I would like to talk to you about decision.

Now we'll take up the second part of this talk: cause and effect and decision as they relate to "to be," "not to be" and going up the line on the dynamics – how you expand through the dynamics on the basis of cause and effect.

Decision is, you will discover, one of the fundamental points of indecision, and one of the fundamental reasons why people are sane or insane. Decision.

Let me say first what I mean by cause and effect. Back in the ninth, tenth century, there was quite a bit written on cause and effect. Those were the days when men were very oppressed about saying what they thought. Now they are not oppressed, so they don't bother to think.

You see, decision is a short way of saying choice. And choice, of course, is the keynote of self-determinism. To determine anything, you must have the choice to determine. Choice to determine means that you must have the power of decision.

But the day was when they had to join into secret cults and hide in the mountains in order to think anything. And when they thought of something, to commit it to writing was tantamount to being burned at the stake. And so when they committed these things to writing, they committed them in symbols.

Automatically, you will discover – automatically, in any case – that the one thing that is holding up beingness is indecision, a maybe.

Some of the old books – Roger Bacon and so forth – are very interesting for the complete indecipherability. Matter of fact, they've left riddles around which cryptographers are very fond of working with; they are the most marvelous riddles.

In any engram that presents itself to be run – in any engram that presents itself to be run – there is a maybe: two choices which are relatively balanced, and their even balancing makes an irresolution.

The whole subject of alchemy is a – nothing really, more or less, than a code. A few of the stupider ones went around trying to make gold out of lead, but actually what the alchemist was doing was trying to transmute the lead of a human being into the gold of spirit. And it was so flagrantly and directly into the teeth of the existing church and was so swiftly punishable by the rack and the stake that they put it in code form. You read an alchemist textbook, and if you think you're reading about chemicals . . . Nope, it's code. Also, there are alchemist books which are about chemicals, which, of course, confused everybody.

Now, there's a great deal to do with time in decision. Decision and time have a lot in common. When we have clean, clear decision, we have clean, clear time. And when we have an indecision, there is an unclarity about time. if you are trying to decide anything and having a difficulty in trying to decide that thing, the root of its trouble is time. Not even necessarily data; it's time. There's a time hangup there somewhere. And if you look for that back of the data, usually the data becomes needless.

Now, one of the prime principles that they worked on in those days was the principles of cause and effect. They were all very interested in this problem of cause and effect. They were interested in it on a very, very high echelon; they were interested in the cause being the Prime Mover Unmoved, or what was he? and the effect being the whole universe. Cause and effect – puzzle, puzzle, puzzle. Well, it needn't be very much of a puzzle for you – not that I have resolved the riddles which they have propounded, since those riddles are not necessarily susceptible of solution and fortunately do not necessarily need to be resolved to resolve the problem of the human mind.

Decision: The basic decision that life makes, that theta makes, is "to be or not to be." Shakespeare's famous line: "To be or not to be: that is the question." Hamlet was in very, very bad condition that day. He was hung up on the squarest maybe that anyone can be hung up on.

Here's cause and effect. There are only two rules, really: ALWAYS BE CAUSE. Be cause as yourself, or be of a group which is cause or a species which is cause, or be cause as life, or be cause as the material universe, or be cause as theta itself or be cause on the infinity of all cause. That's rule one. Of course, that says without saying in rule one, "Never be effect." This was, with all its pristine purity, the highest goal that you could attain: to always be cause, never be effect.

If you see someone facing a new job, a choice of whether or not he's going to continue with his old job or take a new job, you may think that he is resisting change or a lot of other things, and so on. Re's not anything. I mean, he is hung up until he decides one way or the other on a beingness situation. So that any beingness situation where you had a "to be or not to be" on a case becomes itself the most aberrative situation.

Of course, you say right away that's impossible. When you look it over it becomes impossible, unless you changed your state in some fashion or other. Not in the existing state could you always be cause. No, you couldn't be. But by looking at these rules of the game, you can change your state and always be cause and still have good interpersonal relations and still be happy.

Running an engram is really, basically, only necessary until the preclear has reached, of his own volition and evaluation, the decision he didn't make. He's found the maybe in his life. He's found that maybe. And having found the maybe, it is clearly enough in view so that he can resolve it or evaluate its importance, and the rest of the engram will blow. It'll disappear-become completely unaberrative.

And the other one is NEVER be the effect of your own cause. And that was the deadliest sin of all. Never be the effect of your own cause. Don't cause something and then become an effect of it. Actually, every time you postulate something you become an effect of your own postulate; that's why Postulate Processing works so beautifully.

Postulates are important only because postulates are the root material of decision. That is to say, you have the decision and you make the postulate to reserve the decision. "To be or not to be" is action or inaction, existence or no existence.

The fellow – "So, all right," he says, "I am a man." Two seconds later on the time track he's a man, if he were postulating like that. He's now thinking of himself as a man. He's saying, "I will now be a man!" Two seconds later he's now being a man. So he sweeps on down the time track now being the man. The only trouble is he goes into a solution – I mean, a problem where the solution is not to be quite this man.

Actually, there is no such thing as a black-and-white decision. Aristotelian logic would like you to believe that there is such a thing as a syllogism: A is to B as B is to C, then A is to C, or something of the sort. This is very easily confused into A equals B, and B equals C; therefore A equals C. This isn't true. But it was a desperate effort to see if one couldn't get over the awful hurdle of yes-or-no. Syllogism: It gave you a way to reason so that everything didn't keep coming out in the middle.

Maybe he goes into a problem where swinging a little hot music on the "git-box" would resolve it a little better – under a window or something of the sort – instead of being the man. Well, if he's hung up with this solution and he wants this girl, and this girl doesn't appreciate a man but just loved that fellow twiddling on a "git-fiddle," he's stuck! With what?

Aristotelian logic is based upon black-and-white solutions, really. You'll find today the mighty and powerful churches of the world believe in black and white for their people. They tell their people it's black and it's white; it's sin, it's good. There is no intermediate step here. It's one or the other.

It isn't that he can't resolve the problem; it's the fact he's made a postulate which makes the problem impossible to solve. Because the second he goes up against one of his own postulates, he says, "I'm wrong," and that's the bottom of the tone scale. So he can't go down to the bottom of the tone scale just to be right, because if he did he'd be wrong. Maybe, see? So what's he going to do? There isn't anything he can do about it, I guess – except, of course, pick up the postulate; that's rather obvious.

Well, it would be very fortunate for all of our sanities if decisions could be made like that. If we could say it's a black decision, which is to say "not to be," or a "to be" – a "to be," a "not to be" – if we could say just those two and resolve them very cleanly and clearly, we'd be fine.

If you're in good shape, you can pick up all the postulates you ever made clear back to the beginning of time. I won't say what you'll come out to be here though; you might suddenly turn into a griffin. But that's a danger you can risk.

Unfortunately, if you will look under the Logics in the first section (they are printed in the "Handbook for Preclears" and some other volumes) you'll find that gradient scale of logic, and it demonstrates to you that there is only relative decision. Relative. Just like there's only relative self-determinism. And there's only relative yes and no.

So it doesn't matter what postulate you've made, that postulate is bound to make you into an effect by it. So you must be willing to some degree – if you're going to live in a time stream, in a time span – to be an effect. See how that is? I mean, if you're going to be in a time stream at all, you must be willing to be an effect at least of yourself. And of course, most everybody is affected by everything; this society makes a complete dance out of being effect; never be cause, be effect.

There are a million grades, a billion grades, of yes. There are a billion gradient points on the scale of evil, and a billion on the point of good. Things are only relatively bad and relatively good.

Or, if you wanted to avoid this utterly, you'd have to live in no time. Maybe that's desirable. I don't know. Here's no time. It's desirable if it's up here at the top of the tone scale, because you can get everything done in the world. Because up at the top of the tone scale, you see, you don't have any concept of time, you have concept of action, which you can change at will. Down here at the bottom, why, it affects you. Effect down here, cause up here.

Relative beingness, then, is what we are trying to decide. And when a person comes close to the center of the scale and hangs up, that is what happens: he hangs up. Now, why does he hang up at that point? It's very simple why he hangs up at the point. Decision has much to do with time. if you have decision, you have time; if you do not have decision, you do not have time. Now, it doesn't matter whether you decide "not to be" or decide "to be." If you're hung up in the middle between "to be" and "not to be," you have immediately forfeited time, because the middle of the scale is zero time. "To be" or "not to be" – and in the center there, zero time. So when a person hits a maybe he starts worrying about it.

All right, let's talk about going out on these dynamics. Now, you think you have experienced being somebody else when very often you have only experienced being the effect of somebody else. Do you get the difference? This is important – important – in Technique 80. That's one of the most important things about it, is the cause-effect relationship of what you are along the dynamics. Because right now there's hardly anybody who isn't simply an effect.

What is worry? Worry is constant, irresolute computation – constant computation on a certain point or a certain problem. That's what worry is; that's what anxiety is. Anxiety, you see, is fear added in. "I'm not going to be able to resolve this." Then worry becomes anxiety. "I can't resolve this," is just worry; "I'm not going to be able to resolve it" – well, that's anxiety.

He's an effect on the first dynamic. That's gorgeous. I mean, you can't get any less than being an effect on the first dynamic, so that's why you must go up the tone scale with the one, two, three, four, five. Last night I told you about going up the tone scale one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, by just being into the other dynamics. Well, there's that; it's perfectly true.

If you want to treat worry and anxiety, you can slug into a case with just these points, these tenets I'm giving you right now, and just tear the case to pieces. And the fellow, oh, he feels good afterwards. He's got everything all resolved. Trouble is, the most aberrative decisions were generally made when a person was in very bad shape – the worst ones. There is the decision of going on living or not going on living in this body. You can find the places where he makes this decision. "All right, I won't give up. I'll go on living, I . . . guess. No, I'll give up. Uh ... there's no reason to go on living. Yeah, I'd better go on living. No, I guess I can't go on living."

But "to be" is cause. And "not to be" is effect. And so "to be" along the dynamics you have to be cause along the dynamics. And when you go into another person's valence you can say to yourself "Yes, I am being that other person." No, you're not. If you were being that other person, you would be able, actually, to see that other person change if you were cause. Whereas by going into his valence, you become effect a little bit and you change, see? Different. When you go out along the dynamics, you want to go out along the dynamics so that by being the couch, you don't become the couch, the couch becomes you. See the difference? Now, there's a very important difference.

"To be or not to be," you see?

You go into this group. Now, maybe everybody who goes into this group.... And by the way, everybody, if they're way up on tone and so forth, or even if they've postulated themselves way up on tone, or they act way up on tone, actually could be very high-level cause. Everybody in the group could be high-level cause. And being high-level cause, this becomes a terrifically powerful group, because anything that faces the group sort of has an effect of being an effect. And then what happens? It becomes part of the group, so the group keeps on being, being, being, which is the same thing as saying owning, owning, owning. You couldn't get a group of people together who – all of them were high-level cause – who would fail to do anything but own practically everything they laid their eyes on. Impossible, see?

It'll hang up a whole operation. "Now let's see, to go on living I have to have this operation. If I have this operation, it'll probably kill me." He never gets a chance to decide this. Somebody takes him by the scruff of the neck and lays him out neatly on the table and puts the mask over his face. That's why your childhood operations – tonsillectomies and so on – are particularly grim. They affect the individual terribly because a child never has a choice.

Now, here is what an aberrated effect-level action amounts to when you try Technique 80. This is a low-level aberrative effect. Here are two people: they're both really effects; they're both effects amongst effects; they're really down tone scale. Somebody goes thumpity-thump-bumpity-bump on a bass fiddle or something like that and they go thumpity-thump-bumpity-bump, you know? Somebody turns on a television set and says, "Buy Wheaties! The breakfast of Dianeticists," or something, and they go out and they buy Wheaties. Somebody says, "Smoke Luckies," they smoke Luckies. Somebody says, "You have to have a car so you'll have transportation," so they drive a car.

They can go around and say, "Now, Johnny. . . now, Johnny, you want your tonsils out, don't you, Johnny? Now, it's up to you to decide now, Johnny, whether or not you want your tonsils out. But of course, if your tonsils don't come out, you'll keep on having these nasty old colds. But you've got to have 'em out now, and I just want you to decide . . ." All they're trying to do is get him to agree, they're not getting him to decide. And the eventual thing is that poor little Johnny goes on the table.

Here's the point: You take these two people. Each one of them is about 98 percent effect, and they are so leery of being more effect than they are – because if they go any further down the effect scale, they're dead – that they get next to each other and they never really make a group. They just stand here and they say, "Which one of us is going to be cause?" because it's an anxiety. Because they're each saying, "Maybe I won't be." An insecurity, an anxiety, "Maybe I won't be cause." And so they never are able to get together; they can't form a group. They can't form a group for the excellent reason that they have an anxiety, each one, that he may not be cause.

By the way, the first thing that happens to him is his central control post, that stands up above the other two, generally flicks out during one of these operations. If you want to find somebody's control post, you generally go back through his childhood operations. Because he didn't have any power of choice over the thing.

In order to be cause such an individual has to assert his causativeness on the first dynamic only, and he has to do the darnedest things to convince himself.

It's my belief that in a good society every child ought to be equipped with and taught to fire a sawed-off shotgun.

He's really not trying to convince anybody else if he's on the first dynamic, he's just trying to convince himself that he's cause. He's sort of presenting the picture of "Well, here I go now. Here I go. This is what I'm going to say. That's a good boy, that's a good boy. You said that all right. You really caused that. Okay. Did I do all right? Yes, I guess I did all right that time; of course, I'm not sure. Yeah, they look like they were affected all right. Well, I'm not sure that they were." The first dynamic in action on the aberrated level – confusing.

It's like the hunter: He goes out and he shoots a doe or a duck or something of the sort. He gets a big – he feels big about this, you know? The thing to do is to give the duck or the doe or something, you see, give them a shotgun too and then teach them how to use it, and it'd come up to a parity level. Well, it ought to be that way with kids. They ought to have a chance. But they don't have a chance, so there isn't any chance of deciding this until we've solved this body problem, and we can solve that so we don't have to worry about this anymore.

Take two high-tone-level people – and this guy is cause. He knows he's cause, but the first thing he's done is become cause to himself. He's such cause to himself that he doesn't even have to observe himself. I mean, that's open and shut; he's just cause, that's all. He says "Jump" and he jumps. He knows. Instant action, because he has made a very important division. He has made the division of cause delineation: where and what is causing what? He knows that his body is never anything under the sun, moon or stars, and never will be, anything but an effect! And there's where your full argument comes in. "Am I cause or am I effect?" You're saying, "Am I theta body or am I MEST body?"

But the point I'm making is, is decision is sanity and indecision is aberration. Now, you can't say "to be" is necessarily sanity or "not to be" is necessarily insanity. You see, those aren't the scale of sanity to insanity. Because you see, you can always make the decision to be insane. You see, it doesn't say what you're deciding to be; it says that you're deciding. But what is aberrative is whether or not one is able to decide, and the degree that he's capable of decision establishes his sanity, self-determinism, power of decision.

Of course your MEST body is always an effect; anybody can come along, kick it, boot it, run over it, play things at it, do anything to it. It's created so you have something whereby you can become an effect. And then somebody came along and said, "You are your body." That was the second part of the operation. "Now, we're going to take you as a theta body and we're going to fix you up so you have a body and then we [you] can be an effect" – that's stage one. And then they say, "All right, now you're your body and you don't exist over there anymore. And you're your body, and now here's the whips, swoosh-pop! We're all set now. Go to work at nine! Get off at five! Draw your paycheck! Eat Wheaties!" They got you!

Many people have gotten hung up on the idea of willpower. It was very fashionable a few years ago, particularly, to go around telling people they didn't have willpower, they should use their willpower, or something of the sort, without defining willpower. Wonderful operation. Actually, if you said that these people should rehabilitate their decisional power, you would have a much different picture. Willpower, decisional power: now you'd have a point there.

So the first place we take the riddle to pieces is right here on the basis of "What are you?" And the first moment you realize you're not your body – bang! You can at least stand over here. Your body will always be an effect, and there is no reason for you to go on through life going and winding this riddle round and round and round on "Am I a cause or am I an effect?

Any time an individual is put under duress, it is the individual's effort to make a decision about the duress. If the duress is very heavy and makes only one decision possible, well, he falls into that category. It's not terribly aberrative. He's been overcome, he will feel degraded, he'll feel a lot of other things, he isn't free, but somehow or other he can struggle out of this sooner or later.

Or am I an effect or am I a cause? Because if I step on a nail I hurt; therefore, I am an effect. Therefore, I could never be completely at cause, because if I step on a nail, why, then I hurt and that automatically makes me an effect."

The way to drive somebody insane is to convince them that they should have a yes, and then convince them equally they should have a no. And then convince them they should have a yes. "Now, Bessie, you've got to make up your own mind, it's your own free choice of whether or not you get these new shoes. Now, do you want black shoes or white shoes? Of course, the white shoes are going to get dirty a lot faster then the black shoes. Now, which do you want? The black shoes or the white shoes? Oh no, Bessie, you don't want the white shoes, you want the black shoes. The black shoes are much easier to keep polished and they'll go with your new dress. Hm-hm, yes. Oh, they're how much? Oh, uh, huh, well, you want the white shoes, Bessie. Uh . . . Bessie!"

You better locate that part of you which is always cause and then recognize that you are that part. And that's very simple – very, very simple.

It's a wonderful mechanism. I recommend it. I recommend it to governments and sergeants. It reduces individuals to just complete weakness because it's chaos!

Right here on the middle of "youness" is an imperishable, completely indestructible motion source. It is a motion source which itself has no motion. That is your inheritance as part of divine beingness. That is it, and don't think that is a small part of you or merely a part of you, because it's not. That's you. You have immortality in that part of you which is you; that is immortal. If you didn't have that, you wouldn't be here.

We used to draw this tone scale, you know, straight up and still draw it straight up, and it's very, very easy to graph that way, but it's not quite true. It's a curve, if you add decision into the line. Actually, the point of 1.5, if you want to know the truth of the matter, is the center of the scale. Because if you make a person make a decision and then unmake the decision, then make the decision, then unmake the decision and make the decision, you'll eventually make MEST out of him. And 1.5, you've got him holding there, you see? You've got enough confusion so he's holding there, and you'll stick him there. And then there's a method of dropping the whole curve down to apathy and he becomes MEST and he's part of the material universe and you don't have to worry about him anymore!

Every cell basically has a tiny spark of this, but you, your beingness, is so tremendous, actually, that the force and power of this small "you" can actually burn down mountains. If it couldn't, why do they go to so much trouble to fix you so you can't? Now, that's one of those problems that proves itself. Nobody would have taken any trouble to get you aberrated and get you under the thumb if you weren't dangerous. You're dangerous! Ornery, mean, causative! Do you know you're liable to go down the street and cause something? "Hem him in, pin him down. Put the ball and chain on him quick, because in the center of his beingness, he is. And don't let him ever find it out, because then he will be."

All right. There's an actual scale, though, on decision itself. And this is something for you to remember and something for you to use in processing. Never forget to ask your preclear where the indecision is in the incident. Never forget to ask that preclear that. "Where's the indecision here?"

I told you last night that you're going to have a little bit of difficulty finding out which is you – finding out which is you.

Now let's put this in terms of motion. We can understand it a little easier.

Earlier lectures I told you about entities. These entities are very interesting. Your theta body has been chopped up, cut up and given impressions so that you have a position in your body into which a new personality can be injected – actual other life injected into it parasitically.

Now, all of the first Axioms have to do with a static called life and counter-efforts and efforts. You have this chain-fashion affair whereby in comes the counter-effort, the fellow turns around and uses it as an effort. In comes the counter-effort, he turns it into his effort and uses it. That is what life is doing. That's what you're doing. You get a counter-effort and you use it – counter-effort and you use it.

There are two operations on an entity: one is fixing you up – your theta beingness – fixing it up in a certain way so that it can have another thought implanted on it. This is the basis of all of your demon circuits and everything else. This is where the little voices in your head that talk to you – they're a soft spot in you into which a new thought can be implanted, and that's an entity. That thought, by the way, can be injected long range. It can be injected as a whole personality, a beingness. A very, very interesting operation. And you could even handle that personality to such a degree that it has actual life, and elsewhere it does have actual life. But you can be affected that way.

And as long as you can use these counter-efforts, why, you're fine. I mean, it isn't aberrative to get shot at. What's aberrative is not to – yeah, to get hit! – not to shoot back.

Well, you don't have to process all these things to get rid of them. That's just a soft spot in your personality. And with all of these entities – and sometimes there are seven, and sometimes twenty-one basic circuits or basic entities, twenty-one. And every one of those injected personalities is sitting on a soft spot in you where you are – really been made an effect, somewhere on the track. Well, where are you?

It isn't even aberrative to get hit, actually; I mean, so you get killed. So what?

You stop and think about it for a moment: "Let's see, where am I? Who am I? Where am I? Am I on this side of my head or that side of my head, or the bridge of my nose? Or am I resident down here? Or am I back here?" You can get pretty excited about this problem. You keep on saying to yourself, "Gee! Gee, I better find out where I am! Gosh, I might get lost. Where am I, down here? Gee, this is a rough deal. Where am I? Who am I? Just what part of my being am I? Let's see, I've got to find it."

You know, at Pearl Harbor there was – I think it was a tug, lying across from Battleship Bow. And the Jap planes came in, and the high command up there, you know, they were all on the ball and everybody was on the qui vive and FDR was on the qui vive and the War Department, Navy Department – everybody was on the qui vive – and they're all ready for these planes. So the planes came in and knocked the fleet out. And they had made a decision, by the way. They were not on a maybe. They had decided they could lick the Japanese fleet in five weeks. Huh! So they didn't go any further than that. Making a decision prematurely sometimes is quite effective in destroying oneself, but it's not aberrative.

Well, stand at ease. If every entity and being in your head and in your body was a balloon, a hydrogen balloon, you're just one of them. The "you" which you know as "you" is just one of them. And if somebody suddenly chopped the top of your head off and let all the hydrogen balloons out – whoooh! – the one that's you has still got "you" on it! It's marked; it says "I" as it goes floating up in the air.

All right. Here came in these Japanese planes over this little tug and into Battleship Bow – wham! wham! wham! And actually, these planes were passing close enough over this little tug so that they were almost knocking its stack off. And the officer in charge had a full crew aboard. And naturally, a tug, it was on a standby, it wasn't on liberty like everybody else had been sent. So here sat this small tug with a full crew.

Well, I stress this point because you – as you use this technique you're going to have preclears becoming very excited. They're going to say, "Well, let's see, which am I?" And the reason I'm stressing this is because this technique makes you emanate from your point of beingness. And you start emanating from the point of your beingness, and the first thing a fellow wants to know is "Where is my point of beingness?"

The percentage of psychos and war neuroses and so forth who turned up out of Pearl Harbor was enormous, because they had received a motion they couldn't use, you see? They couldn't do anything about it.

And you say, "Well, you emanate, and you will be emanating from your point of beingness."

And this officer grabbed a few bins of potatoes as his crew came on deck. And he grabbed these bins of potatoes and he had his men standing there throwing potatoes at the Zeros. And he didn't have a single psychotic aboard.

"Well, where is it?"

The crew was perfectly cheerful. And immediately after the action, they patched up a few bullet holes in themselves and went to sea merrily to pull things off the bars and the reefs, and so forth.

"Well, you see, it doesn't matter where it is, because if you start emanating, you will emanate from it."

Why? They were getting a motion, you see? They were getting attacked and they were attacking back. And even though it was just a token attack, it was quite effective as far as morale was concerned.

The fellow says, "Where am I?"

Now, if you receive a motion, you should be able to use the motion. Your indecision comes only when you refuse to use the motion you have received. And anybody who has an engram in restimulation (including the human body, which is after all just an engram) – and mark this well – you have in that person simply this: a motion which he will not use. That's the only one he's stuck with – the only one he gets stuck with.

Good, huh?

A counter-effort comes in – wham! "Well," he says, "so they hit you in the jaw. Well, that's something." And – doesn't matter when – a few days, a few weeks from then, a few years from then, a few lifetimes from then, he all of a sudden remembers getting hit in the jaw, and a fellow's standing there and it seems to him that's the motion he's supposed to use. So wham! He hits the fellow in the jaw. He's healthy.

So where are you? There I was.

The fellow that isn't healthy is standing there, you see, and the fellow hits him in the jaw. And he says, "Shouldn't do something like that to me," and he goes on for a few weeks or months or lifetimes (short span of time). Guy comes up – here's a situation where he's supposed to hit somebody in the jaw – and he says, "I think I'll hit him in the jaw! Nah, I wouldn't do a thing like that." After that he gets a somatic. Why? He's called the facsimile up to use and then he hasn't used it. He has a counter-effort which he is unwilling to use. And when he has a counter-effort which he's unwilling to use, it attacks him.

Well, the answer is – the answer to this is – is geographically you aren't anyplace; you aren't anyplace. But if you're alive, if you breathe (and some people do), if your heart beats, or even if you're out of your body living comfortably without these mechanical motions distracting you all the time, you have a point of beingness and you are that beingness. And that is very important. This is the point from which you emanate. And beingness, in this regard and to this degree, has to be tracked down, because that beingness is cause. And it is the one single cause and the rest is effect.

The only way you aberrate people is keep them from using their counter-efforts. You get them out and you do things to them, and then you don't permit them to do it. You say, "Under no circumstances should you be able to do this."

(If you'll hold it for a moment, I'll draw the only diagram I'm going to draw and then you can put it down.) [See diagram five in the Appendix.]

You take little Oswald and you take him down and you kick him a couple of times and you say, "You little brat," and so forth. "Now get out of the house." And little Oswald comes in a few days later – you notice children will do this – and he'll take a look at you and he'll say, "You brat!"

Here is the first dynamic, actually. That point of beingness is the first dynamic. Now, it might be having an effect upon your body which is so tiny – so tiny – that you are only affecting, actually, directly, maybe your right ear. You may be in no more real possession of your body than that, and the rest of you running off sort of mechanically. But there is a point of beingness!

And you say, "You should not say that, Oswald. You must treat your grownups with respect." You fixed him, right there. He's all set; he's going to use this counter-effort – it wouldn't bother him very much and he's going to use this – but you don't let him. That's the way you aberrate him.

Now, the first thing that point of beingness must do (and by the way, with the techniques I'll tell you about tomorrow night, you can bypass entities, soft spots, everything else) – you just spread this point of beingness out until it is in full command of you. It's got you!

The way you can aberrate a whole society is take and put a police force over the top of them that permits them to be arrested and manhandled, given traffic tickets and sent to jail and pushed around and taken into courts of law and everything else, and then you don't let the guy do it himself. He then has a sensation of being handled, pushed, handled, pushed, censured and so on. And he gets all of these counter-efforts and he can't use any of them. Because the police object to being shot and pushed. I don't know why, it's only sporting.

Now, this point of awareness that preclears sometimes tell you about and so forth, you can attain it directly – very, very directly – in this fashion. But this is you – this point of beingness – and here, the next line out is, of course, the first MEST that you contact – the first MEST that you contact – and that's your body. Your body isn't you and never will be and never has been. The first point of MEST you contact is your body, so be sure you don't omit that step, because it's something like trying to cross a very wide river and a range of mountains which lie ... Here's the river and here are the mountains, you're over here and you just cross the mountains.

But this country out here was a good, solid, healthy country until they got their first reformer. It was. Everybody used to carry an equalizer – called it an equalizer. But somebody came up to you and said "You blankety-blankety-blank," you just shot him! I mean, it was simple, justice, so on. So people after that were careful about calling you a blankety-blankety-blank. Till one day you called somebody else a blankety-blankety-blank, he drew faster than you and you're dead. But, it's an interesting game. They played it with wild abandon.

If you do this, and there's an observer over here, I guarantee something: this observer is never going to see you cross the mountains if you don't cross the river first! Now, it's just one of those funny geographical facts that in your conquest of the material universe and the emanation of you – until you can be cause to the widest possible sphere starts with your being cause on the first neuron. And this cause dot is not even located in a neuron, it's not in a cell, it's not anywhere. It has zero size, and it has potential of infinity size. And when you start out, it's pretty close to zero size.

Down to the south, down here at Tombstone, they've got a whole hill there where people played it with abandon. But at the same time, the country was pretty healthy. Guys walked tall, they walked very tall. They didn't drive down the street saying "I wonder if that cop saw me pass that traffic light," see? Big difference between that.

So let's take it out here and hit the first dynamic. And that includes from the top of your head to the tip of your toes, from the right fingers to the left fingers. And that includes not only awareness of these points but the right and ability to cause this object, your body, to do anything you want it to do without even thinking about it; it's complete unawareness.

I'm not, by the way, beating the drum for uncontrolled, unlicensed action in an aberrated society.

You're so causative that as far as your own body is concerned, it doesn't exist. It exists. You can reach up and touch it. You can hit your right hand, your left hand, you say, "Well, I'm here. Think of that."

The society gets into a big maybe. It comes down tone scale to a point where an individual may or may not be ethical. And the second the society gets to a point where it looks at an individual and doesn't know where he is on the tone scale and whether – or whether or not he is going to be ethical, that society has to muster unto itself morals and police power, and suppress all individuals because some might not be ethical. And the second this happens, you get an aberrated society, because everybody is hung up on a maybe. "Is this fellow honest or isn't he honest?" "Is he going to be irrational about the thing or isn't he?" I mean, it's just maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. So people start thinking.

Oddly enough, your aesthetics come way up the line; your gracefulness comes way up the line, everything comes up the line if you do this. That's all you have to do. You're not trying to attain awareness, you're trying to obtain complete cause! If you can attain complete cause, believe me, you know you're complete cause; you aren't just aware.

Thought could be said to be the resolution of maybes. Computation and its purpose depends upon the resolution of maybes. As you go way up tone scale, you get less and less and less maybes, and you actually do less and less and less computing, and you do more and more and more knowing. That's quite important.

All right. Let's take, then, this next step – the next step out. There's two kinds of MEST you are interested in here, and one is the kind of MEST that breathes and lives; that's easy to take over because it's already partly been in conquest. Theta has already captured it to some degree. It's a living organism; therefore, it's easier for another theta to come over and take it. You don't like to eat rocks, but you rather enjoy eating strawberries: Well, that's because theta has already fixed up the strawberries so they're edible for you. And they haven't fixed up the rocks, or has fixed that up too darn well. Okay.

There is a scale here of decision, which I will draw here. Unaberrated conduct to a marked degree is the making of decisions which can be put into effect, as opposed to making decisions which cannot be put into effect, and down to indecision, and lower to irrational decision to force irrational decision into effect, down to indecision, and down to the decision not to be. The Tone Scale of Decision, in other words, is that scale. [See Ron's handwritten notes on the Tone Scale of Decision in the Appendix.]

Your next level out here, then, goes into the most immediate concern which you have, which would be the most intimate personal relationship which you have. Did you ever run into anybody who was very sick one day and then next week he meets a beautiful girl and he's radiant too! "I'm in love! I'm in love! I'm in love! Hooray, hooray, hooray!" He is sick as a dog, and then all of a sudden – wham! He's in love!

Now I'll draw that scale for you. Up here we have "to be." Up here, when you make a decision you put it into effect: decision equals effect. When you're making decisions to put them into effect, believe me, you're cause. (I'm going to talk the second talk this evening on cause and effect and how it applies to "be" and "not to be," how it applies to going up the whole dynamics.) But this is very simple. If you put things into decision, you're going to be a cause and you're going to make an effect, very quickly.

Well, it's just he forgot about himself and got over here into the second dynamic, or the second organism, and he all of a sudden found out that he was cause. Or she found out that she was cause. And the second they found that out, they come up the tone scale enough to make them utterly delirious, or at least uptone! All right. So there's Mr. Second Dynamic.

Now, as you come down scale, you just simply come down to this level: You make a decision here – this is well down scale – that can't be put into effect. So you get a decision that can't be effected. You're making decisions, see, but they can't be effected. It's irrational, you see? The fellow says, "I'm a – I think I'll be president." Well, he can think he'll be president all right. He's made a decision that he's going to be president, but he can't put it into effect. In other words, he has not evaluated the rationality of his decisions. Up here, he makes a decision, it's a decision that can be put into effect. He doesn't keep overmaking decisions or undermaking them. In other words, he's doing a proper estimation of his decision. And then we get down here, this is very mild effect, but here we have an indecision, see?

You take a kid. You get a new kid around him – a nice kid and so forth. Gee, if you're really in good shape, this is really fine. Huh, because boy, can you be cause with a kid. (God help the kid!)

And by the way, it's very, very interesting that low on the tone scale we have people who put indecisions into effect. Did you ever know anybody that put indecisions into an effect? Well, they exist. Believe me.

Anyway, your next one out here is a group, a group. You become causative with a group. That is to say, you must exist with this group to the degree that you're the group with complete unawareness and are causing with that group whatever that group wants to cause, or you can cause that group to cause something else.

This is getting way down the line here: We get decisions to force irrational decisions into effect. Where is that on the tone scale? What is it?

We're not dealing in awareness, we're dealing with the tools of beingness. Beingness actually needs few tools, but once it has conquered these tools such as your body, the group body, your sweetheart and so on, your kids, all this – tools, house – the causativeness is automatic. And it's automatic: The graceful dancer never thinks of what he is causing very much, he just causes. Now, there is one of the main things.

1.5. That 1.5, they're wonderful at that. They're always making decisions to put irrationalities into effect. The second you show them an irrationality, they'll put it into effect; if you show them a rationality, they won't put it into effect. It's as much as your life's worth. As a matter of fact, if you want a 1.5 to act, what you do is demonstrate that what you want to do is irrational, and then they'll make you do it. You see how that is? You show them what you want to do is completely irrational; then they'll make you do it. That's a fact, it works.

So, you get out to the group, then you're getting out to any man you run into, any woman you run into. And then out here you're getting out in your sphere of activity – way out here – you're getting out into all life forms.

Then we get down here into indecision. And that is about 1.0. That's "Am I going to stay here or am I going to run?" Fear is just below this, you see? But that's the borderline of fear right there: indecision.

Actually, just for a gag as far as cause is concerned, you should be able to take a good look at a cat and be the cat. But that doesn't mean go in and be an effect of the cat. You get the difference? You be the cat. Well, you could be the cat and you could make the cat jump up and down off the curb. You're being a cat. You're jumping up and down off the curb. The cat's body will obey you because you are more causative than that cat's body. All right.

And now we come down here finally to apathy, which is decision not to be.

This is just giving you the reductio ad absurdum of the thing. The actual point of it is, as even Rhine in his experiments has recently discovered (big discovery, this; they've been doing this since Daniel) – anyway, you take a dog's nose and you hold the dog's nose shut and you think "Go to the red dish, go to the red dish, go to the red dish," and you let his nose go, he'll go over to the red dish. Of course, you planted an engram in him. But you got his attention fixed on you, you see, by causing a little pain, and then you just entered his head and thought. That's animal magnetism. Known to Moses, known to a lot of fellows who weren't as good as Moses were at this sort of thing.

Here is your enthusiast – people like me, always making decisions that "can't be put into effect," you see? Saying, "All right now, we – what we're gonna do is – is get this and we're going to make this, and then get right in there. And everything's fine."

Moses, by the way, was probably so good that he could enter into a cane and have it wriggle and bite somebody! All right.

And somebody points out to me, "Yeah, but we haven't got the two million dollars that it takes to do that."

The next line up here, we start out in a gradient scale of theta; you can be across the line in theta. A lot of people say "Well, I'm very telepathic." Actually, what they are is, they're telepathic receivers; that's quite different than being causative telepath. A causative telepath is a person who sends. And what you want to get is something you can send or get messages back on that you want. Okay?

And I say, "Oh, well, all right." People have a hard time with me.

Then, of course, we get out here along the line – you can be all with total unconsciousness. When you can be all and be aware – first, aware of all and then be all with total "unconsciousness," we're going to start the universe over anyhow. A lot of reconstruction work to be done. Any of you that get up to this point start it over again.

Well, there's your tone scale of decisions. And you can actually take a preclear and look him over very thoroughly and you can find out what he's deciding to do and you can say where he is on the tone scale. You can also spot him on the tone scale and then predict very, very well what that individual will decide.

Now, that's being facetious, perhaps, but this is actually a divine line.

Now, in interpersonal relations your problem is simply this: the problem of other people's decisions. That actually is the core of interpersonal relations. These people, by being certain things, become very antipathetic to your survival and happiness. By deciding not to be certain things, they become helpful to your survival. And again, by deciding to be certain things they become helpful, and deciding not to be certain things they become very unhelpful. You see how that would be, then? You're continually faced with people's decisions.

All right. You get out here, you can be the MEST universe if you want to be. But when you get out to the line, there's how far out poltergeist is. It gives to laugh, somebody who has never become complete cause to himself, saying, "Well, I'm going to cause this ashtray to move."

Now, there is why individuals who are low on the tone scale are so very hard to be around: It's this decision scale more than anything else.

The point with everything on cause is that you can effect it, but it can only affect you as you wish it. You always have a power of choice over being an effect. So it isn't good enough to sit down and concentrate and say "Well, now I'm going to move this ashtray." No, because you're not going to make the grade. If you can't make yourself jump six feet off the ground – whap! – without even breathing hard, don't try to move any ashtrays. All things in their places. All right.

I told you last night that ARC – affinity, reality and communication – add up to computation. They are understanding. The three together will actually make mathematics. They are computation; they are understanding; they are a gradient scale of knowingness. A, R, C. So ARC would also be beingness, wouldn't it? As you go up the line on ARC, you get into beingness. And therefore, clear-cut ARC resolves into decision. And this is a tone scale, again, of ARC and decision. So that you get your A, your R and your C: Here we have "to be," decisions can be effected, so forth, and we have affinity. Well, believe me, when a person is up there on the tone scale, they decide "to be" on an affinity level, it's really a big "to be." Affinity. They just – wheeoww!

This target is the universe in all of its aspects, and that is the target you will want to be cause to. It doesn't matter how far up the line you go or how far out you cause. You will find out as you start being cause that you will attract to you other people who are cause. And as you enter other people who are cause and they enter you, your individuality increases. Now, that sounds funny, doesn't it?

On agreement, remember that they're cause or they are in parity with other people who are capable of being cause. You start agreeing with people who are way up there to the top of the tone scale and you're not going to be in bad shape, you'll be in good shape.

If you start in at the bottom of the tone scale and you're way down at the bottom of the tone scale, you start into other people and you start to merge. See, you don't know who you are. You don't know who you are. You must be Joe or you must be Bill, and "Gee, I feel like Agnes today." You know, back and forth, back and forth.

You start agreeing with somebody down here, you're agreeing with fear so that fear becomes reality. And if you start agreeing with "not to be" – down, not to live, not to act well and so forth – done yourself a very, very bad trick. This is sympathy right in here in this band. You've agreed that it's all right not to be.

As you go up the tone scale, don't think that you merge, because you don't! You become more independently alert as "I." And you get up to a point where you're never anybody else but you.

You say, "Poor fellow. Poor fellow. It's all right not to be," and the only thing wrong with that is, is you've gone into agreement too low on the tone scale, which is sympathy. All right.

But the ultimate personality of you and the personality which you are happiest in – the personality happens to have certain definite characteristics, and they are written across the top of the Chart of Attitudes. But you're happy to be those, and you are actually struggling to be those and you're merging on up the line. Only the very aberrated love their eccentricities. You're not getting out into a limpid something or other. I don't think there's anything more devilish than somebody at about 32.0 on the tone scale.

Now, as far as communication is concerned, believe me, it's relatively easy to communicate with somebody who is way up at the top of the tone scale. It is very simple to do that. In the first place, anybody up that high, theoretically, is not communicating to any large degree through MEST. The person is actually communicating very, very straight, and it's pretty easy to hook up to. As a matter of fact, when that is hooked up to on a communication level, it has a deaberrative effect upon the individual. Down here when communication is hooked up to, it has an aberrative effect, because they'll start throwing you maybes and so forth.

I know one preclear, by the way, that I stopped working on. I wasn't tough enough to take it. I could take working on this preclear all right, but I couldn't take what would happen to the human race if this preclear came all the way on up the line, because this preclear was coming all the way on up the line, but too causative, too causative. So I said, "Well, I'll let that aside for the moment, because I want some of the race left for you people to practice on." And I want you to thank me for that. I think that's very considerate.

There is ARC on the basis of decision. Practically all that is really wrong with any preclear is basically, if he's in bad shape, he's decided to be the things he shouldn't be, or he's decided not to be the things he should be. This isn't too bad. Might have said that a little bit wrong. I mean, you know lots of people who seem to be getting along fine, and, gee, they've decided to be the damndest things. And you know people that are getting along fine who have decided not to be, perfectly ... Some fellow, he decided not to be a millionaire. See? That's what he decided. That's all right – that's what he decided. Of course, you won't go into very close agreement with him if you think the thing to be is a millionaire. But that's just a – just a matter of decision.

All right. There is cause, "to be," and "not to be." The very funny part of this is, you can get into some of its expression simply through action. You can make a decision all of a sudden to be perfectly willing to use your body for anything. The second you do that, you take this tremendous value off the body so that life becomes much less serious. And when life becomes much less serious it becomes much less worrisome, and you become much more able to know, and you're able to think and able to do. So you take the value off, this tremendous value that you're putting on the body: "Must keep my hands clean; must keep my fingernails clean." Well, you will anyhow. I mean, the higher you get up the tone scale, the cleaner you get anyhow.

What's wrong here is the person who – "Am I gonna be a millionaire, not gonna be a millionaire? Is it good to be a millionaire? No, millionaires get into danger every once in a while; I'm not to be a millionaire. Well, the communists are liable to shoot us, so therefore it's better not to be . . . Now, that isn't good enough. We're – not got any communism over here. I mean, the thing to do is – well, it's awful hard to make a million dollars. But then on the other hand, I might make a million dollars, and I might marry a girl that had a million dollars. Well, it's a ..."

But if it's a strain to do all this and so forth, you say, "Oh, I'd never squash a spider with my foot. Huh, a bare foot on a spider?" Well, why? Why? When did your MEST get that valuable? That's a fact.

Well, the way they get from there on down the tone scale is in terms of maybes. Br-r-r, br-r-r, brr. And they keep hanging up here, hanging up here. Timelessness sets in. Any preclear that's very aberrated has a bad case of timelessness. And the way to resolve timelessness is to resolve decision, and it's the easiest way to get at it I know. The way he got timeless is getting a motion and then not using the motion. He's unwilling to use this motion. He says, "Oh, that motion's very, very bad. Very, very, very bad motion. I can't use that motion!" He can't even change that motion. You can't – that's, by the way, what they call sublimation (just a hobson-jobson back into an old cult they used to have). Sublimation is the alteration of a motion into another kind of a motion – very simple.

Just think of some of the things which you wouldn't even begin to do with this piece of MEST which you have, a human body. Just think of it. Every single one of them is an aberration! Heavy.

All right. The motion comes in, he won't use it, bluntly. He says, "No!" Well, you know that's not so bad. It'll hang him up with one. That's not so bad, because he still at least said no. But the example I gave you a little while ago: the fellow gets hit in the jaw, and then a few weeks or lives or something later he says, "Oh, he will, will he? Well ... " He's called the facsimile up and then hasn't used it. He said, "It's all right to use it. No, it isn't all right to use it. W-h-o-o-a!" And there it'll sit. And he'll say, "I wonder what I do with this. Well, won't go out there, won't go out there. I think I'd better go see a dentist." That's what will happen to him, because it's an unwillingness to decide on that.

Just practice action!

He can say no and somewhat get away with it. "I've got this motion. Now I'm not going to use it at all. No, it's just bad and I'm not going to use it. I got my head cut off in the last life and I'm not going around and cut off people's heads, and that's all there is to it!" That's not so bad. But if he comes around and he says, "I got my head cut off in the last life and . . . Look how sharp that butcher knife is. Huh. No. Ha-ha. No. Yes. No. Yes."

Be willing to use your body to its complete endurance.

And you'll find people running around who say, "You know, I have the awfullest time. I get near the edge of high buildings and I just want to jump off, but ... " You know? So he jumped off a high building some time or other, or somebody threw him off a high building, and he's called this up. He said, "I think I'll throw him off the building." Here's somebody else – "I'll throw Og over the cliff."

Be willing to use it in any direction to accomplish a purpose which you have decided on beforehand. And if you do that, all by itself, you'll come up the tone scale-whsht! And you can go on from there with more processing.

Somebody threw him over a cliff once, so he sees Og standing in the middle of a cliff. He doesn't like Og; Og makes eyes at his cave girl or something of the sort. So he says, "I'll go throw Og off the edge of the cliff. No. No. No, I shouldn't do that. They passed this law in the tribe a while ago, and besides he's carrying a club with a spike on it. And if he turned around and saw me I might get hit with the spike. No, I'd better do it, though, because. . . No, I better not do it because if I – and somebody'd find out . . ." Believe me, after that, every time he goes near a cliff edge . . . Yeah. Is he? Should he? It's funny, but he keeps getting the idea he wants to jump off! Well, that's silly, because it'd kill him.

Thank you very much for coming out here tonight and listening to me.

So he'll sit around the cave instead of going out hunting; he'll get lean, he'll get thin and become declasse' in the tribe, and be pointed out by the tribe elders to the little children as the thing not to be. And there he is. Because every time he walks out of the cave and every time he sits down in the cave and anyplace else, he's worrying about this cliff edge.

That's how people get obsessions. That's how they get inhibitions, so forth. If you want to be utterly uninhibited, I'm afraid you would have to use every motion that you can tap – not have to use it but have to be willing to use it. In other words, no inhibitions of any kind.

But, believe me, you've got to be pretty well up the tone scale before you start using these things, because people object. People object. Particularly when you think of the number of facsimiles which you have and what kind of facsimiles they are and some of the things that have happened to you.

Now, if you turn around and think "Gee, I – would I have to be able and willing to use any one of those, to be completely uninhibited?" But you don't even have to worry about that; you can be inhibited and still not have a body.

All right, the point is, in comes the motion. If you say, "This motion I will not necessarily hold in reserve, but I will classify: 'This motion is not to be used.'" In comes a motion: "I'll use this motion." In comes another motion, not to be used: "I consider this bad. I'm not going to use it."

You know what's very interesting about reform motions: Old lady by the name of Carry Nation one time bought a hatchet. It was an unfortunate day for the saloon keepers of America. And she went around and there was a lot of talk about bills of rights and suffrage and all sorts of things, but it started, more or less, with that hatchet.

I want to tell you something about Carry. When she was younger, she used to go down in the basement and tipple. I wouldn't like to have that known, but that's the horrible truth of the matter.

Beware of these people who come around and say, "Now, actually, we've all got to get absolutely down, wipe out, murder, stamp out and kill and throw to the lions, wolves or anything else that we can find to throw them to, the Z class of the society." Not necessarily beware of them but just know right that moment that they've taken a motion from that Z class and they've said, "Shall I? No, I better not." And then all of a sudden they say, "That maybe; that's what's driving me mad, that maybe. That's what's making me 'not to be' or 'to be' and so forth and I must do something about this maybe. And it's this maybe that's doing it. It's this maybe, I say!" And picks up the hatchet, you see, and goes to work on the saloon keepers – pardon me, it was the bottles.

I'm going to give you a little bit more about decision, just a little bit more.

In interpersonal relations, you will notice that when you have a person agreeing on a decision, you will get action. If a person agrees on a decision, you will get action if it's an action decision, and if it's a "not to be" or an inaction decision, you will also get the inaction. In other words, you get what you want by bringing to pass an agreement. This is very, very important in interpersonal relations and is actually the one problem of interpersonal relations. You'll find all arguments are based upon an inability to agree. You will find that all friction which occurs between an individual and a group, an individual and another individual, or a group and a group, is simply on this basis of disagreement. And this disagreement comes about because of a divergence of decision.

Now, decision is very difficult, sometime, to reach. But this is one of these hidden things, actually, in an argument. You are arguing with somebody. If you will isolate out of the argument the decisions for action or inaction – you see, a decision can be for action or a decision can be for inaction – and if you have selected out the action and inaction decisions which you want effected, the argumentation will be minimal, because you have clarified the problem of interpersonal relations before you have tried to practice interpersonal relations on this problem. You've clarified the problem. "Exactly what do I want this person to do?" or "Exactly what do I want this person not to do?" And from there you base your arguments.

Now, if it comes to a pass where it's very important whether or not this person acts or inacts as you wish, in interpersonal relations one of the dirtier tricks is to hang the person up on a maybe and create a confusion. And then create the confusion to the degree that your decision actually is implanted hypnotically.

The way you do this is very simple. When the person advances an argument against your decision, you never confront his argument but confront the premise on which his argument is based. That is the rule. He says, "But my professor always said that water boiled at 212 degrees."

You say, "Your professor of what?"

"My professor of physics."

"What school? How did he know?" Completely off track! You're no longer arguing about whether or not water boils at 212 degrees, but you're arguing about professors. And he will become very annoyed, but he won't know quite what he is annoyed about. You can do this so adroitly and so artfully that you can actually produce a confusion of the depth of hypnosis. The person simply goes down tone scale to a point where they're not sure of their own name. And at that point you say, "Now, you do agree to go out and draw the water out of the well, don't you?"

"Yes-anything!" And he'll go out and draw the water out of the well.

The introduction of decision is also the end and object of war. It is an unsuccessful war which is fought without that. Any war fought without that as an object or an end is an unsuccessful war. Really, there isn't too much wrong with war, but there's a great deal wrong with waging war with no end in view. So that's just enMEST.

Clausewitz, in his great treatise back in umpteen-umpde-umph, has something to say about war being a method of persuading the cooperation and more closely allied views on the part of some other country, said persuasion being by force of arms. That is not exactly the way he stated it; but he used a paragraph about that long.

Anyway, force of arms is what you use in order to make a decision take place.

Now, this country goes out and anchors all of its battleships in Pearl Harbor, you see, and says, "Well, there we are." They made no decision about the war. And we fought a war from 1941 to 1945. And the end product of that war was national apathy and near economic collapse.

The youth of this country today have no feeling whatsoever for any further action along any line. You take your eighteen-year-old boy today: no goal. If he starts out in any line, the army is going to get him. If the army is going to get him, that's just silly. That's going to be silliness and so forth, so he's just in apathy about the whole thing.

There's no cause there at all. He lived through a period of 1941 to 1945, of a war being fought with no end in view.

And the war — if you’ll notice, wars follow a tone scale. The war of 1917-1918 was fought for a specious reason: “to make the world safe for democracy.” Bull.

Then people tried to find other reasons why we fought the war. And they said the reason why we fought the war was because J. P. Morgan had issued an enormous number of bonds and we went to war to defend J. P. Morgan’s bonds. And then they said there were other reasons why we went to the war, and there were other reasons why we went to the war and there were other reasons . . . But they didn’t have a reason.

The propaganda reason was to make the world safe for democracy, and what sprung up in Europe in its immediate wake? That which sprung up in Europe was the immediate lie to everyone who had believed that we made the world safe for democracy. Because in the wake of this war which we fought and secured in victory was fascism, communism, every kind of political buffoonery known. Europe became a slave state following this war.

And so people found out they didn’t fight that war for a reason or to introduce a decision. That war was not fought for that reason. And a deterioration of national culture ensued, because a war is a violent thing. And if it has a maybe in it, it becomes a national engram.

The Spanish-American War was not a national engram. That was a very interesting war. It was a short war, but that wasn’t why it was passed so easily. Well, we went down there to make Cuba free, and Cuba got free — wham. That was all there was to that. No maybes.

In 1918 we were making the world safe for democracy, and we didn’t and everybody knows we didn’t. So we said we were and we weren’t. And so we didn’t introduce a decision into anybody’s mind by the force of arms. After an enormous expenditure of men and materiel and a complete disruption of national economy, we had failed to introduce a decision. Well, that’s just that. So it was a maybe.

So we come up to 1941, and from 1941 to 1945 we don’t even bother to announce a decision. We didn’t even have a phony one. And now look at the national culture. You know, we’re sort of — kids are all down along the line. We had, for several years, the world’s most powerful weapon, exclusively. All we had to do was bark and every nation on the face of the earth would have jumped. And instead of that, they barked and we jumped. And we have jumped and jumped and jumped. And now everybody’s got atom bombs. Now we can all have fun.

You see the irrationality of it. It has wound up the aberration of the society into a confusion, because no decision was ever introduced for the last two wars.

I’m only citing this, not as an example of Group Dianetics, but only as an example of interpersonal relations. There is nothing wrong with you going to war with another human being or a group as an individual. There’s nothing wrong with you being one of these nasty, snide, decisive characters that somehow or other gets his own way.

When you were a little kid they told you, “You’re not supposed to get your own way, you can’t always have your own way and you must adjust to the fact that you can’t always have your own way because you can’t always have your own way. Get down tone scale, kid. Let’s go a little bit lower. You can’t have your own way, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.” And finally he grows up.

You’ll find a person has to be pretty well up the tone scale in order to commit decision, because committing decision often goes into the commission of an overt act.

There’s nothing wrong with you being right. And there’s nothing wrong with your exerting that rightness on a wrongness in order to get a complete agreement on rightness. There is this factor, however, that you shouldn’t pick people six feet six inches tall to exert this force of arms upon unless you’ve got a club. And that’s a rule I’d like to have you remember.

But in the course of interpersonal relations, you will find two people trying to resolve a problem, usually, in this society, and they try to resolve the problem this way: “Well, I don’t want . . .”

And the other one says, “Well, I don’t want . . .” And then this one says, “Well, I wouldn’t want . . .” And the other one says, “Well, I don’t . . .”

You know? They’re not going to solve anything. They’re going to get a government bill or something out of this — nothing constructive — because each one is saying “I don’t want” and “I won’t be.”

“I won’t be.”

“All right, I won’t be.”

“Good! Neither of us will be. Hooray!”

You will find the last time — I’ll just make this venture — the last time that you had a little clash with another human being, neither of you won. Neither won. Possibly both of you said “No.” “No.” And if you went around now and discussed it very thoroughly after you found you’d given up a point, if you went around and discussed it with the other person, you would find that a much more active decision could have been reached.

You very often have forsworn something in the society. You’ve said, “Well, I’ll do without so that he can,” something of the sort. And you go on doing without — nobly — and doing without and doing without. And after a while you find out, shockingly, that there wasn’t any point in it. That’s very upsetting. The other person didn’t want you to do without. And as a matter of fact, the other person starts tearing his hair out eventually and saying “Please don’t do without! Please.” “I never expected ., . I don’t want it,” and so on. Big rift occurs at that moment.

The best way you can help people is by very thorough action — not doing without, giving away an inaction.

Power of decision applies, then, between two people on interpersonal relations, since they decide something and become a group on that decision. And the moment two or more people have decided upon something, they are a group 80 far as that decision is concerned. And that’s something you should mark very well. They become a group about that decision. And the strength of that group is a measure of their survival. Therefore, it had better be a strong decision.

So mincing words with social lies does not reach the point of a strong group or a decisive action. It gets nothing done. Reaching a low point, then, is bad, and a high point of decision is good. But in order to reach a highpoint of decision, you will find out you often have to be very punitive, very decisive, and that the action you envision must be capable of being effected. And if you follow those rules, boy, the people that combine with you will be a pretty strong group. The power of decision is actually the power of sanity. And just as you can run away and then become afraid, as well as become afraid and run away (it works both ways, you see: you can become afraid and then run away or you can just run away, and by the action of running away become afraid, because you’re dramatizing being afraid, so you will agreeably become emotionally afraid), so it can work that simply by being decisive, you come way up tone scale. You just artificially get decisive. You come up tone scale. In other words, don’t look at this — don’t look at this now as “The only method of being decisive is to come up tone scale and then be decisive.” No, there’s another method. And that is get decisive and come up tone scale.

If you just mercilessly search out of your life, in the actions and the common actions of your life, all of the maybes on a decision level, and if you suddenly assert your decisions where you have withheld decisions, I can guarantee you that your life will smooth out pretty well. If you do that in a big office, for instance, where there’s a big staff, it may very well be that by asserting your decisions they fire you straight out the door. That’s where you belong, then. You’re a lot better off outside that door. If this environment has smothered your power of decision, you don’t belong in it. Most of the indecision which you will meet in life is strictly based around choice of environment and the ability to exert decision in that environment.

There is a therapy, all by itself, of placing a person in another environment: environmental therapy. Merely by changing the environment you bring the tone up of the preclear. If you’ve seen a preclear in somebody’s home — this preclear is in somebody’s house and his power of decision is being nullified continually in this house — by moving him to another house, you will bring him up tone scale to a point where he’ll run much better.