was a slave. The one thing Arsclycus could do that nobody else could do was make good bricks. Civilization plowed in, not very many people were happy in it.

But what about this — this inversion? The fellow says, "Space be me. Space be. Space be me." You know, "Duplicate me. Duplicate me." It didn't, it didn't, it didn't. And after a while, he starts duplicating space. And that's why your thetan's not visible. He's duplicating space. And there's your first inversion.

Now he says — now he says, "Energy, energy. Lightning bolts, lightning bolts."

He's perfectly willing to be space — after a while he's resigned to that, that's his first apathy. He's made space — tried to make space duplicate him and sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't and sometimes he gets — you, every once in a while you'll run a preclear, he gets an enormous white cloud or something like that and it's got a beautiful image sitting in the middle of it. He's actually put an image up in space, you see, and he's kind of made all the space duplicate his image and back and forth, and he's had a good time with it. But he became the space. So he's nothing now in terms of space, so what's our next point?

Next point is, being nothing, he could — still a static, you see. He keeps throwing lightning bolts around. Energy, energy, energy, energy, beams, bolts, beams, bolts. And he keeps on with this endlessly, and finally he gets into a point where he says, "Energy, duplicate me. Energy, duplicate me. Energy duplicate . . ." It doesn't, so he becomes energy.

Now he says this — now he's at energy, he becomes energy and now after a while as energy, he starts telling "Matter, duplicate me. Objects, duplicate me. Objects, walls, duplicate me." And they don't, and he becomes an object and becomes stationary.

And there's the dwindling spiral exactly there. And that's just how it happens. All right.

SOP 8-C has as Step VIII, first, that the prime principle for the resolution of a case is the rehabilitation of all abilities to duplicate. And it includes as technique any and all methods applicable to rehabilitate the ability to duplicate on the part of an individual. Now, that's its broadest statement.

Now, let's be very specific. You take a preclear and you start him in with walls, usually, because he's having trouble with havingness. This has nothing to do with the level of the case, by the way, it's just that step.

And you say, "Walls . . ."All right, now we just have the walls say anything. You just get the emotion in them "can't duplicate." That's the simplest one, see. Have walls and walls and objects and objects, "Can't duplicate, can't duplicate, can't duplicate, can't duplicate."

Now, how do you do the technique? You do it in the most duplicative fashion you possibly can. And that is the little hooker. Because you could do this without having the walls say, "Can't duplicate," but you would just get the same emotion in the wall time after time after time after time, in the same positions, in the same walls. Let's pick out three walls and have each one feel apathy.

Now, the essence of the technique would be to say to the preclear, "All right, now pick out three walls." He does. And you say, "All right. In the first one — put some apathy in the first one. Now put some in the second one. Now put some in the third one."

"Okay," he says, expecting you to go on to something else.

And you say, "Into the first wall, put some apathy. Second wall, some apathy. Third wall, some apathy."

He does that and he's a little bit suspicious of you by this time, and so forth.

Now you say, "Into the first wall, second wall, third wall, each one in turn." All right. Put apathy in the three in turn. Put apathy in the three in . . ."

About this time he says, "Yep, I did it."

And you say, "Put it in the three in turn."

"Yep, I did it."

You sort of have the reaction like, "The heck you did, fellow." You say, "Come on. First wall, second wall, third wall."

"Yeah, but if I do that I — I'd — drive me nuts to keep on going over this stuff," and so on.

Keep at it.

You know that he'll occasionally get so frantic that he'll jump out of his chair, try to leave the session. He'll get frantic. Well, that is the emotion — that franticness, that feeling of strain and that terrible feeling of onerous boredom that comes over the individual because of repetition — is the implanted emotion to prevent duplication. So you just make sure you run it off. See that? And that's where it's going. Because your individual will run on any technique until he comes up against that one, and you as an auditor are liable to run any technique until you come up against that one in the preclear, and then sheer off.

"It's — just so bored! It's — it's just rrrmmm! huhhh! Won't do it anymore."

Well, that's too bad.

Now, do you have to put any meaning into this? No. Actually it runs better without meaning. But the funny part of it is that putting the words in "can't duplicate" all the way around, speeds up the technique. "Can't duplicate you" is the — one of the fastest ways to work it.

But if you were to just sit down and have him pick out three spots in the mest universe and have him spot the first one and spot the second one and spot the third one, and then spot the first one and the second one and the third one, then spot the first one and the second one and the third one, and go on with this for fifteen or twenty minutes — oh! You would break the back of this case on perception.

Now, there's where you get the wildest perception changes. We were steered into this technique because I observed continually — I'd already had duplication a long time ago. One of the early notes taken on the subject of PABs and so forth, very, very early this year, 1953 — duplication. But it was — took a long time to actually get steered in and examine the fact, as far as I was concerned, that we were way above the curve of action of the mest universe. That we were into the prime principle and preventer of action and beingness, and that was it: it was duplication. It was just too simple, you see, and so on.

And if you're going to get any — I've checked this carefully now for many, many months and I've found out that any perception increase and any case level increase is attended by one or another form of duplication. Perception increases.

Now, why do people have to have new entertainment all the time? It isn't necessary for them to be entertained at all. It's the truth of the matter. They don't have to be entertained. They can think of enough things to entertain themselves.

But if you were to destroy in people the ability to entertain themselves, why, you sure could control them, couldn't you? You'd do that by giving them an impulse and a compulsion to be entertained by something new.

And how would you do this? You would keep them from being in the same spots, one after the other, down a long track, and you would eventually get people who always had to be entertained by something new.

You wouldn't let somebody occupy the same spot and area. Do you see that? You'd drive people out continually, in other words. Drive them out, drive them out, drive them out. And they, therefore, would never have the past history of the spot they were standing on, and this would get them lost so they wouldn't know. You see how you could get somebody lost that way? You just — he moves into a new area, and he doesn't know it's a past.

A child, for instance, that is raised in a little town — knows everybody in the town and knows all the streets — you know it really never occurs to him to be bored until he's driven out. The only person who gets bored is the fellow who gets kind of non persona grata around town. Then the town bores him.

But there's people who can stay there and live perfectly happy, fruitful lives, and be sane as can be and go on and on being happy about it all, and doing more or less the same monotonous things. Why, right now as I talk to you, you could see that as a ghastly fate, maybe. But it isn't a ghastly fate. It's probably happiness itself.

And the people keep telling you that happiness lies in your own backyard, and you keep looking at them blankly. Probably it doesn't occur to you to say, "Look I haven't got a backyard. If you just tell me where my backyard is, I'll go look in it. I don't have one."

Almost anybody who's upset emotionally has been shifted geographically early in his life more frequently than his tolerance. In other words, he can't pick up the past of the area he's in fast enough, and he just gets dull after a while. He always enters a place — he's always the strange dog in the front yard, you see? All right.

Because he is not permitted to stay in a place, gives him an enormous impulse away from and gives him the key-in of nonduplication. See that? He can't stay in the same place, so therefore he mustn't duplicate.

If he's thrown out of a spot of space, and kept out of a spot of space, he thereafter mustn't duplicate. See, he mustn't duplicate that spot of space. In other words, he mustn't look at it. So he can't duplicate, and that cuts his ability to duplicate down just that much.

So "won't look" and "can't duplicate" are practically the same thing. He can't be in the same space, is "can't duplicate." So if you can't be in a space, then you can't duplicate.

SOP 8-C is very easily used. It is not particularly designed to tire your preclear out and wear you out as an auditor. It's designed to make it so that your preclear at length senses no danger in returning to or looking at a place where he has been. And the moment when he can do this, he will have his whole track lying out in front of him and any value that memory recall has is a reassurance that an individual can go back into these places.

Reassurance itself could be defined as "ability to be again." In other words, to duplicate. Reassurance and duplication are synonymous.

If you tell somebody he can duplicate, you have reassured him. The only way that you can reassure somebody is to tell them they can't duplicate or can duplicate. In other words, "This incident isn't going to happen to you again. You're all right, fellow. Pick it up." See? I mean you've reassured him. You've said "can't duplicate." The incident can't duplicate. Now you reassure him, "Oh, look, there's other times, there's other places. You can win someplace else."

See, but it's got to be a someplace else. Now that's reassurance. And that you will find as one of the hottest buttons on a case, merely because it's so close to "duplicate" and "can't duplicate."

So the thetan is caught between the horrible spots that he must, must, must duplicate in order to survive, but he must not duplicate and the whole universe around him is telling him that he — nothing will duplicate him, nothing will take his orders, nothing will duplicate him, his postulates are no good. And so he, in this universe, goes down on a dwindling spiral accordingly.

The way to reverse the spiral is to make it possible for him to duplicate. And any method used in doing that is going to be successful.